Over the years, Andrew Revkin has perceptively identified "slow drip" environmental stories as a category unto itself. These range from the tragic to the banal. It's bad enough that these "slow drip" stories receive little sustained coverage; it's worse when you write about them and nobody seems to notice. John Fleck, the superb science writer for The Albuquerque Journal, reflects on why this might be at his blog:
I did a story in 2001 about research by a clever scientist named Bob Root who had quantified the lead wheel weights falling off of our cars' wheels. The amount was staggering "“ four tons per year in a city the size of Albuquerque, being ground up into toxic dust. I wrote a front page story. No one called me. No one called Bob. There was no outrage, no calls for regulation. Nada. It's easy to imagine what the level of outrage ...
