Henry Abbott

The precise outcomes of Tuesday’s elections have yet to become clear. But one thing is certain: Donald Trump or a Republican successor will be president of the U.S. until January 2029. He leads a party committed to removing protective regulations, eliminating green infrastructure investments and rejecting international climate agreements. In his second term, Trump aims to undo longstanding drilling restrictions and allow extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—his promise at the RNC to “drill, baby, drill” across the country.

Meanwhile, the global environmental situation spirals closer and closer to the dreaded so-called “tipping points.”

In 2014, scientists implored policymakers to immediately cut emissions, to avoid the feedback loop caused by the melting of Arctic ice: “Delaying mitigation [of climate change] … through 2030 is estimated to substantially increase the difficulty of the transition.” The gravity of this apocalyptic scenario made decarbonization the backbone of 21st-century environmentalism.

Older campaigns against water pollution, biodiversity loss and environmental injustice have since been sidelined to wage an all-out war on carbon emissions. Society-wide efforts to decarbonize—in the home, the campus, the office and the nation—have driven a gradual reduction in U.S. emissions. Renewables, particularly solar, have flourished, giving us the abundant supply of electricity we need to replace our carbon-intensive technologies.

But it has come too slow. The dozens of international climate conventions or the dogged efforts of environmentalists haven’t stopped the proliferation of new gas plants and drilling sites. Even the College, a leader in college sustainability, will still be emitting carbon until 2042. The modest decreases in American emission rates have been more than compensated by a boom in coal use in China, as the most pollution-intensive manufacturing industries grow and move abroad.

Even though renewables are claiming ever-larger shares of the energy market, there are record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 2022, international climate scientists warned that avoiding runaway global warming was still possible, but only if global emissions began to decline in 2025. Energy researcher and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair Jim Skea said “it’s now or never” and called for “immediate and deep reductions across all sectors.”

With Trump regaining the presidency, it’s hard to imagine this long-shot wish coming true. Neither candidate was friendly to the climate; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris presided over some of the highest oil production levels in U.S. history. But in Trump’s second term, supported by a Republican Congress, American environmentalists will find it impossible to enact the policy necessary to avert significant global warming. Under a fascistic, pro-oil regime, the swift transformation that scientists envision will not come to pass. U.S. leaders after Trump—when the left recovers—can slow the damage, but they will not escape the consequences of our inaction in the 2010s and 2020s.

When I first came to the College, in 2021, I was introduced to the trade-off between “mitigation” and “adaptation” in climate policy. Ideally, it was framed, society would first heavily invest in mitigating climate change, by building renewables, replanting forests and replacing gas cars. Then, as some inevitable global warming set in, we would put a portion of climate investment towards harm-reducing adaptations: seawalls, heat shelters, artificial reefs and the like. Through the right balance of these strategies, we could successfully lower our emissions while protecting vulnerable people and places.

Staring into the next four years, it’s clear to me that this once-central framework is falling apart. Mitigation is a fading dream; the best-case scenarios just got a lot worse. Yet we can’t just put all our efforts towards adaptation; spiraling climate change will be too much to fend off. It is unclear what environmentalists are to do. (To my friends who did not want me to write a depressing piece, I promise you should keep reading.)

A way from here, perhaps, is a focus on “restoration:” in some ways a blend of the earlier strategies but really a distinct mode of imagining environmentalism. Restoration recognizes that our environments have layers of damage, from accumulated pollutants in soils to the very structure of the urban landscape. Environmentalism becomes a battleground with multiple fronts, engaging with the legacy of historical injustices and the uncertain challenges of the present. It may seem abstract, but restoration comes down to reinvesting in the local community, emphasizing the right of each community to govern, use and care for its own lands and waters. It’s an idea that undergirded the environmental justice movement of the 1990s—no community should have to suffer the burden of another’s waste—but was somehow lost in the face of the global climate threat.

As we’ve realized the extent of the Earth’s ecological crisis (and the inadequacy of global governance systems to fix it), some turn to restoration as their way of making just one little place more whole. Feminist Donna Haraway said in 2019 that even as full repair becomes impossible, “that is not the same thing as saying there can be no repair, restoration, restitution, cobbling together again, and … ways of living in the world that haven’t been on this planet before.” Just as gardeners constantly tinker, transplant and nurture their plots, we must reestablish mutually beneficial relationships with the plants, animals and people around us.

And as the nation enters politically uncharted territory?

I see a turn toward the local sphere as a means of rebuilding, from the soil up: reuniting our polarized communities, repairing our local institutions and reestablishing a sense of place and belonging. The new mode of environmental activism is part of the political movement we now desperately need. In the coming four years, and whatever political and ecological future lies beyond that, it is in this way I seek to restore our world.

Addison Davis is a member of the Class of 2025.