by Patrick Appel
Climate change is about rapidly accelerating changes in the substrate of modern civilization, the weather patterns and sea levels that have held relatively steady throughout all advanced human development. By its nature, it affects everything that rests on that substrate: agriculture, land use, transportation, energy, politics, behavior … everything. Climate change is not “a story,” but a background condition for all future stories. The idea that it should or could be adequately covered by a subset of “environmental journalists” was always an insane fiction. It is especially insane given the declining numbers who identify themselves as such.
We need to disentangle the fate of environmental journalism from media coverage of climate change. The two need not be connected. The pressing, nay existential imperative to divert from the status quo and radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions is necessarily enmeshed in all major human decisions. And so journalists who cover those decisions, whatever their “beat,” need to understand how climate change, as a background condition, informs or shapes the decisions. In journalism, as in other fields, climate needs to be freed from the “environmental” straightjacket.
The Dish 