Winners & Losers | Nature Bites Back

Lessons in environmental destruction and resilience.

Welcome back to Winners & Losers, your weekly smorgasborg of the people and forces¹ that are shaping our current world, for both good and bad.

The thing about winning and losing is that they are both temporary states. Anyone who follows sports knows that a team exists over time in a state of both winning & losing (unless that team is the Jets). But possessing the quality of being a Winner or a Loser can often be permanent.

For example, Ted Cruz might win an election or he might lose an election. But he will always be a Loser.

I’m saying this because, as the world burns down around us, it’s important to remember that we will not always lose. Today feels heavy. This week feels impossible. Every week does. The Department of Education is going away. Anyone in our government who deals with real data — economic, educational, demographic, whatever — is being let go because they deal in facts, which are an enemy of this administration. The things that have made us proud to be Americans are being sold for scrap.

But zoom out. Look out across the horizon of time and know that, despite the current state of the world, change is still the only constant. We will win. It might take time, but the world will be different one day.

Stuart Stevens

spoke to the incredible historian, Garrett Graff on Friday (I’ll post the video at the end), and he said something that really struck me. He said that there’s a tendency to look at previous events as if they were ordered and neat and inevitable. It’s really, really hard to write a narrative history of anything that reflects the chaos of any given moment.

But when you listen to someone who was involved, you realize that they had no idea what was going to happen. We can look back on D-Day, for example, and put all the pieces in their place, move the troops across a map, and tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

But if you could have spoken to a soldier preparing to storm the beach, you would realize there is no order and nothing is inevitable. He doesn’t know if he will live to the top of the hour, let alone go on to win the war and save the world from fascism.

We are in the middle of an upheaval. Remember that we don’t know how this ends. But someone will one day.

I chose a Winner and a Loser to reflect this kind of historical uncertainty. Just when things look so bad, and as the villains close in, you get a dose of perspective and know that this fight isn’t over.

Without further ado.

Lee Zeldin, Loser

Lee Zeldin is Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and like all other agency heads, he is tasked with destroying his. And like the other agencies, the EPA turns out to be a pretty important bulwark against the billionaires trying to tear it down.

I won’t go on for too long about all of the great things the EPA has done, but the introduction of stricter emissions standards for cars and power plants resulted in a 70% plunge in common air pollutants since 1970. They took the lead out of gas, which led to a massive reduction in childhood lead poisoning.

Look, guys. They fixed the f*cking ozone layer! It’s a little more complicated than that, but come on!