Covering Climate Now’s 3 Hot Reads for the New Year! Citizens’ Climate Lobby, $2.5 Billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Permits Awarded

COVERING CLIMATE NOW’S THREE HOT READS FOR THE NEW YEAR!

According to Covering Climate Now, a news organization that collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom, here are three climate-related books their team has picked as Hot Reads for 2023.

• The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1969). If you’re a parent who cares about climate change and you haven’t read your kid(s) this environmental classic, what are you waiting for? This tale of heedless deforestation in an endless pursuit of “more” concludes with a call to action relevant for all ages: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Hot Read #2: Lucky Mud & Other FOMA: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship, by Christina Jarvis (Seven Stories Press, 2022). Although best known for anti-war novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was also a committed environmentalist who spoke at the first Earth Day in 1970. Jarvis traces Vonnegut’s evolution as a “planetary citizen” from his roots in small-town Indiana to 1960s counterculture hero who predicted that “in the future [polluters] will be looked upon as swine,” while their opponents will be welcomed at the Pearly Gates by a “cheerful, sexy brass band” playing “When The Saints Go Marching In.”

And #3, The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg (Penguin Press, 2023). For a wide-ranging, deeply informed series of essays by global luminaries about the state of the climate emergency — from what the crisis means for the planet, including terrestrial biodiversity and permafrost, to what we can do about it — pick up Thunberg’s The Climate Book. Don’t miss George Monbiot’s essay, “Changing the Media Narrative,” which begins: “If you were to ask me which industry is most responsible for the destruction of life on Earth, I would say the media.”

DEEPER DIVE: CCN

CITIZENS’ CLIMATE LOBBY

Marshall Saunders founded Climate Citizens Lobby in 2007, a year after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Prior to that climate awakening, Saunders was a volunteer public speaker for a group advocating to end hunger and poverty in the USA. He’d even made a presentation to the US Congress on those subjects. But after watching the movie, Saunders realized ending poverty and hunger would be useless if climate change made for an unlivable world. Saunders therefore switched to speaking publicly about the importance of individuals reducing their carbon footprint. In the back of his mind, he couldn’t quite square his public statements with what he knew was the power of the fossil fuel lobby and its influence on Congress. 

According to his bio, after giving a climate change presentation, a woman at a senior center asked Saunders, “What should we do?” And he blurted out, “What’s needed is thousands of ordinary people organized, lobbying their members of Congress with one voice, one message, and lobbying in a relentless, unstoppable, yet friendly and respectful way.” To which the woman replied, “Why don’t you do that?” And so Citizens’ Climate Lobby was born.

Since 2007, CCL has grown from one to 560+ chapters worldwide with almost a quarter million supports and participants. Check out ClimateCitizensLobby.org to find a chapter in your neck of the woods.

DEEPER DIVE: CCL

$2.5 BILLION MID-BARATARIA SEDIMENT DIVERSION PERMITS AWARDED

Earlier this year, The Climate Daily reported on the U.S. state of Louisiana’s decision to reconnect the Mississippi River to the Mid-Barataria Basin, all in an effort to reduce loss of coastline in that state. Louisiana’s proposed $2.5 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, designed to reconnect the Mississippi River with the Barataria Basin to create as much as 21 square miles of wetlands by 2070, was awarded key permits by the Army Corps of Engineers last week that could allow construction to begin in March 2023. 

On average, between 1985 and 2010, Louisiana lost about a football field of coastline per hour, and the rate has not slowed. Stronger storms each year and sustained sea-level rise continue to eat away at its coast. Few have felt these effects more than the coastal communities. Hurricane Ida forced most of the remaining members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe to abandon their homes on Isle de Jean Charles. Gov. John Bel Edwards said, in a news release after the Corps announcement, “The project represents a major step forward to restoring for injuries suffered by our coastal estuaries as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”

Why does this news matter to us? Because communities we feared could be removed from the map in 50 years will instead see thousands of acres of wetlands in the future that will provide them with natural and sustainable protection. Oh, and it provides a template for other municipalities to follow, allowing Nature to restore itself.

DEEPER DIVE: Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, YouTube, NoLa