by Brian McKenna
November 7, 2001

Saturday, Nov. 3, just hours before the planned confrontation with the enemy, our intelligence assessed its radar, consulted U.S. satellite imagery and identified the front. It would be a good day for bombing, “sunny with a high of 58 degrees.”

The U.S. war on Afghanistan?

No, Stormtracker 6’s weather prediction efforts for the Spartan/Wolverine football game, Michigan’s civil war.

Historically, weather forecasting came of age with the D-Day assault on Normandy Beach in 1944. A half-century later weather-work still retains its militant glow.

Consider the language. Channel 10’s “Sky Team” and “Stormtracker 6” punctuate their TV reports with alerts, watches, warnings, outbreaks, damage, hazards and threats. Like the Joint Chiefs, they monitor the scene with satellites, radar, chase vans, web cams and computerized maps. On occasion, they’ll interrupt our TV viewing with dire warnings of impending disaster, using the shrill three-note cry of the Emergency Broadcast System, originally intended for nuclear alerts. Channel 6’s WLNS will even e-mail you the warnings upon request.

The shift in terminology from the innocuous “weather report” to the ominous “Stormtracker 6” serves notice of a perennial threat.

There are rarely serious storm-related casualties in Lansing, yet Channels 6 and 10 have three full-time weathercasters apiece (yet not a single full-time environmental reporter).

What’s going on? According to several media critics, the latent function of the weather forecast is to reassure you that our boys (the “Sky Team”) are patrolling the heavens and carefully tracking any potential invaders. It’s 11 o’clock prayers, a psychological tonic. All is right with the world as you lay your head upon the pillow.

It’s no mistake that TV weather borrows the metaphorical ammunition of football and war. For, at its heart, U.S. culture is awash in fear and aggression. Has been for decades. And the “cultural cops,” be they Marines, Spartans or middle-aged weathermen with video map-clickers, are on guard, making us safe from “The Other.” Be they terrorists, a football rival or a storm.

Weather has become “the discourse of reactionary time,” says Alex Cockburn, social critic. Weather is supposed to be about our ability to “undergo or endure the action of the elements” in the open air. But weather reporters usually restrict analysis of those elements to the “natural” ones like H2O, lightning and tornadoes. Missing is coverage of human-made elements or compounds like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and hundreds of toxic chemicals spewing from General Motors car assembly plants, the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s coal fired utility or our car exhausts. These airborne elements – totaling hundreds of thousands of tons per year — account for untold levels of Lansing-area disease from cancer, hypertension and asthma.

There is some positive political movement around the edges of weather reporting. The cultural pressure on weathermen to report allergy alerts, ozone action days and high ultraviolet radiation days has highlighted the fact that, like it or not, weathermen are influential educators about nature and the environment.

Ironically, some local weathermen yearn to be seen as environmentalists. Channel 6 meteorologists highlight their relationship with the Ebersole Environmental Center, where once a month they escort a class of Lansing’s public school students for a nature study. Their Web site even has several links to interesting “Science and Astronomy” sites. Sadly, these fact-filled portals into the ecological and astronomical worlds are marginal to the TV show, where a de-politicized rhetoric of temperatures, clouds and the obvious abound.

Let’s imagine that TV weatherfolk really covered “the elements” in all their ecological diversity. Let’s fantasize about weathermen who enlighten, not just put us to sleep. Here are two items that I would have reported on last week:

October 2001 was the fourth wettest on record. It rained 5.69 inches. That equates to 123.5 million gallons of raw sewage that overflowed into the Grand River last month, a record amount for October.

On Thursday, Nov. 1, an environmental group named PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) released the third report that was suppressed by the Ingham County Health Department (the others are on water and food). It found an asthma epidemic among African American youth and particularly high asthma rates in the 48915 area code. (See the report at: http://www.peer.org/michigan/Ingham_air.pdf)

I’d include stories or guest spots by naturewatch folk in every broadcast. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the red salamander had just come out of hibernation that day? Or that the full moon was rising on the “Give Peace a Chance” concert next Saturday night?

http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/archives/011107/health/index.html