Vermonter Bill McKibben, in a September Time magazine article with the shocking headline “How We Survived Climate Change,” takes a futuristic stab at how the U.S. might appear in 2050. For openers, he imagines a female candidate defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election and our political economy began to rejoin the international movement to address both the causes and effects of climate change.
“Of all the issues that made suburban Americans — women especially — uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top,” McKibben imagines.
I’d been thinking about this view of our future when I met a college administrator at an academic shindig. I told him I’d recently written in the Valley News about growing up long ago among people in Oregon who might have supported Trump. He told me he was raised among people in the Midwest who support Trump right now. And he added this: We need to think more about the ecosystem that made Trump’s presidency possible.
We didn’t get a chance to explore his ecosystem idea, but the thought has been bouncing around in my mind next to McKibben’s take on our possible future.
The Electoral College gives small states and lightly populated rural areas power in our national elections disproportionate to their populations. Some Democrats say that’s the problem. But if you think about what to expect in a post-Trump world, a larger problem really seems to be the ecosystem(s) that helped to make this presidency possible.
In at least one way the problem is literally ecological. True, before climate change actually destroys the flyover country where crucial pockets of Trump’s support reside, it will probably bring floodwaters into the homes of many among the “coastal elites” who have been most critical of Trump. But eco-disasters began in flyover country well before we began to worry about Trump or climate change.
The administrator I met may have been using “ecosystem” to suggest conditions that foster the rage now residing in our White House. He might have been talking about damaged local political economies in our country where enough voters shared the rage and fear to give Trump his victory in the Electoral College.
For example, Wisconsin is losing two farms a day and might lose 10% of the state’s dairy farms in 2019. Industrial agriculture is obliterating small farms and damaging topsoil. Walmart has been putting many of Wisconsin’s Main Street merchants out of business.
Those problems probably go a long way toward explaining why Wisconsin, despite its history of progressive politics, voted for Trump in 2016. It gets close to what a person might mean by the “ecosystem” that made the Trump presidency possible.
If we got rid of the Electoral College and relied on the popular vote, we still wouldn’t have addressed the causes of the fear and rage that make Trump’s posturing and lies, his disruptive policies, even his efforts to raze our democracy, credible to many voters.
Here’s my explanation: Support for Trump and other national leaders like him has much to do with inequality.
We know inequality has been spreading widely in our country, and rural America has not been spared. Not only has it become increasingly difficult for farmers to make a living on land that has sometimes been in their families for generations, but the towns they relied on have fallen on hard times as well. Those towns can’t provide enough jobs for young people and others who have to leave their farms.
But what if our federal government began to think of rural America as a place where we can address climate change while fostering sustainable agriculture, rebuilding farm towns, and providing good jobs?
Our government’s Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture might work together on assumptions like these:
■ Sustainable agriculture can address and adapt to climate change.
■ Sustainable agriculture is more nimble and more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture and can provide millions of good jobs. (If you want to meet people who enjoy the work they do, visit a farmers market.)
■ Sustainable agriculture works best at the scale of small and medium-sized farms.
■ Federal policies should provide financial incentives to sustainable farms and local businesses that work against climate change.
Far from costing taxpayers money, such an approach to our climate crisis and the economics of flyover country would begin to produce wealth in America’s neglected heartland. It would reduce the rage and fear that polarize and paralyze our country.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.