Trump Cashes In, Sanitizes History, and Pollutes the Planet
Artists from Anton Chekhov to Marvin Gaye Have Watched the Earth Suffer While Politicians Look Away
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: If artists and scientists have been warning us for centuries, what excuse do we have for treating the planet like a disposable prop?
Trump Earned $2.2 Billion in 2025 Amid Countless Conflicts of Interest: A president turning public trust into private profit is not entrepreneurial brilliance, it’s corruption pure and simple. Do we care?
Trump Rewrites History and Ignores Its Lessons: When a government starts scrubbing slavery, conquest, and civil rights from public memory, it’s not defending patriotism but manufacturing amnesia.
Trump Pardons Polluters and a Major Donor: Calling industrial pollution “fixing their car” is the kind of linguistic buffoonery that turns dirty air into a donor perk.
Years and Years: This series understands that the most frightening apocalypse is the one that arrives disguised as ordinary life.
Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”: Marvin Gaye wraps grief in silk here, then leaves you to reckon with how calmly we destroy what keeps us alive.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.”
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), playwright and physician
Uncle Vanya was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, but Chekhov had been working on it for a decade. An earlier version, The Wood Demon, focused even more directly on the environmental concerns that were peripheral to the themes of the finished play. But the concerns expressed here, by the character Astrov—a provincial doctor and amateur naturalist who plants trees in his spare time as a private obsession—viewed with 21st century eyes, are perhaps the most remarkable thing about the play. In the 19thcentury, there were an estimated four trillion trees on the planet Earth. Today there are roughly three trillion. Dry rivers and lakes, the extinction of countless species, the ravaged climate, which is making Earth an ever hotter and less hospitable planet—Chekhov saw it all, he issued a dire warning, and it has been, for all intents and purposes, roundly ignored.
There’s another judgment here: that the earth has become not just poorer but “uglier.” We are used to ignoring artists when they talk about issues outside their particular field—“Shut up and sing,” right-wing critics tell Bruce Springsteen—but who is better situated to judge the difference between beauty and ugliness than the artist? What Chekhov is telling us, through Dr. Astrov, is that you do not need tools, numbers, or a laboratory to understand what is happening. You just need to open your eyes and resist the temptation to look away. The earth is losing its beauty. When did we decide that was an acceptable trade?
Chekhov was far from the first person to make these points. Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist, was warning in the early 1800s that deforestation would dry up the springs, destroy the rivers, and alter local climates. George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat, wrote in 1864 that “the earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.” By the time Astrov walked onto that stage, a century of clear-sighted people had delivered essentially the same message, and civilizations had listened politely and continued at full speed. What do we make of a species so capable of clear sight, and so consistent in its refusal to act on what it sees?
When people who are able to grasp the consequences still choose short-term extraction over long-term stewardship, what we’re dealing with is a failure of responsibility, and a failure of conscience. The insurance industry has a term for this: moral hazard. Roughly speaking, moral hazard is when one person or entity chooses to cause harm because someone else is going to have to pay for it. That is basically the Republican Party’s environmental policy in a nutshell. We log the old-growth forest and drill-baby-drill because the timber and oil checks clear this quarter and the future doesn’t vote in this election.
If there’s any hope to be found in Astrov’s speech, it’s in two little words: “until now.” Which means we still have a chance to do better. Chekhov practiced medicine, so he understood the difference between a diagnosis and an autopsy. A diagnosis is still worth acting on. Today, scientists are debating whether we are in the diagnosis or autopsy stage of climate change. There is no consensus answer to that question, but we have nothing to lose by acting like there’s still a chance to cure Patient Earth. Worst case scenario, we might keep the planet a fit home for its noblest inhabitants for a few generations longer. Best case scenario, we might turn things around. We created this situation decision by decision. We won’t improve it by kicking the can down the road to our grandchildren because we were too lazy, greedy, or addicted to creature comforts to pick it up ourselves.
