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.