Proprietary Information?

by Frank J. Regan

Information in today’s world is a commodity; something bought and sold like land, cars, or toys in a toy store.  It is an important commodity because it can make or break a person or an organization.  For instance, information affecting stock prices: whoever receives it the quickest and most accurately, makes a profit that day. Others, getting it even a few seconds later, lose. The information business is a business out to make money like any other and it rarely comes without a price. Listening to the news, information about the state of our existence at any one point, over your radio or television, or even the Internet, may seem free of charge, but someone is paying for it through either advertisements or donations.  And, while this is the way the world works in the Information Age, as commercially appropriate and American as waving the flag, the price tag for environmental information should cause us concern.  In a world that desperately needs to understand the depths of the daily and yearly changes in our environment, we are being held hostage to the vagaries of a market oblivious to the health of our very life support system. 

Environmental information is substantially different from all other information.  A family gathering may be ruined if it rains on the day it should shine.  A business may fail if it does not know what its customers want.  Countries may war if they receive the wrong signal from another.  However, if we lose our ability to accurately monitor the health of our planet, we perish.  Information, news about the changes going on in our environment, supplies our collective senses, as it did our ancient ancestors, alerting them to potential dangers around them. Though culture and technological development have decreased our exposure to  small variations in our environment--heat, cold, marauding predators—we are still vitally connected to a relatively narrow band of conditions that must exist so that we can exist.  If we do not respond to signals that the environment is breaking down, we may indeed not survive what the signals portend.  That is, we need to know the ramifications of widespread practices that are harming our health, such as the dumping of toxic chemicals in the waters we drink.  If there are persistent changes in the ratio of oxygen and nitrogen in the air, or if there are changes in how microbes and bacteria breakdown nutrients, or if there are problems caused by the redistribution of the plants and animals around us, we need to know.  We need to know this critical information whether it plays well in the media or not. 

In particular, because information is a commodity, like any other today, its value determines its price and therefore its distribution. Value is the fair exchange or equivalent for something exchanged.  Businesses need to gain a profit from services rendered.  Thus, generally a newspaper will not run the kind of stories that fails to pay for the space it uses up.  A television network will not run a piece that will drive its constituency to its competitor.  A radio station will not run a story that will upset its advertisers.  Give something costly away over a long period without the prospect of gain and you had better be independently wealthy or your business will perish. This is the market.

Nevertheless, the market’s indifference towards environmental news punctuates a profound deficiency in how we receive critical information.  If for a moment, you could reduce the problem to its (possibly absurd) essentials, imagine one prehistoric caveman withholding the knowledge of a distant flood.  Perhaps he saw it building several hours ago up in the mountains on the same river that his clan has adopted as their home.  But, before informing and convincing his clan that they are about to lose their lives to this raging deluge still several miles away, he barters with his family and neighbors until he gets a large portion of elk meat.  If this practice of withholding vital information to maximize personal gain was commonplace among our ancestors, we would not be around arguing about the propriety of information.  Yet essentially this is how we dole out environmental news today.  If the major news agencies do not see a profit in informing their readers about the exact condition of their environment, that is, not only reporting on major disruptions, like the influx of an invasive species, but the long-term consequences of these invaders and repeated follow-ups, their readers do not ‘see’ the implications to their lives and their children’s future. The crux of most environmental stories is that they are not isolated incidents, but usually simply dramatic incidents in a continuum of environmental degradation. Often, a bubbling Brownfield in the center of a city is not adequately reported, except in an environmental rag, until someone makes a big enough stink to make it profitable.  The environmental impact of a new transportation system does not get a complete review in the media because frequently to do so would be viewed as being in opposition to a popular and important economic project.

I contend that a complete sampling of the environmental news reported in and around any one city in the United States will reveal that unless a reader reads all—radio, television, print media, and the Internet—the environmental stories in state-wide radius, he will come up short on what he needs to know to ascertain the health of his environment.  He or she will find that many critical stories have been ignored that may ultimately prove crucial in years to come.  An example of this is the accumulated effect of lead in gasoline on children’s developing brains that took the persistence and dedication of a few heroes over many years (resulting in many deaths and many more lives compromised) to convince the media that it was an issue worthy of attention. This does not even approach the issue of pre-empting the attention-getting news, spending the money to explore potential environmental catastrophes, like global warming or species invasion--anticipating disasters, instead of waiting for them to happen before any information is given to the public. Some environmental problems, like the breakdown of our planet’s biodiversity, requires that a large amount of information be gathered without knowing beforehand if indeed there is a problem. With no promise of return on its investment, only enlightened governments or scientists from well-funded universities and environmental organizations can sustain the possibly fruitless, but eminently necessary, search for environmental dangers.  This is not alarmist claptrap, as preached by the those who only want unrestrained development, but understanding the profound depth of our relationship to our environment and our own long-term health.

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