Earth Day

It’s a bad sign when the biggest news on Earth Day is an animated Google doodle of nature, wherein a blue stream flows from a snow-covered mountain pass into a fish-filled lake surrounded by trees and fields—yet that was the best that most outlets could muster on Monday, the 43rd anniversary of the environmental holiday.

It’s sad. As climate change became a major media story in the mid-2000s, it seemed to galvanize renewed concern about environmental issues in general. Magazines, in particular, adopted the habit of publishing Greenissues in Marchand April, to mark the occasion of Earth Day. There were half a dozen in 2007 and twice as many in 2008.Time even changed its iconic red border to green for a cover that used the famous World War II photograph of soldiers raising a flagpole at Iwo Jima:

The Green issues contained some fluff, to be sure, about biking to work and switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs, but most content was substantive reporting on everything from agriculture to energy to zoology. Unfortunately, the fad was short-lived, and by 2010, they were no more.

Instead of powerful cover images, readers now get the Google doodle, which wasn’t even scientifically accurate in a number of respects, as Bad Astronomer Phil Plaitt explained at Slate. It’s not Google that deserves criticism, however, but rather all the news outlets that produced utterly innocuous Earth Day coverage.

There were a few exceptions, of course. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, which publishes CJR, reviewed the history of the environmental movement for The New Yorker in order to glean “political lessons” about the failure of climate-change legislation in Congress in 2009, which he called, “a humiliating defeat as unexpected as the success of Earth Day had been.”

Echoing the conclusions of two scholarly reports that came out earlier this year, Lemann suggested that while “today’s environment movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970,” it’s also “vastly less successful” due to a focus on Beltway politics rather than broad-based, grassroots organizing.

As if to carry the torch of that argument, journalist-turned-climate activist Bill McKibben wrote an essay for Rolling Stone about “The Fossil

Source: cjr

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