Environmental Journalism

A small change occurred last week in the environmental journalism landscape - so small that you wouldn’t even notice.  But it’s worth mentioning, not just because we’re wonks for this sort of news, but because we feel it represents an important shift.

One of our favorite blogs, The New York Times’ “Dot Earth” , is moving to the opinion side of The New York Times this week .  You might remember in January we reported that Andrew Revkin , the primary contributor of Dot Earth, took a buyout from The New York Times after fifteen years on the job as a reporter - another casualty of budget cuts we called it.  He has however continued to maintain the blog, as a freelance blogger, due to what he calls an “unavoidable responsibility of communicators.”

With Dot Earth 2.0, Revkin assures us he won’t suddenly be “revealed as an ardent liberal or conservative” but that he will remain “an advocate, for sure — for reality.”  He also assures us that Dot Earth will “remain home to a dynamic, sometimes exhausting exchange of reader comment.”  He continues, “many blogs focusing on the environment seem mainly focused on creating a comfort zone for like-minded citizens. Dot Earth will continue to be a place for the expression of all points of view — as long as those views are expressed in civil and constructive ways.”

We’re excited to follow Revkin to the NY Times Opinion page, a move we recently made with one of our other favorite journalists, and Spokane native Timothy Egan .

When we want to dial up thought-provoking writing - like really deep, honest writing - we turn to Orion Magazin e - “serious thinking on the deeper connection between the environment and social and political issues” .  Orion is where we read two of our favorite writers today - Bill McKibben and Derrick Jensen .  Orion never intended to become a strictly environmental magazine, and in a recent editorial from the editors they explore this shift and offer insight into it’s context.  So why’s this important you might ask?  Well like Dot Earth 2.0, Orion’s shift represents the reality that no longer is being an environmentalist a label, it’s reality.  It’s life.  It just IS.   You can read the brilliant article HERE , and below you’ll find an excerpt.

Thankfully, just as climate change is becoming something that you ought to be concerned about whether you consider yourself an environmentalist or not, nature writing too is coming unbound. Today, writing in which environment looms large pervades all publishing media, from books to magazines, newspapers to NPR commentaries, and all across the blogosphere. It takes the form of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and essays, and all sorts of genre-bending combinations of all these things. And it is increasingly hard to categorize. This evolution is due in part to a new generation of writers who are expanding the bounds of writing about nature such that it is becoming less a subgenre than a vital part of literature (no adjective required). But it’s also true that many of the luminaries are writers who never should have been put in the box in the first place, writers whose work has a much wider relevancy and deserves a much wider audience.