I enjoy getting outdoors these days. It is comparatively chilly, but that feels good compared to the burning summers we have here. Wildlife are still about, particularly the quail, the doves, the cooper hawks, and the coyotes.

I doubt if Donald Trump likes the outdoors. His sons have found distraction in killing ‘big game’, an old-school, masculine diversion for the well-heeled. But I doubt if Donald, the father, cares for spending one minute outside, save for golf, or to work on his tan poolside, or expand on the virtues of the landscaping at his latest, overpriced luxury condos. And he doesn’t have much time for that when he has a whole country to look after. The man who loves gold-plated fixtures has shown no indication that he cares for living things beyond people, and as for people, he mostly cares for himself. Sadly, in many ways the future of the whole planet is in the hands of a man who doesn’t care about planets, or the outdoors, or living things, or their futures, and he has proven that with his actions.

As a minority vote president, Trump has focused much of the government’s energy toward helping the wealthy, and making climate change worse as much as possible. He has established the vision at multiple levels of energy dominance for America, and most specifically, a dominance through rapidly accelerated production of oil and gas. He is not unique among leaders with this sad excuse for a vision. George W. Bush and his executioner, Dick Cheney, accelerated natural gas exploration and development as well as oil development on federal lands. Bush told the National Academy of Sciences to keep re-studying climate change until later in his term he finally said that climate change was real but we couldn’t afford to do anything about it. It was an ironically stupid reading of the future that was wrong about a number of critical and expensive things. Sadly, President Obama did not pull back significantly on oil and gas development, but he also was blocked throughout most of his term from doing anything worthwhile toward developing alternatives.

So with many, many years of failed leadership on climate change and the management of wild environments, we now come to a critical point where America seems to be more broadly recognizing the dangers that we face as a nation, and as a planet, with regard to a drastically changing climate. 2018 offered a glimpse of catastrophic fires, immersive rainstorms that exceed any precedent, erratic and intense weather in general, drought, and the accelerating compromise of many wild ecosystems. We face collectively a future of high temperatures, inadequate water supplies, failing crops, floods, famine, pestilence, civil unrest, mass migration, and failing economies. The warning signs are there and some of the changes are here, though not in full force yet, but we as a planet are responding in a grossly inadequate way, and trying above all to preserve the assets and lifestyles of the wealthiest. Our own leader here in the U.S. mounted seminars on the value of coal and other fossil fuels for the future at a key international meeting on climate change. At home, climate science is shoved aside to make way for unregulated fossil fuel dominance.

To further damage the environment, President Trump wants to accelerate off-shore drilling, despite the interests of the states whose coasts would be mired by spills, and he pushes for permits for pipelines, against the will of local people, but especially against the interests fo Native Americans. The peoples who once were stewards of the lands and waters that we now develop without end still have a strong attachment to them. The Trump administration does not disguise his disrespect for native peoples nor for wild lands.

His immigration policies have hurt specifically the refugees of Central America, people who are brown skinned and largely of native blood. Many of these people are coming to the U.S. in response to a series of events in their lives kindled in part by climate change. They are the tip of the avalanche coming. These poor people are demonized endlessly by conservative media and by Trump, both their ringleader and servant. His plan is to build an extremely expensive wall, a manifestly pointless effort to stem the currently modest flow of people into the U.S. History is full of walls that didn’t succeed as barriers and nor as tools of international relations. But Trump’s wall is a symbol, as Michael Gerson pointed out recently in the New York Times. It is a “monument to vanity and bigotry” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-wall-is-a-monument-to-vanity-and-bigotry/2018/12/31/361a7478-0d43-11e9-84fc-d58c33d6c8c7_story.html). There is a wide disinterest in the use of a wall to limit immigration in the U.S., except among the Trump-followers, a minority. The insistence on the wall for just the southern border is clearly racist, and comes at a time when we could benefit from the very people that it would aim to exclude from our society.

The tea party hard core has consistently made it impossible for Democratic or Republican Presidents to update our immigration policy for decades. Part of the needed change would include much higher numbers of visas for agricultural workers. Our agricultural workers come largely from Central America and Mexico. Many of these people come from farms and hard outdoor lives. So many of them work without visas, which makes them without the ability to work toward better treatment and better pay. We need these people to care for our crops, and in the near future, to help care for our wild lands, and generally to help mitigate the effects of climate change. We will need solar panels galore, wind farms, insulation of homes, and on a wide level and in diverse ways, update our ability to manage and save energy. We are on the cusp of a revolution, but we have a small minded President without vision, who is supported by a bunch of venal, self-interested politicians and industry leaders. So instead of seeing the value of the people from Central America that come for asylum and ready to work hard, President Trump, uses them as scapegoats for his followers’ social frustrations and racism. In this way the wall is a symbolic stand against foreigners, native peoples, multiculturalism, tolerance, social change, and the future.

But the wall itself would also be a barrier against the movement of animals and maybe plants across the border. Larger animals like jaguars, ocelots, coati, and others migrate north and south across the border in the wilder stretches. Migration is not an optional behavior. It is essential for keeping the genetic stock of migrating creatures strong and diverse. Further, as climate change stresses all living things along the border, many will need to move further north and higher in elevation to find the cooler and more moist places that they depend on. This process would be impeded by a wall. I don’t doubt that President Trump has absolutely no interest in this problem, just as he doesn’t care about the poor people of Central America and their children.

What do we do with this President, an unenlightened man who values dollars and ruples above all living things and has no interest in learning or thinking? He is a salesman, and as part of selling himself on a daily basis, he must sell his wall right now. All the Congress, all the United States, and all the world must divert him from his wall, and instead lead the planet toward fighting and compensating for climate change. The time for effective action is short. We face a grave future otherwise, and so do the wild things that share our world with us.