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Skirting the Population Issue:
Why Journalists Need to Tackle Growth
by Timothy Wheeler

Why is it so hard for journalists covering the environment to address
population?

Do we lack the guts to tackle really tough, controversial issues? Or
do we lack the smarts to sort out the complicated and often-indirect
role population growth plays in problems such as water shortages,
declines in biodiversity and suburban sprawl?

We've been talking for years about how population growth is one of
the major under-reported stories on our beat. I remember sitting on a
panel at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference in 1994,
offering tips for "localizing" what many perceived then as a global
issue. That wasn't the first, or last, how-to session.

Yet we have succeeded as journalists so rarely in making the
environment-population connection in print or on the air that it
remains remarkable when someone does. Population was one of the
environmental journalism "taboos" hashed over at SEJ's annual meeting
last year in Baltimore. It's on SEJ's agenda again this year in New
Orleans.

That's all rather perplexing to Michael Maher, head of the
communication department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
and one of the few to really study this journalistic bugbear. Back in
the mid-1990s, Maher randomly sampled 150 newspaper and wire service
articles from around the country dealing with endangered species,
water shortages and sprawl. Only a little more than one in 10
mentioned population as a factor; even fewer talked about what might
be done about it.

After interviewing some of the writers of those articles, Maher
concluded that many journalists felt population was just too "big,"
too amorphous for them to deal with in the time and space constraints
of daily stories. Some, though, indicated that they were unwilling to
bring up a sensitive topic that is so tangled up with the abortion
controversy and with bigotry against immigrants that few environmental
activists even dare to raise it. That's what communications scholars
call a "spiral of silence."

"Not only did the journalists not tell readers that population growth
was causing the problem, the people in these stories themselves -- the
sources quoted by the journalists -- seemed unaware that their
predicament was exacerbated by expanding population," Maher wrote in
his 1997 paper. The lack of media coverage, Maher added in a recent
e-mail comment, is what helps make advocacy of population stability
"seem a real loony-fringe idea."

It hasn't always been this way. The planet's seemingly explosive
growth of people was a big story for the first generation of
environmental reporters in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet when
falling fertility rates seemingly defused the population "bomb" --
especially for the United States -- stories about it became rarer than
some endangered species.

While U.S. births have dipped slightly below the replacement rate, the
country's population continues to grow, fueled by an influx of
immigrants. At the current pace, our population of 292 million could
swell to 422 million people by 2050, a 45 percent increase.

Does that mean there'll be a 45 percent decline in air or water
quality or a comparable loss in wetlands and forests? Not necessarily.
Even some advocates of limiting population acknowledge it's not easy
to pinpoint the environmental harm caused by growth so far, or to
project precisely what damage more people will do.

"There's almost no place where you can say 'Here's the direct
connection,'" says Robert Engelman, vice president for research for
Population Action International, and a former environmental reporter
who helped found SEJ. The impact of people varies, he says, depending
on such imponderables as their behavior and government policies that
might either worsen or mitigate the effects of their numbers. People's
lifestyles play a big role –- Americans consume far more land per
person for housing than do people in other developed countries, for
instance, and generate more greenhouse gases.

What also makes population a tough subject, journalistically, is the
shortage of "victims." An enterprising reporter knows how to find
people or critters suffering from air or water pollution.

"As an issue," Maher says, "population growth lacks a specific and
clearly identifiable news peg. It is everywhere and nowhere."

Some brave and insightful journalists have found ways to tackle the
issue. Mike Salinero and Joe Follick wrote a four-part series in the
Tampa Tribune earlier this year suggesting that Florida's booming
population was dragging down the state's budget and degrading its
environment.

Salinero says he got a lot of calls from readers about the series,
which concluded with a brief debate about whether the state should
somehow try to limit or at least slow its population growth. Yet he
said the series sparked no reaction from politicians –- unusual, I
thought, until he pointed out that most members of Florida's
legislature have ties to the real estate industry.

It doesn't help, either, that almost no environmental groups will talk
about population growth. The Sierra Club engaged in a fierce debate in
1998 over immigration, but ultimately decided not to take a stand
against it. No other major environmental group has touched it since.

Recognizing how journalists crave facts that can give them a toehold
on such slippery subjects, one population group, Numbers USA, has come
out with a study that says only half the land gobbled up in the past decade can be blamed on sprawling development patterns. The rest of the land consumed went to house more people, contends Roy Beck, the group's executive director and another former environmental journalist.

Many are uncomfortable with such calculations, and distinctly
uncomfortable with some of the critics of the driving force in
America's population growth these days. Beck and his group have been
lumped in with "hate groups," after all, for advocating limits on
immigration.

I plead guilty to some of the same limitations facing other
journalists: Last year, when I was editing The Baltimore Sun's
environmental coverage, Tom Horton, our Chesapeake Bay columnist, told
me he wanted to write a piece calling for limits on immigration
because he believed population growth was a long-term threat to the
Bay.

"Do it while I'm on vacation," I grumbled. I didn’t relish getting
calls from readers accusing us of xenophobia.

If he was really serious about writing such a column, I told him, I
wanted to see evidence that immigrants are somehow more environmentally
damaging to the Bay than those folks who are moving into the region
from other parts of the United States.

Like many other journalists, I'd missed the proverbial forest for the
trees. And I'd shied away from a controversial topic because of the
"baggage" it came with.

So maybe it's time to quit lecturing others and start figuring out
how to talk reasonably about population again.

Here are links to a few of the pieces done about population in the
past year:

Tampa Tribune, Feb. 23-26, 2003: "More People, More Problems," by Joe
Follick and Mike Salinero (archived stories available for a fee).
NPR's Living on Earth, May 23, 2003, "The Politics of Population," by
Anna Solomon-Greenbaum.
The Baltimore Sun, Dec. 6, 2002, "People Influx Tramples Smart Growth
Efforts," by Tom Horton (archived stories available for a fee).
The Economist, Aug. 24, 2002, "A Tale of Two Bellies" (archived
stories available for a fee).

For links to some population-oriented groups:

Population Reference Bureau.
The Population Council: http://www.popcouncil.org Has a comprehensive listing of population-related links.
United Nations Population Fund.
Population Action International.
NumbersUSA (For sprawl study, go to http://www.numbersusa.com/intrests/urbansprawl/html).

Timothy B. Wheeler has been a reporter and editor for The Baltimore Sun since 1992, and for seven years before that was a reporter for the The Evening Sun. He spent a decade covering the environment full-time for both papers, and until earlier this year was an editor supervising the Sun’s environmental coverage. He is currently on leave. He is a member of the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalism. The views expressed in this piece are entirely his own.