Fellows Updates

The Ted Scripps Fellows' family is growing! At least three former fellows have become parents in the past year. Congratulations to the families of Bill Adler, Pat Joseph and Ted Wood!

Bill Adler helped swell the ranks of Colorado-based former fellows when he and his wife Robin moved to Denver in the fall. Accompanying them were their "rogue hound, Roxie," and their son, Zeke, whom they adopted as a newborn in June. Of Zeke, Bill writes, "He sports a thicket of red hair, a smile as wide as an offensive tackle, and an appetite to match." Bill also "laureled" in a recent edition of the Columbia Journalism Review for his Austin Chronicle article uncovering the true source of some pro-nuclear editorials. Click here to read CJR's write-up.

Zeke Adler models his punk hair-do.

David Baron recently returned from a trip to India, which he calls "amazing, exhausting, exotic, depressing, uplifting... a bit of everything." His three-week "lecture tour" of the country was sponsored by the U.S. State department, which is working with Indians on how to address conflicts between humans and wildlife in both countries. David's 2003 book The Beast in the Garden, won the Colorado Book Award in November for the "Colorado and the West" category. He's now settling into his new job, working as global development director for the public radio show "The World," and his new marriage, to partner Paul. David writes, "That's one advantage of living in Massachusetts—the only state in the union where we could get hitched."

Elizabeth Bluemink pulled up stakes in Florida last June and moved to Juneau, Alaska, to cover logging, fishing and mining for the Juneau Empire. She says she loves Alaska and her new job so far, including some stories on gold mining, small-scale logging in the Tongass and state-federal conflict over proposed off-shore fish farming.

Lucia Joseph says "cheese!"

A project of Jennifer Bowles and two colleagues at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., won a second place award from the Associated Press News Executive Council for California and Nevada. The project was a result of her team's investigation into the pollution at a missile testing site and its impact on a nearby residential neighborhood, where many people have gotten thyroid illness.

Rebecca Huntington traveled to China to report on pollution, coal mining and global climate change for the Jackson Hole News & Guide. Of her paper, she writes, "The small-town newspaper has a strong interest in global issues, particularly when global climate change could impact the town's winter tourism economy."

In June, Alex Markels became a "contributing editor" at U.S. News & World Report. Since then he has covered the presidential election, the Forest Service's poor fire safety record and the growing oil shortage. In October he had a cover story, called "Angry in America," which examined the election's impact on Americans' personal relationships. Check out a list of some of his recent stories. Last month Alex went to Panama on assignment for an eco-adventure story. Later this winter he'll be taking his son Moses on his first foreign travel adventure, to Machu Picchu and the Peruvian jungle.

The Colorado contingent of former fellows continues to grow! In October, Kim McGuire left the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and started work at the Denver Post. She writes, "I am covering toxics, which includes air and water pollution, hazardous waste cleanups, the nuclear West, and EPA's environmental regulation and enforcement. They are also humoring my interest in chemical weapons." And in that vein, on Oct. 3, her two-part series on the destruction of chemical weapons, which was the subject of her fellowship program last year, ran in the Democrat-Gazette. She says she hopes to continue working on the topic, and expand it to include international demilitarization efforts, especially in the former Soviet Union.

Ted and Conor Wood show off their silly hats.

Emily Murphy reports she's still with USA Today, working as a multimedia producer. She went to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Boston and New York; her resulting multimedia pieces are online at Behind the Scenes at the DNC and Behind the Scenes at the RNC. She also wrote a story on NASCAR's female fans. The story and multimedia piece are both also available online.

Bruce Ritchie reports he recently worked on a story about the gill net ban approved by Florida voters 10 years ago. His reporting included going out with state wildlife officers on a night mission—complete with night vision goggles—to try to catch fishers using illegal nets. In November Bruce and his wife, Sue Ellen Smith, went on vacation to Costa Rica. "We had a good time viewing rainforest birds and other wildlife, seeing the Arenal volcano, whitewater rafting on the Sarapiqui River and snorkeling in the Pacific Ocean at Tamarindo," he writes.

David Wilson is teaching radio production at the University of Colorado at Boulder's journalism school. He'll also be providing daily news coverage from the state legislature to 12 Colorado community radio stations this year.

Alumni Updates

Robin Ferruggia ('03) is a general reporter for the Estes Park (Colo.) Trail Gazette. She writes, "I get to do a lot of environmental stories and I love my job. Despite all the grumbling I did while I was in the program, I think it prepared me extremely well for a career in environmental journalism. I thank you all."

Nicole Gordon ('02) is still working as a writer/editor at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (which operates the National Center for Atmospheric Research). "Basically, I write about atmospheric science for the general public, other UCAR/NCAR employees and the atmospheric science community," she says.

Kathleen O'Neil ('03) is working as the energy and environment reporter at the Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She writes, "I spend a lot of time covering the DOE's national research lab right outside of town, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). It's also a major nuclear cleanup site, because it's where most of the waste from Rocky Flats was sent."

Robin Truesdale ('03) writes that she's been editing a documentary film called "Conviction," about three nuns who were arrested in 2002 for their protest at a nuclear missile silo in northeast Colorado. The nuns were convicted of sabotage of national defense, and are now serving time in federal prison. Robin writes, "Not sure when the final cut will come out, but since the sisters will be released from prison at different times during 2005, the project may be held up to include that aspect." In the meantime, they're screening a rough cut of the film around northern Colorado and working on finding a studio to back it for theaterical release.

Two Former Fellows Win Colorado Book Awards

By Wendy Worrall Redal

With more than 400 guests looking on, former Ted Scripps Fellows David Baron and Daniel Glick were honored with Colorado Book Awards on Nov. 18, 2004. The 13th annual gala, sponsored by the Colorado Center for the Book, took place at Denver's Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. Fifteen winners, all Colorado authors, were recognized in 14 categories. Each of the books was published in 2003.

Baron's book, The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, tied for first place in the Colorado and the West category. Glick won the History/Biography category with Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, and Tom Yulsman, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and long-time science writer, was a finalist in the Non-Fiction category for Origins: The Quest for Our Cosmic Roots, his account of the emergence of the universe and life within it.

The Beast in the Garden (W.W. Norton), a study of the complex interaction between mountain lions and humans in Colorado's rapidly growing Front Range foothills, grew out of Baron's fellowship project while he was at the CEJ from 1998-1999. He became fascinated with the big cats and the problems that ensue when predators and people begin to find themselves in close proximity.

"Obviously, I was thrilled to receive a book award, but I was especially thrilled to receive a Colorado Book Award," Baron said.

"When I was writing my book, I wondered how Coloradans would react to it. Would they feel I portrayed the state's history, culture, and landscape accurately? Would they embrace the book as a welcome addition to Colorado literature, or reject it as the work of an 'outsider'? I like to think that receiving the award is a sign that the book has been embraced, and that means a lot to me since I've embraced Colorado as my new home."

The Beast in the Garden has just been released in paperback.

Glick's winning title, Monkey Dancing (Public Affairs), is the saga of the 5-month trip around the world he took with his two children in 2001 following the departure of their mother to another relationship in another state, and the death of Glick's brother to cancer. With his world turned awry, Glick decided to reconstitute his family anew with an adventurous itinerary to some of the earth's most remote and threatened natural places. Monkey Dancing chronicles their physical and emotional journey.

A special delight for Glick, who was a fellow in 2000-2001, was that his 13-year-old daughter Zoe was present to accept the award with him. (Son Kolya was studying abroad in Australia at the time.)

"It was so much fun to have her on the platform with me," said Glick. "It was kind of a dual pleasure to get the recognition and be there with Zoe was who was such an integral part of the experience."

Glick's first book, Powder Burn (Public Affairs), was a 2002 Colorado Book Award finalist but did not win. "I was a bridesmaid, but this time I was a bride," he noted, adding, "I feel like I'm really a member of a community" among writers in Colorado, a state he has called home for 10 years.

Yulsman's Origins, one of three finalists in the Non-Fiction category, was edged out by best-selling author Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.

As for future book award contenders, neither Baron nor Glick has immediate plans to write another book, while Yulsman has an idea in the works. Baron's new position as Global Development Editor for "The World," a public radio program co-produced by Boston's WGBH and the BBC, has put other book goals on hold for now. Glick, too, is at full capacity with magazine work. He is currently working on three natural-history-related articles for National Geographic and Smithsonian.

Yulsman is tentatively collaborating with CU geology professor Jim White on a book about how the Earth's life support systems, particularly climate, influenced human evolution, and how humans now dominate those systems. "We are thinking about a treatment that in its broad sweep would be something like Guns, Germs and Steel," said Yulsman, "but the treatment would be more journalistic."

In the meantime, Yulsman remains busy juggling teaching, heading up the news-editorial sequence in CU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, co-directing the Center for Environmental Journalism, and freelancing for magazines on the side, when there is a 'side.'

For more details on each of these books, or to purchase them, go to: www.beastinthegarden.com, www.danielglick.net, or to www.amazon.com for Origins.

Norton Seeks 'Common Ground' on Conservation Issues

By Wendy Worrall Redal

As Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton oversees a sweeping range of public land in the United States, most of it in the West. Her jurisdiction includes all of America's national parks and monuments, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Much of the country's most spectacular wilderness lies within Interior's purview. One-third of the nation's coal, oil and natural gas supplies also come from Interior-managed lands, while 60 percent of U.S. produce production is grown with reclamation-project water.

How to balance the country's resource needs versus conservation is the key challenge for the future, Norton told a packed crowd at the University of Colorado at Boulder on November 23, 2004. Her visit capped the "Inside Interior" series, which featured previous interviews with former Interior secretaries on their role in shaping the West's public lands. The series was co-sponsored by CU's Center of the American West, The Nature Conservancy, and the Denver law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt and Farber, where Norton was employed as senior counsel before becoming Secretary.

The challenges for the Interior department are growing as "more and more people move closer in to our Western lands," Norton said. "We have more and more requirements that people want to see met from our Western lands." Those challenges must be met, she said, "in a way that addresses people's needs and protects those great areas.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton spoke at CU on Nov. 23 (Photo/DOI).

"It's not always popular to say we have to face reality…We have to provide energy from some place. We have to provide recreation that some people love and some people don't like. We have a great puzzle trying to figure out how you can find the best spots for all of those activities to take place."

As conflict grows, so does the need to collaborate and seek consensus, according to Norton.

"We have to get people to sit down and find common ground…to find solutions. That's what I've tried to bring to the Department of the Interior." She calls her motto, aimed at that goal, the "Four Cs": "communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation."

But the meaning of conservation is itself open to debate, observed CU history professor Patricia Limerick as she introduced Norton.

"The definition of conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's time and the definition of conservation in our time is one of the big questions we've been pursuing in this series, especially in reappraising the role of utilitarian values and preservationist values in the practice of conservation," Limerick said.

She asked Norton to respond to critics' views that the Four Cs are "a smokescreen, a way of taking our eyes off the fact that industry will probably come out ahead." Norton insisted that conservation efforts can and must take into account the complex interests of varied parties, in a manner that both protects the environment and supports society's economic needs.

"I think you can find that if you have an atmosphere that encourages people to be creative in their approaches to solving problems. If you get people to understand each other's perspectives. If you have ways of trying to meet a lot of different goals at the same time. I think you can find that best if you can get people to actually sit down and talk with each other."

Norton said she is convinced that involving local voices is essential to successful outcomes. "It gives us the ability to fine-tune things…to find ways to reconcile some of the problems," she said.

She pointed to success with farmers and ranchers in protecting prairie dogs.

"Endangered species for most farmers and ranchers is a very negative concept," Norton said. At a town hall meeting she attended in South Dakota, ranchers told her that the year prairie dogs were first considered for listing as an endangered species, the sale of prairie dog poison doubled. "Clearly that is not the result we want from endangered species protection," Norton said.

Instead, Interior programs have provided funding and technical assistance for landowners to restore or enhance habitat on their property. "It really taps into people's usual enthusiasm about wildlife, and it gets people involved in protection of endangered species in a very positive way," Norton said. "That's the kind of thing that we're trying to do."

Norton also highlighted progress on air pollution through using technical innovations to create a positive environmental outcome.

"When we originally came in with the Clean Air laws, we started mandating you have to have this kind of pollution-control technology on your smokestack. Well, if we had stuck with that approach, people would comfortably be installing 1975 pollution control equipment, and saying, 'OK, that's over. We solved that.'

"What we instead learned is that you need to have programs that encourage people to develop new technologies, to advance in a way that we find environmental solutions. So we go through things like emissions training and performance and results-based approaches; we have used American ingenuity to solve environmental problems. I think you can do that with land-based issues as well."

"There's a lot you can do to harness technology to solve problems," Norton said. People tend to think of 1920s-era oil wells when we speak of energy development, she explained, "yet when you compare that with what is being used in some of the most advanced sites today, they are using directional drilling from a place on the surface to reach miles underground so there's no effect for miles on the surface."

Norton contends such new approaches will greatly mitigate the environmental impact of drilling for oil and gas in environmentally sensitive places like Colorado's Roan Plateau and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, projects she is solidly behind.

While President Bush's national energy plan also calls for conservation via greater automobile fuel efficiency, Norton sees drilling in ANWR as integral to the country's energy future.

"ANWR is our largest potential source of onshore oil in the country," Norton said, and "oil is part of our future at least for the near term."

While 1.5 million acres of ANWR will be focused on for energy production, according to Norton, she said only 2,000 acres will be discernibly impacted. Limiting the number of roads to serve multiple wells, grouping well heads together, and using directional drilling are among the approaches planned to reduce the environmental footprint, according to Norton.

"I believe that it can go forward in an environmentally responsible way," Norton said, eliciting vocal guffaws from a number of audience members who continued to pose tough questions on the issue to the secretary during a question-and-answer period following her interview.

The secretary was also challenged on her assertion that emissions trading is an effective market-based way to reduce air pollution and potential climate change effects.

"You can't trade emissions of mercury," remarked audience member Jack Twombly, CU professor emeritus of electrical engineering and a harsh critic of Norton and the Bush Administration's record on environmental issues.

Ultimately, however, Norton said she is committed to market approaches to solving environmental problems. "I tend to come from a fairly libertarian perspective," she said, which provides the philosophical base for the way she addresses issues as secretary. "That's a part of why I try to find approaches that are not government-coercion-based. I favor approaches that favor human freedom, human creativity."

"Market forces," Norton said, "establish…a way for people to be creative as they're making decisions about environmental protections. So it's not just top-down regulation after regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency. It is people who are given a standard they need to meet and can come up with all kinds of different ways to meet that standard.

"Similarly, it's not a question of how much. Do we want to have more or less endangered species protection? That's not the issue. The question is whether you want to have people enthusiastic about protecting endangered species or if you want to have a system that is based on a very punitive approach.

"Yes, there are people who violate environmental laws. There are people who shoot endangered species or poach endangered species. For them the punitive, criminal justice approach is the right approach. But for people of good will trying to solve problems, trying to find ways of having an alternative to a regulatory mandate coming from Washington, I think, is a very good way of protecting the environment."

Whether or not such collaborative approaches are indeed effective, or effective enough, is a matter clearly open to debate, evidenced by the at-times heated exchanges between Norton and her audience members.

Clearly, however, Norton was on target when she noted "the Department of the Interior is a microcosm for a lot of the changes that take place in our culture…a lot of the pressures that exist in the West and affect all of our lifestyles in the West.

"Different people have different ideas about what would be ideal for our millions and millions of acres that we manage. The great thing is that people care so passionately about our lands. The worst thing is for people to quit caring. We appreciate the debate because it shows how much people care about our lands."

A full transcript of Norton's interview is available on the Headwaters News web site. Transcripts of the other Interior secretaries' conversations at the University of Colorado are also available on the site.

Glick Chases Climate Story from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean

By Emily Cooper

Not everyone gets the chance to write for an internationally acclaimed magazine such as National Geographic. Even fewer people have that magazine asking them to do a story, especially when it's the first one they've ever written for the publication. And within that narrow subset of people, only a handful can say they got to chase their story to places as diverse as Alaska, Louisiana and Bermuda.

Dan Glick, a Ted Scripps Fellow in 2000-2001, is one of that handful.

In the September 2004 issue of National Geographic, Glick's story is the first in a three-part package entitled "Global Warning." He said the editors contacted him early on about writing the story because of stories he'd done on climate change in the past, including for Newsweek. In deciding where in the world to set his story, he said he tried to choose locations that had some concrete data, and places where changes are already happening.

"The overriding question was 'How is the earth changing, and how do researchers and scientists know that it's changing?'" he said.

The issue, which National Geographic editor-in-chief Bill Allen admitted in his "Letter from the Editor" would alienate some readers, marks a step forward for reporting on climate change, which most scientists have been insisting on for years, but many Americans still think is nothing more than a theory.

"That's where the state of the science is," Glick said, matter-of-factly, in a recent interview. "You'll also notice that we didn't go and find the two or three outlier skeptics."

Former Ted Scripps Fellow and freelance writer, Dan Glick

What he found instead was an Inupiat whaling captain, a Cajun levee district head, and some scientists on a boat near Bermuda, all of whom told Glick the same thing: the climate is changing, and it will impact lives in a very real way.

On a spit of open tundra jutting out where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas come together in northernmost Alaska sits the town of Barrow. It's "sort of a ramshackle sort of place," Glick said. But it's also a scientific and cultural outpost, and it was there that Glick met an Inupiat elder who told him how whaling, a subsistence activity for the Inupiat, has changed over his lifetime.

"I talk to you about things that I have seen," Glick recalls the man saying. He told Glick of the changes he and other hunters had observed in the ice itself, which is critical to their culture. Whalers, the man explained, have a harder time now because they can't trust traditional knowledge about ice conditions. To illustrate, the man told Glick a story about a group of whalers who got stranded on a chunk of ice—ice that betrayed them when it broke off from the mainland and floated into the ocean. The men were rescued by helicopter but the story remains, a testament to the changes wrought by global warming.

In Louisiana, Glick traveled to Bayou Lafourche, located southwest of New Orleans, where the land seems to be dissolving into the Gulf of Mexico. That impression isn't far off. Glick said it was in Bayou Lafourche that he "learned what sea level rise looks like in fast motion." It's also where he met Windell Curole, the head of the levee district, who has the improbable task of keeping that rising water under control.

Residents of southern Louisiana are learning the meaning of "subsidence"—quite literally the sinking of the earth on which they live. Subsidence is caused by sea level rise, sediments not being replenished in the Mississippi delta, and possibly also gas and oil drilling, which might be causing the ground to collapse. To battle subsidence, communities have constructed a complicated network of levees and dikes, which help control water during storm surges, with the goal of keeping water from the gulf out of the cities.

Curole is charged with deciding when people need to evacuate, when they can come back, and which gates get opened or closed to manage flooding. It's a problem that right now is pretty unique to southern Louisiana and other places that are built at or below sea level. But as sea levels rise as a result of glacial melt from climate change, the problem—and jobs like Curole's—will become a lot more common.

"He was somebody that had to deal with what was essentially going to be a lot of communities' future," Glick said.

But not all changes caused by climate change seem logical on the surface. Glick also spent a few days on a research vessel near Bermuda, talking to scientists who are measuring the temperature, salinity and other properties of the ocean water there. It's part of a larger, long-term study that's looking at how the ocean is changing as ice melts near the poles.

Glick said the biggest implication for the scientists' research is the impact all the new fresh water will have on a natural ocean cycle called thermohaline circulation. Basically, in the Atlantic Ocean warmer, saltier water moves north along the Gulf Stream and is replaced by cooler, fresher water from the Arctic. The process brings warm water and air to the north Atlantic, and helps keep Europe's climate temperate. Scientists are concerned that the influx of colder fresh water from the Arctic could disturb the circulation, effectively shutting down the Gulf Stream and actually leaving Europe colder for a while.

This might be a hard sell to some—that global warming could result in lower temperatures in some places—but Glick didn't seem to think it would be. "The earth's climatic systems are really complex," he said.

He added that in the past decade, scientists have done a lot more interdisciplinary research using data from sources as diverse as ancient ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments and stalactites. Each method has holes, he said, but all together the evidence is "very compelling" that climate change is real, and it's caused by humans.

"The convincing case is that what's happening now is anomalous," he said. "It's outside of the realm of any sort of normal pattern that can be explained without adding in these human influences."

Glick is a freelance journalist and author of two books, Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery on Vail Mountain and Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, which won the Colorado Book Award for best History/Biography in 2003.

Pittsburgh Surprises Environmental Journalists at Annual SEJ Conference

By Wendy Worrall Redal

For many, the name Pittsburgh evokes images of steel mills belching black soot and rivers laden with toxic chemicals. But that picture is long outdated, as CEJ staff and this year's Ted Scripps Fellows discovered while attending the 14th annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Pittsburgh Oct. 20-24.

Instead the more than 700 journalists present at the conference discovered a model for urban renewal and environmental transformation.

Pittsburgh boasts more green buildings per capita than any other U.S. city. The city's universities are leaders in high-tech research. The longest rail-to-trail system in the East runs across Pittsburgh's Hot Metal Bridge, which used to carry caldrons of molten iron over the Monongahela River. And the city's rivers—it sits at the confluence of the "Mon," the Allegheny and the Ohio—are now clean enough to host the Bassmasters Classic Fishing Tournament in waters once declared a "dead zone."

Yet challenges remain, from storm-induced sewage overflows to acid rain created by pollutants blown in on prevailing winds.

Pittsburgh sits at the confluence of three rivers. (Photo/Adam Green)

Scripps Fellow Andy Silva, based in San Bernardino, Calif., appreciated the opportunity as a Westerner to "see how issues on the other side of the country have played out."

Silva kayaked the Allegheny River through the city on a conference field trip, which he said offered "a great chance to see how the Three Rivers area has undergone both an environmental and an economic renaissance in the past 15 years. It showed economic growth and ecological restoration actually depend on each other and aren't mutually exclusive."

Field trips like this one augmented conference panels and lectures held at Carnegie-Mellon University, host for this year's event. Participants got a close-up look at environmental success stories in the region, such as river restoration through dam removal in the Conemaugh watershed, and brownfields redevelopment in the Mon Valley, where lethal smog killed 22 people in 1948 and spurred the nation's first air pollution regulations.

Other tours explored ongoing problems, including invasive species in Lake Erie, and longwall coal mining that is causing subsidence and water loss impacting homes, farms and creeks in rural western Pennsylvania.

Several in the CEJ contingent learned about a major pioneer in green architecture during a visit to two of Frank Lloyd Wright's innovative homes, Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob. Both residences incorporate building design with the natural setting, using local materials and climate-sensitive orientation.

Scripps Fellows took away more than just a new knowledge of Pittsburgh as a case study for environmental change, however. Conference activities offered many opportunities for networking with other journalists and sources, as well as sessions that spoke specifically to fellows' various reporting interests.

Fellow Nadia White, state editor for the Casper, Wyo., Star-Tribune, said she found at SEJ "a welcome year-in-review of some of the most creative approaches to covering environmental issues in the country, at newspapers and broadcast outlets large and small. I found it inspiring to see what smart people were doing on their beats despite continued tight resources at smaller papers."

Silva appreciated being able "to hook up with government folks and activists whom we may have been talking with on the phone for years but have never met face-to-face."

Noting the presence of both industry and environmental groups, Silva said he found the "effort at balance at the conference really refreshing," despite his dismay at a standing ovation offered by many journalists to keynote speaker Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Silva said "brought the house down with a passionate barn-burner of a speech" on the Bush Administration's environmental policies.

Conferees also got a surprise visit from Teresa Heinz Kerry who was in town with her husband, then-presidential candidate John Kerry, for a rally on the Carnegie Mellon campus. Heinz Kerry welcomed the journalists to Pittsburgh at the opening night plenary session.

This year's Society of Environmental Journalists conference will happen Sept. 28 through Oct. 2 in Austin, Texas. For more on SEJ and its conferences past and future, visit the organization's Web site.

Finding the "Wright" Kind of Architecture: An Entirely Subjective View of Two Frank Lloyd Wright Creations

By Emily Cooper

Master. Genius. Revolutionary. Admirers of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright seem to be unable to speak of him without resorting to grandiose labels. Even Wright himself fell into the groove, maybe even outdoing them all, when he reportedly called himself the World's Greatest Architect.

But Wright didn't limit himself to grand designs for rich families and foundations. Over the course of his 91-year life, he designed hotels, museums, office buildings, churches, a synagogue and even a gas station. But perhaps most of all, in keeping with his idealistic views of democracy and the middle class, Wright designed homes. Nestled deep in the forests and hills of western Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands region are two of his creations—the famous Fallingwater and its lesser-known neighbor, Kentuck Knob. When I was at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Pittsburgh this October, I decided to combat my architectural illiteracy by going on a field trip to the two Wright houses.

The tour, titled "Origins of Environmental Architecture: The Wright Stuff," was intended to show some of the ways in which Wright worked with the environment, including building with local materials and using design and orientation as climate controls. Our tour leaders, freelance journalist Judy Ostrow and Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Chuck Quirmbach, made the connection to the modern-day green-building movement by including Jennifer Constable of the Rocky Mountain Institute in the program. But despite the wealth of information and story ideas our able leaders provided, it was the houses themselves, and their stunning location, that stole the show.

Our day started with a 90-minute bus ride through the western Pennsylvania countryside. As Route 381 wound past white clapboard churches, roadside stands hawking pumpkins and apple cider, ramshackle houses with school buses parked in the front yards, and fields of dried corn stalks, we chatted and exclaimed about the fall foliage. But our trip leaders had more in store for us.

Keiran Murphy of Taliesin Preservation, Inc., which operates Wright's estate in Spring Green, Wis., opened the program with an overview of Wright's life and artistic influences. One of the biggest influences on the young Wright, Murphy told us, was a toy his mother brought home from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

"I call Froebel Gifts 'Legos with a purpose,'" she said.

She described The Froebel Gifts—which are usually preceded with "The," as if to distinguish them from all those froebel gift knock-offs—as wooden balls, toothpicks and pieces of yarn designed to get more complicated as a child ages. The concept was sufficiently vague that some of us doubted their existence, until a dusty box of The Froebel Gifts turned up later that day in Kentuck Knob, the Wright-designed home that was the second stop on our trip.

I don't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright, but if he was half as obsessed with The Froebel Gifts as his admirers seem to be, you might say he was a "Lego-maniac." Still, the man grew up to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and the Guggenheim in New York, so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

At Fallingwater, the first stop on our trip, the word of the day was "cantilever." As far as I have been able to figure, a cantilever is a horizontal structure that sticks out beyond its vertical supports, seeming to defy gravity. When cantilevers are thick slabs of poured concrete, as they are at Fallingwater, they seem to me like a Very Bad Idea. Wright must have known what he was doing, though, because the only problem so far with these particular cantilevers has been water damage. Water, which is abundant in this damp, mossy forest, tends to pool on the flat rooftops. Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the home's owner, had to reinforce the roofs and terraces last year because they were starting to bow under the weight of all that water and concrete. Without reinforcement, the cantilevers may one day have given "Fallingwater" new meaning.

Fallingwater (Photo/Harold Corsini)

The house was commissioned by the Kaufmann family, friends of Wright and owners of a successful Pittsburgh department store. They had a huge chunk of second-growth, primarily hardwood and rhododendron forest in the gorgeous Laurel Highlands region. In 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Kaufmanns asked Wright to build a home they could escape to on weekends and holidays. The house, which at more than 5,300 square feet is hardly a rustic cabin, literally straddles a waterfall.

"They simply asked to be near the waterfall," quipped Katy Kifer, our tour guide, explaining that the Kaufmanns imagined their home on the adjacent hillside with a view of the falls.

Despite the audacity of its placement, the house was designed to blend in with the vertical rock outcroppings and horizontal ledges that appear here and there among the trees. Its ceilings are low, and the walls on the first floor are made almost entirely of glass. Strangely, all those windows allow no view of ground or sky, which is extremely disconcerting. Several members of my group complained of claustrophobia. It takes a master to make people feel claustrophobic in a house with 180-degree views, but Wright is nothing if not a master.

Upstairs, the bedrooms are small and cave-like, which Kifer explained was because Wright "felt very strongly that architecture first and foremost will shelter." Each bedroom has its own bathroom, complete with what I am certain are The World's Shortest Toilets.

"There was a health fad at that time," Kifer told us enigmatically, leaving us to imagine exactly what sort of health fad would require a person to squat over a knee-high toilet.

Apparently it was a fad that Wright believed in deeply. Kentuck Knob, designed about 20 years after Fallingwater, differs from its cousin in many ways, but one thing both houses have in common is their ridiculous toilets.

Kentuck Knob, located about 7 miles south of Fallingwater, is an example of Wright's Usonian architecture. Marianne Skvarla, our tour guide at Kentuck Knob, said the term "Usonian" was probably coined by Wright from "United States of North America." In essence, Skvarla told us, Usonian means "universal homes to serve the masses."

Kentuck Knob (Photo/Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau)

Wright felt strongly that the United States needed to create its own brand of architecture, and if "Usonian" sounds suspiciously close to "utopian," that might be no accident. Skvarla said Wright's Usonian homes were meant to herald the dawn of an idealized society in America, which apparently would include middle-income families living in geometrically-shaped homes designed by Wright.

Kentuck Knob is, at least in some ways, not a particularly good example of Usonian architecture. At 2,300 square feet, it is unlikely the masses could afford to live there. In fact, the house is now owned by Lord Peter Palumbo, a British gentleman who picked up the house in 1986 to add to his collection. Still, Lord Palumbo isn't stingy. He opened the house to the public in 1996, and although he and his family still come to western Pennsylvania several times a year to visit their Usonian home, they now stay in another estate nearby so they don't have to disturb the daily parade of tourists.

Kentuck Knob was built for the allegedly middle-income Hagan family in the 1950s, for the immodest sum (in the 1950s, remember) of $95,000. The hexagonal house, wrapped around a rather utilitarian gravel courtyard, looks like a cross between a modern art museum and the Brady Bunch house. Inside, the rooms seem strung together like a series of train cars. Several rooms are connected by hallways that are only 21 inches wide, a design that forced some visitors to walk through sideways.

"Mr. Wright did say if it was good enough for a boxcar it'll work in your home," Skvarla said.

But the hallways aren't just a close approximation of a mine shaft; they're also an illustration of Wright's concept of "compression and release." Simply put, it means that after you've squeezed through one of those hallways, the rooms will feel spacious by comparison.

Outside, it's a short walk to The View, which everyone in my group was encouraged to check out. Wright refused to design the Hagans' house for the top of the hill (the "knob" that gave the house its name). "You will lose your hill," he told them. As we walked away from the bustle of tour groups and out to the clearing that overlooks the foliage-covered hills, hay fields and a big red barn, our group hushed. That's when Wright's genius suddenly came home to me.

I may not really understand the concept of a cantilever, or the benefits of a midget toilet, but a man who refused to build a house on a hilltop—who nestled it back in the shade and slanting sunlight of a western Pennsylvania wood and left the view, and its silence, alone—that man is someone I feel I can relate to.

For more information:
Fallingwater: www.wpconline.org/fallingwaterhome.htm
Kentuck Knob: www.kentuckknob.com
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: www.franklloydwright.org
Frank Lloyd Wright Web site by PBS: www.pbs.org/flw

Colorado Ranchers Hopeful in the Face of Drought

By Omar Cabrera

"My water comes from the sky," said Bill Gray, who is grateful that the level of precipitation at his ranch was normal this past year.

Gray is a rancher in Crowley County in southeastern Colorado. He irrigates a third of his land to produce alfalfa and grass to feed his cattle. What happens with the rest, Gray said, depends completely on rainfall.

In recent months the grass has begun to recover on Gray's property after a drought that brought precipitation in the state to its lowest levels in a century.

Encouraged by this wet period, Gray said he bought 50 new cows in 2004 and is considering buying more.

(Photo/BLM Montana)

Like Gray, most ranchers and farmers are now beginning to restock and to increase their production, according to Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen's Association.

"We're now desperately trying to rebuild those herds," added Jim Miller, director of policy and communications for the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Department statistics show that livestock represents about 70 percent of the total agricultural production in Colorado, annual sales for which are about $5 billion.

Though figures for 2004 are not yet available, Miller estimated that agricultural production has increased between 10 and 15 percent, based on direct observation.

"We have a very good harvest this year," Miller said. "It wasn't that we had a lot of rains, but they were timely."

But the effects of the drought continue. In January 2004, the state's total count of cattle and calves was 2.4 million, the lowest inventory since 1962, according to Colorado Department of Agriculture figures.

Fankhauser said the state has lost so many cattle that it will take "a number of years to recover."

With the grass weakened and precipitation returning to normal levels, some undesirable plants are growing faster, Gray said. Two of the most pervasive weeds are kochia and Russian thistle.

Timothy Seastedt, a biology professor at the University of Colorado and expert on invasive weeds, explained that nutrient levels in the soil are more abundant and readily available for plants' immediate use after a drought than during a normal year. During dry years they remain in the soil instead of going up to plants, Seastedt said.

Seastedt said weeds are "rapid growers" that compete with grass and other plants for these nutrients.

Microbes in the soil keep working even after a lack of water has killed plants, processing nutrients that are available when rain comes back. Since weeds compete better than grass, they grow faster, the scientist explained.

Recovery has been difficult, given that this has been a record-beating drought. A study by Hydrosphere Resource Consultants concluded "the current drought…has been the most severe on record by several measures. Stream flows in Colorado in 2002 have generally been the lowest in over 100 years and the tree ring data suggest that flows are probably the lowest in 300 to 500 years."

The study, titled, "What the current drought means for the future of water management in Colorado," stated that the economic sector affected most by this natural phenomenon is agriculture.

The document estimated that in 2002 alone, agricultural losses due to drought were between $500 and $600 million.

According to Miller, the lack of water affects crops in two major ways. First, the roots of plants do not develop enough to take necessary nutrients from the soil.

No matter that producers use plenty of fertilizer, if plants don't have enough water, the fertilizer will not reach them, Miller said. In the case of corn, for example, the result is usually plants that are high in nitrites, which are toxic to cattle.

Another impact of drought on crops is that they germinate poorly or don't germinate at all, according to Miller. The result is a decrease in production.

The head of a normal wheat plant is about as long as an index finger, but in a drought year it may grow only to between an inch and an inch and a half, Miller explained.

Similarly with corn, a cob may not fill completely with kernels. It may have seeds in its lower portion but not in its narrower end, said Miller.

The lack of water doesn't reduce only the amount of production, but also the weight of crops. Miller said that in a dry year, a bushel of corn might weigh 50 pounds, whereas in a normal year it would weigh 62 pounds.

In terms of value of production, hay is the most important crop in Colorado, followed by corn and wheat. The state also produces potatoes, vegetables and fruits.

These crops represent about a third of the total agricultural production of the state. The other two-thirds encompass livestock, mainly cattle.

Miller explained that "most of our field crop production exists because those cattle are there."

Livestock have also suffered as a result of the current drought, due to scarcity of grass and food in general.

Gray said the drought pushed cattlemen to choose one of three options: either buying hay and corn to feed their cows at higher costs, taking their cows to other states, or selling part or all of their herd.

He chose the third option. Gray said that more than a year after the beginning of the drought, in the fall of 2001, he sold a few of his 650 mother cows. As the drought continued and got worse, he sold more cattle until he was down to 325 cows.

Miller recalled that in 2002 there were stock sale yards where people were trading cattle 24 hours a day. Due to the high number of animals on offer, however, prices were not the best.

The result is that from 2002 to the present, the number of cattle in Colorado has decreased about 80 percent, according to Fankhauser.

Most of the cows sold in Colorado went to Iowa, Eastern Kansas and Missouri, Miller said.

This movement of cattle creates another problem: acclimation. "We're all raised to find certain foods tasty and other foods don't taste so good to us. It's just like that with cattle," he explained.

In other words, if cows don't like the grass they find in pastures, they eat enough to keep alive but not to grow as well as they could.

Miller added that cows develop features, like hair size and density, which allow them to do better where they are. Some of these genetic strains were developed by ranchers' grandfathers, and therefore represent the work of several generations.

"If you sold off half of your herd, and now you're trying to buy replacement cattle to rebuild your herd, you're buying a genetic strain that isn't acclimated to your particular geographic area," Miller said.

In addition, now that most ranchers are buying cattle, the prices are higher than two years ago when everybody wanted to sell. Gray said he got an average price of $625 per head when he sold part of his herd, while recently he has paid between $1,200 and $1,300 per head for new cows.

As crops have begun to grow green again this year, so has the hope of ranchers like Gray.

But the lack of water may not be over. Miller said that according to some scientists, the region could be at the beginning of a major 20- to 30-year drought. This forecast is based on the analysis of tree rings and other clues that indicate that Colorado has experienced these long- lasting droughts every 400 years.

The data indicate that one of these dry periods occurred around the year 1700, and before that, around 1300.

Four years of drought have been enough to dramatically impact the lives of Colorado ranchers and farmers. Gray said that with fewer cows in his herd, he has changed some of his habits due to the drought. For example, he used to go fishing in the mountains every spring in but no longer does, because his income has been reduced by about half.

What if the drought lasts for two more decades? He prefers to think that won't be the case, and faces the situation with a sense of humor. "I hope this is a 300-year-drought or even a 100-year-drought. I won't have to be around to see the next one," the rancher said.