time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning marcus greene and devon chakras marc screen is founder and executive director and devin to chris is vice president and they're both  south seattle emerald marcus and devon thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning yeah thank you for having us today mike thanks mike so start out and tell us about the south seattle emerald and what was your motivation in in founding about marcus we say that we act as the countervailing force against what passes for news coverage coming out of the south india area of seattle you know my motivation was you know i lived in the south in the area for majority of my life and the stories that you hear about as for the most part tend to be around violence and basketball and you know i love basketball like anybody else but you would think in seattle's most eclectic and diverse area that you would have more stories than just you know somebody's cell phone was rob that i think i just saw that two weeks ago on a  because reading comal or chiro's news you would you know we have these tremendous people tremendous organizations in the area that rarely get any type of coverage other than you know if something  trade i am seattle's friendly stand web designer but what i've tried to do typically is find ways to use kind of my skill set design web design graphic design branding  to improve the community that i live and i live in the south end as well and that's kind of been a journey that i've been on and along the way i ran into marcus and through that and decided to try and bring those skills to the enrolled and see if i couldn't make stuff happen that way you know for me trying to rebrand a neighborhood kind of developed and of working with the i'm rolled and literally trying to he is designed to package and deliver stories that both connect to readers and leave memorable impressions and so you know we've been doing a lot of things around branding and stuff in just led to me joining the board in becoming vice president and doing all sorts of odd jobs in roles and from resources but i feel like we have such an incredible team and we're all trying to pull as much weight as possible in and i think that sets us apart is that most of us are all volunteers and kind of doing it because we really believe in it and i think that really shows in the work that comes out in the world and we've definitely heard that from folks too so that's encouraging definitely so how did you go about  offer too much of anything else no actually it's just telling them our mission and what we wanted and you see that there's such a thirst for news about this area and i'd say accurate news about this area and so odd to say that it's been fairly easy to acquire writers who especially those who live in the south indian want to see it betrayed in a way that they feel is mourned in line with what they see in there as they live their lives in the day to day in terms of stories it seems like we have our pick of the litter you know or costly getting solicited or you know from people whether it's organizations in the area are artists in the area are people who just want you know better coverage or what they would say see is better more comprehensive coverage around issues that affect our area that you know in terms of you know affordable we are the equivalent but look at this is more of a sort of a democracy now for the seattle area and you know very much i'm appreciative of that and hope we can live up to that do you have working on a print publication as well that will be distributed monthly or similar to you know what the seattle weekly does it will be a free publication and we're also working on a radio show as we speak now will be a  one hour show now i can to you know meet the press or something like that but on the radio and how do you get funding for your different projects really you know we have our tin cup out savings i believe in you know what we're doing and i believe that it will be continue to grow and i believe that you know people will financially support what we're doing and when we say were readers supported that is not a euphemism we really our readers supported from the people who live and appreciate what we're doing here in the south india area so it's mainly it really is something that comes from the people it's been such an incredible experience to talk to people about the old and just see their eyes light up and people whether they're just hearing about it for the first time or folks that of heard about it and read it and are already excited about it i mean it's maybe appropriate that it's valentine's day today because you know the old itself is like one giant extended love note to all of you know our neighbors our coworkers our family the friends we have yet to meet you know in south seattle and you know so many outlets rake in their clicks with all that click sensational stories and if it bleeds it leads like marx was talking about that whole mentality and we try to focus on the stories that aren't getting told the stories don't fit the traditional stereotypes and the stories i talk about in areas plagued by negative popular perception like rainier beaches boo at the beach or where i live west hills sky we had our cinema we had a rash of crime and people not wanting to go on the streets and the media really perpetuated that fear  tenfold you know we have neighbors that don't open up their doors to each other and yet we got hundreds upon hundreds of people out to this little parking lot to watch movies outside with their kids it was incredible so right you know changing that perception allows you know using th i'm role helps things like that be successful so right into the piggyback on what been missing i mean we really see ourselves as you know fighting against you know are providing a counter narrative to you know what sort of taken hold it in terms of the mindset of this area i was a member prior to starting the emerald i was talking to a young man name it was at a bus stop and i asked  him what he thought about the south in the area and he said it's just all bad is terrible and he said we're all bad and we're terrible and i said well why do you think that and he said it's because they tell us that we're terrible they they say that they were terrible and you know i think that was just extremely illustrated of to me of the fact that we it's sort of become in this narrative sort of become ingrained that we're painted with this broad brush all of us  matter you know from al baker where we you know sort of begin our coverage all the way to skyway where we end our coverage and i think it's you know it's that necessity and it feels good to provide a sense of  able to provide that for people you know people need stories that reflect truly reflects their lives in their area and it's important that those stories be accurate and that's what we try to do so it's interesting that you know with mercer island and certain other areas of seattle you know having you know huge incidences of drug crime and things like that those they never for ever reason you get brandished as these horrible areas that you would never want to live but yet that continues to plague the south seattle area for some reason and i'm not a conspiracy theorist but i think that  it becomes intentional after a while that it seems to be too stubborn of a pattern for it not to be so absolutely i mean we have concrete examples and i think the more that we've been digging into the old and spending time thinking about this bias and what not it really makes you realize when those instances are happening and be able to point them out i know that you know for instance i'm i'm very involved in my community down in you know near skyway west hill area unincorporated but just as much seattle region as anything you know like i said we went through a rash of crime just like the entire south and just like the entire city was at the time and after holding a community meeting following a particularly nasty incident there were a few folks in the community that were upset about it but we had cameras from all the major news stations there  and following the whole thing hoping to get some more information on this you know story about the crime and what not yet there were you know resident after resident came up and told these positive stories about great things happening in the neighborhood about all these positive things and yet you know the cameras caught the whole thing and we all went home turned on the news and it turns out they edited out all of the positive to get maybe the one or two people that actually had some negative stuff to say and so it hurts it does hurt because you know that's the place that you live and you know the full story that you know the whole story but that whole story doesn't all neatly fit into this paradigm that the some of the major news outlets have kind of carved out for the south that it's so convenient to kind of pick and choose the things that are to fit the stereotype that they already have right in you know another example of that is that after ferguson protests down in rainier beach i believe it was a dozen students they acted out a bit when they went to the jason this grocery store that's adjacent to the school and  sort of rifled through and stole a couple things and como news they they left you know skid marks outside their headquarters and trying to get down there you know that the coverage is you know for you know a dozen students out of the four hundred fifty i want to say who are who tend to reach high school and so the students themselves they decided to organize a a day of justice they called it to have a positive reaction to not just beach didn't who had ransacked the groceries outlet assuming the grocery store to showcase that yeah not that all of the students are like that that the majority as a matter of fact are responding in a very positive way and they said you then they heard crickets you know nobody wanted to come cover anything that they were doing that was positive because again it didn't fit into this neat little story that you know rainier beach students are essentially you know walking misses to to the south seattle area which is you know then that's their wars so you know we need to highlight those things we need to highlight when you know people are doing wonderful things in our area and you know we continue to do that to do that and we just recently ran a story about them doing that that are about them doing the symbole and the day of justice that thankfully as gotten a lot of  you know been very positive so control also contrast your coverage of the youth jail that appears  to have or i went to the you jail protests and the king county council meeting last monday where over i want to say i want to be in over two hundred people i believe that it came down during this midday meeting you know what i saw there were these people engaged in you know very civil you know this sort of outpouring of civil disobedience against this jail  unfortunately in the other media outlets they continue to be betrayed portrayed as you know people who don't know what they want as these unruly demonstrators who use curse words every three words as to citizens who are actually concerned about you know what is going on in their community and citizens concerned about the disproportionality of youth of color being locked up you know the the stat they cite often  is that you know black black youth make up only eight percent of the population in king county area and yet they account for forty two percent of the juveniles who are incarcerated and you know one of the glaring things that at council meeting because his public testimony wanted gone twenty six over twenty seconds over the two minute allotted time period that people were given this speak and so i believe it was council member mcdermott who  called for police to come in and just twenty five s p d and king county's finest you know flooded into the council chambers and you know seventy two year old men were thrown out the way  women were thrown on the floor you know they just had this blatant disregard for you know anybody who was in the way and try and tell me to get to williams and you had this you had all these citizens who were there concerned about you know williams's you know well being who you know form this halo around him and yet you know we're nonviolently resisting you know the police forcefully removing him from the engaged against what they felt was what they continue to feel is just this ignorance there from the county and this and and the county not wanting to hear anything that that they're saying and yet how to see how it was betrayed in and distorted by major media outlets including como news who said that the police showed extreme restraint when it was the exact opposite it was the people showing this extreme restraint you know anytime that you need twenty five officers to come and you know quote unquote restrain a man who is in resisting you that that sort of should raise red flags i think to you know any citizen and especially ones in this city who you know we pretended that we're such a you know very liberal and progressive city for them to have this sort of extreme response to what was going on that i think that should have been the story as opposed to a few curse words that were said by a few you know people demonstrating in protesting against the prison and you know to me i just reiterated that why we need in iran and why we need independent journalism  be county officials are corporations that it instead we are accountable to the people and i think that's you know i think i was again a glaring example of why you need you know on the national level things like democracy now and on the local level transpired you know at the council meeting when they weren't there when they arrive you know fifteen minutes after the actual skirmish if you will with the police and protesters so it's very interesting that they could you know sort of retroactively write this story about what happened when they weren't there to witness it themselves so it's it was i lost a lot of i didn't have much faith in our local media prior to that but i lost the stress straight a sliver of faith i should say that i had that day you know the south end doesn't deserve to be under certain misrepresented like this i mean you know with such amazing folks and stories that go on all the time there's really no reason for it you know and i encourage folks to check out the south seattle on rolled and see if that lines up with the things that they've been seeing already or if it's it's a change in they if they like that change he braiding of people to to it i mean just go to show goes to show you that journalism needs now i think at this point needs to extend you know past its quote unquote professional journalists and i know  pejorative you know term sort of sort of that equates with community journalists are with advocacy journalists but i think those things are needed more than ever you know in this day and age when you have you know media being a bottom line business like it never been before where again you know somebody would rather go with a click bait story are junk food news or get the low hanging fruit quote unquote of a story as opposed to providing readers with a very nuanced you know complex take on you know issues that are extremely nuanced and complex but that is  become unfortunately seemingly a novel thing to do nowadays and so i so i would hope that the emote can serve as an example of a truly community based organization who encourages others to engage in in community journalism whether that you know and we're not the only example i mean there is a great blog local hyper local blogs which is the west seattle blog in the capital times as well but i think i would hope that people could start to look at themselves as you know content creators of news and you know whether it's one or two stories the year or what have you are or even if it's just helping to provide a more accurate betrayal of what goes on you know in their neighborhoods and in their lives so that you know things like again the camo story  can you know be called into question it doesn't have to be taken as gospel and so community members of the community should also consider giving tips and encourage i should say i certainly encourage people to write in with any thing that they think needs to be covered in more death are just hasn't been covered whatsoever so you know i mean we're we're here for the you know we were here for the folks in the south and whether they work there play there live there you know tell us what you want us to cover because are here to cover your stories so yeah absolutely agree yeah emerald the final sentence the emerald is news as it was originally intended to be not as not as business nor as a form for propaganda but as a service to the community it chronicles yes that moved me when i tendency to sort of when they when they looked at as a the voice for any area are the voice of record i think people have a tendency to  sort of you get a bit of hubris at times to sort of run wild if you will and so i want to make sure that that didn't happen at the emerald and that you know should strive again to be fair and balanced when obviously yeah we do have our own voice when it when it comes to news stories but we want to make sure that their voice is always something that that is true and accurate as much as we can you know as much as that can possibly be good just about a minute left so how can cougar our democracy now with amy goodman will soon be starting it up as well so yeah we're on a path for unstoppable growth and it all has to do with you know the folks that are kind of behind us and cheering us on and really excited about what we're doing so the future is looking really bright yeah devon's in marketing if you didn't know where it's really excited yeah yeah and i would say just just one more thing that like even we are talking today with george marshall george marshall is the co founder of the climate outreach and information network based in oxford england over the past twenty five years he has worked at all levels of the environmental movement including in senior positions for greenpeace usa and the rain forest foundation he writes widely on climate change issues including articles for the new statesman the guardian new scientist and the ecologist and he is also the author of carbon detox and is here to talk about his new book don't even think about it why our brains are wired to ignore climate change george thank you very much for coming and spending time with us now thank you for having me on the program so tell us what was the motivation in writing your new book don't even think about it you know i i spend a lot of time talking to people about climate change of course as it's part of my work always we're trying not just to help people to understand it but to motivate people around change and one of the things that you find if you work on this issue is first of all that it's it's hard to motivate people around the people will express a concern they say you know that sounds really serious but somehow they don't seem to engage with it guess that's kind of a problem but somehow it just doesn't seem to doesn't seem to stick with them in fact quite often what happens if you talk of people as a conversation just dies and you have to wonder why that is i mean we've been talking about it now for what twenty five years the issue's been around of course for far concerned about it but despite all of these attempts to try and get this information over to people despite all of the sign on letters of world scientists or you know that the president saying this is a huge issue still the vast majority of people simply do not seem to be engaged or rather they gauge at one level and people now will tell you a lot about climate change but they don't seem to feel it and i guess what started me on this book was that the key issue which is how is it disengage is with us in the way that our brains work that simply doesn't move us into action somehow but this is the this particular issue just seems to not work with the way that our brains are constructed to perceive threat so how did you go about researching this who did you talk to help you understand this the starting point really was people who are experts in the field of course people who are leading climate scientists also people are leading experts in cognitive psychology column is very interesting on this i had a long conversation with him his view is that climate change is the perfect problem for us he would say that the evidence of his research is that we are very bad at dealing with things that are in the oregon and he says climate change again is a big problem he says that there are a number of criteria of things by which we perceive threats that threats for example of things which that actually with very familiar with that extreme weather events might be frightening at the time but there are things that we are psychologically and socially conditioned to deal with and so when we have an extreme event it feels horrible at the time whether it's for drought here in starting all over again if he said if it turned the sky purple then people go oh my god if you gave us cancer that my god but actually what happens is for they just go wow that was horrible and that becomes the new normal and this is a big danger of climate change really started kicking in about thirty years ago that the polar vortex was not an extreme weather events at all but what made us perceive this as being extreme event was the fact that we have now become so used to warm winters but actually when we have something which is extremely cold that we go oh my god this is extreme and over what happens is what we our our sense of the baseline of what is normal just keep shifting according to what happens and so the seasons the seasons keep changing the weather keeps changing and we just take our idea of what is an extreme a vent from the previous one already i can see in my own country in britain the expectation of what is now an extreme flood is set not by the weather when i was a child but by the weather of the last ten years but i didn't just speak with people who were experts in the psychology i also had some very interesting conversations with people completely disagree with me and everything that i stand for i really made a point to go out and speak with  particularly being english but actually sometimes you can approach these people and talk to people who might be quite hard for americans to do because that kind of interested to see what you like and what you have to say and of course texans are very hospitable anyway i really enjoy talking with them really having the opportunity to listen carefully to why they chose to well not just ignore climate change but very actively resist the science behind it and  like some kind of p r campaign or just they just will are not accepting the science at all i think there's several things happening climate change clearly has a threat to them  we know that to take action on climate change is going to require some changes in our lives and we know that that will probably realistically involve some degree of national and international government limits on how we can how we can choose to live so obviously if you have an ideology which is opposed to the constraint of government you're going to find this this hard and challenging but i think it's also more than that i think that they see climate change  wobbly slippery issue but will readily take the form and shape that you choose it to have and that means but from that point of view the shape they choose to have it it's fis it's opposing issue an issue what belongs to someone else for doesn't belong to them  of course climate change could be and should be their issue climate change is a fundamental threat to freedom it's a fundamental threat to property it's a fundamental of something which is relevant to them so talk about then the framing that one is using when you're basically talking to what i'll call members of the choir people that that i know that accept that climate change is real but aren't really doing anything about it aren't taking any concrete steps what's the difference between you and those their lives to it you know if this was really an impossible issue to deal with those people wouldn't be there so clearly very something in the in those people the social construction well i don't think there's anything special about those of us who care about climate change i think people the same as other people i think that politically it is easier for people who maybe have more liberal politics to accept the threat contained in it of course it stood to reason that environmentalists were the first to pick this issue up because it looks like an environmental issue  concerns pollution produced by industrialized lifestyles often produced by very large corporations and it has extreme effects on the natural environment so fitted very neatly within people i've now come to think that that was a major mistake i understand is not accepted i see what is necessary but i really wish it had not had that form from the outset but we've recognized this was something much much bigger much much  so how do we address that at this point in time there's something i haven't said which is necessary before which is that i guess maybe still like an answer to the last question that there are people who get this issue there are people fundamentally opposed to and there's a very wide range of people in that want talking about climate change but she none of them have ever talked about it with anyone other than their immediate friends and friends and family networks and even then it's pretty clear that this is not exactly a major major subject of appeared in some random conversation so i think we have to say that the the challenge of the initial challenge is actually even to get people recognizing it underlying the fact that a conversation exists and i think in this sense it's not unlike other there was long in my own country assignments against racism whereby a kind of level of just background racism was just accepted as i have a norm and then there are some key points where people started saying you know what jokes racist it's not funny they started communicating with each other and they started expressing values and commitment and different sense of doing things with each other and of course there is you have change comes on many many levels it would be stupid to say climate change from your own personal conviction i'm persuaded but again the research supports what's been the really the key way that people become persuaded by the evidence of what the people around think and feel about things have a real problem i like this language of conviction too because i think the people in the end are a reach to move and excited by the thought of people feel things strongly even if they don't agree with them on other things and i never when i meet people of very strong convictions i'm always moved and excited  them even when i don't necessarily agree with them i want to him more i'm interested about what makes people feel so strongly about it and i think that's the way to to potentially open it up so it sounds like we need to change the environment of those we interact with than kind of a smaller environmental circle of our our friends and peers and acquaintances again changes to come on so many different levels but i don't want to just say that's that's what happens but that's let's just say that is definitely one level i can't see that we're going to move very far without having a lot more people involved we could maybe have a grassroots kind of resistance movement you know a very very strong movement so i think that's important i've worked for the environmental movement for many is and for many social rights issues i want to see that happen  still feel that in order to get real systemic change which is necessary for this but we're going to have to take a whole lot more people with us and i think that means for the conversation does have to be happening in new areas and within our communities one of ways for example that this can happen is by having a much stronger conversation about how we're going to deal with them cope with the changes that we're really seeing are we going to prepare and defend about when is it happening was in the happening is pretty clear something is happening so let's just talk about how we can be ready for it and i think that's a that's a way to at least open up that conversation you see people taking concrete action walking the walk is key to winning over others i read that you recently or maybe not so recently converted your house over to make it more energy efficient it's very important for me let's take a step back and say the thing which i think is is critical is what we speak from a position of personal conviction which i'm convinced the heap of pins in this world but but on another level is very very important for your own sense of your own sense of personal consistency and commitment so for me insulating my house so our model it for you know for me because i'm using a third as much energy as it did before and that wasn't about saving money although it was actually quite nice to save money because in the end in a you know in the course of you know the next ten years i paid for everything but it was also more comfortable more comfortable warm a healthier cleaner house all these benefits i want to be able to share that with people because the benefits of strong i think has real problems when we have an inconsistency between what we say and what we do because that creates an area of personal guilt you know i've already talked talked about how we have socially we have the social sciences but we also have needlessly for personal holidays because they fancy going to the mountains and going climbing i think that compromises them not just in the eyes of others but also in terms of their own work because of course what happens is they create assignments around flying  very apologetic and that's bad news because of course even when they're recommending to other people what other people should do or how do we get out of his problem how do we solve it mysteriously flying doesn't appear on the agenda so when for  issue so i think there's another thing here which is to say this stuff is hard you know it's not black and white so it sometimes we do sometimes have to do things you know we have to get the kids to school sometimes we have to we do have to have myself making a flight i thought well yeah it gets me on this program it gets me to travel around america to meet a whole bunch of people while i try and do is i tried as much as possible with that i say yes ok there's a cost associated with this and i'll make the most of it if an issue came up for example then we collectively shape our policies so that when one of us does need to hop from one continent to the other we come up with an appropriate technology that can do so without adding to the current it might be the technology is not the technology which enables me to get here in a different way but the technology which enables me to you know to simply stay at home let's put it this way we if we could gets our way of living back to where it was in the one nine hundred seventy s with modern technology with all of the various clever ways for we have now for using less energy we would be a very very long way to dealing with this issue and the reason i say that it's interesting is that according to all of the measures and this happens again and again and again in the research that was a point where people said they were happ it was the peak of in our countries britain america europe i think also probably other countries you know other developed countries the seventy's was very often the time when people know most people said they were happy we've lost track since then