© 2024 NPR Illinois
The Capital's Community & News Service
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Illinois Issues
Archive2001-Present: Scroll Down or Use Search1975-2001: Click Here

Editor's Note: This Issue Focuses on Environmental Concerns

Dana Heupel
NPR Illinois

As ?you’re probably aware, this is our annual environmental issue. It isn’t that we neglect environmental coverage the rest of the year; it’s that the health of the planet that we leave to our children and theirs — in areas such as water, air and energy — is so important that it deserves the focus of an entire edition of any public policy magazine.

Our cover story targets an issue that isn’t in the forefront of most Midwesterners’ minds — that even this part of the nation is depleting and endangering its fresh water supply. Water conservation is highly visible in the West, where huge populations have settled on arid land. Many locales there restrict when — or if — residents can water their lawns. People are advised to turn off the faucet while shaving or brushing their teeth. Low-flow shower heads are often mandated, and many residents place bricks in toilet tanks so each flush uses less water.

Not so here. It’s not uncommon to see homeowners sweeping their driveways with garden hoses or scrubbing their decks with pressure washers. Here, water regularly falls from the sky — this year in disastrous abundance. Why should we worry about shortages? There’s always more, and sometimes too much.

That’s a fallacy, as Chris Young points out in his cover article. We are drawing down our Great Lakes and underground aquifers, and the time may not be far off when we, like other Americans in drier climates, could face shortages.

I’ve known Chris more than 15 years. When I first met him, his reputation as an enormously talented photojournalist was well-established, through his position on the staff of the Springfield State Journal-Register and the frequent appearance of his photos in various national publications. But little did I realize then that he also is a persistent reporter who rolls up his sleeves and digs — a skill he honed later as outdoors editor at the newspaper. Instead of relying only on the usual staple of guys grappling with big fish, Chris pored over state budgets for natural resource protections, wrote elegantly about land-use and conservation issues and added his deep interest and understanding about environmental matters to the newspaper’s coverage of the outdoors. It’s truly a pleasure to work with him again.

The same goes for Patrick Guinane, our former Illinois Capitol bureau chief who now covers the Indiana Statehouse for a newspaper in the Calumet region — suburban Chicago — of the Hoosier State. On our pages this month, he writes about concerns that as gasoline prices soar, the corn-to-ethanol boom may cause food shortages in less-developed countries.

We also love frequent contributor Jim Krohe’s curmudgeonly essays. In this issue, he postulates that our children might learn more about the natural world if we let them explore their backyards and neighborhoods on their own instead of through structured and supervised experiences in sequestered areas. 

Two members of our staff also weigh in with environmental articles. Projects editor Beverley Scobell steps out from her usual role behind the scenes at the magazine to chronicle the increasing number of homeowners who want to go “off the grid,” building or modifying their residences to generate their own energy. Statehouse bureau chief Bethany Jaeger looks at the problem of indoor air pollution as we increasingly inhabit sealed, controlled environments where we live and work. 

And just so you don’t think we’re only about gloom and doom, we wanted to show you there are still some wonderful, wild places left in the state with a photo essay on state parks assembled by Adele Hodde of the Department of Natural Resources.

We’ve updated the look and feel of the Illinois Issues Web site. We’ve added audio and video, a comments section, a place to publish additional photos, a search function and lots of links to other public policy sites. We hope you’ll find it cleaner and easier to navigate. We intend to make more changes in the coming months. Please let us know what you think and what else you’d like to see.

Like every other print publication, we’re excited about the opportunities the Internet provides to offer additional content, background and links to sites where our readers can go to find more information about the subjects we cover. 

As a 10-times-a-year publication, it also gives us the same ability to provide immediate coverage as any other news medium — as we do in our blog and as we intend to do more of on our main Web page — along with a place where readers can debate public policy in real time. But also like every other print publication, we’re grappling with how to relate it to our original mission — in our case, a magazine whose stock in trade is in-depth analysis of the important issues of our time.

I worry that in the age of immediate news coverage from Internet sites and 24-hour broadcast news outlets, there’s often not enough time to step back, take a breath and try to add perspective to a developing issue. In the zeal to get a competitive jump, and with nearly unlimited air time and broadband space to fill, every microscopic turn of the screw becomes an entirely new story of its own. And before viewers and readers have a chance to consider a subject fully, the news focus has moved onto something else. I certainly believe that’s been the case in the coverage of the presidential elections this year.

The egalitarian nature of the Internet also gives a forum to anyone who can afford a connection — overall, a good thing. But as someone who researches issues for a living, I find it’s becoming more and more difficult to weed out accurate information from opinion or distortion. I fear that if what is sometimes referred to as “mainstream” or “legacy” media disappear entirely, we as a society may devolve into a babel of voices that serve only to confuse — not to inform.

Such esoteric worries aside, we hope that our print and Internet versions of Illinois Issues can complement each other. Each medium has its strengths and limitations. Our job is to recognize how we can use those.

Just a reminder: This also is our combined July-August edition. We’ll see you next, at least in our printed issue, in September. Tune into our Internet version until then

We are drawing down our Great Lakes and underground aquifers, and the time may not be far off when we, like other Americans in drier climates, could face shortages.

 
Dana Heupel can be reached at heupel.dana@uis.edu.

Illinois Issues, July/Aug. 2008

 

Related Stories