“How Environmental Movement Plans to Leverage the Coronavirus Pandemic; Activists are Pressing Governments to Tie Tougher Rules on Emissions to Post-Pandemic Stimulus Aid.” by Sarah McFarlane (Randy Le)
In “How Environmental Movement Plans to Leverage the Coronavirus Pandemic; Activists are Pressing Governments to Tie Tougher Rules on Emissions to Post-Pandemic Stimulus Aid,” Sarah McFarlane covers the environmental impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. From the beginning, she provides brief statistics on the carbon emission and air pollution reduction in China. This is a result of factories closing, flights canceling, and people staying at home. The article then turns its focus to statistics from a decade before where an economic downturn happened in 2009. During this time, carbon emissions and air pollution dropped in numbers, but emissions grew the next year meaning that data should be supervised over a longer period before making any final judgments. Towards the end, the article mentions more about how sustainability and environmental factors have improved since the pandemic, but environmentalists are not quick to celebrate since this happened because of a pandemic, not from government actions.
Sarah McFarlane’s article frames the statistics on carbon emissions and air pollution to benefit the environmental movement. For example, McFarlane addresses how NASA satellite images showed clear skies over extreme manufacturing regions like China and Italy. She backs up the example with how readings around this time revealed clouds filled with pollutants. Another example is when McFarlane includes that “Early readings from Italy, India and major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, also show signs of improved air quality.” This example reveals that the industrial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic led to better air quality. However, the article mentions that drawing conclusions too early may not be accurate which makes the content more convincing since the article acknowledges its weak point but combats it with statistics from a decade before.
“One farm tried to make sustainable food affordable. Here’s what happened” by Alan Yu by Jacqueline Devone
In the article “One farm tried to make sustainable food affordable, here’s what happened” author Alan Yu tells the story of a farmer on a mission. The article opens up with an introduction to Chris Newman, the farmer, and his mission to run a successful BIPOC owned sustainable farm. Then, the article goes into a tale about how everything went terribly wrong. Due to confinement, overbreeding, and overall terrible living conditions the animals were in terrible shape. The workers were competing over a promised leadership position, and that led to rushed sloppy work. Newman was a bad boss, as he didn’t listen to his workers and he fired them seemingly unnecessarily. In the end, the farm went broke and Newman’s mission was a failure.
The way the article was framed made it seem as though a farm like this could have never worked, mainly because it was sustainable. Overall, this article painted the sustainable movement in a bad light. It could have been presented as a story about a failed farm with subpar management, but the author decided to shine the light on their effort for sustainability. This can be attributed to the fact that the sustainability movement is often regarded as a waste of time and resources by the media. Sustainability is also seen as something that could never work out in the long run, and this article actively plays into that belief.
“Young People as Drivers or Inhibitors of the Sustainability Movement: The Case of Anti-Consumption” by F Ziesemer and others (Maddi)
The article discusses the sustainability movement, but more specifically the youth participation that the movement has. Young people (ages 15-24) are shown to be the most active in the anti-consumption movement to address climate change and other human-caused environmental issues. Young people are motivated to lessen their carbon footprint for a variety of reasons including socializing, convenience, and wanting to feel less personal responsibility for the environmental crises occurring today. This age group is interesting to study because they are not yet fully mentally developed but are in the age range where they start to formulate their own belief systems and values.
The main biases that are within this article are that the author is obviously pro-environmentalism. Their connotation regarding the movement is very positive and they frame the youth participation in it as a good thing, which is obviously not the most objective approach. Other sources may frame the sustainability movement as a hoax, but this article insinuates that it is very relevant and also needs to be addressed. Another bias I saw within the article was that the author very clearly has a positive view of young people and their opinions. They say, “. . . young people, often culturally framed as rebels in the mainstream, are an exciting group for investigating anti-consumption. . .” (Ziesemer 428). This quote clearly exhibits how the author feels about young people and their opinions positively rather than negatively.