The way we talk about environmental news

When I went to get my fix of environmental news today, I found this message: "Environtmental News - Get the Latest on Global Warming and…" That was the description attached to the MSNBC web section about environmental news. It shocked me, and I'm not easily shocked.

I've known for a long time that the environment and "green" way of thinking are commoditized in the media for storytelling purposes. OK, no problem, we're moving toward a more mainstream understanding of those things so we can integrate them into our daily lives, right?

But is a major news organization really doing some search engine optimization for the term "global warming?" Somehow that feels like giving in to the mania in a way that prioritizes the problem over the solutions.

But I bit. I clicked through, and sure enough, every single headline was about something horrible going on. Poaching of wildlife in Africa, out of control grassfires in Australia, the horrible coming sea level rise.

It's not hard to get the message when it swirls all around you. When the media talks about the environment, it's all about how much is being destroyed, how much of the rainforest has been cut down, how disastrous the rising carbon dioxide levels are and how tragic the consequences of polar ice cap melting and continued fossil fuel use will be.

We know, the situation is bad. And the general message not only seems like we aren't doing anything about it, at this point it sounds just as much like there isn't anything we could do about it even if we wanted to. It's all gloom and doom.

Only, it's not. There are plenty of good things going on. And plenty more amazing things. And I think these are the stories that should be more prominent.

And that's when I saw it. The lone, shining wolf running through the dark forest of bad news. The headline ran: "A Promising Sign for California's Water Supply."

It's a story about an early and larger-than-expected-snowfall and pack in the Sierra Nevada. It makes me want to care, and gives me something to hold on to around environmental news. I think hope can be a better rallying cry than fear, and I hope to see more of it in the news headlines in the future.

Image courtesy of Digimist via flickr