Mark Trahant at Indian Country Today writes—Tribal people face 'disproportional impact' from climate change:
A new climate report released Friday by the Trump administration predicts significant -- and expensive -- impacts on the planet as a result of climate change. The threats from weather-related catastrophes are already clear: Stronger and more frequent hurricanes, deadly heat waves, and more intense destructive wildfires.
The changing climate is a threat to “Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and economies, including agriculture, hunting and gathering, fishing, forestry, energy, recreation, and tourism enterprises,” the report says. Though Indigenous peoples "may be affected by climate change in ways that are similar to others in the United States, Indigenous peoples can also be affected uniquely and disproportionately."
Even Native culture is a risk as well as increased health threats from increased asthma to diabetes rates.
The report says: "Many Indigenous peoples have lived in particular areas for hundreds if not thousands of years, and their cultures, spiritual practices, and economies have evolved to be adaptive ... Indigenous knowledge systems differ from those of non-Indigenous peoples who colonized and settled the United States, and they engender distinct knowledge about climate change impacts and strategies for adaptation. Indigenous knowledges, accumulated over generations through direct contact with the environment, broadly refer to Indigenous peoples' systems of observing, monitoring, researching, recording, communicating, and learning and their social adaptive capacity to adjust to or prepare for changes. One of these knowledge systems that is often referred to in the context of climate change is traditional ecological knowledge, which primarily focuses on the relationships between humans, plants, animals, natural phenomena, and the landscape." [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings. The cuts to our green house gas emissions that scientists tell us are necessary in order to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe are treated as nothing more than gentle suggestions, actions that can be put off pretty much indefinitely. Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too.”
~~Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2014)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2007—Klein's "shameful" er, "journalism":
Dan Gilmore, famed journalist and Director of UC Berkeley's Center for Citizen Media:
One of the most amazing episodes in modern American journalism has emerged from a flagrantly inaccurate and misguided Time magazine column by Joe Klein. He’s a political writer whose work in this case may become Exhibit A for what’s wrong with the craft today.
Wow. Now that's a slap in Joe Klein's face right there, and it doesn't get any better from there. Joe Klein makes huge mistake, admits essentially that he hasn't read the legislation he's attacking, and then neither he nor Time have bothered to add corrections to the piece in question online, nor in the print magazine.
It truly is the definition of journalistic malpractice.
Wired's Ryan Singel isn't much kinder to Klein's clearly deficient intellect:
Time ought to stop Klein from writing about any substantive topic, especially FISA. Because when it comes to these topics, Klein is well beyond stupid. He's dangerous.