Looking to earth and ecology to revive local news

This piece is part of our Civic Media Series. Read the Civic Media Magazine and explore pieces from the series here.

State lines, city borders, and political districts — the containers around which many newsrooms base their coverage — are arbitrary.  Many people who live across neighborhood lines or state borders often have more in common with one another because they share the experience of living on the same type of land or in the same climate.

This reality was brought home to me during January’s Eaton Fire near my home in Los Angeles. Crooked Media podcast host Jon Lovett also lives in Los Angeles, and highlighted this disconnect in his first episode of 2025:

“How’s everybody doing? Everybody enjoying a deeply contentious and also quite vague debate about air quality? Everybody love inconclusive scientific advice that acts as if we are all both in a war zone and at the beach in a county that is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined? Providing one kind of guidance even though some people in this city and county live as far apart from each other as New York City and Philadelphia? Everybody loving that part of it?”

L.A. news providers, like other city-based outlets, organize around county lines rather than ecological realities. Most of the nine million people in Los Angeles County were living in areas that were structurally unaffected by the fire, yet those living within or near ignited chaparral biomes (or mountain shrublands) experienced profound disruption, surfacing important questions of whether humans should have built homes in these areas to begin with.

This points to a deeper issue: Local reporting maintains little connection to the actual earth, only bringing it into focus during crises like wildfires, oil spills, or extreme weather. Newsrooms rarely inform people about the original stewards of the land — even if they still live on it — or how the land itself shapes daily life.

With the ongoing hospicing of traditional news media, I’m looking to other movements like bioregionalism to provide a model for how quality information can better flow and lead to productive civic engagement. A bioregion is defined not by political boundaries but by ecological systems. 

I don’t remember the last time I read a news story that focused on our connection to the land when it wasn’t about an unfolding disaster. It’s curious that news rarely acknowledges the land we live upon and other non-human life we share it with, despite that land and what it enables being the foundation of a functioning community — and, by extension, local news itself.

Perhaps we can start to shift local news toward its ecological home in subtle ways. For a simple example, imagine if every local newsroom included a front-page quiz on common local flora and fauna, watersheds, in-season fruits and vegetables, and the history of the land. Most people, including everyday news consumers (myself included!), would currently fail this quiz. Capitalism alienates us from what we need to flourish — what exists beneath our feet and around us. We are taught an individualism that separates us not only from one another but from all life, denying our fundamental interdependence.

“Stressful conditions incentivize nurturing relations of cooperation alongside competition,” Indigenous botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in The Serviceberry. “The extractive practices of the colonists must be replaced with reciprocity and replenishment if anyone is to survive.”

Many news critics and younger journalists have acknowledged how much of the news industry operates through colonialist qualities of extraction and competition. This incentive structure ultimately harms the public it is meant to serve. If journalism mirrored ecological systems rather than capitalist markets, it might function as connective tissue — transferring meaningful information within each bioregion rather than existing to extract information and package content to sell.

Instead of relying on traditional newsroom structures, we could empower those already trusted within communities, people deeply engaged in aspects of local living, to share their knowledge more widely. Right now, that’s already happening in local Facebook, WhatsApp, and other groups, where parents, residents, and activists share resources and collaborate to shift policies. Perhaps the so-called “journalists” of the future are more like curators of connection — helping people to find one another, access quality information, and advance conversations and actions that communities themselves decide to pursue, rather than simply “creating content” or “holding the powerful to account.”

With this approach, communities would be far better prepared to handle climate collapse, natural disasters, and inevitable political crises. Mutual aid and cooperation would become ingrained in civic information networks.

All of this could be possible if local media reorients itself towards the land, recognizing that the strongest foundation for news is not institutions or industries, but the interconnected relationships that sustain us — both human and ecological.

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Jennifer Brandel is a systems thinker who works between industries to launch initiatives that shift narratives and create possibilities. Her company Hearken has been infusing proven engagement models into news media since 2015.  

This story was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Bettina Chang. Fact-checking by Bashirah Mack.