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U.S. ethics and global effects: public radio's struggle to cover climate change for a consumer audience
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Content
U.S. ETHICS AND GLOBAL EFFECTS: PUBLIC RADIO’S STRUGGLE TO COVER
CLIMATE CHANGE FOR A CONSUMER AUDIENCE
by
Sara R. Harris
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Sara R. Harris
ii
Epigraph
“Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics.”
Michel Foucault
(Figure 1.)
iii
Acknowledgements
My sincerest thanks to: Sabiha Khan, Ellin O’Leary, Ingrid Lobet, Roberto Suro, Sergio
Sañudo-Wilhemy, KC Cole, Jacqueline Mills, Leland Saito, Manuel Pastor, Jr., Dale
Jamieson, Sarah Gardner, Celeste Wesson, Liza Taylor, Doug Mitchell, Richard Harris,
Lisa Soep, Ulises Díaz, Holly Harper, Robert Vos and Josh Newell, Ryan Frisinger,
Floricelda Runge, Minerva Harris Lerner, Luis Sierra Campos, Daniela Gerson, Michael
Parks, Ralph Lerner, Ariadne Shaffer and Cost Singer, Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke,
Bertha Cárdenas, Edward Harris, Joaquina Nolacea López, Amanda Harris, Susana B.
McBee, and especially to Jesse Lerner.
iv
Table of Contents
Epigraph ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The distance between knowing and caring 3
Chapter 2. Sustainability and an environmental justice framework 6
Chapter 3. Why examine public radio? 8
Chapter 4. Why now? 12
Chapter 5. Covering consumption in a complex system 17
Chapter 6. “The ultimate slow-drip issue” 27
Chapter 7. Public opinion and climate change 30
Chapter 8. When your subjects are not your audience 38
Chapter 9. Environmental Justice 44
Conclusion 51
References 55
v
List of Figures
Figure 1.
Kill car culture before it kills us.
Digital illustration from postcard
by Susan Coward,
Vancouver, www.adbusters.org, 2001 ii
Figure 2.
Which of the following statements reflects your view
of when the effects of global warming will begin to happen?
From Americans' Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop
Multiple indicators show less concern,
more feelings that global warming is exaggerated
by Frank Newport, Gallup.com, March 29, 2010
http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-
Continue-Drop.aspx 31
Figure 3.
Proportion of U.S. Adult Population in the Six Americas
From Global Warming’s Six Americas; An Audience Segmentation Analysis
by Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, Andrew Light | May 19, 2009
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/6americas.html 33
vi
Abstract
An international consensus of scientists projects that poor people around the world will
be disproportionately affected by climate change. More than half of the world population
lives in poverty and lacks the means to adapt to the adverse effects of a warming planet.
Climate change brings with it some of the most complicated ethical issues of
environmental justice that the world has faced to date. The United States emits more
heat-trapping gasses per capita than any other nation. Much of those emissions are
byproducts of individualized transportation and of the production of goods consumed in
the industrialized world while the effects of those emissions unequally affect less-
industrialized populations. Accountability journalism can examine this relationship as a
strategy for upsetting this power dynamic. The key to the public in the United States
accepting responsibility for climate change lies in people understanding more than the
fact of climate change- it lies in understanding the ethical issues involved. In this essay,
I offer a lens for those who work in accountability journalism in the United States to
consider their role in bridging the gap between public knowing and public caring about
the inherent inequalities of climate change.
1
Introduction: climate change and ethics
An international consensus of scientists projects that poor people around the world will
be disproportionately affected by climate change
1
. More than half of the world population
lives in poverty and lacks the means to adapt to the adverse effects of a warming planet.
Climate change brings with it some of the most complicated ethical issues of
environmental justice that the world has faced to date. The consensus of scientists agrees
that since the adoption of the steam engine in the 1780s, industrial human activity has
been a main cause of global warming
2
. The United States emits more heat-trapping
gasses per capita than any other nation. Much of those emissions are byproducts of
individualized transportation and of the production of goods consumed in the
industrialized world while the effects of those emissions unequally affect less-
industrialized populations. Accountability journalism can examine this relationship as a
strategy for upsetting this power dynamic. The key to the public in the United States
accepting responsibility for climate change lies in people understanding more than the
fact of climate change- it lies in understanding the ethical issues involved.
1
In its Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC identifies with a high degree of confidence that people in the
low-income income world will suffer most from diminished drinking water supplies, dwindling arable land,
extreme floods, and increased infectious and vector-born diseases. In the high-income world, the report
adds, “the urban poor, the elderly and children, traditional societies, subsistence farmers, and coastal
populations” are most at risk from ill effects of heat-trapping gasses such as extreme heat waves, poor air
quality, and seawater intrusion.
2
Global warming refers to observable long-term changes in atmospheric systems and weather patterns,
where the most recent trend is a global increase in temperatures. Climate change has come into fashion as a
less-politically charged reference to the current planetary warming trend. Because it is the term now used
by most news outlets, I use climate change in this essay although it is less precise and more ambiguous than
global warming.
2
In this essay, I offer a lens for those who work in accountability journalism in the United
States to consider their role in bridging the gap between public knowing and public
caring about the inherent inequalities of climate change.
3
Chapter 1. The distance between knowing and caring
The Aristotelian ethical subject is a person in a position of inherent power. The ethical
subject acts in a society that has domination over other people (free men in ancient
Greece). The ethical subject asks himself if his actions are just and good based on what
he is aware of in his current situation. Now, as then, the possibility of possessing the
freedom to exercise ethical behavior (being a good citizen) relies structurally upon the
subordination of the lesser citizen, be she a citizen of ancient Greece or be she a citizen of
the world in a global economy. Michel Foucault speaks of an obligation to truth as rooted
in the political positioning of the ethical self in Western culture.
One escaped from the domination of truth not by playing a game that was totally
different from the game of truth but by playing the same game differently, or
playing another game, another hand, with other trump cards. I believe that the
same holds true in the order of politics. Here one can criticize on the basis, for
example, of the consequences of the state of domination caused by an unjustified
political situation, but one can only do so by playing a certain game of truth, by
showing its consequences, by pointing out that there are other reasonable options,
by teaching people what they don’t know about their own situation, their working
conditions, and their exploitation.
3
In the United States, we consider ourselves to be ethical people. We live in a democratic
society, and when we are aware, we care. Yet, we live in a society that relies on the
exploitation of others for the health our consumer economy.
3
Foucault, Michel. The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom (1984). Paul Rabinow
and Nicolas Rose, ed. New York: The New Press, 1994. p. 37.
4
What, then, is the role of the journalist in such a society? Scientific findings about the
climatic consequences that our actions in the U.S. have on poor people around the world
and here at home have been communicated in many conflicting ways and according to
the agendas of political actors and institutions. This complicates the possibility of the
public’s awareness about its role in climate change and the power to pollute that it
exercises over others. The knowledge gap offers a clear mandate to journalism in the
public interest. Journalists have the formal story-telling skills and communication power
to give voice to those on the ground in the spaces that belie the dominant narratives about
power dynamics and climate change. Journalists can look to Foucault for a strategy with
which to counter truth-claims about climate change offered by corporations and
government that are so often echoed in the popular press. By making the public aware of
the integral hypocrisy of the consumer society that calls itself ethical, journalists take the
role of showing a different truth to society and asking society to care about the
consequences –both intended and not- of its actions.
The current economic crisis has commanded much detailed media coverage on the inter-
connectedness of global financial markets, U.S. consumer debt, and government
regulation. Yet, the complex connections between U.S. consumption habits, the U.S.
economic system, and the global climate crisis have not received much serious media
attention. Climate change has become a hot topic that news outlets most often treat as an
5
issue of policy, economics,
4
or science, but one that they rarely connect to social equity.
The connections between the byproducts of consumer-driven economy and climate
change have been obscured by well-crafted corporate communications strategies and a
lack of government transparency in the United States. Scientists have succeeded in
communicating the environmental dangers and social inequalities that climate change
will aggravate, but scientists are not charged with communicating the ethical problems
those dangers and inequalities present to society. The job of providing relevant
information to the public in order to frame such an understanding falls in great degree to
the press. The job of acting on that information falls to the public.
4
Stephen M. Gardiner writes, “Many recent skeptics no longer cite scientific uncertainty as their reason for
resisting action on climate change. Instead, they argue that there is a strong economic rationale for refusing
to act. Prevention, they insist, is more expensive than adaptation.” (Ethics and Global Climate Change,
April, Ethics, 2004, p. 570)
6
Chapter 2. Sustainability and an environmental justice framework
In 1972, the United Nation’s Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as
economic development that meets the needs of present generations without jeopardizing
the needs of future generations. The concept of the sustainability triangle (also known as
the triple bottom line) connects people (equity), profit (economy), and the planet
(environment) and challenges the idea that “health and transportation, industry, and
financial markets,” can be considered apart from their relationship to the global climate.
Since the rise of a viable global environmental movement, sustainability has been
accepted –but unenforced- as a rubric for framing international economic development.
When media outlets reframe climate change as an ethical issue, they will begin to make
clear the connections that are crucial for public engagement with the problem.
Manuel Pastor, head of the Program for Regional and Environmental Equity at the
University of Southern California, co-authored a 2009 science and policy report called
The Climate Gap. The authors look at data on the unequal impacts of climate change and
climate change mitigation policies on low-income communities in the United States. The
study finds that global climate change, "will more seriously affect the health of
communities that are least likely to cope with, resist, and recover from the impacts of
extreme weather events and potential increases in air pollution,” because low-income and
minority communities have less access to tools that help them to adapt like adequate
healthcare and air conditioners. Pastor and his co-authors have often told and written of
7
his elderly aunt’s response to these studies, “But Manuelito, everyone knows that.”
5
Everyone may know that, but not everyone cares.
The ethical dilemmas that climate change presents for journalists revolve around the
communication of climate change as the tangible effect of a power dynamic between U.S.
consumer society and poor people around the world- including in the United States. In
this sense, I consider ethical behavior in a sustainability framework. This framework
includes news coverage of U.S. consumerism within the context of a complex system, the
inherent cultural biases of U.S.-based journalism, the effect of American public opinion
on the journalistic treatment of climate change, covering climate change from an
environmental justice angle, and continued politicizing of climate change science in the
U.S. media.
5
Environmental Inequity in Metropolitan Los Angeles, Manuel Pastor Jr., James L. Sadd, and Rachel
Morello-Frosch in Bullard, 2005, p.108
8
Chapter 3. Why examine public radio?
The environmental movement in the U.S. has long been maligned for putting animals and
ecology before people, and for being dominated by well-off, white, liberal activists.
Public radio
6
has also been the target of the latter criticism, and for years has bemoaned
its inability to reach younger audiences and audiences of color- a growing demographic
in the United States. And yet, the high quality and editorial standards of public radio
stand out as exemplary in U.S. journalism. Living on Earth and Marketplace have made a
commitment to addressing two key challenges in reporting on climate change: connecting
climate science to environmental justice and connecting climate change to the consumer
economy. Both of these angles assume an ethical audience. Radio has the ability to bring
voices to an audience across great distances, the production costs are relatively low, and
as a non-commercial medium, public radio is supposed to be committed to journalism in
the public interest. Public radio illustrates the ethical concerns of climate change
coverage without the presenting the commercial factors that affect editorial decisions,
although funding does affect editorial decisions. The public radio journalists I
interviewed for this essay hope that by offering knowledge about the projected dangers
and miseries of a warming planet they will convince their audience to care about other
people- the first step to taking action. I question whether they ever really can achieve this
hope. Public radio has made reporting on climate change a priority in the past few years,
but public radio has limitations as news service in the public interest. It speaks to a very
6
Here I am referring to programming from National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and
American Public Media, not Pacifica Radio’s productions and affiliate stations.
9
narrow audience mostly white, middle-to-upper-middle class, older, and highly educated
people in the U.S. It does so to the exclusion of an increasingly diverse public that does
not listen to public radio but that does share a connection with people in the developing
world on the issue of climate change.
Public radio’s forays into engaging Black and Latino audiences have been relegated to
less-promoted shows, like Latino USA, News and Notes (which was canceled in 2008),
and podcasts on alt.NPR.. While public radio has invested energy in recruiting more
diverse editorial and reporting staff, the effect has not translated into a more diverse
audience. When considering if more people of color should be represented in public
radio, a colleague who is both a reporter at a public radio station in Los Angeles and a
fellow member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists suggests this “may be
the wrong place for the right struggle.”
7
.
In the years I have spent producing Youth Radio stories for broadcast on NPR and PRI
programs, our (mostly non-white, mostly low-income) Youth Radio reporters were well
aware that that their work was being edited for audiences who are not part of their
community. Public radio editors often ask reporters to make central and explicit their
common understandings about race and class dynamics for a white audience in stories
where racism and classism are merely the setting, not the driver of the narrative. In this
7
Adolfo Guzmán López of Southern California Public Radio station KPCC weighs in on Los Angeles
Public Media Service’s launch at http://www.kcet.org/local/blogs/movie_miento/, a public media outlet
geared toward Latinos and diverse audiences ages 18 to 35.
10
sense, Youth Radio reporters are performing otherness in order to educate those in power
about their world. As ethical actors in positions of power, public radio listeners would
care about the plight of these teens once they are made aware of it. But often, as their
letters to editors suggest, they do not care. The choice of knowing and not caring is theirs
to make because they are detached from the realities our student reporters describe.
The same equation applies to climate change coverage. Framing climate change as an
issue of environmental justice for existing public radio audiences has the potential to
mobilize an influential group of active consumers and politically engaged citizens to treat
climate change as an ethical concern. Seizing on such an opportunity would work toward
informing audiences about the people most affected by climate change in America- the
poor and the non-white.
Public radio is one of the few non-profit, non-commercial news spaces in the U.S., and it
has a mandate to produce news in the public interest. Non-commercial radio
programming for the growing Latino and Asian American audiences in the Unites States
has remained regional and programming for African-Americans and Native Americans,
marginal. It is not my intent in this essay to focus on the class and racial biases of public
radio, yet in the investigation of climate change coverage, these biases continually
present themselves and raise larger issues of ethics and journalistic responsibility. The
new ethnic and youth media endeavors that have branched off of public broadcasting
offer examples that challenge these biases and lead me to conclude that cultivating new
11
audiences in new media formats may offers a more equitable model for coverage of
climate change and the environment than mainstream public radio outlets.
12
Chapter 4. Why now?
NPR science reporter Richard Harris has been reporting on climate change since the late
1980’s from the American Geophysical meetings in San Francisco and the Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory for the Livermore Tri-Valley Herald. He traveled to Kyoto to
cover the Protocol signing and talks in 1997 and says that the science alarmed him as a
reporter but seemed disconnected from reality.
It was almost on the same scale as that we know the sun is going to burn out in 5
billion years. That is going to be a sad day, but it seems so removed. That's wild
and woolly, but not a sense of real urgency by the scientists…I, to some extent
covered it that way as well. Like, wow, this is kind of bad, but oh well. There
didn't seem to be any impetus for doing anything about it.
8
National Public Radio partnered with National Geographic in 2007 for a year of climate
change coverage called Climate Connections. Richard Harris, a lead reporter on the series
says Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and other popular treatments of climate change
influenced the network’s decision to dedicate one year of coverage.
And quite influential was the New Yorker series by Elizabeth Kolbert. At NPR,
we were all realizing in about 2006 that it is time to make this a focus of our
attention. We spent quite a number of months trying to figure out exactly how we
would do that. In 2007 we took a whole intensive year of climate coverage with
this project called climate connections which was hundreds of stories, and we
traveled all around the world, and that was the tipping point, if you will.
After one year, the coverage ended. It still has a presence on NPR.org that features stories
about how climate change is connected to the Unites States. Radio archives on a map of
8
From an interview with the author, February, 2010
13
the U.S. include features about wind farms, alpine cheese makers, endangered birds and
lilies, and carbon sequestration. The stories that focus on consumer culture and society
look at how people in the suburbs are not “aware of their impact on the environment” and
a 16 year-old activist “attacking mainstream climate science.” The one story about the
effects of Hurricane Katrina examines forests, not humans. All of the reporters and I
editors I spoke to are hesitant to connect climate change to hurricanes and human effects
because they feel the science is not conclusive. Climate scientists, however, see the
correlation between rising sea temperatures and intensity of hurricanes (not frequency,
necessarily) as inevitable.
In 2006, Public Radio International’s Living on Earth aired a series of pieces by reporters
who traveled around the world to find out how global warming is affecting the most
vulnerable communities. Because it is a show about science and the environment, climate
change is an obvious issue to focus on. The show has chronic funding problems that
make it difficult to do continued international coverage. In 2004, before climate change
coverage was common, the editors at Living on Earth began to pay close attention to the
observable effects of global warming on communities around the world. The first piece
on the subject that they aired came from freelancer Gabriel Spitzer, who reported on
costal erosion on the Inuit island of Shishmaref, Alaska. In 2005 and 2006, Living on
Earth collaborated with UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and Salon.com to produce a
series called Early Signs from a Warming Planet. Sandy Tolan,, the series producer and
professor of the class project at Berkeley, says the students worked extremely hard to
14
make the stories accessible and focused on human voices in order to tap into the power of
radio narratives. “We broke some ground with this series. By the time our series was out,
it was part of the shift in perception of people saying hey, we have to recognize that this
is happening, and what impact is it having
9
.”
Climate change coverage on Marketplace is perhaps to be less expected. The business
and economics show has traditionally anchored itself to Wall Street reporting. It recently
received specific funding for climate change science and education from the Gary Comer
Foundation. In 2008, Marketplace’s parent company, American Public Media, launched a
network-wide sustainability initiative that focuses on climate change and the global
economy. “We took a very principled stance in July (2009) where we said, we are
deciding as an organization that the science is settled,” says Adair, recalling one of the bi-
annual climate science conferences that several Marketplace staffers attended. “For every
scientist we quote, do we really need an American Enterprise Institute analyst to counter
balance? We decided we don't.” Unfettering journalistic research and writing from the
swirl of politics around climate change science can be a liberating moment. Seth
Borenstein, who left the environmental policy beat at the Philadelphia Enquirer to cover
science and climate change for the Associated Press, said in a recent phone conversation
that being a science writer is more appealing that covering policy because it affords him
more freedom to look at developments in science without having to answer to political
partisanship that is often of concern in Washington.
9
From an interview with the author, September, 2009
15
Ingrid Lobet, Western Bureau Chief, senior reporter, and editor at Living on Earth has
been reporting on the science and the policy for almost a decade.
I will say that the science behind the story is not always super-evident. It is crucial
to talk about who is affected by climate change and any other environmental
issue. That part is fundamental to the show I work for now and to the kind of
reporting and editing I would want to do.
10
Lobet credits long-time radio documentarian Sandy Tolan with hatching the idea for the
series Early Signs from a Warming Planet which Living on Earth co-produced with a
team of Tolan's student reporters. Sitting in his office at the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg School, Tolan remembers the moment in 2004 when he was
reading the Sunday paper and it occurred to him that while many had studied the
ecological affects of climate change on animals and habitat, no one had really looked at
the impact on human health and safety.
Turned out there had been one book written about this
11
, but other than that, there
hadn't been an attempt to document in different places across the world what was
happening in human terms, to get beyond the debate, and actually accept the
scientific consensus that climate change was happening and that human beings
were a major driver of it. What we wanted to document was how it was happening
on the ground, to people.
While that may seem more obvious in today's media environment, Tolan reminded his
class that an overwhelming fossil fuel lobby and corporate and political advertising have
kept the debate about climate change science alive. So he says the team's "major
10
From an interview with the author, January, 2010.
11
The book Tolan refers to is Ross Gelbspan’s Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal,
Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled a Climate Crisis--And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster, Basic
Books, 2004, New York.
16
journalistic ethical decision was to accept the scientific consensus, and then move
forward from there." Accepting the science is only half of the ethical decision, though.
The other half is deciding how to empower a public to act on that knowledge. This step is
complicated because the unintended consequences of climate change are difficult
to predict. Policy-makers are in no rush to spend funds to act on uncertain projections,
unless they are pushed to do so by citizens.
17
Chapter 5. Covering consumption in a complex system
"Climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, and as such, it should be of serious
concern to both moral philosophers and humanity at large," writes Stephen Gardiner in
the journal Ethics.
12
“Yet few moral philosophers have written on climate change.”
Gardiner attributes this lack of attention to the theoretical challenges and the
interdisciplinary nature of the subject. He claims that the scale and complexity of climate
change is daunting for philosophers. News reporting about climate change presents
similar challenges for the journalist. Philosophers have the luxury of time to analyze and
interpret the problem in social and historical terms. Journalists, society’s watchdogs, do
not. The impact and origin of human-induced climate change reach into the realms of
policy, politics, economics, law, and planning. Explaining climate science involves
communicating the work of chemists, biologists, paleontologists, geographers,
oceanographers, hydrologists, and climate modelers. Climate scientists have made the
connections between global warming the consumer society visible. In this sense, they
have made the public aware of the connection and the problem. Many scientists have
gone an extra step to appeal to the ethical actors in society. The Union of Concerned
Scientists has a whole web presence
13
dedicated to global warming science and solutions
for individuals and regional policy-makers. But who is their audience?
12
Gardiner, Stephen M., Ethics and Global Climate Change, survey article, Ethics 114, The University of
Chicago, April, 2004, pp. 555-556
13
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/
18
The journalist commands a critical mass of audience and calls upon experts, but refers to
events on the ground for confirmation. Any coverage from the field on how climate
change is affecting poor people around the world- in reality, not theoretically or by
projection- is deemed by news outlets to be too expensive and not of great interest to the
public. In commercial media, coverage relies upon revenue from advertisers that promote
the excessive consumption. It is not in their interest to engage in climate change reporting
that directly contradicts the goals of the hand that feeds them. However, it is in the
interest of their audience to be exposed to such reporting. Foucault points out that the
ethical citizen’s primary act of expressing freedom resides in curbing ones own appetites.
I think that insofar as freedom for the Greeks signifies non-slavery—which is
quite a different definition of freedom from our own—the problem is already
entirely political [contextual, historical]. And it also has a political model insofar
as being free means not being a slave to oneself and one’s appetites, which means
that with respect to oneself and one’s appetites, which means that with respect to
oneself one establishes a certain relationship of domination, of mastery, which
was called arkhe, or power, command.
14
Foucault goes on to extend freedom that resides in the ethical care of the self to
relationships of caring for others. In this sense, the golden rule applies, “do unto others
you would have done unto you.” The journalist who inserts herself into this equation is
obligated shine a light on the others who are affected by the actions of the consumer. This
position does not come without its challenges.
14
The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom, p.30
19
The agents of cause and effect in climate change are far removed from each other and
difficult to accurately connect in one news segment, web-post, article, or broadcast piece.
For example, historic practices of subsidizing individual automobile transport in the
Unites States has led to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere which
results in less heat being transferred away from the planet which has altered the
hydrological cycle of the earth and may be resulting in prolonged drought in Southern
California and the Mediterranean. But it’s difficult to say for certain that one is directly
the cause of the other. Dale Jamieson, a law professor and head of environmental studies
at New York University posits this difficulty as an ethical challenge.
In a lot of the problems that we face when we live in a world that has very high
populations mobilizing very large technologies that reach over very large
distances through long periods of time, it's extremely difficult for us to trace the
chain of what exact emission causes harm in another person, but nevertheless, we
know that these emissions will cause harms. The challenge is how we think about
responsibility in that case.
15
It is precisely responsibility in the case of climate change that should concern the ethical
citizen. To follow the threads that connect climate change, human activity, and its
impacts, it would take dedicated coverage that expands over time and space. Prioritizing
that kind of coverage is as much a matter of societal values as it is a matter of funding.
Resistance to an existing power structure, an existing monopoly on truth, can take the
form of presenting truth that counters that of the dominant institutions entrusted with it.
In the context of the United States, this allows for an appeal to the exercise of ethics by
15
From an interview with the author, August, 2009
20
the subjects in the place of power in relation to their own appetites that enslave them
while also hurting others. A U.S. population that is “mobilizing very large technologies
that reach over very large distances through long periods of time,” only knows the truth
put forward by those who design and sell those technologies, not the truth of those who
are in the place of production and pollution. Exposing the truth of others over whom we,
as a consuming public, exercise economic and environmental power can make media
representation of climate change science seem a political act, although many journalists
would feel uncomfortable admitting as much.
Dale Jamieson says the ethical implications of representing climate change science in the
news media have a lot to do with the political system in which the media function,
"Climate change is a collective action problem, it is a complex scientific problem, it is a
global problem, it is a problem where the effects are felt very far off in time from where
the causes are generated.” Computer climate models based on observable past climate
realities buried in the geological record have achieved a high degree of reliability in
projecting the best and worst case scenarios for effects that will come. “There is no
political system that is dealing with it very well,” says Jamieson, “but there are some
political systems that are dealing with it worse than others. One could try to analyze why
this is the case." The political system in the United States is not dealing well with the
problem because the political system in the United States is not designed be ethical.
U.S. attitudes towards climate responsibility are shaped by its history as a foundationally
expansionist nation state.
21
Political historians and environmental scientists in the U.S. look to Garret Hardin as a
seminal environmental thinker. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all
16
,”
wrote
Hardin in his 1968 article, The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin described the dilemma
of placing blame and owning responsibility for the commons in frontier terms. He points
to the inadequacies of the U.S. system of law that relies on administration and not on
common understanding or morality. He explains the difficulty of communicating an
appeal to a person’s conscience as a means to respect and use the commons in a
sustainable way. Hardin offers an admonition against levying fault as inherently
contradictory: “(i) (intended communication) “If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly
condemn you for not acting as a responsible citizen”; (ii) (the unintended
communication) “If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a
simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the
commons.” This kind of double bind describes quite well the logic behind U.S.
resistance to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on moral grounds. As former president Bush is
quoted by Peter Singer in One World; the Ethics of Globalization, “I’m not going to let
the United States carry the burden of cleaning up the world’s air…China and India were
exempted from that treaty. I think we need to be more evenhanded
17
.”
16
Hardin, Garret, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 1968 p. 1245
17
Singer, Peter, One World: Ethics of Globalization, chapter two, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002
22
Hardin saw the ethical nature of decisions made by individuals and by governing bodies
in regulating the use of natural resources as a function of the state of the social system.
“Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier
conditions, because there is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable
18
.”
The U.S. frontier was never an open space devoid of public. It was full of colonial 16
th
century Mexican cities and Native American territories. By not considering Native
Americans, Mexicans, or Spaniards as “public” or “people” Hardin commits an error. To
describe the use of the commons as a cesspool at the frontier moment in U.S. history as
doing no harm to humans renders the affected people invisible due to their non-white
(and in this context, subhuman) status. Hardin’s intends to identify ethical behavior in the
realm of environmental pollution, but his stance toward non-white, non-U.S. actors
undercuts his ethics. His audience, like the audience of public radio, is a mostly white,
mostly privileged group in a position of power.
In 2008, the editors at Marketplace decided, based on audience research, to focus their
coverage of climate change on the effects it is having in the lower 48 states of the U.S.
“Americans, you know, you could talk their ear off about Bangladesh and they are not
going to see how that could possibly affect their lives,” quips Ben Adair, American
Public Media’s head of sustainability coverage for Marketplace and other APM shows.
“That is mostly true of things that are happening in Alaska, too. To people who are living
in the lower 48, where a huge majority of our audience is, Alaska, may as well be a
18
Hardin, p. 1243
23
foreign land.” Adair’s desk, in an office overlooking the posh Figueroa Courtyard in
downtown Los Angeles, is stacked high with popular global warming books like Fixing
Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to
Counter It by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig and The Weather Makers by Tim
Flannery. Adair started the job in 2008 and says he spent the first three months in a fog of
“climate-awareness depression,” and he had to stop talking to his wife about his job.
Adair has no illusions about the practicality of his job. He considers himself constrained
by the expectations of a public radio audience demographic. This editorial constraint
seems strikingly similar to that of commercial media: a consumer audience expects a
product catered to their tastes.
Public radio and mainstream news outlets could take a cue from innovative treatments of
the connections between consumer economy and the environment. One documentary that
challenges frontier mentality and the ecological complexities and inequalities of the
consumer economy is The Story of Stuff. The independent video documentary by Annie
Leonard deals with how consumer products are produced and the multiple detrimental
effects of that production around the world and in the U.S. Leonard describes the U.S.
consumer economy as pulling down the quality of life in the world on a juggernaut to
trashing the planet, and the atmosphere. The key to people perceiving the successes of a
failing system, according to Leonard, is the media. After an explanation of the planned
obsolescence and perceived obsolescence of consumer products, Leonard says, “Media
also helps by hiding all of this (extraction) and all of this (production) so that the only
24
part of the materials economy we see is the shopping. The extraction, production, and
distribution all happen outside of our field of vision.”
19
The documentary is a classic
product life-cycle narrative, but the website is inter-active and new videos piggyback on
and add to the original. While her approach is didactic and populist, she succeeds in
presenting nuance and complexity to a cyclical system that has too often been portrayed
in the U.S. media and education as linear. The rapid pace of news coverage does not lend
itself to examining complex relationships between economies of scale, individual actions,
and distant impacts that all contribute to a closed planetary system. Editors and reporters
of traditional media who want to make those connections would have to make a
concerted effort to find interactive and multimedia components that continue the story of
how “stuff” is connected to climate change. The BBC did just that in 2008 when it spent
one year following a shipping container around the globe in its web special called The
Box
20
in order to illustrate consumer impacts on local economies and ecologies around the
world.
Marketplace has made a similar attempt at drawing linkages and connections with their
series Consumed. The result was shorter in reach but just as gimmicky. The Consumed
project assigned a group of reporters and producers across all the American Public Media
programs to ask the question, “Is our consumer economy sustainable?" The series ran for
one week, with a week of lead-up reporting on Marketplace. Co-host Tess Vigeland
carried out the exercise of literally carrying the trash she personally produced for two
19
The Story of Stuff, http://www.storyofstuff.com/, Chapter 5, Consumption.
20
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8314116.stm
25
weeks. She repeatedly checked in with hosts on the morning and afternoon radio shows
about what she learned about her own consumption and, by extension, the consumer
economy. Looking back on the 2007 series, Ben Adair says there was a general feeling at
Marketplace that the question about the sustainability of the U.S. consumer economy
came about a year too soon, “When we did the series, everyone was still in complete
denial of the bubble economy that we were in, so for us to be asking it so directly felt a
little out of tune.” But a year later, when global financial markets melted down, it turns
out the coverage was very prescient. The question moving forward is whether more
popular media outlets will be willing to look at the environmental impacts of the
consumer economy in a lasting way that continues to make these connections and shatter
the illusion of disconnect from people around the globe.
Entire economic sectors in the United States engage in activities that generate large
amounts of global heat-trapping gasses. When regulatory efforts to limit pollution from
production within U.S. borders cannot be defeated by industry, industry responds by
exporting the polluting process across the national borders.
21
In the case of global
warming, locally produced gasses that result from transportation and the processing of
consumer goods alter the composition and quality of the atmosphere in places far from
the geographic point of emissions and into an unforeseeable future. The local pollution
21
In Confronting Consumption, Editors Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, The MIT
Press, 2002, pp. 106-107. Thomas Princen writes that this practice of externalizing “point-source pollution”
and the abuse of local resources is called “distancing,” and is a common practice for U.S.-based industries.
“Dominant economic actors cross boundaries, opting for simulations of frontiers where resources and sinks
are abundant (at least from the perspective of the home firm and country) and recipients of external costs
are few or have little clout…The jurisdictional divide is a convenient means of taking a hands-off approach
to these ‘messy political’ issues.”
26
does not stay put, its dispersal around the global is continuous and cannot be controlled,
and its dilution is much slower than the rate at which these gasses are generated. The
journalist is often challenged to represent these changes as a linear narrative, but the
climate is a cyclical system with multiple inputs. Yet, the complexity of climate change
does not dissuade the companies that make up these polluting sectors from spending large
amounts of money on communications strategies that mask or “shade” the actual social
and environmental costs from the consumer by promoting new technologies (think of
clean coal) and touting local job creation. Advertisers and marketers have devised
persuasive narratives around perceived needs and desires in the fertile soil of the North
American imaginary. The U.S. consuming public has responded in force, creating the
largest consumer market in the world for items purchased with disposable income. This
can leave the journalist competing with the seductive PR narratives of corporate America
when trying to communicate the science of climate change.
27
Chapter 6. “The ultimate slow-drip issue”
The consequences of global warming happen so slowly and subtly that they can be
noticed only by long-term observation over decades or more. This presents two clear
challenges to journalists and policy-makers whose charge it often is to communicate the
science quickly and briefly to a general public: offering a foundation for understanding
climate projections and offering the public an understanding about what it can do. The
problem with documenting climate changes effects is that once the consequences of
climate change are observable, the effects are irreversible. How can a reporter present
these projections as information the public might act on instead of information the public
might only treat as a doomsday scenario that discourages involvement?
Andrew Revkin, a veteran environmental reporter who recently left a long career at the
New York Times, calls climate change "the ultimate slow drip issue" in a scene-setting
slideshow at his DotEarth blog on the New York Times website.
22
Reporters who have
had the opportunity to report on the subject from the field agree that observational or
eyewitness reporting is the one tangible and effective way they can share the realities of
climate change’s human effects with an audience. That reporting requires extensive travel
and costs money, so scant space is given to it in daily coverage. Even on a program
dedicated to environmental coverage, field reporting on the effects of climate change is a
22
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/science/20071024_DOTEARTH_FEATURE/index.html
28
challenge says Ingrid Lobet, “That reporting can be expensive to do, and our show suffers
chronically with budget issues, so there are often stories that we want that we can't get.”
Michael Mann has spent a considerable amount of effort thinking about how to meet the
practical challenges of communicating climate change science to a general audience.
Mann is a professor of meteorology and geosciences at the Earth and Environmental
Systems Institute at University of Pennsylvania and has written books about
communicating climate science
23
to the public. Mann authored a chapter of the IPCC’s
Third Assessment Report
24
and writes for Realclimate.org, a website where climate
scientists communicate their findings directly to the public. Mann says that the problems
posed by climate change seem easy for a U.S. audience because the most severe impacts
of climate change will be felt by later generations and currently impacts are being felt
outside of the United States. “But I see this as more of a problem of the modern 24 hour
news cycle and the difficulty of conveying more subtle, longer-term threats that lie in the
horizon in the 'twitter' age, where thoughts that can't be expressed as a one line sequence
of text strings have difficulty finding an audience.” This sentiment holds true for almost
any complex news story. Reporters could turn what seems to be a formal difficulty into
an opportunity to reframe climate change as an ethical challenge for society.
23
Mann, Michael and Kump, Lee, Dire Predictions; Understanding Global Warming, Daniel Kaveney, New
York, 2008
24
IPCC Third Assessment Report - Climate Change:Working Group I: The Scientific Basis
29
The journalist is charged with reporting and investigating events as they unfold in order
to inform civil society, civic engagement, and the democratic process. Reporting on
climate change requires that writers, photojournalists, broadcasters, and multimedia
producers alike take responsible risks and involve themselves in the interdisciplinary
study and observation of climate change issues without becoming entrenched in
conventions or customs of the medium when these may not lend themselves to the story
at hand. Public radio has been flexible in this regard, changing the format of programs
and allowing for extended coverage in order to underscore the importance of the issue.
Public radio assumes it is speaking to a particular public that is already informed and
interested in the issue of climate change. The ethical challenge, then, would then be for
editors and reporters to ask the public to care enough to do something about it. U.S.
consumers are disconnected from the “other regions of the world” that Michael Mann
says will be most affected. What Mann neglects to say is that by climate models project
people in the United States will soon see consequences in the form of increased infectious
disease, prolonged drought, and more severe storms. When journalists focus on how
climate change will affect people in the U.S., they have the opportunity to ask people to
ethically care for their own interests as well.
30
Chapter 7. Public opinion and climate change
“Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their
views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore you need to
continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.”
25
–Frank Luntz, GOP strategist, 2003
Luntz’s suggestion to Republicans interested in maintaining the status quo in climate
change policy fell flat after the 2004 presidential election. Between 2004 and 2008, the
percent of Americans the believe the effects of climate change are already happening or
will happen within a few years climbed steadily to reach 65% of the population polled by
Gallup (See chart below.) In that period, the world saw record high temperatures, the
U.S. was internationally criticized for its refusal to curb carbon emissions, and Al Gore
and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Since the 2008 election, the
percentage of those who believe the effects of climate change are already happening or
will happen within a few years has dropped eleven points. In 2010, fewer of the people
polled believe climate change effects are already happening than did in the year George
W. Bush took office. The same poll finds the percentage of people who think climate
change will not have effects in their lifetime, if ever, jumped from 24 to 35%. Why?
25
Lee, Jennifer, “GOP Changes Environmental Message,” Seattle Times, March 2, 2003.
31
(Figure 2.)
The recent resurgence of an increasingly politicized media climate surrounding climate
change does influence public concern with the issue. The series of missteps that climate
change scientists have made in communicating their data to the public, and the flaws
found in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report also undermine public trust in the science.
Climate “fatigue” may also be a factor. War, the economy, and healthcare reform are
perceived to be of immediate concern and crowd-out the “slow-drip” issue of climate
change. Individual beliefs may also play a role, and if they do, the ethical dilemma is a
refusal to know, not just a refusal to care.
NPR attempts to address the role of people’s beliefs in their willingness to accept climate
change science in a recent story by Christopher Joyce. As we’ll see below, most of the
public radio audience already believes the science is solid, so NPR’s approach here offers
a shift in focus from speaking about its standard demographic. Sociologist Don Braman
32
at George Washington University, who is part of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale
Law School, tells NPR that people trust new information if it comes from someone with
whom they identify, "If you have people who are skeptical of the data on climate change,
you can bet that Al Gore is not going to convince them at this point." The reporter posits
that Newt Gingrich might be then a better spokesperson for climate change. Dan Kahan
at Yale, who is also part of the Cultural Cognition Project responds, “The goal can't be to
create a kind of psychological house of mirrors so that people end up seeing exactly what
you want. The goal has to be to create an environment that allows them to be open-
minded.” Kahan tells the reporter, “You can't do that just by publishing more scientific
data.”
26
The story end there, leaving Kahan’s larger meaning unclear to the audience.
If the Cultural Cognition Project is correct in its observation that the messenger is as
important as the message, communicating climate change science more effectively may
have less to do with respecting an audience and more to do with anticipating what the
audience already believes. That’s exactly the climate change reporting strategy American
Public Media and Marketplace have taken.
In 2009, Edward Maibach at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George
Mason University published Global Warming’s Six Americas, an audience analysis of
how people in the U.S. view global climate change.
26
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124008307
33
There are six unique segments of the American public that each engage with the
issue of global warming in their own distinct way. Just over half of American
adults (51 percent) are either Alarmed or Concerned about global warming, and
these individuals are poised to vote on the issue with their pocket books and at the
ballot box.
27
His study divides the U.S. population into six segments based on their views about
climate change: alarmed (18%), concerned (33%), cautious (19%), disengaged (12%),
doubtful (11%), and dismissive (7%)."
(Figure 3.)
American Public Media’s Ben Adair has studied the survey and uses it as tool for guiding
coverage on climate change. Adair explains that he and his colleagues at the Marketplace
aim sustainability coverage at the concerned, the cautious (19%), and the doubtful (11%),
jumping past the “disengaged” segment of the public. "The disengaged are the poor
people who cannot pay the bills, so why would they care about global warming?"
27
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/6americas.html
34
Maibach's survey finds the “disengaged” are likely to be convinced of the importance of
global climate change but are not well informed.
The Disengaged haven’t thought much about the issue at all, don’t know much
about it, and are the most likely to say that they could easily change their minds
about global warming. The Doubtful are evenly split among those who think
global warming is happening, those who think it isn’t, and those who don’t
know.
28
Poor people would care about global warming if they were aware of it, the same as well-
off people would. Adair’s statement about the “disengaged” audience segment reveals a
clear bias toward ignoring people who are not already public radio listeners- well-off,
white, and educated. Public broadcasters have a mandate to inform the public, not only
the portion of the public that contributes money to public broadcasting. If the public is
not aware, the public does not care. Public radio audiences are informed about climate
change and its effects. How they act on that awareness should be of more concern to
journalists who work in the public interest. When editors cater the news about climate
change to this specific audience, they exclude and continue to marginalize low-income
citizens and help to keep them “disengaged”.
Indeed Maibach’s term “disengaged” suggests a voluntary ignorance of the issues that
affect us all. Simultaneously disregarding this segment of the audience by claiming it
chooses not to be part of the conversation does a disservice both to public radio and to a
28
Maibach, Edward, Roser-Renouf, Connie, and Leiserowitz, Anthony, Global Warming’s Six Americas;
An Audience Segmentation Analysis, Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University
Center for Climate Change Communication, 2009, p.4
35
growing and underserved demographic. Any given story on Marketplace has 2 million-
odd listeners, who are mostly middle-to-upper middle class, highly educated, older, and
white. When asked about expanding American Public Media’s reach to cultivate a more
diverse audience -one that might well include that disengaged segment- Ben Adair made
it clear that they’d be glad to, some day, but are constrained by budgets.
We are still a broadcast outlet, and our demographics are largely determined by
the overall public radio listening habits. It's very difficult for us to do something
on Marketplace, for example, that gets syndicated or picked-up simply because
we don’t have a lot resources to make sure that happens. We don't have the
resources to form real strategic partnerships with other editorial groups.
This is typical of responses from editors and producers in public broadcasting. Editorial
staff is pretty clear that it consistently speaks to the traditional middle-class, white, older,
educated crowd. That means not only communities of color, who are more likely to be
adversely affected by climate change are not part of the conversation, it means young
audiences aren’t part of the conversation either. Public radio does not attempt to appeal to
the “disengaged” 12%, nor does it speak to the “alarmed” 18% who are convinced that
climate change, “is happening, human-caused, and a serious and urgent threat.”
Maibach’s study finds that, “The Alarmed are already making changes in their own lives
and support an aggressive national response.” Ignoring this segment of the audience
misses a serious opportunity to engage people who are acting on their awareness and who
care about what we do about climate change as a consumer society.
36
For climate scientists communicating their findings to an increasingly skeptical public
and increasingly critical media, the challenge of bridging the chasm between policy and
science is critical. Ben Adair says the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit lay out a
clear path for Marketplace in terms of that news agenda. “We are interested in looking at
what climate science says is necessary and what politics says is possible, and why that
chasm exists, and is there any chance of bridging it?” Political philosopher Jurgen
Habermas believes that society’s ability to bridge such a chasm in a way that produces
ethical public policy resides in the public sphere. Habermas argued that through
successful communication the public will arrive at rational decisions rooted in critical
thought and in the common interest of the people. In his view, the public sphere is a
space for mobilizing public opinion as a political force, holding state-actors accountable,
and ensuring the actions of the state represent the will of the people. Serious political
criticism of climate change science has sparked the IPCC to investigate its peer-review
process and improve its editorial standards for producing reports. Part of the impetus to
do so has come from truth-claims made by climate skeptics in the popular press. The
weight of these claims has often goes unchallenged and is offered with a context that
obscures the connections that the science in question has to national policies and to global
economic interests. Holding science up to scrutiny is essential to is validity and integrity.
Subjecting science to more scrutiny than economic and policy factors influencing
industrial and consumer emissions sidetracks journalists from the ethical responsibility
they have to connect the consumer audience to their own actions. There surely is a better
37
strategy for addressing the challenges to the science than the NPR reporter’s assertion,
“this is what the best science says, this is what we can and can't say.”
It may be that discussion on the issue in a more interactive space might enliven the public
discourse and underpin the science. Andrew Revkin conducts such a space on his
DotEarth blog where scientists and policymakers talk with readers. AM talk radio is full
call-in shows that question the integrity and political agenda of climate change scientists.
Marketplace ignores mail from the climate skeptics, the “dismissive” segment of the
audience, and NPR reporters are not allowed to engage in online forums about their
reporting as a matter policy
29
“Gavin Schmidt of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies told the New York Times in a recent
article defending the IPCC’s findings
30
. “The answer is simple. Good science is the best
revenge.” Clearly, good science is not enough, and to view the issue of climate change as
a tit-for-tat or zero sum game is to ignore the communication challenges that scientists
face today. Perhaps a better strategy would be to start communicating the complexities of
the climate system in a way that connects to people’s daily experiences. Break it down
for us. Tell us why it matters to society. Make it news we can use or news we can act on.
29
Based on an interview with a reporter who did not want to be named disclosing company policy.
30
Scientists Taking Steps to Defend Work on Climate, By John M. Broder, Published: March 2, The New
York Times. 2010http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/science/earth/03climate.html?ref=science
38
Chapter 8. When your subjects are not your audience
When news outlets have pursued field reporting on the effects of climate change, the
results have offered much-needed windows into the impact on communities around the
world. Unfortunately, much of this coverage tends to be episodic or intermittent,
belonging to a long tradition of disaster reporting about people and places otherwise
ignored in the press. In the case of the Living on Earth’s Early Signs series, reporters
become conduits for communication between two very separate cultures and peoples who
are connected by the air that circulates the globe. Before the reporters embarked on their
field recording, their story ideas were vetted for scientific grounding by John Hart at U.C.
Berkeley and by editor and journalism professor Sandy Tolan. The editorial team was
looking for people in locations who were either clearly already seeing the effects of
climate change or were acting on the assumption that those effects would dramatically
alter their societies.
Sandhya Somashekhar reported from Bangladesh for the Early Signs series and now
writes for the Washington Post. Somashekhar says staying aware of her own cultural
biases about what should be done about the effects of global warming was as challenging
as any other aspect of the reporting. “And then trying to be open minded about the
different way of thinking on the ground there, and then trying to do justice to it, and not
39
to look at it all with a very judgmental eye
31
.” 20 million people live in the southern delta
region where Sandhya Somashekhar and Emily Raguso reported. Scientists project that
the area will be completely under water in fifty years, and in her radio story,
Somashekhar juxtaposed the voice of Bangladeshi environmentalist and journalist
Mahfuz Ullah with the voice of a Princeton geosciences and International Affairs
professor, Michael Oppenheimer, in the following exchange:
ULLAH: If it comes to the question of relocating 100,000 people or even 50,000
people, it will be very difficult for the Bangladesh government to really relocate
them.
SOMASHEKHAR: But others consider even that scenario far too rosy.
Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer talks of planning the evacuation of tens of
millions of people.
OPPENHEIMER: In the long term the land is going, going, gone for a good
chunk of the country. It seems to me that plans for the worst case need to be
made. And that would mean a substantial withdrawal of a lot of the population.
SOMASHEKHAR: But no such plans are underway.
32
Reflecting on the story three years later, Somashekhar related a dilemma she faced in her
approach to covering how traditional farming communities in Bangladesh deal with the
effects that science projects climate change will have on their land. “For folks on the
ground there, you couldn't get people to remember their ages exactly. They don't think of
time in a linear fashion in the way that we do. They think about it in terms of seasons,
and it was hard to get them to think back to their childhood and ask, was the landscape
different. Are you concerned about the future?" Sandy Tolan, who was Somashekhar’s
31
From an interview with the author, February, 2010
32
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00016&segmentID=7
40
producer and professor says that capturing the reality of climate change and life in
Bangladesh for a U.S. audience was tricky. Tolan is exceptionally proud of how his
students handled the challenge of juxtaposing western science with traditional belief
systems.
If they had been different kinds of journalists, or if we had a different kind of
inquiry, they would have said, are you not aware that this is because of climate
change? Then there could have been the ethical issue of an outside reporter
coming in and telling people that their beliefs are wrong.
One Early Signs story about snow melt on Cotacachi mountain in the Andes region of
Ecuador illustrates that traditional narratives do not necessarily contradict the science,
rather they speak of the same projections in local terms and with traditional symbols. The
classic Quichua narrative about Mamá Cotacachi views the mountain as a mother to the
people who live in her foothills and provides for them on the condition that they care for
her. Rosita Ramos tells reporter, Pauline Bartolone, that:
For us, the mountain is not a volcano filled with lava or rocks. It's full of grains
and potatoes and all of the energy of the crops that we have here. We have a lot
of contact with nature. Our parents always had a good communication with the
land. And because of this communication they always had good harvests.
33
The piece goes on to explain how the ice cap on the top of the mountain disappeared at
the turn of the century due to global warming. With that ice cap the local streams and
creeks that farmers have always used to irrigate disappeared. Ramos attributes the loss in
this way:
For me it's because people here no longer have the same respect as before.
33
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00014&segmentID=5
41
Before, we respected Mother Earth, the plants, the animals and all of nature.
Picking a plant was something sacred. Tearing the earth to make an irrigation
canal was like killing a person.
34
Ramos and elders in her village tell the reporter that this loss of respect for Mamá
Cotacachi is what has caused the loss of rain and snowmelt. Although Bartelone never
makes this connection, the traditional Quichua understanding is in line with how
hydrological cycles respond to loss of mountain vegetation and how that loss in
compounded by the rising temperatures and less cloud cover that come with a warming
climate. Climate scientists know that once these kinds of effects are observable, it is too
late for people to do anything but adapt to them. The process of mitigation will do no
good for Cotacachi mountain. The reported does not mention this. By not making the
connection between scientific understanding and traditional beliefs explicit, Living on
Earth casts a pall of innocence and ignorance over the local people without giving them
credit for understanding the empirical facts about their environmental situation.
Sandhya Somashekhar says she found such editorial biases unsettling in her reporting.
Where she reported from in Bangladesh, climate scientists project severe flood events
will become more frequent and periods of drought will be longer. The delta region may
become inhabitable for tens of millions of people. At several junctures Somashekhar was
in the position of explaining what climate models project for villagers in Bangladesh and
them asking them to comment on their own situation as she had just described it. “We do
this in journalism all the time. You kind of inform somebody about something, and then
34
ibid
42
you ask them about it at the same time, and it feels a little bit artificial in some ways.”
That artificiality came from the stark difference in societal values and realities, and from
the fact that most rural villagers in the delta region have already seen terrible floods and
droughts in their life times. To have an outsider from the U.S. come with a microphone
and tell you these events will be worsening and then ask you to comment is awkward and
disrespectful at best. But it is the role of the reporter.
If we look at Somashekhar’s dilemma through the lens of ethical actors in a power
dynamic, it become clear that she is exercising her science-based knowledge in an
attempt to extract anecdotal information from people in subjugated social positions. In
terms of Aristotelian ethics, Bangladeshi’s represent Foucault’s slave. “The Greeks
problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem
35
.”
Somashekhar is free to be ethical as an individual subject of the society in a position of
power. The villagers she interviews are not. This is a fact that she clearly understands and
is not comfortable with as a reporter.
On the ground Somashekhar says encountered whole villages that would plan to eat very
little for a whole season because of drought and lack of infrastructure for irrigation.
These situations –which did not appear in her story- were a source of embarrassment for
the government and an ethical challenge for her as a reporter. “When you think about
those challenges, it almost seems rude to ask people, ‘are you worried that climate change
35
Foucault, edited by Rabinow, p. 29
43
will come in 20 years, and maybe the land will be inundated and you'll have to more
somewhere else?’ They kind of blink at you and look.” Somashekhur laughs when she
recalls how awkward those moments were and how she carried them with her to editorial
meetings. “That was a point of view issue. It sometimes put us at odds with our editors,
actually, because, to convey that idea, and to stay focused on climate change…to
acknowledge to average people there were other problems that loomed larger. How do
you reflect that while not minimizing the devastating effects that climate change could
have?” In effect, Somashekhar is describing her position as an ethical reporter whose
first-hand knowledge of the suffering of people in a far-off land leads her to care about
their values. Yet, her reporting assignment was to document their plight, not their values.
Her editors are asking her to be a messenger of guilt, bringing knowledge of the suffering
of Bangladeshi villagers to the U.S. and implying that something be done to save them
from their impending doom.
44
Chapter 9. Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is an extension of the principals of the U.S. civil rights movement
to politically and economically disenfranchised communities who are systematically most
affected by environmental pollutants and least protected by the enforcement of
environmental laws.
36
In the twenty-first century, countries and corporations will be
contending with the extension of U.S.-inspired environmental justice legislation to
communities most affected by climate change around the world.
It is worth underscoring the link between the civil rights movement and the effects of
climate change today. While all people will be affected by climate change in countless
ways as weather extremes begin to manifest across the globe, the poor and the politically
marginalized will not have the opportunity to adapt as readily as the rest of the
population. Let’s take access to clean water for drinking and irrigation as an example.
Currently, in industrialized economies across the globe, industry exploits water upstream
to the health detriment of people downstream while the government fails to enforce
regulations forbidding such practices. In Kerala, India, in Baja California, Mexico, and
West Virginia in the U.S., poor rural communities have fought such abuses through the
courts and won -against international soft-drink conglomerates, maquiladoras, and coal
mining companies- on the basis that access to clean water is a civil right and that
corporations do not have the right to foul that water. In these cases, citizens had to make
36
For more history on Environmental Justice, see Bullard, Robert, The Quest for Environmental Justice,
Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, Sierra Club Books, 2005, San Francisco, p. 26-27
45
their case through civil disobedience and grassroots legal action in the absence of
government enforcement of existing regulation. As droughts become more frequent as a
result of climate change, competition for this clean water will become more frequent.
Existing corporate abuses and government negligence will be exacerbated, due to lack of
water availability in addition to water pollution. The legal question will not be who has
the right to pollute a stream, but who has the right to pollute the air to such a degree that
the streams begin to dry up. From Shishmaref’s charge against the U.S. government
before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
37
to the case of Tuvalu
planning for legal grounds to relocate its entire population
38
, such questions are already
being debated at the international level.
Dale Jamieson at NYU sees the increasing number of legal challenges citing climate that
are brought against corporations and governments as ethically problematic because it puts
the moral responsibility in the hands of the courts, not in the hands of the public.
On every level of litigation -from private party to international- we are seeing the
legalization or the juridicalization of climate change. That is dangerous. It is
dangerous to make law when there is no social or moral consensus. On the other
hand, a social and moral consensus requires some common ways of viewing the
world, and if you can't achieve consensus that way, sometimes you can only do it
through law, which has been characteristic of American society since the civil
rights movement.
39
37
Flannery, Tim, The Weather Makers, p. 286
38
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00013&segmentID=6
39
From an interview with the author, January 2010
46
It has taken a decade to gain momentum in accepting the scientific community’s calls for
reducing heat-trapping gasses in the Unites States. As a result of that delay, we as a
society are tardy in responding with urgency to probable scenarios laid-out by climate
models. The consequences of this delay are felt in the international policy arena and in
local policy agendas. While journalists are hesitant to attribute severe weather events like
Hurricane Katrina to climate change, scientists have found a positive connection and
policy-makers and insurance companies are already writing policies and legislation that
take projected effects of climate change into account. The U.S. government and
corporations are unwilling or unable to legislate mitigation of global heat-trapping gasses.
Yet, U.S. insurers and small island nations are instituting ad hoc adaptation provisions
based on the available climate models and projections.
Before Morello-Frosch, Sadd and Pastor produced the Climate Gap study (cited earlier),
they applied the concept of the precautionary principle to environmental justice. They
reason that governments and their actors should avoid allowing actions or practices that
have a high probability of doing harm or injury to people and places, even if the certainty
of that injury is not 100% proven. If reporters and editors applied this principle to climate
change projections and new developments in climate change science, they would see a
whole new landscape of potential stories to cover. Living on Earth has interviewed
Morello-Frosch about the Climate Gap study. Morello-Frosh tells host Jeff Young that
communities of color and people in poor urban areas of the U.S. will suffer more from
the impacts of climate change for a number of reasons.
47
…less tree canopy which would protect them from heat and have a larger
proportion of coverage of impervious surface like concrete and pavement
which is gonna increase surface temperatures where they live. And they're
less likely to own things like air conditioning that can help them cool off.
The other issue is that African American communities, particularly low
income African American communities often have pre-existing health
conditions that make them more vulnerable to heat waves such as high
blood pressure, diabetes, chronic heart disease, asthma and these kinds of things.
And extreme heat waves can be exacerbated.
40
This leads us to the question of environmental racism, the often subtle, institutionalized,
and historic dominant cultural assumptions at the root of environmental injustices. Laura
Pulido, a professor of American Studies at the University of Southern California argues
that a narrow definition of racism as either an individual act or overt institutional
intention to harm a population of color allows environmental racism to go undetected by
the dominant society. “Instead of asking if an incinerator was placed in a Latino
community because the owner was prejudiced, I ask, why is it that whites are not
comparably burdened with pollution.”
41
If journalist were to take this perspective into
account in coverage of climate change, and in fact any environmental coverage that deals
with human cause and effect relationships, they would find a wealth of stories to report.
That kind of editorial initiative would require rethinking assumptions and biases about
the human subjects of stories that may be difficult to overcome. One reporter who
40
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00024&segmentID=2
41
Pulido, Laura, Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern
California, 2000.
48
worked on the Early Signs series felt pressured by editors to look at communities affected
by climate change as passive receptors of actions by others.
I think there was still this attitude that we need to persuade everyone how terrible
this is going to be because that is the only way we are going to be able to get
people to take any action on it. I felt as a journalist, some pressure to fall into that
camp and to not believe that there was a way to adapt and to get people to take
any action on it.
This reporter did not want to talk on the record and run the risk of alienating the editors
on the series but expressed concern that coverage was inordinately focused on the
prevention of climate change in the U.S. while almost everyone in the places from which
they were reporting were more involved in adaptation.
They have no control over what is going to happen, and so what they have to do is
figure out a way to save as many people as they can, whereas I felt pressure from
people in the States to not even get into the adaptation side. Because they wanted
to scare the bejeezus out of everybody into preventing it in the first place, and
then predicting mass casualties and awful things happening in the future, and the
minute you talk about adaptation, then there seemed to be this resistance.
The reporter’s instinct to look at adaptation on the ground corresponds to climate science.
Unfortunately, by the time climate change is observable on the ground, it is too late to
address it in that place by mitigation, and adaptation becomes the only option. At the time
(in 2005), focusing on adaptation served as an opening for some countries to justify doing
little or nothing about mitigating heat-trapping gasses in countries like Australia. “ Most
reprehensible was the coercion of its Pacific Island neighbors into dropping their stance
that the world should take “firm measures” to combat climate change,” writes Tim
Flannery in his chapter The Last Act of God? Flannery cites Australian economic adviser
on climate change Brian Fisher as he told a conference in London that it is “more
49
efficient”
42
to evacuate the barrier reef islands of Kiribati, Maldives, Marshall Islands,
Tokelau, and Tuvalu than to cut Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions. The statement
reveals the unethical position held by the governing class of a consuming society in a
global position of power. Fisher knows that the national sovereignty of surrounding
countries is at stake in this case, and he acknowledges that reduction of Australia’s heat-
trapping gasses is essential to mitigating future climate change that will extremely affect
those nations, but he does not care. As a representative of Australian society, he cares
more about maintaining the status quo. Journalists who look at this dynamic through the
lens of environmental justice will ask what stories they can report that examine the
political and economic priorities expressed in such a position and hold respective powers
accountable.
“When you think about climate change, and people talk about needing to spur innovation,
people legitimately say we are going to invent a whole new form of energy, or the
electric car will save us, etc.” says Manuel Pastor. “We need a different kind of
innovation, social and financial innovation. There needs to be innovation that is not just
at the level of science and engineering.” Innovation, in this sense, has to be cultural and
political innovation from an ethical society concerned with the welfare off all its
members. For that to happen, people need to understand the science as it applies to tools
and technologies they already have at hand and demand that government employ those
tools in the interest of those most at risk so that climate adaptation and mitigation
42
Flannery, Tim, 2005, The Weather Makers; how man is changing the climate and what it means for life
on Earth. New York, Grove Press, pp. 287-289.
50
strategies can be available equally to all members of society. A truly ethical public in the
United States has to understand society in terms of global reach, not strictly in terms of
local interests and impacts.
51
Conclusion
In covering climate change, much of the U.S. media have focused on politics, science, or
economics. Rarely are these connected together, and even more rarely are they connected
to social equity. Among the ethical challenges journalists face in this regard are: covering
U.S. consumerism within the context of a complex planetary system, acknowledging the
inherent cultural biases of U.S.-based journalism and how public opinion affects their
coverage of climate change, and addressing environmental justice where climate change
in concerned. Public radio programs have made inroads in covering the human effects of
climate change and connecting climate change to the U.S. economic system and power
structure. While these outlets have made a commitment to accepting scientific consensus
on climate change and steered clear of any serious politicizing the science, they have
clear biases toward dominant culture values to the exclusion of low-income audiences
and audiences of color. Framing climate change as an issue of environmental justice
could mobilize an influential group of active consumers and politically engaged citizens
to treat climate change as an ethical issue. Ethically minded climate change science
coverage takes its cues from a sustainability discourse. Seizing on such an opportunity
would work toward empowering audiences most affected by climate change in America.
In order take advantage of this opportunity, public radio would have to recognize and
move past its own limitations.
52
New ethnic and youth media initiatives that have branched off of public broadcasting
offer examples that challenge the white, middle-class dominant biases of public
broadcasting. These could serve as more equitable models for coverage of climate change
and the environment than mainstream public radio outlets. L.A. Public Media is a new
news channel that offers web and radio content for and by Latino and multi-racial urban
18-35 year-olds, but it has yet to find a radio outlet. Youth Radio (my former employer)
has been forging strategic partnerships syndicating and monetizing content for the web in
order to reach a younger, broader audience. In the past three years Youth Radio has
invested energy in hyper-local reporting initiatives and outlets that reach younger, more
diverse audiences in radio and online. Youth Radio’s founder Ellin O’Leary says this
approach allows the organization move away from the NPR-only model, but she stresses
that the public radio audience is important to speak to.
When we are on radio like that, we are basically giving young people the ability
to talk to older, not very diverse audiences. You want to build on that ability, not
throw it out. We are lucky to be already a broadcaster and venturing into online.
A lot of new endeavors only have online. It’s a different audience. Online crosses
over somewhat, but it does not reach 27 million people.
O’Leary is knows that Youth Radio reporting on NPR is a token presence, and yet, she is
very aware of the value of reaching the public radio audience, both in terms of exposure
to power and opportunity for funding Youth Radio’s programs.
Investments of time and resources in web content geared to new audiences will have to
become the norm if public media is to hold onto its place as non-commercial journalism
in the public interest. Moving slowly away from a traditional public radio demographic
53
may mean moving gradually away from broadcasting. Davar Iran Ardalan, the executive
producer of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday resigned from NPR in March. She
published this as part of her farewell blog.
As public broadcasting reboots, those of us in the field who have a proven record
in integrating new media platforms with traditional forms of journalism have an
added responsibility to empower a new generation of journalists and to broaden
our reach to a more inclusive and diverse audience.
43
That Ardalan should state this on her way out of public broadcasting demonstrates the
difficulty she had in realizing this project from within the organization.
In this essay, I suggest covering climate change as a complex system, yet in my own
work I have encountered difficulty in sparking interest in covering climate change and
sustainability from multiple angles as a regular practice. I asked Sandy Tolan if he could
think about how to call for a shift in priority in incorporating climate change into all
beats.
It falls into the great rubric of environmental coverage, but it's actually not just an
environmental story. It's an economics story, it's a geography story, it's a biology
story, and it has huge implications for the planet and the future of the people
living on the planet. To relegate it to the occasional series is definitely a mistake
in the editorial vision within news organizations. It's like, where do you point
your microphone? Where does any news organization, radio and television,
website, decide to cover anything. What is important? There is all this stuff that is
not deemed worthy of coverage because of resources or priorities. The market is a
priority, but the market is not going to exist if the planet undergoes such
fundamental transformations that the market will not be functioning in the way
that people want it to. And that may be starting to happen already.
43
Davar Iran Ardalan, March 5
th
, 2010,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/sundaysoapbox/2010/03/farewell_npr_family_1.html
54
Part of the challenge is finding narrative forms that are consistently compelling and break
down the science in a way that connects with people’s daily lives. Sandhya Somashekhar
no longer covers climate change, but she has thought about this challenge with regards to
the Early Signs series and has the following suggestion.
If we can just talk about it and write about it as though it were a foregone
conclusion. It is such a huge issue, it's complicated, and part of the point of the
project was to talk about what is happening on the ground and that proved to be
extremely difficult, but totally worthwhile. It would be really good to tell it in tiny
little chunks, little stories, and not try to tell it in the totality, because it is too
overwhelming in scale.
If climate change could become as pervasive in U.S. media coverage as consumer culture
has, maybe we would be able to see possibilities in it that we cannot see today. As a
producer and reporter who believes in the power of radio to bridge all kinds of divides, I
truly hope that we can open doors to those possibilities without losing our grasp on the
power of listening to stories on the radio.
55
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Bell, Martin, The Journalism of Attachment, Media Ethics, edited by Matthew Kieran,
New York, Routledge, 1998, p.15-22.
The Quest For Environmental Justice; human rights and the politics of pollution, edited
by Robert D. Bullard, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 2005.
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring, New York, Fawcett Crest, 1962.
Flannery, Tim, The Weather Makers; how man is changing the climate and what it means
for life on Earth, New York, Grove Press, 2005.
Foucault, Michel, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”
(1984). Paul Rabinow and Nicolas Rose, ed. New York, The New Press, 1994.
Gardiner, Stephen M., Ethics and Global Climate Change, survey article, Ethics 114, The
University of Chicago, April, 2004, p. 555-600.
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http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
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http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch8s8-4-1.html
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Leonard, Annie, The Story of Stuff, Chapter 5, Consumption,
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
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Gap; Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans and How to Close the Gap,
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U.S. ethics and global effects: public radio's struggle to cover climate change for a consumer audience
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