First encounters with fire by our ancient hominin ancestors were accidental, fortuitous opportunities to study smoldering aftermaths of lightning strikes, chance volcanic eruptions and wildfires. As with other animals, their instinctive reactions were fear and awe, triggering flight responses until extinguished landscapes allowed closer examination of charred remains. For the boldest and most curious, painful burns from touching red embers would have passed cautionary info along many generations before opposable thumbs enabled Homo erectus and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) to actually make and control fires. That happened, perhaps, 750,000 to 1 million years ago (based on microscopic wood ash traces). And that tool use, whether striking flint against iron pyrite to generate sparks or using friction methods to ignite tinder, only came about after long periods of trial and error, cultural evolution born of lucky accidents and Paleolithic experiments to replicate them. Before that information passed to successive generations, early humans likely focused on preserving fire whenever natural occurrences provided it. That undoubtedly involved collecting burning branches from natural fires, carefully transporting them to gathering places and shelters, and feeding them with dry wood.
The impact of fire on early human social groups was transformative. Although cooking made food easier to digest, expanded herbivorous diets, and killed bacteria and parasites in edibles, early humans were still predominantly foragers and scavengers. And despite 19th and 20th century anthropological biases to the contrary, women and children, we now know, did most of that work. Controlled fires certainly had a role in tool-making, but more significantly produced warmth and central communal points for social interactions and cohesion. Most importantly, fires provided a deterrent against predators, allowing early humans to sleep more safely and expand their territories. Fear, while still a part of life became less an obstacle to hominin cultural development. Thanks to fire, night, for which we diurnal humans are so anatomically ill-adapted, became less the 12-hour ordeal of hyper-vigilance and bracing for unseen terrors. Fire provided refuge from the darkness, attracted other nomads, forged larger and stronger community bonds.
Today’s campfires are our well-lit homes and winter hearths, coffee houses and all-night diners and cafes, each aglow with the modern technological equivalents of fire, each an island of illumination in a sea of nocturnal threats, albeit hyenas, African wild dogs, crocodiles and leopards less often. But these aren’t the sources of comfort, social cohesion and information exchange points they once were. Our current administration and queues at drive-through windows have seen to that. MAGA’s nativism, strange affinity for oligarchs, and metastasized divisiveness, engage us in an American-capitalist/Project 2025 equivalent of Mao Zedong’s culture war (1966-76). In it, mostly disaffected, lower income whites seek solutions to disparities in wealth and education (which now plague them) somewhere in the Jim Crow past. Abandoning the future, they seek reboots of the Gilded Age, confusing indigenous peoples’ genocide, unchecked pollution, Asian Exclusion Acts, dangerous-exploitative work conditions, and gender/sexual biases with American “greatness.” Ignoring FDR’s admonitions against fear, the radical right has made us afraid of each other. Created with its ad nausea narcissistic figureheads, plutocratic plunderers and sycophant opportunists is a barren political landscape of weak opposition, apathetic resignation and loneliness. A dark and shadowy pall of isolation surrounds and extinguishes our flickering campfires, turning Main Streets into pictures of detachment reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), Intermission (1963) and Gas (1940).
When the Olympic-class ocean liner RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, April 15, 1912, its orchestra members, led by violinist Wallace Hartley, played on its deck until the frigid waters of the North Atlantic engulfed them. Like the Titanic, largest ship in the world at the time, the United States is a colossus broken in two, whose diminishing international prestige, respect and world-leading economy are taking on water. In 1912, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isidor Straus, German-born co-owner of Macy’s department store and New York member of the U.S. House, refused to board lifeboats. Despite Straus’ objections and begging her to leave, his wife Ida remained by his side. Doomed by their gallantry, each insisted that women and children evacuate first. Today, as America’s empire crumbles, the rich are pushing us aside to fill the last of lowered boats, abandoning the ship, taking as much wealth as possible before the hulls of capitalism fully submerge. Absent the likes of Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid and Edward R. Murrow, today’s media voice little objection to this hyper-concentration of wealth, even sane-washing Trump and his cronies, whose attacks on Medicaid and Social Security are tantamount to stealing life vests on the high seas. Sixty-seven percent of Medicaid recipients are already working; 12% are primary caregivers; 7% are in school, and 11% have chronic illnesses or disabilities. So, when massive cuts to Medicaid were misrepresented as eliminating fraud, Republican senators in “town hall” gatherings faced irate constituents. Iowa’s Joni Ernst was reminded that lives would be lost by eliminating health insurance coverage. Her terse response (echoing Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake,” however misattributed): “we are all going to die.” No kidding, senator, thanks for the news flash. What really matters, of course, as every creature on Earth instinctively understands, is not death’s inevitability, but when and how it occurs. That’s why so many marvelous adaptations encompass wills to survive and the universality of self-preservation. Dispassionate dolts, on the other hand, should get voted out of office.
When Richard Nixon gave his emotionally-charged “Checkers speech” (September 23, 1952), saving his political career and moving one of the cameramen filming it to tears, it was six weeks before the presidential election in which he and Dwight D. Eisenhower were running mates. Before his impassioned address to the American people, most of the GOP heavy hitters, including New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and Eisenhower himself, favored Nixon’s removal from the ticket. Doing nothing illegal at the time, Nixon, who grew up and remained of modest means as U.S. senator, received from a fund, established by backers, reimbursements for verifiably legitimate campaign travel expenses and postage costs for political mailings. Nixon, who made a point of attacking corruption while in the Senate, had been accused of improprieties by a disgruntled fellow Republican to the tune of $16,000, the underlying allegation being that donors to the fund from which he was compensated might be given special favors, even though sizes of contributions were limited and small. Nixon in large part beat the rap by emphasizing wife Pat’s inexpensive, cruelty-free cloth coat, giving full disclosure of their middle class finances, and insisting that their beloved cocker spaniel, Checkers, a gift to their daughters by a supporter, would never be returned no matter what. Sixty million viewers tuned in, generating a wave of support that kept Nixon on the ballot.
Now fast-forward to convicted felon Donald Trump, seemingly above the law after violating the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8). Even compared to Warren G. Harding or a post-colonial African dictator, Trump’s capacity for corruption is unprecedented in scope and brazen shamelessness. Make no mistake about it. Trump has blatantly monetized the presidency. $320 million in crypto-currency fees paid to his family and businesses in the last four months, after which the Trump administration “coincidentally” and selectively paused fraud cases and doled out other favors, is corruption with a capital (make that “capitol”) C. Yet, where are impeachment proceedings? Neither does anyone seem to care that insiders are making huge profits playing the stocks in mercurial lockstep with “taco” indecisiveness: raising, lowering and delaying tariffs. A few actually equate France’s 1884 gesture of gifting the Statue of Liberty to our citizenry to a $400 million Boeing 747 flying palace given by Qatar to Trump alone after his staff made overt inquiries about it. Clearly, inking business deals in return for relaxing tariffs is nothing more than a protection racket run by the White House, a nationally degrading payment of tribute to one man and his family with international ramifications. By comparison, all other preceding corruption in our nation’s history was penny ante. Department of Justice Special Counsel has one mission and one mission only: go after Trump’s opposition, not him, no matter his crimes. Meanwhile, the orchestra on the sinking ship plays on!
As Trump continues to turn society upon itself, he also attacks science, truth and the very institutions foundational to America’s success. As Fareed Zakaria recently reported, the Nature Index, which tracks submissions to the world’s leading scientific journals, shows China leaping ahead in scientific research and discovery. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, 9 are currently Chinese. The only U.S. college/university in that mix is Harvard, moving to #1 after finishing 2nd last year. Not unexpectedly, it is Harvard that Donald Trump, possibly the most scientifically illiterate office-holder on Earth, is trying to destroy. Under the guise of reducing anti-Semitism, Trump has demanded private information about Harvard’s foreign student body, even trying to subvert Harvard’s enrollment of international students, over 27% of its classes. Why Harvard has been singled out for retribution remains unclear. None of the research grants Trump threatens to withhold have anything to do with the Project 2025 anti-Woke culture war. Over 90% of the federal research money Trump administrators threaten to deny Harvard is for research in the life sciences, including the study of diseases and medical treatments. As Zakaria points out, denying money for cancer research will do nothing to dissuade people from demonstrating for Palestine, but it will bump Harvard from #1 on the Nature Index. Trump’s proposed $25 billion cuts to science next fiscal year, one fortieth the U.S. military budget, accompanies tenfold hikes in endowment taxes, hurting our most prestigious universities which attract the best students in the world, many of whom will contribute to the success of the EU, Canada, China and Australia instead.
Not stopping there, Trump and Musk’s DOGE fiasco (only saving $65 billion) and “Big Beautiful Boondoggle,” if passed by the Senate, will succeed in gutting crucial federal agencies and their services, including but not limited to the Departments of International Development (USAID), Human and Health Services (HHS), Labor (DOL), Energy (DOE), Social Security (SSA), Education (Ed), and Agriculture (USDA). Among the scientific and safety agencies most impacted within these departments, and upon which we Americans depend for guidance on mitigating diseases, food safety and storm warnings, not to mention advancements in science in general, are the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Also slashed are Federal Emergency Management (FEMA), which Trump falsely accused of funding “luxury hotels” for migrants, the National Parks Service, IRS, FAA, NOAA and NASA. By reducing national preparedness, these so-called “waste, fraud and abuse” measures, a phrase dating back to McCarthyism, could kill thousands of Americans, especially during hurricane and flu/COVID seasons. If passed, these Project 2025 hatchet jobs will raise the national debt by $2.4 trillion in a decade and leave 11 million people without health insurance in order to fund tax breaks for the richest 1% and corporations totaling $664 billion and $420 billion, respectively. Yet the band plays on!
In early 1972, while people were still dying from lack of food, shelter and medicine in East Bengal and a few years before publishing his seminal work Animal Liberation, Peter Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs. In it, Singer argued that affluent people are morally obligated to donate more of their resources to humanitarian causes than normally considered par. Neither does geographic remoteness from preventable evils nor numbers of other contributors to those causes lessen our commitments. Buying new clothes, Singer contends, with a closet full of functional duds, rather than giving that money to famine relief, is indefensibly wrong. Peter K. Unger seconded that sentiment in 1996 with his book, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Driven by capitalism and conspicuous wealth, such moral philosophy doesn’t resonate with many Americans much less make it to a pulpit. But recent comments and a synthesis by David Brooks on PBS News certainly should. Brooks cited a Boston University count of how many people have died to date because of DOGE wrecking USAID after Trump stopped all foreign assistance by executive order on Inauguration Day. According to BU, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS since Trump was elected, while another 6,000 children died of HIV. Factoring in starvations and other diseases over the remaining years of a Trump administration, Brooks extrapolates preventable death tolls will exceed mass murders by Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. Trump’s and Musk’s convenient distancing from body counts prevents us calling that a willful genocide, but only by convention, not degrees. So the band plays on.
Twenty years ago, I was partnered with a friend in a golf tournament benefitting a DEP colleague fighting cancer. On the way to the tee of our shotgun start we had to take our golf cart down a very steep grassy slope made treacherous by an earlier deluge. Despite my friend pumping the brakes, the cart skidded and, fearing a life-threatening rollover, we both bailed out. In a flash, even before I hit the ground, I could see the cart was heading for a deep pond at the bottom of the hill with both our bags in tow. Mine was (and remains) a cherished hodgepodge of clubs assembled over decades, one at a time, from hand-me-downs, thrift store reclamations and clearance sales of vintage models and collectibles bearing the names of Palmer, Snead, Hogan, Bobby Jones, Jr. and Bobby Nichols. The instant I touched down, I rolled to my feet and sprinted desperately after the cart, nearing, despite being over fifty and wearing golf shoes, the 4.7 40-yard dash I ran in college football. Once alongside, I tugged at the vehicle’s steering wheel, and the cart veered sharply from the water’s edge, a meter from the drink. Adrenaline is a hormone to beat all odds and slay impossibilities. When truth and multilateralism are needed to solve the world’s problems and America, increasingly isolationist, is irresponsibly unilateral and acquisitive in its dealings, this is a time when we all need an adrenaline rush to save the country and the biosphere from being deep-sixed. As Peter Singer and other moral philosophers instruct, attempting to distance ourselves from global warming and the on-going anthropogenic mass extinction, already destroying life on the planet at a scale comparable to the K-T asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, doesn’t erase those imperatives. The harm we inflict is irrefutable fact: 96% of the mass of mammals on Earth areus and the livestock we’ve domesticated forus. A mere 4% of that biomass is all the remaining mammals from giraffes to elephants to whales and bats and Bengal tigers, many threatened or endangered. Seventy percent of all birds are now poultry raised to feed us, mostly factory-farmed chickens. These disconnections with the rest of nature are also made at our own peril as is the gap between what is said and what’s known to be real. Discarding truth, science and objective reality into that abyss only gives rise to further ignorance, pollution and dictatorial evils.
Scott Deshefy is a biologist, ecologist and two-time Green Party congressional candidate