But the media are now waking up. In a major new initiative founded earlier this year by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation newspaper, termed Covering Climate Now, more than 300 news outlets from around the world are addressing the urgent need for stronger climate coverage. The media include print and digital, TV and radio, with a combined audience of well over one billion people. The lead partner is, who else, the Guardian. I noticed The Toronto Star in the list of partners but not, disappointingly, the CBC.
Covering Climate Now has geared up for the UN Climate Action Summit now underway (September 21-23) in New York, pledging to increase the volume and visibility of their climate coverage. This will be the partners' first large-scale collaboration. The Guardian will make some of its climate coverage available free to partners to help smaller publications serve their audiences.
At the launch of the partnership in May, co-founders Mark Hertsgaard of the Nation and Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, called for change in how the media covers the climate crisis. In an op-ed in the Review, they observed, "Spun by the fossil-fuel industry and vexed by their own business problems, media outlets often leaned on a false balance between the views of genuine scientists and those of paid corporate mouthpieces. The media’s minimization of the looming disaster is one of our great journalistic failures." It is indeed, and we have seen much of the false balance they refer to in the Canadian media.
The climate crisis is, as the Columbia Journalism Review has written, the defining story of our time. Perhaps the world's media is finally recognizing that fact.
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What we won't know for several years, perhaps a decade, is whether it's too little, too late.
Several climate scientists are now faulting themselves for being too reticent in spreading the word out of fear of retaliation. There was a powerful lobby working to heap abuse on them for speaking out of line.
A fellow I correspond with periodically, Camilo Mora, runs a climate research laboratory at the University of Hawaii. Against the advice of his contemporaries he recently stepped outside the bounds of climate change to discuss overpopulation and broader ecological devastation.
He told Yale 360:
"I grew up in a country [Colombia] where there has been a long history of violence. We have been in war for 50 years, and one thing people don’t realize is what it means to be in a place where anyone can get shot at any moment, where people are starved to death, where there is not enough food to feed people. In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world. And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country."
And we have degraded the carrying capacity of the biosphere. A report last year estimated that we exceeded the planet's ability to provide resources and cleanse our waste when we hit 3 to 3.5 billion in the 70s. We're now closing in on 8 and the consensus seems to be that we're heading for 10 billion. That report noted,however, that the planet's human carrying capacity has already been degraded from 3.5 to something closer than 2 billion today.
Last week, William Rees, UBC professor emeritus of human ecology, wrote in the Tyee we're on course to see a die-off of some six billion people this century although he quotes the current director of the Potsdam Institute who estimates we'll end up at somewhere between a half to one billion.
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/18/Climate-Crisis-Wipe-Out/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180919
It's a terrible thing to have to admit about your own species, Mound, but if our numbers were drastically reduced almost every other species on Earth would benefit.
Yes, that's true enough Bill. When James Lovelock was formulating the Gaia hypothesis of an inanimate world responding in ways known only to organisms, he postulated humanity as a viral infection in response to which, Earth, would respond organically by developing the same sort of fever that the body employs to destroy its attackers. Lovelock later sought to retreat into a "be happy" mode but the argument was that, we can't be faulted for crossing the critical lines decades ago because we simply knew no better - back then. We know better now but we're becoming steadily more resistant to meaningful change.
Am I suggesting we throw in the towel?Not at all. A few years ago I joined the Dark Mountain collective, a group for those unwilling to keep believing the lies society tells itself.
Whenever we become environmentally myopic or wilfully fall short of emissions targets, etc., I want to fight back even harder. For Dark Mountain doesn't preach acquiescence, what I learned at uni in the States as "Andean Fatalism. No, you accept a conscious determination to fight back knowing that we can't really reverse this but, if we fight hard enough, we might give our grandkids enough of an environment that, maybe, they can figure something out.
What confronts us, Bill, is a Dark Mountain election. I don't want to give up on our grandkids. Who does? I will bet the farm that, if all Canadians were presented with the facts we would vote much differently in October.
Sorry, I've outstayed my welcome. Thanks for listening.
Mound, your comment "if all Canadians were presented with the facts we would vote much differently in October" caught my attention. I posted a piece on my blog Notes on Democracy this morning entitled "Is Universal Suffrage Logical? Is it Moral?" I argue in support of one citizen/one vote while entertaining doubts. I would appreciate your observations.
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