Climate Kings

National crises make governments vulnerable to autocracy—a rather obvious assessment, perhaps, but one rarely seen in debates about climate change. Take the Maldives, an atoll nation in the Indian Ocean. Rising seawater is projected to consume most, if not all, of the country this century. In 2008, the Maldives chose its first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed. Almost immediately, he made climate change preparations central to his administration. He announced plans to move 360,000 Maldivian citizens to new homelands in Sri Lanka, India, or Australia, and he promised to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral country. Nasheed also demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, staging an underwater Cabinet meeting that turned him into a viral climate celebrity. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.”

In 2012, the military deposed Nasheed, forcing him to flee the country at gunpoint after mass protests over economic stagnation and spikes in commodity prices. His eventual successor, Abdulla Yameen, has since suspended parts of the constitution, giving himself sweeping powers to arrest and detain opponents, including two of the country’s five Supreme Court justices and even his own half-brother. Meanwhile, Yameen has tossed out Nasheed’s climate adaptation plans and rejected renewable energy programs, proposing instead to build new islands and economic free zones attractive to a global elite. “We do not need cabinet meetings underwater,” his environment minister told The Guardian. “We do not need to go anywhere. We need development.”

If any lesson can be drawn from the power struggle in the Maldives, it is that people who feel threatened by an outside force, be it foreign invaders or rising tides, often seek reassurance. That reassurance may come in the form of a strongman leader, someone who tells them all will be well, the economy will soar, the sea walls hold. People must only surrender their elections, or their due process, until the crisis is resolved. This is perhaps the most overlooked threat of climate change: Major shifts in the global climate could give rise to a new generation of authoritarian rulers, not just in poorer countries or those with weak democratic institutions, but in wealthy industrialized nations, too.

Refugee crises, famine, drought—these are materials strongmen can use to build power. Already, strife and civil instability are spreading throughout the global South, with droughts and floods stoking conflict and refugee crises in parts of Africa and the Middle East. According to a 2016 paper in Science, climate change will increase the risk of armed conflict across Africa by 50 percent by 2030. Eastern Africa is particularly vulnerable. The genocidal strife in Darfur is one of the bloodiest examples, but even countries with robust economies and democracies are susceptible. In Kenya, for example, a crippling drought has led to rapid inflation of food prices, doubling the number of food-insecure people since 2014. That, and disputes over who owns land in the Laikipia region, north of Nairobi, has contributed to violent clashes there, threatening the political stability of the country. This has enabled Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta to tighten his grip on power. In October, amid reports that he’d rigged a recent presidential election, Kenyatta declared the drought a national disaster—this, just weeks before the next round of voting. He was reelected and, amid continued chaos, has cracked down on his opponents in the media.

It’s not just developing nations that are at risk of opportunistic climate-fueled authoritarianism. Wealthy countries may possess the resources to insulate themselves from the near-term physical impacts of climate change—they can afford sea walls, emergency services, and air conditioning. But when conflicts over resources break out in the developing world, they are bound to generate crises that spill into wealthier countries.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 drew a direct link between the 2007–2010 drought in the greater Fertile Crescent, which “exacerbated existing water and agricultural insecurity and caused massive agricultural failures and livestock mortality,” and Syria’s 2011 civil war, which has forced millions of people to seek refuge in Europe. Their arrival has helped fuel antidemocratic movements throughout the continent. “Even the specter of refugee crises and population movements can impact attitudes toward authoritarianism,” said Jonathan Weiler, co-author of Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. These fears aren’t going away: According to a 2017 study published in The Lancet, extreme weather could displace up to a billion people around the world by the middle of the twenty-first century—an unprecedented human migration will undoubtedly influence the politics of wealthy countries, pushing them to the right.

The best way to counteract this phenomenon is naturally to halt, or at least slow, the effects of climate change. So far, the Paris agreement is the only tangible result of those efforts, and its fate is far from certain, with the United States threatening to withdraw. But this might change, if the problems caused by climate change—not just stronger hurricanes, droughts, and rising seas, but political rupture—keep washing up on the disappearing shorelines of wealthy governments.

On March 2, 2017, Ryan Zinke hoisted himself atop a horse named Tonto, and rode “triumphantly” into his first day of work in charge of America’s public lands. At least that’s how Benny Johnson, then a writer for the conservative news site Independent Journal Review, described it. “The cowboy hat is now in charge,” he wrote.

Two weeks later, the same reporter accompanied Zinke as he toured downtown D.C. on a snow day. The resulting 2,500-word article saw the new secretary of the Department of the Interoir personally shoveling snow from the Lincoln Memorial steps, chatting up tourists, and promising never to close off monuments during a government shutdown like President Barack Obama once did. In his articles for IJR, Johnson often painted the former Navy SEAL as an irresistible figure—a patriot with respect for authority; a tough guy who carries an “ISIS Hunting License”; a kind-hearted soul who loves puppies. Zinke, as Johnson wrote, was an “all-around badass.”

Sixteen months in, Zinke’s cowboy image has been dented. He’s worn both a park ranger hat and a cowboy hat backwards. He botched a fishing rod while being profiled by Outside Magazine. He’s been criticized by Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson—twice.

But more significantly, the self-proclaimed “Teddy Roosevelt guy” has been quietly dismantling environmental protections for cherished public lands, repeatedly yielding to oil industry interests and big-game trophy hunters, and leading the administration’s charge against protecting endangered species. He’s also been the subject of nearly a dozen federal investigations, which include allegations of taxpayer waste (like ordering $139,000 doors for his office) and ethics violations (like flying on a private plane owned by oil and gas executives).

Zinke is increasingly vulnerable. The latest polling, from March, shows he has the lowest approval rating of all of the Trump administration’s cabinet members. He’s even gotten on the president’s bad side. Now, after Scott Pruitt’s resignation as head the EPA last month, environmental groups have marked Zinke as their next top target—and the last month has given them plenty of ammunition.

Perhaps Zinke’s most controversial move came earlier this month, with the proposed dismantling of the Endangered Species Act. On July 19, the Department of the Interior announced major changes to the 45-year-old law that, according to The New York Times, “could have far-reaching implications” for threatened and endangered animals. The changes would quicken the approval process for projects like oil and gas drilling, coal mining, and road-building in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

This move was very much the work of Zinke. As the Times editorial board noted last week, the ESA proposal was “announced by David Bernhardt, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department and one of several spear carriers for the oil and gas industry who have risen to commanding policymaking roles under [Zinke].”

As Mark Binelli wrote in an expansive Rolling Stone profile published last week, “there’s been a consistent swampiness to Zinke’s political appointees.” In addition to Bernhardt, “one of the department’s top lawyers, Daniel Jorjani, previously served as an adviser to Charles Koch; Todd Wynn, the DOI’s director of Intergovernmental and External Affairs, worked for Koch Industries-backed think tanks and power-industry trade organization the Edison Electric Institute.” Zinke also appointed 15 outdoor industry representatives to advise him on how to manage public lands this past March. According to The Washington Post, this “marks the third time the secretary has assembled panels dominated by industry players to help chart policies affecting their businesses.”

Industry has thus had a hand in all of Zinke’s most high-profile decisions: the downsizing of national monuments, the expansion of offshore oil drilling, the weakening of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—not to mention the undoing of regulations on fracking, coal mining, methane emissions, and offshore drilling safety. It’s therefore likely the fossil fuel industry played a part in the Interior’s most recent regulatory decision: to eliminate the requirement that drillers and miners pay for damage they’ve caused to public lands during development.

Last week, the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management published a memorandum seeking to mostly eliminate “compensatory mitigation,” the practice that energy companies must pay the federal government for restoring damaged land or buy new land to set aside for conservation. In a secretly recorded June speech, Zinke suggested the long-standing practice amounted to “extortion”—which The National Wildlife Federation’s Tracy Stone-Manning called “over-the-top” rhetoric. “It’s not extortion,” she told the Post. “It’s the cost of doing business on our public lands.” As Outside noted, “policies like this were actually designed to help the environmentalist and pro-extraction camps work through arguments.”

But Zinke seems uninterested in preserving compromises between conservation interests and fossil fuel interests. He also seems uninterested in letting facts compromise his decision-making on behalf of those interests. For example, before he decided to significantly reduce the size of two of Utah’s largest national monuments—Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante—the Interior was given hard evidence that the sites “boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries,” according to a Post report last week. But officials did not include that evidence in its assessment, for the explicit purpose that it would undercut their argument. (This was discovered due to a batch of internal emails the Interior inadvertently released to reporters).

Most policy changes under Zinke can be easily undone by future administrations. But according to Binelli’s recent Rolling Stone profile, Zinke’s ultimate goal may be much more difficult to change. “Ultimately, Zinke plans to enact the largest restructuring of the DOI in its history,” he wrote. This would be done by “moving thousands of workers, and the headquarters of entire bureaus, from Washington to regional locations—and in the process, disrupting the power and access of a bureaucracy in which a third of its career employees have been deemed to have failed a loyalty test.”

This lofty goal may match Zinke’s political ambitions. As Binelli and many others have reported, speculation has swirled for months that Zinke is interested in a higher office one day—perhaps even the presidency. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because Pruitt, the EPA’s former chief, had similar ambitions. But Pruitt was ultimately undone, thanks in part to environmental groups who helped to expose his ethics scandals. Zinke, in other words, won’t be their first rodeo.

In the opening scene of Hulu’s horror series Castle Rock, the retiring warden of Shawshank Correctional Facility (Terry O’Quinn) heads to his last day on the job after 30 years. As Warden Lacy drives through Castle Rock, Maine, he surveys the town and sees all as it should be. The railroad-crossing signal dings optimistically (even if no train ever seems to come), helmet-wearing kids do lazy-8’s on their dirt bikes, and a wholesome breeze rushes through the healthy trees. Never mind that Lacy is on his way to “guillotine himself with a Lincoln” or that, within days, a young man (the devil himself?) will be found locked in a metal vault within an abandoned cellblock of his prison; for this one moment, the warden’s last, we’ll see Castle Rock as it once was. Or could’ve been?

Castle Rock, like much of our politics and many of our entertainments these days, draws its power from the dark-energy grid of American nostalgia. Written and created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, with whom J.J. Abrams serve as executive-producers, the show pulls from Stephen King’s 60-novel-plus oeuvre, dropping characters into a newly porous King-dom, where their narratives can intersect in fresh ways, both creepy and endearing. What many of these characters already share is their hometown; Castle Rock is the setting for Cujo, Dead Zone, and Needful Things, a place where the only employer is the local prison and the only thriving industries seem to be corrections, narcotics, and ecclesiastical dread.

Enter death-row attorney Henry Deaver (André Holland), our stalwart guide through this cedar-shingled hell-scape. He’s living in Texas—perhaps to get as far away as possible from his hometown of Castle Rock—when he receives an anonymous phone call from Shawshank: The secret prisoner (Bill Skarsgard) has no name, no file, and no fingerprints, and he will say only two words: “Henry Deaver.”

The name of King’s blood-soaked setting has its origins in William Golding’s 1954 dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, in which castaway English schoolboys turn on each other, destroying their island paradise as they try to hunt down an imagined “Beast.” “Castle Rock” is the name the boys give a mass of precarious pink stone connected to the island by a narrow bridge, where the hunters build a fort. This is a place where all the civilizing potential of fairness, democracy, and science goes to die. King, who read the novel when he was a twelve-year-old living in small-town Maine, has called it the thing “that unlocked the rest of my life.”

The prison in Castle Rock, now run by a subsidiary of a private defense contractor, is an extension of Golding’s savage rock pile. It’s as if the clock has been allowed to run on the whole operation, the massive pink stones re-stacked neatly into the walls of a penitentiary. We see flashbacks of Warden Lacy chain-smoking and assembling a cage deep within the prison, where he plans to trap the evil he believes is at the root of Castle Rock’s violence and misery. Every house in town, he tells us in a from-beyond-the-grave voiceover, is soaked in sin, as the camera drifts slowly through the homes of Castle Rock, each one a murder scene. The warden’s voice assures us that when people do terrible things here, they say, “It wasn’t me… It was this place. And the things is, they’re right.”

One feature of this aggregated Stephen King cosmos is that we share something of a history with the characters. When they mention off-handedly trouble with the serial strangler or the rabid dog that terrorized town years ago, we can fill in some of the awful details and even feel a strange fondness for them. Nostalgic entertainment comforts us, gently surprises us with the sudden longing for Huffy bikes and Zips, and has at its core the satisfaction of a childhood wish: The beast, whatever it is, has been hunted and killed by good people before, and it can be hunted and killed again. That seems to be what Warden Lacy (and the dead reverend and the local sheriff) thinks he’s doing anyway. “He’d always thought the devil was just a metaphor,” recalls Sheriff Pangborn of Warden Lacy’s decision to build the cage, “and now he knew: The devil was a boy.”

The only character who is immune to this “rosy” view of the past is Deaver, the only African American resident and seemingly still the only person of color for miles around. When he returns to Castle Rock, he is determined to see justice done. Unlike Lacy, who insists on seeing things how they were meant to be, Deaver sees them as they are: Castle Rock is a dying, one-bar, mostly boarded-up, opioid-afflicted town with an improbably high murder rate. Deaver’s only remaining connection to the place is his mother (Sissy Spacek), who now suffers from dementia (she fails to recognize Henry at first, assuring him “I’m not like the others, I adopted a black son”).

While his mother is ever more marooned in the past, Deaver is trapped on the outside of it. As a child, he went missing one night in the dead of winter, only to be rescued in the woods eleven days later unable to remember a thing about his disappearance or his past. Prevented from knowing or telling his own story, Deaver has been cast by his neighbors as the villain of a local legend, which has it that he ran away from home in order to kill his white adoptive father, the beloved Reverend Deaver, by shoving him off the bluff at Castle Lake. Even though there is no evidence to suggest he’s a killer, in a community riddled with bizarre crimes, it’s Henry that the kids of Castle Rock dress up as for Halloween, black face and all. For him, there were no good old days in this place.

Through Henry, Castle Rock offers more than nostalgic horror; it shows the horrific nature of nostalgia. For the townspeople still trapped there, Castle Rock, Maine, feels as isolating as an island in the Pacific. There isn’t an easy way out of the trap the town leaders have set—everything good that could’ve been is locked in a past that never was, marooning its residents in a nowhere time, in which nostalgia is so strong that it seems very possible even the dead won’t stay dead.