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?

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.

Peter Sandman’s idea that risk is equal to hazard plus outrage is widely accepted by professional risk communicators. Hazard is defined as the actual technical risk or probability of something happening and outrage is the public’s fear, concern, or anger over the possibility of something happening. Often the disasters that are most likely to happen (the most hazardous) have the lowest public outrage. Car accidents are a classic example. Most people do not fear getting in a car accident because it is a familiar, everyday occurrence. Comparatively, more people do fear plane crashes, even though the probability is far less of that happening. Both chapters touch on the idea of irrationality and the idea that communities are more irrational than a technical assessment of risk. I don’t see how you can argue with that. People are not always rational when it comes to the safety of themselves and their families. Those same scientists who are rational in a laboratory or while writing a technical assessment of risk, may be the same people who are irrational when their own child is in danger. Just because the public’s fears and outrage is not always rational does not mean it should be discounted. Different communities have different values and different risk communication needs, but they should not be left out.

Risk communication is easiest when hazard and outrage match up – either both high or both low. If both are low, the only risk communication that is needed amounts to public relations. If both are high, usually in the middle or immediate aftermath of a true disaster, risk communicators have a ready and willing audience. People are scared and looking for direction. Risk communication becomes more difficult when there is a high hazard, but people are not concerned because unconcerned people will not pay attention to your precautionary efforts. It is extremely difficult when the hazard is low, but outrage is high. Once people are riled up about something, it is very difficult to convince them that their fears or anger is unfounded.

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.

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?

Social biases seem to have found their way from the cultural sphere into the realm of science. Issues with gender and racial biases have been raised by several scientists and people who study science, several of them quoted by Gregory and Miller. Feminists speaking out against bias in science have claimed a belief that the scientific method should be strong enough to keep social bias out of the laboratory. I found an interesting connection between a point found in our reading a few weeks ago, when we talked about how nature is not political and has no agenda. It just is. The distinction between nature and science is critical, because science can be political and can have an agenda. Although science can be used to study nature, scientists bring their culture and biases into the science they produce.

Another interesting distinction was made in chapter 3 between science and the environmental movement. To some of us who are studying what we call “environmental science” the two  may seem intertwined. However, Gregory and Miller explain an interesting conflict between scientific attitudes which further the domination of nature and the environmental movement. I found this intriguing because as an environmental science student, my idea of scientific knowledge is that is should be used to protect and restore the environment. When I think of some of the main issues facing the environment today, I find that many of these were also caused by advances in science and technology. This revelation only underlines what incredible power science has had in the formation of the world we know today and how important it is that science be utilized in a responsible way for our future.

In chapter 4, Gregory and Miller explore why science is popularized and for who and what reasons. What we expect from scientists when it comes to communicating is not clear to us or to them. It is clear however, that when scientists do their science in public, it looks very different from when they do it in the laboratory. Scientists do not communicate to the public in the same way they communicate with eachother in technical and peer reviewed journals. I agree with others who have seen this as an elitist view, with scientists on the top of the knowledge scale and most of the general public at the bottom. I also see the need for a different kind of communication. I regularly need to read scientific journals, some which are not necessarily in my field. Articles can be long, difficult to understand, and can be extremely dry and hard to read. Many people in the general public would not have the patience to make it through a thirty page article. What most people want is a summary of the conclusions and perhaps a short explanation of how the study was conducted. If they desire to find out more about the science, then they can look up more information. I think people should have access to information that is pertinent to them, but it is not necessary for all the information to be in the mass media. As we’ve talked about in class, there is just so much information available that it is very easy to become overwhelmed with too much to process.

The trust issue in public understanding and popular science is key. I believe the amount of trust the public has in science is an everchanging thing. There have been varying degrees of trust in government science as administrations change. Many people are wary of science that comes from large corporations and are more likely to believe in science that comes from universities.

Questions:

How much of an impact do television programs depicting paranormal or science related fields make on the public perception of science?

To what degree does the public REALLY want to know about science? How do we decide what science they need to know about and what they don’t?

Once the public knew more about what was going on with federal agencies and what was going on with corporations in their own communities, they were ready to share their opinions about it all. The key arena for public comment and participation in federal agencies’ business is through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA was passed in 1970 and requires all federal agencies to complete an environmental impact statement before moving forward with any “major” project. What “major” means exactly continues to be a source of discussion and debate. Throughout the EIS process, there are several opportunities for the public to make comments on draft publications and on proposed and alternative actions. The success of NEPA is debated, but it is clear that the public does take advantage of the opportunity to make comments on federal actions, as demonstrated by the example of the Clinton administration’s roadless rule.

A really interesting component to environmental communication and citizens’ involvement in the government’s environmental affairs is the right to sue. Standing has been awarded to environmental groups suing corporations and the government for failure to comply with environmental protection laws. One of the most interesting cases (in my estimation) is that of the Sierra Club v. Morton. In the original case, the Sierra Club lost its case because it did not allege that any of its members would be injured directly by the proposed actions. Although the court acknowledged an injury in fact, it recognized that the Sierra Club was not a true adversary. The Sierra Club immediately revised its suit and was successful once it claimed that its members would suffer an injury in fact after the project was completed. One of the most environmentally minded Supreme Court dissents was written in response to the first suit. Justice William O. Douglas argued that even trees should have standing in a court of law. He argued that people and groups should be able to file a suit in a court on behalf of trees or perhaps a beautiful valley. The Court’s liberal definition of standing would be beneficial for environmental efforts until the 1990s.

The 1990s brought more conservative views and decisions from the Supreme Court concerning environmental issues. With the fear of terrorism high in 2001, the Homeland Security Act was passed and was one of the few laws to actually limit the public’s right to know. Information is power and the government decided that limiting information to citizens was better than giving information to terrorists that could be used against America’s interests. At the time, Americans seemed more than willing to give up what they perceived a smaller freedom to maintain their safety. It is unclear how these laws and regulations may change in the future.

There has been a recent movement towards collaboration rather than controversy in environmental issues, especially in communities. By utilizing citizens advisory committees, natural resource partnerships, and community-based collaborations, more useful work can be done and less time will be spent arguing (theoretically). I think some controversy is important in any issue, just to be sure that a group is considering all angles of the issue and recognizing various viewpoints from the community. It would be unwise not to include a representative from all groups of stakeholders in deliberation about an issue or project. Having citizens, government agencies, and scientists work together has resulted in many successful partnerships. Examples of these types of partnerships include many of the local watershed groups in southeast Ohio. By having everyone at the table, it is easier to identify problems and solve them. There still will be disagreements, but with a spirit of collaboration, it is easier to muddle through and come up with a solution that is acceptable to almost everyone at the table.

Questions: Is consensus or compromise really possible when considering hot issues like logging, drilling, and forest conservation?

How do we navigate between the rights of citizens to investigate local companies and plants and the community’s overall safety from dangers like terrorism?

Nature inspires such a range of responses from the public, but ultimately Cox says that nature is “ethically and politically silent.”  Take a moment to digest the true meaning of that statement. Nature itself has no political agenda, no party affiliation, not even a moral code. Later in chapter 2, Cox notes that through environmental communication, humans infuse nature or parts of nature with significance. Humans add abstractions like politics and ethics to the equation.

A few months ago, Dr. Lonnie Thompson visited Ohio University and lectured about his work studying ice cores. Dr. Thompson runs the Byrd Polar Research Center at the Ohio State University and has spent his career studying ice core samples taken from around the world. After acknowledging that global climate change is a politically charged issue, he left his audience with his own perspective on the science. His message was this: Ice has no political agenda. Ice is not Republican or Democrat. Ice either melts or it freezes. And for Lonnie Thompson, the truth is that the ice he’s been studying for thirty years is melting. In his experience, the ice cores don’t lie. This idea is pivotal when considering environmental communication, because what is important is the real truth of the science, not the political bent that humans might attach to it.

Cox discusses the idea of the public sphere. Particularly in science and environmental writing, it is important to differentiate between the public sphere, the technical sphere, and the personal sphere. Some fear that the public sphere is declining and will lose importance to the technical and personal spheres. This idea of the “public sphere” deserves some thought and discussion. He uses the Greeks’ agoras, or everyday meeting spaces as an example. That idea made me think of what geographers term “third places” – places besides home and work where people spend significant amounts of their life.  General consensus among researchers studying third places is that the number of them is declining. People are becoming more isolated and no longer spend their time afterwork in neighborhood coffee shops, diners, and taverns, but go home and spend more time in their own isolated space. Perhaps people spend more time on the internet conversing with strangers around the world than they do talking to their neighbors about local issues.  This is something else to think about when considering the importance of environmental communication.  Where are people getting most of their environmental information?  What is the public sphere and how has it changed with new technologies?

Hancock likens the writing process to painting a room. Most of the time, the painting preparation takes more time than the actual painting. You have to tape the windows, cover the floor, patch holes, etc. Once you actually begin painting, the job goes quickly and you won’t have to clean up a big mess because you were well prepared. Writing is the same way. The preparation (thinking) takes far longer than the actual act of writing. If it doesn’t, you may have quite a mess to clean up in many drafts.

I loved her discussion about making a plan before you start writing. Her instructions to at least type in some sort of head, subhead, and ideas for the opener, closer, and middle were refreshing. I vividly recall my eighth grade English teacher’s obsession with five paragraph essays and her insistence that we write a rough outline, a revised outline, two rough drafts, and then finally, finally a final copy. I did exactly what Hancock mentions in her chapter – I wrote my final paper first and then dumbed it down for the rough drafts and wrote my outlines last. It was refreshing to me for her to acknowledge that not everyone will write with a detailed outline and that is ok.

In chapters five and six, Hancock offers suggestions on what she calls the nitty gritty of writing and refining drafts. As a newcomer to journalism, I was encouraged because several of her suggestions were things I already do in writing research papers. Perhaps my writing habits will result in better beginning articles than I anticipated! I utilize what Hancock calls the “bone heap” and tend to agree with her adage that if you’re doubtful or iffy about something you should generally throw it out. Seldom does anything find its way out of my bone heap.

Hancock continues to reiterate the importance of considering the reader each step of the way. Even during your final reviews of your draft, you should continue asking yourself if you’re saying what you really want to tell the reader. It is important to remember that your article is a fluid, changing entity. The opener you started with may have been excellent, but if your writing has travelled to a completely unanticipated closing, your opener may have lost its shine. You also must be certain you properly closed the article and did not just stop writing because you were tired or anxious to be finished. While refining  your drafts, you should consider the differences between speech and the written word. It is critical that you clean up your prose, throwing out garbage words, unnecessary words, and redundancy.

Hancock ends her book with the answers to every new writer’s first question: what happens if I get stuck? As an editor to young writers, I imagine she was asked this question many times. She reminds you to take good care of yourself and accept that you may not be able to continue quality writing if you are too tired, hungry, or feeling sick. She recommends trying to salvage good parts and reorganizing paragraphs that seem beyond repair. If you’ve lost the reader or are bored yourself, you need to find more information that will connect the dots or reignite your excitement for the subject.

After reading Hancock’s guidebook, I do find myself with a bit more confidence to try my hand at science journalism. I appreciated Hancock’s frank suggestions and her realistic examples in the second half of the book. I imagine that I might look back and find some gems of advice in her book once I really do get stuck on my first story.

Questions: I was intrigued by Hancock’s description about writing with a shape in mind. My question is this: does anyone in our class actually use this method and what shapes do you use? How do you decide your audience and how do you decide what they need from you as far as explanation, etc?

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.