NYTimes: How to find joy in climate change”
and how that paper still finds ways to avoid reporting it :-(
Please note: For the first half of this diary, I had only my memory to rely on and although I am certain of the general accuracy of the truth regarding the incidents I recount, more specific details are not always as sharp as they may have once been.
When I first moved to NYC in 1969, The New York Times was as synonymous with the city as, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, Tiffany’s and Times Square. It was a ‘prescription’ for the health of the New York intelligencia and one of the most trusted news sources in the world. Over time that trust has eroded into a form of blindness.
I rarely read the Times while I lived there, for the simple reason that I could not afford it, but would find discarded copies from time to time in the subway and on Sundays in almost any public waste basket near a newsstand as people discarded the sections they did not want from copies they had just bought.
Although I vaguely remember that it garnered criticism for some of its ‘establishment’ slanted Vietnam War coverage, I had my first serious misgivings about the integrity of the Times, from an article published in the Sunday Magazine section, possibly obtained in this manner.
That article was an attempt to undercut the value and therefore necessity of recycling and the writer did his best to make his case that it was essentially an ineffectual waste of time. But the time wasted was his own.
Although I can’t remember a more precise date, I am leaning toward circa 1980 as a time frame for this ‘recycling’ of my relatively high regard for the paper.
Since I knew by then that newspapers constituted 16% of the contents of landfills and the Times was still more than a decade away from making any attempts at salvaging the ‘collateral damage’ of their runs, I did not think they were the best source for an unbiased opinion on the pros and cons of recycling. I might also add, that at the time the article appeared, it took 6000 fully grown trees to print one run of the Sunday Times, and little if any of that was from recycled paper.
Years later, in the pre-debate run-up to the Gore / Bush election, when G.W.B. was trying to wheedle his way out of having to debate, the Times ran a fatuous article ‘dis-plaining’ and attempting to subliminally legitimize his recalcitrance. Although, I wasn’t as deeply engaged in politics as I became after that election, I could still smell ‘o de B.S.’ wafting between the lines.
Once DailyKos found me, at the start of our post Obama unending ‘reign of terror’, I gained a collective access to the many examples of Times journalistic malfeasance provided by others on DK, which is kind of like what eBay is to garage sales if your looking for something special.
From what I’ve read here, Bret Stephens is a classic example of the manipulation of reader opinions that the Times practices.
Embraced for years for his ‘pseudo’ skepticism of environmental degradation, ostensibly to “be fair and balanced” this ‘fox’ was given a ‘world stage’ platform to voice his ‘doubts’, spreading disinformation and confusion in already heavily silted waters constantly agitated by the Fossil Fuel industry, corporations and their ‘P.R.’ minions, including the Times. His ill-founded ‘convictions’ were supported for some time by what was morphing into an elitist ‘water carrying’ tabloid, past the point where there was zero scientific validity to his legless stance and his ‘opinion’ had gone from damaging to destructive. It had always been worthless, but obviously of value to the Times’ agenda.
That the ‘great’ paper didn’t also give print space to “flat earthers” and “Elvis sightings” to be fair to all those post-Columbian delusionists and Las Vegas junkies, unmasks the paper’s duplicity of purpose.
Once continuing to maintain this ‘ruse’ became just a bit too blatantly absurd, Stephens took a ‘well timed’ trip to Greenland and had a ‘convenient’ catharsis. Whether he actually went by plane or Google Earth, is of no consequence, as either way was sufficient to provide him and the Times with a cover for transitioning to their next ‘climate awareness’ incarnation, best incapsulated by such feints as: “ignore that man behind the curtain”, “things aren’t as bad as they look” and “look over here at all the pretty-shiny-things being done by others.”
So I have to think it was due to some slip up on their part, that the ‘august’ and ‘unassailable’ news purveyor recently printed an article forwarded to me by one of my several climate news scouts. While relatively tepid pablum when compared to the work of M.B., Pakalolo, and others on this site, it did contain some worthwhile content.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/briefing/climate-action.html
Written by David Gelles, it begins with the by now obligatory litany of climate ‘ills’ and then quickly segways into the equally standard, but oddly less popular list of ‘salves and balms’ being formulated by others, to treat Mother Earth’s metastasizing boo-boos, all pleasantly ‘pine scented’ to buffer the stench for the climate ori-fact-ily impaired.
Because I understand that for many Times readers, much of this is ‘breaking news’ and at the very least bears endless repetition, (until the time that its readers are finally brought up to date, not by responsible journalism, but by in-our-face events that can no longer be whitewashed), I paid my tithe and slogged through, to be happily rewarded with an introduction to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. (Curiously, although Dr. Johnson holds a masters degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Mr Gelles, appears to overlook this, referring to her simply as “Johnson”.)
This admirable “marine biologist and climate expert” “is attempting to shift the narrative around the fate of our planet.” While she is not alone in this, as the aforementioned on D.K. and many others are struggling to do the same, two things jumped out at me in the quotes Mr.Gelles provides.
The first is when she speaks about optimism and mirrors my own annoyance with the misguiding connotations of that word as voiced by so many who take a pessimistic view of our climate odds.
Dr. Johnson and I agree that the correct position to take is neither optimism nor pessimism, but in the reality that surrounds them. What I define as a view based in ‘reality’ as gleaned from many reliable sources across a broad spectrum of disciplines, she describes as ‘science’ based, and since in our current situation they are essentially interchangeable or intersectional, our thinking aligns.
Mr Gelles presents her stance this way:
“Johnson is not Pollyannish. She knows that climate change is diminishing biodiversity, that vulnerable communities will be disproportionately affected by extreme weather and that drought and famine are likely to get worse.
She bristles at being labeled an “optimist.”
“Optimism assumes that the outcome will be good,” she said. “That’s unscientific. I don’t harbor any sort of assumption that it will be OK in the end.”
But nor is Johnson closed off to the possibility that a climate catastrophe might be averted with the right combination of collective action, technological innovation, conservation, smart policymaking and systemic change.”
….but it is what she says next that ‘raised the blinds’ and enhanced the vista for me.
“What people perceive as hope or optimism is actually just joy,” she said. “I’m a joyful person. I find delight in any number of strange things. I have a lightheartedness that people don’t expect from someone who works in climate.”
While my climate action has helped me sleep at night and not get corroded by anxiety during the day, I have consistently had trouble maintaining my balance on the tightrope of climate news and have only recently found myself arriving at a place of inner-peace with the possible horrors and losses we are facing.
However, I’m not unaware that this ‘acceptance’ is partially denial based. It is not so much that I am comfortable with the comprehension of a world spinning out of control, as that I feel less of an anxiety driven compulsion to take a conceptual ‘tour’ of it. While fear based anticipation has loosened its grip somewhat, this is a long way off from “joy”.
I am tenacious and self-healing by nature and I reset to a positive outlook rapidly, no matter how serious the setback. However, in my experience, “joy” is a ‘bubble’ that has as yet to rise from the muck of this toxic ‘swamp’.
Nevertheless, I find it a marvelous and challenging word, which I will do my best to embrace…joyfully.
Mr Gelles then goes on to quote Ms. Johnson from a Ted Talk she gave last year, in which she discusses a method she conceived of as an aid for people looking to become more proactive by helping them to sort out their priorities and find their best path forward, removing that obstacle to making a meaningful personal contribution to saving the planet.
“TED Talk titled “How to Find Joy in Climate Action.” In it, she encouraged people who are looking for a way to contribute to create a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles: “What are you good at?” “What work needs doing?” And “What brings you joy?” Where those three things overlap is the opportunity for action.
For Johnson — a marine biologist who grew up in Brooklyn, wanted to protect coastal cities and loved changing laws — that meant co-founding X4, a think tank working on policy change to protect populations threatened by sea level rise.
“The opportunity is to do things that you love and that are part of the climate solutions we need,” she said. “If we can find meaningful ways to contribute to the problems we face, it just feels good.”
All of this impressed me as both valuable and refreshing and so I thought I would share it here.
Post script: At the end of the Times article there is an option for subscribers to sign up for a twice weekly news letter providing other climate news…which is not how the paper is presenting the Netanyahu/ Hamas conflict.
On the day this article appeared, I counted 6 different articles addressing the war and no ‘newsletter’ option for more. It would appear from this that while the conflict is positioned up front and in the reader’s face, most climate news has been sequestered off and only available by choice.
Judging from how few readers opt to read climate news on DK, it is likely that few Times readers request the newsletter. While these same readers still have the ‘option’ to read about the war or not, they are exposed to the headlines without such choice.
I understand that the war is generating a wide variety of news worthy stories, but so does environmental collapse, which is continuing to affect our weather worldwide, with devastating ramifications. A diarist (I think it was Pakalolo), pointed out how days after the hurricane decimation of Acapulco, coverage of the aftermath was all but dropped by MSM and yet, one of the Times’ Netanyahu/Hamas conflict articles addressed protests at the Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade, which I guess outweighs covering of how the lives of a million Acapulco residents were permanently ‘changed’ overnight by climate ‘change’.
I found this relevant quote from the Columbia Journalism Review, as placed by Hunter in his 11/25 diary on how major newspapers are deliberately undermining our democracy:
“As before, we figured the front page mattered disproportionately, in part because articles placed there represent selections that publishers believe are most important to readers—and also because, according to Nielsen data we analyzed, 32 percent of Web-browsing sessions around that period starting at the Times homepage did not lead to other sections or articles; people often stick to what they’re shown first.”
Naughty naughty, NYTimes :-(
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/24/2207078/-All-horse-race-no-substance-The-nation-s-major-papers-continue-to-endanger-democracy#read-more