Hello. Im Bill Kovarik, editor of Appalachian Voice and freelance contributor to other environmental publications. I also teach environmental journalism on the university level.
A few months ago, I drew the short straw. Now I’m hiking out to get help.
And Appalachia needs help. If you read the Appalachian posts on this blog, you’ll see why. We are deadlocked in ideological debates over science and technology.
The economic climate, the climate of public opinion, and the regulatory climate for mining are all changing rapidly.
The climate for violence is heating up. Temperatures — and tempers — are rising.
So — Im headed for climate briefings in Berlin and Copenhagen in early September. Following that, Ill be spending the fall in Ontario, where the Green Energy Act is the most innovative in North America.
How does renewable energy work elsewhere? What policies are being followed that we might consider using here?
Those are things I’ll be looking for as part of our “climate rescue party.” Why party? Simply because there is a danger when serious things are taken too seriously.
I do see this as public service journalism based on a realistic interpretation of science and public policy issues. I don’t think its entirely “objective” in the sense that it probably reflects more of a personal view than, say, a front page newspaper column.
It’s interesting to recall Atlanta Journal editor Ralph McGill, who, during the civil rights era, opted for social responsibility over objective journalism. As Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff note in their Pulitzer Prize winning book:
“McGill proselytized his fellow journalists with the idea that they had become mindless, robotic followers of the ‘cult of objectivity’ at the expense of truth. Certainly, reporters had to try to be fair, McGill felt, but he did not see the point of purely objective news presentations if that meant the truth got lost in the process. Objectivity, he believed, was an anachronistic antidote that had emerged in earlier days, when publishers had been wild and reckless in pushing their biases into the newspapers. It had evolved into a formula of printing all sides ofa story — sometimes in the same number of words or paragraphs — and leaving readers to make their own choices. From their, McGill felt, the goal of objectivity had devolved to the point where newspapers had become neutered. If a public figure said something that wasnt true or mischaracterized a situation, McGill felt, most newspapers wouldnt report the falsity unless the reporter could get someone else to point it out. And if that someone else stretched the truth, McGill said, newspapers devoted to blind objectivity found themselves in a bind, printing two falsities.
Climate rescue is a serious enterprise where the consequences of failure are depressing to contemplate. As in any civil rights movement, the people who are involved tend to stick together, and be supportive of each other. Its difficult, but its rewarding on many levels. It’s my privilege to document and work alongside these extraordinary people. One day the world will owe them a great debt of gratitude.
There are already some great blogs about climate change (such as the Yale 360 blog); and there are several great blogs about Appalachia (Ken Ward’s Coal Tattoo, and Jim Bruggers’ Watchdog Earth).
So this blog will partly reflect the work we’ve been doing with Appalachian Voice, where we are observing an unprecedented civil rights and public rights struggle over the environment. But it will take these perspectives to a global level and bring the globe back home to Appalachia.
After all, in a global village, coal smoke from China blows all the way to California, just as coal smoke from Appalachia kills fish in Nova Scotia. These problems reflect colossal failures of vision, and they need to be understood. But more than the endless rhetoric of failure, we need information about where to go and what we can do. (And I do mean WE). Other countries are transitioning away from their coal industries and shifting to a green economy. Appalachia needs to hear it and think about it.
Consider the Appalachian coal miners who are so frightened about losing their jobs and the impacts that would have on their families. They need to understand that the transition could land them in a better place, in a more diverse economy, with a healthier kind of job.
It was hard, but not impossible, to imagine a racially integrated nation when I was growing up in the South in the 1950s. We have become a nation too busy — and too wise — to hate on racial grounds.
It is hard, but not impossible, to imagine an economy with a better relationship to the environment, where clean high-paying jobs in renewable energy industries go to grateful former coal miners.
We are living in unprecedented times, and change is in the air. As Paul Hawken said recently:
We “are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.”
So, in the end, Appalachian Climates is about what we can learn about science, technology and public opinion from around the globe, and how that can inform our attempts to find solutions for the changing climates of Appalachia.