around the Southlands: In the shadow of Walmart
How much influence does the country's largest grocer have on our Southern landscape? Plus: the end of the Anthropocene and more news...
A flock of roseate spoonbills lifts off from still water. That’s a compelling illustration of the beauty of the coastal South—which is probably also why it’s a closing image in a brief, promotional video released by the Walton Family Foundation back in 2018.
“Our environmental focus really grew out of a family connection to the land,” Rob Walton says in the video. He is the eldest son of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, and, according to Bloomberg, the eighteenth wealthiest person in the world.
I’ve already written in this newsletter about how the Waltons are pushing to develop a more robust outdoor tourism economy in the Ozarks. Now I’ve found myself wondering how much wider across the South their influence spreads.
I found the video thanks to Civil Eats’s long, excellent series investigating Walmart’s influence. The latest piece in that series hit close to home: It details how tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars from the family’s foundations have poured into journalism—and in particular environmental journalism.
Luke Runyon, a former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, told Civil Eats that it’s impossible to avoid the Waltons’ presence in his home region, the Colorado River Basin. That’s perhaps even more true here in Louisiana. Per Civil Eats, the earliest-known instance of Walton-backed journalism came in 2013, when the Walton Family Foundation began supporting coastal reporting initiatives focused on the Mississippi River Delta. I know for certain that some of those Walton dollars have trickled down to me, through various nonprofits; they are a funder, for example, of the Food and Environmental Reporting Network, which is currently supporting two stories I’m reporting on nature in the South. (I will note that FERN, like other journalism outlets, receives the funding on a condition of editorial independence.)
I’m in a moment of change and contemplation, as, in concert with the release of The Great River, I consider what this newsletter could become. I dream of building something bigger than an outlet for just my writing alone: we need a hub for people interested in nature in the South, and the human relationships with nature. (I think of the great work of the Southern Foodways Alliance as an example of what I’d like to create.) But to pay others to contribute, to organize events, to do meaningful research: that all takes money. The conundrum is how to get that money in ways that won’t disqualify my position as an objective analyst of what’s happening across the Southern landscape. While I’m not worried about working with FERN, I have done work for influential conservation nonprofits. Given my goals, that work seems less possible moving forward.
And that leads to a quick aside: a paywall will kick in after this paragraph, as I’ve decided, at least for the moment, to make these “around the Southlands” posts a feature only for paid subscribers. I’m currently on track to make around $2,700 this year from this newsletter, and that’s before Substack and Square (the payment processer) take their cut—which would put my hourly rate so abominably low that I’m not going to bother to even make an estimate, and doesn’t account for the travel expenses involved in the work.
With that aside, what is the Waltons’ influence on the South?
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