When It Comes To Environmental Protection, When Will We Get It Through Our Heads – ‘It Is The Economy, Stupid!’

By Doug Draper

When is the corporate media going to stop referring to the oil mess off the U.S. Gulf Coast as a ‘potential environmental crisis or disaster.’

Volunteers scramble to save wildlife along U.S. Gulf Coast

Not that it isn’t a catastrophe for the ecology of an area that, among other things, is home to dozens of rare and endangered species, including reptiles and birds. But it is also an economic disaster – and that is something that the corporate media, as tied in as it is with the petroleum industry and others that consume petroleum products, doesn’t seem to want to mention all that much.

There has always been this false reality pushed by some in government and the private sector that any move to protect the environment is a threat to the economy. In other words, environmental protection and the economy are at loggerheads, and those who believe that are quick to belittle the David Suzuki’s of this world as a bunch of dangerous tree huggers who would do nothing more than damage the quarterly return on profits for oil, coal, chemical interests and other interests.

As a reporter who covered environment issues fulltime for the better part of two decades in the 1980s and 90s, I could list numerous examples of environmental messes around our greater Niagara region, from Love Canal in Niagara Falls, N.Y. to the leakage of PCBs into an aquifer used as a community drinking water supply in the Niagara, Ontario town of Smithville, that ended up costing multi-more millions of dollars in damages to the community and cleanup costs, than it would have to more safely treat the poisons that created these messes in the first place. And more often than not, it was the taxpayers who picked up the bill.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, most of the media was bought up by private corporations that owned shared in the petro-chemical industry and other concerns that weren’t too interested in any government that came along and set environmental protection rules. So even the environment beats disappeared. My full-time beat at the St. Catharines Standard vaporized in about 1997 and, at the same time, many of the full-time environment beats across the country disappeared.

I can say that with some authority because I was a member of Canada/U.S. Society for Environmental Journalists, and we compared notes. And the killing of the environment beat across this continent was so dramatic, I feel confident calling it a conspiracy to silence any real and penetrating reporting on environmental issues by journalists who had come to know enough about these issues to cover and comment on them in some meaningful depth.

Today, we still get some environment reporting in the corporate press. But it doesn’t amount too much more than stories about people planting trees or picking up trash on Earth Week.

But then, the disastrous mess along the Gulf Coast should drive the point home that it is not just about saving birds or sea turtles. This one could destroy a third of the seafood fishery in North America and a major tourism industry in the southern U.S., not to mention the havoc it may wreak on other industries across this continent, and the stock, banking and insurance industries that can impact on most of the rest of us.

In other words, just as the old slogan from former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s campaign said, it is not just the environment, “it is the economy stupid.”

Not that I hold out very much confidence any more that we will finally grasp that lesson. My guess is that in a few months, the media will be on to the next Tiger Woods-like story and it will be back to business as usual.

The federal government in Canada is now courting a plan by the Chevron oil corporation to drill an even deeper well off the shores of Newfoundland than the BP well now gushing tens-of-thousands of barrels worth of oil per day on the floor of the Gulf seas.

Will Chevron be allowed to move forward with it. To quote a former U.S. vice-presidential candidate, my guess is – “You betcha! Drill baby drill.”

(Click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)