Notes From an Environmentalist.

Climate and a Trump Depression?

           Will the climate crisis lead to another Dust Bowl and Depression under Trump?      

The day after the presidential election I took the day off to do two of my favorite things. I dug up some oysters and picked some cranberries, red and firm despite the drought gripping every state in the country except Alaska and Kentucky.     

But I had an unsettling sense of foreboding. The last time a president had tried to run a country like a business we plunged into the Depression, with its Dust Bowl and Hoovervilles. In my hometown of Ipswich, mills and businesses had shuttered and it was our clamflats and orchards that provided about the only decent food and jobs.

Initially I thought we might make it through the next few years relatively unscathed, protected in our own state moving forward with protecting its citizens and creating jobs in fields like expanding wind and solar industries.

But Trump’s recent appointments reminded me of how chaotic his first term had been. How will he cope with the weekly drumbeat of drought, fire, storms, floods and lethal heat waves that have become the climate crisis norm?

His appointments and Project 2025’s plans to dismantle government agencies and privatize weather forecasting give us a glimpse of how he will try to deny what everyone can see from their own front porch.