Entries tagged with “Andrew Revkin” from Reality Window

Andrew C. Revkin of the NY Times dotearth blog recently received the 2008 John Chancellor Award for sustained achievement in journalism and spoke at a gathering of "graduate students in journalism at Columbia University". He blogged about it on dot earth and highlighted this Q&A out of the video clip that he posted.

Q. Obviously climate change is the biggest story on your plate right now, but looking ahead what do you see?

A. My coverage has evolved. Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite. So how we mesh infinite aspirations of a species that's been on this explosive trajectory -- not just of population growth but of consumptive appetite -- how can we make a transition to a sort of stabilized and still prosperous relationship with the Earth and each other is the story of our time.

And it's a story about conflict. It's a story about the fact that there are a billion teenagers on planet earth right now. A hundred thirty years ago there were only a billion people altogether -- grandparents, kids. Now there are a billion teenagers and they could just as easily become child soldiers and drug dealers as innovators and the owners of small companies in favelas in Brazil. And little tweaks in their prospects, a little bit of education, a little bit of opportunity, a micro loan or something, something that gets girls into schools, those things -- that's the story of our time. And climate change is like a symptom of the story of our time, meaning our energy choices right now come with a lot of emissions of greenhouse gases and if we don't have a lot of new [choices] we're going to have a lot of warming.

This pulls together many of the elements that Obama talked about in his campaign - that green technology and working with our finite and infinite resources is critical to our future in economic terms, in national security terms, in environmental and quality of life terms. Obviously Mr. Revkin has spent more than a little time thinking about this.