I very much appreciate your responses, Deb, and paulak!
We probably can never be completely objective about our own time -- especially not without the further knowledge that will come from science and philosophy in the future. But I think it is possible to see our own time more objectively if we look at our history, and as a former journalist and retired teacher of literature and history, I'm impressed with the parallels Kingsolver drew between this part of the 19th century and our own time.
Landis is definitely Trump, or the people willing to work with him (whether or not she intended that, the parallel holds): promoting "fake truth," to preserve an "Eden" for "people like us," while allowing a few immigrants in to do the dirty work of creating wealth for their "superiors", people willing to use or encourage violence to silence opposition and truth. This wasn't just true of Landis, either; the late 19th and early 20th century was an era of violent suppression of protests on behalf of labor rights, in an era of great income inequality which we now see in our own time, and not by accident. The people who let Landis get away with murder out of their reluctance to part with the illusion of their superiority and security that he represented, have their counterparts today.
In times of change, such as growing income inequality, the loss of economic mobility known as the American Dream, and global warming, some people want to cling to their comfort zones, their myths about the way things are or were; rather than look at facts and then have to somehow amend their beliefs, they dismiss facts as "fake news." Or, in the case of Darwin's evolutionary science, still being resisted today, as "heresy."
People today still have a hard time accepting that we are one human family, related to other nonhuman forms of life, and part of an intricate web of life on this planet, that we are not inherently entitled to exploit its resources without consequences that can destroy us. For some people, there's still the myth that God gave us dominion, or God gave America dominion, or gave white people dominion, or gave rich people dominion, that wealth is a sign of divine favor (instead of a rigged system).
I agree with paulak that it is hard for us to make the connections between our lifestyle and what's happening on the global scale, but another factor is the Landis problem: petty dictators of the oil and industry with unlimited power to influence Congress and control media to promote fake news, to maintain their billions in revenue. The scale of the problem is beyond individual carbon footprints, unless we can organize as a human community collectively strong enough to restructure society.