Environmental journalism – Page 15

Saving the Planet, one tiny step at a time

A youth theatre group that tours the Philippines, engaging small groups on history, culture and development.

A public radio station that takes up development issues through on air reporting and discussions in Nepal’s Kathmandu valley.

A project that brings together Thai school children and farmers to study and understand farmland biodiversity.

These are among the winning projects that have just been selected to be featured in TVE Asia Pacific’s new regional TV series, Saving the Planet.

Six projects or activities – each addressing an aspect of education for sustainable development (ESD) – have been chosen from worldwide public nominations.

Click here for full list of competition winners.

Read TVEAP news story announcing the winners.

I was part of the International selection panel that sifted through dozens of public nominations from all over the world. Reading these was an inspiring experience. In a world that is full of doom and gloom type of news, there still are individuals, groups and communities who are doing their bit to live within our planet’s means….that’s what sustainable development is all about.

The joint statement by the selection panel noted: “The selection panel was impressed by the breadth and scope of nominated activities, which indicates that all across developing Asia, there is an upsurge of concern and commitment to living within the planet’s resources.”

Read the full statement by selection panel

I have always held that governments or scientists can’t save the planet – people can. In the final analysis, all the inter-governmental babble and scientific research are means to an end. Unless people change their attitudes and lifestyles, all that governments or science can do is to buy us more time — which will run out sooner or later.

In Saving the Planet, we are going to showcase some Asian communities and groups who are not just walking the talk themselves, but showing others how to do it as well.

The new TV series will go into production by July, and will be released next year. Watch this space.

Nepal’s Aankhijhyal is 500 — and counting!

Aankhijhyal is a Nepali word. It means window.

Aankhijhyal is today also a ‘brand name’ in Nepal. It’s Nepal’s most popular TV magazine programme on environment and social development, which recently produced its 500th edition.

Aankhijhyal logo NEFEJ logo

The half-hour programme has been produced regularly since May 1994. Now in its 13th year, it is one of developing Asia’s longest running television shows.

The landmark 500th edition was broadcast on 27 February 2007. In this special programme, its producers, the Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists (NEFEJ), looked back at the interesting and challenging times they have chronicled and investigated.

And last night in Kathmandu, the Nepali capital, I sat down with a team of friends from NEFEJ to belatedly celebrate the occasion.

A dozen journalists, producers and film-makers joined us. We chatted away well into the night. There was no longer any worries about curfews and army check-points.

“We don’t often get together like this as one big group,” said Rabindra Pandey, head of Audio-Visual at NEFEJ. “Most of the time, we are too busy to socialise. We are chasing deadlines, or stories, or sponsors!”

There is much to cheer, both at micro and macro levels.

Sustaining a half-hour show on television is no mean feat in any part of the world, especially in a low income country like Nepal. Broadcasters here don’t put any money in programmes like Aankhijhyal . In fact, NEFEJ not only produces the show entirely at its own cost, but also pays for airtime on Nepal Television to get it out to the public! That’s the broadcast reality that many of our western colleagues are often unable to understand.

And the general feeling right now in Nepal is upbeat. After Nepal’s own People Power revolution of April 2006, people are hopeful that their ‘second chance in democracy’ can actually work better. While the streets of Nepal are as dusty and chaotic as ever, I can see far more tourists and far fewer soldiers on the roads now than on previous visits in recent years.

NEFEJ is a non-profit collective of journalists committed to communicating sustainable development issues. Foundecd 20 years ago, it has a much better record of democracy than Nepal itself: every year, office-bearers are democractically elected by its over 100 members. There is regular ‘change of guard’ at the top.

NEFEJ is also one of the oldest and strongest parters for us at TVE Asia Pacific.

Aankhijhyal is the organisation’s ‘crown jewel’. It’s the centrepiece of NEFEJ’s Audio Visual Department, and has been widely acclaimed for its investigative approach to sustainable development and social justice issues.

From land reform and agrochemical misuse to the conservation of heritage sites, and from the trafficking of women and children to HIV, Aankhijhyal has been covering a broad range of issues, concerns and controversies in the public interest. While remaining apolitical, the programme has also reflected the human, social and environmental costs of Nepal’s violent insurgency and pro-democracy struggle in recent years.

Filming Aankhijhyal - image courtesy NEFEJ

“Since its inception in 1993, we have come a long way and Aankhijhyal has managed to create awareness among the Nepalis on the issues related to environment and development,” says Rabindra. “Aankhijhyal still remains one of the most popular video magazines on Nepal Television.”

Aankhijhyal’s passing 500 editions is all the more significant because it has been sustained without a break by this non-profit cooperative of journalists. Whether or not external funding was available, NEFEJ has continued producing the programme – often using its own savings from other, better-funded projects.

And it was clear to me last night that they have no intention of resting on their laurels.

“There’s so much happening in Nepal today. We are living in a period of rapid change. We feel one half-hour show a week is not enough to capture the unfolding stories,” said NEFEJ’s current President, Sahaj Man Shrestha, himself a former CEO of a private TV channel in Nepal.

Image courtesy NEFEJ

Read TVE Asia Pacific news item: Nepal’s premier TV magazine Aankhijhyal is 500 (27 Feb 2007)

NEFEJ Aankhijhyal online archives

More about NEFEJ Audio-Visual Department

Read Indian magazine Down to Earth on Aankhijhyal

All images courtesy NEFEJ

Gasp! Asthma on the rise – and we made it all possible

Gasp!

This morning, I woke up at 4.30 in the morning struggling to breathe. It’s another attack of asthma.

My lungs don’t know – and won’t care – that yesterday, 1 May, was World Asthma Day. All my long-suffering lungs need is some fresh air.

But in the increasingly polluted — and right now, incredibly humid — Greater Colombo, I’m not likely to find it any time soon.

World Asthma Day is designed to increase awareness of asthma as a global health problem. Those who live with Asthma, and suffer on a daily or weekly basis, know what it’s all about.

I’m among the lucker ones. My asthma is well under control most of the time, but an inhalor is never far away. In fact, asthma is my personal indicator of how clean or polluted the air is in places I visit on my frequent travels.

I’ve had bad attacks in Beijing and Kathmandu. No surprises there. But at least in the latter city, which I’ll be revisiting soon, my lungs feel that the air quality has been getting better.

So there is some good news, even if we have to look hard and dig deep for it. That’s part of the job for us journalists — and in this instance, I readily declare my self interest: I want to breathe more easily!

Last year, TVE Asia Pacific conducted a regional media training workshop on covering air quality issues in Asia. That was part of the Better Air Quality 2006 event, a large gathering of everyone concerned with cleaner air issues. It was held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in mid December 2006. Read TVE Asia Pacific website coverage of BAQ 2006 and the media training workshop.

Political, scientific and industry leaders made lofty statements about the value of clean air. Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment minister, said clean air was more important for Asians than even rice, the staple food for most Asians.

Inspired by the week-long event, I wrote an op ed essay that month titled ‘Grappling with Asia’s Tsunami of the Air’. It has appeared online at several websites.

Images courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

In that essay, I argued:

In the wake of the Asian Tsunami, some development and humanitarian groups used the phrase ‘silent tsunami’ to describe slowly unfolding emergencies that rarely attract much media coverage or global compassion. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made frequent, passionate references to the ‘daily tsunami of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation.’

It’s easy to call Asia’s air pollution induced sickness and death another silent tsunami. Except that there is nothing silent about it: the lung-corroding, heart-threatening, cancer-causing and blood-poisoning pollutants are released with a thunderous roar from the region’s cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and other motorised vehicles. Anyone who has stood in a busy intersection in an Asian megacity knows exactly what I mean.

For the want of a phrase, we might call this Asia’s ‘tsunami of the air’.

And this tsunami is very much of our own making — let’s acknowledge that we are all part of the problem, some more than others. It makes us culpable for what India’s Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) once termed ‘slow murder’ by dirty air.

Read the full essay on One World South Asia

TVEAP News: Rising Asia chokes, but continues its quest for cleaner air

Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities

Images courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

Thank you, Brundtland. Now for the unfinished business…

On 2 April 2007, I posted excerpts from a speech I made in Hyderabad, India, on the worldwide influence of Our Common Future, the final report of the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development that came out 20 years ago this month.

I have now expanded on that theme in an op ed essay titled ‘Children of Brundtland coming of age’.

It has just been published by Green Accord, an Italian non-profit group that every year organises a gathering of leading environmental experts and journalists. The GreenAccord Forum on Media and Nature, held in an Italian city every Fall, is now the largest, regular gathering of its kind. I have been a participant or speaker at three past editions.

GreenAccord logo

Here are excerpts from my essay:

Brundtland did not invent the concept or term -– various versions had been around since the first UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972). But it was Our Common Future that took these mainly academic and inter-governmental discussions to a mass audience.

In doing so, it nudged the environmental movement to move up from simple pollution prevention, tree-hugging and whale-saving action to a much broader developmental agenda. Issues such as poverty, international trade, peace and security were integrated into one framework.

And, equally importantly, the report inspired a whole generation of young journalists, educators and activists worldwide. I was one of them: in that sense, we are all Children of Brundtland.

By happy coincidence, the report came out during my first year in science journalism, and significantly altered my outlook and priorities. My early fascination with mega-science topics such as space travel, genetic engineering and nuclear power gave way to an interest in issues of science for human survival and development. I haven’t looked back.

Some environmental journalists at GreenAccord Forum in Nov 2006

I then go on to question the continuing relevance of environmental journalism, and suggest that this kind of labelling has, inadvertently, ghettoised the media coverage of sustainable development issues.

I argue that we urgently need simple good journalism that covers sustainable development as an integral part of the mainstream of human affairs.

“We can’t engage in shoddy journalism in the name of saving endangered species or ecosystems. There is no substitute for plain good journalism.”

Photos courtesy: Zilia Castrillon

Read my full essay here

TVE Asia Pacific website news item on the last GreenAccord Forum in October 2006

Tabloid journalism – and MTV’s Environment News

What can be done to lure more young audiences to care for and discuss about issues of science and technoloy?

This question was put to a panel on ‘Science and television’ that I was on last week at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne, Australia.

Each panelist offered suggestions. Mine was just three words: think more tabloid.

Those who try to communicate science to the non-technical public are mostly trapped in the mindset of the classical documentary, or its print equivalent: broadsheet newspapers. That engages a certain kind of audience, but the masses — including many young people (15 to 25 years) — are not widely represented there. To engage the latter, we have to consider more tabloid formats.

Is that dumbing down the weighty issues we’re peddling? Not necessarily, I argued. We can make things in different formats, without over-intellectualising and not over-simplifying either.

A recent example of this comes from Music Television, MTV, and is discussed in an interesting piece appearing in the Columbia Journalism Review website, CJR Daily.

MTV Break the Addiction campaign

Here are some excerpts from the article written by Curtis Brainard, titled ‘Surprise: MTV’s Environmental News Rocks’

Just over a year ago, on Earth Day 2006, the station announced its “Break the Addiction” campaign, encouraging people to kick (or cut back on) habits that depend on fossil fuel. The campaign is a suite of on-air programming, MTV News stories, public service announcements, contests, online resources, and grassroots mobilization efforts. No, MTV is not the type of news outlet that one would reference in a scholarly paper, and it never will be. And although MTV has produced environmental stories intermittently for over twenty years, the “Break the Addiction” campaign was its first ambitious commitment.

“Historically, the environment never rated highly,” said Ian Rowe, MTV’s vice president of public affairs and strategic partnerships. “But we were starting to see signs that global warming was becoming a bigger story, even if our audiences weren’t clamoring for such news, so we made a proactive decision that we would connect the dots for our audience.”

On Earth Day (22 April 2007), MTV ran a special edition of “Pimp My Ride,” the popular automobile makeover show. Governor Schwarzenegger is a friend of the team at Galpin Auto Sports in California, where the program is filmed. He and the crew (mostly the crew) retrofit a 1965 Chevy Impala with an 800-horsepower, biodiesel engine. “We try to publicize celebrity involvement in these issues to show people it’s cool, and bring the unconverted into the fold,” said Pete Griffin, a public affairs officer who worked on the “Break the Addiction” campaign. It’s no Pulitzer-caliber exposé on the socioeconomics of biofuels, but, Griffin says, “Stand-alone half-hour shows on these issues can be less effective than integrating them into shows that people are already watching.”

With short public service announcements airing around the clock between scheduled programming, says Ian Rowe, “There is no way you can watch the channel without realizing that global warming is one of our central issues.”

Read the full article here

Can journalists save the planet?

Earth’s city lights at night: this is one of my favourite images. Without a single word, it says so much about resource and energy use disparities on our planet.

It also reminds us of the biggest challenge we face: to better manage our affairs so that life — and lights — are not snuffed out.

“The Earth is one, but the world is not.”

These perceptive words opened the final report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), published 20 years ago this month.

Titled Our Common Future, it was the outcome of over 900 days of worldwide consultations and deliberations by experts, activists, government officials, industrialists and a cross section of ordinary people from all walks of life.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, that report made a deep impression on myself just when I was getting started in journalism.

Two decades on, there’s much unfinished business. In an editorial just published by the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net), I take a closer look at the role of journalists in pursuit of that elusive goal of sustainable development.

Here’s a short excerpt:

But environmental journalists can, at best, only weave part of the multi-faceted tapestry of sustainable development. Grasping the bigger picture, and communicating it well, requires the active participation of the entire media industry — from reporters, producers and feature writers to editors, managers and media owners.

Climate change — rapidly emerging as today’s charismatic mega-issue — could provide the means for unifying media and communication industries for this purpose.

Already, there is recognition of climate change’s far-reaching impacts. Echoing the United Kingdom’s Stern Review on the economics of climate change, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is pushing for climate change to be ‘rebranded’ as a development, rather than an environmental, problem.

In this scenario, we urgently need more good journalism that covers sustainable development as an integral part of mainstream human affairs.

Read the full editorial on SciDev.Net

Note:
The composite image of Earth at night was created by NASA with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS). Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.