Have you ever seen a tree on a slope? The soil beneath it slowly creeps downhill, and the tree’s trunk curves at the base as it grows upward, leaving an awkward spine formed from instability. Much the same is the current state of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), being bent out of shape as the Trump Administration swipes the rug out from beneath it. Just like the tree trying to straighten itself out again, the impact of these attacks will remain visible and debilitating long after the fact.
There are many ways that the Trump Administration has been trying to disarm our nation’s main authority over the environment. The EPA has been severely curtailed, reducing its employment from over 16,000 to around 12,500. It has also proposed to shut down the Office of Research and Development and ceased some of its most critical functions, like monitoring carbon emissions from polluting facilities or considering human health benefits in their economic analysis of pollution limits. This is not to mention the EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s staunch plans to repeal The Endangerment Finding, which found in the first place that climate change is a human health threat. It is true that a lot of these actions have only been proposed, and the federal rulemaking process is a lengthy one, and it’s possible that they still won’t be in place by the time Trump’s second term ends. However, federal rules don’t seem to mean much to Trump, so really, anything is possible. More importantly, though, there is great damage done by the mere suggestion of such ideas.
Now, this isn’t the first time that a president has majorly overhauled his predecessor’s environmental policy. President Carter was a pioneer in forward-thinking environmental policy, building up the EPA in its infancy. Even in the 1980s, Carter grasped the direness of correcting errors like our unrestrained consumption of fossil fuels, and had his vision been appreciated back then, we might be living in a very different country. Maybe, for example, we would have lived up to his plan that solar energy would make up 20% of our energy usage by the year 2000. Yet when he left office, President Reagan slashed his efforts.
In some ways, we managed to recover from that setback and move forward in Carter’s example. Yet Trump’s pillage on environmentalism in America has not occurred in a vacuum. He has been capitalizing on cultural disdain for environmental protections that has long existed in America. It’s worth asking whether a tide of unprecedented and unrestrained environmental exploitation is being unleashed, whether a sleeping giant is being awoken.
The EPA’s authority is deteriorating as it threatens to do away with longstanding, science-based research and policy. Its strength as a regulating organization starts to slip away when all the missions it has held for decades — things like valuing human health — are forfeited. As The EPA turns its loyalty away from the pursuit of science and public health of the nation to instead service the ephemeral whims of our president, its integrity too slips away. But perhaps the most disappointing part is that the agency is falling from within, sabotaged by the leaders Trump appointed. It’s not an external force ruling against The EPA anymore; The EPA is ruling against itself.
What happens if nature loses its guardian when it needs one more than ever? With the UN projecting in November of last year that we are on track to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s goal for limiting global warming, the situation is even more dire than before. Simply put, we don’t have time for this setback, for more rollbacks and inaction. Trump’s disruption of EPA should not be taken lightly, because the next few years are not fungible in the face of rapid climate change; the future desperately depends on our actions now.