With climate change commanding the news spotlight, dominating environmental discourse, you don’t hear much anymore about biodiversity or endangered species, two interconnected issues which, until the last decade or so, had been a focus of many environmental campaigners and widespread media coverage. A case in point: In recent years, the conservation community has been at…Continue Reading…
Environmental journalism, by and large, reflects not just news of the day (and an underlying theme) but also the zeitgeist. For example, when I made ecology my beat in the late 1990s, stories about the biodiversity crisis were prevalent in mainstream media and in environmental magazines–one of which I worked at through most of the…Continue Reading…
In a brilliant essay (PDF), the American geographer D. W. Meinig writes: “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” Meinig’s piece is in a classic 1979 book of essays called, “The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes.” This collection features scholars whose work touches on the human/environment relationship….Continue Reading…
Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity. They recently shared this anecdote: A few years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading ecologist. We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent chance of avoiding a…Continue Reading…
If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on…Continue Reading…
In 2012 Scientific American asked: Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? In case you weren’t aware, wind energy has an ecological downside that’s hasn’t yet been smoothed out. As AP reporter Dina Cappiello wrote earlier this year, “the green industry is allowed to do not so green things”: It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the…Continue Reading…
Being a city boy (for all my adult life), my exposure to agriculture is woefully limited. I’ve parachuted onto actual farms in the Midwest during reporting trips for stories and every year around Halloween my wife and I take our kids to a farm in the outskirts to pick pumpkins, get lost in a corn…Continue Reading…
Have you heard about the big event National Geographic is hosting with TEDx this week, the one about restoring species? No, not endangered species–but ones that are already extinct, like the woolly mammoth. I have mixed feelings about the idea. In the abstract, I think it’s pretty cool. The prospect of regaining lost pieces of…Continue Reading…
As someone who tracks environmental discourse in real time, I find it valuable to step back on occasion and look at how public attitudes are shaped. For that, I depend on the work of scholars. One book from 2008 that I’ve only just read explores how several major contemporary environmental themes have been expressed culturally,…Continue Reading…