Uncovering the forgotten culprit of climate change
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Version 0 of 1. Your paper’s campaigning journalism to tackle the crisis of climate change is much needed. But too many times, as with your article on the bumblebee’s failure to escape warming climates by moving north (10 July), one of the major culprits is omitted from the story. While the article begins with the well-worn causes of “emissions from cars, factories and power plants”, the huge impact of animal agriculture is again missing from the picture. The UN’s 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, and the World Watch Institute’s 2009 report, and many since, including the fourth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all recognise animal agriculture’s major role – more than all traffic and communications combined. For your reports on climate change to be meaningful and not derisory, animal agriculture should be one of the key industries you investigate and report on, even in passing. Only then can your campaign against this threat of our times have real purchase.Dr Alex LockwoodCentre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland |