Do we need to downgrade journalism on the altar of upgrading environmental quality? Think a moment: Environmental journalists thought and wrote some truly worthwhile and provocative pieces around the 30th anniversary of Earth Day this year.

Problem is the public will never see them.

Some of the most compelling discussions took place not on the nation’s air waves and not in news stories and columns. Instead, they took place far from the public eye, on the largely inbred cyberspace listserv populated by members of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

It’s a listserv, like so many others, that rises and falls. At times, and for prolonged ones, it is largely moribund and passive. A yawn.

At other times, and this was one of them, it comes to life with exchange after exchange of penetrating observations, carefully caveated “Yes, buts …”, and sheer insight.

Too bad that perhaps the two most visible media gorges in this year’s Earth Day feeding frenzy didn’t reach comparable levels.

Given the nature of things, perhaps more eyes saw the Saturday, April 22, 8 p.m. ABC special, “Planet Earth 2000,” than any other single Earth Day “news” piece, broadcast or printed.

Oh, my!

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales nailed it in saying the broadcast — Leonardo DiCaprio/Bill Clinton “interview” notwithstanding — “barely registered a blip on the outrage-ograph.” The ABC “Hollow Eco,” as a Post headline had it, “was much less a report than a call to arms, a sort of tutorial docutorial that sounded warning after warning about global warming,” and did so through a series of “now-hackneyed MTV-ish” jittery edges and bouncing images.

Journalistically, it was ouch-ville.

On the DiCaprio/Clinton interview brouhaha, Shales concluded that “Nearly everything about the way ABC has handled the controversy … has been just this side of despicable. Or maybe, come to think of it, that side. The fact that the program itself was terrible is almost an anticlimax,” wrote Shales. “A preachy hour about protecting the environment quickly [had] become an air pollutant itself.”

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times, also took no prisoners on the ABC “special” front. She quoted a memo from ABC News President David Westin — responding to concerns voiced by ABC News’s Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson — that “a sincere, informed celebrity (DiCaprio) can play a role in that sort of news special. But the role must be that of a sincere, informed celebrity — not journalist. All roles of journalist must be played by journalists (duh!).”

“Even in an era of celebrity journalism, it is jarring to see the job of a journalist called a role to be played,” Dowd lamented. (The “duh!” is hers.)

“As part of a conscious ratings strategy, ABC News and the other media networks long ago blurred the lines between journalism and celebrity superficiality,” a St. Paul Pioneer-Press columnist wrote. “So long ago and so thoroughly, you can make a good argument that Leonardo DiCaprio is at least as credible an interviewer as any ABC News star.”

A Los Angeles Times columnist agreed that the DiCaprio/Clinton “schmoozing” was no big deal. “In fact, actors have been impersonating journalists on TV for years,” Howard Rosenberg wrote.

A port in this storm? Perhaps it’s in The New York Times headline of Monday, April 24: “ABC’s Earth Day Special Culls Hour’s Lowest Rating” — about 3.6 million homes in the first half hour, 3.1 million in the second. “Losing to ‘Cops,’ even with DiCaprio on the news team,” The Times teased.

And then there’s that “Special Edition.” Next time a news organization tells you it’s going overboard to give you a special edition, throw it a life raft (and watch your wallet).

This was Time’s Earth Day 2000 tome, 100 pages of celebrity bylines and puff pieces — and, yes, a few “real” journalists among them — sponsored entirely by Ford Motor Company through 36 full-page ads.

With bylined pieces by President Clinton and also by DiCaprio and by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and by scientists like E.O. Wilson and Richard Leakey, the “more special than most” special issue gives comfort to the troubling view that only with passive journalism will society support strong environmental protection.

Environmentalists and some others may be momentarily heartened by the ostentatiously pro-green flavor both of the ABC piece and of the tripe special issue. Similarly, skeptics of the global climate change ilk will deplore pronouncements such as that in Time that “only a handful of the most doctrinaire die-hards still dispute the idea that human activity is heating up the planet.”

For the ink-in-the-veins journalism purists and those believing that environmental protection can stand up to even the most honest aggressive journalism, it was one more affirmation that the best journalism — at least that going beyond SEJ’s own listserv — exists independently of the now-tired annual Earth Day blitz.

Earth Day. Friend or foe of responsible environmental journalism? For sure, it generates some ink and air minutes that otherwise might not exist at all. But the resulting quality?

CNN Science/Technology/Environment [note the order there] Executive Producer Peter Dykstra is reminded of a reported Lyndon Johnson muse concerning Phillipine leader Fernando Marcos: “Sure he’s an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.”

Earth Day as environmental journalism’s S.O.B.? In the end it may have to be a burden worth bearing. But need it follow that bad environmental journalism’s is preferable to none at all?

Earth Day this year turned 30, the age at which some of us once would have said it could not be trusted. But could it be praised? Lambasted? Patronized? Ridiculed?

There wasn’t much about this Earth Day that reporters and editorial writers agreed upon.

It was “a full-fledged international celebration.” But it was also “a big yawn.”

An entire generation “has never known civic life without green activism.” But polls find that concern for the environment “has slipped.”

Saving the planet “starts at home.” But “‘you’ cannot save the planet.”

There is still the “unfinished business of protecting the planet.” But that “sour outlook is badly misplaced.”

And one writer, who was obviously around for the first Earth Day, actually used the phrase “conspicuous consumption.”

Some excerpts of how Earth Day played across the country:

Ü BALTIMORE SUN (Editorial), “Renewable Pledge for Earth Day:”

“With local action and global vision, hundreds of millions of people will observe the 31st Earth Day today in events of unparalleled scope and connection. The annual vernal event, which began in the United States in 1970 as a nationwide environmental call to action, in now a full-fledged international celebration ....

“Yet the domestic danger signs persist. Oil consumption is rising, half of it imported. Energy consumption has climbed 40 percent since 1970; vehicles miles traveled are up 125 percent .... Renewable energy supplies — biofuels, fuel cells, solar, hydroelectric, wind and geothermal — are becoming more available and more cost-competitive with carbon-based fuels. But they make up less than 10 percent of the U.S. energy pie and will need significant subsidies to grow.

“Global pressures to further reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions will make these alternative sources more practical in the future.”

Ü COLUMBUS DISPATCH (Column by David Lore), “Earth Day Reminds Public of Work Still Unfinished”

“Even as global temperatures rise, public concern about the environment appears to fall .... Recent polls tell us that the environment has slipped in the rankings of public concerns ....

“In reviewing these old clippings, I was struck by how many new problems — acid rain, global warming and zebra mussels, for example — have overtaken us since 1970 even before we could resolve such older issues as water pollution and the loss of species and ecosystems....

“Earth Day is a nag of an anniversary, and it should be, Ohio University geographer Frank Bernard said in 1995. It should be an opportunity, he said, to ‘take stock of how far we’ve come, and what we’ve got to do.’”

Ü LOUISVILLE COURIER-JOURNAL (News story), “LG&E’s Role in Earth Day Upsets Some; ‘Clean Energy’ Theme Shunned in Louisville”

“What do you get when a local power company that burns mostly coal takes the lead in sponsoring Earth Day?

“Louisville’s Earth Day, some environmentalists say.

“The city has eschewed the international theme of ‘Clean Energy Now’ for its April 22 event at the Louisville Zoo, opting instead for ‘ROARRR: Reach Out and Rethink and Reduce and Renew’ ....

“The event’s biggest financial contributor is Louisville Gas & Electric Co., which gave $15,000 to help cover zoo admission for the public. An LG&E employee, Linda Nuss, is co-chairwoman of the local event.”

Ü NEWSWEEK (News story), “The Battle for Planet Earth”

“Individual actions on behalf of the environment pale beside the actions of big business and big government ....

“No matter how many of us switched from aerosols to roll-ons, the CFCs that powered spray cans continued destroying the ozone layer — until the manufacture and use of these chemicals began to be phased out worldwide by the 1987 international agreement know as the Montreal Protocol. Millions of us might walk to the mailbox rather than drive, but the effect on emissions of the greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide (which comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas) is minuscule compared with the effect of more than 68 million SUVs on American roads.

“None of this is to say that individual decisions do not matter. They do: the lemming-like movement from cars to SUVs has resulted in some 200 million more tons of carbon-dioxide emissions every year than if everyone had stayed with his nice little Taurus. But individuals can exert a greater force for environmental good by pressuring corporations and governments than by lecturing their Navigator-driving friends.”

Ü NEW YORK TIMES (Editorial), “The Earth Day Challenge”

“Today, on the 30th anniversary of the first Earth Day, there is much to celebrate and much to remind us of the unfinished business of protecting the planet. While the job of cleaning the water, air and land continues, the world must begin tackling the less visible threat of global warming, an issue largely unknown 30 years ago ....

“Unlike polluted air and contaminated water, global warming is not a local problem that can be seen or felt. But its impact on every region on earth could be devastating ....

“Curbing these gases requires intensive energy conservation and the promotion of cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind power. The political and economic hurdles are substantial, both in this country and abroad. They can be overcome if the public is educated about the importance of this issue.”

Ü NEW YORK TIMES (News story), “Peaceful, Easy Feeling Imbues 30th Earth Day”

“Under the banner of clean energy, Earth Day participants today celebrated in the nation’s capital and at thousands of events around the globe in an extravaganza of entertainment, advocacy and politics.

“Environmentalists and supporters participated in events in 183 countries for the 30th Earth Day ....

“Today’s celebration in Washington, called EarthFair 2000, was not politically diverse. The speakers who accepted invitations tended to be Democratic and liberal.”

Ü ORLANDO SENTINEL (Editorial), “Maintain Earth Vigilance”

“Millions of Americans today will celebrate the nation’s abundance of natural resources, rallying to protect those resources from conspicuous consumption and benign neglect.

“From revamping growth-management laws to approving a finance plan for Everglades restoration, environmentalists have their work cut out for them. For example:

“Everglades restoration: Most everyone now understands the need to reclaim the Everglades, to restore the ecosystem, ....

“Growth management: There’s no point in changing growth-management rules until everyone — property owners, environmentalists, local government officials and so on — understand what’s wrong and coalesce around a plan to fix those problems.”

Ü ST. PETERSBURG TIMES (Column by Jeanne Malmgren), “Save the Earth, Blah, Blah, Blah”

“Earth Day, the event that stirred the passions of the socially responsible set during the days of fringe vests and peace signs, now inspires a collective yawn.

“Earth Day, once a big deal, is now a big yawn. It has slipped from a national passion to a gratuitous once-a-year observation, like National Day Care Worker Appreciation Week and National Pecan Pie Day ....

“Earth Day No. 1 was a wake-up call for the environment.

“Today, we need a wake-up call for Earth Day.”

Ü SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (News story), “Earth Day Report Card — We Still Care, Sort Of”

“An entire generation has grown up since the first Earth Day in 1970 — an entire generation that has never known civic life without green activism, without corporate slogans professing environmentally friendly intentions, without donnybrooks on both Capitol Hill and the streets over everything from clean air to logging.

“While generally committed to environmental protection, Americans are seemingly not too alarmed about the long-term implications of global warming, overpopulation and resource depletion ....

“So how is the world doing, 30 years after Earth Day One? ...

“David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club: ‘I’d like to paraphrase Tom Hayden here: All I’ve done in my career is slow the rate at which things get worse. Basically, that’s all the environmental movement has done during the past 30 years ....”

Ü TIME (Entire Special Issue), “How To Save the Earth”

(To Our Readers) “This Earth Day 2000 edition is more special than most. It is the first global special edition — the first published by every one of our regional magazines around the world. And what topic could be more deserving of global treatment? When it comes to the environment, we’re all in this together.”

(News story) “For more than 40 years, earth has been sending out distress signals. At first they were subtle, like the thin shells of bald-eagle eggs that cracked because they were laced with DDT. Then the signs were unmistakable, like the pall of smoke over the Amazon rain forest, where farmers and ranchers set fires to clear land....

“What will it take for us to get serious about saving our environment? When will environmentalism move from being a philosophy promoted by a passionate minority to a way of life that governs mainstream behavior and policy?”

Ü USA TODAY (Editorial), “Hidden Environmental Gains”

“When the first Earth Day was held 30 years ago, the nation had good reason to feel gloomy about the environment .... Today, the gloom still persists .... Yet while there are still plenty of environment problems to tackle, the sour outlook is badly misplaced. Economic progress, it turns out, is not the environment’s worst enemy, and in some cases it is a good friend.

“Environmental activism, begun here 30 years ago, is already entrenched internationally, relying as much on economic leverage as on regulation.

“That suggests that as the nation observes Earth Day this Saturday, it should do so with a smile on its face. Prosperity does not have to come at the expense of a clean planet.”

Ü WALL STREET JOURNAL (Editorial), “Free the Roads”

“Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. The air will fill with speeches against global warming. Yawn. How about an Earth Day speech against a real problem with a real solution, like traffic jams ....

“There is a solution: targeted construction projects on the nation’s worst highway bottlenecks.

“There are 166 of them, according to a study by Cambridge Systematics for the American Highway Users Alliance. They found that smoothing traffic flow at those chokepoints would help avoid 287,000 auto accidents over the next two decades and lower carbon dioxide emissions on vehicles traveling through the bottlenecks.”

Ü WASHINGTON POST (News story), “Earth Day: From Radical to Mainstream”

“The ‘Ag-Earth Day’ celebration held on the Mall for the last 10 days includes the usual eco-fare: lectures about owls, booths on recycling and a place where children can decorate their own Earth Day grocery bags.

“But the event — sponsored by the Department of Agriculture and dozens of farm groups and agri-businesses — also features a slate of rather surprising participants, among them, Monsanto Co., the Fertilizer Institute and the American Forest and Paper Association ....

“Earth Day, in other words, has become a bona fide mainstream extravaganza, underscoring how issues considered radical just a generation ago now enjoy widespread — even global — support ....

“But Earth Day has also become a powerful marketing tool for companies that drill for oil, manufacture chemicals and build cars — many of which have launched aggressive advertising and public relations campaigns portraying themselves as stewards of the environment.”

Ü WASHINGTON POST (News graphic), “Earth Day at 30"

“After the first Earth Day was held 30 years ago in 1970, the federal government created the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress subsequently passed a series of laws aimed at protecting the environment. While the United States still faces many important ecological issues, the nation’s environment has benefitted, according to a number of key measures.”

Thirty years after the first Earth Day, it is appropriate to pause and savor the accomplishments of the Environmental Revolution. And of the journalists who helped spark its many successes.

These successes involved a good deal more, even, than the well-known improvements in protecting air, water, land, and wildlife. For this revolution has changed dramatically our ideas about what we value. It has transformed the way we analyze problems. And it has pried open our government to far greater scrutiny. It is these three sociopolitical transformations that have given environmentalism its deepest inherent strength.

As to values, citizens have a far greater appreciation of the many amenities that fall under the rubric “quality of life” — landscapes, wilderness, wildlife, space, serenity. Moreover, we have a greater reverence for the value of human life and human health (as in safeguarding from smog a community’s most sensitive people), and for healthy communities (as in refraining from ramming a four-lane highway through an urban neighborhood).

When it comes to solving problems, environmentalists have pushed analysts to extend their intellectual grasp. Planners and officials are apt to better appreciate that many actions — building highways, filling wetlands, killing of species — are largely irreversible. It is now a commonplace that officials are required, under the National Environmental Protection Act, to lay out the alternatives to any action, even the previously heretical alternative of doing nothing.

Environmentalists have insisted on more long-term, or futuristic, analyses — typically as an antidote to short-term economic considerations. They also have promoted the study of “worst-case scenarios.” The shopworn technique of building waterway projects to withstand 100-year floods has been shattered, notably by the 225-year flood that devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1997.

We tend to overlook the fact that these and other naturally progressive environmental concepts are by their nature very conservative.

Now there is a far deeper understanding that most of life’s components are interconnected, including not only the ecological but economic and social, and that multidisciplinary analysis is important. We realize, as well, the many ways in which individuals (or nations) acting in their own self-interest can bring tragedy to the “commons.”

Pressures built up during the “Environmental Revolution” have transformed — to a significant degree, at least — the way many economic analyses are performed. More fully recognized are the invalidating weaknesses in traditional economic calculations like the Gross National Product or the typical cost-benefit analysis. These have long minimized or excluded values that cannot be expressed in monetary terms — such as protection of a forest to mitigate flood damage or retain biodiversity.

Now we have reached the point of attaching dollar values to the mere existences of a wilderness or recreation area for people who never even expect to go there. In its fight with Exxon over the huge Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, the State of Alaska commissioned a study to determine how many dollars Americans would be willing to pay to avert another such accident — even if they never expected to visit the area.

Finally, environmentalism has brought us a more enlightened mode of governance — more information, more openness, more accountability. Environmental activists and lawyers have pushed hard and successfully to make our democracy a less concentrated, close-to-the-vest operation. For we now have environmental impact statements, more (and fairer) public hearings, more open meetings, more Freedom of Information Act releases, and more citizens empowered to bring lawsuits — which themselves produce valuable information.

Also courtesy of environmentalism, we have enacted various right-to-know laws for consumers and communities.

The combined effect of all these pervasive changes in our political conduct is truly revolutionary. Obviously, much remains to be done, and everyone knows efforts to roll back environmental accomplishments never cease. Still, journalists and others are entitled to reflect with satisfaction on the striking historical progress. m

Rice Odell, former editor of the Conservation Foundation Letter, has written extensively on the environment, including Environmental Awakening and A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations.

GIS. If you are an environmental journalist, more than likely you’ve encountered these three letters within the last year or two. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many state environmental agencies are now using GIS to store information, such as the location of chemical plants, Superfund sites, or public drinking water supply wells. GIS, or geographical information systems, is a computer-based method for displaying geographically-based data on a map.

But the real power of GIS, especially for journalists, is the ability to perform what would have been impossible or, at the very least, time consuming analysis by layering different types of data.

For example, let’s say you want to do an analysis of the threat to drinking wells of the gasoline additive MTBE. The first step would be to get a database of the location of leaking underground storage tanks in your state listed by address or geographical coordinates. You would also need to obtain a database of the location of all public water supply wells. With GIS, you could easily layer the two databases and find wells that are within one kilometer of a leaking underground storage tank. The U.S. Geological Survey actually did an analysis like this using GIS. It was published in the May 1, 2000, issue of Environmental Science & Technology/News. For more information, visit: http://sd.water.usgs.gov/nawqa/vocns/.

With GIS, you can also layer environmental data, such as location of toxic release inventory facilities, with demographic data, such as U.S. Census Bureau tracts or blocks. With these two layers, you could quickly determine if TRI facilities are concentrated in lower income neighborhoods. One of the first projects I did using GIS was EPA’s cumulative exposure project, which estimated the airborne concentration of more than 100 toxic chemicals in every census tract in the country. The database for New Jersey had more than 100 columns and nearly 2,000 rows of numbers. Without GIS, there would have been no way to tell this story. But with GIS, I was able to calculate the cancer risk in each census tract for each chemical and display it on a map of New Jersey. The map clearly showed what the database of numbers never could: the urbanized parts of the state had a higher cancer risk, sometimes hundreds of times higher, than the rural areas. The story can be read on the Internet at: http://www.bergen.com/special/breathe/breathe.htm.

One of the drawbacks to GIS is that there is a steep learning curve. I took two courses at a local college that cost $1,200. It’s also necessary to be proficient in spreadsheet and database software.

Another drawback is that the software is expensive. The software I use, ArcView by ESRI (http://www.esri.com), cost more than $1,000, although the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting (http://www.nicar.org) has worked out a deal with ESRI to provide one copy of ArcView to news organizations at a discount. Other software packages are available, including, MapInfo by Map Info Corp. (http://www.mapinfo.com/), GeoMedia by Intergraph (http://www.intergraph.com), and Autodesk World by Autodesk (http://www.autodesk.com), but they are just as expensive.

If you are willing to make an investment in time and money, you’ll find it is well worth it. Once you begin using GIS, you’ll wonder how you ever functioned without this powerful tool.

Bruno Tedeschi is deputy chief of the Bergen Record’s State House bureau. Contact him at: Bruno Tedeschi, State House Bureau, The Record, P.O. Box 21, Trenton, NJ 08625; Phone, (609) 292-5159; Fax (609) 984-1888; tedeschi@bergen.com; http://www.bergen.com.

Tedeschi will participate in a panel on GIS and environmental journalism being sponsored by the Environmental Health Center, publisher of Environment Writer and the Radio & Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF) as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual meeting this fall at Michigan State University. Future issues of EW will provide additional details on the panel and on potential applications of GIS software in environmental reporting.

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