The Media, Nature...and Ultrarunning

Just got the Oct/Nov issue of National Wildlife, the magazine of the National Wildlife Federation.  I love this simple magazine--it's full of photos, great articles, plus hard-hitting editorial positions.

The latest is another Lawrence Schweiger essay (he's president and CEO of the NWF) that is spot-on.  He takes on the national media in What's Not Making the News.

The key point here for us is how the national media somehow has lost its tradition of diligent journalism.  Let's see Schweiger's words [I added the bolding]:

Given the intense competition, broadcast news content skews toward then interests of big advertisers, reflecting a diminished sensitivity to environmental issues that threaten wildlife, such as pollution, climate change and habitat destruction. We hear a lot on the news about massive drought, record-breaking floods and other extreme weather around the world, but we hear little about the causes of those extremes because special-interest advertisements dominate the airwaves and stifle the newsrooms.  How can we learn about the threats to nature when the media often is allergic to the subject?

That's one of my pet peeves about the network news, which I still am in the habit of watching.  So often I see an environmental story about something happening, but I wait in vain for the other shoe to drop...i.e., the WHY? of the story.  Is there a reason, is there a cause-and-effect explanation?

If there is, we frequently are not told about it, I believe, for the reasons Schweiger cites: the networks just don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

Which is not journalism.

The connection to Ultrarunning should be obvious.  We, more than most, are connected in a very physical and visceral way to the natural world. What happens to the natural environment happens to us.  We need to know the cause-and-effect, the ultimate causation, not just the proximate causation, so that we can take appropriate steps if we are so inclined.

Mississippi's Pascagoula River

I love the National Wildlife Federation.  I have not done research into nature groups, and maybe (I honestly don't know) there are other organizations that are better, more effective, etc., but I always get a wealth of knowledge and information from their monthly magazine.

For example, many people would not know this, from the Aug/Sep issue of National Wildlife (also for the photo credit).  I sure didn't:

Southern Mississippi's Pascagoula River starts with the wedding of the Chickasawhay and Leaf Rivers near the former timber town of Merrill and cuts lazy S-curves through verdant forests, swamps and floodplains to the Gulf of Mexico. It is 80 miles long and drains a watershed the size of Vermont.


In a 1994 study of rivers in the northern third of the world, the journal Science identified this undammed, unlevied, undredged vestige as the largest free-flowing river system in the lower 48 states. Naturalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson, who grew up in nearby Mobile, Alabama, says places like the Pascagoula "are the closest thing the south-eastern United States has to wilderness."

That is one interesting factoid, that every other river of any significance in North America, has been either dammed or levied or dredged.  Kinda sad, that civilization has progressed (?) so far.

The concern of the NWF is that:

...the Pascagoula is threatened by a proposed Strategic Petroleum Reserve depot, a proposed port expansion, periodic dam proposals and the prospect that large timber tracts will be subdivided once the real-estate market rebounds.

This is why contributing to such groups, who can serve as a focused advocate for conservation, is such an important thing, even as many of us have tightened our belts thru these tough economic times.