by Kai Chan
With yesterday's election result, authoritarianism is at our doorstep. Western nations were so certain that state-run media plus state propaganda was the route to authoritarian regimes. Now it is obvious: an equally possible route is through unbridled capitalism with corporate control of the media, unconstrained social media, and money in politics.
The warnings were all there, eight years ago, and with the narrow miss four years ago. Trump didn't pull this off because he's Mr. Invincible in the sense of being a superhero among mortals. He triumphed because the echo chambers of American social and political systems are deeply vulnerable to bullying blow-hards and unfairly favour the wealthy.
Eight years ago, it became clear that the truth was not enough. At CHANS Lab, we were already employing tools of science communication that were more sophisticated than a simple bullhorn or press release.
Four years ago, I wrote about the need to seize the opportunity while we had it, to reign in out-of-control media, social media, and political systems (this would mean tightly controlling money in politics, including Super PACs and dark money). We missed our chance, perhaps imagining that Trump's first presidency was an isolated phenomenon. It wasn't: it was a symptom of a failing system.
A second Trump presidency will be a wildfire of massive proportions, a mega-fire. In my undergraduate class, ENVR 430, students learn how different climate-fuelled mega-fires are from regular fires (fires that would have been common historically). Whereas 'regular' forest fires would generally burn small areas, leaving some or many adult trees and the soils intact, mainly clearing the understory, mega-fires burn huge expanses including the biggest trees and organic soils including the seed bank. They so completely remove the structures of the old system that they enable entirely new systems, generally much less productive ones.
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| How ecosystems respond to 'regular' wildfire, with a cycle of adaptive renewal. Adapted from C.S. Holling 1986, 2001. |
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| How ecosystems respond to mega-fires, which burn hotter and at greater spatial scales, eliminating pathways of ecosystem memory. From Chan, ENVR 430 lecture for Week 6, Air & Fire. |
Get ready a mega-fire and prepare for its aftermath, when there is at least an opportunity to reshape the system for the better.
CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.
