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    Interesting article on climate change and activism Archived Message

    Posted by margo on October 7, 2019, 12:04 pm

    Good news in many ways. South Africa's feisty journalists at work again.
    Only part of concern is that the mantra is "all journalism becomes climate journalism".
    Does 'climate journalism' include journalism on poverty and inequality?
    Will 'climate journalism' - like 'identity politics journalism' - crowd out certain voices?
    Remains to be seen... hopefully not.

    [An African example: the poor shack-dweller selling wild flowers ripped from wetlands - and wood chopped from rare trees because he can't afford electricity and needs fire to cook - will be berated for threatening the planet and 'educated' to be green. He (and millions like him) are desperate for a job and their best bet in the Americanised South African landscape is to clean the toilet at a glittering shopping mall that hosts dozens of international brand consumer stores. Designer brand clothes and goods are flown in on polluting planes from China since the thriving local fabric and clothing industries were destroyed by globalisation 20 years ago]


    extract

    Daily Maverick -- LAUNCHING Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet Climate Journalism Unit in Cape Town, former Irish president Mary Robinson, Amnesty International’s Kumi Naidoo and journalist Kevin Bloom painted a picture of a civilisation that could remake itself from the opportunity that the crisis brings.
    [...][...][...][..]

    Of course, not everything needs to run on biogas. Naidoo, formerly head of environmental group Greenpeace, told the audience he had no desire to “kill energy companies”, which were holding the world to ransom by “trying to find arguments that could extend the oil and gas industry right to the end of the next century”. He simply wanted them to transform into some form of clean energy. “I’d like to hold onto that position. However, given the resistance, inertia and dishonesty, as well as the falsification of the science, if needs be, we’d be best served by the collapse of the entire fossil-fuel industry.”

    For Robinson, the climate fight involves a three-step mantra “for all people of the world”: making the crisis personal by reducing individual consumption patterns; addressing anxiety by, for instance, supporting effective advocacy organisations; and being a “prisoner of hope”. This is a lesson, Robinson said, she took from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

    “Imagine the world we are supposed to be hurrying towards by 2030. A much healthier world free of fossil fuel pollution; a more equal world, in which everyone has access to clean energy; and the world of solidarity, the world of deeper human relationships, that we need in order to get there.”

    ‘All journalism becomes climate journalism’

    The brainchild of award-winning investigative journalist Kevin Bloom, Our Burning Planet in its first year published at least 100 climate articles, ranging from an analysis by leading commentators to far-reaching investigations by in-house and freelance writers.

    “In a very real way, as extreme weather events begin to break down infrastructure, cripple economies and cause mass migrations, all journalism becomes climate journalism,” said Bloom. “The aim at Our Burning Planet is to draw these links, to use the power of narrative and deep reporting to show how it’s impossible for any human being alive today to be unaffected by climate and ecosystem collapse.”

    Our Burning Planet’s Leonie Joubert, who has authored books and articles on the crisis for the better part of two decades – including Scorched: South Africa’s Changing Climate – warned that we are “three decades behind on the urgent action needed to throttle back the carbon pollution destabilising our climate. This inertia has partly been driven by politicians and big corporations whose interests to stay elected or profiteer off their free access to atmospheric space have allowed business-as-usual exploitation of what should be a shared, common-good Earth system.”

    Joubert said the unit “is a chance to expose the corruption, political patronage and vested interests in our energy sector, which remains the single-biggest hurdle to South Africa – the continent’s biggest carbon emitter and the 14th biggest globally – from making the urgent transition to a low-carbon economy that it’s entirely capable of”.

    She noted that “climate change” was a “bland, sanitised term we once used to talk about the notion that carbon pollution could ‘tweak’ our climate a bit – it now looks as though the extent of this pollution could bring about an extinction-level event within our lifetime. It’s time to dial up the temperature on this conversation as never before. It’s time to get angry.”

    Although news on the crisis hardly received priority in the press as little as 10 years ago, acute awareness of the phenomenon is increasingly affecting the public – to such an extent that the mental health industry now faces a whole new set of challenges: acute anxiety and depression brought on by fear, paralysis and frustration, not only among those who dread our lack of preparedness, but those who are already hounded by the real-time fallout of biosphere breakdown.

    This, according to Bloom, is why Our Burning Planet’s commitment is to seek radical solutions that match the scale of the planetary crossroads at which humans stand.

    “In each piece we publish, we aim to report on at least one course of action — not to provide false or meaningless hope, but to outline a practical path to mitigation or adaptation,” Bloom added.

    “This series is also a chance to grapple with some of the ‘softer’ philosophical questions that keep us in a miasma of inaction: the values and world views that drive extractive capitalist consumption that now threatens the very life support system in which we evolved,” said Joubert.

    “Our Burning Planet is also a chance to look at practical solutions to help build ‘airbags’ into our communities so that we can absorb the physical and political shocks that are going to come thick and fast: how we can restore natural systems to buffer against extreme weather; how we can use our veld and savannas to draw carbon out of the atmosphere; what indigenous knowledge resides in our collective memetic libraries to help us find ways to organise and respond as our political and economic systems begin to unravel and the climate becomes ever more unstable; and how we support coal workers to retain their livelihoods so that the handbrake-turn into a low carbon economy is just.”

    Covering Climate Now

    Starting this critical September, Our Burning Planet joins hands with new sister unit Maverick Citizen and the Covering Climate Now initiative to report on the global climate protests around the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. Founded by The Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, this inaugural watershed initiative aims to reach hundreds of millions of people through more than 170 major and smaller news outlets worldwide.

    Covering Climate Now     ranks as one of the most ambitious media collaborations yet to galvanise around a single cause, positioning Our Burning Planet to bring to its readers breaking climate news from all corners of the Earth.

    It also enables the unit to take world-class African stories to the climate stage — this, in addition to the compendium of original features, analysis and investigation the unit has published in the run-up to its public launch.

    “Bold action”, in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is the non-negotiable currency if humanity is to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement: cutting within 12 years 45% of lethal emissions to stay below the crucial 1.5°C threshold and keep on the road towards carbon neutrality by 2050.

    Whether world leaders will heed Guterres’s call to show up at the summit with “concrete plans” for the voluntary agreement, rather than merely “beautiful speeches”, remains to be seen.

    Either way, Our Burning Planet will be here to hold them to account — and, once the leaders return home from New York, the unit will continue to doggedly pursue the narratives of climate justice, follow the money trail of self-interest, tell the human story from Makhanda to Musina, and shine the light on disruptive solutions that can activate revolutionary global systems change.

    LINK https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-15-dont-sweat-about-earth-just-save-your-children/

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