Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Andrew Revkin is one of America’s most honored and experienced environmental journalists and the founding director of the new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
But I feel like this story is really the story of our lifetime and our planet. It’s the story that crosses every boundary that we humans have artificially put upon the world. Anybody who can be engaged in dealing with it, on any level, should do that. And so, being a journalist, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell these stories.
What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it? That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change.
With political strife and economic woes often taking precedence over environmental issues, what are environmental journalists in the developing world doing to get their messages heard?
How can reporting on energy, presented as opportunity or catastrophic risk, compete against grumpy cat memes and economic woes? Is there a secret to breaking through the flood of information to make a meaningful impression on the public?
We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a journalism of collapse.
Environmental journalists are like doctors. Doctors run from patient to patient, harried, dealing with symptoms more than causes. They’re too busy dispensing pills to talk about holistic health. It’s an approach that makes money for the health industry but isn’t so great for public health.
