Talk About It
Thoughts on why environment blogs tend to die quickly
What exactly is the environment?
Something about trees, flowers, and wildlife, you might think.
And what is a blog about the environment?
Quite often, it is about plastic, smoke, and other pollutions, and about the terrible act of cutting down forests and killing the whales.
So, there is a discrepancy between your image of the environment, and what the blog about the environment actually talks about. Such a discrepancy will often scare readers away. Like if a site about babies is all about their illnesses and bad behavior. Readers expect a confirmation in that babies are cute, and simply seek confirmation of that bias, plus perhaps some practical advice.
There are some topics that are notorious difficult to talk about, at least if you try to attract an audience.
I have seen various blogs and newsletters about illnesses, for instance, with many pictures of something that a lot of people don’t like to look at. And with detailed descriptions of how bad it is to have those illnesses.
Blogs about tax and bookkeeping might have their fans, put personally I hate reading them, almost as much as I hate dealing with tax and bookkeeping – but I do read them anyway, when I really need an answer to a question I have, because no matter how much I hate these topics, I can’t avoid them. And so, I must make sure to do things right, according to standards. The blogs will help with that.
When people want to talk about the environment, it is often because they are worried about the treatment of it. Like I force myself to read about bookkeeping, they force themselves to write about plastic and oil spill, simply because it is necessary.
What we environment-writers really want to see and talk about, is beautiful nature, thriving animals, good news about endangered populations recovering, and the recovery of the world’s rainforests.
We would enjoy telling the good stories. And people would enjoy reading that, because a good story is more pleasant to read than a bad one.
But if we only write about the good, how can we then spread the words about the bad – that needs to be paid attention to, needs to be talked about, and dealt with?
It’s a real dilemma!
When starting this blog/newsletter, I looked around on Substack to see what else was there. And I found different sites:
Most were inactive. The owner had published a few articles years ago and then stopped
Some were very commercial, not really talking about the environment but trying to sell something
Some were very local, talking about the USA at most, but more often about one county or one valley
Most of the active ones weren’t very active, just a post every several months
Most had almost no readers
Considering that we all live in “the environment” as an overall term for everything that happens around us, and given that “we all” in fact are all the people on Earth, which, by the latest count, were quite many, there should be a basis for more readers.
But how many readers can relate to local laws and regulations regarding the building of a road in a valley somewhere in the USA?
In fact, many of the blogs seemed to have been made as a reaction to one particular event or local situation that may not even be interesting to the blog owner after a short while – when the initial upset has settled, the events have unfolded and there is nothing but a memory left, then what is there to tell, going forward?
If a blog should speak to a wider audience, it should mention something that may be interesting to many, and it needs to have an ongoing theme that makes sense for people to engage with.
When the organization Greenpeace many years ago launched a slogan called “Save the Whales”, it caught attention by many and helped the organization grow. Suddenly, by the help of that slogan, it became clear to many people that the planet was in the process of being deprived of a group of animals, big and majestic, doing no harm to people and even being important for the ecosystems of the oceans.
Whales were a good theme, as they sort of belong to us all. They are part of our understanding of what “Earth” means. We don’t want them to disappear. And especially not, if the only reason is that some people could earn some money on killing them – a very short-lived benefit for a few people.
Microplastic also had its affection for a while, since it is a new discovery, and people are often interested in hearing about something new. The further discoveries around that theme included the fact that you and me and everyone else, in fact every living being on the planet, we all contain microplastic. It is everywhere!
Getting to know such a thing makes people worry, and they want to read about it, to understand better what it is all about and how to react.
But after a while, even microplastic become “old news”, and as we don’t seem to be able to neither stop it from spreading nor remove it again from our bodies and where else it is, we stop paying attention to it, stop reading articles about it.
It’s a bit like outer space, where an occasional discovery of a new thing, be it black holes or gravity waves or something else, attracts the attention of most of us. For a while, because the same sense of “old news” appears also there, and for the same reasons. You may tell yourself after a while that “yes, there are supermassive black holes out there, swallowing galaxies for breakfast, and it’s amazing, but so what? What can I do about it?”
As for the environment, it is sadly so that most of what we have to say about it is negative. Or, at least, there is a negative side of it.
We can talk about the whales and how some of them are recovering, now existing in bigger numbers than 100 years ago, which is good. But they still are only a fraction of the populations believed to exist before the whale hunting era happened.
Rainforests like the Amazonas have the ability to recover, we have found out, seeing successful experiments with planting trees of the rainforest in an area that was previously deforested, and we can see how it grows and how wildlife moves back into the area. That’s really wonderful to discover, but the flip side is that there is still a lot more rainforest being deforested than replanted – and the wildlife that became extinct because of the brutal actions against their habitats during many years, will never come back. They are lost forever.
We talk about the environment because there are reasons for talking about it.
These reasons are almost all negative. We need to tell about the destruction, be it immediate and clearly visible, like the killing of a whale or slashing a million years old forest, or the more subtle destruction from microplastic, global heating, and all kinds of pollution of the air, the water, and the soil that we and our environment were supposed to survive on in the future.
It all makes an environment blog somewhat negative, exposing you to sad news and worried thoughts. But it is necessary to be aware and pay attention to all of it, seeing also the positive, but making sure that the negative will get known, so that we can do something about it.
And that may scare people away who don’t want to save the environment, or who prefer to see the world as consisting only of positive things.
My suggestion: if you feel sad from reading about the environment, then think about what you can do to help remedy the problems described. While you can’t wring extinct animals back, you may be able to help to prevent some others from getting extinct. And while you can’t clean the oceans from poisonous chemicals, you can stop adding more and spread the news about what is needed.
You can do something!
And even when you aren’t doing anything, it can be uplifting to know that others, who have read about the problems, find ways to do something.
There is always a potential upside to negative news, for you to create or discover.
The more we talk about it, the more upsides we find, and the more actions we’ll take, all of us together, to make the world and the environment better.