Routledge Handbook of Environmental Journalism

David B. Sachsman, JoAnn Myer Valenti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351068383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Journalism provides a thorough understanding of environmental journalism around the world.

An increasing number of media platforms – from newspapers and television to Internet social media networks – are the major providers of indispensable information about the natural world and environmental risk. Despite the dramatic changes in the news industry that have tended to reduce the number of full-time newspaper reporters, environmental journalists remain key to bringing stories to light across the globe. With contributions from around the world broken down into five key regions – the United States of America, Europe and Russia, Asia and Australia, Africa and the Middle East, and South America – this book provides support for today's environment reporters, the providers of essential news in the 21st century.

As a scholarly and journalistic work written by academics and the environmental reporters themselves, this volume is an essential text for students and scholars of environmental communication, journalism, and global environmental issues more generally, as well as professionals working in this vital area.

PART I

Journalism and the environment

1
The development of environmental journalism in the Western world

Mark Neuzil

Mark Neuzil is professor and chair of the journalism program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eight books, nearly all dealing with environmental themes, and a frequent speaker and writer on environmental issues.

In four days during late June 2012, the reporting team of Lisa Song, Elizabeth McGowan, and David Hasemyer authored a series of investigative reports on an enormous oil spill in the United States, a regulatory system that had serious flaws and failures, and the disastrous effect of the spill on the lives of people who lived in the Michigan communities nearby. Their stories, and six more articles in the months to come, were published on the website InsideClimate News of Brooklyn, NY.

The work of the reporting team was classic environmental journalism. They spent 15 months on a story of the most costly onshore oil fiasco in US history, a ruptured pipeline and spill that had been largely ignored outside of the Kalamazoo River region. From the opening scene-setting lead to the why-you-should-care nut paragraphs, the narrative featured in-person interviews, paper trails, timelines, maps, government responses, activist group outrage, and plenty of data. In 2013, the trio won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor, in the category of national affairs reporting. The other finalists were from the Washington Post and the Boston Globe.

Environmental journalism and its antecedent, science writing, had won Pulitzer Prizes in the past, the first in science in 1923 to Alva Johnson of The New York Times. But the Michigan oil spill series felt different because of its publication in a five-year-old, web-only, nonprofit, all-environment site. In the world of the web, the larger, better-funded, general interest publications ProPublica and The Huffington Post were honored with Pulitzers in 2010 and 2012, but 2013 was the first time a specialized site founded and focused on a particular environmental issue, climate, came out on top.

At the time, InsideClimate News had a staff of four reporters and no office. Publisher David Sasson and editor Stacy Feldman began the site in 2007, making its content available for free and partnering with larger journalism organizations to disseminate the work. Its funding model, which largely depended on foundation donations and individual pledges, was similar to national sites such as ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting as well as regional outlets such as MinnPost. (Full disclosure: MinnPost was where I was one of the two founding environmental journalists.) This funding model was one answer to the financial downturn and rapidly shifting economics of the media industry after the turn of the 21st century. The Associated Press reported: “In a sign of a rapidly changing media world, a relatively unknown New York-based online nonprofit news site joined some of the country’s most well-known media outlets in claiming a Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in journalism” (Brainerd, 2013). InsideClimate News was not a one-hit wonder, either; the team was a Pulitzer finalist in 2016 for its nine-part investigation of Exxon’s 40-year knowledge of, research into, and subsequent denial of, climate change.

With the awarding of the Pulitzers to InsideClimate News, ProPublica, and The Huffington Post, there was a temptation to say online news had “arrived,” but citizens had been getting their news via digital delivery for nearly two decades. The InsideClimate News Pulitzer did represent the continued importance of writing stories about environmental issues, even as it highlighted the changing nature of journalism in the second decade of the 21st century. As such, InsideClimate News and its team joined a trail of regular coverage of the environment – defined here as the gathering, writing, editing, and distribution of information about the interaction of people and the natural world, and issues related to that interaction – with roots to the 1960s and even links to writings from centuries past.

Ancient texts

The natural world and the interaction of humans with it was a common topic of ancient thinkers and writers just as it has been for those of our times. (For more on this idea, see Brady and Neuzil (2005).) As such, the keywords in ancient texts are not all that different from those in current stories about the environment. Of course, one would be advised not to read the ancients too literally, but even seen as metaphor, there are similarities that cut across the centuries.

For example, pollution began to appear regularly in the media as a social problem in the 19th century in Western societies as the harmful effects of the industrial revolution were felt by more and more people. But this was not the first time pollution was mentioned as a social concern; the origins of the word are from the Latin pollut, which means soiled or defiled. In the Hebrew Bible, the authors who collected the works of the biblical prophet Isaiah spoke of it eight centuries before Christ:

The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.

(Isaiah 24:4–5)

Isaiah is considered a major prophet: “For versatility of expression and brilliance of imagery Isaiah had no superior, not even a rival. His style marks the climax of Hebrew literary article” (Orr, 1939, p. 885). When he spoke of the Second Coming, Isaiah says, in two of his memorable phrases, that “the desert shall … blossom as the rose” and “waters shall burst forth in the wilderness” (Isaiah 35:1–10). Undoubtedly, Isaiah used examples from nature in ways that could make the audience understand the main points. Most people lived more closely to nature in ancient times than today; such themes would have made sense. “The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them,” (Isaiah 50:4) is a description that could apply to journalists in any era.

In the passage on pollution from Chapter 24, the “everlasting covenant” referred to is from the book of Genesis and the time of the great flood, when Noah, in association with every living creature, becomes a partner with God. Isaiah states that the people have broken the covenant, thus threatening the natural order of things. When the covenant is destroyed, the earth dries up, becoming withered, barren, and polluted. Does he mean pollution in a literal sense? Or, as seems more likely, is pollution in this passage a metaphor for sin? Perhaps it does not matter; it is only important to note that pollution meant something very, very bad in the days of the prophet.

Isaiah was a keen observer of the natural world and his phrase “voice in the wilderness” (Isaiah 40:3) came into common use, repeated in all four Gospels and eventually making its way into the title of a book by Edward Abbey, a nature writer not usually associated with religion. (He was an atheist.) Consider also these images from Isaiah Chapter 11:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6–9)

The Hebrew scriptures are populated with references to the natural world, but no writer employed a skill for turning a memorable phrase like Isaiah. Writers in other religious traditions frequently refer to the environment in ancient texts, as well. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu used water as a teachable moment: “The highest good is like that of water. The goodness of water is that it benefits the ten thousand creatures; yet itself does not scramble, but is content with the places that all men disdain. It is this that makes water so near to the Way” (as quoted in Waley, 1997, p. 8).

The Christian theologian Augustine was sitting under a fig tree, in a garden, trying to figure out what to do with his life when he heard from a child the words “tolle, lege; tolle, lege,” which translates to “pick up and read; pick up and read” (or sometimes “take and read”) (Outler, 1955), thus combining communing with nature and literacy. Augustine picks up a copy of the letters of Paul, reads a passage from Romans, has his final conversion, and dedicates his life to God. In this way, Augustine closes a literary and dendrologic circle, in that his metaphoric original sin was stealing a pear from his neighbor’s tree.

Fig trees play multiple roles in ancient texts. In the New Testament, Christ twice mentions figs that do not bear fruit – in Luke 13:6–9 the tree is cut down and burned and in Matthew 21:19 it is cursed. Scholars understand these passages as the fruitless tree representing faith without acts. One Christian tradition proposes that it was a fig tree in the Garden of Eden that tempted Adam and Eve, rather than an apple (many theologians go with the more generic “fruit tree”). It is often the leaves of the fig tree that cover the private parts of Adam and Eve as well as too many Roman statues to count – perhaps as a symbol of carnal lust, or that there are 850 species of fig, or that the common fig’s leaf is largish at 7 inches by 10. The expression “fig leaf” became a metaphor for a token or flimsy cover easily seen through or around.

Of course, cultures with oral traditions, such as those of Native American tribes, passed nature stories down from generation to generation and, sadly, many of those have been lost to time. Trees are clan symbols for many tribes, particularly in the American Southwest. In the Northeast, the birch tree, in addition to providing the flexible, tough material for canoes, dwellings, and baskets, was said to be a gift from the benevolent cultural hero Wenabozho to wrap bodies of the dead and as a hiding place from lightning strikes.

That the ancient texts and oral traditions influenced more modern writers associated with environmentalism (as we have come to call it) is evidenced in the work of Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), the most important work on environmental ethics in the 20th century. Twenty-nine years earlier, in a journal article, Leopold examined the connections between the moral obligations of humans toward their surroundings by comparing biblical prophets such as Isaiah with nature-lovers of his generation such as President Theodore Roosevelt and the naturalist, activist, and writer John Muir.

Figure 1.1 “Aldo Leopold examining tamarack at his Sauk County, Wisconsin, retreat.” The biologist and writer Aldo Leopold influenced generations of environmentalists with his posthumously published A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold was killed fighting a fire on his farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in 1948 at age 61.

Source: Photographer Robert McCabe, courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives <https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AQXLCCWDWJE7OC8Z>.

From the works of Ezekiel, a prophet in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, Leopold quoted the following:

Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have fed upon the good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture? And to have drunk of the clear waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?

(Ezekiel 24:18)

This, wrote Leopold, is “the doctrine of conservation, from its subjective side, as aptly put as by any forester of this generation” (as quoted in Mazel, 2001, p. 232).

Leopold eventually rejected Roosevelt’s conservationism, which puts the benefit of humans as a core principle, as insufficient. Leopold’s idea of a land ethic, in which nonhuman members of a biotic community should be given ethical considerations, would be adopted by many. The Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium, writing three centuries before Christ, is considered an important influence: “The aim and object of life is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: environmental journalism
• Part I Journalism and the environment
• Part II Environmental journalism in the United States
• Part III Environmental journalism in Europe and Russia
• Part IV Environmental coverage in Asia and Australia
• Part V Environmental reporting in Africa and the Middle East
• Part VI Environmental journalism in South America
• Index