Gound-Level Environmentalism: Trumpism's Unexpected Outcome Part Two

Introduction

America’s current environmental protection enterprise – the complex but effective blend of institutions, laws, and personnel at every governmental level – will not survive the Trump presidency unscathed. Trumpism’s Project 2025 pledged to favor profits over protection.  Part One of this article anticipates how its implementation will remodel agencies, rewrite laws, and exile federal experts.

However, Part Two foresees that Americans’ shared commitment to environmental health, beauty, and conservation will incite a response unseen in most of our lifetimes: localized, ground-level, grassroots citizen mobilizations.  Similar upwellings of emotion, activism, and politicking founded, over a half-century ago, our system of using law and science to safeguard our natural environment.

PART TWO (see part one here)

Agency Diminution to Neighborhood Activism

My cautious confidence about Americans’ response to Trumpism’s assault on administrative agencies reflects history, experience, and conviction.

I’m a scholar of American environmental history, law, and policy.  The next four years could be terrifying: “Well, there goes a quarter-century of teaching and writing!”  But I’m also a curious analyst who muses, “I wonder, just wonder, what would happen to X or Y if Trump did try to kneecap EPA or the Fish and Wildlife Service?”

My PhD in history, earned at KU in 2000, stimulated a decade of writing about American environmental and legal history after the Great Depression.   My first book, Public Power/Private Dams, explained how one of America’s most rural, conservative, pro-business places– the inland Pacific Northwest–blocked federal agency plans to plug America’s deepest canyon with the world’s biggest power dam. In Before Earth Day, I examined the unexpected but almost unstoppable emergence of what we called after 1970 “environmental law.” 

American responses to environmental problems -- under our shared skies, in our hometowns, next to our backyards, and along our riverbanks—demonstrate the power and potential of local, determined, and practical efforts.  Strong enough to create new law.  Packed with enough potential to thwart alliances of power and expertise.  Creative enough to do what self-governing Americans have done to and with their law for 250 years: Redesign if possible and invent if necessary, the legal doctrines, systems, and institutions that reflect their wants, allay their concerns, and honor their evolving values.

Americans’ environmental needs haven’t changed since World War II.  Though we are 100 million stronger, and inhabit a society changed dramatically since 1946,  science endures.  We live in and depend on natural features and forces for every breath we draw. We literally have no choice.

Historical Optimism

As people sharing a common heritage, and as real-life individuals, we Americans still value environmental beauty, health, and permanence.  These days may feel turbulent. Volatility crackles with change and crisis. Remember, though, our grandparents also believed they lived in anxious, ominous times.

If the Supreme Court repeals, by a series of 6-3 votes, the administrative laws that have lengthened our lives, brightened our futures, and redressed injuries we inflict on the Earth, I don’t foresee us quietly applauding.  We will always need law, and will always use it to restrain our appetites.  A legal historian put it this way: We don’t need law to “manage the environment,” we use law “to manage ourselves.” That’s why federal law, freighted with constitutional supremacy, is the Constitution’s intended system for managing our use of national waters, air that knows no boundary, public lands, and the global environment.

Expect institutional change under Trump.  Good, qualified, and talented people will quit or be forced out of environmental agencies. Trumpists show casual contempt for our environmental protection enterprise even though their Republican predecessors helped build it. But Trumpism will encounter – in fact, it will likely create and provoke and inspire – American reactions we’ve seen before: awareness first, then concern, next outrage, and finally action.

I entered green politics as a bell-bottomed Idaho teenager in 1971.  I’m certain we Americans care deeply about the places where we live, where we raise our kids, and where we honor our parents’ legacy.  Degrading what we rightly deem our natural birthright spurs action. We speak up for places.  We find or create the leaders we need.  And we build practical solutions that conserve our natural sovereignty. 

Arrogant people and stubborn institutions have, time and again, collided with this environmental fact when they menace the heart of what Americans value.