West Point fired its only climate scientist for telling cadets the truth.
Out behind the shop last Tuesday morning I watched the fog come off the cranberry marsh on the south side of the section. Forty years ago my uncle Pete used to say the vines started going dormant around Halloween and stayed that way until the May frost was past. The vines next door went dormant the second week of November, four days after the picker passed through. The muck on the north end, where my neighbor Jeff has had trouble with root rot two of the last four years, was still warm enough to fog in October. That is not a memory. It is a thermometer.
Adam Kalkstein is the man who got fired for telling cadets at West Point the same thing Jeff’s bog thermometer is telling me. Kalkstein is the only climate scientist on the West Point faculty, a 17-year civilian professor of geography. A federal lawsuit filed this month in the southern district of New York alleges that Brigadier General Shane Reeves, then dean of the academy’s academic board, ordered Kalkstein last September to strip human causes of climate change from the curriculum. When Kalkstein objected at a meeting in November 2025 — telling the dean the order was like teaching constitutional law without ever mentioning the Constitution — Reeves reportedly stormed out and reminded the professor that Donald Trump is commander in chief and “sets the agenda for West Point.” Six months later Kalkstein was gone.
You do not have to love the climate consensus to be alarmed by what that case describes. Generals and admirals, retired and active, have said on the record that warming oceans, longer droughts, and worse storms are going to reshape the operational environment American soldiers are sent into. The Pentagon has named climate change an accelerant of instability in region after region where US troops deploy. To send cadets preparing to lead troops in that environment to an academy that punishes the man who taught them the basic science is not discipline. It is preparation for failure.
The order is not staying at West Point. The administration that put Reeves in that meeting has spent months putting solar-cycles-and-not-CO2 skeptics into federal climate advisory slots and gutting the fire research the Forest Service runs out west. The same wall shows up at the agencies that produce the data Adams County actually depends on. The Natural Resources Conservation Service has trimmed technical-assistance staff in Wisconsin over the last two budget cycles — the people who helped my neighbor Hank write a nutrient-management plan, the people who run the well-water testing on the south side of the county where a neighbor’s well came back at 14 parts per million of nitrate three years ago, well over the EPA’s 10-milligram drinking-water limit. NRCS staff are the pipeline that takes the federal climate science and shows up at the township meeting to explain what it means for our drainage district, our wells, our road-ditch planning. Cut that pipeline and the climate science does not stop being true. It just stops being taught.
The state still has the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, run out of UW–Madison and the Wisconsin DNR. The 2021 assessment is the document I keep folded inside A Sand County Almanac on the bench — Aldo wrote about the cranes coming back to the Wisconsin in February; WICCI writes about the ice going out earlier, the rain falling harder, the winters warming faster in the northwest part of the state. Every county emergency-management plan in Wisconsin pulls from those projections when the culvert sizing gets redone and the FEMA flood maps get updated. The same universities train the people who work at the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department. UW–Stevens Point’s College of Natural Resources, down the road, has been putting DNR officers and county conservationists in the field for sixty years. The federal pipeline does not have to disappear to hurt us. It just has to be told to stop saying the wrong sentence, the way Reeves told Kalkstein to stop saying the wrong sentence.
I drove past the washout on County Z this summer. The box culvert was undersized for the storm that took out the road in June — a four-inch rain in two hours, the kind the FEMA maps still rate as a hundred-year event. The road commission patched it and the town is paying for a larger culvert next year. The assessment the state needs to redraw the maps comes from the same federal projections that Kalkstein is being told to stop teaching. I have been to those township meetings. The county conservationist brings the projections, the road commissioner brings the cost, the town board asks who pays. If the conservationist is told the projections are too hot to show, the road ends up undersized when the next storm comes, the town levy goes up to fix it, and the people on the fixed income at the end of my road pay that bill. That is not a hypothetical. That is the road past my shop.
Kalkstein’s lawyer, Michael Sussman, says his client is a conservative Republican. “He is loyal to the cadets and the academy. Edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom are beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive,” Sussman told the New York Times. That is a line every American ought to be able to get behind. So should the Wisconsin county conservationist who brings the WICCI assessment to the township meeting. So should the National Guard armory at Camp Douglas that tries to staff a domestic-response team with officers who were taught the climate science they are going to use. So should my neighbor Hank, who is still running the nutrient-management plan written for him by NRCS staff who may or may not be there next year.
It is not the firing that matters most. It is what the firing tells the people who stayed. If a 17-year professor who taught the truth can be told to sit down or get out, the conservationist at the township meeting can be told the same thing. If a general can storm out of a meeting when a professor objects, a county board chair can do the same when the well-water numbers come back over the limit. The lesson is not the curriculum change. The lesson is that the curriculum belongs to the man who won the last election, not to the man who knows the science.
Mike is eight years old. Quinn is five. They are going to live in this county or one like it. The work in front of us is to keep teaching the truth in the classrooms we still have. The county conservationist’s office. The township meeting. The cranberry bog at the back of the section. The bench at nine at night with A Sand County Almanac and WICCI’s 2021 assessment and the notebook I have kept since I was twenty-three.
The ice went out on Petenwell on the fourteenth of March this year. Twelve years ago on the same date the launch was still closed for another week. The notebook says so. The kid who mowed my ditch bank last summer is going to be plowing snow on a township road before long, and the question of whether he does it well is going to depend on whether someone in his chain of command was willing to put the climate data in front of him and let him learn. Adam Kalkstein tried. They fired him for it. The rest of us have work to do.