It's time to finally state the obvious – what we as environmental journalists are doing isn't working.

We generally cover this beat because we think the issues are important. Not important to us alone, but to others as well. Dirty water and stinking air affect everyone equally. Acid rain in our lakes hurts all those who use them or rely on them for drinking water. Let's face it – by shining light onto environmental issues, we sometimes accomplish something significant.

Yet despite our best efforts, all our work combined is no more than a drop in the news bucket.

That's because most media provide little coverage of environmental issues. The numbers don't lie – environmental coverage rarely rises above about two percent of total news coverage in television, and it's not much better for print.

We recognize this, and try to get our bosses to do more, cover more. But it never seems to happen.

Sure, there are exceptions. 1989 was a great year for environmental coverage, thanks to the Alar scare and the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. 2005 was a banner year because of Hurricane Katrina. But this level of coverage does not represent a watershed in environmental coverage. Rather, they are the outliers. They exist not so much because of the importance of the issues themselves, as for the fact that they involved major crises. After all, the media love crises – the more damage, the greater numbers of dead, the better. A good crisis, bosses believe, sells papers and brings eyeballs to the newscasts.

The environment deserves more than a crisis level of coverage. Yet when you remove the crisis coverage, the total amount of environmental news drops back to our normal, miserable levels.

After Katrina hit, many in the journalism industry predicted a watershed had been reached for environmental coverage. Such a tragic event, the view went, would finally engage the public, and more importantly our bosses, in a more sustained discussion of environmental issues. Now it's clear that isn't happening, any more than it did after Love Canal, Three Mile Island, or even the Exxon Valdez.

Yet we continue to grasp at each little up-tick in coverage, no matter how small, and point to it as if it were a seismic shift in awareness on the part of our bosses. When that up-tick fades, as it inevitably will because it's based not on substance, but rather crisis, we then wait for another crisis to come along to get a new fix.

Much of the blame for this state is ours. We worry that our bosses hate environmental issues, so we spend too much time trying to convince them that environmental stories are anything but environmentally related. Rather, it's a business story, or a health story – anything but the dreaded E word.

While it's worthwhile to get a story on here and another there, and anything that allows that to happen is fair game, such efforts do nothing long-term to encourage a consistently high level of environmental coverage. Instead, they serve to ghettoize the stories.

Because we rarely make a case for the intrinsic worth of environmental stories, our bosses rarely think of them as worthy. So the cycle continues – we pretend it's a sports story, and they pretend we're fulltime environmental reporters.

The problem is, we never build a base of support for our work when we are constantly disguising these significant issues as something else.

So it's time for a drastic change, and that change must start with us. We need to do more than discover new tricks to fool our bosses. We need to stand up and be counted. We need to show our bosses that viewers want this information – and they do. Studies show people want more environmental news than business, politics and even sports coverage.

And most of all, we need to teach our bosses why these stories are important. Shower them with studies. Show them the research. Explain why your entire audience needs clean air and water.

And don't give up. We know how important these stories are. It's time our bosses do too. What we're currently doing just isn't working. So it's time for some tough love, strong research and a major education program, before it's too late.