Lost In Cyberspace

By John Skow

This environment reporter's idea of interactive technology was to tap the computer case with a 12-in. adjustable-end wrench to correct vapor lock and improve e-mail reception. Mostly on instinct, he patrolled the environment outdoors and avoided the World Wide Web. The information superhighway vanished last year, he noticed, at least as an annoying metaphor, and maybe the World Wide Web would go away too.

But no. The Web is still here, and without it, journalistic obsolescence looms (yawns? festers? creeps in petty pace? click one). So this reporter sets out (urls forth?) onto the Internet. And what does he discover?

There appears to be more virtual environment on the Web than there remains real environment in the actual, tattered, non-virtual world itself. Or nearly. Yet doing research on the Internet is like taking a two-year-old for a walk. Pretty pebbles and deeply meaningful small sticks present themselves, but enlightenment seldom proceeds in a straight line. There is always some beguiling irrelevancy to be clicked, which is good. Often, however, the environmental pilgrim discovers to his surprise that there is not much depth of information. A surprising number of green websites are little more than 16-bit fund-raising brochures.

The Web is praised as a wondrous educational tool, and in some respects it is. Mostly, though, it appears to be a stunning advance in the shoring up of biases, both benign (one's own views) and noxious (other views). Whether anyone's opinion is changed by the Web is an open question, though of course the same could be said of Balkan politics and air strikes. A six-month debate on an Environmental News Network forum www.enn.com/community/forum) about agribusiness, organic farming and Monsanto's genetic engineering of plants, began in September with sweet reason: "In the U.S. only 10.9% of the average American's income is spent on food. Compare this to Britain at 11.5%, Sweden 14.5%." Fairly quickly the discourse descended to a mudball fight. A farmer who thinks chemical fertilizers and pesticides are fine dismissed an organic farmer as a gardener and added, "Man, you drip of liberalism; it almost stinks." Another nonorganic disputant offered, "More than anything, I cannot STAND ignorant hysterics seeking to ban or destroy whatever technological innovation currently threatens their precarious emotional stability." From the other side came this: "You are a vile individual who licks the boots of the well-heeled, and you'll never see the light about the virtues of unspoiled nature and wildlife...You are just full of technocrap!" The mudballs still fly, and all are welcome. Park your chewing gum and razors at the door.

Or punch in another Internet address, like www.swcenter.org which brings up a useful activist group I know, Arizona's Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. As usual, the Southwest Center is tormenting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to add deserving beasts and plants to the Endangered Species List (the beluga whale in Alaska's Cook Inlet is a candidate). There's good information here, on a wide array of eco-skirmishing, but what I print out is something I've never laid hands on, a copy of the Endangered Species Act itself, the great Magna Charta of U.S. environmentalism. Yes, the Interior Department probably would have sent a copy of the ESA if I had phoned and asked. But the Web is right there: reach up and pick the overhanging mangos.

A friend recommends www.envirolink.org a widely used green portal, and this leads across the Atlantic to the Danish Wind Turbine Manufacturers Association, which offers detailed text on wind power in Dansk, Deutsch or English. I am glad to see that the Danes, my forebears, are hoisting a wetted finger toward non-pollutive electricity, but the download time is more than an hour, and that is too windy. Click the "back" button.

Returned from Denmark, but still on Envirolink, I stumble on controversy. It seems that last spring, Lycos, a prominent Internet search engine, promised support to Envirolink, which was started in 1991 by Josh Knauer, then a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, and is chronically underfunded. Envirolink was to get financing, and Lycos would be allowed to look green. (So says news analysis downloaded from the New Haven Advocate newspaper. Stealing good stuff is what the Web is for.) For three months, if you clicked on "Lycos saves the planet," you reached Envirolink. Then Lycos canceled the contract. Norm Lenhart, a senior editor at something called Off-Road.com had complained that Envirolink offered entry to such activist groups as Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front. Norm who? At what? Off-Road.com is an Internet site for fans of off-road vehicles, with ties to the anti-environmental "wise-use" movement. The website is a click away from Blue Ribbon magazine, another off-road lobbying outfit, sponsored by Honda, Yamaha, Ski-doo and Polaris, whose motto is "preserving our natural resources FOR the public instead of FROM the public."

Here is one of the back alleys in which the Web can be brilliantly educational. Will enough high school kids, rummaging for term-paper material, find this alley and see what it means? Which is, perhaps, that virtual power, not real size, is often what's important. Envirolink has few staff members and little money, but it has power, because it is an entry to 400 enviro and animal-rights websites. Off-Road.com is an unknown, except to its communicants, who are mostly Western motorheads determined to keep Forest Service logging roads open at a time when rising environmental awareness makes it clear to the wider society that they should be closed. Lycos, briefly eager to save the planet with Envirolink, is a real business with real funding. Did Lycos, which now carries the Environmental News Service in place of Envirolink, cave in to an insignificant squawk from the far reaches of Webland? Lycos execs say no, and it is true that Envirolink shows up among the search engine's top-rated enviro websites. But the conservative American Land Rights Association seems to think yes, and offers a Web address www.lycos.com at which Lycos may be thanked for right thinking. What's a Web crawler to believe? Well, for one thing, that Japanese car, motorcycle and snowmobile manufacturers--the power here is quite real, not virtual--are trying, through Blue Ribbon magazine and its parent, Blue Ribbon Coalition, to defeat U.S. environmental policy.

An innocent enviro wandering the Web--or an innocent black-hearted polluter--learns to click skeptically. Brave souls who reach www.radio4all.org/anarchy/fakes get a list of "anti-environmental" groups, most of them with wonderfully benign-sounding names: the Abundant Wildlife Society of North America, the California Desert Coalition, the Evergreen Foundation, the Environmental Conservation Organization, Mothers' Watch. Maybe most of these really are benign. Dunno. I check out the National Wetlands Coalition, a big-biz coalition against wetlands, and the Global Climate Coalition. The cover of this last org has been blown for some time. It's a consortium including oil and car companies that are mightily interested in stalling enactment of the Kyoto accords on carbon-dioxide emissions. Will a high school student patching together a paper on global warming buy the GCC's line, which says go slow because scientists disagree? Or click further and discover that, no, scientists really don't disagree; that 2,500 of them say Earth is in a period of potentially dangerous warming, to which human activities contribute to an alarming degree?

The wanderer learns a lot about prairie dogs, which are in sharp decline and should be listed as threatened, says the World Wildlife Fund www.panda.org) And about the last Congress, which was insufficiently environmental, according to the League of Conservation Voters www.lcv.org) I download a superb four-part, college-level course on the ozone hole from the University of Cambridge (www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/index.html). And I am assured by www.eco.freedom.org/unibomb.htm that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are environmentalists (a deniable charge, surely) and in league with Earth First! and the Unabomber.

And...it's 4 a.m.; do I know where my eyeballs are? So--oxymoron alert--a beginner's conclusion. The Web's strongest suit, at least as it deals with the environment, is serendipity, random walking. Search engines only pretend to sort out the jumbled and expanding Internet universe. Which, as has been widely noted, is unedited, unowned, unsanitized--though Congress continues to try--and, like the worldwide world itself, decidedly not guaranteed. Likewise for its environmental subset. Run barefoot through its meadows, but be careful where you put your feet.