A VOICE TO RECKON WITH: JUDITH LEWIS

Judith Lewis is a respected journalist who writes in-depth articles about environmental issues for the L.A. Weekly. Her blog, AnotherGreenWorld, is a forum for her more personal, shorthand take on current green affairs.

Judith’s posts are fact-based arguments, and as such they don’t take many poetic turns—but they do feature powerful, hard-hitting language and a blistering logic. There are a number of recurring literary devices: a snazzy title, a conversational opening remark, the use of serial questions to construct her case, alliteration and word repetition for dramatic effect, and a punchy concluding sentence. All of this makes for an incisive and exciting voice in the often dim and dreary eco-blogosphere.

A case in point is Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Tap Water, from August 2007. In this essay Judith recounts her eco-minded switch from bottled water to tap water, and her subsequent appall over the government’s impending fluoridation plan.

True to form, the blog’s title is a wry allusion to an exasperating dilemma. And its opening lines set a withering tone:

That nutjob senator from Oklahoma had it wrong, It’s not climate change that’s the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People. It’s bottled water.

Judith uses sarcasm to evoke the impossibly long journey of such so-called natural water, “transported from Australia/Fiji/England/France/Venus in plastic.” Then she repeats the word “plastic,” evoking a sense of its ubiquitous danger:

…after reading about plastic in the oceans, plastic in the landfills, the environmental cost…of plastic bottles…I’ve become a tap-water fascist.

Judith playfully admits “I gently lecture everybody…,” and she proceeds to cloak a bunch of dry facts about bottled water in a first-person recitation. “I recite statistics about…,” “I remind them that,” etc. By casting boring information in friendly confidences, Judith makes her complex case against bottled water a cinch to follow…and easy to agree with.

The second phase of her argument begins with a metaphor:

But just as this movement (of drinking tap water) was gaining steam, along comes the Metropolitan Water District, hell-bent on going through with its four-year plan to fluoridate Southern California’s tap water.

The image of a steam engine stopped cold by the Metropolitan Water District effectively conjures the overpowering negative impact the fluoridation plan will have on tap water.

Judith then frames her position against fluoridation in a series of rhetorical questions:

Why?. . Does it matter if children…get little white spots on their enamel…called ‘enamel fluorosis’? Or if several studies have strongly suggested that fluoridated drinking water may disrupt thyroid function…?

The alliteration of the phrase “several studies have strongly suggested” adds to the dramatic impact of the prose; this subtly underscores Judith’s argument, as does the use of repetition in her conclusion:

This is crazy. The more I read about it, the crazier it gets.

Judith posits that the American Dental Association is behind the fluoridation plan—because it will prevent low-income people from getting cavities, and thus free up dentists to perform higher-yielding cosmetic procedures on their better-off patients. She cleverly tugs on her audience’s heartstrings by linking her charges against the ADA to two hot-button minorities—Indians and children:

Better that adults should come in to have their teeth capped…than that a dentist should have to fill another child’s cavity on an Indian reservation in Alaska.

It’s an effective, if clichéd, manipulation.

Another post, entitled Enviros to Container Ships: Slow the Fuck Down, employs similar literary devices in its argument that sonar exercises by the Navy are the likely cause of whale disorientation and death along California’s coast. With its eye-catching obscenity, the post’s title is attention-grabbing, to say the least. The column’s opening lines then set Judith's familiar conversational tone:

Okay, those aren’t exactly the words the Center for Biological Diversity used in its…press release today. But it’s the basic sentiment.

As in the previous post, Judith builds drama with devices like alliteration:

If you live in Southern California and pay any attention at all, you know that three blue whales…have turned up dead…

And with word repetition:

This exact sonar has killed other whales before…Three of those dead whales had bloodied eardrums, another had bleeding on the brain.

Just as she argued against the government's fluoridation plan with probing questions, so does Judith protest the Navy's sonar exercises:

What causes a deftly echolocating beast to collide with a speeding tanker that can be heard three days away?... How the hell are they plowing into ships…?

She dismisses alternative excuses for the whales’ problems, hammering away with still more questions: “Could it be that…? But has…? Or could it be that…”, etc. Her final query drips with sarcasm: “Or could it be that our brave Navy has been blasting noise into the ocean for three weeks…?”

Judith ends the post with her customary flourish, this time with the force and brevity of a bumper-sticker;

Stop Navy sonar testing now, and in all whale migration seasons in the future. It’s insane.

In these and her other blog posts, Judith Lewis proves that on the environmental front lines, the pen can be mightier than the sword.