The Year’s Best Enviro Stories

by Douglas S. Barasch  |  December 16, 2007  |  More By Douglas S. Barasch

To be honest, I didn’t intend to write a Year’s Best Whatever list. Reading about the Golden Globe nominees must have gotten me in the mood.

The first glimmer of my list came, oddly enough, when I read a recent story in The New York Times, “Oil-Rich Nations Use More Energy, Cutting Exports,” which offered a quick glimpse of how our crazed lust for oil is reaching new global heights. The result, reports Clifford Krauss: there will be “big market shifts, with the number of exporting countries shrinking and unconventional sources like Canadian tar sands becoming more important, especially for the United States.”

That bland little phrase, “sources like Canadian tar sands,” innocuous though it sounds, reminded me of a story we ran a few months back about the awful implications of getting our oil from Alberta’s booming new industry. Our piece, “Canada’s Highway to Hell,” reports that a largely undeveloped area the size of Florida is being razed to get at this particularly filthy form of oil buried beneath the ground. The extraction process itself is not only polluting and destructive, but ridiculously energy-intensive.

Here’s where the awards thing comes in: The story is also a great read --so much so, that its Canadian author, Andrew Nikiforuk, was the runner-up for this year’s John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, administered by Columbia University’s Journalism School. (As I post this, the Oakes site has not yet been updated to reflect the 2007 winners—so shhh, don’t let anyone know I told you.) The tar sands story is important enough that two months later The New Yorker ran its own story on the subject, this one written by the wonderfully talented Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a regular contributor to OnEarth.

I’m a judge on the Oakes award panel, so I had to recuse myself from deliberations on the magazine award (there’s also an award given to the best newspaper series). But as a judge, I got to acquaint (or re-acquaint) myself with some great magazine work. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the other Oakes nominees that I particularly fancied, all of them published between October 2006 and September 2007:

I was a huge fan of a New York Times Magazine story, “An Elephant Crackup?” by Charles Siebert. The basic premise of the article: humans’ culling of elephant herds and our assault on and eradication of their habitats are literally driving them crazy. Siebert finds elephant experts who believe that the majestic mammals are experiencing the animal equivalent of post-traumatic stress syndrome, brought on by witnessing the destruction not only of their homes but also the brutal massacre of their kin. Elephants, remarkable for the deep, complex social bonds among members of a herd, have lately exhibited wildly bizarre behavior. “Since the early 1990’s, to cite one example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses,” writes Siebert. A lurid image indeed, but the underlying message is striking: We are not just killing animals, we are in some cases pushing them to such depths of anguish that insanity results. Siebert’s story offers a poignant and very different perspective on the impact that we have on other living beings.

Another worthwhile read, by way of Vanity Fair’s green issue, examines the increasing privatization of water worldwide, with a particular focus on China. In his story, “The Rise of Big Water,” author Charles C. Mann examines the implications of huge multinational corporations running public water systems around the world. His article takes a close look at the French company, Veolia, and its client-cities in China. What happens when impoverished people on the edge of economic survival must shell out unaffordable sums for one of life’s fundamental necessities? Mann offers a disturbing glimpse of how water and commerce will mix in our water-scarce future.

Also, check out “Last of the Amazon” in National Geographic, which focuses on deforestation and the large national and corporate interests driving it. You’re thinking: Don’t we know this story already? Sure, there was hoopla and all-star rock concerts back in the eighties to save the rainforest (Sting, of course, comes to mind), yet the clearcutting continues on an unimaginably enormous scale, as Scott Wallace reports in his story. Given the even more crucial planetary role these forests play in helping us soak up our prodigious carbon effluence, the urgency of halting the devastation is greater than it ever was.

This is by no means a complete list. I didn’t mention George Packer’s vivid New Yorker story, “The Megacity,” whose setting is Lagos; or Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker story, “The Darkening Sea,” the first major magazine piece to discuss the acidification of the oceans—perhaps a greater threat to sea life than the global rise in sea temperature. And let’s not forget—ta da!—this year’s winner of the Oakes magazine award: McKenzie Funk’s darkly amusing piece in Harper’s, “Cold Rush: The Coming Fight for the Melting North,” an entertaining jaunt up to the Northwest Passage, which, as the Arctic Ocean melts, will soon be open for business (and international conflicts) in a way not conceivable even five years ago. Of course, I’m too modest to name a number of other superb pieces published in OnEarth over the last year.

If I failed to mention a magazine story you thought was absolutely remarkable, inspiring, memorable, please let me know so we can add it to the list and share it with everyone else.

One last thought: some of the stories I mentioned may seem bleak (although, come to think of it, so are some of this year’s Golden Globe nominees), but at least they give us important insights about the state of our planet—and do so grippingly.