A Question for Journalists: How Do We Cover Penguins and the Politics of Denial

[Guest guest]

Published on Friday, October 7, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

A Question for Journalists: How Do We Cover Penguins and the Politics of

Denial?

by Bill Moyers

Keynote Speech to the _Society of Environmental Journalists_

(http://www.sej.org/) Convention

Austin, Texas - October 1, 2005

 

Thank you for inviting me here today and for counting me as a colleague.

I don't fit neatly into the job description of an environmental journalist

although I have kept returning to the beat ever since my first documentary on

the subject some 30 years ago. That was a story about how the new Republican

governor of Oregon, Tom McCall, had set out to prove that the economy and the

environment could share the center lane on the highway to the future.

Those were optimistic years for the emerging environmental movement. Rachel

Carson had rattled the cage with Silent Spring and on the first Earth Day in

1970 twenty million Americans rose from the grassroots to speak for the

planet. Even Richard Nixon couldn't say no to so powerful a subpoena by public

opinion, and he put his signature to some far-reaching measures for

environmental protection.

I shared that optimism and believed journalism would help to fulfill it. I

thought that when people saw a good example they would imitate it, that if

Americans knew the facts and the possibilities they would act on them. After

all, half a century ago, I had walked every day as a student across the campus

of my alma mater, the University of Texas and could look up at the main tower

and read the words: " You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you

free. " I believed we were really on the way toward the third American

Revolution. The first had won our independence as a nation. The second had

finally

opened the promise of civil rights to all Americans. Now the third American

Revolution was to be the Green Revolution for a healthy, safe, and sustainable

future.

Sometimes in a moment of reverie I imagine that it happened. I imagine that

we had brought forth a new paradigm for nurturing and protecting our global

life support system; that we had faced up to the greatest ecological challenge

in human history and conquered it with clean renewable energy, efficient

transportation and agriculture, and the non-toxic production and protection of

our forests, oceans, grasslands and wetlands. I imagine us leading the world

on a new path of sustainability.

Alas, it was only a reverie. The reality is otherwise. Rather than leading

the world in finding solutions to the global environmental crises, the United

States is a recalcitrant naysayer and backslider. Our government and

corporate elites have turned against America's environmental visionaries - from

Teddy

Roosevelt to John Muir, from Rachel Carson to David Brower, from Gaylord

Nelson to Laurence Rockefeller. They have set out to eviscerate just about

every

significant gain of the past generation, and while they are at it they have

managed to blame the environmental movement itself for the failure of the

Green Revolution. If environmentalism isn't dead, they say, it should be. And

they will gladly lead the cortege to the grave.

Yes, I know: the environmental community has stumbled on many fronts. All of

us in this room have heard and reported the charges: that the rhetoric is

alarmist and the ideology polarizing; that command-and-control regulation

produces bureaucratic bungles, slows economic growth, and delays technological

advances that save lives; that what began as a grassroots movement has now

become an entrenched green bureaucracy precariously hanging on in occupied

Washington while passionate citizens across the country are starved for

financial

resources. There is some truth in these charges; all movements flounder and

must periodically regroup.

Before we consider the case closed, however, let me urge you to take a hard

look at the backlash. I didn't reckon on the backlash. If the Green

Revolution is a bloody pulp today, it is not just because the environmental

movement

mugged itself. It is because the corporate, political, and religious right

ganged up on it in the back alleys of power. Big companies fund a relentless

assault on green values and policies. Political ideologues launch countless

campaigns to strip from government all its functions except those that reward

their rich benefactors. And homegrown ayatollahs are more set on savaging gay

people than saving the green earth.

I especially failed to reckon with how ruthless the reactionaries would be.

What they did to Rachel Carson when Silent Spring appeared in 1962 has been

honed to a sharp edge aimed at the jugular of anyone who challenges them.

I felt the knife's edge some years ago when I took up the subject of

pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary on PBS. My producer, Marty

Koughan,

learned that the industry was plotting behind the scenes to dilute the

findings of a National Academy of Science study on the effect of pesticide

residues

in children. When the companies found out we were on the story, they came

after us. Before the documentary aired television reviewers and the editorial

pages of newspapers were flooded with disinformation. A whispering campaign

took hold. One Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast without

having seen it and later confessed to me that he had gotten a bum tip about the

content from a top lobbyist for the chemical industry and printed it without

asking me for a response.

Some public television managers were so unnerved by the propaganda blitz

against a yet-to-be aired documentary that they actually protested to PBS with

a

letter prepared by the chemical industry.

Here's what most perplexed us: eight days before the broadcast, the American

Cancer Society, an organization that in no way figured in our story, sent to

its three-thousand local chapters a " critique " of the unfinished documentary

claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We

were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of

criticizing a documentary that it had not yet seen, that had not yet aired,

and that did not claim what the Society said was in it? An enterprising

reporter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into these questions for Legal Times.

She found that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had several

chemical companies as clients, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer

Society. The firm was able to cash in on some of the goodwill from their

" charitable " work to persuade the communications staff at the Society to

distribute

erroneous talking points about the documentary before it aired - talking

points supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter Novelli. Legal Times

headlined

the story, " Porter Novelli Plays All Sides, " a familiar Washington game.

This was just round one. The producer Sherry Jones and I spent more than a

year working on another PBS documentary called " Trade Secrets. " This was a

two-hour investigative special based on records from the industry's own

archives. Those internal documents revealed that for over 40 years big chemical

companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging

information about toxic chemicals in their products. They confirmed not only

that a

shameless and amoral industry knowingly deceived the public. They also

confirmed

that we were living under a regulatory system designed by the chemical

industry itself - one that put profits ahead of safety.

Once again the industry pounced. We found ourselves the target of another

public relations firm - this one noted for using private detectives and former

CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for big

business. One of its founders acknowledged that corporations " sometimes " resort

to unconventional resources, including " using deceit. " We were the target of a

classic smear campaign and PBS felt the pressure. Still, the documentary

ran, created a big impact across the country, and a year later received an Emmy

from our peers for outstanding investigative journalism.

But this crowd never gives up. President Bush has turned the agencies

charged with environmental protection over to people who don't believe in it.

To

run the Interior Department he chose a long-time defender of polluters who has

opposed laws to safeguard wildlife, habitat, and public lands. To run the

Forest Service he chose a timber industry lobbyist. To oversee our public lands

he named a mining industry lobbyist who believes public lands are

unconstitutional. To run the Superfund he chose a woman who made a living

advising

corporate polluters how to evade the Superfund. And in the White House office

of

environmental policy the President placed a lobbyist from the American

Petroleum Institute whose mission was to make sure the government's scientific

reports on global warming didn't contradict the party line and the interest of

oil companies. Everywhere you look, the foxes own the chicken coop.

My colleagues and I reported these stories again and again on my weekly PBS

series, to the consternation of the President's minions at the Corporation

for Public Broadcasting. The CPB Chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, turned the

administration's discomfort at embarrassing disclosures into a crusade to

discredit

our journalism. Tomlinson left the chairmanship this week but the Rightwing

coup at public broadcasting is complete. He remains on the board under a new

chair who is a former real estate director and Republican fund raiser. She

recently told a Senate hearing that the CPB should have the authority to

penalize public broadcasting journalists if they step out of line. Sitting

beside

her and Tomlinson on the board is another Bush appointee - also a partisan

Republican activist - who was a charter member and chair of Newt Gingrich's

notorious political action committee, GOPAC. Reporting to them is the White

House's handpicked candidate to be President and chief executive officer of the

CPB - a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee whose husband

became PR director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had

helped

the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the

environment, Silent Spring. Mark my words: if this gang has anything to say

about

it, there will be no challenging journalism to come from public television

while they are around; no investigative reporting on the environment; no

reporting at all on conflicts of interest between government and big business;

no

naming of names.

So if the environmental movement is pronounced dead, it won't be from

self-inflicted wounds. We don't blame slavery on the slaves, the Trail of Tears

on

the Cherokees, or the Srebrenica massacre on the bodies in the grave. No, the

lethal threat to the environmental movement comes from the predatory power

of money and the pathological enmity of rightwing ideology.

Theodore Roosevelt warned a century ago of the subversive influence of money

in politics. He said the central fact in his time was that big business had

become so dominant it would chew up democracy and spit it out. The power of

corporations, he said, had to be balanced with the interest of the general

public. That warning was echoed by his cousin Franklin, who said a " government

by organized money is as much to be feared as a government by organized mob. "

Both Roosevelts rose to that challenge in their day. But a hundred years

later mighty corporations are once again the undisputed overlords of

government.

Follow the money and you are inside the inner sanctum of the Business

Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American

Petroleum

Institute. Here is the super board of directors for Bush, Incorporated. They

own the Administration lock, stock, and barrel, and their grip on our

government's environmental policies is leading to calamitous consequences. Once

the

leader in cutting edge environmental policies and technologies and awareness,

America is now eclipsed. As the scientific evidence grows, pointing to a

crisis, our country has become an impediment to action, not a leader. Earlier

this year the White House even conducted an extraordinary secret campaign to

scupper the British government's attempt to tackle global warming - and then to

undermine the UN's effort to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions. George W.

Bush is the Herbert Hoover of the environment. His failure to lead on global

warming means that even if we were dramatically to decrease greenhouse gases

overnight we have already condemned ourselves and generations to come to a

warming planet.

You no doubt saw those reports a few days ago that the Artic has suffered

another record loss of sea ice. This summer, satellites monitoring the region

found that ice reached its lowest monthly point on record - the fourth year in

a row it has fallen below the monthly downward trend. The anticipated

effects are well known: as the Artic region absorbs more heat from the sun,

causing

the ice to melt still further, the relentless cycle of melting and heating

will shrink the massive land glaciers of Greenland and dramatically raise sea

levels. Scientists were quoted saying that with this new acceleration of melt

the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which

the climate cannot recover.

Nonetheless, last year a Gallup poll found that nearly half of Americans

worry " only a little " or " not at all " about global warming or " the greenhouse

effect. " In July of this year, ABC News reported that 66% of the people in a

new survey said they don't think global warming will affect their lives.

If you've seen the film " March of the Penguins, " you know it is a delight to

the eye and a tug at the heart. The camera follows the flocks as they trek

back and forth over the ice to their breeding ground. You see them huddle

together to protect their eggs in temperatures that average 70 degrees below

zero

Fahrenheit. So powerful and beautiful a film can only increase one's awe of

our small neighbors far to the north.

In the New York Times recently, Jonathan Miller reported that conservatives

are invoking " March of the Penguins " as an inspiration for their various

causes. Some praise the penguins for their monogamy. Opponents of abortion say

it

verifies " the beauty of life and the rightness of protecting it. " A

Christian magazine claims it makes " a strong case for intelligent design. " On

the

website " lionsofgod.com " you can find instructions to take a notebook,

flashlight and pen to the movie " to write down what God speaks to you " as you

watch

the film.

Fair enough. It would not be the first time human beings felt connected to a

transcendental power through nature. But what you will not find in the film

is any reference to global warming. Why is it relevant? Because to reproduce,

the penguins must go to the thickest part of the ice where they can safely

stand without fear it will break beneath their weight. Global warming

obviously weakens the ice. If it becomes too thin, the penguins will lose the

support

necessary for reproduction. Yet the film is silent on this threat to these

little creatures that conservatives are adopting as their mascots in the

culture wars. The film's director explained that he wanted to reach as many

people as possible and since " Much of public opinion appears insensitive to the

dangers of global warming, " he didn't want to go there.

Again, fair enough. I can't fault him for the aspiration to tell the story

for its own sake, in the most simple and profound way. I can't fault him for

wanting to avoid disturbing the comfort of viewers. I often wish that I were a

filmmaker instead of a journalist and didn't have to give people a headache

by reporting the news they'd rather not hear.

But what we don't know can kill us.

Our oldest son is addicted to alcohol and drugs. I'm not spilling any family

secrets here; my wife Judith and I produced a PBS series based on our

family's experience and called it " Close to Home " because we wanted to remind

people that addiction hijacks the brain irrespective of race, creed, color or

street address. He's doing well, thank you - he's been in recovery for ten

years

now and has become one of the country's leading public advocates for

treatment. But we almost lost him more than once because he was in denial and

so were

we. For a decade prior to his crash he would not admit to himself what was

happening, and he was able to hide it from us; he was, after all, a rising

star in journalism, married, a home-owner and a God-fearing churchgoer.

Naturally we believed the best about him: A drug addict, slowly poisoning

himself to

death? Not our son! The day before he crashed I was concerned about his

behavior and asked him to lunch. " Are you in trouble? " I asked? " Are you

using? "

He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, " No, Dad, not at all. Just a few

problems at home. " " Whew, " I said, placing my hand on his. " I'm really glad

to hear that. " And I switched the subject. The next day he was gone. We

searched for days before his mother and a friend tracked him down and coaxed

him

from a crack house to the hospital.

They say denial is not a river in Egypt. It is, however, the governing

philosophy in Washington. The President's contempt for science - for evidence

that

mounts everyday - is mind boggling. Here is a man who was quick to launch a

'preventative war' against Iraq on faulty intelligence and premature judgment

but who refuses to take preventive action against a truly global menace

about which the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

Unfortunately, the people in his core constituency who could most

effectively call on this President to lead are largely silent. I mean the

Christian

conservatives who gave President Bush 15 million votes in 2000 and maybe 20

million in 2004. Without their support, the transnational corporations who now

control Washington would fail to have the votes needed to eviscerate our

environmental protections.

Some of these Christian conservatives are implacable. They have given their

proxies to the televangelists, pastors, and preachers who have signed on with

the Republican Party to turn their faith into a political religion, a weapon

of partisan conflict.

But millions of these people believe they are here on earth to serve a

higher moral power, not a partisan agenda. They overwhelmingly respond to

natural

disasters like last year's tsunami or the AIDS crisis in Africa by opening

their hearts and wallets wide. Alas, although many of them may believe

Christians have a moral obligation to protect God's creation, most remain

uninformed

about the true scope of the environmental crisis and the role of the

Republican Party in it. As a result, they typically vote their consciences on

social

issues rather than environmental ones.

Listen to this anguished moral missive from Joel Gillespie, a conservative

Christian who recently wrote to On Earth magazine: " I'll admit that when I

pushed the button for President Bush, I did so with some sadness, given his

dismal environmental record. But many of us who love the natural world…feel

we

face an almost impossible either-or-predicament. Voting for pro-environmental

candidates usually means voting for a package of other policies that we will

never swallow. We're forced to choose unborn babies or endangered species,

traditional marriage or habitat protection, cleaning up the smut that comes

across the airwaves or the smut that fouls our air. And the fact that we are

forced to make such choices has harmed the natural environment and the special

places we love and cherish. "

Many evangelical Christians face Gillespie's dilemma. They need to be

challenged to look more closely at their moral choices - to consider whether it

is

possible to be pro-life while also being anti-earth. If you believe

uncompromisingly in the right of every baby to be born safely into this world,

can you

at the same time abandon the future of that child, allowing its health and

safety to be compromised by a President who gives big corporations license to

poison our bodies and destroy our climate?

In his grandstanding during the Schiavo right-to-die case last spring,

President Bush said, " It is wise to always err on the side of life, " and he

pleaded for a " culture of life. " But by ignoring the wise counsel of thousands

of

environmental scientists, the President is not erring on the side of life. He

is playing dice with our children's future - dice that we have likely loaded

against our own species, and perhaps against all life on earth.

There is a market here for journalists who are hungry for new readers. The

conservative Christian audience is some fifty million readers strong. But to

reach them, we have to understand something of their belief systems.

Reverend Jim Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network, for example,

tells us that " creation-care is starting to resonate not just with evangelical

progressives but with conservatives who are at the center of the evangelical

spectrum. " Last year, in a document entitled For the Health of the Nation: An

Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility, the National Association of

Evangelicals declared that our Bible " implies the principle of sustainability:

our

uses of the earth must be designed to conserve and renew the earth rather than

to deplete or destroy it. " In what might have come from the Sierra Club

itself, the declaration urged " government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce

pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the

proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats. " Ball and a few

evangelical leaders have also pushed for a climate change plank to their

program,

standing up to demagogues like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson

who are in the service of the corporate-funded radical wing of the Republican

Party.

But we can't expect to engage this vast conservative Christian audience with

our standard style of reporting. Environmental journalism has always spoken

in the language of environmental science. But fundamentalists and

Pentecostals typically speak and think in a different language. Theirs is a

poetic and

metaphorical language: a speech that is anchored in the truth of the Bible as

they read it. Their moral actions are guided not by the newest IPCC report

but by the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Here's an important statistic to ponder: 45 percent of Americans hold a

creational view of the world, discounting Darwin's theory of evolution. I don't

think it is a coincidence then that in a nation where nearly half our people

believe in creationism, much of the populace also doubts the certainty of

climate change science. Contrast that to other industrial nations where climate

change science is overwhelmingly accepted as truth; in Britain, for example,

where 8l% of the populace wants the government to implement the Kyoto Treat.

What's going on here? Simply that millions of American Christians accept the

literal story of Genesis, and they either dismiss or distrust a lot of science

- not only evolution, but paleontology, archeology, geology, genetics, even

biology and botany. To those Christians who believe that our history began

with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and that it will end soon on the

plains of Armageddon, environmental science with its urgent warnings of

planetary

peril must look at the best irrelevant. At worst the environmental woes we

report may be stoically viewed as the inevitable playing out of the end of

time as presented in the book of Revelation. For Christian dominionists who

believe the Lord will provide for all human needs and never leave us short of

oil

or other resources, no matter how we overpopulate the earth, our reporting

may be viewed as a direct attack on biblical teachings that urge humans " to be

fruitful and multiply. " It's even possible that among many Christian

conservatives, our environmental reporting - if they see it at all - could seem

arrogant in its assumptions, mechanistic, cold and godless in its world view.

That's a tough indictment, but one that must be faced if we want to understand

how these people get their news.

So if I were a free-lance journalist looking to offer a major piece on

global warming to these people, how would I go about it? I wouldn't give up

fact-based analysis, of course - the ethical obligation of journalists is to

ground

what we report in evidence. But I would tell some of my stories with an ear

for spiritual language, the language of parable, for that is the language of

faith.

Let's say I wanted to write a piece about the millions of species that might

be put on the road to extinction by global warming. Reporting that story to

a scientific audience, I would talk science: tell how a species decimated by

climate change could reach a point of no return when its gene pool becomes

too depleted to maintain its evolutionary adaptability. That genetic

impoverishment can eventually lead to extinction.

But how to reach fundamentalist Christians who doubt evolution? How would I

get them to hear me? I might interview a scientist who is also a person of

faith and ask how he or she might frame the subject in a way to catch the

attention of other believers. I might interview a minister who would couch the

work of today's climate and biodiversity scientists in a biblical metaphor: the

story of Noah and the flood, for example. The parallels of this parable are

wonderful to behold. Both scientists and Noah possess knowledge of a

potentially impending global catastrophe. They try to spread the word, to warn

the

world, but are laughed at, ridiculed. You can almost hear some philistine

telling old Noah he is nothing but a " gloom and doom " environmentalist, "

spreading

his tale of abrupt climate change, of a great flood that will drown the

world, of the impending extinction of humanity and animals, if no one acts.

But no one does act, and Noah continues hearing the word of God: " You are to

bring into the Ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep

them alive with you. " Noah does as God commands. He agrees to save not only his

own family but to take on the daunting task of rescuing all the biodiversity

of the earth. He builds the Ark and is ridiculed as mad. He gathers two of

every species, the climate does change, the deluge comes as predicted. Everyone

not safely aboard drowns. But Noah and the complete complement of Earth's

animals live on. You've seen depictions of them disembarking the Ark beneath a

rainbow, two by two, the giraffes and hippos, horses and zebras. Noah, then,

can be seen as the first great preservationist, preventing the first great

extinction. He did exactly what wildlife biologists and climatologists are

trying to do today: to act on their moral convictions to conserve diversity, to

protect God's creation in the face of a flood of consumerism and indifference

by a materialistic world.

Some of you are probably uncomfortable with my parable. You may be ready to

scoff or laugh. And now you know exactly how a fundamentalist Christian who

believes devoutly in creationism feels when we journalists write about the

genetics born of Darwin. If we don't understand how they see the world, if we

can't empathize with each person's need to grasp a human problem in language of

his or her worldview, then we will likely fail to reach many Christian

conservatives who have a sense of morality and justice as strong as our own.

And

we will have done little to head off the sixth great extinction.

That's not all we should be doing, of course. We are journalists first, and

trying to reach one important audience doesn't mean we abandon other

audiences or our challenge to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth.

Let's

go back for a moment to America's first Gilded Age just over a hundred years

ago. That was a time like now. Gross materialism and blatant political

corruption engulfed the country. Big business bought the government right out

from

under the people. Outraged at the abuse of power the publisher of McClure's

Magazine cried out to his fellow journalists: " Capitalists…politicians….all

breaking the law, or letting it be broken? There is no one left [to uphold

it]: none but all of us. "

Then something remarkable happened. The Gilded Age became the golden age of

muckraking journalism.

Lincoln Steffans plunged into the shame of the cities - into a putrid urban

cauldron of bribery, intimidation, and fraud, including voting roles padded

with the names of dead dogs and dead people - and his reporting sparked an era

of electoral reform.

Nellie Bly infiltrated a mental hospital, pretending to be insane, and wrote

of the horrors she found there, arousing the public conscience.

John Spargo disappeared into the black bowels of coal mines and came back to

crusade against child labor. For he had found there little children " alone

in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no

living creature except…a rat or two seeking to share one's meal; to stand in

water or mud that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow…to work for

fourteen

hours…for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle

of night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to

the nearest 'shack' to be revived before it is possible to walk to the

farther shack called 'home.' "

Upton Sinclair waded through hell and with " tears and anguish " wrote what he

found on that arm of the Chicago River known as " Bubbly Creek " on the

southern boundary of the [stock] yards [where]: " all the drainage of the square

mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open

sewer…

and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that

are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations…bubbles of

carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or

three

feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the

creek looks like a bed of lava…the packers used to leave the creek that way,

till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and

the fire department would have to come and put it out. "

The Gilded Age has returned with a vengeance. Washington again is a

spectacle of corruption. The promise of America has been subverted to crony

capitalism, sleazy lobbyists, and an arrogance of power matched only by an

arrogance

of the present that acts as if there is no tomorrow. But there is a tomorrow.

I see the future every time I work at my desk. There, beside my computer, are

photographs of Henry, Thomas, Nancy, Jassie, and SaraJane - my

grandchildren, ages 13 down. They have no vote and they have no voice. They

have no party.

They have no lobbyists in Washington. They have only you and me - our pens

and our keyboards and our microphones - to seek and to speak and to publish

what we can of how power works, how the world wags and who wags it. The

powers-that-be would have us merely cover the news; our challenge is to uncover

the

news that they would keep hidden.

A lot is riding on what we do. You may be the last group of journalists who

make the effort to try to inform the rest of us about the most complex of

issues involving the survival of life on earth.

Last year, my final year on NOW with Bill Moyers, we produced a documentary

called " Endangered Species, " about a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., known

as Anacostia, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill. It is one of the most

violent and dangerous neighborhoods in the city, one of those places that give

Washington the horrendous distinction of the highest murder rate of any major

city in the country. It's horrendous in other ways too. The Anacostia River

that gives the neighborhood its name is one of the most polluted in America;

more than a billion gallons of raw sewage end up in it every year.

We went there to report on the Earth Conservation Corps, a project started

by one Bob Nixon to recruit neighborhood kids to help clean up the river and

community. For their efforts, they earn minimum wage, get health insurance,

and are offered a $5000 scholarship if they go back to school.

The area where they work is practically a war zone. Since the project began

an average of one corps member has been murdered almost every year. One was

beaten to death. One was raped and killed. Another died when he was caught in

the middle of a shooting while riding his bike. Three were shot execution

style.

One of the most charismatic of the kids who joined the Corps was named

Diamond Teague. He worked so hard the others jokingly called him " Choir Boy. "

His

work became his passion; he loved it. It gave purpose and meaning to his life

to try and clean up his neighborhood and river. But one morning while he was

sitting on his front porch someone walked up and shot him in the head.

It's that kind of place, not far from where the swells of Congress are

hosted and toasted by lobbyists for America's most powerful and privileged

interests.

After his death Diamond Teague got the only press of his short life - 43

words in the Washington Post:

 

" A teenager was found fatally shot about 2:05 Thursday in the 2200 block of

Prout Place SW, police said.

Diamond D. Teague, 19, who lived on the block, was pronounced dead. "

That's all. That was Diamond Teague's obit. Not a word about his work for

the Earth's Conservation Corps. Not a word.

It was left to his friends to tell the world about Diamond Teague. One of

them explained to us that they wanted people to know that just because a black

man gets killed in the Southeast corner of the nation's capitol, " he's not

just a drug dealer or gang banger…and not just discount him as nobody when he

deserves for people to know him and to know his life. "

They made a video - you can see part of it in our documentary. They turned

out for his funeral in uniform. They wept and prayed for their fallen friend.

And then they went back to work, on a dusty patch of land squeezed between

two factories that they envisioned as a park. " We see the bigger picture, " one

of Diamond's friends told us. " All great things have to start in roughness.

We're just at the beginning of something that's gonna be beautiful. "

They've said they would call it the Diamond Teague Memorial Park, in honor

of their friend who was trying to save an endangered river and neighborhood

but couldn't save himself.

On that fleck of land, where anything beautiful must be born in roughness,

they see " the bigger picture. "

Just blocks away, at opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the White House

and the Capitol, the blind lead the blind, on one more march of folly.

Who is left to open the eyes of the country - to tell Americans what is

happening? " There is no one left; none but all of us. "

_http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1007-21.htm_

(http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1007-21.htm)

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix