Natural Man

Each one is more dire than the last: “Trump’s Latest Plan to Undo the ‘Holy Grail’ of Climate Rules: Never Mind the Science”; “Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths”; and “One Year After Trump’s Inauguration, the Damage to Environmental Policy Is Unprecedented.” The former US senator from Wisconsin, who served for almost two decades as one of the chamber’s most ardent advocates for climate action, publicly rebuked Trump’s January 7 withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “Nothing in the Constitution grants the president any such power.” That cry of frustration echoes the sentiments of many environmentalists in a moment when the Trump administration seems to be reversing all the progress that Feingold and others fought to achieve after the awakening that Americans experienced on the first Earth Day in 1970. As the chair of the global steering committee of the Campaign for Nature—an international effort based on the tenet that “the rapid loss of biodiversity threaten[s] the very existence of humanity on Earth”—Feingold has emerged as a high-profile advocate for the ambitious agenda outlined in the somewhat clumsily named yet vital Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Capitalizing on the fact that “nature is still something that crosses not just party lines but ideological lines,” Feingold leads a steering committee that includes progressives such as former Irish president Mary Robinson along with Iván Duque, who served as the president of Colombia from 2018 to 2022 and whom Feingold rightly describes as “very conservative.” Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia, is another, moderately conservative member of the committee, along with Lord Zac Goldsmith, who served in the cabinets of British Conservative Party governments led by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak—not exactly the credentials of a “woke” internationalist.

Author: John Nichols

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