a blog about the changing world we live in
CLIMATE ACTIVIST GRETA THUNBERG is back in the news but not in a manner that she is enjoying. According to the article “Trolls Force Artist to Cancel a Planned Greta Thunberg Mural in North Dakota” by Yessenia Funes for Gizmodo (February 13, 2020), local artist/photographer Shane Balkowitsch took portraits of Thunberg in October 2019 when she was visiting members of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. [Continue reading]
TRUMP PREPARING FOR CLIMATE CHANGE! Actually, the headline for the article by Zoya Teirstein for Grist (January 27, 2020) reads, “The Trump Administration is helping nine states prepare for climate change.” Either way, I know that many of you are thinking that word that Vizinni kept using in all the wrong places, “Inconceivable!” [Continue reading]
DONALD TRUMP, ENVIRONMENTAL HERO. To most of the people in the world concerned with the state of that world, those four words are more than a simple bit of irony: President Trump may be the quintessence of the climate change denial “movement”—ignorant (or duplicitous) and arrogant. Yet when perusing the latest email newsletter from Gizmodo, I was greeted by this headline and teaser: “Trump Has a Book Written By a Trump Advisor About How Trump Loves the Environment Actually.” [Continue reading]
AS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL lobbying groups in the country, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long been a central player in the network of organizations seeding denial about climate change. Its work includes spending millions of dollars influencing elections and lobbying in support of new oil and gas development, rollbacks of U.S. [Continue reading]
THE TWIN PHENOMENON of denial and inaction are related to one another, at least in the context of climate change. They are also complex, both in the general sense of “complicated and intricate,” and in the technical psychological sense of “a group of repressed feelings and anxieties which together result in abnormal behaviour.” [Continue reading]
PROPERLY, A MYTH is a “traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon” (Merriam-Webster). But we rarely use that definition today. Most of us use myth with its secondary definition: “an unfounded or false notion.” [Continue reading]
THE NEW YORKER focused on Greta Thunberg today, publishing an article and a featured cartoon. The article is titled “Greta Thunberg Is the Anti-Trump” and was written by Masha Gessen: “She is young and he is old. She is honest and he is a habitual liar. [Continue reading]