Gail Small Attorney Gail Small fights for Northern Cheyenne environmental rights. Image source: Kathdin Foundation

You can’t investigate topics such as growth and sprawl without soon recognizing how they connect with a variety of interrelated issues of environmental degradation. Today there are countless stories of environmental destruction, all indicative of our overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. Many are hugely important to the futures of our children and grandchildren. Yet even the biggest of these stories, such as the burning and leveling of the Amazon rain forest, are barely covered by the media. That is undoubtedly one reason why few people seem to appreciate the gravity of these problems and the urgency with which we must address them. (Another reason — and one deserving far more attention than it gets — is our failure to appreciate the nature of exponential growth.)

With that in mind I plan to do what I can with this site to bring more attention to specific aspects of the environmental plight in which we find ourselves. This is consistent with recent efforts here to clarify the “big picture” encompassing issues such as the impacts of land development. It is also a small step toward broadening this site’s focus, part of a plan for the future of the site of which I’ll say more in the next couple of months.

It seems fitting to start by pointing to an information source on some of the most underreported environmental issues in the U.S. today. I’m talking about the environmental challenges forced upon American Indians on reservation land. Just as the social struggles of the American Indian are all but ignored by the media and government, their struggles to protect many millions of acres of land from destructive effects of mining, oil drilling, nuclear waste dumping, and other assaults coming from the U.S. government and large corporations are grossly underreported.

An easy introduction to these issues should be found in the film, Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action. I’ve not yet seen it myself, having only learned about it recently. It’s garnered some excellent reviews though, and judging from the clips available on the site, it should be well worth seeing if you can catch a screening or see it on DVD.

Exactly why topics such as those in this film don’t get more media play is a large question. But considering the proportion of news time now given to things like celebrity gawking and car chases, it’s clear mainstream news now consistently ignores important stories. The stories in Homeland are among those needing much wider coverage.