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Environment Reporting
conditioners, computers, copying machines,
and much more—had released
a very unusual brew of airborne compounds,
many of which were known to
be hazardous in sufficient concentrations.
The dust had seemed to settle on
every possible surface, indoors and out.
And clinicians were noticing a chronic
respiratory condition in hundreds of
people, so many that they gave it a
name: World Trade Center Cough.
But environmental health issues are
meaningful only when risks are put
into context. Many reporters detest the
word “context” because it’s often misused
by sources who try to explain
away an accurate but embarrassing
quote by saying it was reported “out of
context.” In environmental health stories,
however, context is everything.
The presence of a chemical in dust on
a table, or drifting in mid-air, or even
deep inside the human lung, means
something only if it wasn’t there before
and only if there’s some evidence that
it has a significant effect.
By that standard the evidence was
weak, and is still weak, that the contaminants
generated by the September
11 disaster pose a meaningful longterm
health threat to anyone, with the
possible exception of those rescue
workers who spent many days on the
debris pile without protective gear.
There is virtually nothing in the peerreviewed
scientific literature to suggest
that the pollutant concentrations
tens of thousands of office workers and
downtown residents were breathing in
the days and weeks after the attack
were as hazardous as, for example, the
smog inversions that settle over major
cities on hot summer days.
But that’s not the end of this story,
because absence of reliable evidence is
not the same as absence of risk. The
post-September 11 air plume was so
unusual—more glassy than sooty, for
example, and alkaline instead of
acidic—that the usual ways of assessing
risk weren’t especially helpful. For
example, the air in most of downtown
Manhattan met Clean Air Act standards
almost every day in the months after
the attack, but the Clean Air Act was
written to deal with smog, soot and
acid rain, not glass fibers. The persistent
coughs reported by many people
who worked there were undeniably
real, even if there was no reliable way
to verify the cause of specific cases. And
the lack of relevant studies in the scientific
literature surely had something to
do with the fact that no one had ever
destroyed two skyscrapers before in
the midst of a crowded U.S. city.
So for journalists who are serious
about reporting risk in context, the airquality
issue was difficult, even maddening.
I found it especially difficult
for personal reasons. Having seen and
felt the intense trauma of September
11 from an up-close vantage, I agonized
over whether air hazard stories
based on weak evidence were, in some
small way, adding to the sense of powerlessness
and fear that seemed to pervade
the city. What was my responsibility?
To report only what I knew to be
significant and thus be certain I was
not recklessly adding to the trauma? Or
to report on highly uncertain risks that
I knew many people were very worried
about, because those risks might someday
be shown to be meaningful?
In the end, I tried to pick my way
down a middle path, emphasizing in
my reports the sketchiness of the evidence.
But soon, frustrated and unsure
about what to write, I drifted away
from the air-quality story and back to
another project—about epidemiology
and cancer clusters—that I felt much
more comfortable with reporting. By
then, the Manhattan air story had
slipped the bonds of science and become
a full-blown political controversy,
with health officials making decisions
that had little to do with the evidence at
hand and everything to do with easing
public anxiety. I watched from a safe
distance. ■
Dan Fagin has been Newsday’s
environmental reporter since 1991.
He also teaches environmental
journalism at New York University
and is the president of the Society of
Environmental Journalists.
Dan.Fagin@newsday.com
The Press Portrayed the Story as Fish vs. Farmers
But the Klamath River story is a whole lot more complicated than that.
By Michael Milstein
Here is the way one of my articles
described what might be
called the center ring of one of
the biggest environmental stories in
2001: “Encampments grew on both
sides of the fences around the closed
federal head gates, creating a surreal
scene amid suburban homes on the
north end of Klamath Falls. It was the
result of what began as an April decision
by biologists to help protected
fish in an arid basin beset by drought
and declines in water quality.
“Up to 200 farmers and their supporters
flew American flags upside
down outside the fences, illustrating
their defiance of the federal government
and its ruling that reserved water
for endangered lake fish, called suckers,
and threatened coho salmon in the
Klamath River in this year of record
drought. The decision has left many
farms in the 200,000-acre Klamath Reclamation
Project to dry out in the summer
sun.
“On televisions facing federal agents
inside the fences, farmers broadcast
54 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002