Jeff Adam works crop fields near Batavia, Iowa. Scientists say climate change could mean farmers like Adam will face new insects and plentiful weeds. Credit: Mary Chind/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

The news for environmental journalism in the United States is grim and getting grimmer.

On Mar. 1, the New York Times announced it was discontinuing the Green Blog that tracked environmental and energy news. In January, the paper had dismantled its three-year-old environment pod."Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses." -- FERN's Samuel Fromartz

This year, too, Johns Hopkins University retired its 30-year-old science writing programme, following in the footsteps of Columbia University which, in 2009, closed its earth and environmental science journalism programme because of a poor job market.

Like climate change, the demise of science reporting is a slowly unfolding tragedy, say many environmental journalists in the United States.

At a time when conversations should be revolving around climate change, energy, natural resources and sustainable development, space for environmental reporting and coverage in the United States seems to be shrinking.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the fifth in a series, says the evidence is now overwhelming that humans are the primary drivers of global warming.

“A potential knowledge gap arises as environmental journalism shrinks. The public learns less about environmental and related health issues, but at the same time may fall prey to unscientific claims that often hold sway on the Internet,” a worried Samuel Fromartz, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), told IPS on the sidelines of the 23rd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, held earlier this month in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses,” he said.

Scott Dodd, editor of On Earth.org of the Natural Resources Defence Council, and who considers climate change the “most urgent story of our times”, told IPS that environmental issues are “consistently under-covered”.

From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012.

“Environment is maybe 25 percent of a reporter’s beat,” Dodd said. “They are asked to cover city hall, night cops, the planning commission, and squeeze in an environmental story here and there when there’s time.”

In addition, climate change and the associated energy issues “tend to be complex, unspool over longer time periods, and require a level of knowledge and expertise that the average general assignment reporter might not have,” he added, noted that he is one himself.

“A long-term story like climate change, where the news today isn’t all that different from the news last week or last year, it’s difficult without a deep knowledge of the subject to find a fresh angle and sell an editor on why it should be front page news,” Dodd said.

Founded in 1990 by a small group of “full time” reporters and editors, the SEJ’s membership speaks volumes of this decline. Today, with a current strength of 1,300 members, a vast majority are “freelance journalists”, not all by choice, conceded Beth Parke, SEJ’s executive director.

But to be fair, if space for pure environmental journalism has shrunk, a bit of “cross-fertilisation” with other beats is still taking place.

“Editors generally understand that they cannot cover health, food, real estate, transportation, politics, energy, consumer issues… without bringing environmental questions into the story in one way or the other,” Parke said.

Interestingly, this meltdown of environmental reporting in the U.S., observed Adam Vaughan, editor of the U.K. based Guardian’s environment site, is not mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Guardian, for example, still has four reporters, two editors, two sub-editors and a picture editor dedicated to the subject, and earlier this year the paper hired an Australian environment correspondent for the first time. The Times, said Vaughan, recently moved one of its best reporters, Ben Webster, back to the environment beat.

So what did environmental journalism in the U.S. lose its glory to?

According to Parke, “Scandals, celebrities, sports – almost everything but serious investigative journalism is favoured as opposed to explanatory and public service journalism.”

The commercial media, she said, are “under severe pressure” to cover issues that increases their sales, ratings, listenerships and online views.

But all is not lost. This shuttering has led to a new genre – a rise in nonprofit journalism.

“I have seen the rise of more specialist sites online, such as InsideClimate, which won a Pulitzer recently, and Climate Central,” said Vaughan.

“There’s been the rising phenomenon of philanthropic-funded environmental efforts [such as Carbon Brief, China Dialogue, and Energy Desk], as well as freely-distributed public interest reporting from veteran journalists under the banner of the Climate News Network which were doing some of the best reporting on climate change,” he said.

“Look at what is winning prizes,” Parke said. “It’s news of oil spills, ocean health, contaminated food and building products, climate change. We see a lot of great work taking place outside the traditional media structure.”

And yet this kind of reporting has some obvious pitfalls.

“I’d view [blogs and magazines by NGOs] as an extension of their communications and marketing work, not what I’d recognise as traditional, independent journalism. It’s writing with an agenda, however impartial it appears to be,” said Vaughan.

Dodd, on the other hand, is worried “fewer people are seeing the important stories that these new outlets are telling” because these tend to be smaller, niche operations, without the resources or audience reach that national newspapers and the nightly network news were once able to command.

Huama farmers harvest their crop. Half the population lived as subsistence peasants in the year 2012, according to the World Bank. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, U.S., Oct 5 2013 (IPS)

What does gorilla conservation have in common with the provision of contraceptives to women? How does rural-urban migration contribute to global warming? What does city planning in Kenya have to do with coastal erosion in the Philippines?

Such are the topics of conversation at the 23rd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), running from Oct. 2-6 in what was, until 1960, referred to as “the dirtiest city in America”: Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Besides exploring an urban centre that has made the impressive about-turn from a highly polluted landscape into a model of sustainability, the nearly 300 journalists convened here are looking past their many differences to answer some fundamental questions about the profession.

What is the role of the media in an era of rapid climate change? How do we tell the interconnected stories of population, development and environmental crisis? And, more, importantly, is anyone listening?

Speaking at a pre-conference workshop entitled ‘From Chattanooga to Chennai: reporting on population and sustainability in an urbanising world’, Meaghan Parker, of the Woodrow Wilson Centre and associate board member of SEJ, pointed out that the global urban population is expected to nearly double from its 2009 total of 3.4 billion people to 6.4 billion by 2050.

Citing World Bank statistics, she added that in the decade between 1995 and 2005, cities in developing countries welcomed 165,000 newcomers every single day. By the middle of the century, seven out of 10 people will live in an urban area.

These numbers have long had population experts on red alert but seldom made it into dinner table conversations, let alone onto front-page headlines.

But as the planet gets hotter – with the U.N.’s latest comprehensive climate change report predicting an “ice-free” Arctic by 2050, much sooner than previously anticipated –more voices are sounding the alarm that densely-packed cities are disasters waiting to happen.

Others are finding ways to link rural flight with erratic temperatures, a combination that is altering the basic composition of the earth’s human population, 50 percent of which lived as subsistence peasants in the year 2012, according to the World Bank.

Yet at every turn, journalists attempting to thread together the umpteen strands of this crisis say they are thwarted by a global media industry reluctant to accept stories that fail to fit into established paradigms.

“If we pitch a story on how climate change and natural disasters affect women from poor communities in the U.S., we’re told it’s a ‘human interest story’. If we pitch on the weather hazards of the construction industry, we’re told it’s a ‘labour story’,” a reporter from a prominent U.S. news outlet told IPS under condition of anonymity.

“If we talk about climate refugees lacking access to health services, we’re told it’s a ‘human rights’ piece – it’s almost impossible to connect the science of climate change with the human impacts of those changes.”

Forced to think outside the box, journalists are stretching the narrow limits of the profession by working closely with researchers and grassroots activists for whom the links between environmental justice and population are inseparable.

In southwestern Uganda, a small NGO known as Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) has teamed up with communities on the fringes of the secluded Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) to achieve the twin goals of gorilla conservation and improved access to family planning.

With a wild population of just 880, mountain gorillas are one of the most critically endangered species on earth, according to Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder and CEO of CTPH.

Nearly half of those gorillas live in BINP, whose outlying areas are among the most densely populated in all of Africa, housing some 200 people per square kilometre.

This is partly a result of Uganda’s massive population boom – which took the country from 6.5 million people in 1959 to 28.5 million in 2008 – and a high-fertility rate in the region: the average family size is 10 people in Bwindi, well above the already high national average of seven.

Speaking at a panel at the Chattanooga Convention Centre Friday, Kalema-Zikusoka said the gorillas enter human settlements where people live in squalid conditions, 20 miles from the nearest health centre. In such close quarters, gorillas frequently lay waste to farmers’ crops, and pick up and transmit diseases like scabies and tuberculosis (TB).

With one of the top 22 TB infection rates in the world, Uganda is already in the middle of a veritable health crisis, lacking the resources to reach remote communities and stop the outbreak, which is exacerbated by the country’s high HIV/AIDS rate.

Inspired by the emerging field of “conservation medicine”, Kalema-Zikusoka launched CTPH in 2003. Today the initiative reaches some 40,000 people, teaching them how to prevent the spread of diseases from ape to human and vice versa, and recruiting them into conservation efforts that double up as economic opportunities.

In addition, the programme deploys ‘couple peer educators’ to deliver information about family planning services to combat the region’s high infant and maternal morbidity, and reduce overpopulation.

“Now, 60 percent of women in the two parishes where the programme was piloted use some form of contraception and we’ve seen an 11-percent increase in TB suspect referrals,” said Kalema-Zikusoka, adding that scientists are also recording fewer signs of sickness among gorillas.