Backgrounder: David Seideman
David Seideman is an unapologetic activist.
As editor-in-chief of Audubon Magazine, Seideman has wide latitude to advocate, in whatever way he chooses, for what he calls the magazine's "holy trinity" of "birds, wildlife, and habitat." "There's the expectation that I'll do Audubon coverage," he said, but "I have pretty much full autonomy. It's a good place to be, at a very important time."
Audubon was founded in 1898 and remains one of the most respected green magazines in America.
Seideman is using his bully pulpit to experiment with progressive approaches to advancing environmental causes. He's attempting to help environmental activism evolve from a cause embraced by the far-left fringe to a concern at the center of what he sees as the political mainstream.
To that end, Seideman courts unlikely allies who share his interest in maintaining wildlife and habitat, such as hunter's groups and evangelical Christians. His guidance leads the magazine's authors to cover old-but-still-relevant topics in creative ways. For example, the magazine focused on endangered species by covering an Australian scientist’s controversial attempts to use cloning to bring the extinct Tasmanian Tiger back to life.
Ted Williams, a long-time contributor to Audubon and a writer for Fly, Rod, and Reel magazine, says Seideman is "an absolutely excellent editor. He's got a stiff backbone. He's fearless."
Growing up, Seideman read environmental magazines, Audubon among them. During high school, he worked at a nature center during high school, blazing and maintaining trails and giving tours to groups of students. One of the job's less exalted chores consisted of cleaning a Mississippi mud turtle's tank. Even so, says Seideman, the balance of physical and mental exertion made his time at the nature center "my all-time favorite job."
After interning at the political magazine The New Republic while a student at Georgetown University, he graduated and landed a position on the national desk at Time magazine for nine years. Finally, Seideman's lifelong passion for conservation culminated in being named editor-in-chief of Audubon Magazine.
"I've come full circle from reading this magazine as a kid," he said. "To cover a subject I've been passionate about, day in and day out, is a real thrill."
Seideman's biggest goal for the magazine is to bring new people into the environmental movement, to "broaden the base of our support," he said, "by covering unexpected allies in the movement," be they deer hunters, evangelical Christians in the "creation-care movement," farmers, or land developers.
When Seideman speaks about the environment or coverage of the environment, he is critical when he thinks events or coverage deserve it, but he tries to be fair, he suggests.
In his "Editor's Notes," he confronts those he believes are hurting the environment or demonizing environmentalists; his rebukes of Bush administration policy and his response to Michael Crichton's book State of Fear are reasoned yet stinging, laced at times with cold fury. At the same time, he is quick to applaud good acts by unlikely actors, as when he complimented Bush for increasing funding for wildlife refuges to its highest level ever.
Seideman is also willing to take stands that run counter to some people's long-held beliefs when he thinks those beliefs are misguided. For example, he supports deer hunting as a necessary evil to curb the deer population and protect other species.
"When it comes to deer, I admit that, as a longtime member of animal-welfare groups, I’m emotionally conflicted," he writes, in his "Editor's Note" from the magazine's March-April 2002 issue. "But today, because of their record numbers, deer are dying painfully, from starvation and from collisions with their main predator—cars. Look at it this way: What’s sadder than an innocent animal taking a bullet for the conservation cause? Extinction that causes forests in spring to turn silent and barren for want of songbirds and wildflowers." Echoes of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.