Robert Cox hit on one of the key issues in environmental justice when he asked “Whose environment? Whose voice?” Who does the mainstream environmental movement respresent and whose interests do they bring to the table? The early environmental movement in the United States focused on saving special places, places that were unique in their wilness, geology, or biology. We wanted to fight for places like the Grand Canyon or Hetch Hetchy, places that epitomized the beauty of the environment. But what exactly is the environment? Is it a pop-culture idea of something out there, needing to be saved by humans? Is it a word, like nature, that has acquired a connotation or has somehow separated itself from its true meaning?

Surely my childhood home in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio couldn’t be part of the environment. Right? Or the General Motors plant where my Dad went to work as an engineer everyday for 30 years… that’s certainly not part of the environment, right? Same with inner city areas covered in pavement where the only green space comes in vacant lots. These places are part of the city, part of the human experience, not the environment. WRONG!

Robert Cox tells us this is a very limited view of the environment. By thinking in these terms, we assume a separation of the social from the ecological. When low income communities began questioning this definition, they rocked the very foundation of the environmental movement. These groups wanted to fight not to save a far off forest or mountain, but to save their own backyards and neighborhoods from toxic chemicals and pollution. An expanded definition of environment was neeeded. The environment is anywhere where people live, work, learn, worship, or play.

The heart of the matter is that the environment is all-consuming. We can’t escape the environment or try to outsmart it by “hiding” waste somewhere. We can try to fool the public, but we can’t fool the earth. We can’t section off parcels of land on a map and designate some of it “environment” and some of it not. There is no place on earth that is not part of the environment, so there is no place on earth where toxic chemicals and pollution could not be an issue of environmental concern.

Earlier in the quarter, we spent some time talking about the externalization of costs to produce cheaper goods in the world market. We talked about how environmental impacts were part of this externalization. Impacts to people in low income communities or communities of color often fall into this externalization as well. Environmental justice is where the two come together, to fight both environmental degradation and the marginalization of a certain community of people.

Communities fighting for environmental justice have been made sacrifice zones. They absorb the brunt of the bad environmental impacts, but most of the time any positive impacts g, economic or otherwise, go elsewhere. Bullard said these communities already have more than their share of environmental problems and polluting industries and they are still attracting more. Appalachia is a perfect example of a sacrifice zone and a region where environmental justice fights are being fought everyday. With Appalachia’s history of extractive industries and high poverty, it’s easy to see how the people who live here have been carrying the burdens of the US’s hunger for cheap energy and more of it. With coal mining, the benefits (cheap energy, profits) find their way out of the mountains and to companies and consumers hundreds of miles away. The Appalachian people are left with cracked house foundations, polluted water, stripped mountainsides, and unemployment when the mines leave. Everything has been taken from their region, with very little being input and left there in exchange.We also need to consider environmental justice outside of US borders. We dump our externalities on many developing countries and then often expect them to clean up environmental messes we have forced them to make to keep up in a world economy.

Is there a danger of still excluding certain groups when fighting for environmental justice? (Appalachian region not included in The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit?)

What is the best way to convince government, public that there is an issue with the way things are done and the impacts to a community, without coming off as hysterical housewives?

Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (Chapter 6) and Science in Public (Chapter 7)

Risk Communication

Environmental risks have always been part of the human experience. Early people were certainly ravaged by hurricanes, thunderstorms, fires, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Natural disasters have been a part of life on Earth from its early beginnings. As humans have gotten smarter and smarter, we keep coming up with new technologies that will make our lives better. It never occurred to us that we could be engineering ourselves into a perilous position. Today, the environmental risks that the general public perceives as most risky are human made: chemical pollution, nuclear weapons and energy production, and bioengineering, just to name a few.

A few weeks ago, Andrew Revkin visited our Environmental and Science Journalism class. Revkin has one of the ultimate environmental and science journalism jobs; he covers science for The New York Times and writes the Dot Earth blog on their website. We had a great discussion and Revkin really enjoyed talking about his recent work and how journalism is rapidly changing. We talked a little bit about what that could mean for people like him and us, when we graduate in the coming years. He posed this question: “What is your vision of how the public will track environmental issues and developments in five years?”

Hmmm….. as we’ve seen with the economy, it can be pretty hard to figure out what’s going to happen in the next five months, perhaps even five days, let alone jumping into the future five years. But, judging from recent trends, it’s clear there will be some major changes in the way the public tracks not just environmental issues, but all their news. The decline of traditional print newspapers and the rise of blogs, citizen journalists, and nontraditional communication networks like Facebook and Twitter will continue. It seems inevitable that the public will increasingly get more and more of their science news and information from people who are not professional journalists. It also seems inevitable that the amount of science and environmental news will grow exponentially on the Internet as every Joe and Jane starts writing their own personal blog. While some of these blogs will probably be very well done, my fear is that the public will reach a point where every bit of news they read has their own idealogical slant behind it. Already, with cable news networks, the public can choose what bias they want in their news and mostly chooses to watch the network they agree with, while scoffing at the other.

Blogs are especially interesting to me. The concept of posting comments about a news blog post is something akin to writing a letter to the editor with instant gratification. In some cases, the distinction between author and readers is blurred, as readers become secondary authors, adding information and viewpoints to the original story. To me, this dialogue epitomizes the future of news. No longer does the public just want someone to tell them the news, they apparently want to interact with it.

On the other hand, turning our backs on print newspapers and embracing the Internet will leave many people out. Many people either don’t have access to the Internet or choose not to have access to the Internet. The amount of information on the web is staggering and often difficult to sift through. Journalists in the future will have the important responsibility of helping the public sort through all the information to find what really matters.

Environmental Communication: Media and Environmental Journalism

In this chapter, Robert Cox discusses the importance of mass media on the public’s understanding of environmental issues. At the beginning of the chapter, Cox says that the most important sources of environmental news are mass media outlets. I thought this was an especially interesting comment and chapter because of our current thought assignment from Andrew Revkin. I would bet that most of us wrote about the decline of mass media outlets as sources of environmental and science news in the next five to ten years and the growing importance of what Cox terms “alternative” sources like the internet, blogs, and environmental groups. Environmental news is sometimes difficult to present in the traditional mass media because of its complexity and its often delayed and gradual impacts. I completely agree with this statement, as we are experiencing this while working on our final article project. While Dysart Woods is a worthy topic for our article, we are struggling with how to present the situation now: mining is happening and the impacts will probably be visible in several years, but right now, there is nothing happening in the forest. It is hard to write about what will happen and what did happen when it has already been covered. In the case of most environmental issues, though, the public needs to know what is happening, but often it feels like the same story over and over again.

Science in Public: Media Issues in the Public Understanding of Science (Chapters 5 & 10)

I enjoyed the authors’ discussion about what makes a good science news story. The description of a brand new science discovery that reads like an Indiana Jones adventure may be hard to come by. The nature of science lends itself more to stories about reports being released measuring increment changes in some environmental factor – not exactly sexy stuff.

Journalists have an enormous power (and responsibility) to choose what stories are covered and in what way. As gatekeepers, they determine to a large degree what many people are thinking about. They do not necessarily influence what people think, but what they think about and talk about.  In their last chapter, Gregory and Miller recap the important points they’ve made throughout their book. Again, we come back to the issue of trust and respecting the audience. While trust is an issue for all journalists, I believe it is critically important and hard to establish in science journalism, perhaps because of the complex issues at hand. Not everyone can understand exactly what is going on in the black box and if they don’t trust the person trying to explain it to them, understanding is even more difficult.

Questions: What can journalists do to show their trustworthiness to readers?

What is the mass media’s most important responsibility when dealing with environmental news?

Does the media create controversy when there is scientific consensus?  What types of media might be guilty of this?

Allowing public participation in science is a risky business, according to authors Jane Gregory and Steve Miller. Scientists are separated from the general public by a substantial knowledge gap, creating tension and misunderstanding between the two groups. Typically, interactions between scientists and the public occur with the help of a middleman, often the mass media. Differing views on how much information scientists should share with the public and in what way the information should be delivered has created much debate in the scientific community.

We live in a world of information. During the past fifty years, the amount of information readily accessible to the average person had increased exponentially. With the advent of the internet, information is literally at our fingertips. Even before the mainstream media’s 24 hour news cycle and proliferation of the internet, Americans were privy to more information than many probably realized. The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966 under intensifying public pressure for access to federal documents.  Any American has the right to access documents from all federal agency, except judiciary and Congress. During the 60s and 70s, growing public awareness and concern over environmental problems resulted in many “right to know” and “sunshine” laws, in addition to the FOIA.

Defining environmental communication may not be an easy task. Environmental communication encompasses myriad types of communications and has changed significantly over time. In his book, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, author Robert Cox strives to introduce his readers and students to the ever changing field of environmental communication. He defines environmental communication as “the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world; the symbolic medium that we use in constructing environmental problems and in negotiating society’s different responses to them.”

Science writing is not easy. In chapters 4-7 of her book, Ideas into Words, Elise Hancock makes no bones about it. The process of writing scientific material comes naturally to few. She admits that she, even as a professional writer with many years experience and while writing a book telling other people how to write, had to throw out an entire chapter of the book. I must say I was relieved to hear it. After the first three chapters touting common sense suggestions and ideas, I had a picture in my head of a perfectly simple writing scenario. I knew it couldn’t be so easy. She continues the book by giving more suggestions about how to begin writing and then what to do if you get stuck. By the end of the book, the readers have a much more realistic idea of what their initial writing process will look like.

Ideas into Words (Chapters 1-3)

Elise Hancock, author of Ideas into Words, gifts her readers with a detailed introduction to the world of science writing. Her years of experience serve the writing student well, as she offers a common sensical slant to what initially seems the intimidating task of explaining complex science to the general public. She contends that, with the proper attitude, writers can forget about themselves and focus solely on the reader and the reader’s understanding of the topic at hand.  The relationship between the reader and the writer and the scientist and the writer are key.  The role of the science writer is to artfully serve as the linking bridge between the scientist’s world (the lab) and the reader’s world (real life). She describes science writing as translation, respectfully acknowledging that the scientists and readers do not speak the same language.

The first two chapters of Science in Public delves into the long and interesting history of science journalism.  The authors introduce readers to Herodotus, who became the first science writer in the 5th Century BC. From there, science writing has only become more and more complicated as scientific discoveries reach deeper and deeper into the unknown frontiers of space and the human body. The authors underline the difficulty science writers face and the often tumultuous relationship they have with the public and with scientists. One of the most interesting examples to me came in the very first pages of chapter one when the authors cited a survey study measuring the American public’s scientific knowledge in 1979 and then in 1985. I found the results surprisingly low, but wondered about the context of the survey. Often readers in the general public are smarter than they are given credit for; they simply do not speak in scientific jargon, but understand real-world examples they can observe in their everyday environments.

Between these two sets of readings lies a chasm filled with real life examples of science writing. Is science writing always as easy as Hancock would like us to think? Probably not. However, it may not be as difficult as the Science in Public authors insinuate. Our own experiences in science and environmental writing will probably fall somewhere in the middle of these two representations. The readings complemented eachother in the sense that they showed two sides of the story. Science in Public introduced us to the historical difficulties in presenting science to the general public and Ideas into Words offered a nearly step-by-step guide for success. Hancock’s respresentation of an idealistic, perfect relationship between the scientist, writer, and reader seemed a bit naive to me. As I read her book, I wondered how science writing happens in the real world. I will present a rather harsh point of view in class given by a man who believes the media is providing the public with what he calls “bad science.”  He believes many scientific stories are misrepresented in the media or flat out lies. I’m interested to see what my classmates think about his point of view and what is really going on with science writing in context of the two sets of readings and Bad Science.

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