Covering Earth In The 21st Century

On thethirdpole.net, interested readers can find in-depth discussion and multilingual coverage of the Himalayan Valley watershed. This watershed provides fresh water to nearly 1.3 billion people and the website highlights local political challenges that South Asian countries face regarding the collective management of this precious natural resource alongside detailed, interactive maps that show the distribution of infrastructure and natural landmarks around the eight countries bordering the Hindu Kush Himalayas.  InfoAmazonia covers the endangered Amazon region through a network of organizations, citizens, and professional journalists from nine countries.

The site also aggregates maps and datasets from open-source research and provides the data behind its stories to the public. InfoAmazonia encourages citizen participation and encourages contributions from readers on the front lines of the forest. On Africa’s first investigative environmental journalism platform, Oxpeckers, readers can explore MineAlert which geolocates the distribution of mining and water use licenses across Southern Africa. Using Oxpeckers’ PoachTracker, citizens can track the distribution of rhino deaths since 2010. Oxpeckers has a robust whistleblower’s guide with detailed instructions for sending an encrypted email to the nonprofit or through their partner afriLEAKS. Mongabay is a multinational environmental journalism web site that publishes in nine different languages and has bureaus stationed in India, Latin America, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, but accepts submissions from freelance journalists around the world.

Some have described his website as “the most depressing place on the internet.”

These outlets are not the New York Times. They are not the Washington Post. They are not even National Geographic. At the same time, these 21st century environmental journalism outlets are creating a new ethic around climate and environmental coverage, one which puts the everyday “Earth citizen” at the center of environmental reporting and advocacy. 

In a panel organized by the Center for Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder, Mongabay CEO and founder, Rhett Butler has said that some have described his website as “the most depressing place on the internet.” A sampling of recent headlines on Mongabay include “Makers of Oreos, KitKats among brands linked to Indonesia forest fires” and “Coke is again the biggest culprit behind plastic waste in the Philippines.” An article from November 8 on The Third Pole is titled “Climate refugees stripped of citizenship in Assam.” A recent article in the Mekong Eye, a journalistic platform for discussion of the Mekong area’s environment and development, discussed how saltwater intrusion in Myanmar is causing farmers to uproot their farms and move to higher land due to saltwater contamination of freshwater underground aquifers.

The news found on these transnational, open-access, data-driven and hyperlocal environmental journalism-focused outlets is not pretty. It often shows the visceral details of transnational power grabs which compromise the land of indigenous people, their livelihoods, and the environment overall. At the same time, these news outlets that are exclusively covering climate and the environment transnationally are ushering in a new era of global governance, one which co-opts regular people as citizen watchdogs and covers environmental issues across national borders.

News outlets that are exclusively covering climate and the environment transnationally are ushering in a new era of global governance, one which co-opts regular people as citizen watchdogs and covers environmental issues across national borders.

In Shifting Roles of Science Journalists Covering Climate Change, Brüggemann argues that there are two types of climate journalists: journalists who cover climate change issues intermittently as beat reporters and journalists who focus on the topic exclusively and direct regional coverage. Mongobay and other outlets like it demonstrate that publications themselves are starting to separate according to this distinction given the difficulty traditional news outlets have covering environmental news.

Environmental hotspots such as the Indus Valley region, the Amazon rainforest, and the tropical Andes cross national borders, but news outlets are often confined by country, city, or state. Transnational environmental journalism networks are therefore better-tailored to cover the environmental hotspots. They also represent the perspectives of indigenous people who may not be represented under current state and municipal divisions. While traditional media outlets are making an effort to feature climate change and environmental issues in their regular coverage, efforts are often transient and sustained coverage is difficult. While the Covering Climate Now (CCN) initiative coordinated by the Columbia Journalism Review brought hundreds of newsrooms together to cover the environment and reached over a billion people, this spike was not sustained beyond the week it was planned for. Covering climate and the environment requires a continuous, unique form of vigilance which goes beyond specific climate events, and even coordinated “climate pushes” like the CCN may not be providing useful environmental journalism. 

Transnational environmental journalism networks are better-tailored to cover the environmental hotspots themselves and also represent the perspectives of indigenous people who may not be represented adequately under current state and municipal divisions.

Today’s newest environmental journalism platforms are demonstrating that they are up for the task. Many are cleaning up and hosting public datasets of the regions that they cover. They are licensing their material under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND international license which allows other publications to republish their work at no cost. Others are developing and publishing educational tools and workshops to help existing climate journalists become familiar with an issue that they have never covered. Some publications work with translators to ensure articles are available in many languages. Mongobay created an open-access academic journal and prepared material for elementary school classrooms to learn about the environment.

Clearly these new outlets are not only providing more continuous coverage but also creating a new journalistic ethic that emphasizes global citizenship and creates opportunities for disseminating environmental awareness in novel ways. We should be elevating and highlighting their coverage in our own environmental advocacy rather than depending on traditional news outlets.