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Letter to the editor: Earth Day more essential than ever

Too many mainstream-news-media CEOs and senior editors remain unfazed by manmade global warming and its resultant extreme weather events.
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Earth Day should be every day, not just once a year, this letter writer says.

Re: "Take note when opposites agree," Opinion, May 12

While Earth Day has unremarkably passed by, every day of the year needs to be one — but a serious effort rather than just brief news-media tokenism. Clearly, too many mainstream-news-media CEOs and senior editors remain unfazed by manmade global warming and its resultant extreme weather events. And it's not just Fox News but rather pretty much the entire mainstream news-media spectrum that are complicit — especially in regards to human-created climate change.

In an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019), Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media, including The New York Times, do publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”

Particularly disturbing was an editorial The Surrey Now-Leader) printed, headlined “Earth Day in need of a facelift”. It opined that “some people would argue that [the day of environmental action] … is an anachronism,” that it should instead be a day of recognizing what we’ve societally accomplished. “And while it [has] served us well, in 2017, do we really need Earth Day anymore?”

Varied lengths of the same editorial, unfortunately, was also run by some sister newspapers, all owned by the same news-media mogul who also happens to be an aspiring oil refiner.

Until reading this, I had never heard anyone, let alone a mainstream news outlet, suggest we’re doing so well as to render Earth Day an unnecessary "anachronism”. Considering the sorry state of the planet’s natural environment, I still find it one of the most absurd and irresponsible acts of editorial journalism I've witnessed in my 3.5 decades of news consumption.

Frank Sterle Jr.  

White Ro​ck