Baby wombat thief sums up the American Administration’s approach to nature: “it’s only an animal”.

The story from Australia that has been making headlines over the last couple of days has ended. The American ‘influencer’, Sam Jones, has left Australia voluntarily while her visa to stay in the country was being reconsidered after she had herself filmed stealing a baby wombat from its mother. Despite clear distress from both the mother and baby, Jones continued the kidnap, finally putting the baby wombat on the road, not near its distressed mother, and letting it go.

The retaliation from Australians, including politicians, was intense and immediate. The state may lay charges against Jones, while revoking her visa was immediately considered. Even Prime Minister Albanese, who is something of a milquetoast, suggested Jones might want to try stealing a baby crocodile from its mother to see ‘how you go there’. On-line she had to shut down her blog because of the backlash. However, a TikTok account reputedly created by Smith, said “I get hundreds of dea** threats for picking up an animal. WT*? . . . Let’s have some respect.”

If that message is from Jones, clearly she did not earn her lesson. Stealing a baby animal from its mother is not just “picking up an animal”. And clearly she is expecting accolades for her actions rather than fury from animal lovers everywhere. Respect for the animals she tormented is nowhere to be seen, yet she demands respect for herself despite her cruel actions. This is the attitude of an entitled bully.

If the American Administration follows its current trajectory of deregulation of all protections of nature, we can expect Jones to be invited to the White House any day now and offered an important post in the EPA. There she can continue the current task of taking all protections away from endangered species while opening up their habitat to mining, oil and gas exploration and logging. In fact, she can follow in Kristi Noem’s footsteps, the new Secretary of US Homeland Security who sometimes accompanies ICE on their raids to arrest ‘undocumented and criminal immigrants’, and accompany the miners, loggers and petroleum companies to watch while they destroy those habitats.

Yesterday the EPA rolled back 31 laws protecting the environment, some that have been in place many decades, protecting parks and reserves and protecting people from pollution. Further, Trump has demanded that the EPA revisit the long-held scientific findings on anthropogenic climate change as he does not believe in it. Meanwhile, his sycophantic new director of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, said “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate change religion”. It is very much up for question who is following the religion here—the scientists who have spent decades studying the effects of anthropogenic climate change on the planet, including the increased ferocity of hurricanes, typoons and cyclones, the wildfires that have ravaged vast swathes of southern Europe and the Western US, the droughts and floods that are endangering the lives of millions all over the world, or the climate change deniers who resist, as Al Gore put it, “the inconvenient truth “ that not only does climate change exist but it is human activities such as the excavation and burning if fossil fuels that are causing it. Of course anyone with even the tiniest bit of an open mind who follows the news can see the planet beginning to seriously react to our, still increasing, emissions. And, at 1.5 C above pre-industrial norms in 2024, it is already far worse than even the gloomiest scientists expected even 10 years ago. We are facing a planet whose equatorial zones, where the bulk of the human population resides, will not be habitable quite possibly as early as 2050. Ten years ago, that date was 2100.

“A move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of America’s climate laws” is what the Guardian newspaper says of Trump’s decision to revisit climate science. No doubt, there will be some climate scientists who, threatened with loss of their jobs or death threats to their families, will fall in line and ‘find’ that the rock-solid, received science of climate change was wrong all along. If that happens, worldwide climate science will come under question at exactly the time when there is no more time for delay for stringent cut-backs to fossil fuel use and urgent need for huge investment into clean energy. Petro-states like Saudi Arabia will seize on such ‘un-science’ to push for their products to be used more, and the already out-dated and under-subscribed actions required by the Paris Agreement will be thrown out. Small island nations will be lost, shorelines supporting major cities around the world will flood, and by 2050 much of the non-tropical world will be under relentless attack from a planet pushed way beyond its limits. The tropical zones will simply be uninhabitable.

If we continue on the emissions path we are already on, scientists are warning a potential 3-4 C increase in global temperatures by the end of this century. At that point, civilization as we know it will have collapsed as people move from thriving to struggling to survive. That’s IF we continue on as we are doing. If we increase emissions, that point will come sooner, and therefore faster than anyone can prepare for.

At an environmental conference I once attended close to 20 years ago, some of the world’s leading scientists debated whether we would see a 75 or 90% die-off of the human race by 2100. No one went below 75%. And that was before the failure of the Paris agreement and before anyone could have imagined the historically most polluting country in the world being headed by a rabid climate change denier. No doubt those cutting-edge scientists knew what they were talking about. But we’ll be lucky if the great human experiment, started between 100,000-200,000 years ago, which coalesced in the short-lived Holocene Age to create the great civilizations from the ancient Sumerian’s who first invented writing to the Babylonian’s, the Maya, Aztec and Inca civilizations, to Rome and then European civilization, does not fall apart within the lifetimes of many people alive today. If Trump has his way, human civilization will be gone within decades, and the few of our young people, our children and grandchildren who survive the rising seas, the unbearable heatwaves, the collapse of the fisheries in a rapidly heating ocean, the collapse of agriculture through heat, drought and flood, the burning of the last forests remaining will truly experience lives that are “nasty, brutish and short “. All for some short term profits for (mainly) men who are already so rich they don’t know what to do with their money.

It is time to say a very determined “no” to this wanton destruction of the only planet we have. It is time every citizen of every country in the world makes it clear that the climate has to be a priority. As Europe prepares for potential war, it cannot forget its commitment to the planet. States, cities, counties and ordinary citizens in the US have to stand up to the American Administration and its wrecking ball approach to nature, and refuse to give in to this phenomenally destructive government. All over the world we have to stand up for nature while there is still something left to stand up for. For if we destroy our environment, no matter how much short term profit we make from it, we destroy ourselves.

(13 Mach 2024)