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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