From Unearthed:
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira
I feel numbed by the killings of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira in Brazil. Dom was someone I admired a great deal and, to those who knew him and Bruno well, the past two weeks have been a nightmare. At Unearthed, we’re grateful to those who have reported on their disappearance and to their friends and family who, through interviews and writing, have helped put their lives in the proper perspective.
In the Guardian, Jonathan Watts described Dom as someone whose “interest in the world was like a mental searchlight forever scanning the horizon.”
Our Brazil correspondent Lucy Jordan, who like many reporters in Brazil knew Dom personally, spoke of his generosity and desire to work on “under-reported stories” about Brazil’s marginalised communities.
The murder of these two men comes at a time when reporting on the ongoing destruction of the natural world has maybe never been more dangerous. 1,540 environmental defenders were killed worldwide between 2012 and 2020, according to the NGO Global Witness. In Brazil, activists and journalists who report on environmental destruction are threatened by armed gangs emboldened by the country’s far-right President.
In this atmosphere, it’s important that the work of reporting on the climate and ecological crisis continues. As Watts says in his piece, as much a manifesto for modern journalism as a tribute to a friend, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira’s “work mattered because our planet, the threats to it and the activities of those who threaten it matter. That work must be continued”.
You can donate to a fund set up to support the families of Dom and Bruno here.
Scientists have a new name for summer: ‘danger season’
The US experienced a series of major floods this week and much of Western Europe is going through a repressive heatwave. As climate change has made extreme summer weather events more extreme and now a group of scientists wants to change how we think about this time of year.
Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist “we were thinking about this season, and how we’re going to respond to it, the phrase ‘danger season’ seemed appropriate.” Dahl said she hopes the new framing will help people better grasp summer threats, “because if you understand it, you can start to do something about it.”
To get a picture of how extreme events have impacted the US this week, I recommend taking a look at this New York Times article on flooding in Yellowstone, one of the country’s foremost national parks. Meanwhile, Reuters has a story about the rapid desertification of a vital lake in Chile that is worth your time.
This week we loved
I attended the Paul Foot Awards in central London earlier this week and it was a genuine delight to see so many investigative reporters being acknowledged for public interest stories. Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 prize: David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman from the Sunday Times, who won for their extraordinary report on the murder of Kenyan woman Agnes Wanjiru. I urge you to click the link and read their article.
