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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

This arrived in my Inbox right after Bill's e-mail.  Serendipity?

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- 

> http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1007-21.htm
>
>      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 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."