Bob Lalasz is director of science communications for The Nature Conservancy.

Maybe the most surprising thing about the demise of The New York Times’ Green blog was that…so many people were surprised by it.

When I attended the ScienceOnline 2013 conference in late January — an annual gathering of digitally savvy scientists and science reporters and communicators held at North Carolina State University — everybody I talked to about Green thought its death was a foregone conclusion.

That’s because the Times had dissolved its environment desk earlier that month, and paying the desk’s two editors to essentially manage a blog is a rather dear expense in today’s precarious newspaper environment.

Still, the Twitterverse erupted in howls when the news finally leaked out last Friday. Bora Zivkovic, the irrepressible blogs editor for Scientific American, summed up the agony:

(Background: When the Times shut down its environment desk, Bora put forth this long post outlining how its reporters who used to be on environmental beats could now evangelize with the rest of the news staff to build an environmental newsgathering ethos throughout the paper, with Green as its flagship. It was a nice theory, but newsrooms unfortunately don’t really work that way — especially as more and more reporters work from home these days.)

I wasn’t surprised when Green got killed, but I was still a little shocked. “Shocked” because, while I saw it coming, the idea of one of the most influential newspapers in the United States giving up its dedicated channel for reporting on energy and the environment is a particularly big tree to fall in the ever-thinning forest of mainstream U.S. environmental journalism.

You probably know the numbers by heart: More than half of all environmental reporting positions at U.S. dailies have been terminated since 2000, and the number of science sections at dailies has fallen from about 150 to fewer than 20.

(And, let’s be frank: The shock for many enviros also stems from the Times’ reputation as a liberal paper, friendly to environmental concerns. As the thinking goes: If even the Times can’t even see fit to keep an environmental blog going, is there any hope of getting our stories back in the mass media?)

Once the shock wears off, though, what does the disappearance of Green mean for environmental science and science communications? It’s more complicated than you might think.