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at the Summer Environmental Journalism Workshop,
Western State College, Gunnison, Coloardo.
Environmental journalism
reminds me of Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart's comment about pornography --
he couldn't define it, but he knew it when he saw it.
Likewise, I'm pretty sure I can spot an environmental story, but I'm not sure I can tell you how I know. Environmental journalists, at least in the West, have to deal with so many topics: water law, water quality, water use, wildlife management, wildlife habitat, individual recreation, industrial recreation, transportation, commodity prices and thus international trade, forestry, geology, Native American traditions and treaties, geography from Central Place Theory to Sacred Place Theory -- any of these can be part of an environmental story.
George Sibley gave us three suggested topics to address, and for that I'm grateful. The hardest part of writing is coming up with an idea, and he took care of that. We were asked to consider:
A) The current state of environmental journalism;
B) How the field can be improved; and
C) Advice for journalists wanting to work in the environmental field.
I attempted to consider these separately, but they generally refused to fracture no matter how much I hammered on them. An examination of the current state automatically produces ideas for improvement and advice for practitioners.
In examining the current state of environmental journalism, we need to separate the special flaws of environmental journalism from the general flaws that afflict almost all modern journalism.
(I say almost all,
rather than all,
because, of course, neither High Country News nor Colorado
Central suffers from such flaws.)
Modern print journalism is part of a
celebrity-worshiping culture, and it performs its role
quite well, especially on the sports pages. Where else do
we take someone who is paid quite well to perform certain
tasks, and call him a hero
if he actually performs
those tasks?
Modern journalism assumes that no one will read a story
more than a few hundred words long, and that a profusion of
color charts and gaudy pictures will improve the story.
Many of my editor friends have in recent years discovered
that they're not in charge of the content any more --
that's determined by an art director who sees type as a
design element,
rather than as a means of
communication.
Modern journalism is part of a consumer culture, with the ever-present subtext that your life will improve after making purchases -- computer magazines exist to get you to buy computers, outdoor magazines want you to buy crampons and $3,000 bicycles, newspapers want you to buy real estate in their territory so that you can buy more furniture and cars from their advertisers. Often, that's the real message of journalism, no matter how bravely the editor attacks the city council.
Modern journalism also suffers from too much
objectivity, in that it reports events, rather than issues.
This means that whoever stages the events -- be it a grand
opening or a political candidate's daily theme
message
-- controls what's in the news. Journalism has
abdicated its role in setting the community agenda.
These problems will affect environmental journalism because they infect all journalism, and I'm sure you can think of examples, so I'll spare you. Environmental journalism specifically suffers from these flaws:
1) Unsupported, and unsupportable, statements. I've
lost track of how many times I've read that Every hour
(or second, or day), another species becomes extinct and
disappears forever from the face of the earth.
How do they know? I keep thinking that deep in the rain
forests of Brazil, there must be a big numeric display,
like the ones you see counting down the seconds to Y2K, and
it proclaims that At this moment, there are precisely
6,535,897 -- no, wait, it just turned to 6,535,896 --
species on the earth.
Nobody I know has ever seen that sign, though, even on the Internet. In truth, we don't know how many species of beetles there are, let alone of all living things, and biologists argue all the time about what is or isn't a distinct species.
I know, you can't stop your sources from saying such things. But you could ask them where their information comes from and why they believe it's credible and reliable.
2) Apocalyptic rhetoric. Last fall, I spent a few days writing a story about proposals to pump water from a deep aquifer under the Closed Basin of the San Luis Valley.
The opponents -- which meant just about everybody in the Valley except Gary Boyce and his employees -- kept saying this would destroy agriculture in the Valley by drying it up like the Owens Valley of California. And they got quoted a lot in other media.
But none of them would tell me how pumping water from a deep aquifer that they said wasn't connected to their rivers and shallow aquifers would dry up the Valley. Nobody offered me a mechanism or an explanation.
I kept pushing and finally got an honest answer from
Ralph Curtis at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
It's plain old fear of the unknown that makes us oppose
this project,
he said. Things are working now, and
we're scared to make any changes.
I think that's a legitimate and sensible view, a true
and honorable form of conservatism
-- but it's not a
viewpoint that you'll see quoted very often. After all,
you can always find somebody who give you a better quote,
that the Rio Grande will go dry from Creede to El Paso,
just as soon as Boyce sinks his first well.
To move to a bigger scale, there's global warming, and there is certainly solid evidence that the atmosphere is warming.
But to get here, you drove past, or flew over, mountains
with great U-shaped valleys carved by several different
generations of glaciers, obvious evidence that the world's
climate has warmed and cooled before. It didn't mean the
end of life on earth, and it obviously wasn't caused by
humans burning too many fossil fuels and putting more
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing the
greenhouse effect.
How much carbon dioxide do we put into the atmosphere as compared to, say, a major volcanic eruption? I don't know, and I've yet to see anyone address that, although it seems like part of the story.
Instead, I read about how life as we know it might be threatened because the ice caps could melt and the oceans might rise by 50 or 100 feet. But are people in Gunnison necessarily going to see this as a catastrophe if it's only 30 below in the winter, instead of 40, and the town is only 7,603 feet above sea level, instead of 7,703?
The earth is a volatile place, not a stable one, and
there are always threats to life as we know it. Let's put
them in a natural
perspective, rather than
sensationalizing like some amplified Chicken Little on
crank. Do we really have to compete with the Y2K zealots
by continually trying to proclaim that My potential
disaster is bigger than yours?
3) Service to the powerful and well-connected. Granted, this is a flaw of journalism in general, but it seems a special flaw of environmental journalism.
All sorts of Not In My Back Yard -- NIMBY -- issues turn
into environmental stories when they're really protect
my property values
stories.
No reporter ever seems to ask the Environmentally
Conscious Homeowner If you want a concrete foundation
under your house and a road to the door, where's the gravel
supposed to come from, except from gravel pits like the one
you're opposing?
Or Your employer pays through the nose to an HMO to
get you the best possible medical service, which generates
medical waste which must be incinerated, and where should
they burn it? Is it fair to put it in a poor neighborhood
when it isn't poor people -- people who don't get medical
care because they can't afford it -- who are creating this
dangerous waste material?
There are some people we ask hard questions of -- Evil Corporation Presidents and their flaks, for instance -- and there are some people who get spared the tough questions -- Virtuous Homeowner Association presidents. I know, it's a tough job to whip up public sympathy for people who live in $500,000 houses, and it is truly impressive that the press so often succeeds at it -- but is this a job that needs to be done at all?
Along the same line, Colorado is full of what I call Stupid Zones -- places where no one should build on account of unstable soil, predictable snowslides, flammable forests, and the like.
And whenever the inevitable and predictable disaster happens, it's an environmental story. But the script of an environmental story apparently forbids asking some resident of an upscale mountain subdivision why he built a log-sided house with a cedar-shake roof and a wooden deck in a tinderbox forest, or why we should feel sorry for him.
Our society expects little ghetto kids who sell crack
cocaine to live with the consequences of their
decisions.
Can't we have the same expectations for
educated white property owners, rather than writing stories
that generate compassion for these idiots?
Any geologist or forester would be happy to point out
some stupid zones in your area. Stories about disasters
waiting to be happen
would be good reading -- although
the ad department isn't going to like it when the
developers start jerking their ads, and the publisher isn't
going to like it when the threats, or even subpoenas, of
defamation suits appear at the door.
But hey, what are we here for?
4) Environmental Blinders -- failing to look past the obvious environmental angle on stories.
The lynx re-introduction was a good example. It was a morality play, with Colorado trying to redeem itself by restoring a species that may have been hunted and trapped to extinction.
But why was the lynx selected for re-introduction, as opposed to wolves or grizzlies? Did that have anything to do with Vail Resorts wanting to expand on the last known haunt of the lynx in Colorado, and thus a need to have lynx somewhere in Colorado to avoid endangered-species concerns?
Is that an environmental story, or should we just ignore that angle while devoting acres of space to snowshoe hare population cycles?
Another example is the struggle between the Town of Crested Butte and Cyprus/Amax over a proposed molybdenum mine on nearby Mt. Emmons. The tale is generally told from a David and Goliath environmental angle -- here's this little town that's trying to protect its gorgeous scenery and water from degradation at the hands of a multi-national mining company.
But maybe it's also a labor story -- how does Crested Butte Mountain Resort, with its $7-an-hour seasonal jobs that have no benefits, compete in a tight labor market with a mine that offers $20-an-hour year-round jobs with good benefits?
Does that have anything to do with the resort's opposition to the mine? Does that belong in an environmental story? Can you tell the environmental story without looking at that angle? Are recreation companies like Vail Resorts and Intrawest, all four-square in favor of clear blue skies and pure powder snow, just as much greedy multinationals as mining companies?
Or Crested Butte could be a tax story. Amax still has 20 years of reserves at Bartlett Mountain above Leadville. Here's a mountain that is already pretty well trashed, next to a town that supports mining and wants its mines to reopen. So why does Amax, if it needs to produce more moly, want to open a new mine at Crested Butte when it has a developed mine at Climax?
I've heard several theories -- that it's a preemptive move to keep some other company away from the Mt. Emmons deposit, that Amax is just trying to protect its earlier investment in the site, and so forth.
I've also heard that our tax and environmental laws favor developing a new mine as opposed to re-opening an old one. I don't know if that's true, but it's worth looking into -- Crested Butte might better protect itself with a change in tax laws than with water-quality regulations. But who's going to know if environmental writers don't expand their focus and start looking into those matters?
Currently, we've got a complicated conflict in Salida that I'm going to have to spend next week researching for our little magazine, and the only way it can possibly pay is if I can find some way to sell the story to Ed Marston. The tale involves a state fish hatchery, a gravel pit, a proposed expansion of the golf course, paper water, and even some wet water.
Our only statewide newspaper, The Denver Post, has done some coverage -- from the environmental angle of the state overhauling the fish hatchery to purge it of the whirling disease that afflicts rainbow trout.
But there's a deeper issue that High Country News explored a few years ago in a great article by Ray Ring -- why are we raising rainbow trout? They're not native, any more than carp are. But rainbows are a much more exciting sport fish than the native cut-throat, and so our Division of Wildlife is a subsidiary of the tourist industry, not a protector of Colorado wildlife.
Aside from Ray Ring in that article, though, that question never gets asked. It's just assumed that Rainbow Trout are a Good Thing, and that anything we do for the Rainbow must therefore be a benefit.
Mentioning what is assumed
-- that conveniently
leads me to some concluding advice:
1) Question assumptions. It is very hard to find the assumptions that you're using when you write the story; it takes some soul searching and random meditation. But it's worth the trouble.
As someone born and brainwashed in this state, for years
I approached water stories from the Colorado vantage of
We can't let California get our water.
One day I
realized that was an assumption -- so what if it does flow
to California? Who benefits then? Is it in the Western
Slope's interest to send it to Los Angeles rather than
Denver?
Questioning assumptions makes for better questions and better stories.
2. Remember that the Law of Untintended Consequences has never been repealed. For instance, in the 1970s, power plants had to install scrubbers to cut emissions. That raised electric rates. There were people like me in houses with electric heat who saw the increased rates and put in stoves to burn wood and coal. We didn't have stack scrubbers, of course, and so the air got dirtier as a result of efforts to make it cleaner.
Try to imagine how people will respond to various environmental proposals, and ask questions accordingly. You'll have better stories, and journalism might even provide some benefit to society.
3) Whenever possible, avoid writing about the environment. Most environmental stories, at least those that I've worked on, really involve money and power.
Wilderness designation isn't about protecting the land, since wilderness designation makes an area attract more users while depriving the managers of tools like privies and paved trails to accommodate those users. Instead, it's about which user group gets priority.
Transportation decisions are often determined by campaign contributions, not on any environmental basis. With a Democratic administration that gets a lot of help from the Teamsters, radioactive waste goes from Rocky Flats to Carlsbad by truck -- even if rail is safer and cheaper. Western railroads backed the wrong candidate in 1996, and the result is all the current protests about nuclear wastes going down highways in our cities.
As for water, the old saying is true that in Colorado, water flows uphill to money. Where the water happens to flow and fall is largely irrelevant to the geography and environment we have constructed for the West. Several large cities get their water from the Colorado River -- Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego -- and none is anywhere near the river. Knowing where the Colorado River flows tells you nothing about where its water goes.
Finances will tell you a lot more about where water goes and will go than hydrology will. So there's a conclusion: In good environmental journalism, as in all good journalism, the best rule is FOLLOW THE MONEY. In America, that matters more than fish or fowl, air or water.
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