Lately we’ve had more environment-related stories than usual in UBJ, which is OK with me. We had a Q&A about business and conservation, and this week we’ve got a couple of stories about extractive industries – one about potential profits, the other about potential threats and costs.
I spent some years focused on reporting and building an environment beat from scratch at a weekly paper in Kentucky working as a freelancer. It didn’t register at the time, but now that I’m back to business reporting at UBJ, it has struck me how much of the environment reporting I did back then was actually business reporting.
Topics like endangered species and climate change weren’t really my purview. Being first and foremost a community journalist, my reporting had more to do with particulates in the air from chemical plants clustered on the west side of town, environmental education, and the Ohio River on whose banks our community was located. Yes, I wrote about what was in the water and who was polluting it, but one of my favorite stories was about a company that goes around the country cleaning up rivers. I spent a couple of nights with them on their barge on the Ohio and got to see the city literally from a completely different perspective.
People in that community also paid attention to coal mining, though it mainly occurred in a different part of the state, and agricultural policy, which mattered even in the most urbanized city of a state with a largely agrarian economy and culture. I covered those things as well.
Somebody’s bottom line, whether it was a farmer or a paint manufacturer, was usually part of the conversation, if not a central issue. Now that business is my main gig, it’s hard to divorce any industry from its environmental impacts.
The tech industry, for instance, depends on massive amounts of energy and water, both in the creation of the devices and the maintenance of servers that make up what we like to refer to as “the cloud.” Maybe law is exempt… but don’t they still use tons of paper? I might Google that.
Anyway, thankfully sustainability has emerged as the arena where business and environment come together a bit more concretely. These columns are supposed to be brief so I’ll skip the details of that complex and evolving concept, but I see it very generally as the point at which it is acknowledged that business comes from and puts something or other back into a physical world. It’s deeper than recycling and light bulbs or profit-versus-planet.
As a reporter, I find looking through the sustainability lens refreshing and interesting. It leaves room for broader thinking. I didn’t come out and say so in this week’s stories about forestry and coal ash, but that perspective was definitely part of my reporting. It’s often there in the background, and I suspect as this community grows, sustainability issues will move more to the front.
