2009 was a big year for climate change coverage in the media. Last year saw the first serious discussion of cap and trade legislation in Congress, unsuspecting climate scientists on the receiving end of an email hacking fiasco, and COP15, the first international summit to attempt a world treaty on climate change since the Kyoto Protocol. And I think my local radio station had “climate change” right up there with “Twitter” as one of the big keywords of the year in their New Year’s wrap up – which says a lot considering the ridiculous hype Twitter has been showered with this year.

There’s been an obvious uptick in climate coverage in the mainstream – see this graph to get a sense of how it’s spiked significantly just in the last year. But compare climate to the raft of other stories making their way around the news cycle and media coverage starts to look less impressive. Can you even find climate in this infographic about media coverage in 2009? (click for bigger version)

In a way, it’s hard to blame mainstream media for the weight they’ve put on environmental coverage – and climate in particular. For one, it’s a tough argument to make considering the term “green” has gotten so cloying (at least to me) that Will Ferrell has even threatened to kick your ass if you litter or drive or eat a Snicker’s bar without a biodegradable wrapper. But more than that, climate change is such a strange story – one that doesn’t really fit the way media currently works, or, for that matter, how a lot of our institutions work. Environmental change happens slowly and often in far away places. It’s scientifically abstract.  And it’s hugely complex. It’s hard to understand what we’re supposed to do about it either politically or individually (NYT environment reporter Andy Revkin dives into all of these difficulties in this blog post).

So in some ways, climate change is a story that gums up the traditional news process. But are we even telling the right story to begin with?

Last  year, in an answer to a question posed by a Columbia University journalism student during a Q&A session,  NYT’s Andy Revkin said, “Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite.” Video of that Q&A is here – it’s 20 mins long, beware.

I think Revkin nails it. He’s one of the few reporters I’m aware of that seems comfortable taking the long view of what climate change really represents: a small but significant chapter of our changing relationship with the natural world. Maybe it’s because Revkin isn’t really a climate reporter specifically – he covers environment as a whole. Or maybe it’s because he’s been in action as an environmental journalist for decades before climate became a fashionable topic. Whatever the reason, I think Revkin has it pitch-perfect when he says that our relationship with nature is really “a coming of age story” – a slow, collective dawning that we’re citizens of a very real, physical, and finite world. Our future is a shared future – not one that’s dictated just by personal utility curves, but one that’s anchored firmly to the rest of the living world in very specific ways.

As Revkin leaves NYT for other ventures, it’ll be interesting to see who’ll try to get their arms around these stories in his place. And, with the journalism world on its head these days – and with climate change casting an unpredicatable shadow over this next decade – it will be very, very interesting to watch this story take shape.

Image credit: GOOD magazine

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