It’s fair to say that the 21st century world of mass journalism has gotten off to an …, er …., ahhh …. Aaarrrggghhh … start.

A start, that’s about it.

There’s still plenty of time — in this decade even, let alone in this century — for things to straighten out.

And none, let it be clearly said, of the early dismaying start on this new century’s “new journalism” can be laid squarely at the door of environmental journalism.

Of that, there can be no doubt.

Still and alas.

The situation in the house that Edward R. Murrow, Izzy Stone, and H.L. Mencken built is anything but good after this, what, 40 or so, days of the new millennium.

You have your Los Angeles Times Staples Center fiasco, mind you, and the breathtaking, extraordinary, and voluminous analysis of that collapse of the wall by the Times’ well-respected media critic David Shaw. Let’s relegate the Staples tragedy to the century-past, with only the aftermath carrying into (well into, one dreads but expects) the new one.

And, sure, also on the West Coast, only further up it, you have your presumed morphing of the Chronicle into the cross-town Examiner, under the Hearst empire. Big damned deal! Whoever said a great city has to have a great daily newspaper in the first place? What for? Didn’t before, doesn’t after. What’s the big schtick?

Oh, yes. Take comfort, faint heart, in that Murrow’s current understudies apparently feel it perfectly acceptable to digitize a bogus backdrop over the shoulder of Walter Cronkite’s protege. What’s a little dummying-in of falsehoods got to do with the news “business” after all? Again, no big deal, nada, zip.

And show me how the number of independent voices has slipped even a tad in the wake of the AOL/Time Warner deal? Show me, I dare ya.

Ain’t-a-gonna-happen, no way, not so long as traditional journalistic stalwarts like the Associated Press continue to insist that all of its news that’s fit to be reprinted come from the pens and PCs of its 3,500 or so editorial employees.

Say what?, you say.

Say, you say, that that tradition went under even before the first month of the first year of the first decade of the 21st Century was toast? Could it be that the 150-plus-year-old wire service now carries copy from a four-year-old Internet site, Cnet News.com, that many of the wire service’s journalist/clients have never heard of? (Will they notice? Will they care?)

Big deal that too, ya ask me.

Not a taint of it comes directly from environmental journalism. And not a taint of it, therefore, can come back to haunt environmental journalism. No how. No way. No day.

Ah, the changes we’ve seen, are seeing, in the halls of journalism even this early in the new millennium. Where, just where, will they go from here?

Isn’t it enough that environmental journalists everywhere have to edit their macros to change “Environmental Defense Fund,” what with its name change, to “Environmental Defense.” Period. (No “E.D.” jokes, please, and no further suggestions of former Senator Bob Dole’s becoming ED[F]’s new poster boy.)

But still. It raises a question. What if, in the end, we – that is, you – fix the chamber of environmental journalism. Only to discover that it’s but one small room in a sprawling mansion which, for the good of democracy and things Jeffersonian, ends up being condemned in any event?

That, as they say, would be a sheck-of-a-hame.

Having survived Y2K, journalists early in 2000 may be wondering what the next century and its environment would look like.

“Will the next 100 years overwhelm our ability to adapt?” asked The Washington Post.

“The good news is that, in our judgment, the ‘look forwards’ greatly outweigh the ‘worry abouts,’” said Newsweek’s “User’s Guide to the 21st Century.”

“All the News That’s Fit to Transmit,” declared a future front page of The New York Times dated January 1, 2100, included in a special section of “visions” for the next century.

Here are some prognostications and musings about the environment of the future.

Population

• The Washington Post – “World population more than tripled in the 20th century and could easily double again in the next 100 years. Absent some catastrophe, it will almost certainly reach 9 billion by 2100, 50 percent more than the current figure, and will likely hit 10.5 billion. Almost all the growth will occur in Asia and Africa. Collectively, these new lives will dwarf the total combined population of Europe and the Americas, which is estimated to be no more than 1.8 billion by 2025 and won’t grow much during the rest of the century....At least half of the added population will live in ‘supercities,’ of which the three largest by 2015 will be Tokyo, Bombay and Lagos, each with 25 million inhabitants or more.”

Global Warming

• The New York Times – “An average global warming of 4.5 degrees, more or less, might not sound like much until it is realized that the world has warmed by only 5 to 9 degrees since the depths of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. The heating would not be uniform. North America would warm more than the global average. Northern latitudes would heat up more than southern ones. Climatic zones would shift north 100 to 350 miles, making the climate of New York, for instance, more like that of Washington today .... winter would probably be shorter .... Scientists warn that the warming would be enough to push summer heat waves to higher, more dangerous combinations of temperature and humidity, a trend that federal scientists say is already under way .... One of the most striking effects of a warmer atmosphere, many scientists say, would be a worsening of floods and droughts .... Most of the country, and especially the heart of the plains, would experience less summer rainfall. But winter precipitation would generally increase, especially in the northern regions.” (see box)

• The Washington Post – “Thus it appears that under any but the most Draconian scenario of greenhouse gas reduction (and probably irrespective of what sorts of Kyoto-like agreements industrial democracies may make), humanity will continue to pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future .... The answers should be unambiguously clear by the end of the 21st century, when global average temperatures are expected to be 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea levels six to 20 inches higher. We will know whether and to what extent, human behavior has altered the Earth’s climate – and incidentally, whether we will have the flexibility to adapt.”

Sprawl

Transportation

• The Washington Post – “Let’s start with the simplest prediction – naming the energy source for transportation systems in 2100. It won’t be petroleum, given that our reserves are already dwindling. My own guess is that cars in 2100 will be powered by new kinds of batteries, and that the electricity to recharge them will come from an environmentally benign mix of solar collectors in the Arizona desert and nuclear reactors .... The number of business trips per person will decline as teleconferencing gets more sophisticated, but the number of people needing to travel will increase. The way we will travel, though, will change. High-speed rail links (most likely involving magnetically levitated trains) will connect major urban areas.”

• The New York Times – “Daimler [Chrysler] is already campaigning for governments to approve what it calls an electronic tow bar, a system that would regulate the speed and distance between trucks in a convoy. The technology would enable trucks to reduce wind resistance and save fuel by bunching together, Daimler engineers say.”

Food

• The Washington Post – “The fundamental moral and aesthetic distinction between ‘natural’ order and ‘artificial’ disruption of nature – currently embodied in squabbling over ‘organic’ foods – may disappear entirely, or become merely a parlor topic for the wealthy.”

Wilderness and Wildlife

• The Washington Post – “The whole surface of the globe is now proximate to the city, and 100 years from now it will no doubt be unimaginably closer .... Already, the word ‘wilderness’ now usually means ‘wilderness area’ – a park, really, complete with permits, rangers, posted trails, rules and regulations. In 2100, most of these parks will be closed to all but a few privileged visitors, to maintain the habitat of wolves and bears as museum pieces.”

Energy

Recycling

On the Next Century’s Front Page

• The New York Times’ January 1, 2100 front page – “Microsoft, a once-dominant company whose industry faltered, was dropped from the Dow Jones industrial average and replaced by Solar Incineration Inc., the pioneer in the business of sending solar-powered rockets filled with garbage toward the sun, where the trash is vaporized.”

• The New York Times’ January 1, 2100 front page – “Census officials in Washington announced today that the Atlanta metropolitan area, as defined for the purposes of the 2100 population count, will extend north to Nashville; south to Tallahassee, Fla.; east to Charleston, S.C.,; and west to Tuscaloosa, Ala. The new designation makes Atlantaland, as the region of 40 million people is known, the largest of the country’s five major metropolitan areas, followed by Vegastown, the Los Angeles-Bay Area metroplex, Tamiamilando and Texas. New York City, once the nation’s population and cultural leader, now ranks ninth and is expected to be bumped into double digits by Santa Fe, N.M., after this year’s census.”

What will the weather be like in 2100? asks The New York Times.

Here are two projections for the year 2100 under two cases: those assuming the highest and lowest levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Highest-Emissions Future Assumptions: High population growth Relatively little emphasis on technological change No specific steps by governments to control greenhouse gas emissions Global conditions in 2100: Average surface temperature increase of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit Sea level would rise about 2 feet

The Lowest-Emissions Future Assumptions: Low population growth Emphasis on global action to reduce environmental problems, but no policy steps on greenhouse gas emissions specifically Rapid technological change Use of cleaner-energy technologies Global conditions in 2100: Temperature increase of about 3.5 degrees Sea level would rise about 1.5 feet

New York Times science reporter William K. Stevens – print journalism’s most highly visible reporter regularly covering global warming and climate issues – is being accused of journalism “that borders on the fraudulent” from a highly vocal global warming “skeptics” organization.

Stevens, author of a newly published book on climate and weather, is singled-out by the Western Fuels Association’s “Greening Earth Society” for what the coal group says is reporting that “has cast aside any semblance of journalistic objectivity.”

The group makes the charge in an unusual press release announcing the press-release-prolific interest group’s new Internet-based “Virtual Climate Alert.” Seeking to counter what it says are press and other inaccuracies on climate change science, the group singles out Stevens for particular criticism. Its first issue of its “Alert” focused on a front-page December 19, 1999, piece by Stevens.

“Bill Stevens has cast aside any semblance of journalistic objectivity” in his climate change coverage for the Times, said Western Fuel’s Chief Executive Officer and Greening Earth Society President Fred Palmer.

“I really don’t have much to say” about the P.R. offensive, Stevens told Environment Writer in a phone interview. “I stand by my reporting, and my reporting speaks for itself.”

Just weeks before a National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report downplayed the significance of differences between satellite and land-based temperatures, Palmer said Stevens’ alleged failures to report on those temperature differences “borders on the fraudulent.” (In its third edition of its Virtual Climate Alert, the group expressed its own interpretation of the Academies report, one at great variance from most scientific and popular press renderings of that report.)

Stevens, who has been with the Times as a science reporter and editor since 1968, is the author of a new 432-page hardback book, The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate.

Kirkus Reviews calls Stevens’s book “a thorough, and thoroughly fascinating, report on the world’s ever-changing climate and the phenomenon of global warming.” It labels Stevens “an amiable guide through the history of climate change on our planet and a skilled presenter of the natural workings of the weather system, and of the science of everyday weather … Without being an alarmist, he presents scenarios” involving precipitation extremes.

Stevens has been a Times correspondent in Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, and New Delhi, India, and for the past 11 years has specialized on environmental issues, ecology, conservation biology, climate, and weather. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in journalism and political science from West Virginia University.

The “Greening Earth” group’s second version of its Web-based “Alert” accused Bob Hager, on NBC Nightly News, of broadcasting a report consisting of “errors, half-truths, and exaggerations.” It challenged comments given Hager by scientific sources and said, “In the future we hope that he will consider all of the facts and present a story that perhaps will lack the hype, but will set the record straight on both the history and the potential future of climate change.”

The group, whose financial support has helped make University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels one of the most widely quoted climate change “skeptics,” says it draws its conclusions based on expertise from Greening Earth Society science advisors and from Michaels’s New Hope Environmental Services, of Charlottesville, Va. [Greening Earth on January 24 issued a press release reporting that its new Web site had been selected “site of the week” by CNSNews.com, of the Conservative News Center, “the news source for Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, and Dr. Laura.”]

The group describes itself on its Web home page as a nonprofit “grassroots organization” committed to promoting “the viewpoint that humankind is a part of nature, rather than apart from nature.” It uses as its symbol the bristle cone pine “because it’s been nurtured for thousands of years with CO2 …. the bristle cone pine proves our point – that nature and CO2 can grow together.”

Greening Earth says its new “Alerts” campaign is aimed at countering “ongoing efforts by politicians and those at work in the media who engage in climate-change advocacy in portraying weather events and models-modeling-models as climate reality.”

“We’re making up for the poor job that television stations and newspapers have done conveying the truth about the global temperature record and the benefits of rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide,” Palmer said in a release. The group’s Web site is at http://www.greeningearthsociety.org.

New RTNDF Guide

The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF)’ Environmental Journalism Center has published Covering Key Environmental Issues: A Handbook for Journalists. Topics covered include air quality, water quality, sprawl, sustainable development, climate change, endangered species, hazardous wastes, public health, public lands, radioactive wastes, the science of environmental stories, solid waste, and wetlands. Each chapter starts with bullet points explaining the importance of the topic in today’s society, followed by background material, issues and trends, key players, and story ideas. There is a glossary of environmental terms and an extensive appendix of contacts and resources.

RTNDF’s Environmental Journalism Center is funded primarily by grants from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The W. Alton Jones Foundation, and The Winslow Foundation. RTNDF is affiliated with the Radio and Television News Directors Association.

To receive a copy of the handbook, contact Michelle Thibodeau Loesch at (202) 467-5206, e-mail michellet@rtndf.org . The handbook is free to working journalists and $10 to non-journalists. RTNDF plans to put the guidebook on the Web (http://www.rtndf.org) in the near future.

Editor’s Note: This guidebook was produced by the Environmental Health Center, publisher of this newsletter, under contract to RTNDF.

Responding to a U.S. District Court decision, EPA has proposed delisting phosphoric acid from the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), where its emissions rank seventh highest. The chemical is also among the top five chemicals for releases in Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

The U.S. District Court last spring reversed EPA’s denial of a petition from the Fertilizer Institute, asking that phosphoric acid be deleted from the TRI and arguing that it was not toxic and did not meet the environmental effects listing criterion under the law. EPA argued that phosphoric acid is a phosphate nutrient that can lead to toxic algal blooms and invader plant species when released into certain water bodies.

Human exposure to phosphoric acid can cause convulsion, shock, and asphyxial death. It can also burn the skin, mouth, and eyes, and cause dermatitis, nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal pains, extreme thirst, and difficult breathing.

In 1997, 78,291,628 pounds of phosphoric acid were released by 2,726 facilities. In 1998, 14,395,000 tons of phosphoric acid were produced in the United States.

Comments on the proposal are due by February 7. The Federal Register notice of the proposal, which appeared on December 7, is on the Web at www.epa.gov/fedrgstr.

Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.