Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard offers a must-read interview with the NY Times Andrew Revkin, the environment beat's most influential reporter. Revkin has been covering the environment for a quarter century and was recently awarded by Columbia University the prestigious Chancellor Award for sustained career achievement.
At the award ceremony, Revkin asserted again his view that climate change is not the dominant story of our time. Rather, as he puts it, climate change is a symptom of the much bigger challenge of sustainability: coming to terms with explosive population growth and consumer appetite on a planet of finite resources.
In his interview with Brainard, Revkin discussed just how difficult it is for the media to cover the story of sustainability. In fact, he notes that one of the reasons he started the blog Dot Earth at the Times site was to create a news space where the story could be featured and discussed.
CB: Given the lack of public engagement with sustainability issues, would the world have been better off if the media had clued in to the bigger story sooner?
AR: Well, in that sense, I think the media inevitably migrates from theme to theme. That's almost unavoidable. There's interest in the news, and when you have a confluence of events that make something seem important--Katrina, Al Gore's movie, the IPCC reports in 2007, [melting sea ice] in the Arctic--that kind of defines the issue.
So we're always going to be bouncing from one thing to the other, and there's no way for the media to take up the more nuanced issue. In fact, one reason I started Dot Earth is that it's hard to find space in the newspaper for these other issues. Many of them are what I call "slow drips," or "iffy" looming catastrophes. We don't do well with "if" stories and we don't do well with dispersed stories. So the blog created a space to keep sustained focus on them.
The rest of the interview is more than worth reading. On Feb. 10 I will be joining Revkin on a panel at the American Museum of Natural History where I am sure these topics and others will be discussed.
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This is very good. Thanks for the link.
This is what has bugged me for a long time. Most people do not understand growth. Population growth and related resource depletions, to my mind, are THE big issues of the day. Global warming commands attention from the scientific, environmental, and media communities and is somehow seen to supercede almost any other problem. Yet the current human condition is best seen in light long-term population and energy dynamics which are reaching a crisis point (global warming or no global warming). Oil is set to enter its permanent depletion phase, and contrary to what is often cited, coal may not be far behind. However, the scale of our hydrocarbon usage, and the realities underlying substitution, are largely ignored or dismissed. Almost any discussion of population is taboo and issues surrounding fresh water and topsoil are usually mentioned only in the context of the adverse effects of global warming.
Energy issues themselves are almost always framed (if you will) in the context of climate change, not as, well, energy.
Thus, I am disappointed in the scientific community in general, in the environmental community, and by the representation of these issues even on these science blogs. Even the term "sustainability" is so overused that it has lost much of its meaning. We hear things like "sustainable growth." That just means growth.
I think Andy Revkin is a powerful force for good in this world, but there is one fundamental problem with his reasoning: market forces will correct for over-consumption in real time. (Running out of a resource automatically takes it out of the running for everyday consumption.)
This is not, however, the case for climate -- we could put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to doom ourselves to 1,000 years of irreversible climate change and not even feel its effects until 20-100 years later when the ice caps are gone. That's what makes climate change the bigger issue -- the built-in time lag means we could have effectively destroyed our civilization and not know it until it's literally too late.