A Response Submitted to Robert Redford’s Earth Day opinion piece from Time

Dear Editors –

I deeply appreciated the stark truths Robert Redford expressed so passionately in his recent article (“Don’t Fall for Political Distractions. Saving Our Planet Must Come First”). But I think your headline is doing it, and the vital cause it promotes, a huge disservice.

As Redford himself points out, one of the chief things keeping the US from taking the crucial role it must in averting planetwide climate disaster is the Trump/Pence regime. In addition to pushing a nakedly fascist worldview,committing crimes against humanity, and violating national and international law, they have proved themselves not just callously indifferent but actively hostile to any attempts to stem the environmental crisis. They have also continued the now-well-established GOP tradition of sabotaging our scientific community and refusing even to acknowledge the basic facts that community reached clear consensus on years ago. We must accept that this is no longer the party of Lincoln—or even of Nixon, who created the EPA back in the days when breathing clean air was still a nonpartisan issue.

By some estimations, we have about 10-12 years to turn things around before we reach a tipping point for irreversible environmental disaster. We can’t afford to waste even one of those years, far less five or more. This means that removing Trump and Pence from office as soon as possible is not just a national but a planetary emergency—which, in turn,means there are some political battles that are anything but distractions, and are in fact the heart of any realistic climate-change plan.The inescapable conclusion is: for humanity and the Earth, Trump and Pence must go. Now.

Sarah Roark
Editorial board member of RefuseFascism.org