by Mickey Huff
The result of this distorted coverage is that precious years, during which a well-informed people might have acted, have been lost to confusion produced by so-called “objective” journalism.
There’s an additional, less recognized flaw with journalism as currently practiced. Journalists are considered objective when their reporting accepts the dominant worldview as a given, without questioning beliefs and assumptions that may or may not hold up to scrutiny. The good journalist, in other words, goes along with the worldview of the powerful. Today, that worldview includes the assumption that all growth is good and can go on indefinitely, that a rising tide will lift all boats (an ironic phrase in this time of sea-level rise), that technology and free enterprise will solve any problem, and that the Earth will provide all we need.
Real objective journalism would question these assumptions, especially those contradicted by the evidence on the ground—and in the glaciers.
Although some of the media has flouted their responsibility to truth-telling, others have been extraordinary. Rolling Stone published a game-changing piece by Bill McKibben on the math of climate change, which shows that most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground if we are to avert climate catastrophe.9 And among Project Censored’s Top 25 stories is Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s article from the Guardian on the likelihood of food shortages becoming the new normal, in large part because of the impact of climate change on crop yields.10 The Guardian’s coverage of the climate crisis has been among the best and most consistent among the large newspapers. (Full disclosure: I occasionally write a column for the Guardian). And there are some extraordinary blogs like Inside-ClimateNews, Grist, Climate Progress, Climate Wire, and Real Climate, which are out in front on climate coverage.
Project Censored has highlighted some of the key climate stories of the last decade. Among the Project’s annual list of the censored stories over the past years are independent journalists’ reports on the disruption to marine species resulting from global warming,11 the role of excessive consumption in the climate crisis,12 and the flaws in World Bank cap-and-trade schemes, which result in the displacement of indigenous farmers.13
Still, there is a mixed record among the progressive press on climate coverage. Perhaps this is a reflection of a split within the progressive world, which until recently was divided between those who focus on the environment and those who focus on politics and social justice. Much of the progressive press has left climate change to environmental magazines.
The implicit view that environmental issues are for backpackers, conservationists, and middle-class white folks is outdated and dangerous. The climate crisis is changing everyone’s life—especially the poor and vulnerable.
MAKING SOLUTIONS VISIBLE
More truly objective reporting on the climate crisis and its systemic causes would be a huge improvement over what we find now. But still it would be just half the story. The other half is the solutions. We need much more reporting on solutions, and not just to keep despair from sending us screaming into those rising seas. We need solutions journalism because it is the only way we can develop the global consensus we need to take action and the knowledge base that makes that action effective.
Over just a few hundred years, we clever humans have transformed our world, creating a vast fossil fuel-driven industrial economy that permits high-consumption lifestyles (for some). Yet until recently, we lacked an understanding of what industrialization was doing to the prospects for our children and their children.
But we have the smarts to create a world in which the climate is stable, diverse species thrive, and all people have a shot at a good life. The means to do that are as diverse as the factors that cause the problem. Renewable energy can displace carbon-based fuels. Buildings can be built or retrofitted for super-efficiency. Organic fertilizers can build the fertility and resilience of the soil while safely storing carbon, replacing the chemical fertilizers that are a major contributor to the climate crisis. Fuel-efficient vehicles, fast trains, and bicycles can replace gas-guzzlers. A greater appreciation of time well spent with family and friends, and of the satisfaction of meaningful work, can replace an obsession with owning and using up stuff.
Each of these shifts improves our chances of stabilizing the climate, and most of them have multiple benefits: they improve health, clean up air and water, improve community life, create new economic opportunities, and promote equity. And some do all of these at once.
But the potential of these solutions can’t be fulfilled unless people find out about them. That’s why the media is so important.
With international talks at a standstill and little national leadership on this issue, the focus of action has shifted, becoming much more bottom-up. Local and state governments (and an exceptional few national governments) around the world are instituting policies, like carbon taxes, that help shift the market toward cleaner energy sources. Policy makers are rethinking the use of economic growth and the gross domestic product as a measure of progress. Inventors and entrepreneurs are coming up with new ways to produce clean energy or to cut the inefficient use of energy.
Importantly, there is a climate justice movement happening that few know exists—a movement founded in the grassroots and especially in communities that are often ignored by the corporate media: Appalachia, indigenous communities, youth, farmers, fishermen, and small businesses. It’s a movement that doesn’t separate environmental concerns from human concerns, but that recognizes that they are one and the same.
At the forefront of this movement are young people, ranchers, tribal leaders, people living near refineries, those resisting hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking), and others who are most affected by the fossil fuel industry. People are using their bodies to block the building of tar sands pipelines, to stop mountaintop removal, to prevent drilling in their communities—both to protect their land, water, and health, and to protect the climate.14
The 350.org campaign, headed up by Bill McKibben, is spurring actions around the world, including civil disobedience in front of the White House aimed at convincing President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
Others are responding to the climate crisis through changes in their own lives. Many are finding much greater satisfaction in ways of life focused on community or personal development. Young people are seeking out livelihoods that allow them to contribute to a more sustainable planet and to ride out the storms they see on the horizon. There’s extraordinary interest in developing local food systems. These deeper cultural shifts offer another part of the solutions matrix.
These new policy initiatives, innovations, social movements, and lifestyle shifts are rarely covered, but with all that’s at stake, these responses deserve to be front-page news. We need this sort of reporting to seek out the many solutions, investigate which ones are working, and tell the stories through the media now available. Out of those many stories and many solutions, the answers can emerge. If these answers spread, are replicated, and inspire others, we have a shot at preserving a healthy planet and our own future.
WHAT SOLUTIONS JOURNALISM MAKES POSSIBLE
The truth is that there is no shortage of solutions—whether it’s Germany’s turn to solar power or the carbon-storing power of restored soils. But given the shortage of stories about solutions, it’s little wonder that so many people—once they understand the implications of the climate crisis—leap right from denial to despair. When stories of people taking action are censored, when the innovations that could help us tackle the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced go unreported, when the ordinary people and grassroots leaders working to build a sustainable future go unquoted, people are left isolated and feeling powerless.
That’s what makes solutions journalism so important at this point in human history.
When the myriad efforts to build a sustainable world are covered, the rapid evolution of our society toward solutions becomes possible.15 The best innovations can travel quick
ly and build on one another—bike lanes in one city become a linked system of bike lanes and public transit in another. A public food forest, where all are free to harvest fresh fruits and nuts, sparks the same idea in another community. One city sets out to be carbon neutral, to reduce asthma and heart disease, and inspires other cities to follow suit. If they encounter these sorts of stories, people don’t feel alone, powerless, and even foolish when they pick up a shovel and plant a tree, start an urban garden, or risk arrest blockading a tar sands pipeline. They see their work as part of a much larger fabric of change—one with real possibility for a better world.
So here’s where solutions journalism is at its best. Just as an individual coal plant is not the whole picture in terms of the climate crisis, the individual windmill is not the whole solution. To meet its potential, solutions journalism must investigate not only the individ-ual innovations, but also the larger pattern of change—the emerging ethics, institutions, and ways of life that are coming into existence.
UN-CENSORING SOLUTIONS-FOCUSED JOURNALISM
PROBLEM-FOCUSED SOLUTIONS-FOCUSED
News Corn Belt Fears Large Germany Swaps Nuclear
Stories Crop Loss from Heat Wave, Power for Wind and Solar19
Drought Conditions16
Old Ways of Life are Fading Why We’re Putting Ourselves
as the Arctic Thaws17 on the (Pipe)line With the Tea
Party20
Methane Emissions Higher How Bicycling is Transforming
than Thought Across Much Business21
of US18
* * *
Stories Climate and Capitalism in How Thoughtful Farming Could
with Copenhagen22 Curb Climate Change, Feed
context, the World25
analysis,
implications Western Lifestyle
Unsustainable, Says Climate
Expert Rajendra Pachauri23 Less Work, More Living26
The World Bank and Climate Religion, Science and Spirit:
Change: Sustainability or A Sacred Story for Our Time27
Exploitation?24
The change will not happen from the top down—most of the leaders of big government, big business, and even big religion are too entrenched in the status quo to offer much help on this score.
Instead, it is the actions of millions of ordinary people that have the best chance of transforming our society to one that can live within its ecological means and meet the needs of humans and other life forms. To do that, we need evidence-based stories of practical, feasible innovations. But we also need to see the larger picture that they are a part of, the new ways of doing business28 that are rooted in community and work in harmony with our ecosystems, along with the emerging values and ways of life that create genuine well-being without compromising the life-sustaining capacity of the planet. We need to experience the democratic impulse, which, at times, can overcome the top-down power of giant corporations.29
Journalists, it has been said, write the first draft of history. In that spirit, discerning these patterns of change—which ones have promise, which ones are taking hold—is an inexact science. But a bottom-up global process thrives when the first draft is available, and all of those with a stake in the future can see that they, themselves, are its authors.
Bainbridge Island, Washington
May 17, 2013
SARAH VAN GELDER is cofounder and executive editor of YES! Magazine and Yes-Magazine.org, which feature powerful ideas and practical actions for a more just and sustainable world. YES! covers issue ranging from prison alternatives to do-it-yourself culture, from climate justice to the cooperatives movement. Sarah edited This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement and coedited Making Peace: Healing a Violent World. She has lived in China, India, and Central America, and has cofounded a cohousing community, organized low-income tenants, and collaborated with the Suquamish tribe to win the return of the land where Chief Seattle once lived.
Notes
1. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds,” Guardian, May 15, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/16/climate-re-search-nearly-unanimous-humans-causes.
2. “Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research,” April 2, 2013, http://www.pewre-search.org/2013/04/02/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research.
3. Joe Romm, “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces,” Climate Progress, September 28, 2011, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/28/330109/science-of-global-warming-impacts.
4. Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, “Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us,” Guardian, February 21, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/feb/22/us-news.theobserver.
5. Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323528404578452483656067190.html.
6. Ryan Chittum, “The WSJ Editorial Page Hits Rock Bottom,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 9, 2013, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_wsj_editorial_page_hits2.php.
7. Jill Fitzsimmons, “Warmest Year On Record Received Cool Climate Coverage,” Media Matters, January 8, 2013, http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/01/08/study-warmest-year-on-record-received-cool-clim/192079.
8. Margaret Sullivan, “He Said, She Said, and the Truth,” New York Times, September 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/public-editor/16pubed.html. For more on climate change denial front groups, like the Exxon Mobile-funded Heartland Institute (Heartland.org), see Sourcewatch.org by the Center for Media and Democracy, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute.
9. Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719.
10. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Why Food Riots Are Likely to Become the New Normal,” Guardian, March 6, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal, analyzed as Censored story #15 in this volume. For more on Ahmed’s writing on climate issues, see the foreword of Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 11–19.
11. Censored story #2, “Oceans in Peril,” Censored 2013, 87–89.
12. Censored story #21, “Western Lifestyle Continues Environmental Footprint,” Censored 2011: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009–10, Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 113–116.
13. Censored story #15, “World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco,” Censored 2010: The Top Censored Stories of 2008–09, Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 67–72.
14. See Censored story #18, “Fracking Our Food Supply,” in this volume.
15. Sarah van Gelder, “Is There Inspiration in Your Media Diet?,” YES! Magazine, February 10, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/sarah-van-gelder-inspiration-media-diet-solutions-journalism.
16. Christine Stebbins, “Corn Belt Fears Large Crop Loss from Heat Wave, Drought Conditions,” Insurance Journal, July 9, 2012, http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2012/07/09/254790.htm.
17. Steven Lee Myers, Andrew C. Revkin, Simon Romero, and Clifford Krauss, “Old Ways of Life are Fading as the Arctic Thaws,” New York Times, October 20, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/science/earth/20arctic.ready.html?ref=thebigmelt.
18. “Methane Emissions Higher than Thought across Much of U.S.,” ScienceDaily, May 15, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130515165021.htm.
19. Oliver Lazenby, “Germany Swaps Nuclear for Solar and Wind Power,” YES! Magazine, June 7, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/making-it-home/renewable-power-for-germany.
20. Will Wooten, Candice Bernd, and Ron Seifert, “Why We’re Putting Ourselves on t
he (Pipe)Line With the Tea Party,” YES! Magazine, August 24, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/why-we-put-ourselves-on-the-pipeline-with-the-tea-party-keystone.
21. Jay Walljapser, “How Bicycling Is Transforming Business,” YES! Magazine, December 31, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/how-bicycling-is-transforming-business.
22. Walden Bello, “Climate and Capitalism in Copenhagen,” YES! Magazine, December 2, 2009, http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/climate-and-capitalism-in-copenhagen.
23. James Randerson, “Western Lifestyle Unsustainable, Says Climate Expert Rajendra Pachauri,” Guardian, November 29, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/rajendra-pachauri-climate-warning-copenhagen, included in “Western Lifestyle Continues,” Censored 2011.
24. Mary Tharin, “The World Bank and Climate Change: Sustainability or Exploitation?,” Upside Down World, February 11, 2009. Also see “World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco,” Censored 2010.
25. Nora Doyle-Burr, “How Thoughtful Farming Could Curb Climate Change, Feed the World,” Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0328/How-thoughtful-farming-could-curb-climate-change-feed-the-world.
26. Juliet Schor, “Less Work, More Living,” YES! Magazine, September 2, 2011, http://www.yes-magazine.org/issues/new-livelihoods/less-work-more-living.
27. David Korten, “Religion, Science, and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time,” YES! Magazine, January 17, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/religion-science-and-spirit-a-sacred-story-for-our-time. For more on this theme, see Michael Nagler’s chapter, “The New Story,” in this volume; and see the work of Kenn Burrows (with Michael Nagler) published in Censored 2013, ch. 10; and Kenn Burrows in Censored 2012: Sourcebookfor the Media Revolution, ed. Mickey Huff and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), ch. 4.