‘Garbage’: Whole New Perspective

Anyone who browses the news racks knows they’re often littered with garbage. Garbage magazine, however, will be the first publication to claim that title with pride.

Arriving in August, Garbage will be, according to editor and publisher Patricia Poore, “the best of environmental magazines, the best of science magazines, with a practical, how-to slant and a sense of humor.”

Or, as the slick, direct mail campaign now under way puts it: “To those who say it’s beyond the individual to grasp our environmental problems--let alone fix them--we say ‘Garbage!’ ”

Poore, who publishes the successful Old-House Journal, is well aware that postal employees already stagger under the weight of dozens, if not hundreds, of environmental magazines.

“This is totally different,” she said. “It comes out of magazine publishing, rather than the environmental movement. The others, to a great extent, exist for a constituency that is giving money to a cause; the magazine becomes a mouthpiece for the group.”

Focus on Practicality

“Garbage, the Practical Journal for the Environment,” on the other hand, will be free to explore environmental issues for every perspective, with the focus on practicality.

Poole said she has notes charting the evolution of the magazine from concept to reality, going back 10 years. “It’s terrible and wonderful that the headlines have kept up with it,” she said.

With a four-color cover and engaging graphics, Garbage ($21 for six issues, P.O. Box 56520, Boulder, Colo., 80321-6520) looks suspiciously slick in its advertisements.

Poole swears it’s printed on recycled paper. “It’s not high gloss, but it’s not whole wheat either--you know how recycled paper tends to have little goobies in it?” she said. And the magazine is careful not to use certain inks with heavy metal toxicity. “We’re doing the best we can.”

Her own involvement in environmental issues has largely been limited to joining the Sierra Club and “sending money to lots of organizations,” but she knows she’s an environmentalist because “I feel guilty a lot.”

Garbage, she said, will show people like herself how to confront the environmental dilemma in a reasonable manner. The premier issue, for instance, will include articles on redesigning a kitchen to accommodate recycling, and a piece on composting a small garden.

It also will feature more far-reaching features on environmental issues, but “without the jargon,” Poole said. For example, the magazine will approach the stupefyingly complex issue of Chloroflurocarbons and atmospheric chemistry from the perspective, “What does a Big Mac box have to do with ozone?”

There will be regular departments with a lighter touch. “Disposable decades” will look “at how we got into this mess. Magazines from the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s were amazingly blatant in their ads pushing convenience and disposability. We poke fun at ourselves for having bought that hook, line and sinker,” she said.

Another regular feature--”Into the Dumpster”--”will deal with newly introduced products we hope will have a short shelf life--things we’d like to dump,” Poole said. The first item will be an excessively packaged microwave oven. “I’d rather not name the company,” Poole said. “I want to get sued after it runs, not before.”

The Right Thing?

Director and screenwriter Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing” opens this weekend amid a heat wave of controversy. Essence magazine decided to go to the source of the heat. The editors picked the one person who might have some insight into the unique director’s brain: Shelton Jackson (Spike) Lee himself.

The short interview in the July issue has “Shelton” asking “Spike” about the film that some predict will stir racial tensions this summer. In one exchange, Shelton asks, “I see there are some white people in there. . . . How was it working with white actors?”

Spike: That’s a stupid question.

Shelton: I know that.

Spike: No different from working with black actors.

Shelton: Good. Glad we got that out of the way.

Lee later explains that “Do the Right Thing” is “about racism, about our own individual prejudices, which I feel are hurtling us as a nation into a descending spiral of hate.”

The interview concludes with Spike’s prediction: “It’s going to be a long, hot summer.”

Puppets in the Media

Press bashing was in vogue in America long before the Reagan Revolution. The usual charge is that the massively powerful media, prodded by the arrogant liberals who control them and without a mandate from any electorate, are rendering America’s leaders impotent.

The July Harper’s magazine, however, presents an overview of press bashing from an opposite perspective--that of the press itself.

Titled “All the Congressmen’s Men,” the essay by contributing editor Walter Karp surveys a dozen insider-type books on the subject, including Ben Bagdikian’s “The Media Monopoly,” and Mark Hertsgaard’s “On Bended Knee.” It concludes that the government spoon-feeds “news” to the American media, which they dutifully regurgitate for their eternally naive viewers and readers.

“Reporters are puppets,” Lyndon Johnson said. “They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings.” Karp lists example after example to support that view, from the press’ alleged misreading of Congress’ Iran-Contra report to CBS’ alleged capitulation to pressure from Nixon’s henchmen during Watergate.

“It is a bitter irony of source journalism that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources,” Karp argues.

Elsewhere in Harper’s, readers are allowed a glimpse of a piece of correspondence that hindsight renders particularly ugly. Written in 1985, the letter is a complaint to an Exxon executive from a former navigation officer. The subject is Capt. Joseph J. Hazelwood, the man who was supposed to be at the helm of the Valdez when it wrecked off the shore of Alaska.

The letter, turned over to Harper’s by the letter writer’s attorney, charges among other things that Hazelwood falsified ship records and routinely abused alcohol between 1980 and 1982.