Introducing The Clade

By Chris Clarke | Posted on May 1, 2009

Hello and welcome! This is The Clade, a community-based environmental web site that’s open to any and all interested contributors.

Why have we launched? A couple reasons.

First, journalism as we know it is dead. Newspapers are folding, so to speak, and broadcast journalism gets more shallow with each news cycle. They say that people writing for free will fill the void left by the collapse of paid journalism. We have our doubts, but if it’s going to happen and we’re not going to get paid it’s going to need to be a coordinated effort. The Clade will unite dozens of contributors, each doing a percentage of the work: passion and a shared workload might just take up some of the slack left by the collapse of the ancien regime.

Second, environmental journalism as it has been practiced suffers a serious flaw: the “he-said, she-said” false-objectivity model ensures that the base motives of those who would despoil the Earth for profit are granted validity equal to the warnings of the scientists who study our eroding biosphere, or the people who care enough to work to stop the damage. While The Clade’s founding members hold journalistic and scientific accuracy, and fairness, as core values, we also think that journalism is useless if it doesn’t have a sense of right and wrong.

Third, there’s a lot more to the environment than just climate change, but you’d never know it listening to political speeches, or reading a pundit’s dissection of Administration environmental policy, or for that matter reading Administration environmental policy. Climate change is a looming disaster because it will augment the mass extinction already in progress, but that mass extinction has other causes we cannot ignore. Climate change will cause untold human misery due to dislocation of the world’s poorest people and conflict over resources, but that dislocation and conflict has other causes we must combat. In fact, some of the common remedies proposed to address climate change will make those other causes worse.

Environmentalism is, by definition, all about context, and The Clade exists to bring that context to reporting about the environment. You’ll find a lot more than straight environmental news reporting here. Our contributors will bring you profiles of wild places and the animals, plants, and other things that live there. They’ll offer thoughtful essays on environmental philosophy, no-holds-barred analyses of the latest environmental horror story du jour, informed constructive criticism of environmental groups and practices, art and photography and more.

Who are our contributors? You are. The whole point of this experiment in reinventing environmental journalism is to put you behind the wheel. You need not be a journalist, nor an expert, nor an activist: if you care about the environment and you have something to say, we want you on board. Share your observations, reporting, links to valuable websites, crossposts of your enviro entries on your personal blog, hike reports and wildlife sightings, or other environmental information. Check out our FAQ for more. If we’re going to make this work, we need your help.

So take a look around, see what our founding contributors have published so far, leave a comment or two, then sign up and publish your own content here. Together we can change the world.