Reflections of an Environmental Reporter

By Rocky Barker, Idaho Statesman

 
At the environmental history conference several years ago in Durham, Donald Worster told his audience of historians that they were inherently a part of the environmental movement.

My immediate reaction was similar to several other people in the room, who as historians viewed themselves as outsiders looking in, observers of the environmental movement but certainly not participants. It forced me to think more about my own role as an environmental journalist.

My craft, environmental journalism, is relatively new.  It began in the 1960's in the days after Rachael Carson wrote her landmark book Silent Spring and before Earth Day in 1970.  The craft was pioneered by people like Dick Kienitz at the Milwaukee Journal writing about pesticides, Michael Frome writing about wilderness for Field and Stream and Paul McClennon in Buffalo revealing the horrors of Love Canal.

It remains a controversial segment of the journalism family because we care passionately about the subjects we write about.  We have had to fight for credibility with our editors and had to protect it for our readers and ourselves.

We must continually ask ourselves when caring gets in the way of credibility.  In many ways we share the challenge community journalists have for decades.  As a journalist, by professional standards, I'm not supposed to be a player.  Tony Hillerman, the former newspaperman turned Western mystery writer, described our recognized proper role as a fly on the wall to the events we cover, listening, reporting and even interpreting, but not getting involved.

For many of my colleagues the way to deal with objectivity is to keep their opinions to themselves.  I lost the luxury of hiding my views in 1989, when I became the Idaho Falls Post Register's editorial page editor and again as author and columnist.  My readers got proof of what they already knew.  I loved wilderness, wildlife, clean air and water.

 
I address my biases with fairness and a balanced approach to seeking the truth. The balance I use is the knowledge that no matter how comprehensively I have researched a subject, I may not understand the real truth.

 
I may be wrong, so I have a responsibility to show my readers plausible alternative realities to those I present.

Being a part of community doesn't mean we don't compete in the marketplace of ideas, resources and politics.  But as a journalist who seeks truth, and knows he doesn't know it, I limit that involvement to bringing the voices of all sides to each other and to the rest of my readers.

Yet I don't apologize for caring. When you care about education, you're not accused of being pro-education or pro-children. But when you care about the environment, you become a lightning rod.

So I too, like all of my colleagues in environmental journalism, am a part of the environmental movement, something larger and more powerful than I can understand today. We will have to await our understanding for future environmental historians to sort out.

 
(ASEH News, winter 2007)