ANDREAS GERMANOS—Activists with Extinction Rebellion (XR) were occupying a bridge over the Seine to demand the French government declare a climate emergency and take necessary action to avert planetary catastrophe. “We need to civilly disrupt because, otherwise, nothing is going to be done,” a British woman who took part in the protest told Euronews.
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RICKI OTT—In 1989, FAIR did a study of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, then as now considered among the most serious news programs. And between February and August of that year, they did seven segments on the Valdez spill, not one of which included an environmentalist. Debate on that show was illustrated by the then-chairman of Exxon and the governor of Alaska, who sat down to have a cozy conversation, in which the governor of Alaska said that the chairman of Exxon was being far “too heavy on his own company.”
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MEDIA LENS—The Independent, owned by billionaire Sir Tony O’Reilly, can manage to provide an eight-page supplement for a former ‘ecowarrior’ to explain why environmentalism must throw in its lot with capitalism. But there are no multi-page supplements to present community initiatives and grassroot debates around the world on alternatives to the present disastrous system.
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PATRICK WALKER—A wise old political adage says, “When you’re ‘splainin’, you ain’t gainin’.” We need a new, ad hoc version to wake up “climate kid” supporters of an existentially crucial Green New Deal, now sitting politely bored–as through their principal’s speech–while Democrat elders crowd them off stage with their heated-but-trivial Mueller-based debate on whether or not to impeach Trump.
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DAVE LINDORFF—Without such honest, responsible, and continuing news reporting Americans, most of whom prefer to get their news homogenized, filtered, sterilized and censored by the likes of Fox News and CNN, or curated and buried by “serious” papers like the New York Times or Washington Post, will just continue doing what they’ve been doing: voting — if they vote — on the basis of diversionary issues like abortion, gay and lesbian rights, terror “threats,” and the latest gaffes by candidates for high political office, all the while running their air-cons set to 60 degrees in summer and their furnaces set to 70 in winter, mindlessly opposing regulations to reduce or eliminate coal and oil as fuels, stockpiling wasteful incandescent lightbulbs and that damned Roundup herbicide, and in the process sending us all — including much of innocent creation — marching to extinction.
