The Most Dangerous Beat | The Frontline Newsletter

Dear reader,

A gun was waiting for Chhoeung Chheng.

In the gathering dusk of December 4, 2024, on the edge of Cambodia’s Beng Per Wildlife Sanctuary, Chheng, a 63-year-old environmental journalist, was doing what he had done tirelessly for five years—documenting the destruction of one of his country’s last remaining forests. He was armed with just a camera and conviction. Chheng was photographing illegal logging operations when a man driving a tractor—an illegal logger, as it turned out—approached him and his colleague, Moeun Ny, and shot Chheng in the abdomen with a homemade firearm, a weapon commonly used by poachers. The journalist died three days later.

For many, Chheng’s death felt like the continuation of a disturbing global pattern, of environmental journalists who document the quiet violence of ecological destruction being silenced. And, more often than not, of their deaths going unanswered.

Be it in Cambodia, Indonesia, the US, Latin America, or India, journalists exposing environmental crimes face a lethal trifecta: the wrath of criminal enterprises, the complicity of state machinery, and the indifference of the public.

Over the past 15 years, at least 44 environmental journalists have been killed around the world, according to UNESCO’s Observatory of Killed Journalists. Among them were Cambodian activist-journalist Chut Wutty, shot while investigating illegal logging; Indonesian reporter Ardiansyah Matra’is, who was covering deforestation in Papua; and many more. Shockingly, only five of these 44 cases have led to convictions. That is an impunity rate of nearly 90 per cent.

The stakes have never been higher, and the toll has never been more brutal. Environmental journalism is the most dangerous beat, not crime, not politics. Yes, even in India.

Surprised? Sample this slice of statistics: since 2014, according to data from Reporters Without Borders, at least 28 journalists have been murdered in India, and nearly half of them were reporting on environmental stories. These journalists were not covering wars or riots. They were reporting on sand. On soil. On trees. And they were killed for it.

One of them was Jagendra Singh, a freelancer in Uttar Pradesh. Singh ran a Facebook page, Shahjahanpur Samachar, and was investigating illegal sand mining tied to a powerful Minister. He died from burn injuries after a police raid in 2015. In 2016, Karun Misra and Ranjan Rajdev were gunned down for reporting on illegal mining in, again, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In 2018, Sandeep Sharma, who exposed links between the sand mafia and local police, was run over and killed by a truck in Madhya Pradesh.

More recently, in 2020, Shubham Mani Tripathi was gunned down in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao district. He had told friends he feared he would be targeted by the sand mafia. In 2022, Subhash Kumar Mahto was shot in the head outside his home in Bihar. And in 2023, Shashikant Warishe, who had been exposing illegal land grabs in Maharashtra, was run down by an SUV allegedly driven by a real estate developer.

Obviously, these are not stray incidents. They speak of a failed system in which journalists trying to protect what is left of the country’s natural assets live under threat, while perpetrators of crimes against these brave individuals are not held accountable. India now ranks 159 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index (2024), and the decay of press freedom has gone hand in hand with the destruction of the environment.

That brings us to the next question: If the stakes are so high, the risks so great—why do these journalists keep doing it?

Because environmental journalism changes the world. But how?

It began with a book. In 1962, Rachel Carson, who was not an environmental journalist, published Silent Spring, a lyrical but damning exposé of the use of pesticides such as DDT. She was dismissed as hysterical, attacked by chemical companies, and vilified by those in power. But, as history tells us, it is Carson’s work that spurred the modern environmental movement. It led to the banning of DDT in the US and the creation of an institution that Donald Trump fears and has tried to throttle: the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Since then, environmental writing, especially journalism, has become a powerful engine of accountability—unearthing hidden crises and environmental crimes, and helping to protect forests, ecosystems, and vulnerable communities.

For instance, in 2013, a collaborative investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists exposed the shady workings of the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia. The report revealed how vast swathes of tropical rainforest were being razed for plantations, displacing indigenous communities and threatening endangered species such as orangutans and Sumatran tigers. The exposé pressured major multinational buyers such as Nestlé and Unilever to adopt stronger sustainability pledges. It also forced governments to tighten regulations on land use and led to global scrutiny of supply chains.

In Brazil, the reporting of journalists such as Eliane Brum and outlets such as Mongabay have been instrumental in exposing illegal gold mining and deforestation in the Amazon.

Since Carson, environmental writing, both by journalists and writers, has helped educate the masses. I must mention some of my all-time favourites here. First, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), which brought the science of climate change into the mainstream, showing how humanity had dangerously altered Earth’s systems. It was not just a scientific problem; it was, the book argued, a spiritual and existential crisis.

Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (1986), a brilliant work, explored the politics and corruption behind water development in the American West, while Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) combined globe-spanning reporting with scientific depth to explain how human activity is causing a mass extinction on a par with the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Then there is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, which paints an alarming picture of the potential consequences of climate change. In India, we have plenty of works, including Arundhati Roy’s writings on the Narmada Valley project and more.

The environment is not a distant, abstract concern. It is here. It is now. It is about who breathes clean air, and who does not. Who gets poisoned. Who profits. And who dies.

While Chheng’s accused killer awaits trial, the bigger question arises: how many more must die before environmental devastation is recognised as a human rights issue? Chheng’s colleague, Moeun Ny, who survived the attack, said something that rings in my ears even as I write this: “The forest might be destroyed at a faster pace without the local journalists.” The pace of destruction is already dizzying. Without journalists, it becomes invisible.

For young students and aspiring journalists reading this newsletter, the message is clear: your voice is needed now more than ever. Environmental journalism is not just about the planet. It is about people. It is about justice. It is about fighting against land dispossession, water contamination, and the theft of futures.

It is also about courage. Perhaps that is the driving force behind the work. Frontline, as you may know, has been at the forefront of environmental journalism since its inception. We have reported extensively on all major events in India’s green history. We continue to do so. You must have seen our extensive coverage of the megaproject in Great Nicobar. And, in our latest issue, we examine another shocking reality: the rapid decimation of India’s wild species and ecosystems—and worse, how this phenomenon is killing humans. Our writer, Divya Gandhi, has done meticulous research to uncover disturbing truths about the country’s biodiversity breakdown.

Read the piece, and write to us if there are stories in your vicinity that you want us to pay attention to.

Wishing you a meaningful week ahead,

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor, Frontline

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