What happens when cluster bombs rain down
Earlier this month the Biden administration publicly announced its decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.
To an American public watching the Russia-Ukraine war play out on television or across the rapid-fire and almost-always-top-of-the-page headlines of The New York Times, the war is typically portrayed as one of good versus evil, invader versus victim. These black-and-white narratives resonate with Americans and, inadvertently or intentionally, inspire people to support an expansion of U.S. militarism and the manufacture and use of immoral weapons.
Just consider cluster bombs.
An international convention adopted by more than 20 countries—though not the United States, Russia, or Ukraine—bans their use. Even Congress placed some restrictions on their production, use, or transfer. As reported by The Washington Post:
Although the United States has used cluster munitions in every major war since Korea, no new ones are believed to have been produced for years. But as many as 4.7 million cluster shells, rockets, missiles and bombs, containing more than 500 million submunitions, or bomblets, remain in military inventories, according to estimates by Human Rights Watch drawn from Defense Department reports.
Those are the bombs that the U.S. is sending to Ukraine. They will be “effective,” as Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told The Post, in allowing the country to defend itself against Russian forces, who Reznikov said “are using them against us, so for our self-defense we have full right to use the same munition.”
They’ll be effective in killing people (including your own soldiers sometimes) and they will kill and injure people for decades and decades to come.
How do we know that?
In part because of people like New Mexico filmmakers Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern, who have reported for about 20 years on the impacts Vietnam-era cluster bombs continue to have in places like Laos and Cambodia.
On this week’s show, Coates and Redfern talk about their reporting and how they’ve seen lives and landscapes changed because of munitions like cluster bombs. They’ll also talk about their recent film, “Eternal Harvest,” which documents the bombing campaign in Laos between 1964 and 1973, when the U.S. military dropped four billion pounds of explosives, about 30 percent of which didn’t detonate and remain on the Laotian landscape today.
Meanwhile, our warming Earth continues to smash records. Looking far beyond New Mexico (where the Albuquerque Journal reported on a rise in emergency room patients treated for heat-related illnesses), we only have to witness New England’s historic floods, massive heat waves in Europe, and Africa’s rising temperatures (and challenges).
But warming is also devastating to wildlife, especially alongside habitat loss and pollution. Now, there’s a new study looking at how changes in phenology (the timing of seasonal events) are affecting birds, and in particular, songbirds. (If you don’t want to read the peer-reviewed study itself, you can also check out this blog post from The Institute for Bird Populations.)
Last year, I spoke with the University of New Mexico’s Blair Wolf about the impacts of heat waves on birds. It’s a conversation worth revisiting this year. (And unfortunately, into the future, as it continues getting hotter.)
“The scary thing is the Poles are warming three to four times faster than these more subtropical areas like deserts,” Wolf said. “Those animals have never seen these kinds of temperatures in their recent evolutionary history. They’re totally unprepared for these heat waves. What we’re seeing in the Arctic now…Animals just can’t cope with the heat. They’re unprepared for it, physiologically or behaviorally, and there’s no place to escape.”
We know that to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, fossil fuel extraction needs to end, immediately. Scientists keep telling us that. That’s a challenge that leaves most people feeling overwhelmed. But that rapid change is possible, writes Bill McKibben. And there are ways you can help birds in your neighborhood. There’s a tip sheet on the Audubon Society’s website, and I promise: You don’t have to buy a fancy birdbath to do something helpful.
Here’s some of the other news and analysis you shouldn’t miss:
• “Safety lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory” (Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico)
• “Lawsuit claims Holtec made “false” statements on proposed New Mexico nuclear storage site” (Danielle Prokop, Source NM)
• “Industry Wants New Pipeline on Navajo Land Scarred by Decades of Fossil Fuel Extraction” (Jerry Redfern, Capital & Main)
• “How the Oil and Gas Industry Is Quietly Thwarting Progress on the Climate Crisis, Yet Again” (Marcus Baram, Capital & Main)
• “Oil and gas withdrawal around US park stirs debate over economic costs for Native American tribe” (Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press)
• “FEMA disaster relief fund faces August shortfall as feds scramble to find cash” (Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom)
• “FEMA has so far paid out less than 1% of what Congress allocated for victims of NM wildfire” (Megan Gleason and Patrick Lohmann, Source NM)
• “Luna Community College program teaches land recovery from devastating 2022 wildfire” (Margaret O’Hara, Santa Fe New Mexican)
• “Hurley OKs water rights deal with Freeport-McMoRan” (Juno Ogle, Silver City Daily Press)
• “Arizona officials to consider groundwater rule changes behind closed doors” (Tony Davis, Arizona Daily Star)
• “When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable?” (Ruxandra Guidi, The Atlantic)
• “I thought fossil fuel firms could change. I was wrong” (Christiana Figueres, Al Jazeera)
Last week, I watched a webinar, “The Ever-Shifting Landscape Of Climate Misinformation,” from Covering Climate Now, a nonprofit co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation.
There’s a difference between “misinformation” and “disinformation,” explained Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-founder of Climate Action Against Disinformation.
People can share misinformation accidentally, whereas disinformation refers to content deliberately created to deceive people into believing inaccurate information about issues that affect their lives. As King explained, people often assume that disinformation is ideological, but a lot of it centers around commercial profit.
Melissa Aronczyk, professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University, studies the public relations industry and she reminded journalists that PR professionals and campaigns are operating on an entirely different time horizon than we typically are. (I’ll also note that PR is a more lucrative career path than journalism…) She also noted that PR strategists “closely monitor their opposition and work to prevent opposing viewpoints from coming out.”
The three panelists, including Marco Silva, a senior journalist for BBC News who specializes in climate change disinformation, offered tips on how journalists can avoid falling prey to buying into disinformation. For instance, journalists might quote repeated statistics without knowing precisely where the numbers came from or cover “solutions” promoted by companies that are distracting people from the more serious problems they aren’t addressing.
Journalists need to be savvy about disinformation, but y’all do, too. That way, you can sniff out PR for yourself, so I thought Our Land Weekly readers might want to check out a recording of the conversation on YouTube.
And interestingly, when Aronczyk was talking about PR campaigns, she mentioned a ballot initiative and some energy companies in Maine. My interest was piqued, given the proposed PNM-Avangrid merger here in New Mexico, and I found a story published in The Guardian last month, “Power companies spend millions to fight Maine’s proposed non-profit utility.”
In their story, Mario Ariza and Tux Turkel write about how Maine residents are about to be “bombarded with a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign aimed at saving the state’s two dominant electric utilities from being voted out of existence in November.”
Existing utilities want to maintain control over the poles and wires and the profits that flow from them while activists say a not-for-profit company managed by local people can bring about a transition that’s more reliable and less costly.
In Maine, the ballot initiative was launched by a citizens group called Our Power.
Supporters want to buy out the assets of Central Maine Power (CMP) and Versant Power – which distribute 97% of the state’s electricity – and replace them with Pine Tree Power, a new, not-for-profit distribution utility.
The ballot initiative has already been outspent 17 to one by the parent companies of the two utilities, Avangrid and Enmax. Together, the two legacy power companies have given $18.4m to three ballot committees, which have spent $16.5m fighting back against what they see as an existential threat. Those committees received 100% of their funding from the utilities.
The referendum presents a threat not only to Avangrid’s business model in Maine, said [Kenneth] Colburn, the former energy policy consultant, but to the utilities it operates in Connecticut and New York.
If you’re interested in a little more about Avangrid’s track record in Maine, you can check out my 2021 conversation with Caitlin Andrews, a reporter with the Bangor Daily News.
Thanks for reading!
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