If you smoke cigarettes, you may have reached a desperate point where you’ve picked up a half-smoked butt from an ashtray and lit up.  Sure, it’s dirty, takes a lot of work for a relatively small reward, and is more than a little disgusting.  But it serves the purpose:  feeding a tenacious addiction.

It’s a provocative analogy to conjure as we consider President Obama’s recent announcement to postpone a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.  That 1,700-mile project, which most observers had thought was a done deal, would have transported Canadian tar sand sludge to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.  This week, Obama said he was going to review the health and environmental effects of the decision, and there are even hints that he will also consider the alarming climate-change impacts of industrial tar sands production.

Is this environmental progress we can believe in?

Maybe.  Maybe the president has been studying his personal playbook to make this bold call.  Obama, we know, has struggled with a nicotine addiction, and has been rumored to sneak off into the Rose Garden to light up.  That said, he knows that Sasha and Malia don’t want their daddy to get lung cancer, and vowed to stop.  Apparently, he succeeded; we were told after the recent Presidential health-check that Obama was “tobacco-free.”  Would it be too much to think he’s turning the page on self-destructive fuel habits as well?

Here’s a quick paragraph for those who haven’t kept up with the “unconventional fuels” debate.  Because oil is getting harder to come by and more expensive to get, many oil companies are turning to ever more far-fetched carbon-based alternatives for transportation fuel:  oil shale, coal-to-liquids, and tar sands are three of them.  Tar sands are basically proto-hydrocarbons – a mixture of sand, clay and bitumen that can be mined by the megaton, cooked into a goopy sludge that can be transported long distances in pipelines and eventually processed into something that you can put in a car or a plane to make it run.  Tar sands require more energy to find and refine than conventional oil, produce more water and air pollution, and have a carbon footprint that is so big that some climate scientists have warned that continued tar sands production would doom the planet.  In a recent piece I wrote for National Wildlife magazine, I look at how animals are acting as unwitting sentinels for humans – and are already dying in flocks because of the Alberta tar sands juggernaut.

That’s because up in Canada, there are a lot of these tar sands – which are the functional equivalent of a trove of cigarette butts.  In essence, oil companies are basically scraping the pavement for vast quantities of these butts, picking out the vestigial tobacco, liquefying it, shipping it in pipelines to a distant manufacturing plant, reprocessing the tobacco into cigarettes, repackaging it, and bringing these reformulated butts to market.  In order to do that, they’ve proposed building a giant pipeline that carves a path all the way across the country, from Montana to Louisiana, to carry these cigarette dregs.

Wouldn’t it be easier to stop smoking?

Could that be the message from Obama’s decision?  It’s far too early to tell, but we can all breathe one clean, collective sigh of relief that this truly bad idea of a pipeline will not be built during this president’s first term.  Whether you opposed the pipeline because of its climate change impacts, its vast pollution, its wrong-headed approach to our energy future, or just because it’s killing a lot of migrating birds, a sane future for this planet should not include tar sands production.

Because the sad truth is, whether you buy your Camels by the carton or scrounge them from train station platforms, if you smoke, you still stand a good chance of getting cancer.

If you smoke cigarettes, you may have reached a desperate point where you’ve picked up a half-smoked butt from an ashtray and lit up.  Sure, it’s dirty, takes a lot of work for a relatively small reward, and is more than a little disgusting.  But it serves the purpose:  feeding a tenacious addiction.

It’s a provocative analogy to conjure as we consider President Obama’s recent announcement to postpone a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.  That 1,700-mile project, which most observers had thought was a done deal, would have transported Canadian tar sand sludge to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.  This week, Obama said he was going to review the health and environmental effects of the decision, and there are even hints that he will also consider the alarming climate-change impacts of industrial tar sands production.

Is this environmental progress we can believe in?

Maybe.  Maybe the president has been studying his personal playbook to make this bold call.  Obama, we know, has struggled with a nicotine addiction, and has been rumored to sneak off into the Rose Garden to light up.  That said, he knows that Sasha and Malia don’t want their daddy to get lung cancer, and vowed to stop.  Apparently, he succeeded; we were told after the recent Presidential health-check that Obama was “tobacco-free.”  Would it be too much to think he’s turning the page on self-destructive fuel habits as well?

Here’s a quick paragraph for those who haven’t kept up with the “unconventional fuels” debate.  Because oil is getting harder to come by and more expensive to get, many oil companies are turning to ever more far-fetched carbon-based alternatives for transportation fuel:  oil shale, coal-to-liquids, and tar sands are three of them.  Tar sands are basically proto-hydrocarbons – a mixture of sand, clay and bitumen that can be mined by the megaton, cooked into a goopy sludge that can be transported long distances in pipelines and eventually processed into something that you can put in a car or a plane to make it run.  Tar sands require more energy to find and refine than conventional oil, produce more water and air pollution, and have a carbon footprint that is so big that some climate scientists have warned that continued tar sands production would doom the planet.  In a recent piece I wrote for National Wildlife magazine, I look at how animals are acting as unwitting sentinels for humans – and are already dying in flocks because of the Alberta tar sands juggernaut.

That’s because up in Canada, there are a lot of these tar sands – which are the functional equivalent of a trove of cigarette butts.  In essence, oil companies are basically scraping the pavement for vast quantities of these butts, picking out the vestigial tobacco, liquefying it, shipping it in pipelines to a distant manufacturing plant, reprocessing the tobacco into cigarettes, repackaging it, and bringing these reformulated butts to market.  In order to do that, they’ve proposed building a giant pipeline that carves a path all the way across the country, from Montana to Louisiana, to carry these cigarette dregs.

Wouldn’t it be easier to stop smoking?

Could that be the message from Obama’s decision?  It’s far too early to tell, but we can all breathe one clean, collective sigh of relief that this truly bad idea of a pipeline will not be built during this president’s first term.  Whether you opposed the pipeline because of its climate change impacts, its vast pollution, its wrong-headed approach to our energy future, or just because it’s killing a lot of migrating birds, a sane future for this planet should not include tar sands production.

Because the sad truth is, whether you buy your Camels by the carton or scrounge them from train station platforms, if you smoke, you still stand a good chance of getting cancer.

Lac Bleu, or Blue Lake, in southern Gabon

In 2002, the west African country of Gabon made international headlines with one of the boldest moves in conservation history:  then-President Omar Bongo Ondimba announced the creation of 13 national parks, comprising more than a tenth of the country’s territory.

In a recent trip to Gabon, I learned that nearly a decade later, Bongo’s bold move remains largely an unfulfilled promise. In this article and short photo essay, I chronicled the efforts of a local environmental group to bring that promise closer to reality.  I came to understand why the dream of Gabon’s national park system remains an aspiration that, hopefully, might yet capture the imagination of Gabon’s current politicians – and the rest of the world.

Here’s one way to understand the scale of Omar Bongo’s vision:  Gabon is about the size of Colorado, which has four national parks (Rocky Mountain, Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde and Black Canyon of the Gunnison) totaling about 575 square miles, or half a percent of the state’s land mass.  If we expanded Colorado’s national parks by about 20 times, that would be close to what Gabon’s late president had envisioned for his country.

Instead of elk, moose, mountain lions, bear, deer and antelope that grace Colorado’s wildscapes, Gabon’s wildlife heritage includes its famous surfing hippopotamuses, herds of forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, gazelle and some of the world’s largest remaining tracts of equatorial rainforest.

Gabon’s conservation efforts made international headlines in 2002, thanks largely to the efforts of Michael Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society scientist who famously traversed much of Gabon’s tropical wildlands on foot, and whose efforts were documented several times in National Geographic and elsewhere (including surviving an elephant goring).  One of Fay’s WCS colleagues, Lee White, went on to be named as current head of Gabon’s national park system.

All good so far.  Stand by for the update.  First, a little background on Gabon, and why I went there:

In September, I was invited to give journalism workshops in the capital city of Libreville, courtesy of the U.S. State Department and Gabon’s Conseil National de la Communication.  I had been a Knight International Press Fellow for four months in Algeria in 2006, living in Algiers and working (in French) with journalists from both Francophone and Arabophone newspapers.  I returned twice to conduct investigative journalism training sessions, observing the dance between a newly “democratic” regime and a newly “free” press.

In Gabon, as in Algeria, freedom of the press is still a fledgling concept; for four decades of Gabon’s post-independence history (it was a French colony until 1960, and its first president, Léon M’ba, served from 1961 until his death in 1967), it was ruled in what could kindly be called an autocratic way by the aforementioned President Omar Bongo Ondimba.  Most of the media was state-run or state-controlled, and freedom of expression – if it meant expressing opposing views to the prevailing power – was met with wrathful displeasure.

In theory, some of that changed after the president’s death in 2009, and his son, Ali Bongo Ondimba, came to power in a disputed election.  Nonetheless, the international community accepted the results, and le fils Bongo was soon being heralded as a reformer and a leader in the African continent’s new, post-post colonial politics.  Press freedoms opened a crack, although without a tradition of a free press, some of the resulting journalism seemed to resemble the undisciplined acts of teenagers who had been given the car keys and a bottle of whiskey, without ever having a driving lesson.  Hence, there was a perceived opening to invite a U.S. journalist to talk about the rights – and responsibilities – of a free press.

I learned during my brief time there that President Ali Bongo, by most accounts, has indeed streamlined the government, vowed to fight corruption, and notably articulated a vision of Gabon’s future based on three economic pillars:  service Gabon, industrial Gabon, and Gabon Vert, or green Gabon.  He still has many detractors and doubters, but has initiated some environmental initiatives, including a ban on the export of raw logs.

Now we’re back to the national parks.

Before going to Gabon, I tried to arrange a reporting trip at the conclusion of my teaching responsibilities, and thought it would be interesting to visit Loango National Park, often described as the “crown jewel” of Gabon’s parks and home to the legendary “surfing hippos.”  What, I wondered, did Loango and other parks look like, nearly a decade after the fanfare of their creation?

Well, basically, I couldn’t get there from here.  Or even from there.  The major tourism companies had started to operate in the park weren’t operational.  Flights that had once ferried tourists from the capital to a nearby airport had stopped flying.  Although it would have been possible, given a little more time than I had, to get to Loango, the fact that it wasn’t obvious or easy made me wonder just what had been done in the years since Gabon had been embraced as the darling of international conservation.

Not much, as it turns out.  For a hundred reasons, it is easier to proclaim the creation of a park system than it is to actually create one.  Lack of infrastructure is high on the list, even though Gabon is one of Africa’s top ten oil producing countries and has a relatively tiny population of about 1.5 million.

One of those hundred reasons is the lack of a culture of formal, national conservation organizations – and a lack of any culture of environmental philanthropy.  While in Libreville, I had heard about a small, regional environmental group called Muyissy Environnment, operating near three proposed national parks about 300 miles from Libreville in the south of the country.  Please click on the link above to read about their efforts.

Although I do not consider myself to be an expert in the science of climate change, I have interviewed many people who are, and in 2004 contributed to National Geographic’s single-issue opus on the subject, entitled “Global Warning.”

What baffles me about the subject is this:  Scientists have postulated for more than a century that increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could plausibly lead to an increase in terrestrial temperatures.  Since the 1950s, there has been an unimpeachable data set that shows that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is on the rise.  Since the 1970s at least, scientists have measured changes in the earth’s systems that correspond with what you might expect in a warming world – including simple, understandable data like increased average global temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels.

Fast forward to 2011.  On virtually every scientific front, the data sets are getting stronger, the observations more conclusive, the models more robust, and the scientific consensus more profound:  the planet is warming, and humans are contributing to this worrisome trend.  Our prodigious burning of fossil fuels is creating a thicker atmospheric blanket that is trapping heat, and the planet is showing us signs that this warming trend is accompanied by other disturbing changes:  our oceans are more acidic, species are disappearing because they cannot adapt to these changes fast enough, and human populations are at risk from rising sea levels, increased diseases, and profound changes in the ecological balance of many regions.

So why aren’t people listening?

In this profile and audio slide shoe of climate scientist James White of the University of Colorado, he explains again, and in beautifully simple terms, why he knows that the planet is changing, how he knows it, and a little about what it matters.  White is one of the articulate ones, who can explain stable isotope ratios and paleoclimactic changes in a language that anybody (even me) can understand.  Please take a few minutes to listen to what he has to say.

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The Altai Mountains in southern Siberia are part of the huge Altai-Sayan Ecosystem, where Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan come together.  This beautiful alpine region provides important corridors for species like the snow leopard and argali that cross between the countries.

The proliferation of “citizen-journalists” has its upside, to be sure.  Over the past few decades, we’ve seen a steady decline of smaller, independent journalism outlets.  In their place, we’ve seen the growth of newspaper chains and the consolidation of broadcast outlets.  We’ve seen a shift away from the public’s right to know in favor of the public’s right to be amused.

More recently, economic crises hit the industry hard, closing newspapers and reducing the number of mainstream journalism outlets from coast to coast.  But widespread media cutbacks of the past few years are not simply a reaction to an economic downturn.  They reflect a revolutionary change in how Americans receive information about the world.  Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter transmit news faster than a squadron of newspaper delivery boys; nytimes.com receives 20 million visitors per month with a paid print circulation of little more than one million; smart phones, electronic tablets and mobile devices have recast traditional media molds.

Enter the blogosphere, which is a fine new word but a dangerous trend if anybody thinks it’s going to replace the role of journalism in a free society.  Although it’s tempting to hail the democratization of media as a great breakthrough, the dangers of allowing anybody with a server and a keyboard to “inform” the public are pretty obvious.  With no gatekeepers even pretending to hold up bedrock journalism principles of accuracy and fairness, we are losing the ability to separate the wheat from the gaffe.

Some might argue, “Who cares?”  What is good journalism good for, anyway?

A lot.  I taught journalism in Algeria as a Knight International Press fellow a few years ago, and a colleague from Lebanon showed me a remarkable pairing of lists.  One, from Transparency International, ranked countries on how well their governments worked in key areas, like human rights and accountability.  A second was from Reporters Without Borders, which ranked the same countries on their press freedoms.

You probably know where this is going.  There was almost a one-to-one ratio between the countries with the biggest human rights violations and those with the most restrictive press.

Journalism still matters, and you don’t have to live in a repressive one-party state to appreciate it.

We started The Story Group because traditional media outlets in the United States may be floundering, but the public’s need and desire to know has not diminished.  The need for and availability of online journalism is exploding, but no economic model has emerged to fund this important work. Delivery methods for journalism have changed, but not its importance.

If public interest groups, foundations and philanthropists wish to take advantage of this revolution, they, like news outlets themselves, need to fundamentally change the ways they communicate. The Internet now enables these organizations to reach a much larger audience with dynamic content and interactive, content-rich websites where members, funders, media and interested parties seek accurate information.

We at The Story Group believe in the enduring power of journalism.  Important stories, well told, still have the ability to drive public opinion, motivate politicians, indict criminals, and, as Joseph Pulitzer famously remarked, “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

By marrying bedrock journalism practices, timeless storytelling techniques, and new media distribution possibilities, The Story Group is poised to take advantage of journalism’s vibrant and uncharted next phase.

About 50 percent of this country’s electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. But as concerns grow about the wide-ranging health and environmental effects of coal burning — from asthma to climate change — so has citizen opposition to new coal-burning electricity production. Around the West, grass roots efforts in Montana, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah show the power of local activism in shaping regional energy policies. These four videos document the efforts of ranchers, physicians, local politicians and other residents who rose up to say “no” to coal — and won.

In Great Falls, Montana, an unlikely alliance of farmers, environmentalists, historians and scientists formed to fight the proposed Highwood Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant. Their efforts show how local activists can stand up to outside energy interests.

In the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, a new coal-fired power plant has been proposed on Navajo lands. The Desert Rock Energy Project will worsen the region’s air quality, already degraded by two operating coal plants. Isn’t it time to turn away from coal?

In Sevier County, UT, citizens of this rural region stood up to a proposed coal-fired power plant, planned for one of Sevier’s most beautiful valleys.

Three new coal-fired power plants have been proposed for Nevada, even though the state has the highest potential for alternative energy development in the country.