Dear America: If I told you that billions of wild animals’ lives were on the line in this Presidential election, as well as in widely ignored Senate and Congressional races across the country, would you assume I’m exaggerating? If I told you that the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, the extinction of thousands of species, with repercussions that will echo for literally millions of years to come, depends on the actions of American voters on Nov. 8th, would you pause for a moment to consider how, and why that could possibly be true?
While its widely known that Eric and Donald Trump Jr. enjoy shooting innocent, and often endangered animals for fun, fewer people realize that that same Donald Trump Jr., infamous for posing, ISIS-like with the severed tail of an elephant that he killed for pleasure, along with a prominent anti-animal rights activist are vying for position in the reality TV star’s administration as Secretary of the Interior. If that sounds relatively innocuous to you take note: The Department of the Interior controls 1/5th of the landmass of the United States, including all national parks, inland fresh waters, lakes, rivers and the entirety of the massive oceanic territory under American jurisdiction, (372 million acres of which was recently designated as the Earth’s largest marine reserve by President Obama).
But while the Junior Trumps have been working overtime to reach out to sport hunters as part of an explicit campaign to expand the killing of American animals in National Parks, including the 548,000,000 acres of sensitive terrestrial and ocean ecosystems given protection over the last 8 years under Obama’s Executive Orders, (the greatest expansion of protected ecosystems in American, or planetary history) and their father advocates aggressively for the expanded use of coal (responsible for approximately 13,000 premature deaths and 20,000 heart attacks annually, along with being the biggest single source of American GHG emissions) - even these designs do not represent the greatest threat to the animal kingdom, homo sapiens included, posed by Donald Trump and the GOP.
In the #AnimalsAgainstTrump video linked above, I will argue why Donald Trump, as well as the serially science-denying flat-Earthers of the modern Republican Party, represent the greatest threat to life as we know it on Earth. I got a little bit of help explaining things courtesy Leonardo DiCaprio, Bernie Sanders, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jimmy Kimmel, Larry King, Bill Maher, Judie Mancuso, Jane-Velez Mitchell, Moby, Ed Norton, Bill Nye, Simone Reyes, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Russell Simmons, Jon Stewart, Cenk Uygur/The Young Turks and a certain President who recently signed into law the biggest cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions ever made. [See: Clean Power Plan, massive reductions in methane emissions, a doubling of fuel-efficiency standards on American vehicles, vetoing the Keystone XL pipeline, signing an historic global warming pact with China equivalent to not building 22 Keystone XL pipelines, the Paris Climate Accords that Donald Trump has promised to cancel, restoring 7 million acres of bee & pollinator habitat, a 30-fold increase in US solar power generating capacity, along with 70 billion tonnes of GHG reductions signed into law via an international treaty just last week. None of this incorporates the carbon-storage benefits of the millions of acres of wilderness that have been protected by Obama as mentioned above.]
As a final thought, the last time Greenhouse Gas Emissions and global temperatures rose at anywhere near the rates that we are witnessing today, it led to what has become known as the “Great Dying,” or officially: the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction Event. 70 percent Of vertebrate animal species on land, and 96 percent of life in the ocean went extinct. Life on Earth did not recover for another 10 million years.
With a very short amount of time remaining for the human race to transform our society towards a sustainable civilization, not only can the world not afford to have a climate-denying conspiracy theorist become the most powerful man on Earth for 4, or possibly 8 years, but for any Jill Stein/Green Party supporters who may be reading this, we can also not afford to pretend like we have time to play the political “long game” in the hopes that the Green Party may eventually, maybe achieve any real, tangible progress at some point in the hypothetical future. Green Party supporters should understand better than most that no such future will exist unless we take emergency action immediately, which is why I’ve suggested the concept of a #BlueGreenAlliance, an emergency coalition not only to keep Trump and equally dangerous Republicans from assuming power, but to further improve the Democratic Party’s environmental platform immediately as part of a strategic partnership with the Greens in Swing States and close Senate and Congressional races. That campaign is explained here.
