Defending the Planet

The older I get, the more I stay the same. I’ve always liked having a paper copy of The Guardian. Now I’ve got a chromebook, which I regularly consult, I’m for the first time in a position to compare The Guardian online with my old-fashioned, expensive version on paper. And the latter wins every time. The double-page photos in the middle of the paper trounce the copies on screen, and there are so many little, out of the way stories that I come across turning the pages which I would never find online unless I already knew what I was looking for.

Francisco Vera, for instance, is a keen environmentalist, aged twelve, grinning for his photo as he proudly displays his “There is no planet B” T-shirt. The catch is that he lives in Colombia, where they’ve killed 65 earth defenders in the last year, and he’s had death threats. The men who run the fracking and the mining don’t want defenders of wild life pointing out the damage they do, and they’re in the habit of paying to have them removed. It’s scary, but it’s also cheering that he plans to keep going, contacting other environmentalists around the world, insisting on the power of social media. Definitely my kind of hero.