1.1 Connections
This book is about connections, often unexpected links in a complex world. It brings together detailed information about seemingly disparate subjects. In the process, the growing air traffic of Miami International Airport is shown to be connected to the city’s low‐lying status in the ocean, to the use of sediment rock in the area’s hydraulic and drinking water filtration systems, and to king and red tides. Elsewhere, the connections are examined between the climate of Earth and human evolution, the peopling of the world, and the historic development of modern society. Also of concern are the multiple ways national and international development under capitalism are entwined with deforestation, coral die‐off, emergent infectious disease, and mounting food insecurity around the world. This list could go on, but the basic point is that a holistic perspective on diverse issues is needed in the investigation of the interaction of contemporary ecological dangers, human behavior, and health.
In visiting ecocrises around the globe, from U.S. nuclear waste buried below the melting glaciers of Iceland to the deteriorating asbestos cement used to construct homes in Australia, and many other catastrophes in many places in between, a considerable amount of detail is offered. Why such a thoroughgoing approach to cases and examples? Because, while there are redundancies reflective of the unfortunate fact that in countless ways adverse elements of environmental history repeat themselves, it is by knowing a multitude of events that the patterns and their determinants are brought into sight. In this way, we begin to see the forest through the trees. It is a critical moment for this task, as the logger’s saw, intensifying wildfires, climate change‐induced pest invasions, drought, global warming, and over‐extraction conspire to denude the planet of oxygen‐generating forests, depopulate the oceans, melt the cryosphere, and put human well‐being at risk.
1.2 Is this a dangerous book?
In an essay entitled “The Danger of Environmentalism,” Michael Berliner (2020), senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives, writes: “Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.” The perception, by some, of the danger inherent in being concerned about the industrial destruction of the environment is what has led covering the environment to be one of the most risky assignments in journalism. It is estimated that 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and 2016 because of their environmental reporting. This is more than were killed covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Notes journalist Saul Elbein (quoted in Warren 2016): “In Cambodia and in remote forests elsewhere, a rising boom in the illegal sale of wood, land and minerals has turned the environmental beat into a new sort of conflict journalism. The dead have overwhelmingly been local reporters, covering illegal mining or logging. They are largely independent, poorly educated, untrained and despised by their nations’ establishment media. Reporting on a violent, corrupt frontier, they are never sure when they’ll cross a line and end up dead. Their lives in their hands, they head into the woods.” Newsworthy environmental controversies often involve powerful business and economic interests, explosive political clashes, criminal gangs, anti‐government rebels, or outright corruption. Often, they focus on struggles between elites and local people over indigenous rights to land and natural resources. In wealthy and developing countries alike, journalists covering environment issues find themselves the targets of attack by military, police, and paramilitary forces. In 2013, for example, independent journalist Miles Howe was assigned to cover protests by the Elsipotog First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. In his reporting, Howe sought to highlight unreported and underreported incidents. He recalls (quoted in Freedman 2018): “Many times I was the only accredited journalist witnessing rather violent arrests, third‐trimester pregnant women being locked up, guys tackled to the ground.” On one occasion, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pointed at him and shouted, “He’s with them!” His equipment was taken and the police searched his home. In addition, they offered to pay him to spy on the protesters—an offer that he rejected. In 2014, the body of Taing Try, a journalist covering the illegal logging of the forests of Cambodia, was found by local farmers in Kratie Province. He was lying face down in the mud on a logging road, a bullet in the back of his head. Try’s fate was not his alone. In 2008, Mikhail Beketov, a Russian journalist who wrote about the destruction of the Khimki Forest, part of the green belt surrounding Moscow, to make way for the Moscow–Saint Petersburg motorway, died of injuries suffered several years earlier after unknown attackers crushed his skull, broke his legs, and left him for dead in his own front yard. Similarly, in 2012, Chandrika Rai, an Indian reporter for the Hindi‐language newspaper Navbharat and the English‐language The Hitavada, who covered illegal coal mining, was bludgeoned to death along with his wife and their two teenage children in their home in Umaria, a small city in Madhya Pradesh state in central India. In 2017, Colombian radio journalist Efigenia Vásquez Astudillo was shot to death while covering the emergence of an indigenous movement to reclaim ancestral land that had been stolen and converted to large farms, resorts, and sugar plantations (Elbein 2016; Freedman 2018). The list goes on. Environmental reporters are often put at risk because they stand between the public and its need to know about environmental destruction and business interests or corrupt and criminal organizations intent on profit or personal gain. Degraders of the environment have a great deal invested in preventing the public from knowing the truth, or from knowing that is unencumbered by corporate spin (Conway 2018).
While environmental journals have been subjected to the most brutal forms of violence, environmental scientists—especially climate scientists—have been the targets of violent intimidation. The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (2019), which has assisted numerous researchers who have been harassed and attacked through email, social media, and other online platforms or subjected to more explicit politically motivated personal threats, notes that:
These forms of intimidation have also been directed at other kinds of scholars who have written about climate change. A founding member and current board member of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, became a target of the anti‐climate science movement in 2004 when she published an article in Science documenting the broad scientific agreement on climate change. Based on an analysis of 928 scientific abstracts with the keywords “global climate change,” she concluded that “there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen” (Oreskes 2004, p. 1686). In response to her publication, Oreskes began receiving hate mail, and extremely hostile letters were sent to Science. Many of the letters to the journal were penned by economists and others affiliated with pro‐free market think tanks, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute. James Inhofe (R...
