Topic Overview II: Basic Issues in Environmental Journalism

Dr. William F. Griswold, Associate Professor, Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, U.S.A.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would first like to thank Drs. Hidalgo, Sarmiento and Becker for the opportunity to be here and to take part in what I know will be a tremendous learning opportunity for me. I would also like to apologize for being unable to communicate these thoughts to you in the language of this region. I've been through 19 years of formal schooling and still can barely manage in one language.

Dr. Becker asked me to prepare some remarks on basic issues in environmental journalism. I certainly can't claim to be an authority on environmental reporting around the world, but I do have some experience with doing environmental reporting, and I have studied the process of environmental mass communication in the United States. So what I'd like to do is to tell you about some of the challenges I know environmental journalists are facing in the United States, and then I'd be very eager to hear from you which of these issues are common to your experiences, and which ones are unique to my country.

I'd like to begin by telling you how I became interested in the study of environmental communication. Shortly after I joined the faculty of the College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, I heard about a program that the University was running, called the Rural Revitalization Initiative. It was a three-year campaign to make the resources of the University available to help with economic development activities in 12 selected rural counties in the state of Georgia. A colleague who is now at Ithaca College, Jill Swenson, and I took on the task of working with the local news media in these areas to try to provide them some of the help they thought they needed to improve their reporting on economic development.

We spent a year conducting focus groups and interviewing the publishers and journalists in those areas, and asking them what they thought their biggest problems were and what they most needed help with. By far the most commonly occurring answer was that they needed help in reporting on environmental problems -- and the specific problem that almost all of them faced was a proposed waste disposal facility. In every county we went to, at least one company had come in and proposed to build and operate either a regional landfill, which would have had household garbage hauled in from big cities like Atlanta, or a biomedical waste incinerator, which would have meant that linens soiled with blood and other body fluids would have been trucked through the community, or a chemical waste storage facility, and so on.

The journalists said these proposals were the hardest things they had to deal with because they found it nearly impossible to answer the questions their readers were asking: Were these proposed facilities safe? Would the claimed economic benefits actually come about? Had the companies making these proposals operated such facilities responsibly in other areas? Was the state or the national government in a position to guarantee the community's safety? These concerns became especially troubling to the journalists when it became known that one of the companies making these proposals was partly owned by one of the largest organized crime cartels in Germany.

When I saw that pattern developing, I thought back on my own days as a reporter and realized that some of the most challenging stories I had done were about environmental issues -- weather and climate changes, oil shortages and rationing, and food supplies, for instance. I've now spent about seven years studying mass media and environmental issues, and I think I've identified a set of four major challenges that environmental journalists face. Two of these challenges involve communicating the relationships of individuals to the environment, and two involve communicating the relationships of organizations and institutions to the environment.

At the individual level, it seems to me that the first challenge for environmental communicators is the challenge of making individuals aware of the problems we all face in maintaining a livable environment. And in the United States at least, this is a challenge that is more difficult that it may seem. It is extremely difficult to persuade some Americans that the very little bit of trash that each person thinks he makes, or the very little bit of hydrocarbons he thinks his car emits into the air, or the very little bit of water he thinks is removed from the water supply when he waters his lawn, can possibly matter in a nation that seems as vast as the United States. To put it differently, there is a psychological disconnect between the immediate personal experiences of individuals and the long-term global consequences that can result from the actions of 6 billion humans. So, the first task facing environmental reporters, I believe, is to find a way to expand the consciousness of individuals beyond the boundaries of their own perceptions. That's a difficult task. In the United States, we lived with pollution for decades before Rachel Carson, in her book "Silent Spring," found a way to show average Americans that the innocent actions of individuals could add up to collective catastrophe.

The second challenge at the individual level, it seems to me, is to try to give individuals the information they need to change their own individual behaviors in ways that do less damage to the environment. In the United States, for instance, that may mean telling people how they can recycle materials that otherwise would go into landfills, or how to use fewer pesticides on lawns and gardens, or how to select automobiles that use less fuel and produce fewer pollutants. In a developing nation, it may mean teaching farming practices that don't require clear-cutting forests. However, there are two major problems that communicators face in trying to do this. The first is that there may not be much good information on the real consequences of various individual behaviors. In the 1960s, for instance, there was a fad in the United States for a "back to the earth" movement that called for doing without electricity, heating one's home with wood, and growing one's own food. It took several years for scientists to demonstrate that under many circumstances a properly built home heated by electricity could actually produce less pollution than even the most efficient wood-burning stove. There have now been enough instances of these about-faces on recommended environmental behaviors so that, in the United States at least, a lot of audience members are leery of anything they're told about how to be environmentally responsible. The second problem with helping people make better environmental choices is that it assumes that there are good environmental choices available. We laugh about people agonizing over the choice of paper or plastic bags, but of course the best choice would be for consumers to buy goods that don't require packaging that must be thrown away at all. But for a variety of reasons, consumers are not offered that choice.

And that brings me to the issue of collective relations. In this area, I would argue that environmental problems will never be solved by individuals alone, but will require action at the organizational and institutional level as well. The simplest way to change individual behaviors, I would suggest, is for legislatures, or regulatory agencies or corporations to change the range of choices available to individuals. In the United States, however, the task of legitimizing and taking seriously collective solutions to problems, particularly those that involve government actions, has become much more difficult in recent decades. We have always mythologized the individual, but now we also demonize government, and the media in American in large part are participating in that process. That is a very different stance than the traditional "watchdog" role ascribed to the media in our system. That role is reformist; it tries to point out abuses and to get them corrected so that the system of government works properly, but it does not argue that the system should be shut down. So, it seems to me that one of the major challenges facing environmental communicators, at least in the United States, is to make it clear that collective solutions to problems are not automatically suspect.

And finally, the last major challenge facing environmental communicators is to expand the range of organizations and institutions that are viewed as legitimate actors in making environmental decisions. Many media scholars argue that the principal function of the media in any society is to legitimize and maintain the power of elites in the social system. The media do that by continually presenting representatives of powerful organizations and institutions as the experts who are competent to make decisions on important matters. But environmental issues have in the past and must continue in the future to give rise to new organizations and institutions that are competitors for power with existing elites. In the United States, examples of these organizations have included the Sierra Club and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which at various times have disputed the authority of corporations and other government agencies, such as highway departments, to make important decisions.

In order for these new players to have a chance to affect decisions about environmental matters, they must be taken seriously by leaders of other organizations and institutions, and that almost always requires that they be presented in the press as serious contenders for power. That means that journalists must find ways to seek out new organizations, and to give their arguments and goals a sympathetic hearing. In the United States, at least, the media have been very good at doing that.

These, then, are what I believe are some of the biggest issues and challenges facing journalists and other environmental communicators in the United States. I know that journalists in other parts of the world share many of them, but probably not all. I look forward to hearing from you what the situation is in Ecuador and other parts of the Andean Region. Thank you again for your attention and for allowing me to take part in this gathering.