I wonder if I am the only reader who experienced a strong cognitive dissonance while reading your July 8th edition? An article in the Business section, “King expects Bath-built warship cut from the budget will be restored,” was followed a few pages later with, “Study: Northwest heat wave not possible without climate change.”

Unfortunately, we live in a world where decisions and the effect of those decisions cannot be conveniently compartmentalized like sections in a newspaper. The US military is the single largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world (according to the Cost of War project, Brown University). The conventional mantra of “good-paying BIW jobs” does not pass the sniff test anymore. Unless these are good-paying green-economy jobs.

I am pretty sure there are middle-school students in Maine having a stronger sense of the ironic tragedy that is our society’s slow death-march toward ecological collapse than the average middle aged reader of your paper. In 2019, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) explored media complicity through silence in the article, “Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon’s Massive Carbon Bootprint.”

Are you, as a journalistic institution, going to stand up and make a statement? Will you become part of the conversation so desperately needed and so consistently avoided? If you need any incentive, recall the closing statement by Andrew Weaver, climate scientist, quoted in the heat wave piece: “But you ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s going to get a lot worse.”

Thomas Kircher
Biddeford