Climate Change’s Original Sin

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&search_tracking_id=s3dU3xc64r5YxgaeFDu6-A&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=journalist&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=91706285&src=s3dU3xc64r5YxgaeFDu6-A-2-3">Everett Collection</a>/Shutterstock


This story first appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over the years I’ve been asked many times about how to get into environmental journalism, or, alternately, how to save environmental journalism. The answer is always: I have no f’ing idea.

For one thing, as I mentioned the other day, my path into professional journalism was highly idiosyncratic and probably not replicable. I remain blissfully unaware of the career mechanics that other journalists are forced to deal with (bless their hearts).

For another thing: What is environmental journalism, anyway? For those concerned about the interlocking problems of our age—sustainability, energy poverty, peak everything—I’m not sure it matters.

The field has traditionally been represented by the Society of Environmental Journalists, composed of reporters assigned by newspapers and magazines to the environmental beat—pollution, deforestation, ecosystem stuff. For the most part, environmental journalism has been a subdivision of the science desk.

Now SEJ, like everyone else, is struggling to deal with two trends.

First, journalism is dying (and being reborn at the same time), and it’s grinding up lots of traditional journalists in the gears. Environmental journalism, as traditionally practiced, has been particularly hard hit. Why? Well, people are going to yell at me for saying this, but: because it’s a niche, and a relatively small one. And lots of it is, with apologies to the many wonderful environmental journos I’ve known, boring. “Creature/area threatened by pollutant/industry” is a story everyone’s seen before a million times. They know what it says before they read it and so, with the exception of the small class of people who care intensely about nature/creatures as such, they don’t read it.

When newspapers and magazines were flush with cash, they could afford to maintain desks that existed, effectively, as an expression of social responsibility. But as budgets decline, it’s the stuff that gets clicks (and draws advertisers) that survives. The reason the New York Times has a half-dozen blogs about cars and one about the environment is that lots of people love reading about cars and not that many love reading about the horrible stuff human beings are doing to ecosystems. I’m not saying I like it, but it is what it is.

The second trend, of course, is climate change, which has scrambled the term “environmental” across all sorts of domains, including activism, academia, and media. As I’ve said so many times, the original sin of climate change is that it entered US culture via environmentalism. It was framed as an environmental story, about the struggles of environmentalists, covered by environmental journalists.

It is not a good fit for that category. Climate change is about rapidly accelerating changes in the substrate of modern civilization, the weather patterns and sea levels that have held relatively steady throughout all advanced human development. By its nature, it affects everything that rests on that substrate: agriculture, land use, transportation, energy, politics, behavior…everything. Climate change is not “a story,” but a background condition for all future stories. The idea that it should or could be adequately covered by a subset of “environmental journalists” was always an insane fiction. It is especially insane given the declining numbers who identify themselves as such.

We need to disentangle the fate of environmental journalism from media coverage of climate change. The two need not be connected. The pressing, nay existential imperative to divert from the status quo and radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions is necessarily enmeshed in all major human decisions. And so journalists who cover those decisions, whatever their “beat,” need to understand how climate change, as a background condition, informs or shapes the decisions. In journalism, as in other fields, climate needs to be freed from the “environmental” straightjacket.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate