"What environmental headline goes here 100 years from now?"

Analyze this, as they say. (Or is it that?)

The headline atop a press advisory from Environmental Media Services, a prominent "green" public relations organization, had the potential to inspire this column, one originally intended to address not just the next 100 years but, you guessed it, the entire next millenium. All 1000 years of it!

Snapshots from the Final U.S. News & World Report
of the 20th Century

U.S. Population 1900: 75,994,575 2000: 273,482,000 Deaths from Industrial Accidents 1900: 35,000 2000: 6,100 Cigarettes Produced 1900: 4 billion 2000: 720 billion Farm Population 1900: 29,875,000 2000: 4,600,000 Registered Passenger Autos 1900: 8,000 2000: 130 million Highway Fatalities 1900: 36 per 100 million miles 2000: 1.64 per 100 million miles Homes w/ Electricity 1900: 8 percent 2000: 99.9 percent Average Household Size 1900: 4.76 persons 2000: 2.62 persons Life Expectancy 1900: 46.3 years (M), 48.3 (F) 2000: 73.6 years (M), 70.7 (F)

Urban vs. Rural 1999: 40 % urban, 60 % rural 2000: 75 % urban, 25 % rural Los Angeles Population 1990: 102,479 2000: 3.8 million Daily Newspapers 1900: 2,226 2000:1,489 Number of Farms 1900: 5,740,000 2000: 2,191,510 Cars Produced in U.S. 1900: 5,000 2000: 5.5 million Miles of Paved Road 1900: 10 2000: 4 million Voter Turnout 1900: 73.7 percent 2000: 48.9 percent Number of Bison 1900: 400 2000: 200,000 Cancer Deaths 1900: 64 per 100,000 2000: 200 per 100,000

Here's a better idea. You write it. But before you do. Think back.

Where were you, let's say, 10 years ago, when the Internet and the Web were nowhere on most radar screens, when mouse generally referred to a rodent smaller and less officious than a rat. When the Net was lower case and not the name of a movie, and when it dealt not with surfing but more likely with fishing. As too did “on line,” back then two words. The words “mouse” and “pad” seldom appeared together. And “Yahoo!” was yodeled in campus stadiums and field houses after a score, … not in Wall Street brokerage houses after another run of the bulls.

Go back further. Where were you in 1980, when Superfund was passed into law? When the term endocrine disrupters was unknown, the term greenhouse had a positive connotation, and “GM” stood for General Motors, and not for genetically modified?

Step back still more. Let’s say to 1970, the proverbial dawn of the modern environmental era with the first Earth Day and passage of the seminal National Environmental Policy Act and the landmark Clean Air Act? Pre-federal environmental regulation, for all practical purposes. A time when “Cisco” conjured up thoughts of “Kid” and perhaps of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Not of networking a la what is now, incredibly, the world’s fifth largest corporation by market value? (FIFTH IN THE WORLD!)

Exxon and Mobil were competitors, not complicitors.

So why be daunted by the notion of musing on 2100’s first official environmental headline? (Will they still call them that, “headlines”?)

Why not go all out … speculate on Y3K and the then-air quality of what certainly they’ll still be calling Youngstown and Morgantown? The fate of post-nuclear-era Paducahns? A cleansed Chernobyl? The population of dynamics of sprawl in the 29th century? The nature of the independent news media and the iron curtain between business and editorial? (Will there be any left?)

Pause a moment.

A series of snapshots from the final U.S. News & World Report of the 20th century offers a compelling image of change (see box).

Where are we going, where have we been? Information, and humans’ thirst for it, certainly will survive, so long, alas, as they [we] do. But will independent journalism, as we currently know [or at least still remember] it?

The environment will be here, will survive in one form or another. At least we must assume so. Perhaps even in much better overall shape. Oh, really?, one might legitimately wonder.

A’changin,’ the times they sure are, we will have been told what by then will be some eight-to-twelve generations ago, (depending, of course, on the life expectancy of we Homo sapiens that far out).

Reporters – some of your very own great-great-great-great-great-great-greats – may be recording it, come that very day, January 1, 3000.

And some may even look back at the quality of what you write this week and next as the “instant history” that will help define where they take it from there.

Things will change. For sure. The only certainty is that honest and accurate information — honestly and fairly communicated — will still be a vital component of it all.

And for all time.

News Analysis

Environmental journalists enter the 21st century with a beat that faces major questions and challenges in newsrooms across the country even while the issues they cover have become firmly entrenched throughout American society.

Or are the challenges in part because those issues have become so firmly entrenched?

Like their journalism peers in most, if not all, other specialized beats, environmental reporters with mass media news outlets face challenges of an ever-shrinking news hole; increased consolidation of the “business” overall in fewer and fewer ownerships; an uncertain relationship with the Internet, Web, and other communications media; and a sense of the seemingly endless “dumbing down” of the mass media generally.

At the same time, environmental reporters in particular face a series of issues characterized by substantial progress in the United States but also involving profound, if often seemingly remote and distant, continuing challenges. With the Cuyahoga River no longer likely to go afire and air and water cleanups having achieved marked success over the past three decades, the problems and anxieties which in past years helped drive column inches and air time seem to many to be less obvious and more subtle.

Like other domestic issues, environmental protection is cyclical. While the public at large sustains a strong interest in a clean environment, the issue clearly has fallen in recent years as a commanding public interest. At least for the time being.

Make no mistake about it here: The condition of your audiences’ rivers and clean air, parents’ interest in safe drinking water for their children and families, and support for the generalities of national parks and vibrant forests remain strong and abiding. An issue among the bottom top-dozen in one year can easily rise to the top three in succeeding years, based on events.

The next “live at five” Chernobyl, Times Beach, or Bhopal could easily boost both public interest and that of scores of editors. (That, it appears, is what it may take in our and others’ societies.)

But the rise and fall of editors’ appetites for environmental coverage – theoretically at least and we like still to think a reflection of audiences’ real hungers – is but one of the myriad challenges journalists should be contemplating as they now ponder the future of the environmental beat.

Few among them would seriously argue that environmental issues indeed were “the story of the decade,” as they were being told at the beginning of the decade now behind us. And most with an ounce of experience and a smidgen of healthy skepticsm will be loathe to swallow whole predictions of their now becoming “the issue of the century.” Remember, alas, the airtime-eating potential of an unforeseen Monica or O.J., let alone of dozens more pressing problems.

As the century turns, few can now foresee the “end” of clean air, clean rivers, safe drinking water, energy efficiency, and cleanup of waste sites as subjects of legitimate and frequent news coverage. The expanding notion of environmental coverage as clearly going beyond traditional “pollution control” issues – to include things now umbrealla-ed under urban sprawl, genetically modified organisms, children’s health, and long-term sustainability – is tantamount, of sorts, to a form of continued job security for environmental reporters.

How tomorrow’s editors and reporters handle the increasingly demanding responsibilities of reporting efficaciously on these complex matters will help determine the health of the beat down the road.

Bad guys. And good guys. Deep corporate pockets. And white hats. They too are changing and changing radically.

Get over it: There still are scads, and always will be, of corporate renegades and recalcitrants and just plain blow-hards.

But the fact is – and, one hopes, will be – that pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later environmental consciousness has set in for real in more than a few corporate boardrooms, particularly among, let’s call them, the Fortune 1000. Targets still of environmentalists’ bashing and also of reporters’ legitimate exposes? No question. But the differences – the sinking in, over the past century, of environmentalism as part of the social fabric and, therefore, of the corporate board room ethic – can’t be overlooked as a factor in shaping environmental news of the first decade of the century. And beyond.

Think just of this: A recent Business Week instructs that the fifth largest corporation in the world by market value – in the world! – is Cisco Systems. Whooda thunk? How many of you soothsayers called that one right a decade ago, let alone ten decades ago? How many of you (or is it them?) foresaw just three decades ago that 80 percent of the Fortune 500 no longer would be among that count just 30 years later?

The future. Environment will be an essential – indeed a critical and compelling – component of it. Arguably a, the, driving one in many cases.

So too will informed, independent, and authoritative reporting and analysis on it.

Beyond that, the crystal ball gets less precise. Even less.

In 1980 – before the ozone hole, the Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, or Chernobyl – the Council on Environmental Quality and the State Department wrote The Global 2000 Report to the President to study the “probable changes in the world’s population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.”

Its oft-quoted first paragraph rallied both sides of the environmental debate, and prompted critics to attack what they called the “doom and gloom” approach to natural resource management:

“If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.”

The report details projections that “depict conditions that are likely to develop if there are no changes in public policies, institutions, or rates of technological advance, and if there are no wars or major disruptions.”

How accurate were those projections? Here are some of The Global 2000 Report’s projections, forecasts, and predictions, for all to judge for themselves.

PROJECTIONS

“The world’s population will grow from 4 billion in 1975 to 6.35 billion in 2000, an increase of more than 50 percent. The rate of growth will slow only marginally, from 1.8 percent a year to 1.7 percent .... Most of the population growth will occur in the less developed countries rather than in the industrialized countries.”

“By 2000, Mexico City is projected to have more than 30 million people .... Calcutta will approach 20 million. Greater Bombay, Greater Cairo, Jakarta, and Seoul are all expected to be in the 15-20 million range, and 400 cities will have passed the million mark.”

“In the years ahead, lack of food for the urban poor, lack of jobs, and increasing illness and misery may slow the growth of less developed country cities and alter the trend.”

Food:

“Assuming no deterioration in climate or weather, food production is projected to be 90 percent higher in 2000 than in 1970.”

“Land under cultivation is projected to increase only 4 percent by 2000 because most good land is already being cultivated .... Because of this tightening land constraint, food production is not likely to increase fast enough to meet rising demands unless world agriculture becomes significantly more dependent on petroleum and petroleum-related inputs.”

“The United States is expected to continue its role as the world’s principal food exporter. Moreover, as the year 2000 approaches and more marginal, weather-sensitive lands are brought into production around the world, the United States is likely to become even more of a residual world supplier than today; that is, U.S. producers will be responding to widening, weather-related swings in world production and foreign demand.”

Fisheries:

“The world harvest is expected to rise little, if at all, by the year 2000 .... On a per capita basis, fish may well contribute less to the world’s nutrition in 2000 than today.”

Forests:

“If present trends continue, both forest cover and growing stocks of commercial-size wood in the less developed regions (Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania) will decline 40 percent by 2000 .... Deforestation is projected to continue until about 2020, when the total world forest area will stabilize at about 1.8 billion hectares. Most of the loss will occur in the tropical forests of the developing world .... By 2020, virtually all of the physically accessible forest in the less developed countries is expected to have been cut.”

“The real prices of wood products – fuelwood, sawn lumber, wood panels, paper, wood-based chemicals, and so on – are expected to rise considerably as GNP (and thus also demand) rises and world supplies tighten.”

Energy:

“Engineering and geological considerations suggest that world petroleum production will peak before the end of the century. Political and economic decisions in the OPEC countries could cause oil production to level off even before technological constraints come into play.”

“World energy demand is projected to increase 58 percent, reaching 384 quads (quadrillion British thermal unites) by 1990. Nuclear and hydro sources (primarily nuclear) increase most rapidly (226 percent by 1990), followed by oil (58 percent), natural gas (43 percent), and coal (13 percent). Oil is projected to remain the world’s leading energy source, providing 46-47 percent of the world’s total energy through the 1975-1990 period. The energy projections indicate that there is considerable potential for reductions in energy consumption.”

“Per capita energy consumption is projected to increase everywhere. The largest increase – 72 percent over the 1975-90 period – is in industrialized countries other than the United States.”

“DOE is now able to project supply and demand for an additional five years, to 1995 .... Coal is projected to provide a somewhat larger share of the total energy supply .... The higher oil prices will encourage the adoption of alternative fuels and technologies, including solar technology and conservation measures.”

Water:

“Regional water shortages and deterioration of water quality, already serious in many parts of the world, are likely to become worse by 2000 .... Population growth alone will cause demands for water at least to double relative to 1971 in nearly half the countries of the world.”

“It is known that several nations in these areas [Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America] will be approaching their maximum developable water supply by 2000, and that it will be quite expensive to develop the water remaining .... In the industrialized countries competition among different uses of water – for increasing food production, new energy systems (such as production of synthetic fuels from coal and shale), increasing power generation, expanding food production, and increasing needs of other industry – will aggravate water shortages in many areas.”

ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

“Perhaps the most serious environmental development will be an accelerating deterioration and loss of the resources essential for agriculture. This overall development includes soil erosion; loss of nutrients and compaction of soils; increasing salinization of both irrigated land and water used for irrigation; loss of high-quality cropland to urban development; crop damage due to increasing air and water pollution; extinction of local and wild crop strains needed by plant breeders for improving cultivated varieties; and more frequent and more severe regional water shortages.”

“The rising yields assumed by the Global 2000 food projections depend on wider adoption of existing high-yield agricultural technology and on accelerating use of fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and herbicides .... A rapid escalation of fossil fuel prices or a sudden interruption of supply could severely disturb world agricultural production, raise food prices, and deprive larger numbers of people of adequate food. As agriculture becomes still more dependent on energy-intensive inputs, the potential for disruption will be even greater.”

On Water:

“Water pollution from heavy application of pesticides will cause increasing difficulties .... Pesticide use in less developed countries is expected to at least quadruple over the 1975-2000 period (a sixfold increase is possible if recent rates of increase continue).”

“Virtually all of the Global 2000 Study’s projections point to increasing destruction or pollution of coastal ecosystems, a resource on which the commercially important fisheries of the world heavily depend .... Rapidly expanding cities and industry are likely to claim coastal wetland areas for development; and increasing coastal pollution from agriculture, industry, logging, water resources development, energy systems, and coastal communities is anticipated in many areas.”

On Forests:

“If present trends continue, forests in these regions [South Asia, the Amazon basin, and central Africa] will be reduced by about half in 2000, and erosion, siltation, and erratic streamflows will seriously affect food production.”

On Atmosphere and Climate:

“Despite recent progress in reducing various types of air pollution in many industrialized countries, air quality there is likely to worsen as increased amounts of fossil fuels, especially coal, are burned. Emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides are particularly troubling because they combine with water vapor in the atmosphere to form acid rain or produce other acid deposition.”

“Rising CO2 concentrations are of concern because of their potential for causing a warming of the earth. Scientific opinion differs on the possible consequences, but a widely held view is that highly disruptive effects on world agriculture could occur before the middle of the twenty-first century. The CO2 content of the world’s atmosphere has increased about 15 percent in the last century and by 2000 is expected to be nearly a third higher than preindustrial levels.”

“The ozone layer is being threatened by chlorofluorocarbon emissions from aerosol cans and refrigeration equipment, by nitrous oxide emissions from the denitrification of both organic and inorganic nitrogen fertilizers, and possibly the effects of high-altitude aircraft flights .... The most widely discussed effect of ozone depletion and the resulting increase in ultraviolet light is an increased incidence of skin cancer, but damage to food crops would also be significant and might actually prove to be the most serious ozone related problem.”

On Nuclear Energy:

“The risk of radioactive contamination of the environment due to nuclear power reactor accidents will be increased, as will the potential for proliferation of nuclear weapons .... Nuclear power production will create millions of cubic meters of low-level radioactive wastes, and uranium mining and processing will lead to the production of hundreds of millions of tons of low-level radioactive tailings. It has not yet been demonstrated that all of these high- and low-level wastes from nuclear power production can be safely stored and disposed of without incident.”

On Species Extinction:

“An estimate prepared for the Global 2000 Study suggests that between half a million and 2 million species – 15 to 20 percent of all species on earth – could be extinguished by 2000, mainly because of loss of wild habitat but also in part because of pollution .... One-half to two-thirds of the extinctions projected to occur by 2000 will result from the clearing or degradation of tropical forests. Insect, other invertebrate, and plant species – many of them unclassified and unexamined by scientists – will account for most of the losses.”

“At present 274 freshwater vertebrate taxa are threatened with extinction, and by the year 2000, many may have been lost. Some of the most important genetic losses will involve the extinction not of species but of subspecies and varieties of cereal grains.”

ENTERING THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

“There will be fewer resources to go around .... Over just the 1975-2000 period, the world’s remaining petroleum resources per capita can be expected to decline by at least 50 percent. Over the same period, world per capita water supplies will decline by 35 percent because of greater population alone .... The world’s per capita growing stock of wood is projected to be 47 percent lower in 2000 than in 1978 ....

“By 2000, 40 percent of the forests still remaining in the less developed countries in 1978 will have been razed. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will be nearly one-third higher than preindustrial levels. Soil erosion will have removed, on the average, several inches of soil from croplands all over the world. Desertification (including salinization) may have claimed a significant fraction of the world’s rangeland and cropland. Over little more than two decades, 15-20 percent of the earth’s total species of plants and animals will have become extinct – a loss of at least 500,000 species ....

“The world will be more vulnerable both to natural disaster and to disruptions from human causes. Most nations are likely to be still more dependent on foreign sources of energy in 2000 than they are today. Food production will be more vulnerable to disruptions of fossil fuel energy supplies and to weather fluctuations as cultivation expands to more marginal areas ...

“The full effects of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, depletion of stratospheric ozone, deterioration of soils, increasing introduction of complex persistent toxic chemicals into the environment, and massive extinction of species may not occur until well after 2000. Yet once such global environmental problems are in motion they are very difficult to reverse. In fact, few if any of the problems addressed in the Global 2000 Study are amendable to quick technological or policy fixes; rather, they are inextricably mixed with the world’s most perplexing social and economic problems.”

A search of the Pulitzer Prize Archives brought up these environmental stories.

Year	Category	Author(s)	Publication/Work	Explanation
1941	Public Service		St. Louis Post-Dispatch	For its successful campaign against the city smoke nuisance.
1967	Public Service		The Milwaukee Journal	For its successful campaign to stiffen the law against water pollution in Wisconsin, a notable advance in the national effort for the conservation of natural resources.
1967	Public Service		The Louisville Courier-Journal	For its successful campaign to control the Kentucky strip mining industry, a notable advance in the national effort for the conservation of natural resources.
1969	National Reporting	Robert Cahn	The Christian Science Monitor	For his inquiry into the future of our national parks and the methods that may help to preserve them.
1971	Public Service		The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal and Sentinel	For coverage of environmental problems, as exemplified by a successful campaign to block strip mining operation that would have caused irreparable damage to the hill country of northwest North Carolina.
1979	National Reporting	James Risser	The Des Moines Register	For a series on farming damage to the environment.
1980	Local General Spot News Reporting	The Staff of the Inquirer	The Philadelphia Inquirer	For coverage of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.
1990	Public Service		The Washington (NC) Daily News	For revealing that the city's water supply was contaminated with carcinogens, a problem that the local government had neither disclosed nor corrected over a period of eight years.
1992	Public Service		The Sacramento (CA) Bee	For "The Sierra in Peril," reporting by Tom Knudson that examined environmental threats and damage to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
1993	Explanatory Journalism	Mike Toner	The Atlanta Journal Constitution	For "When Bugs Bite Back," a series that explored the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics and pesticides.
1994	National Reporting	Eileen Welsome	The Albuquerque Tribune	For stories that related the experiences of Americans who had been used unknowingly in government radiation experiments nearly 50 years ago.
1996	Public Service		The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC	For the work of Melanie Sill, Pat Stith and Joby Warrick on the environmental and health risks of waste disposal systems used in North Carolina's growing hog industry.
1996	Editorial Writing	Robert B. Semple, Jr.	The New York Times	For his editorials on environmental issues.
1997	Public Service		The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, LA	For its comprehensive series analyzing the conditions that threaten the world's supply of fish.
1998	Investigative Reporting	Gary Cohn, Will England	The Baltimore Sun	For the compelling series on the international shipbreaking industry that revealed the dangers posed to workers and the environment when discarded ships are dismantled.

Whatever Happened to ... Coal leasing Sick building syndrome Eating lower on the food chain Acid rain Electromagnetic fields Tropical forests Spotted owls Composting Rechargeable batteries Solar power Noise Control Act Prevention of Significant Deterioration under the Clean Air Act Making EPA a Cabinet department Citizens’ suits Regulatory negotiation Rita Lavelle Depoliticization of environmental issues Cloth diapers The garbage/landfill crisis Energy audits CAFÉ standards Compact fluorescent lightbulbs Carpooling

Issues That Won’t Go Away Reauthorization of Endangered Species Act Reauthorization of Superfund El Niño Nonpoint source pollution Reorganizing government agencies Legislative riders Stricter standards under the Clean Air Act Invasive species Opposition to climate change treaties Gas guzzling vehicles U.S. dependence on oil How much “right to know” is right? Corporate polluters Styrofoam packing peanuts Flea collars

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