Prologue

The British writer Adam Weymouth tracked a wolf that had walked some 1,000 miles across Europe. That was the post-Cold War Europe opened to people and protective of wildlife, including wolves. But ecological crises, especially the anthropogenic climate chaos, waves of refugees, and the coming to power in America of Donald Trump, triggered the emergence of a new Europe of walled borders and trapping of animals and life behind those walls. Weymouth observed Europe protecting the wolf and then abandon it. He said:

“As species push against these political divides, driven by degraded environments, changing climates and life’s imperative, it remains to be seen whether hard borders can resist a changing world. In times of crisis, we move. Wolves, persecuted for millenniums, have always embodied this truth…. Can we cede space [to wolves]? Can we sanction risk? Can we fall back in love with the world?… To follow [the wolf] Slavc across Europe was to get a feel for the unvanquished desire for life to thrive. And to see that humanity, terrified of change, will forever attempt to hem it in.”

Censorship

The transformation of Europe from open societies that protected the wolf to fenced in by walls, while abandoning the wolf to its bleak fate, may well be connected to the return of President Trump to power in the United States. Trump, a faithful fossil fuel supporter, has been undoing all that the country has had, even minimal measures of environmental protection. He ordered federal officials to deny, hide, delete all that the federal government had done against climate chaos.

According to a reporter,

“The Trump administration has ordered the USDA and U.S. Forest Service to remove all references to climate change from their websites, deleting critical information on wildfires, agriculture, and climate adaptation… federal agencies ordered to halt communications on politically inconvenient topics. The deletion of wildfire vulnerability assessments comes as wildfires rage across the U.S., leaving communities without access to government-provided preparedness resources. A new report estimates that climate-driven disasters will force 5 million Americans to migrate in 2025 alone, but the administration is erasing public data that could help communities plan for these displacements. Legal experts warn that removing government climate data may violate transparency laws, while environmental groups and congressional Democrats are preparing lawsuits and investigations to challenge the censorship. Scientists, activists, and journalists are racing to preserve deleted climate data before it disappears permanently, while public backlash against the suppression of climate science continues to grow.”

National security

“This [environmental] censorship,” says a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Peter Gleick, “was not limited to military and intelligence work; the [Trump] administration ordered other federal agencies to [hide, archive or delete] materials related to climate change as well. These actions will not reduce the actual risk that environmental problems pose for national security or the military—the physical reality of those threats will be unchanged. Instead, they will blind the country to environmental instability and real-world conflict risks that jeopardize our military and national security…. Very real climate changes are already underway, including accelerating extreme events, an increasingly ice-free Arctic and rising sea levels, disruptions to food supplies, more failed states and environmental refugees, and violence over shared water resources. Wars and armed conflicts are already being triggered, influenced, or worsened by environmental factors. Denying or turning a blind eye to environmental security threats and hamstringing intelligence agencies will only make the United States weaker and more exposed to dangerous security surprises, military bases and operations more vulnerable, and communities less prepared. Physical reality will always trump political ideology.”

Power trumps facts

True. However, it’s also a matter of political power. The reality of the atomic bomb or war trumped public and environmental safety. The anthropogenic climate calamity is a classic example of the triumph of fossil fuel, oligarchic and plutocratic power. Once petroleum powered cars, trucks, airplanes, ships of commerce and warships, and wars and factory farming, the beneficiaries of this petroleum economy and culture fought like hell to institutionalize petroleum everywhere, in government regulators, politicians, national security, plastics, electricity production, agriculture. Meanwhile, news that the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal was warming the planet, was either not taken seriously or was dismissed by fossil fuel funded professors publishing biased accounts raising doubts about the validity of climatological science.

The censoring of climate data by the Trump administration follows the path of other Republican administrations. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations were not transparent about the state of the greenhouse gas emissions by both industry and the military. And in general, Republican administrations weakened environmental protection.

Big ag exception

Agriculture and food, however, found Republicans and Democrats in agreement in doing exactly the bidding of the large farmers: forcing and corrupting the US EPA to approve carcinogenic and neurotoxic pesticides / biocides for the spraying of the crops and, sometimes, the harvested food people eat. The industry used corrupt laboratories for the “testing” of their products. One of those laboratories, Industrial Bio-Test Laboratory, IBT, cooked test data out of thin air. In addition, the external political influence on the EPA was so pervasive that EPA scientists created their own corrupt cut-and-paste science in “reviewing” the data of the pesticide companies.

This is the culture of the continuing Jungle immortalized in 1906 by Upton Sinclair. Power and greed become virtues. The safety of humans sprayed by deadly chemicals or eating food tainted by carcinogens and neurotoxins, like the doubts academics raise about climate change, dissipate and are forgotten. As for the medical establishment, awash by pharmaceutical and insurance money, care less about the ecocide of farm toxins and global warming, much less about the quality of food people eat.

Reversing the corrosion of the spreading Jungle syndrome is a Herculean task without a hero like Herakles. But it’s worth trying.

Living democracy and science

Start by teaching and practicing democracy and science at home, school, and town and city governments. Democratic theory and science are not theology, but they are more powerful than theology. Democracy and science are about human priorities here on Earth, how people learn to respect, cooperate, collaborate, and help each other. Science is asking questions in search of discovering the truth. Take these simple steps and you see people, the land and the world in a different light. The study of history is complementary to democracy and science. Schools should also have gardens where teachers and students would grow food and science.

Obviously, these suggestions may help us take democracy and science seriously. Adults must think of their children, grandchildren and the myriad of animals, plants and other species affected by climate chaos. The crises of corruption explain the life threatening reality worldwide, what I call the continuing and spreading Jungle, did not start yesterday. Trump and his colleagues did not come out of thin air.

Democracy and science are complex yet extremely valuable human inventions for making life worth living. The Greeks invented both democracy and science. Greek history is full of clear thinking and inspiration for democracy and science.

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