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Last fall, the press was glowing from the accolades its post-Katrina news coverage had earned, but the editors of Grist, the online environmental magazine, were dissatisfied. They had seen plenty of admirable reporting on the suffering of the poor along the Gulf Coast, and they were glad the environmental roots of the disaster were getting attention. But why, they wondered, were two of the biggest issues raised by the storm — poverty and environmental degradation — being covered as unrelated problems? To them, the hurricane proved the rule: that low-income communities bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of environmental damage. From the power plants and trash heaps of the South Bronx to the noxious industrial chicken and hog farms of the Carolinas, America’s poor are far more likely to live in areas affected by pollution than are the affluent. The poor are also more likely to be exposed to toxins in the workplace, to suffer from asthma and other diseases tied to pollution and, when they complain, to be ignored by local government and businesses.
Chip Giller, Grist’s founder and president, worries that even when reporters take on stories about poverty, they rarely tease out these connections to the environment. He also thinks that too much environmental reporting is confined to big-picture topics like global warming and species extinction — important concerns, but unrelated to readers’ daily lives. Part of the problem is that pollution and toxic working conditions are just harder topics to pitch. As Giller points out, “These stories aren’t breaking — they tend to ooze.” But the lack of interest, he says, is also because “the environment” has come to mean nature or wilderness rather than people’s immediate surroundings. “We hope that when people think of environmental reporting, what comes to mind wouldn’t simply be salmon protection or fights about national parks,” says Giller. “We’re asking that journalism begin to connect environmentalism back to communities in which people live.”
The attention generated by Katrina spurred the staff at Grist to undertake an ambitious project in hopes of addressing such questions and, ultimately, expanding the very definition of green journalism. For seven weeks, starting in February, the site published “Poverty & the Environment,” a series focusing on the overlooked link between class and environmental damage. Along with stories and interviews, it includes a variety of sidebar features, such as statistics on how the cost of living encourages unhealthy lifestyles, photos of West Virginians affected by mountaintop-removal mining, and historical essays that explore such things as how the movement first got its elitist overtones (it was Teddy Roosevelt’s fault). An audio slide show, narrated by a woman from Columbia, Mississippi, takes readers on a “virtual walking tour” through her low-income African American community, polluted by a chemical plant that once manufactured Agent Orange.
Giller launched Grist (www.grist.org) in 1999 as an e-mail newsletter to a few hundred friends and colleagues, but his sense of humor and his pop-culture sensibility quickly caught on with readers, especially young ones, who were burned out on the dour advocacy of much environmental writing. Despite its growth since then, the site has managed to maintain that irreverence while remaining seriously committed to the environment, a combination that Giller believes has helped Grist appeal to a new generation of environmentalists, one that probably doesn’t read Sierra Magazine or the Greenpeace newsletter. In large part, Grist continues to define itself against the rest of the green press, and is rewarded by a loyal audience — more than a half-million unique visitors a month.
While Grist hopes the series will inform and energize its readership, “Poverty & the Environment” is also aimed at the same media outlets the staff believes routinely underplay the importance of that ampersand. The ambition is not without precedent. In January 2005, Grist launched a smaller series based on an influential essay entitled “The Death of Environmentalism,” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, which argued that the movement must develop new strategies to remain effective in the twenty-first century. When the New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer saw Grist’s coverage of the essay, she gave it 1,500 words and national attention in her paper. It remains to be seen whether “Poverty & the Environment” will garner similar interest in the connection between green streets and greenbacks, but Giller sees hope in the realities of the newsroom. “You can only write so many stories about the rainforest,” he said. “To be able to use real people, it just makes storytelling easier.”
— Kevin Friedl
To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.
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