Patrick Webb

The most remarkable element about EO Media Group’s climate series was the timing. Planning began in April 2005. That’s 15 years ago.

This was way, way, before climate change was a fashionable topic. This was years before carbon offsets or cap and trade became loaded buzzwords in political and economic discourse. No one was running for president with climate as their single issue.

Heck, the delightfully blunt Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was just 2 years old. And former Vice President Al Gore’s influential movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was still a year away.

Yet Steve Forrester, then editor and publisher of The Astorian, gathered his senior staff from around the company in a conference room and announced, “We are going to do a series on the most important issue facing the world.”

Some newsroom leaders in that room, perhaps most, literally did not know what he would say next.

His exact words are not recorded, but the emphasis was clear. The Northwest’s climate was changing. There is clear evidence. Because of this, our news-gathering forces from the eight newspapers in the company are going to be harnessed and cover the issue.

Two agricultural economists were brought in to address an early planning session. Their expertise from Oregon State University and the University of California, Davis added significant validity to our direction.

Extraordinary

It became clear early on there was a stumbling block. Human-caused global warming was not considered a fact. Instead, it was a political issue. Human impacts — basically rampant industrialism and polluting vehicle fumes — were in dispute, contested by other advocates who chose instead to point to evidence that climate patterns are cyclical.

For many of us, it is hard to imagine that all the cars clogging Seattle or Portland or Seattle and the belching smokestacks of coal-powered industrial plants are not doing something detrimental to our environment, and the air we breath.

But in this context, the chief executive officer for our company made an extraordinary statement. In my 40 years of journalism, I will admit that I found it the most arrogant-sounding statement ever made by a colleague in the zillions of hours I have spent in workplace meetings.

“Let’s not focus on the naysayers,” said former news executive John Perry. “It is clear our climate is changing. Let’s report that.” Basically, he was offering permission to ignore them.

Perry, now retired from our company, may not have realized it at the time, but his simple statement saved the entire reporting team hours and provided the focus we needed. Perry gave us permission not to add an obligatory “insert denial” before the fifth paragraph of every story.

This morphed into a policy: We would always, always use the words “climate change” and never “global warming,” unless it was in a direct quote from a scientist or other source. That may seem a cosmetic difference, then and now, but for us it was important.

Perry’s statement was the second biggest reason the series was completed so smoothly. At conferences of journalists a couple of years later, I was asked how our company pulled it off. Most environmental journalists were still pressuring their editors to allow them to report on climate change, often with a considerable amount of push-back because it was unproven or just plain dull.

The single-most important was Forrester’s zeal for the topic. We were not going to fail.

Important

The series roped in 22 writers, seven photographers, seven editors, six page designers and two logo creators. It ran in our daily newspapers in Astoria and Pendleton, the Capital Press, which is our regional farm weekly based in Salem, and three weekly newspapers, the Chinook Observer in Long Beach, Washington, the Blue Mountain Eagle in John Day and the Wallowa County Chieftain in Enterprise.

I was put in charge by Forrester’s deceptively simple statement, “We’ll funnel the copy through Patrick.”

It proved the largest and most rewarding project of my journalism career. I have a reasonable aptitude for organizing, so we divided up the assignments and began our research. Some talented writers took part, including Astorian environmental writer Cassandra Profita, who later moved to Oregon Public Broadcasting. One full-time EO staff member, Phil Wright, now editor at our newly purchased La Grande paper, and our Long Beach freelance columnist Cate Cable, are still doing solid journalism for us. Laura Sellers and Crindalyn Lyster were very important in the online presentation of all this important work. But most of the rest of the team has scattered, as journalists do.

The series was published in 10 parts in The Astorian, with packages running on consecutive editions in March, September and December 2006. The other papers ran it in similar groupings; the weekly papers ran their own pieces and condensed versions of the rest as space allowed. Our series logo was “Our Climate is Changing — ready or not.”

It would earn awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association and the annual Dolly Connelly Award for Northwest environmental reporting. Most significantly, it earned an award of merit in the annual Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment. This was presented by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island, an achievement that earned us national attention. As a sidelight, the Los Angeles Times package that won that year’s top prize highlighted the amount of plastic clogging the world’s oceans. That was prescient, too.

Zealot

To me, it began just as a professional project; the content itself was not a cause célèbre.

The first story packages of the series were already published when I read a book on the flight home from a rugby tournament in Canada. It was young adult fiction called “On Thin Ice” about diminishing polar bear habitat, written by environmental author Jamie Bastedo. I devoured its 345 pages in two sittings and would recommend it to anyone, including climate science skeptics. The book warns about warming trends through the eyes of a precocious teenage girl in Canada’s farthest north village.

I flew home to Astoria as a climate change zealot, then spent the balance of the year cracking the whip to get the job done. Gore’s movie was released midyear, and although criticized, it moved the issue onto everyone’s radar.

I was very satisfied with the project. Collecting the awards our team won helped make 2007 one of the best years of my life. But our reader response was one of widespread gratitude, which is perhaps more important. One of the most popular elements was the cameos of scientists, designed to put a personal face on local people doing climate research.

Do I regret not mentioning the naysayers? No. It certainly made the work easier. We have been proved prescient. In the interim, legitimate media outlets around the world have changed their published style from “global warming skeptics” to “climate science deniers.”

Our December package that concluded the series was preceded by a public debate in Salem featuring skeptics that my former colleague Elaine Shein covered. It wasn’t designed to be part of the series, but it proved useful in helping to announce the final portion was about to be published.

Fourteen years after we published the series, our 2006 logo asks a question that is still relevant today. “Our Climate is Changing — ready or not.”

And I stand behind the decision not the have the draft of every story contain the words “insert denial.”