Six years after its launching, the Dispatches are an established presence on the Internet. They have a steady monthly readership of about six thousand people from ninety countries-- sometimes more, sometimes less.    The audience has grown organically, without any publicity or promotional effort, in response to its eclectic cornucopia of offerings. Word of mouth and people discovering it and e-mailing others have played a role, but most of the readers have stumbled on the site by Googling or searching on one of the other engines something specific they are interested in. A Japanese lepidopterist, for instance, searching Papilio. The readers are not necessarily from the small segment of the population who have the disposable income to buy books and magazines. I am getting fascinating e-mails and putting people together all over the world.  The goal is to get Dispatches from the local people themselves, who know their own situation far better than I or any Western visitor ever will.  A woman from the Amazon and several people from Africa are working on Dispatches, and we have published ones from a Brazilian woman who discovered she was Jewish, a saxophonist with a deep interest in neurocognition, an American artist of Romanoff descent, and a Middlebury student’s impressions of Africa and India. I am currently working on  Dispatches about the mata atlantica, Brazil’s coastal rainforest, only seven percent of which is left and about the vanishing mountain culture of the Adirondacks, trying to get its lore and stories and lingo before it is lost forever.    

       The internship program at DFTVW is in its third year. For the last two, seniors at McGill University, most of them majoring in environmental studies,  have been redacting and filing in dozens of categories more than 50 pages of bulletins about biological and cultural developments around the world, most of them not positive. It is harrowingly educational work. Each bulletin is a piece of the puzzle, and the overall picture is not looking good, but one that people need to know about, and the Bulletins have become a good place to start understanding the disparities and connections and far-flung impacts
that our ever-growing numbers and ever-growing number of people with money to spend are having. 

      The site is now fully multimedia. There are not only a thousand or more pages of reportage, but still fotos, video, slideshows, music, art and poetry. One of our projects is to record “One Morning Soon” in as many countries as possible. 

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        The site was started with a grant from the Winslow Foundation, and some the first Dispatches were commissioned by the Helen Clay Frick and United Nation Foundations and the J.M. Kaplan Fund. The Dispatch on the vanishing mountain culture of the Adirondacks has been  supported by Bob Worth and Ann McCrory, people with a great affection for this special and still undescribed local culture, and by  the Winslow Foundation, The Wildlife Conservation Society, and the National Geographic Society. 

        The world has changed alarmingly during this half-dozen years, and the perception of what is happening, which the Dispatches have been on the cutting edge of,  has changed as well. More record-high temperatures are being reported the globe, and their impact on terrestrial and marine ecosystems are being assessed. We are beginning to experience major systems breakdown. Everyone but the oil industry and other vested interests still in wilfull denial now accept that  global warming is a fact that will have dire consequences for all the life on earth. Various collapses and “tipping points” (so many that “tipping point” has become the cliché of the moment, displacing “perfect storm” and “oxymoron”) are being predicted for mid-century by the best computer models and mega-studies by thousands of scientists all over the world : the glaciers will be gone, the Amazon rainforest will dehydrate into savanna (my piece on this in Vanity Fair’s May green issue will be posted shortly), the remaining coral reefs will be done in by bleaching, the remaining commercial marine fisheries  will go the way of the cod. Honeybees are experiencing  a mysterious massive die-off, and the still not completely understood die-off of frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians continues. Every form of life across the board is undergoing a drastic reduction in population, except us : birds, butterflies, polar bears (if you want to see one in the wild, better get up there fast), due to habitat loss and conversion and fragmentation, deforestation, and the multifarious  nefarious effects of global warming, including species being pushed poleward out of their ranges and into oblivion and the increase in the frequency and intensity of the El Ninos and the hurricane, tornado, monsoon and typhoon seasons. It is much clearer now than it was in 2001 that we and the diversity of the life on the planet are at the eleventh hour, that we all  have to make drastic changes in our daily lives if there is going to be any chance of averting a planetary apocalypse. The most pessimistic are saying it’s already too late. The only animal there is no shortage of is the canary. The bees are canaries, the amphibians are canaries, the polar bears are canaries, and the message they are sending us from the mouth of the mineshaft is that the mine is in flames, and we’re next.

    Many more people  “get it” than they did at the inception of DFPVW and are  taking  steps to reduce their individual ecological and carbon footprints. Others get it but still don’t want to be bothered to change their consumption behavior. It is to them that another soon-to-be-posted piece in Vanity Fair’s green issue (“An Ecosystem of One’s Own”)  is directed. It takes an ordinary American consumer through his day and tracks the ghastly far-flung impacts of his oblivious hyperconsumption (how your cellphone is killing the last wild gorillas; how many of the 350 billion plastic bags use in North America every year are dumped out at sea and are strangling the intestines of sea turtles and dolphins, to cite two impacts). But there are many simple and stressless things an individual can do to make himself no longer part of  the problem and part of the solution.

      As the state the world deteriorated, the mission of the Dispatches expanded. A steady diet of woe is not something a writer, any more than a reader, can keep up indefinitely, without starting to have thoughts about committing altruistic environmental suicide (if you really want to do the planet a favor, the best thing you could do is to remove yourself from it, and you can find a simple, painless way to do so on ChurchOfEuthanasia.come.) Not that we are suggesting anything. We are all compromised, because in order to live even the most compassionate ascetic must take life.  It’s a much better idea to dedicate yourself to the many positive contributions you could be making to alleviate the situation, some which are also laid out in this piece.)

      The thought that the arc is sinking, that we have gone and done it, have irreparably wrecked the biosphere and are extinguishing much of the world’s diversity, natural and cultural,  is a bitter pill for anybody to swallow, so I decided to leaven and lighten and brighten the message of the Dispatches with other subject-matter, to put the extinction of species and cultures in the broader contexts of flux and the diversity of life. Plus, I myself have undergone significant physical, ideological, and experiential transformation during these six years. Since hitting the big six-o, I have become increasingly aware that it is not the world that is vanishing—it will continue to exist in one form or other long after I am gone, and long after the human species mankind wipes itself out, which it seems hellbent on doing—as much as it is I myself who am vanishing. So the Dispatches have also become a record of my own consciousness, of a peripatetic Proust who has kept 70,000 pages of detailed notes since the early Sixties. Son Andre, the designer and manager of the Dispatches, and I originally thought  we would devote a sister site, Shoumatopia.com, to this record. But Shoumatopia.com has just ended up sort of naturally folded itself into the Dispatches, as when I had nothing to offer on the environmental beat, but something had to be posted because it had been awhile,  I dredged up old envelope-pushing experimental and other work that had fallen through the cracks over the years and were well worth rescuing from oblivion,  and put up  reprints of my ongoing work for Vanity Fair, Travel + Leisure, Audubon, Onearth, Walrus, and other magazines. While this dissipates the focus and creates a “farrago” (as one critic accurately described my last book, on the desert Southwest),   going this route  seems desirable philosophically because it recognizes, in a way not achievable by conventional environmental writing,  the astonishing, uncontainable diversity of what is actually out there, and emphasizes the subjectivity of all perception,  especially mine (another critic said, less accurately, that I “revel in the subjective.” I don’t so much revel in it, as I recognize that I am trapped in it. I see the world through my own particular, indeed unique set of lenses; we all do, inescapably.)

     My latest trip to Africa, this spring, was an enormous eye-opener. Far from finding Africa to “the hopeless continent,” as the Economist called it in 2003,  I met people who were really making a difference  and saw in action the new entrepreneurial face of wildlife conservation and cultural preservation, which is all about empowering and partnering with the local tribal people in the conservation and ecotourism business,  rather than excluding them or classifying them as poachers. In another generation Africans will have taken responsibility for their own land and resources, rather than being told what to do by paternalistic n.g.o.’s, half of whose funds go to maintaining the enviable lifestyle of their European  staff, and the other half into the pockets of the local government’s bureaucracy, so little or nothing changes on the ground, and the problem, like the desertification of the Sahel, for instance,  is still there. There is much that a passionately engaged individual can do. And the holistic approach of visionary activists like Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, who sees women’s rights, civil rights, the rights of forests and wild animals and traditional societies, and the fight against poverty and social injustice as all part of the same struggle, is very much what the Dispatches have been making the case for all along. 

      As an independent voice and forum, based in Montreal (from outside the fishbowl you can see how dirty the water is),   with no advertisers and no commercial interests influencing its content, the Dispatches will play an increasingly important role in the battle  for the environment and the integrity of the world’s remaining traditional cultures, which is now at the critical stage.  In the last few years I have had experiences with four respected magazines in which it was impossible to fully expose deplorable situations that needed to be brought to light, for fear of alienating their advertisers, paper supplier, or  institutions they  had  long-standing cozy relationships with. My ability to tell the truth was compromised. On the Dispatches, it is not.

       What has to be done now is to take the Dispatches to the next level. We need to incorporate and get the Site tax-free status, and to raise $180,000 a year, to make this a financially viable operation. We need an office, salaries for the site manager and the author/editor and a full-time staff person to take care of the business, promotion, and development part of the operation and to common-cause with green companies in social and environmental enterprises that give value to traditional cultures and financial incentives to preserve them and the ecosystems they evolved in and the wildlife.  Andre and I are both holding down strenuous and demanding day jobs, and we don’t have the time to apply for the next round of grants, to do the networking and help keep up with the huge amount of media and scientific output that the planetary emergency is generation. It’s a breaking story with unlimited strands, new developments daily.   

We need an office. Mine is bursting at the seams. It’s becoming a storage room for cartons stuffed with bulletins waiting to be redacted and all sort of other documents. The Dispatches have gone beyond the two-man operation stage. We need help. We’re hoping that a promising young journalist with p.r. business savvy will be coming aboard. But she’s working at two magazines and volunteering for an ngo that is putting in wells in African villages that have no clean running water. We don’t want to charge a subscription rate. That would defeat the purpose of the Dispatches, which is to be available to anyone with access to the Internet,  and would severely limit its readership. But the right kind of advertising, from green companies, could be synergistic and by offering positive initiatives to become involved in, could help bring about the changes we all are trying to make. At this point, though, appealing to foundations and individuals who appreciate what we are doing and want to support it, still seems the way to go.