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Photo by Sylwia Duda
This job of mine involves the ability to nudge …and nudge often. I think I need one of those tools on Facebook where I can poke people!
I’ve just emailed two “Your Story” citizen journalists in Uganda. They belong to the Women of Uganda Network. They helped me make a piece about poverty last year and have a digital recorder I sent them.
I haven’t heard from them so I’ve given them a nudge as I saw this article about Uganda’s melting ice.
Another reason for looking into the problem of melting ice is because I had an email from Rafn Erlendsson in Iceland who is worried about the Snaefells glacier in his home country. As I was looking around for info on this glacier, I found this article on how Iceland are shipping their melting ice water to the middle east rather than letting it flow straight into the ocean. Interesting but probably expensive – have you drank any of this water?
The Ugandan story came out of the recent conference in Copenhagen - covered by my colleague Matt Mcgrath. I was looking around for a young person – maybe a child or teenager – who had a burning desire to be a citizen journalist for us, to cover environmental issues but I haven’t come across anyone yet – if you know someone who might fit the bill, let me know.
Monbiot’s blog is saying that climate change isn’t the right phrase anymore.
In the meantime, I am asking my Ugandan citizen journos to look into doing something on how much ordinary people in Uganda – especially poor people and farmers actually care about this issue. And whether they feel they can do anything about it.
What do you reckon it will take for people to feel a responsibility? I have a confession to make – I don’t recycle anything.
A woman who normally lives in Oklahoma but who is in the process now of moving to Oregon contacted Your Story to talk about the weather. Her name is Dallas and she talks about the ice storms and cold weather currently covering north eastern America.
we lost thousands of trees and our entire nut and fruit tree industry was decimated, ancillary damage was in the billions.
She goes on to say,
we are potentially expecting one such ice storm tomorrow night…..this is no frost. this is being caked in ice six inches deep. The last storm, I was here, and it sounded like guns going off every ten minutes or so as the branches of our trees just snapped off. when all was said and done, i had a stack of wood cut in three foot lengths, five feet high and ninety feet long. Our old growth trees were reduced literally to snags, very nearly every major branch completely sheared from the main trunks. it had vast effects on local wildlife and the citizens. Roofs caved in, cars crushed, heart attacks from heavy lifting, chain saw accidents, electrocutions from cutting through power lines they couldn’t see. we get these events about every five years. the truly remarkable thing is the resillience of the trees and animals. in oklahoma, we only know extremes, ex: sunday afternoon it was 72F by 11:00pm it was down to 16F
You can read more on the weather in this part of the world here
This photo was taken by Archman8 on flickr.
Archman8's Photo taken Dec 08
There are some other great photos on his flickr stream.
If you would like to share your photos with Your Story on the weather in your part of the world them you can do so by posting to Your Story directly
or you can join the Your Story flickr group.
I have asked Dallas if she wants to do a citizen journalist report on the situation in her area. She says that there might be another resident there who would be able to spare the time to do something for us, so looking forward to that.
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