We all know that this government will make the climate crisis and ongoing environmental damage worse.
(This comes from a talk given at College of the Atlantic, Friday, February 21, 2025, that was titled as Carbon and Colonization: Thoughts on Environmentalism in an Illiberal Age)
I agreed to give this talk before the incoming president began dismantling our 250-year-old system of governance, and over the last few weeks I have been thinking more and more that my advertised title feels inadequate to the moment. What we are after is Decarbonization and Decolonization and what we need to talk about is politics, ecology, and freedom in an illiberal age.
I am not sure how much damage will be done by this breaking wave of political malpractice and malfeasance, but trust in, and understanding of our government was already weak, and this will make all that worse. Things will not be the same when this is over, even if we could snap our fingers and make it all stop right now, and I’m afraid it’s not going to stop anytime soon.
Being Ready to Act
It’s fair to say that this scares me. That seems honest and rational. I’m also angry – and that’s understandable – though this is not about my feelings. This is not, in fact, a moment for feelings. “Vibes” driving politics is a large part of the current problem, really. This is a moment for being intellectually and politically prepared to act when the time comes – and it will come.
Over the course of my career, I have often been critical of the modern political economy – the damage it’s done to both people and to the Earth. My critique was always made in hopes of making things better, so one of the things that I find most disheartening currently is watching our government jettison the very best of who we are in favor of the very worst – the exact opposite of what I’ve always hoped for change. The other thing that’s disheartening is that this was probably all foreseeable, given our inaction on environmental issues since the 1970s.
We all know that this government will make the climate crisis and ongoing environmental damage worse. We should also understand that our failure to act in the face of climate change over the last half century is the driving force behind this administration’s actions – the damage to democratic governance around the world.
I have very old-school – you might even say conservative – values surrounding our system of governance. I believe in centrist liberal principles: political and moral individual rights (therefore responsibilities), consent of the governed, the rule of law and equality before that law, freedom of speech – the list goes on. Liberty and freedom are things I believe in. I still want to believe that when we got rid of a king 250 years ago, that we built something new in western governance, and that these ideas have saved the world from anti-democratic forces numerous times. I am, at the end of the day, the child of a WWII veteran. I still believe in the things for which he fought.
Moving Beyond the Tension
But you can hear the narrative tension in what I’ve already said – the ideals versus the damage I acknowledge has been done. We must acknowledge that tension before we can move beyond it. And we need to move beyond it.
We contrived, for example, to create a free society but built slavery into our Constitution. Quite a few of the Founders understood slavery as the cancer it was, and some had the courage to free the people who they owned in light of the principles they had adopted. They could not, or at least did not, keep the institution out of our government because owning human beings meant wealth and affluence. It took a war to get slavery out, and even after we created citizenship for those formerly enslaved, the United States has still too often failed to deliver on its stated principles of freedom – or delivered on them too late.
I’m going to come back to the subject of slavery and freedom later but see it first as emblematic of our conflicted political ideology. Along with all the values in our Constitution that I listed a moment ago, America has also always held economic liberty as foundational. Life, liberty and property according to John Locke – the “pursuit of happiness” in Thomas Jefferson’s words, but everyone knew what he meant.
We have talked about life, liberty, and property as though they were in perfect harmony with one another, but they are not. We managed to deinstitutionalize the practice of taking people’s freedom to build wealth, but the tension remained in our history of “free land” and Manifest Destiny. We can see it still in many aspects of globalism.
From inside, the future has always been bright in American politics, but the future has always been over the next hill – on somebody else’s land.
What I’m saying is that America has added to the balance sheet, expanding economic and political liberty for some, by forever driving the resource frontier out over the horizon. From inside, the future has always been bright in American politics, but the future has always been over the next hill – on somebody else’s land. And you can tell that we are running out of other people’s land to take and exploit, because now apparently, we’re planning to go to Mars.
Until World War II, this expansion was straight-up colonialism, and the math was pretty simple – take what you want by force and expand political and economic freedom for those within the circle of rights. That circle expanded over time – it really did – but those outside and the land have continuously borne the burden.
After 1945, the policy equations got fantastically complicated because we were making our case for world leadership outside of the immediate circle of rights – global American political leadership, working in tandem with global American corporate leadership, working in tandem with American higher education – all in our ideological struggle with the Soviets. We promised freedom to the world, financed by a growth economy. And when we won the Cold War, we doubled down on our bad environmental math.
Facing A Crisis In Democracy
This kind of economic liberty cannot support political liberty in a finite environmental system like the Earth, however, and that is why we are now facing a crisis in democracy.
The people running the new administration have abandoned liberal political values and recast “liberalism” as leftwing fiscal excess and moral degeneracy. They use the word “liberty” to pull a veil over an oligarchy rapidly expanding their economic freedom. America First is simply Trump declaring the boundaries of his own enterprise on the same street as Xi, Putin, and the rest of today’s panoply of authoritarian thugs.
And Trump knows how to read that street. He knows that people are angry and disillusioned – he knows they are confused by shrinking opportunity. He doesn’t care about them, but he knows they are politically accessible. Engaging with this anger and confusion is why Make America Great Again is such a crouched and fearful kind of “greatness,” looking out at a dark world of limits, grievances, and enemies.
Trumpism has been wildly successful in the US because it found fertile ground with people left behind by post-Cold War global prosperity. This is the red America that neoliberal policy makers flew over and ignored from thirty thousand feet while paging through Milton Friedman and dreaming about the Global Village. After the economic wreckage of 2008/2009, people in this other America were increasingly willing to abandon democracy to claw back a shadowy and romanticized economic prosperity which they think they remember when “America was great.”
Many of these same folks fought our two-decade-long war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rural, middle-American whites served for years while their homeplaces became sacrifice zones for fracked gas, industrial ethanol production, and opioid dumping. Poor working-class blacks and Latinos served too, because the military was an opportunity in a country that increasingly offered no others. For these Americans, neoliberalism was a failure of economic and trade policy. Neoconservatism was a failure of foreign policy.
And yet, there are plenty of Trump signs on manicured lawns in wealthy neighborhoods, and the phenomenon of the Trump boat parade was not born of economic desperation. Some of these people are MAGA for the ugly appeal of the race and culture wars, but more than anything, I think they fear the same dark world of limited opportunity that is reality for others. I mean that they understand at a gut level that, as comfortable as they might be, they are much, much closer to the bottom than they are to the circle of billionaires at the top. They have lost faith in the future and have chosen to stake out their turf, abandoning democratic values and grabbing their piece of the limited pie.
Here’s where it gets difficult for me and where the tension I mentioned earlier comes to the fore. I hate the MAGA response to these circumstances, but they have their finger on the bad environmental math I pointed out.
An Environmental Ponzi Scheme
The modern industrial economy is running up against its limits. It is wholly unsustainable, an environmental Ponzi scheme if you want. How else do you characterize a system that demands continual feeding from the natural world, while creating only transitory, even illusory wealth and progress? Intuitively we have known this for a long time, though like the victims of any good Ponzi scheme we have willfully suspended our disbelief because the short-term benefits seem too good to pass up. We have ignored the unreality of returns that our ecological common sense should have told us were impossible, using a kind of narrative amnesia to continually look out over the horizon to a better future.
Ecologically, we know that everything we value relies on a relationship with a healthy Earth. Yet we have spoken of environmental issues as something that could be bargained over for our own political or economic ends. This was an intellectual fallacy, but we acted as if our human context was greater than the context of the living Earth. This has driven our climate failure and reduced most of our environmental politics to rancorous exercises in rearranging deck chairs – bootless economic heterodoxy.
People seem baffled by Trump’s sudden fascination with Greenland and Canada, but the logic is as impeccable as it is disheartening. The world is warming, and Canadian arctic sea lanes are more and more accessible. Glaciers are melting fast, especially in Greenland, and the north is mineral rich – gold, silver, copper, rare earths. Industry has been on this path for nearly two decades – the Chinese government too – though everyone has been playing within the confines of the post-WWII international order. Trump, always willing to ignore table manners, is simply reaching across and trying to take from his neighbor’s plate.
This is by no means a new exploitation of the North. I’ve been travelling in northern Canada for more than forty years, thinking and writing about that resource frontier. Canada’s math has been no different than ours. My First Nations friends have faced the brunt of forest clearcutting that has made Canada wealthy and freed us to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres here in the northeast. The James Bay Cree have had millions of acres flooded and water polluted with mercury to create “clean” hydroelectricity for the international market here in northeast North America – a billion-dollar export for the Province of Quebec. And now Cree land is being opened to mining to extract what’s needed for our cellphones and computer chips.
Donald Trump didn’t start any of this, but it is driving his actions.
The arctic – Canada, Greenland, Russia – is the last resource frontier. Exploitation there goes hand in hand with “drill baby, drill” because Trump and his band of oligarchs, both domestic and foreign, have made their calculation. They are returning to the global melee of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, choosing carbon and colonization over twentieth-century expansion of rights and freedom.
This explains everything about what’s happening in Ukraine right now too. Democracy and the environment are being sacrificed simultaneously, and collectively, we need to understand this new colonial reality. As people who care about the Earth, we need to reckon that the environmental politics of the last four or five decades no longer apply.
Some History Before Reaching for the New
We need something new – we really have for half a century – and here I need to give you my interpretation of the history of those politics before talking about something new.
I was six when the first Earth Day happened in April 1970. My early education was shaped by the environmental movement and the legislation that grew from it – the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the creation of the EPA. At an emotional level, what I remember most from that period is a sense of hope and agency, and the beginnings of political awareness around environmental issues.
…the Carter presidency foreshadowed what we are seeing in Trump today.”
In 1972, I had only a child’s awareness of the presidential race, but by 1976, I supported Jimmy Carter, who we have just lost. And Jimmy Carter is important to what I’m saying today, so let me talk about him for a minute. In many ways, the Carter presidency foreshadowed what we are seeing in Trump today.
The awful cliché is that Carter was a terrible president, but a great ex-president. This is wrong. He was a maverick Democrat trying to lead an ideologically overextended and moribund party, tethered to shopworn and increasingly impotent ideas. He also faced a resurgent conservative movement that reconfigured the Republican Party in the wake of Nixon. All this was during a time of economic upheaval that reminded too many older voters of their childhoods in the Great Depression. They had created the hyper-consumptive, petrochemical economy to stave off hardship, and their kids had grown up comfortably within it. It was too important to lose.
It was a hard time to stake a presidency on the environment, but this is what Carter did, and while much of what he told us was intellectually and morally honest, it was politically deadly. He told Americans that we had to accept limits on affluence – that environmental policy could not be dependent on affluence. There were environmental limits that we needed to acknowledge – environmental messes that we had to clean up. This was the thrust of his failed energy policy, aimed at curbing pollution and our dependency on foreign oil. It was the heart of his Superfund Legislation which is still operating – for now.
For the most part, Americans turned their backs, and Ronald Reagan came to power on a wave of real and perceived threats to American prosperity, which ought to sound familiar. Nobody wanted to hear the new language of “environmental sustainability,” so Reagan took the solar panels off the White House. We abandoned the paradigm shift nascent in Earth Day, articulated by Carter, and this was a great moral failure.
With Reagan, environmentalism went on the defensive, and while it remains a part of American politics, it is a shadow of what it promised to be in the early 1970s. In many ways, after Carter, the political movement became a series of compromises.
The environment never became the defining context of politics, only a subset at the policy level, treating the ecological foundations of our survival like any other infrastructure. Successful political action was affected around the language of “green capitalism” valuing “ecosystem services.” We did manage to legislate away CFCs, but the great plastics recycling bamboozle opened the flood gates on production and pollution.
The point was always to avoid being too politically or economically subversive, which is exactly what Carter was doing when he suggested limits to our affluence. Because of our collective failure, more than half a century after Earth Day 1970, there is no influential environmental political party in the United States. No president or congress between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden spent any meaningful political capital on behalf of the environment. Even the so-called “Green New Deal” was not that environmentally progressive, pitched mostly as a 21st-century Works Progress Administration. The vision was a decarbonized but still highly extractive and destructive hyper-consumptive growth economy.
Jimmy Carter bet and lost the presidency because he advocated limits to wealth and power in favor of freedom and a healthy planet. Remember that Carter was as powerful an advocate for democracy and human rights as he was for environmental change. Both were central as he spent half a century being honored as our “best ex-president,” but we would honor him more by taking the advice he offered in the late 1970s. Even if we are fifty years late in doing it.
And here I want to pivot. I want to pivot away from critique and political analysis toward something more generative. I said at the beginning that we needed to be politically and intellectually prepared to act, and I want to take a stab at honoring Jimmy Carter by being intellectually subversive and articulating some principles around which we can act – for both freedom and the Earth.
A Sliver Lining?
If there is a silver lining to what is happening in Washington right now, it’s that they are making space for the kind of deep change I think we need. They are doing it like a tornado makes space for a better planned community, I know, and they are causing real pain and suffering. But there will be room after the storm for deeper thinking and not just policy tweaks. This will be our opportunity.
We have an existential problem with subsidizing our freedom with the depletion and destruction of the Earth. And we do this because we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of freedom – or that’s what I’m going to argue – and we must conceptualize how to found our understanding of freedom on principles of ecology, not on affluence.
The goal is to decolonize at the same time that we decarbonize, so here is one self-evident truth where we might start our thinking.
Inherent within the interrelationship of organisms and their environments, disbursed as those organisms are around the world, are not only the principles of ecological science, but the principles of ecological governance. Freedom is the birthright of every living thing, and our liberal principles should begin with this ecological principle.
No matter its origin – and I am agnostic on that question – life on earth is composed of the same matter generated by the Big Bang and is affected by all the laws of physics that determine how inorganic matter and energy behave across the universe. In this respect, there is a continuum between the nonliving and living on our planet. At the same time, living things also have characteristics that separate them from the rest of the inorganic world. These differences lie in the ways that living beings use energy, and they are as germane to the simplest single-celled organism as they are for human beings in complex societies.
The critical feature of this relationship is the fact that all life uses energy to create freedom. The second law of thermodynamics might demand that the universe is always moving matter and energy away from areas of concentration, but entropy has a complicated relationship with living organisms. This is something that Erwin Schrodinger and other physicists pointed out a century ago – that living organisms use outside energy to organize matter internally against the universal forces that shape the inorganic world outside.
Living organisms are thus systems that resist entropy by self-regulating an internal environment – homeostasis. Plants and cold-blooded creatures do this in a direct relationship with the environment, absorbing energy, regulating it as best they can. Plants use a whole range of physiological mechanisms and cold-blooded animals largely use their ability to move to better environmental conditions. Warm-blooded animals “burn” food energy within, or store it in fat, though they too react to short-term outside changes by moving – when flowers open to the sun, humans move into the shade.
Simple organisms move with the flow of water or air, making the best of the situations in which they find themselves, but most life struggles with the laws of motion and gravity as well as entropy. Even the most complex life is not free of those laws, but while amoebas scoot themselves along in the water, birds take to the air. Humans launch themselves into space, though that involves technology which is something I will get to in a minute.
Movement in opposition to gravity and inertia, as well as homeostasis, comprise a good working definition of life – and there is after all no formal definition of life. And while individuals can only carry on this struggle for a lifetime, species adapt through reproduction and evolution. This is the other thing that helps define living beings. Sexually or asexually, we pass energy and genetic strategies forward through time as we search for increased freedom.
Freedom of movement, freedom of reproduction, freedom of continued community identity, are all driven by the organization of energy in the biotic world. Energy and matter flow, constantly changing and adapting, as we all look for self-actualization.
Energy is freedom, biologically and politically, and this has everything to do with our current crises.”
This is a pretty good working definition of politics as well as of life. And that is why human politics has always been dominated by the flow of energy. Energy is freedom, biologically and politically, and this has everything to do with our current crises.
For millions of years humanoids existed in the same energy relationship with the Earth as all their warm-blooded kin. Then, archeological evidence tells us, early humans learned to use naturally occurring fires when they found them. That was maybe a million years before learning to make fire independently toward the end of the last ice age. This was a transformative moment, which began a long process of anthropogenic ecological change. More importantly, it was an immediate energy revolution in the political structure of the Earth.
Homo sapiens, one could argue, did culturally what warm-blooded creatures had done biologically, taking plant-based fire into the body of human society. I mean that if we believe, as I do, that other beings on Earth have cultures, then human culture became metaphorically warm-blooded. The cave became a little warmer with a fire burning at its mouth – little pockets of climate change that foreshadow a planetary crisis. It also opened an envelope of human-made cultural space that put us on a different political trajectory from other life on Earth.
Fire has at least had as much to do with what we consider our history as later developments. We captured the power of releasing carbon atoms, and with that exothermic chemical reaction, which made both heat and light, we made dramatic changes in our ecology and our physiology. Cooked food changed our bodies. Fire allowed us to shape the land. Fire was freedom, a technological sea change, and an imaginative leap.
We also made huge changes in the politics of the Earth, and this is the reason why all the myths about its acquisition are so vibrant. Whether it’s Prometheus or Nanabozho, we knew we were acquiring world-changing power. We gave ourselves transformative agency on a new scale, capturing the world imaginatively in a new way. This was the beginning of our long love affair with carbon, the opening chapter in this political energy story.
Like controlling fire, agriculture also amplified our energy potential and made it mobile – mobile through time rather than through space. Here is the chief feature in what we once called the Neolithic Revolution – the shift in the control of food energy into a new political context.
The domestication of plants was a new way of controlling the flow of energy toward human need, though it was not without challenges. Our individual bodies can only transform a limited amount of food no matter how much there is to eat. We solved this by using other bodies, domesticating animals as well as plants. And this same calculation explains why, for thousands of years, for a large part of the human population, one person’s freedom was supported by many others’ enslavement. Slavery of the Ancient World, serfdom in pre-industrial societies, the chattel enslavement – first of Slavic pagans and then of African people – all were driven by this desire to control and dominate the political flow of energy.
And this system required expansion, so for thousands of years, agriculture drove imperial political frontiers. Even with this, however, there was an upper ecological limit in the amount of land and number of people that could be controlled. There were also limits to plants’ ability to photosynthesize.
The nature of solar power, then and now, is that the sun puts out its billions of joules of energy by the minute, but a tiny portion can be used or stored. Human societies were held in check by the limited concentration of power in the biotic world, and by all the other energy-hungry creatures competing for that limited supply.
Burning fossil carbon shattered those limits and rewrote the calculations of human freedom again, and the revolution in the last few centuries has been science and technology pushing out the boundaries of human affluence and freedom. Fossil fuels have allowed us to free ourselves from the political constraints of the existing system because technology has a nearly endless capacity for turning fossil fuels into work, wealth, and political power.
If agriculture was the harnessing of energy that created a system in which only a few could wield political power and have real freedom, then the use of fossils has meant that freedom could be defined as a kind of human birthright by much of the world. We have seen the advance of freedom as the chief benefit to our way of life, in fact, but none of it would be possible without fossil energy. And fossil fuels only bring affluence in relation to the use of other resources, so we have gained freedom for much of humanity, only by exploiting or destroying more and more of the rest of the living community on Earth. That exploitation has nearly run its course.
But it’s more than simply the depletion and destruction of the environment. Fossil fuels have overturned basic ecological principles by which life creates freedom. They are not just destructive but evolutionarily regressive.
If we could go back four billion years, to the foundations of the Earth, and view it from far out in space, the Precambrian would not even hint at the Earth to come. Looking across the dark void, Earth’s starkness would feel complete, the harsh light bouncing back at us, modulated only by the sweep of great storms, would be a textbook picture of the laws that rigidly organize the inorganic universe.
But then the revolution happened, a greening as simple plant life forms in Earth’s ancient oceans, slowly crept out of the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelves, up water courses, into wetlands. These were all simple organisms, clinging to water for their survival, but some adapted to use not only standing water, but also rainwater to carry out their reproductive needs.
Then there was an increase in structure and scale, the development of plants that stand free of the water. Some of those woody plants developed ways of broadcasting a kind of heavy pollen by air, like pines do today, allowing further movement away from water. And after a long while – a long while – animal life emerged and began to evolve alongside plants, eating them and building on their ability to photosynthesize. Plants then learn to use insects particularly to spread further, and all this added to the freedom of living things.
But, if we still imagine ourselves looking at the ancient Earth from space, we should consider that after hundreds of millions of years, green is still the only color to be seen in the plant world. There are no flowers, just the leaves of woody plants reflecting a verdant monotone into the darkness of space, populating swamps and building forests – an endless progression in which plants live, die, and are buried beneath new life.
Two hundred and fifty million years or so ago this layer of evolving life gave rise to dinosaurs, and for another hundred million years, they dominated the planet, until Chicxulub apparently ended their reign. The giants survived because they pulled heat energy from their surroundings, but they paid the price in the torpor that took them when the warmth and the sun diminished.
The green of earth could feed them enough to keep them moving when the sun shone, but not when it was absent. Warm-blooded creatures survived only in miniature form, lurking on the edges, hiding in the night, including our evolutionary forebearers.
They needed another revolution, and they got it toward the end of the dinosaur age, an evolutionary change that lasted millions of years, but really happened in the twinkling of an eye in the deep timescale we are considering. It was a silent explosion for which the evolutionary fuse had been lit tens of millions of years before by those first pollinating plants, as they groped for freedom and a solution to their water dependency.
Toward the end of the Cretaceous Age is when we finally see the eruption of flowering plants – the angiosperms – the plants of seed and fruit and nectar, that showered the planet with a silent firework display of color and food. Here was a new way of storing energy. Darwin called their advent an “abominable mystery,” but mysterious as their advent might be, they changed the face and the history of the planet.
Flowering plants were a new way to concentrate energy, not possible in the cellulose of older plants. They were a new kind of solar battery, and with enough food energy, millions of years of potential was realized in species that now had the energy to feed their needy bodies with warmth from within. Here began a new kind of twined evolution as a whole new ecology evolved on Earth.
This ecological community was unimaginably complex, when compared to the cold-blooded world of swamps and lizards, so this self-actualization at the species level was a revolution in freedom too. This is the ecological community that gave rise to human cultures, but also those of primates, elephants, dolphins and whales – the world where tree communities share energy and information through networks of mycelium.
But here’s the key point. Fossil fuels are not part of our coevolved community. The Carboniferous Age, 360 to 280 million years ago, when all those early plants were dying and being buried away in the Earth, is what gave us most of our oil, gas, and coal. This fuel represents the remnants of that older, less-productive ecology, the ecology that could not support our evolution or our freedom.
Fossil fuels, in a very real sense, represent a zombie ecology, long dead, but reanimated it in our technology to meet solely human needs. They are the apotheosis of carbon and colonization.
Our current system is failing our planet and our freedoms together.”
In our dependence on fossil fuels, in addition to creating climate chaos, we have turned our backs on something profound in our collective heritage of freedom as living beings on Earth. Our current system is failing our planet and our freedoms together.
So here is where I will conclude for today. The first thing we need to do is resist the malevolent stupidity and rampant greed driving our current politics. This is a lot to do in the short run, but while we are doing that, we also need to think about cleaning up the mess and moving forward.
Some of this is thinking about the ways we live. We need to think about a built environment that is as photovoltaically robust as our co-evolved community is photosynthetically robust. That means far more than tacking solar panels on to things. We need to think about an economy that recycles and reuses as efficiently and robustly as the natural world. There are no end of technological projects, and these need to be founded on good policy.
Beneath that, however, there need to be principles, and those principles need to sustain political freedom as well as our climate and economy. They need to decolonize the Earth.
I’ve laid out a few thoughts today, but the thinking needs to be deeper and broader for fundamental change to happen. But, if I boiled it down to a metaphor, I would say this. Two hundred and fifty years ago we began a new system of governance with a declaration of our political independence. The next step may be as simple as making a declaration of our interdependence, both ecologically and politically, with the rest of the Earth and moving out from there.
That would be a new liberal tradition – or maybe it would be going back to a much older liberal tradition on the earth than the one we usually associate with those words. But that’s a whole new train of thought, and I’m out of time.
