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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (April 21, 2020)
A4 THE ASTORIAN • TuESdAy, ApRIl 21, 2020 OPINION editor@dailyastorian.com KARI BORGEN publisher DERRICK DePLEDGE Editor Founded in 1873 JEREMY FELDMAN Circulation Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN production Manager CARL EARL Systems Manager CLIMATE CHANGED Making climate change understandable T he brutal coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that we live in an interconnected world. When things go haywire in some small place, its repercussions can soon be felt on the other side of the globe. So it is with our climate. The dryland wheat fields of Umatilla County connect to the roiling sea at the Columbia Bar, Mount Bachelor’s snowy slopes connect to the Painted Hills, the alpine meadows of the Wallowas connect to the Amazon rainforest and the Australian outback. Climate is a world- wide phenomenon — too large to easily compre- hend. Yet, it is as local as TIM your backyard garden, TRAINOR as intimate as the air you breathe. For decades, it has been difficult for media organizations to connect global cli- mate implications to local lives. We’re just not designed for it. For plenty of good reasons, newspa- pers focus on what occurred today and what you need to know to get through tomorrow: how the Senate voted, how the judge ruled, who won the big game. The daily temperature increasing steadily, but at a relatively unnoticeable amount from day to day, rarely met the newsworthiness requirements to make the front page. That means we’ve been ill-equipped to cover per- haps the biggest story cur- rently pulsing through our planet: the consistent creep of a changing climate. That change has mas- sive implications for our daily lives. The world around us is increasingly hostile to human life — a petri dish capable of mov- ing a deadly virus across the world in a few months, with unnatural forests sit- ting a lightning strike away from inferno, levees straining against 100-year floods each spring, air so foul it is taking years off our lives. The systems of agriculture, infrastruc- ture and technology that undergird civi- lization are at risk. And that’s front page news. Hailey Hoffman/The Astorian Waves roll in along the beach at Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton. Rising sea levels are among the concerns with climate change. Yet, this change has manifested in dribs and drabs. For most people, it won’t be noticeable — it won’t be real — until they see it in their garden or feel it in their lungs. EO Media Group, imperfect though it may be, is well organized to attempt to stitch the local impacts to you and your community into a wider story of the region and the world. We have done it before, to acclaim. In 2007, our organiza- tion won the prestigious Grantham Prize for Excel- lence in Reporting on the Environment. That proj- ect included traditional, local reporting on cli- mate change by our news- rooms — from the sandy spit of Long Beach, Washington, to the dry pine forests of John Day. It offered views on the issue from diverse peo- ple in diverse locations. We shared the diverse demands those people made on their water, soil and air. Placing disparate stories alongside one other in 2007 helped readers get a sense of climate change in a new way. By watching people deal with different issues in different communities, readers were able to see the larger context of cli- mate at play. This year, we’re embarking on a sim- ilar project. Climate issues have changed dramatically in the intervening 13 years, so we’re looking back on what has changed, we’re looking at the facts on the ground now and we’re looking ahead to what is still to come. It’s not the most opportune time. COVID-19 has devastated the world economy and the local news ecosys- tem has been no exception. Many people are out of work, out of the office, out of daily routine. But for a project like this, our cur- rent moment has its benefits. We can now clearly see the invisible threads that connect the world. If airplane traffic can clearly help spread a virus, we now understand that it can also spread pollu- tion that affects Northwest communities — even if the flight was between Dubai and Tokyo. We now see clearly that it costs lives to ignore, downplay and be ill-prepared for a disaster that science tells us is approaching. Despite the constraints in our world and in our newsrooms, we’re moving forward with this important work. In The Astorian — and EO Media Group papers like it — you’ll see stories written by your local reporters about climate issues in your community. And you’ll see reporting from other locations — places you’ve visited, places where you have family, places you haven’t heard of. We have no desire to make this polit- ical. And, while our reporting will be backed by science, we’re not going to inundate you with data. We will cover climate change like we would cover every other local issue: We’ll talk to your neighbors and rep- resentatives about what they are doing about it, we’ll get advice from local experts, and we’ll tease out the impacts on local industry and community life. Our goal is to make climate change understandable and approachable. We want it to be an issue that you can get your head around and do something about. Tim Trainor is the former news edi- tor of the East Oregonian. He is oversee- ing EO Media Group’s Climate Changed series. WRITER’S NOTEBOOK Climate series was landmark journalism T he most remarkable element about EO Media Group’s climate series was the timing. Planning began in April 2005. That’s 15 years ago. This was way, way, before climate change was a fashionable topic. This was years before carbon offsets or cap and trade became loaded buzzwords in politi- cal and economic discourse. No one was running for president with climate as their single issue. Heck, the delightfully blunt Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was just 2 years old. And former Vice President Al Gore’s influential movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was still a year away. Yet Steve Forrester, then editor and publisher of The Astorian, gath- ered his senior staff from around the company in a conference room and PATRICK announced, “We are going WEBB to do a series on the most important issue facing the world.” Some newsroom leaders in that room, perhaps most, literally did not know what he would say next. His exact words are not recorded, but the emphasis was clear. The Northwest’s climate was changing. There is clear evi- dence. Because of this, our newsgathering forces are going to be harnessed and cover the issue. Two agricultural economists were brought in to address an early planning session. Their expertise from Oregon State University and the University of Califor- nia, Davis added significant validity to our direction. Extraordinary It became clear early on there was a stumbling block. Human-caused global warming was not considered a fact. Instead, it was a political issue. Human impacts — basically rampant industrialism and polluting vehicle fumes — were in dispute, contested by advocates who chose instead to point to evidence that climate patterns are cyclical. For many of us, it is hard to imag- ine that all the cars clogging Portland or Seattle and the belching smokestacks of coal-powered industrial plants are not doing something detrimental to our envi- ronment, and the air we breathe. But in this context, the chief executive officer for our company made an extraor- dinary statement. In my 40 years of jour- nalism, I will admit that I found it the most arrogant-sounding statement ever made by a colleague in the zillions of hours I have spent in workplace meetings. “Let’s not focus on the naysayers,” said former news executive John Perry. “It is clear our climate is changing. Let’s report that.” Basically, he was offering permis- sion to ignore them. Perry, now retired from our company, may not have realized it at the time, but his simple statement saved the entire report- ing team hours and provided the focus we needed. Unlike the Woodward-Bernstein stories on Watergate in the Washington Post, Perry gave us permission not to add an obligatory “insert denial” before the fifth paragraph of every story. This morphed into a policy: We would always always use the words “climate change” and never “global warming,” unless it was in a direct quote from a sci- entist or other source. That may seem a cosmetic difference, then and now, but for us it was important. Perry’s statement was the second big- gest reason the series was completed so smoothly. At conferences of journalists a couple of years later, I was asked how our company pulled it off. Most environmen- tal journalists were still pressuring their editors to allow them to report on climate change, often with a considerable amount of pushback because it was unproven or just plain dull. The single-most important was Forrest- er’s zeal for the topic. We were not going to fail. designers and two logo creators. It ran in our daily newspapers in Astoria and Pendleton, the Capital Press, which is our regional farm weekly based in Salem, and three weekly newspapers, the Chinook Observer in Long Beach, Washington, the Blue Mountain Eagle in John Day and the Wallowa County Chieftain in Enterprise. I was put in charge by Forrester’s deceptively simple statement, “We’ll fun- nel the copy through Patrick.” It proved the largest and most reward- ing project of my journalism career. I have a reasonable aptitude for organizing, so we divided up the assignments and began our research. Some talented writers took part, including Astorian environmental writer Cassandra Profita, who later moved to Oregon Public Broadcasting. Laura Sellers and Crindalyn Lyster were very import- ant in the online presentation of all this important work. The series was published in 10 parts in The Astorian, with packages running on consecutive editions in March, September and December 2006. The other papers ran it in similar groupings; the weekly papers ran their own pieces and condensed ver- sions of the rest as space allowed. Our series logo was “Our Climate is Changing — ready or not.” At least one of our sister publications redesigned it to remove the “ready” part. It would earn awards from the Soci- ety of Professional Journalists, the Ore- gon Newspaper Publishers Association and the annual Dolly Connelly Award for Northwest environmental reporting. Most significantly, it earned an award of merit in the annual Grantham Prize for Excel- lence in Reporting on the Environment. This was presented by the Metcalf Insti- tute for Marine and Environmental Report- ing at the University of Rhode Island, an achievement that earned us national atten- tion. As a sidelight, the Los Angeles Times package that won that year’s top prize highlighted the amount of plastic clogging the world’s oceans. That was prescient, too. Important The series roped in 22 writers, seven photographers, seven editors, six page Zealot To me, it began just as a professional project; the content itself was not a cause célèbre. The first story packages of the series were already published when I read a book on the flight home from a rugby tourna- ment in Canada. It was young adult fiction called “On Thin Ice” about diminishing polar bear habitat, written by environmen- tal author Jamie Bastedo. I devoured its 345 pages in two sittings and would rec- ommend it to anyone, including climate science skeptics. The book warns about warming trends through the eyes of a pre- cocious teenage girl in Canada’s farthest north village. I flew home to Astoria as a climate change zealot, then spent the balance of the year cracking the whip to get the job done. Gore’s movie was released midyear, and although criticized it moved the issue onto everyone’s radar. I was very satisfied with the proj- ect. Collecting the awards our team won helped make 2007 one of the best years of my life. But our reader response was one of widespread gratitude, which is perhaps more important. One of the most popu- lar elements was the cameos of scientists, designed to put a personal face on local people doing climate research. Do I regret not mentioning the naysay- ers? No. It certainly made the work eas- ier. We have been proved prescient. In the interim, legitimate media outlets around the world have changed their published style from “global warming skeptics” to “climate science deniers.” Our December package that concluded the series was preceded by a public debate in Salem featuring skeptics that my former colleague Elaine Shein covered. It wasn’t designed to be part of the series, but it proved useful in helping to announce the final portion was about to be published. Fourteen years after we published the series, our 2006 logo asks a question that is still relevant today. “Our Climate is Changing — ready or not.” And I stand behind the decision not the have the draft of every story contain the words “insert denial.” patrick Webb is a former managing edi- tor of The Astorian.
