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Environment Reporting
(www.earthcharter.org), a global effort
to educate people about the need
for a just, democratic, peaceful and
sustainable society. This effort, which
is an outgrowth of the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, has received
surprisingly little media coverage
in the United States.
The news media need to give much
greater coverage to these and many
other grass roots initiatives blossoming
around the globe. They need to
develop and practice a new kind of
reportage—sustainable journalism—if
they are to help society grapple with
many daunting environmental challenges
in the years ahead. ■
Jim Detjen is the holder of the Knight
Chair and director of the Knight
Center for Environmental Journalism
at Michigan State University.
Before joining the MSU faculty in
1995, he spent 21 years reporting
about environmental issues for The
Philadelphia Inquirer and other
newspapers. He is the founding
president of the Society of Environmental
Journalists and served as the
president of the International Federation
for Environmental Journalists
from 1994 to 2000.
Homepage of The Earth Charter Initiative.
detjen@msu.edu
Environment Journalists Don’t Get Much Respect
‘… the environment beat is so far down the journalistic pecking order that if it were
alive it would be an amoeba.’
By Bud Ward
“Greens with press passes.”
Robert Engelman was the first person
I heard utter these words. He used
them as a way of conveying how he
thought he and his environment reporting
peers were regarded. A founding
member of the Society of Environmental
Journalists (SEJ), he was at that
time an environmental and health correspondent
for the Scripps Howard
News Service in Washington, D.C.
Those four words sum up the view—
and for many environmental journalists
the nagging frustration—that reporters
covering the environmental
beat often are seen not as environmental
reporters but as environmentalist
reporters. Is it something they said that
earned them such a derisive nickname?
Or something they did? Or perhaps
something they didn’t say or didn’t do?
Though causes remain undetermined,
this perception has become an
occupational hazard. And it’s a perception
the most dedicated U.S. journalists—swearing
allegiance to the practice
of independent journalism, not to
environmental values per se—find particularly
annoying. Especially frustrating
to many is that this view often
persists in the newsroom itself, not just
outside of it. Being labeled a “green
reporter” by a newsroom colleague is
40 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002