Hatters roll up sleeves for Earth Day cleanup
By KENDALL KING, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on April 23, 2022.
kking@medicinehatnews.com Cool weather couldn’t keep Hatters inside this Earth Day as community cleanup efforts took place across the city. Methanex employees and their families began the day by clearing garbage and other debris from the Methanex Bowl and Big Marble Go Centre property, as well as the Methanex plant site. Approximately 75 employees and their families took part in the annual cleanup effort for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. “(It’s) part of our company culture as a responsible care company,” plant manager Brad Apking told the News. “We want to give back to the community and be good environmental stewards … (It’s about) having some responsibility for the areas that we live in. It’s also just … a good opportunity to send a good message to our kids and families as well as a little togetherness.” The City of Medicine Hat is hoping Hatters will come together to take part in the week-long community cleanup initiative, which kicked off Friday and continues until April 30. “For Earth Day 2022 … we are encouraging residents to get out and help beautify our city by cleaning up litter from around each neighbourhood,” a statement from the city read. “Now is the time for the unstoppable courage to preserve and protect our health, our families and our livelihoods … It’s going to take all of us – businesses, governments and citizens.” The city will be hosting morning coffee followed by a community barbecue to wrap up the initiative on April 30 at 7:30 a.m. at Kin Coulee Park. Attendees are asked to bring their own reusable cup. Several other events will be running in honour of Earth Day, including the South East Alberta Watershed Alliance’s volunteer event, which begins at 8:50 a.m. Saturday in the Connaught pond parking lot, as well as the Medicine Hat Interpretive Program’s Earth Day Bash, a learning event targeted toward youth and families, running from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Police Point Park. 9-8
Every day of the year desperately needs to be World Earth Day — but a serious effort rather than just brief news-media tokenism. Clearly, too many mainstream-news-media CEOs and senior editors remain unfazed by manmade global warming and its resultant extreme weather events.
And it’s not just Fox News but rather pretty much the entire mainstream news-media spectrum that are complicit — especially in regards to human-created climate change.
In an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019), Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media, including The New York Times, do publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.” …
Particularly disturbing was an editorial a local newspaper (The Surrey Now-Leader) printed, headlined “Earth Day in need of a facelift”. It opined that “some people would argue that [the day of environmental action] … is an anachronism,” that it should instead be a day of recognizing what we’ve societally accomplished. “And while it [has] served us well, in 2017, do we really need Earth Day anymore?” (?!?!)
Varied lengths of the same editorial, unfortunately, was also run by some sister newspapers, all owned by the same news-media mogul who also happens to be an aspiring oil refiner.
Until reading this, I had never heard anyone, let alone a mainstream news outlet, suggest we’re doing so well as to render Earth Day an unnecessary “anachronism”. Considering the sorry state of the planet’s natural environment, I still find it one of the most absurd and irresponsible acts of editorial journalism I’ve witnessed in my 3.5 decades of news consumption.