Climate info being disappeared by Trump? The School of the Americas is long dead

An article appeared last week in the Guardian newspaper penned by Arctic researcher Victoria Herrman.

It is mild in tone, maybe because academics are generally encouraged to present a calm and authoritative demeanour to the public. The subject matter, however, is rather wild.

It appears that, under the Trump administration, US government data that may support climate change arguments is being disappeared.

Evidence is being quietly abducted from its various abodes in the Internet and disposed of who knows where, in the hopes that it won’t be readily available to mobilise people around environmental action.

Ms Herrman’s request is a simple one: That her president stop deleting her citations.

All because President Trump is a global warming denier.

It would be so much fun to believe this is part of his rather irregular “thinking” patterns but something tells me that he is not yet that far gone into the wilderness of geriatric malfunction.

This is strategic: Acknowledging global warming has all kinds of consequences and there is a certain brand of business that doesn’t like the implications for its bottom line. Solution? Just pretend it doesn’t exist. Just like cigarettes “didn’t cause cancer” and obesity is a character defect rather than the fast food-processed food-highfructose cornsyrup industry’s fault, and the war on drugs definitely “isn’t” fuelling an exceedingly lucrative black market.

What a moment in history to be alive. To belabour the point, of course from an African perspective, there is nothing about the Trump presidency that is unfamiliar.

The novelty comes from observing with some disbelief how a nation that has enjoyed an untoward level of adulation for at least a decade has revealed itself to be just as prone to dysfunction as we the “poor” and “developing” countries are.

There is a certain warmth of fellow feeling here. We can sympathise with the struggles visited upon them by a ridiculous head of state while thoroughly enjoying their discomfiture. It’s not called an African sense of humour for no reason.

So this thing that Trump is doing about deleting climate change information isn’t new and it’s not even particular to his regime and frankly it won’t work, because… technology.

But this is a level of bad news that should be causing us proper anxiety even all the way here. If climate is changing due to global warming (and it is) we “developing” nations are smack dab in the pathway of the greatest harm that will result from it.

I can’t help but think of the invasive army worm currently chewing through food supplies in the region as an analogy, Uganda being the latest casualty of this horrendous, and ironically American, invasion. How exhausting.

Uganda happens to border Kagera Region in northern Tanzania. Yes, that one sitting smack in the Great East African Rift Valley where a recent earthquake wrecked lives and the United Republic of Tanzania’s government responded to the crisis in a less than satisfactory manner.

If this American army worm shows up there, will my government acknowledge the problem? Or will there be some American strategising employed where people experience food insecurity not because of drought or crop diseases but because they don’t work hard enough.

After all, hard work solves all problems! Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda... maybe their farmers did not work hard enough!

Excuse my sarcasm, it is coming from a very non-academic place of frustration.

Advocates for freedom of the media and freedom of information are readily dismissed in my society by the dark forces of conservatism as being inappropriate.

This quest to create an inappropriately obedient society has real-life consequences that are far more important than trendy concerns with “appropriate social media use” and “not insulting the government.”

When Trump denies climate change, if the sea level rises faster as a consequence then those of us lucky enough to live on this rich and beautiful Swahili Coast best be prepared to cope with the effects of American jingoism.

How much we are prepared to cope with the strictures of a work ethic that excludes army worm invasions and earthquakes and climate-change related weather pattern effects on crop yields and food security is another matter altogether.

But you can see the link, neh? Do read the Guardian article for inspiration: In the end, Ms Herrman triumphs, albeit in a small way: Information never really disappears.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]