Dance the pens to green!

The title of this editorial are inspired by the words of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed on November 10, 1995 by the Nigerian military forces during his uncompromising struggle against a multinational oil company to save their land.

Dance your anger and your joys; dance the guns to silence! Yes, we have a similar situation prevails in various parts of our country. Here, there should be a need for transfusing new blood into environmental journalism in India, especially Tamil Nadu. This is nothing but the journalism associated with non-human world with an interaction by human beings as well. For understanding, it reports on events, trends, and issues associated with the environment and focuses on the planet’s natural systems like plants, animals, habitats, ecosystems, atmosphere, water, climate, etc.

Since 1960s, it branched off with the book of Silent Spring authored by Rachel Carson, which alerted the people’s minds to dire problems in the environments. The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention.

Environmental journalism seeks to raise awareness about environmental problems and related issues to influence policy and action to resolve them.

Environmental journalists need to be fluent in the language and methods of science. They need to understand how policy decisions are made because science and implementation of projects in the name of science development are different vendettas. It should be important to extract and exhibit political ideology behind the implementations of the projects. Therefore, the environmental journalist must be able to place current environmental events into a historical context. And, on top of all that, they must tell compelling stories, communicating complex information in ways that are relevant to people’s lives and easy for them to understand.

We have a lot of environmental journalists or writers who often work on environmental issues in great depth. But in mainstream media like newspapers and televisions, we sense blank spaces in environmental journalism. And, we have a ‘sin’ in media - Bias.

There are organizations, movements, people, and scientists, writers who are having continuous struggles dealing with environmental issues. Sadly, it is not enough.

It is high time to nurture green journalism. Let dance the pens to green!

Ariharasuthan R (31, December, 2014) 

Editorial for Greenwatch (e-digest)