Make no mistake -- the environment is a hot topic in the media today.
The Wall Street Journal earlier this month unveiled its new environmental blog Environment Capital. Last month, Columbia Journal Review launched The Observatory, focused on critiquing the press coverage of science and the environment. And late last year, The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media began as an online publication to link the various players involved with the climate change dialogue.
Meanwhile, magazines as wide-ranging as Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit and Sports Illustrated have published "green" issues, while green advertising has spread to companies like Diesel, which advertised last year's spring/summer collection as "global warming ready."
A major question being asked now in many newsrooms and offices is whether this coverage of sustainable issues is itself sustainable, according to Curtis Brainard, staff writer at CJR.
"That's really the $50 million question. It's what a lot of science and environmental writers are asking themselves," Brainard said.
Answering that question involves looking at where the shift happened first, in the media or in public opinion, a circular thought process with no definitive answer.
But it can be instructive in understanding the underlining forces that have led to such a dramatic change in the way the public views an issue and the way the media covers it.
As society has been flooded by various publications addressing climate, the type of coverage has shifted, according to Bud Ward, an independent freelance writer and editor of The Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.
"An important transition is that there is now less of an emphasis on earth sciences and more emphasis on 'solutions' to the climate change issue," Ward said. "The public wants to know what we as individuals and communities can do."
Brainard agreed, saying the media now contains more consumer-oriented journalism that moves away from the question of climate science and focuses on green living, including "news you can use" stories about how to live green.
"It's the low-hanging fruit, the easy things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint," Brainard said.
The release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report in November 2007 (Greenwire, Nov. 16, 2007) was a watershed moment, after which the news angle shifted away from the science toward the bigger social focus of mitigation and adaptation solutions, Brainard said.
"That report really got a lot of people thinking," he said. "It was so conclusive, with so much certainty behind it that it really changed the way people were looking at the problem."
The result was a fundamental shift in how the media thought about environmental issues, and in particular climate change, Ward said.
In the past, the media focused on "balanced" stories, where journalists sought to balance scientific expertise, represented by the IPCC, with much smaller climate change skeptics. As the scientific community became more certain in its evidence and evaluation of global warming, the media began to recognize what Ward calls the two areas of settled science: that the Earth is warming and that humans are playing a significant role in that warming.
Laying the groundwork
By the time the IPCC released the report, several key events had already come into play, laying the groundwork for the shift in focus.
The devastating consequences of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast in 2005 brought the threat of global climate change into focus for many people, Ward and Brainard agree, although both caution that no one extreme weather event can ever definitely be attributed to global warming.
"There is absolutely no doubt that Katrina was a seminal event in American opinion," Ward said.
Then, in 2006, a group of major corporations, including Alcoa Inc., General Electric Co., DuPont Co. and Duke Energy Corp., formed a coalition with environmental groups to call for a firm nationwide limit on carbon dioxide emissions that would lead to reductions of 10 percent to 30 percent over the next 15 years.
This group, called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, received broad media coverage and highlighted a change that was taking place in American society, filling the gap stemming from the federal government's reluctance to take up the issue.
"The group's formation shows the unity that is emerging on climate change between some of the country's biggest manufacturers and its most influential environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council," the Wall Street Journal reported.
Brainard said once major companies began to offer products that emphasized sustainability and ecofriendly qualities, the effect began to filter down into the lives of the average consumer.
Small indicators
Around the same time, magazines and newspapers began to pick up on the trend, with "green" issues, increased environmental coverage and online sections dedicated to the topic.
Bon Appetit last month came out with its Green Issue: Feel Good Food, which Hugh Garvey, the features editor who helped put together the green package, said was a natural decision since the food industry is so closely linked to sustainable issues.
"We realized finally that mass culture was coinciding with culinary culture, so we thought it was a perfect time to dedicate an entire issue to food that is good for you and good for the world," Garvey said.
He said the "preponderance" of green coverage in the media is a positive shift, especially for lifestyle magazines. "It's refreshing that the media, in particular glossy lifestyle magazines, is engaging directly in accountability and ethical practices," he said. "It puts more journalism back in the glossy magazine coverage, because the back story behind how things are produced gets to a curiosity about the production of products that are in your category.
"In a way, lifestyle media is looking at itself in green issues," Garvey said.
The slew of environmental articles and postings highlights the growing importance of this kind of coverage, Ward said.
"Curtis' new site is an indication, my site is an indication; there are lots of indicators," Ward said. "It's amazing how many entries are now on climate. They're small indicators, but they show where news organizations are spending their increasingly finite resources -- on climate change issues."
For sustainable coverage to continue to be an area of growth, Ward said, it will depend on whether it can expand beyond the science and environment beats into other beats, including finance, international trade, international security, banking and forestry.
"It's in the early stages now," Ward said. "I don't think all other news stories should include a climate change component, but reporters on other beats should know enough to consider if the issue they're covering is affected by climate change. It could happen because newsrooms are competitive, and reporters might see that environmental reporters are getting more air time, so maybe they'll add climate."
Garvey thinks such a merging of topics is bound to happen.
The fact that people are overfishing the oceans, for example, has appeared on the social radar, and has therefore made an impression that cannot easily be wiped away. "Once you have food consumers asking these questions, and restaurants and the media asking them, I don't think it's a dialogue you can suddenly drop," he said. "What's at stake is huge, and of such significant concerns that I don't think we can collectively forget them. Editors might say, 'OK, now we've done the green issue, we can't do that again,' but we're going to see that 'sustainability' and 'green' are increasingly being built into other categories."
Brainard said regardless of how far into the future climate change remains a hot topic, the question of energy is not likely to fade away.
"In some ways I believe we're just at the very beginning of an energy revolution that is going to be akin to the Industrial Revolution of the late 20th century," Brainard said. "We're finally waking up as a global society to the need to find more sustainable ways to power our energy-hungry lifestyles."
"Climate is definitely still pushing this, but my hope is that even if climate doesn't end up amounting to the kind of catastrophe that's been predicted, people will still see the need to revolutionize the way we handle energy because we do have depleting coal, oil and fossil fuel resources," he added.
Brainard pointed to the ongoing drive to transform the energy market, as companies and governments turn more to using solar, wind and wave energy. Because these technologies are still in the beginning stages of full implementation, he said it was hard to imagine what might derail that push, virtually guaranteeing ongoing coverage as the industries mature and take greater hold in the market.
Lurking behind the transformation of the news market is an inherent contradiction though, that Brainard said the "news you can use" angle glosses over, and is an area the scientific reporting does not really touch.
"We still live in a disposable consumer economy," he said. "Even though products are made to be more recyclable or made with green manufacturing processes, you can only promote green consumerism to a certain point before you start to contradict yourself."
For that reason, Brainard added, the "nuts and bolts" scientific journalism will continue to have a place in today's coverage.World Business Council for Sustainable Development
