…Industrial pollution stained our skies with smoke that literally slowly killed people, filled our streams with poison and the water became so dangerous, it occasionally caught fire.

Fish died in mass and floated upside down to the surface, and the chemicals in fish bodies made some fish too dangerous to consume.

Our crops were infested with toxic chemicals that killed plant predators and slowly killed us humans. Our power plants spewed so many dangerous chemicals, they put at risk our children’s mental development.

And then we began to get our act together, realizing that our planet was our home, and lacking the ability to move from the dangerous planet we had created, we created the Environmental Protection Agency. “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions,” said Richard Nixon. And in 1970, the Nixon Administration created the EPA.

And it was the EPA that reduced air pollutants like sulfur dioxide by 67 percent, ended acid rain, leaded gasoline, DDT in our food supply, and led the attack on cancer-causing secondhand smoke.

But then we elected Donald Trump, the denier of all things science, the rebutter of knowledge about the environment, the leader of the Know Nothing Party in Congress, the party and president that has attacked the environment as though it was ISIS invading Detroit.

Party and President have been oh-so-successful in their destruction of all things that make the planet better for humans, from exiting U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Accord, to dismantling the EPA from within, to selling, reducing, and converting our national parks into oil and gas resource centers, to endangering our oceans and attacking our endangered species.

Whether dumping coal mining residue into clean water streams, or allowing harmful pesticides in our food chain, or rolling back regulations to prevent coal plant pollution of our water from coal ash retention ponds, the Trump administration has been as passionate to do harm to the environment as if they were paid for the effort.

While Trump promised to save coal, all he has accomplished is to further allow coal to degrade the environment and endanger humans. Coal cannot be saved when natural gas is cleaner and cheaper, and wind and sun are truly clean, renewable energy. It is a fiction to argue about saving coal, it is a story based upon ignorance of the facts and the future.

Meanwhile, lest we dwell on the Presidents’ latest daily lies, we should not look away from his proposed funding cuts to our national parks, the near elimination of the Land and Water Conservation Program ran by the Park Services, the efforts to privatize some national lands, the willingness to expose Bear Ears native antiquities to oil and gas development by reducing the park by 85 percent, and the intention to ease restrictions on oil and gas pipelines that would cross the national parks.

Nor should we look away from the threat to our oceans by the Trump Administration’s policies that favor the fishing industry and the fossil fuel industry over coastal communities and clean water.

One succinct argument is that the Trump Administration simply prefers plunder over protection in all things environmental. The evidence supports the claim.

Democrats should not gaze at their navels and wonder what to run on in 2018. It is the environment and healthcare, stupid.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator, political enthusiast and award-winning columnist living here in the Tri-State.