Is it time for a Society of Environmental Journalists weblog?

As journalists, we vigorously advocate for transparency in public institutions and many other areas of society. We argue that it’s good for democracy — that the people have a right to know how decisions are made.

But as journalists, we are generally shy of public attention to how we do our jobs, let alone to what we think and believe. That’s partly because our job is to report the story, not become part of the story. In the old days, of course, one would never, ever utter the “I” word in a news story. If it was absolutely necessary to bring yourself into the story, you did it awkwardly in third person: “A reporter who witnessed the event . . .”

I think we’re also shy of public attention because we worry that people might see that beneath the public front of an unbiased, objective journalist lies a human being with biases, emotions, and personal strengths and weakness.

And so blogging about how we do our work may seem risky. But at a time when newspaper readership is declining, young people are getting their news from sources such as “The Daily Show,” and the public is increasingly distrustful and even cynical about what they’re getting from news media, is it time to swallow our discomfort and get on with it?

I think many of us would probably agree that how we do our work, and how we think, are not well appreciated by our audiences. So is there a way to do a public blog — by environmental journalists about environmental journalism — that would help us do our jobs better while also giving our audiences a glimpse of the incredible care most of us take in doing those jobs?

What would we write about in such a blog? Certainly, some, but not all, of the conversation now taking place in the SEJ listserve could migrate over to a blog. It could be a place to talk about ethics, how to cover stories, the scientific status of important issues like climate change, and attempts to hinder what we do as journalists. It could also be a place to call attention to particularly noteworthy achievements, such as awards and important stories that have made a real difference. And if we're brave, we could use the blog to call attention to examples of environmental coverage we don't like.

As Amy Gahran said last year to our Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism, young people “are more interested in conversation than lectures . . . They expect direct interaction as a basic aspect of their media experience. They expect their perspective to matter.” Similarly, “There’s a growing need/demand for greater audience participation and a remaining need for quality news content.”

I think she’s right. Many of the young people I encounter as a professor here at the University of Colorado are pretty cynical about us journalists. They feel that we’ve been bought and sold just as surely as the politicians, and that what we write and broadcast needs to be taken with a shaker full of salt. If done right, could a bit more transparency in what we do as journalists, and some interactivity with our audiences, actually help counteract this distrust and cynicism?

A Society of Environmental Journalism blog could serve other purposes as well. Look at the success of RealClimate. It is produced by climate scientists, mostly for climate scientists. But many journalists go there to see what scientists are saying outside of peer reviewed journals. If you want to see how climate scientists think — because it might help you cover them better — this is a good blog to go to. Similarly, if you were an environmental scientist, an environmental journalism blog might be useful if you wanted to learn how to deal with journalists more effectively. In other words, it’s possible that a blog like this could improve communication between scientists and journalists. (Perish the thought — we could even ask them to do guest blogs!)

We would obviously have to put our best foot forward in such a blog. That may be difficult, since emotion rules in the blogosphere. It is without question a place for uninhibited and often unrevealing bloviation. Perhaps the content would have to be moderated to some extent, because one intemperate remark from a journalist who hits the return key too quickly could become fodder for the likes of James Inhofe. That would hurt more than it would help. On the other hand, many journalists already are too keen to give fodder to those folks — and without the agency of a weblog. For example, some of us haven’t hesitated to publicly compare skeptics of global warming to Holocaust deniers. That’s been done in good, old fashioned print.

SEJ members already engage in daily conversation through the SEJ members’ listserve. It’s like a private club. A blog is more like a coffee house — a public place to come for some spirited conversation. Maybe it’s time that we open the door and let other people in to join the conversation.

If transparency in the institutions we cover is good for the sake of democracy, wouldn't transparency in the institution of environmental journalism be good for the same reason?

-- Tom Yulsman

How to manage the Colorado River until 2026? Bureau of Reclamation issues an EIS on proposed guidelines

The Bureau of Reclamation has issued a draft environmental impact statement on proposed guidelines for managing the flow of the Colorado River through Lake Powell and Lake Mead, particularly under drought conditions. The guidelines, once adopted, would be in force until the year 2026.

As last week's report from the National Research Council showed (see our earlier posting), we should expect drought conditions to be common, especially as global warming intensifies. So this is a big deal. How the bureau chooses to manage water in the Colorado will impact many millions of people in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and throughout the parts of the interior West that depend on the river for water.

The EIS considers five alternatives. The first is a "no action alternative." Here are the others:

Basin States Alternative: Under this plan, the bureau would operate Lake Powell and Lake Mead in a coordinated manner to minimize shortages in the Lower Basin states (Arizon, California and Nevada) "and avoid risk of curtailments of use in the Upper Basin" (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming).

Conservation Before Shortage Alternative: Developed by a coalition of environmental groups and other NGOs, this alternative would include "voluntary, compensated reductions in water use to minimize involuntary shortages in the Lower Basin and avoid risk of curtailments of use in the Upper Basin."

Water Supply Alternative: This plan would maximize delivery of water at the expense of keeping water in the reservoirs for future use.

Reservoir Storage Alternative: This plan was developed in coordination with Western agencies, the Naitonal Park Service and other stakeholders. It would "keep more water in storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead by reducing water deliveries and increasing shortages to benefit power and recreational interests."

The draft EIS was released for public review and comment on Wednesday, Feb. 28.

Al Gore: Mainstream Media Still Don't Get It

If you read this posting earlier, there's a bit of an update based in part on the excellent analysis by John Fleck:

The mainstream media still reject the scientific consensus on global warming, Al Gore told a media ethics conference earlier this week, The Tennessean reports.

Speaking of the conclusions of the IPCC, Gore said the media "have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias." Citing a study showing that 53 percent of newspaper articles on global warming offer false balance on the issue, he said, "I don't think that any of the editors or reporters responsible for one of these stories saying, 'It may be real, it may not be real,' is unethical. But I think they made the wrong choice, and I think the consequences are severe." The consequence, he argues, has been political gridlock on the issue.

I suspect Gore is referring to the study by Maxwell and Jules Boykoff examining "prestige press" converage of global warming between 1988 and 2002. ("Balance as Bias: global warming and the U.S. prestige press," Global Environmental Change, 14 (2004) 125–136.) Included in the survey were the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The researchers found that "the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action."

After the release of the Boykoff study, John Fleck posted an an excellent critique, noting that the researchers conflated the scientific consensus on science with the policy response. (Also see his comment below.) "While they may be correct that there are cases where stories about the science are marred by a bias created by false balance, their conflation of scientific understanding of the issue and policy responses renders their argument fundamentally flawed."

According to the Boykoff paper, "the scientific community has reached general consensus that immediate and mandatory actions are necessary to combat global warming." It may well be that most climate scientists agree with this statement. But that certainly doesn't mean most other people do. This is just pointing out the obvious — scientific consensus by no means equals political consensus. And as we all know, we're not even close to a political consensus yet. So journalists providing balanced coverage of the policy side of the issue are only doing their jobs. Gore is just flat wrong. They are not guilty of false balance.

I suspect Gore was reacting to the hyper-bloviation on global warming that's prevalent on cable news (much of it directed at him this week), and to the low quality of news coverage in broadcast media. In this case, false balance on global warming is probably the least of our problems.

-- T.Y.

Marine Ecosystems Pressured from the Top and Bottom

A study published in the Feb. 23 issue of Science finds that climate change is contributing to ecosystem shifts in in the North Atlantic. Increased flows of cold, fresh water from increased melting of permafrost, snow and ice in the Arctic region are changing the abundances of phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish that live near the ocean's surface. Scientists had attributed these changes to the collapse of cod fisheries from overfishing In places like the Georges Bank off the coast of Massachussetts (shallow area in the NASA image above). The new study suggests that climate change is also playing a strong role.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that Northwest Atlantic ecosystems are being affected by climate forcing from the bottom up and overfishing from the top down," says Charles Greene, a Cornell oceanographer and lead author of the Science paper.

-- T.Y.

A Pristine Ecosystem Revealed by the Collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelves

These organisms living on the Antarctic seabed are part of an ecosystem that was all but inaccessible to scientists — until two giant ice shelves, Larsen A and B, disintegrated. Before they collapsed five and twelve years ago respectively, the ice shelves covered 10,000 kilometers of the sea bottom. Dramatic warming in this region caused the shelves to break up, giving scientists aboard the German research vessel Polarstern an opportunity to study the pristine marine ecosystem at the ocean floor. The copyrighted photos were taken by Julian Gutt of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

For more information about this research, see here, and here.
-- T.Y.

An Excellent Article on Responding to Climate Change

Andrew Dessler, a climate expert at Texas A&M University, has written an excellent posting on the elements of an effective response to global warming over at Grist. If you cover global warming as a journalist, or you simply feel that responding to climate change is all but hopeless, you really should read this article. It compellingly describes how we could respond to climate change over the long haul, with the goal of stabilizing our impact on the climate system at a manageable level. Dessler has also written a "The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change", a book that looks like an excellent resource for any reporter who might have to cover this issue.

-- Tom Yulsman

Colorado Considers Bill to Greatly Expand Use of Renewable Energy

This guest posting by Hank Lacey considers an effort by Colorado legislators to greatly expand the use of renewable energy sources to generate electricity in the state. The legislation builds on Amendment 37, passed by voters in 2004. The amendment requires Colorado’s top utility companies to provide 10 percent of their retail electricity sales from renewable resources by the year 2015. Hank Lacey, a lawyer turned journalist who is currently covering the Colorado legislature for the Colorado Springs Gazette, describes the effort to boost the requirement to 20 percent by 2020. -- T.Y.


Coloradans may soon be getting alot more electricity generated from renewable sources such as the wind and the sun.

If a bill that expands the requirements of Amendment 37 is enacted, investor-owned utilities such as Xcel Energy and Aquila will have to produce twice as much electricity from renewable resources as Amendment 37 requires. Municipal utilities, such as Colorado Springs Utilities, and the rural electric cooperatives will be definitively brought under the umbrella of the renewable mandate for the first time.

HB 1281, which is the vehicle for these changes, passed the state House of Representatives on second reading Friday. The bill will be considered for a third and final time in the House early next week, then move on to the Senate.

The measure will require the large investor-owned utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. A portion of that will have to come from solar power. It will also require the munies and the coops to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, including a portion from the sun.

Some legislators sought to weaken the bill on the House floor Friday. One amendment offered by Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, would have specified that hydroelectric power would count as a renewable source. The bill's sponsors, Reps. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, and Rob Witwer, R-Golden, argued that the bill is intended to encourage development of new energy sources. Hydroelectricity has been a commercially viable energy source for
decades.

Another lengthy floor fight centered on continuing efforts by the state's largest rural electric cooperative, Intermountain Rural Electric Cooperative, to secure the right to "opt out" of the requirements. IREA successfully invoked that right under Amendment 37. Legislators killed that amendment, too, but only after Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, and Reps. David Balmer, R-Centennial, and Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, complained that HB 1281 overrides the will of IREA's customers that voted to exempt the utility from renewable energy production standards last year.

Gov. Bill Ritter said at a news conference Thursday that IREA's objection to the bill would not be a reason for him to veto it. The Colorado Rural Electric Association, an industry association of the state's rural electric cooperatives, supports the bill. So does Xcel and Colorado Springs Utilities.

HB 1281 is one of the cornerstones of the "new energy economy" promised by Ritter and the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly.

Amendment 37 was adopted by the state's voters in 2004.

-- Hank Lacey