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Environment
A Good Week for Green Journalism
A blockbuster feature in the New York Times sparks a wide-ranging debate.
Posted August 8, 2018
Those of us accustomed to the general absence of environmental reporting in the mainstream media were surprised by this week’s explosion of green media reporting. The release of a 30,000-word New York Times Magazine feature by Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth,” set off a series of engaging rejoinders, critiques, and corrections in a variety of media outlets. The Times editors present the essay as a “work of history” focused on the 1980s when the U.S. almost, almost became a world leader in the fight to save the planet from global warming. It is accompanied by links to relevant educational materials as well as critical commentaries provoked by the essay.
It is rare that the Times devote almost an entire Sunday magazine to an issue of such far-reaching importance. Even green activist Naomi Klein had to acknowledge her excitement “to see the Times throw the full force of its editorial machine behind” the article, even if its publication can’t “mask the dereliction of duty” of theTimes to report consistently on the climate crisis.
The story reads like a PBS documentary about a brief but hopeful moment in our history when American politics awoke to the perils of climate change. In this particular version of a national drama, groups of forward-thinking scientists and environmental lobbyists struggle to convince doubting politicians about an unseen threat to our health and safety. With their hearts in the right place, a few Congresspeople decide to convince their colleagues that it’s time to join the fight against global warming and reduce carbon emissions. For a fleeting moment, even oil industry giants see the light and invest in the effort.
But then the cynical forces inside American politics and industry emerge to curtail the forward movement of political change, undermining environmental policy-making at home and in international negotiations. The fragile coalition of conservatives, environmentalists, oil industry leaders, and scientists comes apart and climate action is indefinitely postponed.
It’s a great story. But as critics have noted, the framing of the story and many of the claims about conscientious conservatives and fossil fuel companies are misleading. The main point of contention is how the author blames the failure of political will on an inherent fault in our humanity. In Rich’s words, “If human beings really were able to take the long view—to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths—we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”
Mighty words that, as Naomi Klein notes, dismiss the possibility that humans have the capacity and agency to transform society into “something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its center.” The idea of a universal humanity is also a skewed notion in which inequality is nonexistent and everyone is in a position to make change. There are not only geopolitical inequalities that exclude the most vulnerable nations from political influence; there are also systemic inequalities of daily survival that, as Kate Aronoff points out, “make it virtually impossible for most people to care—and organize—around forces not affecting them in the immediate present.”
Redesigning national economies with the goal to empower individuals and nations to create an environmentally sound international order was never on the agenda of the characters in this story. This marks the narrative with a fatalistic and passive point of view: “We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human nature. Keeping the planet to two degrees of warming, let alone 1.5 degrees, would require transformative action. It will take more than good works and voluntary commitments; it will take a revolution. But in order to become a revolutionary, you need first to suffer.”
This behaviorist version of mass mobilization is something a first-year student of environmental studies might say before learning about existing international examples of pro-environmental policies that enable viable models of economic plenitude. There are blueprints for greener societies and a greener planet, but there are also powerful political and economic actors whose wealth depends on those blueprints never becoming reality. This doesn’t mean the wealthy are not afraid of the ecological crisis; there are signs that they are actually planning for its inevitability.
While it might please readers of the New York Times to hear that blame falls on us all—rich, poor, weak, strong—it will be a much harder lesson for many of them to learn that in truth it has been a small group of powerful countries, their past and present leaders, and big corporations that are responsible for continued inaction on climate change. Ironically, the body of the Times article illustrates how this power elite consciously worked to undermine environmental policy and climate science.
Still, the Rich essay has provided readers with an important and provocative introduction to the challenges that climate and atmospheric scientists have faced over the years. The achievements of scientists like Jim Hansen should be better known in this country. He has helped to provide important ways of seeing and explaining global warming and the greenhouse effect. Along with his colleagues, he deserves the prominent place that Nathaniel Rich gives them.But the Times has a long way to go to provide a strong normative sense of what should be done. Without a standard against which to measure how we’re doing, we get reporting that seeks refuge in universalist psychological claims that fail to account for why many nations and scientists think differently from those of U.S. government and corporations.
