The rabid environmentalism of the 1970s spilled over into the 1980s, with issues like DDT, the "death" of Lake Erie, a Great Lakes fisheries ravaged by the sea lamprey and polluting industries taking center stage in environmental reporting.

But the 1990s brought steady declines in newspaper circulation and newsroom budgets, a public that seemingly lost much of its interest in environmental issues, and a new generation of consumers more interested in video games than splashing through creeks.

Today, you won't have trouble finding full-time reporters writing about television shows, minor league sports, shopping, fashion, restaurants and movies.

But just try and find one who writes about the environment.

"There's been a huge drop," said Dave Poulson, Booth Newspapers environmental reporter from 1991 to 2003. He now is associate director of Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. "When I went to work for Booth, it was a plum job, the environmental reporter. Lots of papers had people covering it full-time."

Today, only a handful remain who devote most of their time to the environment — John Flesher from the Associated Press; Jeff Kart from the Bay City Times and Jeff Alexander from the Muskegon Chronicle among them. (And, of course, the legendary guy from The North Woods Call).

The Detroit News has no full-time environment writer but is experimenting with devoting a reporter, Jim Lynch, to an enviro beat. And the Detroit Free Press is struggling with whether to keep the environment a full-time beat, recently assigning veteran reporter Tina Lam to the environment. Time will tell what percentage of those beats will be devoted to news about the Great Lakes, land use, energy and the myriad others that so inherently affect all of us.

Poulson said the news is not all bad: Many news outlets have matured to regularly incorporate environmental stories into other beats. Business writers routinely cover energy issues. Garden writers cover invasive species and the dangers of pesticides. Local reporters understand that developers can do harm by draining wetlands. And outdoors writers, most notably the Free Press' Eric Sharp, are no longer just "hook-and-bullet" guys. Sharp and many of his counterparts frequently write about global warming, land use and toxic dangers because those issues have such a direct impact on the sports they love.

Still, in a state surrounded by 20% of the world's fresh water supply-the liquid gold of the next century-you would think that forward-thinking media outlets would be clamoring to establish one or more full-timers devoted to environmental issues.

A little nudge in that direction wouldn't hurt. Next time you read something good, something that ticks you off, or your news outlet fails to report something significant-call 'em up and give 'em hell.

This article first appeared in The North Woods Call ("Michigan's Conservation Sentinel for more than half a century").