Introducing… Transition Tips! Throughout 2020 and beyond, Transition Kamloops will feature a series of ideas for small actions to help us all get started on the road to lightening our carbon footprint.
Our very first Transition Tip isn’t about personal resource use directly but rather about the media that informs our daily decision-making. The mainstream media (our daily paper, our nightly news) do make efforts to cover environmental topics now and then, but for various reasons–from ever-tightening time, budget and staffing limitations, to the biases of editors, to the interests of the advertisers and the media’s actual owners–those efforts often fall short in terms of helping us reduce the impact we’re all having on our planet.
For this reason, it’s important for us to seek out and support news sources just outside of the mainstream that (importantly!) still have proven track records of reliability, and preferably also a dedicated focus on the environmental/resource/public-policy issues. These media outlets are often crowdfunded so as not to rely so heavily (if at all) on the whims and interests of advertisers, and may even be staffed by citizen-journalists who don’t necessarily have official journalism training but simply have a deep knowledge of some relevant field combined with a strong ability to communicate about it.
At the same time though, we have to be on our guard against falling into one of the endless supply of conspiratorial or otherwise totally made-up “rabbit-holes” that litter the media landscape today particularly online. Until you’ve established an outlet’s credibility for yourself (and even afterward!), it is INCREDIBLY important to exercise a bit of skepticism about anything you see or read online, ESPECIALLY if it’s telling you something you really want to believe.
As a place to start, consider subscribing (or at least regularly visiting or signing up for the weekly newsletter from) sites like The National Observer, The Guardian and The Tyee. They’ll provide Canadian news and events with a more socially- and environmentally-conscious tilt than the usual stuff. The Narwhal and Grist focus on environmental and climate news in particular, while the Canadaland network of podcasts and articles provide a critical perspective on our domestic media.
Was this Transition Tip helpful to you? Let us know in the comments! We’re working towards a “Media Recommendations” page, and we’d love to hear your suggestions about what should be included.