In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not just about delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations – not just about wringing as much profit from living systems as they can? Could it be that they want to see the destruction of the habitable planet?
We know that Trump’s overriding purpose is power. We have seen that no amount of power appears to satisfy his craving. So let’s consider power’s ultimate destination. It is to become not only an emperor, but the last of the emperors: to close the chapter on civilisation. It is to scratch your name indelibly upon a geological epoch. Look on my works, ye vermin, and despair.
It’s true, of course, that many of his actions amount to standard capitalist looting, released from the feeble regulatory restraints of previous administrations. This week Trump ordered the mass destruction of national forests and other protected lands by the timber industry, to be overseen by the US Forest Service, whose new boss was previously vice-president of a timber company. The results will include heartbreaking losses of wildlife and rare ecosystems, and a heightened risk of wildfires. Trump justified his order with that classic dictator’s gambit: a purported “emergency”.
He has used the same excuse to trigger a new wave of fossil-fuel projects, granting them “emergency” permits to override environmental protections. This is likely to cause the poisoning of wetlands and water supplies. Overseeing the assault is the new energy secretary, Chris Wright, previously CEO of a fracking company.
If the US were really suffering an “energy emergency”, you would expect the government also to accelerate the deployment of renewable power. Instead, Trump has frozen it. You might also expect it to insist that energy is used more sparingly; instead, his team is deleting fuel economy standards. This looks like payback to the fossil-fuel industry that helped elect him.
But other policies look more like gleeful vandalism. The devastating staffing cuts at national parks and forests won’t help any of his corporate backers. But they will degrade the experience of visitors, while jeopardising wildlife and habitats.
The same goes for the mass destruction of jobs at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the freezing of all the international conservation grants it offered, many of which are crucial to the protection of wildlife overseas. There’s not much to be gained here by any corporate lobby, and a great deal to be lost by the rest of us. Trump’s stated aim of “getting rid” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency would put corporate profits at severe risk, especially among insurers and investment funds, while intensifying the suffering of people hit by environmental crisis. He has also eliminated the help offered to communities suffering from heavy pollution. Again, there’s no obvious gain for capital, just plenty more human misery.
Vengeful nihilism, the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, is a major theme in Maga politics. It is applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world. It is hard to avoid the thought that environmental destruction is not just a means by which Trump serves his corporate backers, but an end in itself.
At the same time, Trump enthusiastically (albeit vaguely) boosts Musk’s plans to send people to Mars, a planet incapable of supporting human life. These men, who claim without evidence that unless they cut $1tn from the federal budget, causing innumerable harms, “America will go bankrupt”, are pressing for a programme likely to cost hundreds of billions while delivering no benefit to humanity. For all its grandiosity, the plan amounts to nothing more than an elaborate means of sending people to their deaths.
One of the most persuasive explanations of our times I’ve read is an essay by the author Jay Griffiths, published in 2017. She connects today’s planetary vandals with the Italian futurists of the early 20th century. The futurists, who created much of the iconography and ideology of fascism, fetishised the machine, fantasising about “the technological triumph of humanity over nature”. They were obsessed by flight. “Hurrah! No more contact with the vile earth!”, the author of their manifesto, Filippo Marinetti, exulted. “Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business,” the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio claimed. “It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements.”
Through flight, Griffiths notes, they believed they could achieve their ideal, purified state, characterised by the notion of Deus Invictus: the unbound, totalitarian god, no longer restrained by such earthy, humdrum matters as honesty, kindness, sympathy, respect or even gravity.
I believe, like her, that the revival of this belief system might offer a key to understanding Elon Musk and his remarkable hold over the Trump administration. What Musk presents is the definitive fantasy of escape: from decency, care, love and the living planet itself. They can leave it all behind, leap off the vile Earth, and ascend into heaven.
On Mars, Musk dreams of building private cities under the exclusive control of his company SpaceX. Never mind the technical impossibilities; it’s the fantasy that counts: the definitive release from social and biological constraint. His subterranean prison cities, in which survival would depend on extreme technological intervention – the slightest interruption of which would mean instant death – would make the worst terrestrial dictatorship in history look like a yoga retreat. Deus Invictus would reign supreme.
Where there is no love, there can be only destruction. Smash the planet then transcend it; leave your indelible mark on Earth while reigning triumphant in the heavens: this, I believe, is a deep, unspoken urge that helps explain Trump’s programmes. But even if, through some grim miracle, the planet wreckers succeeded, they would soon discover that no technological wonderland, no space station or Martian city, compares to what we have.
This is the only planet in the universe to which we are adapted. Things we seldom think about – 1 bar of atmospheric pressure at the Earth’s surface; the magnetosphere, which, with the atmosphere, shields us from cosmic radiation and solar proton bombardment; ambient oxygen; 9.8 m/s2 of gravity; an average surface temperature of 15C – create, alongside the living systems that feed, water and shelter us, a place that would sound like paradise to anyone removed from it. This is our heaven, and there can be no other.
