By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Human Rights Assessment as Satire, with a Nod to the Peerless Jonathan Swift
1. Trump’s Aesthetic Hostility to the Future
In their 2015 book Love in the Anthropocene, Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam imagine a world in which the climate has changed, the landscapes have reorganized around diminished equilibria, and the people living in that world have done what people always do: they have gotten used to it. Their characters move through absent glaciers and altered coastlines and particular colors of sky, and what is striking is not that they grieve. It is that they do not, quite. There was no single moment of loss to mark. The losses accumulated the way all geological facts accumulate — slowly, then faster, then as background. The names on the map are simply the names.
Jamieson is a philosopher who has spent decades thinking about climate ethics — what we owe each other and what we owe the future, and why our political systems are almost perfectly designed to avoid answering either question. Nadzam is a novelist. Together they built a world in which the moral accounting has long since been absorbed into the landscape as geology. Their characters carry grief the way you carry grief for grandparents you never met, for cities that flooded before you were born, for species that appear in old photographs with the quality of myth. The loss is real. The connection between cause and consequence has blurred the way names blur when you say them too many times, until the word is just a sound attached to a thing.
This is the frame in which to think about Donald Trump's naming legacy. And this is a worthy subject to think about toward the end of a summer shaped by dramatic climate news from around the world — in an era when the dismissal of climate change itself has already become one of Trump’s key legacies.
Not the arch on the Mall, which the courts are currently disputing. Not the ballroom in the White House, which the courts are also currently disputing. Not the Eisenhower Executive Office Building painted white — apparently on the theory that the greatest surviving example of Second Empire architecture in the U.S. would look better if it resembled a recently primed garden shed. Those are the monuments he is commissioning: in marble and gold and latex house paint, at public expense. New York Times columnist Paul Goldberger is right that the arch, if built, will be "hard for anyone to make go away." He is right about the wrong thing. The harder-to-make-go-away monuments are being prepared by the landscape itself, without congressional appropriations, court review, or the slow ritual humiliation of a Section 106 public consultation. They are being written in retreating ice, in bleached coral, in dry deltas, in the advancing line on the map where insurability ends and the future begins.
“Trump wants to be remembered in the landscape. He will be. The landscape will remember him whether we name it appropriately or not — in thinning ice, whitened reefs, dry deltas, advancing lines, shrinking snowpack, accidental lakes where neighborhoods used to be.”
They are being written, too, in something less photogenic but equally real: a vandalized moral vocabulary. The human rights movement and Indigenous ecological thought were slowly converging on a point many Indigenous peoples around the world have always understood: protecting the environment is not a lifestyle preference or a boutique concern. It is a condition of human flourishing. It is, quite literally, what makes rights exercisable at all. And then — into the moment when that understanding had finally begun to harden into law — walked Trump, carrying a gold paintbrush, a grievance, and what can only be described as an aesthetic hostility to the future.
People in Jamieson and Nadzam's world will find Trump's name the way they find any name: on trail markers, on flood maps, in actuarial tables. They will grow up with it the way we grow up with "Appalachia" or "Everglades" — as geography, not argument. The child who hikes to the Trump Glacier Memorial Cirque will take a photograph. It will not occur to her to be angry, any more than it occurs to her to be angry at the cirque's shape, which was also carved by something that is now gone. The ice is what is missing. The name is what remains.
Trump wants his name on things. This is, at this point, less a political observation than a geological fact, like noting that water runs downhill or that Mar-a-Lago has a gift shop. The man has a vision. The vision is: more Trump, everywhere, unavoidable, preferably gold.
The vision is being fulfilled. Just not in the building he has in mind.
Fine. Let us take the vision seriously.
2. The Right to Be Cold (and What Was Built, and What Was Broken)
In 2005, Sheila Watt-Cloutier — an Inuk leader from Nunavik, the vast Arctic territory that constitutes Quebec's northern third — filed what is widely understood as the world's first major international human rights petition arguing that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions violated Indigenous rights. Her phrase for what was at stake was simple enough to be a headline and specific enough to be a philosophy: the right to be cold (which also became the title of her 2018 book, which documents her journey). A stable climate is not a luxury. It is the condition under which any way of life can persist, and under which any right can be meaningfully exercised. The Inuk hunter falling through melting ice, she wrote, is connected to the cars we drive and the policies we create, and to the small islander fighting to save his home from rising tides on the far side of the earth.
The Inter-American Commission declined to hear the petition. But it invited Watt-Cloutier to testify at its first hearing on climate change and human rights in March 2007. The idea she had planted kept growing.
It grew into soil Indigenous peoples had been preparing for generations. After decades of sustained advocacy within international institutions designed, in their original architecture, to exclude them — decades in which Indigenous delegations had been turned away, petitions dismissed, causes absorbed or ignored — those efforts culminated in 2007 in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. UNDRIP acknowledged, among much else, that Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories, and resources they have traditionally owned, and that their relationship with those territories generates obligations the state system had spent centuries refusing to recognize.
What UNDRIP acknowledged, at its deepest level, is what many Indigenous peoples worldwide have always understood: that human beings are embedded in nature, that this embeddedness is not optional, and that the health of the living systems within which humans live is not separable from the possibility of human flourishing. This is not a philosophical discovery of recent decades. It is the load-bearing principle of a vast body of accumulated knowledge — built not in universities but in the long work of making a life in particular landscapes over millennia, by people who knew that if they misread the ice, the tide, the soil, the season, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and fatal. It is what Indigenous American philosophers Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat meant when they argued that power and place produce personality — that who we are cannot be separated from where we are, and that the inability of Western thought to understand this is not a minor philosophical oversight but a structural failure with catastrophic consequences. (See Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America, 2001.)
The dominant tradition treats humans as agents who act upon the natural world from a position of detachment. Indigenous ecological thought has always known that there is no such position. You are in it. What you do to it, you do to yourself.
By 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council formally recognized a human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The General Assembly followed in 2022. These were not meant to be revolutionary declarations. They were acknowledgments of what had been building for decades in national constitutions, regional agreements, and international tribunals — the recognition, in the words of Special Rapporteur John Knox after six years of work on the subject, that environmental protection and human rights are interdependent: that a healthy environment is necessary for the full enjoyment of rights to life, health, food, and water, and that human rights are in turn essential to defending the environment. As Knox put it in the first of his framework principles: human beings are part of nature, and their human rights are intertwined with the environment in which we live. Translation: the planet is not an externality.
This convergence — between Indigenous ecological thought and the human rights framework — was hard-won. It did not happen because Western legal institutions suddenly became philosophically sophisticated. It happened because Indigenous peoples made it happen, in institutions that initially had no place for them, over decades of sustained advocacy, while living with the consequences of the destruction they were advocating against. They did not inherit this framework. They built it, from the outside, by insisting that the dominant culture's emancipatory vocabulary be made to say something it had resisted saying for centuries: that the health of the planet and the dignity of human beings are not separable questions. That this required fighting from outside a framework born of the very system that had dispossessed them is among the more remarkable achievements in the history of international law. That the achievement remains fragile, partial, and contested is among the more predictable features of that history.
Into this moment — imperfect, still fragile, but legally embodied and philosophically real — walked Donald Trump. Trump is not the first American president to prioritize fossil fuel interests over climate commitments. He is not, in any simple quantitative sense, the largest single contributor to the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide. The industrialists of the 19th century burned coal without knowing what they were doing; the architects of the postwar petrochemical economy locked in infrastructure whose consequences would unfold across generations; the executives at major fossil fuel companies who knew by the late 1970s what their product was doing to the planet, and spent decades funding denial and blocking policy, bear a causal responsibility whose total weight might exceed that of any single political figure. The history of climate culpability is long and densely populated.
What distinguishes Trump is different, and in some ways more damning.
He arrived when the scientific consensus had fully crystallized, when Paris had been signed, when UNDRIP existed, when the Human Rights Council had formally recognized the right to a clean environment, when Watt-Cloutier had already testified, when Knox had already submitted his framework principles, and when the Biden administration had taken significant legislative steps — the Inflation Reduction Act foremost among them — to translate that framework into domestic policy. Into that moment, he did not merely decline to act. He attacked the framework itself.
He dismantled clean energy incentives. He expanded fossil fuel production, treating it as a form of national self-expression. Since his first day in office, he has dismantled as much of Biden’s climate policies as he could. He also proposed changes to the historic preservation review process — Section 106 — that would allow federal agencies to determine unilaterally whether public input is useful at all, effectively removing citizens from decisions about the destruction of the places they depend on (buildings and landscapes alike, as long as they are in the National Register of Historic Places). And Trump told a roomful of oil executives at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that he hated wind — seemingly not as a policy argument, but as a personal aesthetic, which is somehow more clarifying about the nature of the project.
It is worth sitting with this. The President of the United States hates wind. Lucky us he does not feel the same way about light.
Previous climate offenders operated in the familiar space between knowledge and action — a gap that institutions have always struggled to close. Trump operates in a narrower, more deliberate space: after the closing — after Paris, after UNDRIP, after the environment had begun to be spoken of as a rights-condition rather than a charitable add-on. He is the most consequential deliberate opponent of the most complete framework for climate action humanity has yet assembled — not the first to act in bad faith, but the most powerful to act after the understanding had been embodied in law, and after Indigenous peoples had spent generations making the dominant culture acknowledge what they had always known. That is not the offense of ignorance or institutional inertia. It is the offense of someone who arrived just when the margin for course correction was narrowing fastest, when the institutional fabric was most in need of protection, and chose to pull at the threads.
This, too, will bear his name. Not on a trail marker or a nautical chart. On the gap — the shape of something that was removed.
3. And Now at Last, to the Naming
The landscape of the future will bear his name. Here is what it looks like.
The Trump Glacier (formerly a glacier)
Somewhere in the American West — pick a range, there are options — a glacier is retreating on a schedule that keeps getting revised upward by embarrassed climatologists who thought they were being pessimistic. When it is gone, there will be a rocky bowl where it used to be, scraped clean and slightly damp, like the bottom of a melted snow cone.
This is, technically, a cirque. It deserves a name. The Trump Glacier Memorial Cirque has a ring to it. The interpretive sign at the trailhead would be brief: “Here lay the [X] Glacier, which retreated approximately [Y] feet per year during the period 2025–2029, when the United States was busy building an arch.”
Hikers would photograph themselves in front of it. The hashtag would write itself. The silence would do the rest. Alternatively, it could be Trump Icefield, for the broad plateau in Alaska where ice is thinning at an accelerating rate and the permafrost below is beginning to do things permafrost is not supposed to do. (On Alaska, see here and here.) The local infrastructure — roads, pipelines, buildings — is slowly tilting and sinking.
Trump Reef (admission free, no snorkeling recommended)
The Florida Keys once had a coral reef system of extraordinary complexity and color. It is now, increasingly, a field of white calcium carbonate — architecture without inhabitants. Trump Reef would be an honest designation. Visitors could take glass-bottomed boat tours over it, perhaps on a day trip from Mar-a-Lago — which by that time Trump’s descendants will have sold for a large amount to the federal government, having relocated to a compound of gold-decorated domes in parts of the country with more moderate climate. They spend most of their time in underground golf courses, taking the occasional break to look in awe at one of the many portraits of the man who made it all possible that clutter the place.
Those boats could be painted gold. The narration would explain, in the bright tone of American optimism, that the reef died during repeated marine heat waves in the mid-2020s, during which ocean temperatures reached levels that corals find — and this is the scientific term — completely unacceptable.
There would be a gift shop. The gift shop would sell bleached coral replicas. The tagline: Make Reefs Great Again.
No one would find this funny. That would be the point.
Lake Trump
Not a real lake. An accidental one. Somewhere on the Gulf Coast or the mid-Atlantic seaboard — pick a neighborhood, there are options — a combination of sea level rise, subsidence, and the kind of storms that are technically still called "hundred-year events," delivered with the straight face of a bureaucracy that has lost track of the century, has converted what was once a residential area into a shallow brackish expanse.
The street grid is still visible at low tide. A stop sign stands in three feet of water, which photographers find evocative and insurance adjusters find professionally devastating. The U.S. Geological Survey recognizes Lake Trump as a permanent water feature. It has a depth chart. Kayakers paddle over what used to be a Walgreens. Real estate listings describe adjacent properties as having "water views" — which is accurate in the way it is accurate to say the Titanic had ocean access.
In Jamieson and Nadzam's world, someone lives on the shore of Lake Trump, in a house built on a berm, in the practical way people build on berms once berms are simply how you build. She looks out at the water in the morning — beautiful in the low light, genuinely beautiful — and she does not think about the stop sign, because the stop sign is just something that is there, like the berm, like the particular quality of morning light on water that used to be a neighborhood. She has gotten used to it. This is not a failure of imagination or a failure of feeling. It is what surviving requires. It is what surviving always requires.
The Trump Delta (or: where the river stopped)
The Colorado River, after traveling 1,450 miles through some of the most spectacular terrain on the continent, used to reach the Sea of Cortez in a biologically extraordinary delta ecosystem teeming with migratory birds, fish, and the kind of ecological complexity that takes ten thousand years to build. It no longer reliably reaches the sea. The river is consumed before it gets there — by agriculture, by cities, by golf courses in the desert, by the accumulated political failure to treat water as a finite resource in an increasingly hot and dry landscape. The dry delta is one of the great ecological losses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It deserves a name commensurate with the will that declined to address it.
Trump Delta: the place where the water stopped, the birds reorganized their migration routes around an absence, and the mud dried into something that looks like the surface of a planet that used to have water and made some choices. There could be a visitor center. Built in the brutalist style, to suggest permanence and also mild despair. The gift shop would sell postcards of what the delta used to look like. They would be labeled: Artist's Reconstruction.
Jamieson and Nadzam are interested in what happens to the imagination when the real thing is gone and only the reconstruction remains — what happens to grief when grief has no object because the object was already absent when you arrived. The birds have reorganized their migration routes around the absence. They do not know the absence is an absence. It is simply the geography. It is simply the Trump Delta. It is simply where the water stops. You learn to read a map. You teach your children to read a map. Eventually reading the map feels like the same thing as understanding the world, because it is the same thing, because the world is what the map describes.
The Trump Snowpack Deficit
Water managers across the American West regularly measure the snowpack in the mountains — the accumulated frozen precipitation that will melt slowly through summer and fill the rivers and reservoirs that seven states and forty million people depend on. The snowpack has been declining. The decline has been faster in warm years. There have been more warm years. The relationship between fossil fuel combustion, atmospheric warming, reduced mountain snowpack, and the drinking water available to, say, Phoenix in August is not scientifically contested.
It is, however, apparently contestable in the policy sense, because the 2025–2029 period featured the aggressive expansion of fossil fuel production — treated, as noted, as a form of national self-expression — alongside the dismantling of every incentive structure designed to move the country in a different direction.
Water managers track the shortfall as a snowpack deficit. Given the period in which it accelerated, and why, and what was said at the fundraiser while it was accelerating, it would be educationally apt to rename it the Trump Deficit — a phrase with the advantage of being both measurable and unmistakably moral without ever needing to use the word "moral."
The Trump Line
Coastal planners speak of "managed retreat." This is a soothing term for the advancing boundary beyond which flood insurance is actuarially unavailable and property becomes effectively uninsurable, unmortgageable, and increasingly uninhabitable. The line moves. Northward. Westward. Inland. Every year it advances a little further, swallowing zip codes, collapsing property values, stranding homeowners who were told, by various levels of government over several decades, that they would be fine.
“That is not the offense of ignorance or institutional inertia. It is the offense of someone who arrived just when the margin for course correction was narrowing fastest, when the institutional fabric was most in need of protection, and chose to pull at the threads.”
They are not fine. The Trump Line would be the official USGS (United States Geological Survey) cartographic designation for that boundary during the years of its most dramatic movement. It would appear on maps. Realtors would be required to disclose it. "Your property is 0.3 miles from the Trump Line" would be delivered in the tone doctors use when they say we need to discuss the test results — and then, a generation later, in the tone people use when they say it's a ten-minute walk to the train. A fact. Priced in. Normalized. Jamieson and Nadzam's world is full of Trump Lines, under other names. Their characters know where the line is. They have built their lives at the appropriate distance from it. They have stopped being surprised. The line is simply where the water starts.
A Note on the Arc de Trump
Goldberger observes that the proposed arch on the Mall would, if built, be "hard for anyone to make go away." He is right — which is also why, in mid-August of 2026, Trump is asking that construction on his ballroom be allowed to continue while the case is contested in court. He knows how hard it will be to tear it down once it is there. The same is true of glacial retreat, coral bleaching, coastal inundation, aquifer depletion, and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
The difference is that the arch would be ugly on purpose, in the way that very expensive things designed by absolute certainty and no aesthetic education are ugly on purpose. The other monuments are ugly by accident — by the accumulated accident of choices made and not made, commitments honored and abandoned, windows opened and closed. In one register, this is the familiar story of democratic failure and institutional inertia. In another, it is a more specific story: the wasting of a convergence that had taken decades to assemble — between Indigenous ecological understanding and a human rights framework that had finally begun to admit that the environment is not optional.
The arch will outlast its political context and become simply a structure on the Mall. People will picnic near it. Children will climb whatever parts are climbable.
The other monuments are not structures. They are conditions.
4. Conclusion: The Names People Will Find
Trump wants to be remembered in the landscape. He will be. The landscape will remember him whether we name it appropriately or not — in thinning ice, whitened reefs, dry deltas, advancing lines, shrinking snowpack, accidental lakes where neighborhoods used to be.
What Jamieson and Nadzam understood in 2015 is what is hardest to hold onto now: the future arrives not as catastrophe but as geography. Not as event but as condition. The people who live among these names will not experience them as ruin. They will experience them as Tuesday.
The child who grows up on the shore of Lake Trump will love the morning light on the water. She will. The light will be real and the love will be real. If you ask her about the stop sign at low tide she will say, yes, there's a stop sign, people say there used to be streets here, which is strange to think about — and then she will go on with her day, because that is what human beings do in altered worlds.
But the record will still exist: Watt-Cloutier's insistence that climate stability is a precondition for rights; UNDRIP's recognition that place generates obligation; the UN's halting admission that a healthy environment is a human right; the philosophical tradition of Indigenous ecological thought that was, slowly and imperfectly, beginning to be heard. Archives are patient. They preserve what was understood, and when, and what was done instead.
The future child on the shore of Lake Trump can learn not just that the neighborhood flooded, but that the people most likely to understand why it flooded — those who had read the ice and the tide and the delta for millennia — had fought their way into the institutions of the world and made those institutions say something true, and that a specific person in a specific period had made himself the most consequential opponent of that saying at the moment when the window for course correction was narrowing fastest.
That is the charge. Not that he was uniquely responsible for all the warming, across all the decades, in all the places. Climate culpability does not collapse into a single name. The charge is more specific and more historically precise: he arrived after, not before. After the science was settled. After the law had begun to speak. After Indigenous peoples had spent generations forcing the dominant world to acknowledge what they had always known.
He did not merely ignore the warning. He tried to take down the sign.
So name the cirque. Name the reef. Name the line where insurability ends and the future begins. Name the gap where the framework was. Name our failure to enable him.
So let us give him what he wants: his name on unavoidable things. Ruined things.
AI-generated illustration
