The Long and the Short of It: <em>Of Time and Trump and Tapestries</em>

1.

You can say what you want about Donald Trump (and I will), but the old man has energy. “Flooding the zone” has famously been the strategy of his second term, with a new crisis-inducing edict coming every day, sometimes every hour. Consider this: The blustering threat to take Greenland, by force if necessary, which sent the world into red alert, happened barely a month ago. In any other time that would have been the shocking and possibly defining event of an administration. Here it is just another day at the office. Ho-hum.

It is as if time itself has been altered.  

2.

The Red Knot, a small shorebird which counts the tundra of northern Greenland among its nesting sites, has been billions of years in the making.

Much more recently, twenty thousand years ago, the life of this bird, like the life of every creature on earth, was altered when a seismic event occurred. Ice, which had covered much of the northern and southern hemispheres, began retreating. One result of this retreat was that the sea level began to rise around the world by as much as thirty feet, or as Scientific American puts it, the seas rose “more than if the ice sheet that still covers Greenland were to melt today.”

Another smaller result was that the migratory routes of many birds changed due to the altered climate. There were suddenly new possibilities, new potential stopover points in their arduous annual journeys. At some point the Red Knots established their migratory route, the same one they have stuck to right up until today. These birds, which weigh less than five ounces, are one of the champion migraters of the animal world and can travel over nine thousand miles in both the fall and spring, flying down to Patagonia and other points in South America for the winter and back to the Arctic when that cold part of the world thaws. There are two main branches in the Red Knot family, with the American Knots traveling up and down the East Coast to South America while their European cousins travel through Europe down to Africa.

After thousands of years these routes are so deeply encoded in the species that the young, newly born in the Arctic, migrate on their own after their parents have already flown south.  

3.

​A presidential term lasts four years. Unless you are a child, you will understand that this is a smallest speck of time, a period that will rush by so fast it makes your head turn. Voters from opposing parties used to console themselves that only so much damage could be done in four years, which was really three when you threw in the lame duck year.

​But here is what this fast twitch presidency has delivered up, on top of the threats to take Greenland, in less than 365 days: the deposing of a foreign leader by invading that leader’s country, the blowing up of boats without trial or order of law, the empowerment of ICE as a federal force that has led to the murder of American citizens, the elimination of many key government agencies and positions by Elon Musk’s DOGE, the destruction of historic parts of the White House itself, the plastering of the Trump name on public, time-honored institutions, the pardoning of the criminals behind an attack on the American capital, the criminal investigations of anyone who ever crossed the president, the instigation of massive tariffs, the declaration of the end of birthright citizenship….    

I could go on.  

​These acts have damaged not just the international reputation of the country but democracy itself.

But from a Red Knot’s point of view, these are the least of his crimes.

4.

The Red Knot’s journey does not occur in isolation. It is part of an exquisitely timed ballet coordinated with other species and choreographed over the last ten thousand years, basically since the last ice age.

Consider: Every May thousands of these birds arrive on the shores of Delaware Bay, a body of water that separates southern New Jersey from the Delmarva Peninsula. Their arrival is perfectly timed so that they land just after thousands of ancient, armored creatures, born in prehistory, make their way inland to lay their eggs. We call these creatures, which look like the helmets soldiers wore in World War II, horseshoe crabs. Their eggs look like tiny green peas. There are millions of them, ready to eat if you are so inclined, on the tidal flat.

The lives of the Red Knots depend on those little green eggs.

And not just that: Their lives depend on the greater timing of it all.

5.

​If we put aside morality and focus just on effectiveness, I think we can say that the Trump strategy is brilliant. We are a fast-twitch society, our attention spans shrinking by the second, and this president feeds us what we seem to feel we need. The long term has been eliminated. The current moment, the current crisis, is all.

​Consider: When was the last time you saw a headline reminding you that climate change is the existential issue for homo sapiens? The fact that the world is rapidly warming and the seas rising has gone out of vogue. Who cares what is going to happen in, what, a hundred years or so? Pshaw. We are focused on one hundred days at best, more like one hundred minutes or one hundred seconds. A week after the Greenland crisis you barely heard that country’s name on the news. It was on to Minneapolis.  

6.

​Horseshoe crabs, the animal that Red Knots so depend on, know all about playing the long game. It was in the shallow murky seas of the Paleozoic Era that they evolved over four hundred million years ago, which is to say two hundred million years before the rise of the dinosaurs. While the dinosaurs died off, the horseshoe crabs stuck around.

​They did pretty well for themselves for most of those four hundred million years. Until the last ten or so. Although that is not entirely accurate, since degraded marine environments and beaches, and over-fishing of the crabs for bait in traps, has been going on for decades. But there were still tons of horseshoe crabs around when I was a kid. It was a more recent discovery that, on top of the usual suspects, accelerated their decline. That was when humans figured out that the bright blue blood (do a search—it’s crazy) of horseshoe crabs is exceptionally sensitive to toxic bacteria and perfect for testing injectable drugs and surgical implants and, importantly, vaccines. This last fact made horseshoe crabs one of the unsung heroes of the COVID era.

​Which has helped lead to the steep decline in the population of crabs, which of course means a decline in the number of eggs, a reduction of over ninety percent from the 1980s.

​You will have made the next jump before me. As the number of eggs has crashed so has the number of Red Knots. When the birds arrive on the shores of Delaware Bay, emaciated after flying thousands of miles, they immediately go in search of the little green peas that have sustained them for a millennia or two. What they find is that what was abundance is now a paucity.

7.

​The presidential puppet show effectively guarantees that the media can’t focus on the long term. It’s an effective smokescreen but that doesn’t mean that the less publicized actions, the cruel work behind the smoke, won’t have long term consequences, consequences that are in fact much greater than even the stripping of our civil liberties or who owns Greenland.

​While researching this essay I did a survey of various magazines and their summaries of the most important moments and issues of Trump’s first year. None but the strictly environmental magazines mentioned climate, which has been rendered a kind of exotic sub-issue. And why not? The ADHD of the prez is mirrored in the ADHD of the press. Editors know where their bread is buttered. Trump sells. A recent Gallup poll says that only three percent of Americans believe that climate change is the most important problem the country faces.

​Meanwhile, below the smoke, this has happened:

The president, calling climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” has worked not just to eliminate greenhouse regulations but to rescind the crucial and long-accepted 2009 declaration that greenhouse gases negatively affect public health and welfare. As Dana Drugmand writes in Sierra: “This so-called endangerment finding underpins all other regulations on climate pollution under the Clean Air Act, and experts say that repealing it would be a massive blow to efforts to rein in this pollution and slow down planetary heating.” 

Trump has effectively withdrawn from all our international climate agreements and commitments while gutting the EPA, slashing clean air and water regulations, pushing the use of fossil fuels, and hindering the development of solar and renewables. Once banned chemicals are now allowed in our waters and air while public land is being given away to companies hungry to drill and mine.

​Even as I write this list, I imagine your eyes glazing over. Enough already, you want to tell me. And there’s also this: I am aware that my list isn’t nearly as juicy or fun as the ones that contain Jeffrey Epstein or the Trumping of the Kennedy Center.

8.

​Donald Trump might not know or believe this, but the reason he is president and the reason he can do what he is doing is because of something that happened 11,700 years ago. This was the time after the ice retreated and we entered the miraculously fecund interglacial period known as the Holocene. We had been around for a while as a species, but during our early years the world kept freezing and unfreezing and the seas rose and fell. Climate was wacky. Now we were about to enter an aberrational period, and during that period something wonderful happened. Here is how Adam Welz puts it in his profound and moving book, The End of Eden:    

“For the first time in our species’ existence, we were able to continuously grow our populations, develop new machines, create literature, and build sophisticated systems of politics, governance, and medicine. These massive advances were made possible by one key attribute of this epoch: climate stability”

During this lucky period of stability, as we busied ourselves with creating civilization, biodiversity exploded. The nonhuman world developed into a vast and complex tapestry full of interrelationships between species and places, interrelationships that often depended on almost preposterously perfect timing, timing that only a stable climate allowed. It was as if we were all part of one great mind.

​The Red Knots’ relationship with horseshoe crab eggs on the East Coast is one example of this. But another perhaps even more finely-tuned example is provided across the Atlantic by the journey of the Afro-Siberian Red Knots, a journey that Welz describes in detail in his book. The short version is that Red Knots arrive in northern Siberia just as the snows are finally melting in late spring and set right to work feasting on insects and laying eggs. When the eggs hatch the females head south, leaving the males to oversee the next few weeks, during which the young birds transform from “balls of fluff” into birds big enough to fly thousands of miles south. They will make that flight on their own after the males, having gotten their young in shape, take off. If all goes well, the fledgling Knots will end up off the coast of northern Africa just in time to feast on their favorite food, the Loripedes clam, which is, according to Welz, “the size of an American dime.” The young desperately need to gorge since they are emaciated after their long flight.

​And here is the crazy part: It takes one type of bird to migrate from Siberia through Europe to Africa. It takes another to eat Loripedes clams. What the Red Knots have learned to do, through the trials of evolution, is to be two different birds in two different places. As Welz explains, upon arrival on the African coast “they begin to break down their pectoral flight muscles, which had been enlarged for their long migration, and relocate those resources to growing a large gizzard, a stomachlike chamber in their digestive system that’s lined with muscles strong enough to crush mollusks.”

​Again, you can probably guess what comes next. But I’ll spare you the usual bad news for a moment so that we can simply dwell on this miracle of adaptation.  

9.

At the moment I am writing this Donald Trump is seventy-nine years old, quite old for a homo sapien. (Extreme old age for a Red Knot is twenty years.) In our epoch of the short term, when nothing is valued more than getting attention, Trump is the clear winner. If his dream was to fill the minds of others, he has surpassed even his own likely-wild expectations. But for the Red Knots and horseshoe crabs and other inhabitants of this planet, he is even more than that.

We can’t predict the future of American politics. Perhaps someone will follow who will play Jimmy Carter to Trump’s Nixon. Perhaps human beings will understand their common plight, and understand that everything they have done is due to the stable climate they have lived in for the last twelve thousand years. Perhaps.

​But let’s say that does not happen. Let’s say the things that Trump has torn apart can’t be mended. Let’s say that the scientists are right, and we are in a vital moment, the vital moment, if we hope to slow what these scientists promise will be a massive and cataclysmic change in our world.

​If that happens, and our politics continue on the course set over the last decade, you could make an argument that Donald Trump, he of the reality shows and glitzy casinos, will be rightly remembered as the most consequential creature, human or otherwise, in the history of this planet.

​Crazy, right?

10.

When I was growing up it was common for environmentalists to take some solace in the idea that even if humans blew themselves up the earth itself would continue. The animals would carry on without us! It is harder to take solace in this now. It is true that, barring a supernova or asteroid strike, the world will keep spinning. But at the current rate of extinction, it will be a shockingly empty planet. Not empty of life, which will find a way, but of the great diversity of life that has been billions of years in the making.

​Think of what we could lose.

​Adam Welz writes:

“(This world’s) richness and beauty is nothing short of a miracle, though not a miracle created by an all-controlling God, but one that emerged via the processes of energy and matter being shaped through evolution over billions of years.

Just as every individual living organism is the product of an unbroken chain of successful reproduction that links back to the very beginnings of life so every living species is the result of an unbroken series of successful answers to the challenges of life. All living species are the latest in a mass of continuous evolving streams of good answers that have flowed a long time, passing through extinction filters, changing direction, and evolving new forms, splitting into different streams, and sometimes merging with other good answers via hybridization.”

​The good answer for horseshoe crabs was coming to shore—migrating by walking on the ocean’s floor!—in the spring to lay millions of pea-like eggs, each female capable of laying about four thousand, and the good answer some Red Knots came up with was arriving just in time to gobble down those eggs. Meanwhile across the ocean their old relatives did them one better by learning to change their physiognomy so that they could crack open clams.

​They passed the test for thousands upon thousands of years. But the old answers don’t work on the new tests. Climate stability, civilization’s friend, is getting shaky again. The Arctic spring comes earlier now which throws the world’s finely-tuned clock off, and young Afro-Siberian Knots can’t fatten themselves up for the long flight south and so they arrive on the coast of Africa, if they arrive at all, malnourished. Worse, their bills are often unformed and undersized, no longer capable of cracking open their favorite clams.

11.

​We no longer believe in facts, but here are a few:

The earth isn't flat.

​Donald Trump lost the election he said he won.

Time did not begin when the Bible said it did.

The Red Knot was not created on one day with the wave of a wand or the pointing of a big magic finger, but was sculpted by evolution over thousands of millennia.

Red Knots and homo sapiens share a common heritage dating back billions of years, with birds splitting off from the human branch a mere six hundred million years ago.

The ancient plants and animals that we call fossil fuels come from the Carboniferous period approximately three hundred million years ago.

An exajoule is the unit used to measure the world’s energy consumption. Burning one billion barrels of oil releases roughly 5.8 exajoules of energy. These days our annual consumption of fossil fuels exceeds 500 exajoules.

And I’ll go out on a limb here and add what might admittedly be more opinion than fact: If there is any hope of not ripping up the last of the tapestry, it might be better to listen to smart people who have spent their lives studying the world than to a huckster who made his name selling real estate.

12.

Sometimes, every once in a long while, we can slow down time and get a glimpse of the mosaic, the symphony.

Sometimes it starts with beauty.

Where was I when I saw the thousands of Red Knots out on the sand flats? I have spent the last couple of decades traveling for my work as an environmental writer and I honestly can’t tell you if it was in Nova Scotia or Maine or possibly near Cape May on Delaware Bay. I could search through my old journals to let you know, but what is important is what has stayed with me. The sight of so many birds covering the flats, like some ancient migration before the dwindling, Red Knots mixed in with plovers and ruddy turnstones, working their black bills in and out of the sand like little tiny sewing machines. When they took off the sun hit them so I could see their burnished, tawny bellies, truly red in the low light, and their beautiful dark patterned backs, and I knew I had to learn everything I could about this bird.

I wasn’t thinking about what might be lost.

I was thinking about what was.  

Coda

I am going to step out from behind the curtain of my essay for a moment.

It is traditional to end an environmental essay on an uptick, a note of hope, or at least a kind of hopeful wrap-up. I can’t do that here.

I am not anti-hope. “Without hope, there is no endeavor,” said Samuel Johnson. I agree. Hope is a fuel. It is necessary.

But the situation is dark. There are those claiming that what Donald Trump is doing signals the end of democracy, and others who understandably regard that claim as hyperbolic. But what if the claim is not hyperbole but understatement, and what if democracy is the least of it. Of course the President is not alone in his crimes against nature, but remember how important timing is. At this crucial moment when we might be moving forward, he insists on backward. At the very least he is a vehement, and almost joyous, ripper apart of the tapestry.

Whatever you believe, whoever you want to blame, the tapestry is being shredded. Creatures like the Red Knot and horseshoe crab, that are the result of millions of years of experimentation, that have answered all the questions survival has posed, no longer have the answers.    

The name of the magazine you are reading is Punk Eek. This name is short for punctuated equilibrium, the theory put forth by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, and the idea is that the ever-so-slow and gradual process of evolution is punctuated by sudden bursts forward. There is hope in that idea, though I won’t be betting my life savings on homo sapiens bursting forward any time soon. Rather I find myself focused on the punk part of the name. I was a teenager when punk took the music world by storm, I never wore an earring or shaved my head. But now I find myself drawn to a kind of punk environmentalism.

Punk was never an answer. It was a response. An angry response. I think that would be enough for me right now. If I could only sense something in myself, and others, something stirring. Maybe it isn’t hope, but at least it isn’t apathy. Maybe it is anger, even rage, over the ripping apart of the tapestry. Maybe that is enough for now. Maybe that is a start.