At least by implication, Trump absolves anyone living outside of California from any share of the blame. That includes him in Washington, presumably.
His statement reflects an old evasive attitude in environmental philosophy often referred to as the paradox of the "pygmy in the forest." It is a denialism school of thought that sees the inhabitants of the forest as its main destructors. The pygmy cuts down tree branches with his primitive machete to use as fuel to cook food. Since he doesn't have a chainsaw he can't really go for the trunk. But he strips off its bark to make a canoe, depriving bark beetles of home and food. He rides his canoe on the river where he catches fish, harming marine life.Then he digs the earth for a latrine, depositing human organic waste in the soil, despoiling the groundwater. He then spears a wild boar, diminishing the wildlife population. He picks a flower or two for herbal use, disrupting the vegetative pollination process. He builds a small fire that alters the humidity around him. The smoke rises to the forest canopy, annoying a hive of wild bees. He fetches water from a nearby stream, unfairly competing with deer or elk for that precious lifegiving resource. Bad, bad pygmy. He is the scourge of the forest.
Meanwhile, half a world away, baby Donald is born to his rich parents in a modern hospital in a western society far, far away from any forest. His overprotective parents will have no synthetic fiber or material touching their precious baby's skin. His diapers, his clothes, his towels, the sheets on his crib--all made from natural fiber spun from natural cotton and hemp grown in mountainside farms in Bolivia cut from the forest after felling down thousands of trees. Some of the wood--hundred year old cherry and such--make up Baby Donald's all-natural wooden crib. When he is older, teenage Donald develops an insatiable craving for all-beef hamburger. The beef comes from cows raised in livestock farms clear-cut along the fringes of the Amazon forest in Brazil. Year after year, as the demand for all-beef patties shoots up the cattle rancher drives his bulldozer deeper and deeper into the forest to create more grazing land for more cows. By age 15 juvenile Donald has his learner's permit from the DMV. He needs a car, made from steel and aluminum from mineral ores mined deep in the Indonesian jungles. His iPhone has gold contacts in the motherboard, extracted from gold mines in the northern Philippines and copper wirings from ore gouged out of an open-pit mine in sub-Saharan Africa.
If like Donald Trump your worldview is no larger than America Only, you will probably never realize that the birth of a child in a western society impacts on the environment on a more massive scale. The needs and the lifestyle of the consumer culture to which Donald belongs is the driving force for a wider-range destruction of the world's forest cover than the existence of an entire pygmy village living right in the middle of the forest.
There are three elements of fire: heat, fuel and oxygen. Donald Trump sees fuel--California's unraked forest leaves. He could not see either heat or oxygen because they are invisible. But he can feel heat--the planet's temperature has risen so high the polar caps and great glaciers are all melting. Sea water level is rising globally pumping thermal energy potential into more storms forming offshore in greater number, frequency and severity. With less trees--because they were felled to provide grazing for cows to produce beef for Donald's hamburger--less carbon dioxide is taken off the atmosphere, where it remains trapping solar heat energy, causing California and the rest of the planet to literally simmer. Powerlines carrying electricity to light up homes and drive refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, furnaces, flatscreen LED TV's and all--flick a spark that ignites an overhanging tree branch with dry leaves (not the leaves on the ground, Donald). Once the fire starts, the high winds resulting from the altered global wind patterns fan the flames to Armageddon proportions.
The people of California are only pygmies in the forest. The forest fires raging in California, just like the forest fires that devoured millions of acres of the Amazon in 2018, are the result of a global crime in which all societies--enlightened and indifferent--are equally complicit. When environmental calamity strikes, it hurts both the ecologically aware as well as the indifferent one. But the blame is not unequal. Even the most proactive naturalist is responsible for a carbon footprint, no matter how small.
The solution is for all to agree that climate change is real, and climate change is here to stay. Developed societies--especially the United States of America--bear the biggest burden to act on mitigating climate change because it has the greatest capacity to adjust through sacrifice. It is the biggest polluter and has the biggest buffer space for environmental reform. Right now, under Donald Trump, the US is just the biggest international blame denier and blame pointer. It would have been unimaginable in recent modern technological history for the United States--the first nation to put a man on the moon--to be the ONLY COUNTRY IN THE WHOLE WORLD to exclude itself from the Paris climate accord.
If environmentally indifferent America is to be held to account, it is for denying science and defying reality. If enlightened America is to be held to account, it is for failing to hold the indifferent to account.*
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
When you have a leader who refuses to return to policy rationality, your failure cannot just be in the form of lack of outrage. You must aim higher and more proactively than just accepting the mediocrity of your environmentally-blind leadership.
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