History Rhymes 12 Feb 2026
The USSR, despite having world-class geneticists and seed banks, chose to silence and discredit them in favor of the convenient narrative of a poorly educated charlatan, Trofim Lysenko. He pushed Lamarckism, the long-discredited idea that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetime. He rejected chromosomes, genes, and the foundations of modern genetics as “bourgeois” constructs. One particularly devastating initiative was his “cluster planting” method, based on his belief that plants of the same species would never compete with each other, a rejection of Darwinian competition that he considered a capitalist concept. Farmers were ordered to plant seeds in dense clusters. The plants competed, of course, and yields plummeted. Over 3,000 biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Among them was Nikolai Vavilov, the world’s foremost agricultural scientist, who was arrested for defending genetics and starved to death in a Soviet prison in 1943. A man who dedicated his life to preventing famine, killed by famine, because he wouldn’t abandon evidence.
In Stalin’s USSR, ideology at least pretended to be a theory. There is no Lysenko of climate. There is no alternative theory. There is just erasure. And yet, eighty years later, with more evidence and far higher stakes:
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
…
Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, revived a debunked myth to sum up how the Trump administration views carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. “CO2 was never a pollutant,” he said. “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.(NYT)
As the Soviet biology eventually recovered, climate science will too. But, climate doesn’t wait. Carbon emitted today commits the planet to warming for centuries. The grounds we lose today will never be regained.