A Burning Issue: The LA Times Mischaracterizes Chaparral in Their Story On the Powerhouse Fire

Whenever there is a large-scale fire here in southern California, the press repeats the same narrative about our native flora that just continues a great deal of misunderstanding of our environment and our relationship to it.

            The Powerhouse fire, which has been burning in the Angeles National Forest since last week, is the subject of this story in the Los Angeles Times: Powerhouse fire: Old dry brush proved explosive. Among the descriptions of the chaparral in the story are the following sentences:

This old chaparral, with layer upon layer of dead growth underneath, has proved difficult to fight.

Chaparral tends to grow taller as it ages, collecting dead material below it.

Readers are left with the impression that chaparral builds up dead and highly flammable twigs and wood as it ages. This is not true. While dead twigs and leaves do fall from the canopy of a chaparral stand, creating a blanket of duff on the ground, most of the plants that comprise chaparral are actually evergreen. As someone who hikes around in chaparral country, I can attest that stands of chaparral that are decades old can be quite lush, with decomposing duff on the ground that is about as flammable as most other mulch.

            San Diego County, where I live, experienced huge wildfires in 2003 and 2007. If the thinking that is conveyed in this article were true, then the stands of chaparral that are 40, 60, or 100 years old would have been more likely to burn than younger stands of chaparral in these wildfires. This did not happen. As a matter of fact, GIS analysis that I did on the 2007 fires indicated that areas that had burned in 2003, only four years earlier, were actually more likely to burn than older flora.

            Before we had millions of people making their homes here, the chaparral had rare chances of being ignited. Thunderstorms are rare along the coast and foothills where chaparral grows. It is just unlikely that a lightning strike will start a fire among the chaparral. Unlike western forests, which are estimated to have, historically, experienced ground fires every seven to 20 years, chaparral may not burn for decades. Some stands of old growth chaparral are well over 100 years old.

But now add to the naturally occurring thunderstorms ignition from cigarettes, sparks from machinery, arson, and stray embers from barbeques. With the prevalence of nonnative grasses, which dry up early in spring and serve as tinder the rest of the year, you have a formula for lots of wildfires in southern California. That should have been the greater narrative of this LA Times story.

For a greater understanding of chaparral, visit the California Chaparral Institute's website.

The San Diego UT Profiles Scientist Ralph Keeling, But Where Is the Science?

I am left feeling that there is something a bit remiss in this story from San Diego’s UT newspaper. The story concerns the work of Ralph Keeling, who is carrying on the work of his father, the late Charles Keeling. The elder Keeling established the measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide atop Mona Loa in Hawaii back in the 1950s. The continued observations of increasing carbon dioxide are what is known as the Keeling Curve and serve as some of the bedrock research upon which the science of global warming is based.

            As to the science of global warming, Deborah Sullivan Brennan, the writer of the story, gives us the following:

Most, but not all, scientists believe global warming is accelerating and that human activity plays a key role.

Although the curve shows a consistent upward trend, its implications for climate are the topics of ongoing debate. Uncertainties remain about carbon dioxide’s effects on weather, precipitation and other facets of climate.

Maybe I’m being too critical here, but it seems to me that Brennan is placing an emphasis on the uncertainties of global warming. “Most, but not all, scientists believe global warming is accelerating,” just strikes me as a needless way of emphasizing the beliefs of a few contrarians—many of them on the payroll of fossil fuel industries or their allied “think tanks”—who buck the scientific consensus of global warming. Nowhere in the article does Brennan mention that the world’s temperatures have risen in correspondence to the rise in CO2 that the Keeling Curve reveals. Neither is there any mention that it is the burning of fossil fuels that throws CO2 up in the air.

            Most of the article is a very pleasant profile of Ralph Keeling and his relationship with his father, describing their shared interests in music and tinkering. If that is the emphasis of the article, fine. This is from today’s paper, the Sunday paper, which usually features a lot of human interest features. I don’t object to that. But if you’re going to profile a son who is carrying on the scientific work of his father, please, in the two or three paragraphs that describe the research that they share, get the science right.

            And as far as I’m concerned the reporter buried the lead of the story. The money quote at the very end of the profile has Ralph Keeling saying: “Rising carbon dioxide is not a threat to life. No one ever claimed that. It’s just a threat to life as we know it.”

            But then again it wouldn’t have been a very good human interest Sunday paper story if the headline read: Prominent Scientist Says Global Warming Ends Life As We Know It.

RAMPS Protests Mountaintop Removal at Alpha, But the Local Press Slants the Story to King Coal

Reading some of the posts to United For Coal’s Facebook page, I am sometimes flummoxed by the amount of support that folks in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky have for the coal companies. Despite the great harm that these companies are doing to the land and people of Appalachia, and despite of the inability or unwillingness of the coal companies to economically benefit the communities of Appalachia where coal is mined, many of the residents voice unwavering support to Arch, Alpha, and other big coal companies.

            True, there are the three important things that the coal companies provide: jobs, jobs, and jobs. But that still doesn’t explain the blind devotion that has Appalachia residents supporting even some of the most egregious mining practices like mountaintop removal.

            Two days ago, five persons associated with the Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival (RAMPS) protested the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the building of gargantuan coal slurry impoundments by blocking the entrance driveway to Alpha Natural Resources, a coal company that extracts coal through mountaintop removal. The protesters chained large industrial equipment and themselves to guard railing. They also placed a 250-gallon container of nontoxic black colored water to symbolize the water held in slurry impoundments. All the protesters were freed from the chains by police and arrested. Traffic was restored to the driveway by 10:00 am.

            Now, looking at the reportage of the arrests by a local television station, it’s easy to see the slant that favors the coal companies. Lindsey Price, the journalist for WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, states in her news report:

The five protesters who were strung across the bridge were from a group called Mountain Justice, a group who protests what they refer to as 'mountain top removal' mining.

“What they refer to” designates a word or phrase not used in general parlance but is used by a particular group, such as, “What Catholics refer to as a Holy Day of Obligation.” or “What scientists refer to as a control group.” Some groups will have terms like these to convey a connotation that they want to communicate to the broader populace, such as when the tea party refers to the estate tax as a death tax. Estate tax sounds neutral; death tax sounds bad. You get the idea.

By using this phrase and putting mountain top removal in quotation marks, Price seems to indicate that it is some sort of value-laden bit of rhetoric. This is wrong. The term mountaintop removal has been used by a wide range of folks for years, from those who oppose it to those who favor it, to describe this efficient but destructive mining practice. The term goes back at least to 1997, when Penny Loeb wrote about mountaintop removal in her August 3, 1997 story “Shear Madness” for US News and World Report.

Price failed to mention that the action of civil disobedience by the individuals was additionally to protest the building of coal slurry impoundments. I don’t know why this aspect of the story was left out of her piece of journalism. Slurry impoundments have failed in the past, flooding valleys with toxic slurry to great ecological damage. People have died when coal slurry dams have failed. With that in mind, near the town of Whitesville, federal regulators recently approved the expansion of a slurry dam that would allow it to grow taller than the Hoover Dam. To me, it is a serious omission to her news story.

Also Price limits the narrative of the protest, the bigger picture of the conflict, to one in which a the spokesperson for RAMPS, Emily Keppler makes a statement about the water pollution or the health consequences due to mountaintop mining, only to be answered by the vice president of Alpha, Ted Pile.

"This exact action was to bring, symbolic of course, the impacts of mountain top coal mining to the headquarters to the people who are causing it, but don't have to suffer the consequences of it," said Mountain Justice supporter Emily Keeppler.

Protesters filled a barrel full of concrete, then put a pipe through it and connected themselves all the way across the bridge with chains. When firefighters cut the protesters free it left piles of concrete on the bridge. "They locked themselves to a giant barrel of dirty water to symbolize how Alpha coal is locking Appalachian to dirty water," said Keppler.

Pile told me last year Alpha had a 99.7 percent compliance rate with the water, and they are constantly monitored at the state and federal level. "We're also a highly-regulated industry, probably one of the most regulated industries in the country," said Pile.

The five protesters were arrested, but Keppler says it was worth it because this protest was personal for those who were arrested. "Their health is being compromised, their communities are being compromised, so they're absolutely willing to risk arrest in order to engage in non-violent action to stop this," said Keppler.

Pile tells us they have not received any complaints or science to prove there are health issues. "Out of about 86 million tons of coal we expect to mine this year, only 22, tons come from the type of mining they're objecting to. That'll probably be close to zero next year," said Pile.

This boils the conflict down to a “he said, she said” scenario, in which the truth of the matter—the science being done points to irreparable damage to Appalachian waterways and dire health consequences for those who live in proximity to mountaintop mining— is left out of the picture. Watching the video that was broadcast for this story, the reporter gives a bit of an upper hand to the coal company. After each statement by Keppler, Price begins the retorts by the coal company vice president with “But Price said…” This gives the impression that the vice president is correcting a misstatement or misunderstanding by the RAMPS spokesperson.

So is this why there is so much support for the coal companies in Appalachia? Folks there turn on their televisions and get new reports like this one?

Have You Read the News?

Newspapers have always had sections. There’s always been the business section, a local section, and of course, the sports section. Before the Internet, when papers were the way to get the news, sections were a precursor to the hyperlink. You could find the section that interested you and read about how your stocks were doing, see who was getting married, or just read the comics without having to leaf through a lot of other news that may have been of lesser interest to you. Transitioning to the Internet, papers still have sections. Instead of being a separate bundle of paper, the sections are links displayed below the paper’s banner on their home page.

            Now here is something to ponder: Of the ten largest circulating U.S. papers in the U.S.[1] none of them have an environment section, a place devoted to covering advances in green technology, the impact of rising sea levels on coastal areas and islands, the listing of plants and animals as endangered or threatened, and other such stories.

            Looking elsewhere at newspapers in other English speaking countries, their papers devote sections to the environment. The Guardian and The Independent in England have sections on the environment. The Sydney Morning Herald has an environment section. Even the Irish Times devotes a section of its online paper to environmental matters.

Recent polls indicate that Europeans consider the problems of global warming to be of utmost importance, second only to the problem of poverty,[i] while Americans’ concern about global warming is waning.[ii] A majority of Americans think that the protecting the environment should take a back seat when doing so is at odds with extracting coal, oil, and natural gas.[iii]

I believe that the difference of priorities that Americans and Europeans place on the environment is, at least in part, due to the way they are covered in the news. American papers may argue that they are merely giving their readership what they want. They provide a travel section because they know that there are people who want to read about snorkeling in Belize and train travel in Canada, and it’s the same with the financial section and sports section.

This is true, but news sources also influence the way their readers perceive the news and the importance of the news. An easy example is warfare in Central America. During the eighties Americans were acutely aware of the Sandinistas and Contras in Nicaragua as their conflict raged and engulfed Oliver North and Ronald Reagan in an Iran-Contra scandal. There was also a bloody war in Guatemala at the same time, one in which the United States played a role, yet Americans were largely ignorant of the fighting in Guatemala.

Using the New York Times as an indicator of the general press coverage, the number of stories concerning Nicaragua jumped from 1,663 during the seventies to 11,477 during the eighties, while the number of stories about Guatemala went from 1,821 to 3,590 for the same time period. The number of stories about Guatemala did increase, but not to near to the extent that it did for Guatemala.[2]

Americans knew about Daniel Ortega and his baseball caps because the press told them, again and again, about the war in Nicaragua. It’s the same for the environment. Americans would know a great deal about mountaintop removal, and probably care about the plight of the land and people of Appalachia, if it received as much press as Newt Gingrich.

For an adequate democracy, a populace needs to be informed. Without the U.S. press responsibly reporting on the environment, we are left with inadequate knowledge to make the tough decisions we need to make while the planet warms, wetlands are stressed, water grows scarce, and the rest of the natural world is placed at risk.

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[1] The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, New York Daly News, New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune – Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation

[2] I used Proquest to obtain these figures.

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[i] Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil, poll shows The Guardian 10/7/11 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/07/europeans-climate-change-poll

[ii] In U.S., Concerns About Global Warming Stable at Lower Levels Gallup 3/14/11 http://www.gallup.com/poll/146606/concerns-global-warming-stable-lower-levels.aspx

[iii] In U.S., Expanding Energy Output Still Trumps Green Concerns Gallup 3/16/11 http://www.gallup.com/poll/146651/expanding-energy-output-trumps-green-concerns.aspx