Public Radio: In-depth ... or Head-in-Sand?

On August 4, I tuned in to the public radio program "Marketplace," just in time to hear a report on the decline of farming communities in Canada. The report noted that small farms have been going out of business across the continent, but it focused on the small community of Sperling, Manitoba. As introduced by anchor David Brancaccio, the gist of the story seemed to be that in Canada, which is competitive and individualistic and does not protect its farm communities with subsidies the way the welfare-state Europeans do, small farms everywhere are being swallowed up by larger ones. It's a big, tough, farm-eat-farm world out there.

I had just finished proofreading Brian Halweil's article, "Where Have All the Farmers Gone?" in preparation for the September/October issue of WORLD WATCH, and was aware that this is not just a Canadian problem: small farms all over the world are being gobbled up by larger ones. But Brian's article also explains, in a way I never quite understood before, just why this attrition is happening. As you may recall, he describes how large corporate conglomerates such as Con-Agra/DuPont, Cargill/Monsanto, and Novartis/ADM have taken control of agriculture in most industrialized countries, and how these conglomerates have become so vertically integrated that they can now take for themselves the lion's share of every food dollar spent by a consumers--leaving only 5 cents for the farmer. Typically, the traditional family farmer finds himself having no choice but to buy seed, fertilizer, and other inputs from the conglomerate, then sell the harvested crop back to the same conglomerate, or a subsidiary of it. Unsurprisi ngly, the farmer has to buy his inputs at painfully high prices, then sell the harvested crop cheap. Caught in a vise-like squeeze, the farmer can survive only by selling larger and larger volumes at smaller and smaller margins. And that's why large farmers buy out their smaller neighbors--and why farm communities lose their populations, board up their stores, and close their churches and schools.

I would never have guessed any of this by listening to the Marketplace piece, in which reporter Erin Galbally mentioned nothing about the conglomerates who take the bulk of the profit but share none of the farmers' heavily publicized burden. I found myself skeptically wondering whether this curious oversight had occurred because (1) these big agribusinesses provide major funding support to public radio (I have often heard Arthur Daniels Midland, or ADM, mentioned among the NPR supporters), or (2) because it was too much trouble for Erin Galbally to look at the hard economics behind the sentimental story. Or, indeed, whether it's just that a radio segment, even on public radio, has to be simple and dramatic and have a "human face" that people can relate to--and really can't afford to get into complicated explanations.

Whatever the reason, I couldn't help noticing how similar this piece seemed, in tone, to those blame-the-victim explanations we sometimes hear when a woman is raped (it's because she was "loose"), or why poor people are unemployed (it's because they "don't want to work"). A few weeks ago I heard a professor from Florida State University suggest that the reason 1.3 billion people in the Third World are so pathetically poor is that they lack the American ability to make money and succeed. I wondered how Florida governor Jeb Bush justifies spending his state's public tax revenue to pay an educator who is that educationally challenged. The message of the Marketplace piece seemed to be that with farmers, the good ones survive and all the others are driven out in a kind of Darwinian strengthening of the breed.

Public radio prides itself on being more "in-depth" than commercial radio, so I might have shrugged off the see-no-evil quality of this farm piece as a rare mistake--except that a few days later I heard another story, this one on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," that was at least as noteworthy as the farm piece for its obliviousness to the larger picture.

The NPR story concerned the recent discovery of serious melting in the Arctic, and it began with Renee Montagne announcing:

Readers of the New York Times woke up Saturday to a startling story. It said, simply, "The North Pole is melting." Scientists leading a group tour told the Times that they were flabbergasted to reach the North Pole to find open water rather than ice. The report suggested this hasn't happened for at least 50 million years. But as NPR's Richard Harris reports, the story is being greeted with skepticism.

I had been out of town for a few days and hadn't seen this piece in the Times, and my first reaction was to feel a bit disoriented, as though I'd entered a time warp and was just now looping around to a moment I'd already been through some time before. It wasn't the first time I'd seen a story appear in the mainstream media months or years after it had discussed in WORLD WATCH. But here, a phenomenon we'd been watching for many months had apparently been treated as a huge piece of breaking news, on the front page of the world's "newspaper of record." If the point was that the Arctic ice cap is melting, I wondered where the Times reporter, John Wilford, had been for the past few years.

As I listened, however, my disorientation only increased. Montagne recounted how the story had been met by objections from contrarian scientists who instantly challenged the "50 million years" claim, suggesting that it's actually normal, at any given time in the Arctic summer, for around 10 percent of the ocean to be open water--so in all probability, the Pole had been melted before. It was as though, in one dismissive observation, the real message of the Arctic tour's report had been proven nonsense. Blown away was the still-essential message of that journey: that throughout the long trip to the Pole and back, it appeared that most of the ice that had once been there was now thinning or gone. It was not just at the spot we happen to call the Pole, but over thousands of square kilometers that the open water prevailed--and this, indeed, was something not seen in 50 million years (see Chris Flavin's essay in this issue). It was the "uncertainty" about whether the Pole itself had ever seen open water that the c ontrarians zeroed in on.

Apparently some of these contrarians had "gotten to" the Times editors, at least enough to cause confusion among them and precipitate a hasty retraction a few days later. The NPR editors, perhaps emboldened by the Time' chagrin--and spotting a good story in their rival medium's presumed embarrassment--fell prey to the same confusion, by ending up their own story on a note provided by yet another contrarian--one Ronald Quock, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "It's dangerous to guess what's happening throughout the entire Arctic on the basis of a single trip," said Quock. "Because ice moves around and it's moved to different places at different times, it's important to consider the bigger picture." The NPR reporter, Richard Harris, then wound up the story of the boat tour with a flourish that must have lifted spirits throughout the global oil and coal industries:

"So wind, rather than temperature trends, could well explain their odd experience."

Thus, just as the Marketplace report ignored 95 percent of the industry that is driving farmers our of business, the NPR report ignored perhaps 99 percent of the research that's been done to monitor Arctic ice. A single trip? NPR made no mention of the hundreds of trips that have been made under the ice by American submarines using sonar to measure ice thickness, or of the thousands of photographs taken by satellites and aircraft, showing the gradual decline in the area of water covered by ice over the years.

In one respect, the North Pole story is trivial, because it focuses on just one spot of oceanic surface. To be sure, it's a spot that looms large in popular imagination, and seems to have awakened a lot of people to a problem they weren't otherwise inclined to notice. But as the Harvard scientist James McCarthy, who led the trip, pointed out, a much more important observation was that astonishing lack of ice all across the Arctic. Add to this larger picture the dimension of time, and the picture is unmistakable.

There's a still larger picture, though, which is not just about the ice cap, but about the melting of ice all over the world. While sea ice is diminishing in the north, giant chunks of ice are breaking off the Antarctic ice shelves in the south. Perhaps even more significantly from an ecological standpoint, some parts of the ice sheets that cover Greenland and the Antarctic land mass are beginning to melt. Unlike sea ice or shelf ice, which have already displaced the water they float on, the land-based ice will add new water and raise sea levels as it melts. Forget the North Pole; if Greenland melts, the sea will rise by 7 meters.

Then there's the ice in the glaciers, which are shrinking rapidly in hundreds of places--and have been doing so for decades. With increased spring snowmelt and glacial runoff in major river basins on every continent, the likelihood of catastrophic flooding from upstream is added to that of storm surges from the sea. Cities on rivers like the Ganges, Mississippi, and Yangtze, as well as coastal cities all over the globe, face a very uncertain future. In short, global warming is no longer a theory--the pervasive melting of the Earth's huge store of ice makes that clear. On the following pages, we have made a map of some of the larger examples.