Paula Dobbyn (1998-99) landed several awards for her series of articles in the Anchorage Daily News on a conflict of interest involving Alaska's state attorney general who resigned as a result. Her reporting was honored with a McClatchy President's Award, a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award, a Society of Professional Journalists regional award for investigative reporting, and the Alaska Press Club's investigative reporting award. Paula hopes to spend next year in Ireland, where she wants to explore her family roots and attend graduate school. She is making an initial trip this November to check out master's programs in Creative Writing, Celtic Studies and Reconciliation Studies. She also provides foster care for an Alaska Native girl and is currently getting certified to teach yoga.
Sam Eaton (2004-05) was recently hired by Marketplace as a Senior Reporter heading up their new Global Sustainability Desk, which covers the intersection of sustainability and the economy. While the beat is global, Sam will get to stay in Boulder, where he and his wife relocated following his fellowship last year. Sam had previously been reporting for Marketplace on contract since June and has led the program's coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans' recovery efforts.
John Flesher (2002-03) now has a specialist byline with the Associated Press: AP Environmental Writer. While he still covers general assignment stories as the wire's northern Michigan correspondent, his new title, bestowed through a competitive process at AP headquarters in New York, honors John's depth in environmental coverage. A specialist title recognizes a reporter's initiative in carving out a beat in a given area and demonstrating accomplishment in that arena. John says that when his bureau chief submitted his nomination to the New York office, he emphasized the value of the Scripps Fellowship in bolstering John's environmental reporting prowess.
Daniel Glick (2000-01) stays busy covering the environment for several major magazines. His cover story on endangered species success stories appeared in the September 2005 Smithsonian, and the fall issue of Nature Conservancy featured his cover story about climate change's effects on native Alaskan cultures. National Geographic will again feature's Dan work with a piece on lynx reintroduction in the January 2006 issue.
Katy Human (2000-01) is enjoying her job as science writer at the Denver Post where she has covered many environment-related stories from climate change to naturally occurring asbestos. She and her husband Gregg are expecting baby No. 2 in March, who will join big brother Miles.
Vicki Monks (2003-04) has relocated to Oklahoma where she is working on a book about Indian Country in Oklahoma 100 years after statehood and reporting on environmental threats to Indian lands. She won a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to continue a series of radio stories on that subject for NPR's Living on Earth program. (For more on Vicki's SEJ award for her Living on Earth reporting, see the feature story in this issue of CEJ News/Views.) She is currently investigating the situation in Tar Creek, Okla., where Indian children have blood lead levels four times the national average, far above levels known to cause brain damage. Abandoned lead and zinc mines in northeastern Oklahoma continue to contaminate Quapaw tribal lands in the region, despite designation as a priority Superfund site 20 years ago, Vicki reports. She is also teaching broadcast writing as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Susan Moran (2001-02) has been living in Boulder since her fellowship ended, where she balances freelancing and teaching journalism classes at CU. After spending a year and a half as a full-time instructor, Susan is teaching less in order to write more, mostly on the intersection of environment, business, public health and technology issues. Her most recent articles have appeared in The Economist, Newsweek, 5280, and Inc. magazines. In June 2005, Susan married Tom McKinnon in an outdoor ceremony atop Flagstaff Mountain in the Boulder foothills.
Rachel Odell (2004-05) got bit by the Boulder bug following her fellowship last year and is now an associate editor at Skiing magazine here. Her fellowship project story on whether dams on the Snake River represent a "taking" of tribal fishing rights was published Sept. 5, 2005 in High Country News. Rachel just bought a house in Boulder and plans to spend the winter skiing, writing and learning more about editing. Her new e-mail address is rachel.odell@time4.com.
Paul Tolme (2000-01) is a very active freelance magazine writer specializing in the environment, wildlife, skiing, outdoor adventure and travel. He is a contributing writer at SKI magazine and a frequent contributor to Newsweek, for whom he covers breaking national news from the Rockies. He writes regularly for National Wildlife and his stories have also appeared in Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, Hooked on the Outdoors, FAIR, and Mountain Gazette. For links to Paul's many articles ranging from the effects of mercury poisoning on wildlife to threatened flowering plants affected by climate change, visit Paul's website. Paul lives in the small mountain town of Nederland in Colorado's Front Range, where he spends a lot of time on his mountain bike when he isn't reporting.
Nadia White (2004-05) has moved to Missoula, Montana, where she is writing a book about brucellosis, the subject of her fellowship project last year. She participated in October in a 10-day tour of "Salmon Country" for reporters, sponsored by the Institutes on Journalism and Natural Resources, headed by Ted Scripps Fellowship board member Frank Allen. Traveling through coastal and mountain areas in the Pacific Northwest, White studied the links between salmon, habitat and forestry, and says, "I learned a ton." Her new e-mail address is white_nadia@hotmail.com.
David Wilson (2002-03) updates us with news that he has "crossed over to the dark side": he's nearly through his first semester of law school at the University of Colorado. He blames his year as a Scripps Fellow for the career transition, when he took natural resources law classes at CU and was impacted by Professor Charles Wilkinson. While he says he loves law school, he adds, "I'll always be a journalist, regardless of my other occupations. Hopefully, this education will enhance my reporting skills." He's also excited about the opportunity to "feed, clothe and house myself," which he admits was difficult as a freelance radio producer.
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Alumni Updates
Josh Blumenfeld (Class of '03) is braving the cold in La Crosse, Wisc. and working as a meteorologist with WKBT-TV.
Janine Frank, formerly Wingard (Class of '00) and husband welcomed a new addition to the family earlier this year. Before Caleb was born Janine worked for Gaiam writing web content and doing marketing. "It was a great job that fit well with my interests and personal ethic…my journalism (and particularly the environmental aspect) came in very handy," she said. However, she's decided to stay home with 2-year-old Ethan and 8-month-old Caleb for as long as possible. That is until she gets bored and starts doing consulting work again.
Nicole Gordon (Class of '02) is still working here in Boulder as a writer/editor at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Robin Truesdale (Class of '03) has been hard at work, completing two independent documentary films in the last year, "Conviction" and "Rhythm Bridge." Conviction is about three nuns imprisoned for protesting a Colorado Nuclear missile silo in 2002, and "Rhythm Bridge" is about the power of music to cross borders and create bonds among people of different cultures (specifically Zimbabwe and the U.S.). She's now starting a full time position with Ontos Media in Boulder as their film editor. She'll be working on several documentaries, including a 5-part series on pediatric health in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Michelle Wallar (Class of '05) is living in Seattle and working as a technical writer at an independent review board.
Janine Frank, formerly Wingard (Class of '00) and husband welcomed a new addition to the family earlier this year. Before Caleb was born Janine worked for Gaiam writing web content and doing marketing. "It was a great job that fit well with my interests and personal ethic…my journalism (and particularly the environmental aspect) came in very handy," she said. However, she's decided to stay home with 2-year-old Ethan and 8-month-old Caleb for as long as possible. That is until she gets bored and starts doing consulting work again.
Nicole Gordon (Class of '02) is still working here in Boulder as a writer/editor at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Robin Truesdale (Class of '03) has been hard at work, completing two independent documentary films in the last year, "Conviction" and "Rhythm Bridge." Conviction is about three nuns imprisoned for protesting a Colorado Nuclear missile silo in 2002, and "Rhythm Bridge" is about the power of music to cross borders and create bonds among people of different cultures (specifically Zimbabwe and the U.S.). She's now starting a full time position with Ontos Media in Boulder as their film editor. She'll be working on several documentaries, including a 5-part series on pediatric health in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Michelle Wallar (Class of '05) is living in Seattle and working as a technical writer at an independent review board.
Win, Place and Show: Former Ted Scripps Fellows Capture Top Environmental Reporting Awards
By Wendy Worrall Redal
Former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks took first-place honors in the
largest environmental journalism contest in North America. Monks won the
top prize for Outstanding Radio Reporting, Large Market from the Society of Environmental Journalists for her National Public Radio story on industrial contamination of Indian lands in Oklahoma.
The story aired earlier this year on the NPR program "Living On Earth."
SEJ announced the award winners Sept. 28 during the organization's annual conference
held this year in Austin, Texas. The contest attracted 240 entries nationwide. The first- place award included a trophy and $1,000 prize.
Two other former Fellows were also honored at the ceremony at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel: Daniel Glick was part of a National Geographic magazine reporting team that took second place in the Outstanding Explanatory Reporting, Print category for its package of stories on global climate change, while Daniel Grossman garnered third place with reporter John Rudolph for their American RadioWorks story, "Climate of Uncertainty," in the same category that Monks won.
Monks' prize-winning story examined contamination from a carbon black production facility near Ponca City, Okla. and the failure of Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality to control the pollution. Judges called the story "a riveting account of how industrial pollution has affected Native Americans in Oklahoma."
In her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Monks encouraged other journalists to pursue environmental stories in Indian country. "You can find a wealth of stories that are largely unreported," she told the assembled reporters and editors.
Monks left Santa Fe, NM this past summer to work on a book about Indian Country in Oklahoma one hundred years after statehood. The Fund for Investigative Journalism is backing her continuing project on environmental threats to Indian lands with a $6,000 research grant. She is also teaching broadcasting this semester as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Both Glick and Grossman continue to cover climate change. Glick traveled to Kaktovik, Alaska in October to track the effects of a warming climate on polar bears for a chapter he is writing in an upcoming book for The Mountaineers press.
Former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks took first-place honors in the
largest environmental journalism contest in North America. Monks won the
top prize for Outstanding Radio Reporting, Large Market from the Society of Environmental Journalists for her National Public Radio story on industrial contamination of Indian lands in Oklahoma.
The story aired earlier this year on the NPR program "Living On Earth."
SEJ announced the award winners Sept. 28 during the organization's annual conference
held this year in Austin, Texas. The contest attracted 240 entries nationwide. The first- place award included a trophy and $1,000 prize.
Two other former Fellows were also honored at the ceremony at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel: Daniel Glick was part of a National Geographic magazine reporting team that took second place in the Outstanding Explanatory Reporting, Print category for its package of stories on global climate change, while Daniel Grossman garnered third place with reporter John Rudolph for their American RadioWorks story, "Climate of Uncertainty," in the same category that Monks won.
 |
| Contamination from the Continental Carbon plant near Ponca City, Okla., is so severe that pure white sheep have turned black (Photo/Vicki Monks) |
Monks' prize-winning story examined contamination from a carbon black production facility near Ponca City, Okla. and the failure of Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality to control the pollution. Judges called the story "a riveting account of how industrial pollution has affected Native Americans in Oklahoma."
 |
| At the SEJ awards ceremony, Vicki Monks encouraged reporters and editors to pursue environmental stories in Indian Country |
In her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Monks encouraged other journalists to pursue environmental stories in Indian country. "You can find a wealth of stories that are largely unreported," she told the assembled reporters and editors.
Monks left Santa Fe, NM this past summer to work on a book about Indian Country in Oklahoma one hundred years after statehood. The Fund for Investigative Journalism is backing her continuing project on environmental threats to Indian lands with a $6,000 research grant. She is also teaching broadcasting this semester as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Both Glick and Grossman continue to cover climate change. Glick traveled to Kaktovik, Alaska in October to track the effects of a warming climate on polar bears for a chapter he is writing in an upcoming book for The Mountaineers press.
 |
| Daniel Glick and friend stand atop a melting Arctic ice pack |
Bill Moyers Exhorts Environmental Journalists to Stay the Course
By Wendy Worrall Redal
Calling George W. Bush "the Herbert Hoover of the environment," veteran television journalist Bill Moyers told fellow journalists that only they are left "to open the eyes of the country" in an era of unprecedented corporate and political assault on the natural world.
In a speech both inspiring and sobering but always passionate, Moyers addressed several hundred members of the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual conference October 1. Speaking on his alma mater's campus, the University of Texas, he said it was up to journalists to uncover the news that the forces of power would rather keep hidden, even though the current level of collusion between those forces is making investigative reporting on the environment a daunting challenge.
While Moyers was optimistic in the 1970s that a "Green Revolution for a healthy, safe and sustainable future" was under way, now "the reality is otherwise."
"Rather than leading the world in finding solutions to the global environmental crises, the United States is a recalcitrant naysayer and backslider. Our government and corporate elites have turned against America's environmental visionaries," said Moyers, who decried them for eviscerating the gains of the past generation while blaming the environmental movement itself for its failures.
Acknowledging that "the environmental community has stumbled on many fronts," Moyers said, "If the Green Revolution is a bloody pulp today, it is not just because the environmental movement mugged itself. It is because the corporate, political and religious right ganged up on it in the back alleys of power."
Big companies and political ideologues have fomented a backlash against environmentalism that's been far more ruthless than Moyers ever anticipated. He himself has felt that reaction, citing two of his PBS documentaries that were the target of smear campaigns by the chemical industry and its PR firms.
"Trade Secrets," a 2-hour investigative special based on records from industry archives, revealed that for more than 40 years big chemical companies purposely withheld information about toxic chemicals in their products, putting workers and consumers at risk. Furthermore, the reporting "also confirmed that we were living under a regulatory system designed by the chemical industry itself—one that put profits ahead of safety," said Moyers.
The program, which former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks worked on, aired despite intense pressure on PBS to pull it. It was widely acclaimed and won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
The intensity of the backlash has only grown stronger, however, according to Moyers. Compounding the problem is that "President Bush has turned the agencies charged with environmental protection over to people who don't believe in it." He listed some of the nation's key environment and resource management posts held by former defenders of polluters and lobbyists for the timber, mining and petroleum industries.
The obstacles to journalists who cover those agencies' role in environmental protection have also increased, not least at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees PBS. "The right wing coup at public broadcasting is complete," Moyers said, with the board now dominated by Bush-apppointed Republican activists and a new chair who is a former party fundraiser. He said the White House has also "handpicked" a candidate for president and CEO who is "a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee whose husband became PR director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had helped the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the environment, Silent Spring."
Moyers' recent PBS series "NOW with Bill Moyers," which he headed until his retirement in December 2004, was a target of the CPB's new vision. The mission of the current affairs program was to expose injustice in the workings of power, a task Moyers apparently did all too well. He warned that under the corporation's current leadership, the public should not expect any challenging journalism from public television, and certainly no investigative reporting on the environment or conflicts of interest between government and big business.
Corporations have become "the undisputed overlords of government," Moyers said. And the Bush Administration's hostility to science has supported that corporate agenda on environmental issues. While a growing mountain of scientific evidence points to global environmental crises, most notably global warming, current U.S. policies sabotage any role for action, let alone leadership, in Moyers' analysis. In such a context, Americans' concern for the environmental problems is diminished, he said, citing a July 2005 ABC News poll that reported that 66 percent of those surveyed said they don't think global warming will affect their lives.
"But what we don't know can kill us," said Moyers, contending that journalists must report the news the public would rather not hear. To do so is to buck the tide in Washington, where according to Moyers, "denial…is the governing philosophy. The president's contempt for science—for evidence that mounts every day [about global warming]—is mind-boggling."
Moyers' hope for turning that tide caught some in his audience by surprise. He called on journalists to reach out to Christian conservatives, who Moyers said could most effectively call the president to task on the environment. While some of their leaders are "implacable," Moyers said, "millions of these people believe they are here on earth to serve a higher moral power, not a partisan agenda." And their receptivity to environmental concerns, sometimes called "creation care" within church circles, is growing. Moyers cited the Evangelical Environmental Network, and a National Association of Evangelicals document that declared that "the Bible implies the principle of sustainability," with a mandate to conserve and renew the earth rather than deplete or destroy it.
Yet while many conservatives "may believe Christians have a moral obligation to protect God's creation, most remain uninformed about the true scope of the environmental crisis and the role of the Republican Party in it," according to Moyers. Thus most Christian conservatives vote their consciences on social issues rather than environmental issues.
A Christian and son of a Baptist deacon himself, Moyers encouraged journalists to challenge evangelicals "to look more closely at their moral choices—to consider whether it is possible to be pro-life while also being anti-earth."
"If you believe uncompromisingly in the right of every baby to be born safely into this world, can you at the same time abandon the future of the child, allowing its health and safety to be compromised by a president who gives big corporations license to poison our bodies and destroy our climate?"
Noting the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case that galvanized opinion last spring, Moyers argued that President Bush does not "err on the side of life." "He is playing dice with our children's future—dice that we have likely loaded against our own species, and perhaps against all life on earth."
Journalists should not write off conservative Christians when they need to see the moral complexity of environmental issues, said Moyers. He encouraged journalists in search of new readers to aim stories at this 50-million-member audience, but to do so with an understanding of their worldview and the language necessary to reach them.
When 45 percent of Americans hold a creationist view of the world that discounts Darwinian evolution, there is going to be skepticism about science and its claims, Moyers said. And not just evolution, but "paleontology, archaeology, geology, genetics, even biology and botany." To many Christian conservatives, it's possible that environmental reporting "could seem arrogant in its assumptions, mechanistic, cold and godless in its worldview. That's a tough indictment," he acknowledged, but one that must be faced if journalists are to learn how to convey news to this audience.
Moyers was careful to state that journalists must not give up fact-based analysis or a search for verifiable truth, but he encouraged them to tell stories "with an ear for spiritual language, the language of parable, for that is the language of faith." He used the biblical story of Noah and the flood as an example, noting its parallels with the challenge of telling the story of climate change:
"Both scientists and Noah possess the knowledge of a potentially impending global catastrophe. They try to spread the word, to warn the world, but are laughed at, ridiculed." While no one acts, faithful Noah takes on "the daunting task of rescuing all the biodiversity of the earth…Noah then can be seen as the great preservationist, preventing the first great extinction," Moyers explained, doing "exactly what wildlife biologists and climatologists are trying to do today: to act on their moral convictions to conserve diversity, to protect God's creation in the face of a flood of consumerism and indifference by a materialistic world."
Moyers recognized that some in his audience might be uncomfortable with such an approach, but pushed journalists to strive for understanding: "If we can't empathize with each person's need to grasp a human problem in the language of his or her worldview, then we will likely fail to reach many Christian conservatives who have a sense of morality and justice as strong as our own." And journalists may end up being part of the problem as a result.
In an era that mimics the corrupt Gilded Age of a century ago, Moyers admonished journalists to make the same response their predecessors did, who birthed a "golden age of muckraking journalism" that went after sleaze and cronyism. Like Lincoln Steffens who exposed electoral fraud, or Nellie Bly's quest to reform mental hospitals by going undercover and pretending to be insane, like John Spargo's crusade against child labor in coal mines or Upton Sinclair's campaign to reveal the wretchedness of the meatpacking industry, journalists today have to fight for tomorrow, said Moyers.
The photo of his five grandchildren beside his computer reminds him of journalism's enormous responsibility. Children have no vote, no voice, no party, no lobbyists in Washington, Moyers said. "They have only you and me—our pens and our keyboards and our microphones—to seek and to speak and to publish what we can of how power works, how the world wags and who wags it…There is no one left, none but all of us."
Read the transcript of Bill Moyers' SEJ address. You can also download an audio MP3 file of the speech at SEJ's web site. Bill Moyers was the 2004 recipient of the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Calling George W. Bush "the Herbert Hoover of the environment," veteran television journalist Bill Moyers told fellow journalists that only they are left "to open the eyes of the country" in an era of unprecedented corporate and political assault on the natural world.
In a speech both inspiring and sobering but always passionate, Moyers addressed several hundred members of the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual conference October 1. Speaking on his alma mater's campus, the University of Texas, he said it was up to journalists to uncover the news that the forces of power would rather keep hidden, even though the current level of collusion between those forces is making investigative reporting on the environment a daunting challenge.
 |
| Bill Moyers |
While Moyers was optimistic in the 1970s that a "Green Revolution for a healthy, safe and sustainable future" was under way, now "the reality is otherwise."
"Rather than leading the world in finding solutions to the global environmental crises, the United States is a recalcitrant naysayer and backslider. Our government and corporate elites have turned against America's environmental visionaries," said Moyers, who decried them for eviscerating the gains of the past generation while blaming the environmental movement itself for its failures.
Acknowledging that "the environmental community has stumbled on many fronts," Moyers said, "If the Green Revolution is a bloody pulp today, it is not just because the environmental movement mugged itself. It is because the corporate, political and religious right ganged up on it in the back alleys of power."
Big companies and political ideologues have fomented a backlash against environmentalism that's been far more ruthless than Moyers ever anticipated. He himself has felt that reaction, citing two of his PBS documentaries that were the target of smear campaigns by the chemical industry and its PR firms.
"Trade Secrets," a 2-hour investigative special based on records from industry archives, revealed that for more than 40 years big chemical companies purposely withheld information about toxic chemicals in their products, putting workers and consumers at risk. Furthermore, the reporting "also confirmed that we were living under a regulatory system designed by the chemical industry itself—one that put profits ahead of safety," said Moyers.
The program, which former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks worked on, aired despite intense pressure on PBS to pull it. It was widely acclaimed and won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
The intensity of the backlash has only grown stronger, however, according to Moyers. Compounding the problem is that "President Bush has turned the agencies charged with environmental protection over to people who don't believe in it." He listed some of the nation's key environment and resource management posts held by former defenders of polluters and lobbyists for the timber, mining and petroleum industries.
The obstacles to journalists who cover those agencies' role in environmental protection have also increased, not least at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees PBS. "The right wing coup at public broadcasting is complete," Moyers said, with the board now dominated by Bush-apppointed Republican activists and a new chair who is a former party fundraiser. He said the White House has also "handpicked" a candidate for president and CEO who is "a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee whose husband became PR director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had helped the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the environment, Silent Spring."
Moyers' recent PBS series "NOW with Bill Moyers," which he headed until his retirement in December 2004, was a target of the CPB's new vision. The mission of the current affairs program was to expose injustice in the workings of power, a task Moyers apparently did all too well. He warned that under the corporation's current leadership, the public should not expect any challenging journalism from public television, and certainly no investigative reporting on the environment or conflicts of interest between government and big business.
Corporations have become "the undisputed overlords of government," Moyers said. And the Bush Administration's hostility to science has supported that corporate agenda on environmental issues. While a growing mountain of scientific evidence points to global environmental crises, most notably global warming, current U.S. policies sabotage any role for action, let alone leadership, in Moyers' analysis. In such a context, Americans' concern for the environmental problems is diminished, he said, citing a July 2005 ABC News poll that reported that 66 percent of those surveyed said they don't think global warming will affect their lives.
"But what we don't know can kill us," said Moyers, contending that journalists must report the news the public would rather not hear. To do so is to buck the tide in Washington, where according to Moyers, "denial…is the governing philosophy. The president's contempt for science—for evidence that mounts every day [about global warming]—is mind-boggling."
Moyers' hope for turning that tide caught some in his audience by surprise. He called on journalists to reach out to Christian conservatives, who Moyers said could most effectively call the president to task on the environment. While some of their leaders are "implacable," Moyers said, "millions of these people believe they are here on earth to serve a higher moral power, not a partisan agenda." And their receptivity to environmental concerns, sometimes called "creation care" within church circles, is growing. Moyers cited the Evangelical Environmental Network, and a National Association of Evangelicals document that declared that "the Bible implies the principle of sustainability," with a mandate to conserve and renew the earth rather than deplete or destroy it.
Yet while many conservatives "may believe Christians have a moral obligation to protect God's creation, most remain uninformed about the true scope of the environmental crisis and the role of the Republican Party in it," according to Moyers. Thus most Christian conservatives vote their consciences on social issues rather than environmental issues.
A Christian and son of a Baptist deacon himself, Moyers encouraged journalists to challenge evangelicals "to look more closely at their moral choices—to consider whether it is possible to be pro-life while also being anti-earth."
"If you believe uncompromisingly in the right of every baby to be born safely into this world, can you at the same time abandon the future of the child, allowing its health and safety to be compromised by a president who gives big corporations license to poison our bodies and destroy our climate?"
Noting the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case that galvanized opinion last spring, Moyers argued that President Bush does not "err on the side of life." "He is playing dice with our children's future—dice that we have likely loaded against our own species, and perhaps against all life on earth."
Journalists should not write off conservative Christians when they need to see the moral complexity of environmental issues, said Moyers. He encouraged journalists in search of new readers to aim stories at this 50-million-member audience, but to do so with an understanding of their worldview and the language necessary to reach them.
When 45 percent of Americans hold a creationist view of the world that discounts Darwinian evolution, there is going to be skepticism about science and its claims, Moyers said. And not just evolution, but "paleontology, archaeology, geology, genetics, even biology and botany." To many Christian conservatives, it's possible that environmental reporting "could seem arrogant in its assumptions, mechanistic, cold and godless in its worldview. That's a tough indictment," he acknowledged, but one that must be faced if journalists are to learn how to convey news to this audience.
Moyers was careful to state that journalists must not give up fact-based analysis or a search for verifiable truth, but he encouraged them to tell stories "with an ear for spiritual language, the language of parable, for that is the language of faith." He used the biblical story of Noah and the flood as an example, noting its parallels with the challenge of telling the story of climate change:
"Both scientists and Noah possess the knowledge of a potentially impending global catastrophe. They try to spread the word, to warn the world, but are laughed at, ridiculed." While no one acts, faithful Noah takes on "the daunting task of rescuing all the biodiversity of the earth…Noah then can be seen as the great preservationist, preventing the first great extinction," Moyers explained, doing "exactly what wildlife biologists and climatologists are trying to do today: to act on their moral convictions to conserve diversity, to protect God's creation in the face of a flood of consumerism and indifference by a materialistic world."
Moyers recognized that some in his audience might be uncomfortable with such an approach, but pushed journalists to strive for understanding: "If we can't empathize with each person's need to grasp a human problem in the language of his or her worldview, then we will likely fail to reach many Christian conservatives who have a sense of morality and justice as strong as our own." And journalists may end up being part of the problem as a result.
In an era that mimics the corrupt Gilded Age of a century ago, Moyers admonished journalists to make the same response their predecessors did, who birthed a "golden age of muckraking journalism" that went after sleaze and cronyism. Like Lincoln Steffens who exposed electoral fraud, or Nellie Bly's quest to reform mental hospitals by going undercover and pretending to be insane, like John Spargo's crusade against child labor in coal mines or Upton Sinclair's campaign to reveal the wretchedness of the meatpacking industry, journalists today have to fight for tomorrow, said Moyers.
The photo of his five grandchildren beside his computer reminds him of journalism's enormous responsibility. Children have no vote, no voice, no party, no lobbyists in Washington, Moyers said. "They have only you and me—our pens and our keyboards and our microphones—to seek and to speak and to publish what we can of how power works, how the world wags and who wags it…There is no one left, none but all of us."
Read the transcript of Bill Moyers' SEJ address. You can also download an audio MP3 file of the speech at SEJ's web site. Bill Moyers was the 2004 recipient of the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Babbitt Boasts of Boulder on Book Tour
By Felicia Russell
Praising the Open Space plan, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that Boulder has become a hub of discussion on land use planning in the West.
Babbitt, a member of President Clinton's cabinet for eight years, spoke to faculty and students Sept. 23 at the University of Colorado about the historic and future roll of the national government in land use planning as part of a tour to promote his new book "Cities in the Wilderness: A new vision of land use in America."
"Land use planning has been reduced to traffic design and the location of community facilities," said Babbit. The United States fails to do land use planning on a large enough scale and has lost sight of what is urban and what is wilderness. However, he says that there is hope in communities like Boulder that have begun to think about curbing sprawl.
The common attitude among politicians is that land use planning is a local issue, he said, but "the fact is, land use planning in the U.S. has always been a national issue." Canals, railroads, levees, interstates and dams are all federally funded projects. Babbitt pointed out that such projects often promote economic growth and development but can also result in large-scale ecological deterioration.
"Building of dams and development was the beginning of the death of the Mississippi Delta," Babbitt said. Two centuries of flood control in the Mississippi watershed has reduced the amount of sand and silt that the river carries from the center of the country out into the Gulf of Mexico. And channeling has caused the remaining sediment load to be shunted over the continental shelf.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site says early attempts to train the river caused the massive 1927 flood which damaged 11 million acres of farmland. And research by scientists at the University of Memphis Meeman Biological Field Station support claims that channeling and other flood control measures contributed to the 1993 flood. New reports say that the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was multiplied because Louisiana's shrunken coastal wetlands couldn't absorb the storm surges.
"We need to struggle toward a kind of higher vision," said Babbitt; one that is more holistic and better able to prevent disasters like the floods in New Orleans.
According to Babbitt, such a vision stipulates that all federal highway funding require states to plan with ecosystems in mind and set aside open space, and that all federal water projects be accompanied by plans to protect the health of surrounding plants, animals and ecological services.
Writing new laws is not part of his plan. Rather, he envisions changing the way that Americans value and interact with their environment—a deepening of the conservation ethic that Teddy Roosevelt practiced.
Land use planning, said Babbit, is the "major issue this century for those of us who are concerned about the environment." He urged people faced with a new shopping mall or highway to use the political power of the community to say "No," then negotiate with developers to ensure sustainable and environmentally-sound building practices.
Grassroots activism is vital to protecting ecosystems in the current political climate, he said. And urged the audience to be persistent in their efforts.
"Not in this session of Congress. Not under this president." But, said Babbit, "the moment of change will come."
Praising the Open Space plan, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that Boulder has become a hub of discussion on land use planning in the West.
Babbitt, a member of President Clinton's cabinet for eight years, spoke to faculty and students Sept. 23 at the University of Colorado about the historic and future roll of the national government in land use planning as part of a tour to promote his new book "Cities in the Wilderness: A new vision of land use in America."
 |
| Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton's Interior Secretary from 1993 to 2001. (Photo/Center of the American West) |
"Land use planning has been reduced to traffic design and the location of community facilities," said Babbit. The United States fails to do land use planning on a large enough scale and has lost sight of what is urban and what is wilderness. However, he says that there is hope in communities like Boulder that have begun to think about curbing sprawl.
The common attitude among politicians is that land use planning is a local issue, he said, but "the fact is, land use planning in the U.S. has always been a national issue." Canals, railroads, levees, interstates and dams are all federally funded projects. Babbitt pointed out that such projects often promote economic growth and development but can also result in large-scale ecological deterioration.
"Building of dams and development was the beginning of the death of the Mississippi Delta," Babbitt said. Two centuries of flood control in the Mississippi watershed has reduced the amount of sand and silt that the river carries from the center of the country out into the Gulf of Mexico. And channeling has caused the remaining sediment load to be shunted over the continental shelf.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site says early attempts to train the river caused the massive 1927 flood which damaged 11 million acres of farmland. And research by scientists at the University of Memphis Meeman Biological Field Station support claims that channeling and other flood control measures contributed to the 1993 flood. New reports say that the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was multiplied because Louisiana's shrunken coastal wetlands couldn't absorb the storm surges.
"We need to struggle toward a kind of higher vision," said Babbitt; one that is more holistic and better able to prevent disasters like the floods in New Orleans.
According to Babbitt, such a vision stipulates that all federal highway funding require states to plan with ecosystems in mind and set aside open space, and that all federal water projects be accompanied by plans to protect the health of surrounding plants, animals and ecological services.
Writing new laws is not part of his plan. Rather, he envisions changing the way that Americans value and interact with their environment—a deepening of the conservation ethic that Teddy Roosevelt practiced.
Land use planning, said Babbit, is the "major issue this century for those of us who are concerned about the environment." He urged people faced with a new shopping mall or highway to use the political power of the community to say "No," then negotiate with developers to ensure sustainable and environmentally-sound building practices.
Grassroots activism is vital to protecting ecosystems in the current political climate, he said. And urged the audience to be persistent in their efforts.
"Not in this session of Congress. Not under this president." But, said Babbit, "the moment of change will come."
"Something Smells Funny": Covering the Chemical Industry With Award-Winning Reporter Dina Cappiello
By Wendy Worrall Redal
Emmett Dunn lives in a modest ranch house in Southeast Houston's Manchester neighborhood, a working-class residential area that borders the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel. A fence divides Dunn's back yard from the Texas Petrochemical refinery, though it does nothing to protect Dunn from the plant's noise, odors and toxic gas releases that he blames for stunting the vegetables in his small garden plot and turning his new white roof charcoal-gray in less than two years.
The refinery's flare burns just a few hundred yards beyond Dunn's property line. When its emissions are highest, usually during rainy or stormy weather that prompts more accidental releases, or "upsets," Dunn notices that his eyes and throat burn. He also guesses that the skin lesions that have bothered him for the past few years are connected to what's coming out of the stack.
When Dunn got an invitation from Houston Chronicle environment reporter Dina Cappiello to participate in an air-quality monitoring study conducted by the newspaper, he took the opportunity to find out exactly what he was breathing.
With $20,000 in funding from the Chronicle, Cappiello set up the study that monitored the air in four neighborhoods adjacent to some of the state's largest oil refineries and chemical plants along the 50-mile-long Ship Channel during the summer of 2004. One hundred monitors were hung at homes, public parks and playgrounds, with the help of 84 volunteers who offered their residences as test sites. The results were analyzed for 18 chemicals known to pose human health hazards, including cancer, kidney and liver damage.
Dunn found out that benzene levels in his community were so high that one scientist said living there "would be like sitting in traffic 24/7," Cappiello reported. Four other homes in Allendale, a mostly Hispanic neighborhood near Manchester, showed levels of another known carcinogen, the rubber ingredient 1,3-butadiene, at levels 20 times higher than federal guidelines used for toxic waste dumps.
At 49 of the 100 sites, the Chronicle found quantities of up to five different chemicals that exceeded levels considered safe in other states with stricter guidelines for air toxics. Three compounds measured consistently higher than the EPA's screening level, the national standard for acceptable exposure. All of the compounds found at elevated levels have been linked to cancer.
Dunn shared his story with a busload of journalists in his backyard during a Sept. 29 Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) field trip led by Cappiello, whose 5-part series based on the study, "In Harm's Way," appeared in the Chronicle in January 2005. Cappiello in turn shared the results of her reporting on the all-day tour of the Ship Channel corridor that also brought participants face to face with industry executives, state environmental regulators, and activists. On the tour were Ted Scripps Fellow Jeff Johnson, who writes for Chemical and Engineering News, and CEJ News/Views editor, yours truly.
The series received SEJ's new Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, Print, at the organization's annual awards presentation during its conference held Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in Austin, Texas. The stories' impact has been dramatic, and Cappiello, 31, has set an impressive standard for her colleagues.
We spoke with Cappiello in early November to learn more about "the story behind the story."
When she joined the Chronicle as its environment reporter in 2002, Cappiello knew her beat would cover the Ship Channel and petrochemical industry, and that it would include major corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP. While she had covered PCB contamination of the Hudson River as a reporter for the Albany Times-Union before moving to Texas, most of that pollution had occurred as a result of actions years before. In Houston, air pollution is a current and ongoing issue, and that angle appealed to Cappiello's reporting interests. "Contamination happens every day," she said.
After a year or so on her beat, she recognized a pattern in certain events. "What I saw happening over and over again was there would be these releases – upsets, they're called – and I would hear from people that their eyes would run, their throats would burn." She would repeatedly follow up, calling state regulators and industry personnel, and they would repeatedly tell her, "There's nothing in the air."
"I covered that over and over again," she said, "and frankly, I got really frustrated…Something didn't add up."
Usually she did not think anyone was intentionally being deceptive, though "in one case I was outright lied to," she said, choosing not to name the company involved. "There was jet-black smoke in the air, a signal of incomplete combustion. I knew something was in the air, but how could I get at that?"
The answer, she concluded, was to set up her own monitoring project. With a B.S. in biology and a master's degree from Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Science Journalism, Cappiello had the knowledge not only to recognize incomplete combustion when she saw it, but to carry out a rigorous scientific study of the sort she knew was necessary to get credible results that made sense. "You have to make it air-tight," she said.
The next step was pitching the story to the Chronicle's projects desk. She spent several months doing her homework before drafting a lengthy memo outlining the story's methods, projected cost and timeframe. Not surprisingly, she recalls, her editors' response was initially lukewarm: "The air is polluted? What's new?"
The story Cappiello wanted to do "came out of my journalistic gut," she said, and she spent time pondering her reply. The news angle, she contended, was, "It's worse than you think, and how things work in Texas obscures that." As her coverage reveals, Texas air-quality standards are far more lax than most of the the nation's.
She convinced her editors the project was worth pursuing, and thus began a year-long process of research and reporting, funded with approximately $50,000 invested by the Chronicle. The work was all-consuming, and Cappiello had no bylines from August 2004 until the stories debuted in January, five months later.
The path to publication was fraught with challenges, most of them involving the logistics of getting data. Cappiello recalled the hundreds of hours she put in contacting, recruiting, training, interviewing and arranging photographs of her 84 volunteers. Many who lived in the neighborhoods she was studying worked in the industry and said, "No way, Jose," when she invited them to participate. Others were reluctant because they knew how much the plants provide economically to their communities.
"This is Texas," she explained, "A lot of these schools wouldn't exist without money from these chemical companies." Especially in the less-well-off fence-line communities, industry achieves much good will through its contributions, Cappiello said.
Ultimately, she found enough willing volunteers, though she also encountered obstacles of a more threatening sort. At a lunch she attended in Austin, a spokesman for the Texas Chemistry Council, an industry association, told her "their people" – lawyers, she presumed – "did a background check on me."
Even the feds got involved. "I can't say for certain this was sabotage," said Cappiello, but in one case the monitors that some Chronicle summer interns had placed in a public park were ordered removed by the FBI.
The park was on land owned by one of the chemical companies, and word had made its way back. "The companies knew what we were doing," she said. The agents who forced her team to take the monitors down said the company had called them with "concerns about terrorism." "Calling a tiny monitor a possible bomb is a bit of a stretch," she said with wry understatement, but "we got no data near that facility."
Undaunted, Cappiello completed the study and the Chronicle had the data analyzed at a laboratory at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Publication of the results brought rapid and broad reaction, including legislative revisions in air toxics standards and voluntary commitments by several companies to further reduce their emissions of certain hazardous compounds.
But it was the public's response that was especially gratifying to Cappiello. The paper set up a hotline when the stories ran, which received hundreds of calls. She found satisfaction in knowing "that I got the discussion flowing on an issue that was taboo." One reader told her she had revealed "the elephant in the living room in Houston."
Most rewarding to Cappiello is "when people near the plants see a change." Dunn, however, noted that while the air smelled cleaner and the plant was quieter after the series appeared, within about two weeks he began to notice new releases from Texas Petrochemical's flare that gradually increased in frequency.
Clearly, Houston's chemical industry must remain an object of close scrutiny on Cappiello's environment beat. And she remains convinced that her reporting – and journalism generally – can make a difference, even in a climate where news often tends to be shaped by the commercial values of profit-driven media conglomerates.
The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst newspaper chain, "is the poster child – one of many poster children -- " for contemporary working conditions, Cappiello said. "We have a small staff, we have tight budgets. But what this series shows is that you've got to get the most bang for your buck. We got a lot of bang out of this. Certainly more than if we spread that $20,000 out somewhere else."
What the series' success shows, said Cappiello, is that "there's hope that you can set the agenda, and that agenda does not necessarily have to come from your readers." If the paper had done a market survey on topics its audience most wanted to read about, petrochemical industry releases or even air pollution probably wouldn't be high on the list, she said. But the huge response to her story from all strata of the public revealed that the interest was there, and perhaps people just didn't realize it.
She also applauds the Chronicle's public-service commitment, citing the decision to translate the entire series into Spanish for an audience that typically does not subscribe to the paper yet that is impacted by the findings. In today's tight financial climate, "that shows some hope," said Cappiello.
While the Chronicle's willingness to devote major resources to an in-depth investigative story may be unusual in contemporary journalism, Cappiello encourages fellow environment reporters, even those young in their careers as she is, to pursue such stories.
"Investigative reporting is essential to covering the environment," she emphasized. "Trust your journalistic sense," she advised. Share it with your editors. "Don't be afraid to ask, to pitch. You may be turned down, but you may not be turned down."
However, she stressed that it is essential to create a record of credibility and reliability first. "It doesn't matter that you have a degree in journalism from Columbia. It's about what you put in the paper…You have to set some kind of precedent. Every bit of your work reflects on you. Do your homework; do good work every single day. That gets you the people who will talk to you."
"In Harm's Way" is a finalist for the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, bestowed annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Dina Cappiello recently returned from New Orleans where she analyzed the National Response Center database for spills following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Emmett Dunn lives in a modest ranch house in Southeast Houston's Manchester neighborhood, a working-class residential area that borders the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel. A fence divides Dunn's back yard from the Texas Petrochemical refinery, though it does nothing to protect Dunn from the plant's noise, odors and toxic gas releases that he blames for stunting the vegetables in his small garden plot and turning his new white roof charcoal-gray in less than two years.
The refinery's flare burns just a few hundred yards beyond Dunn's property line. When its emissions are highest, usually during rainy or stormy weather that prompts more accidental releases, or "upsets," Dunn notices that his eyes and throat burn. He also guesses that the skin lesions that have bothered him for the past few years are connected to what's coming out of the stack.
 |
| Emmett Dunn surveys the Texas Petrochemical refinery from his back yard (Photo/Carlos Antonio Rios) |
When Dunn got an invitation from Houston Chronicle environment reporter Dina Cappiello to participate in an air-quality monitoring study conducted by the newspaper, he took the opportunity to find out exactly what he was breathing.
With $20,000 in funding from the Chronicle, Cappiello set up the study that monitored the air in four neighborhoods adjacent to some of the state's largest oil refineries and chemical plants along the 50-mile-long Ship Channel during the summer of 2004. One hundred monitors were hung at homes, public parks and playgrounds, with the help of 84 volunteers who offered their residences as test sites. The results were analyzed for 18 chemicals known to pose human health hazards, including cancer, kidney and liver damage.
Dunn found out that benzene levels in his community were so high that one scientist said living there "would be like sitting in traffic 24/7," Cappiello reported. Four other homes in Allendale, a mostly Hispanic neighborhood near Manchester, showed levels of another known carcinogen, the rubber ingredient 1,3-butadiene, at levels 20 times higher than federal guidelines used for toxic waste dumps.
At 49 of the 100 sites, the Chronicle found quantities of up to five different chemicals that exceeded levels considered safe in other states with stricter guidelines for air toxics. Three compounds measured consistently higher than the EPA's screening level, the national standard for acceptable exposure. All of the compounds found at elevated levels have been linked to cancer.
Dunn shared his story with a busload of journalists in his backyard during a Sept. 29 Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) field trip led by Cappiello, whose 5-part series based on the study, "In Harm's Way," appeared in the Chronicle in January 2005. Cappiello in turn shared the results of her reporting on the all-day tour of the Ship Channel corridor that also brought participants face to face with industry executives, state environmental regulators, and activists. On the tour were Ted Scripps Fellow Jeff Johnson, who writes for Chemical and Engineering News, and CEJ News/Views editor, yours truly.
The series received SEJ's new Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, Print, at the organization's annual awards presentation during its conference held Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in Austin, Texas. The stories' impact has been dramatic, and Cappiello, 31, has set an impressive standard for her colleagues.
We spoke with Cappiello in early November to learn more about "the story behind the story."
When she joined the Chronicle as its environment reporter in 2002, Cappiello knew her beat would cover the Ship Channel and petrochemical industry, and that it would include major corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP. While she had covered PCB contamination of the Hudson River as a reporter for the Albany Times-Union before moving to Texas, most of that pollution had occurred as a result of actions years before. In Houston, air pollution is a current and ongoing issue, and that angle appealed to Cappiello's reporting interests. "Contamination happens every day," she said.
After a year or so on her beat, she recognized a pattern in certain events. "What I saw happening over and over again was there would be these releases – upsets, they're called – and I would hear from people that their eyes would run, their throats would burn." She would repeatedly follow up, calling state regulators and industry personnel, and they would repeatedly tell her, "There's nothing in the air."
"I covered that over and over again," she said, "and frankly, I got really frustrated…Something didn't add up."
Usually she did not think anyone was intentionally being deceptive, though "in one case I was outright lied to," she said, choosing not to name the company involved. "There was jet-black smoke in the air, a signal of incomplete combustion. I knew something was in the air, but how could I get at that?"
The answer, she concluded, was to set up her own monitoring project. With a B.S. in biology and a master's degree from Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Science Journalism, Cappiello had the knowledge not only to recognize incomplete combustion when she saw it, but to carry out a rigorous scientific study of the sort she knew was necessary to get credible results that made sense. "You have to make it air-tight," she said.
The next step was pitching the story to the Chronicle's projects desk. She spent several months doing her homework before drafting a lengthy memo outlining the story's methods, projected cost and timeframe. Not surprisingly, she recalls, her editors' response was initially lukewarm: "The air is polluted? What's new?"
The story Cappiello wanted to do "came out of my journalistic gut," she said, and she spent time pondering her reply. The news angle, she contended, was, "It's worse than you think, and how things work in Texas obscures that." As her coverage reveals, Texas air-quality standards are far more lax than most of the the nation's.
She convinced her editors the project was worth pursuing, and thus began a year-long process of research and reporting, funded with approximately $50,000 invested by the Chronicle. The work was all-consuming, and Cappiello had no bylines from August 2004 until the stories debuted in January, five months later.
The path to publication was fraught with challenges, most of them involving the logistics of getting data. Cappiello recalled the hundreds of hours she put in contacting, recruiting, training, interviewing and arranging photographs of her 84 volunteers. Many who lived in the neighborhoods she was studying worked in the industry and said, "No way, Jose," when she invited them to participate. Others were reluctant because they knew how much the plants provide economically to their communities.
"This is Texas," she explained, "A lot of these schools wouldn't exist without money from these chemical companies." Especially in the less-well-off fence-line communities, industry achieves much good will through its contributions, Cappiello said.
Ultimately, she found enough willing volunteers, though she also encountered obstacles of a more threatening sort. At a lunch she attended in Austin, a spokesman for the Texas Chemistry Council, an industry association, told her "their people" – lawyers, she presumed – "did a background check on me."
Even the feds got involved. "I can't say for certain this was sabotage," said Cappiello, but in one case the monitors that some Chronicle summer interns had placed in a public park were ordered removed by the FBI.
 |
| Children playing in Milby Park near Houston breathe dangerous air (Photo/Carlos Antonio Rios) |
The park was on land owned by one of the chemical companies, and word had made its way back. "The companies knew what we were doing," she said. The agents who forced her team to take the monitors down said the company had called them with "concerns about terrorism." "Calling a tiny monitor a possible bomb is a bit of a stretch," she said with wry understatement, but "we got no data near that facility."
Undaunted, Cappiello completed the study and the Chronicle had the data analyzed at a laboratory at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Publication of the results brought rapid and broad reaction, including legislative revisions in air toxics standards and voluntary commitments by several companies to further reduce their emissions of certain hazardous compounds.
But it was the public's response that was especially gratifying to Cappiello. The paper set up a hotline when the stories ran, which received hundreds of calls. She found satisfaction in knowing "that I got the discussion flowing on an issue that was taboo." One reader told her she had revealed "the elephant in the living room in Houston."
Most rewarding to Cappiello is "when people near the plants see a change." Dunn, however, noted that while the air smelled cleaner and the plant was quieter after the series appeared, within about two weeks he began to notice new releases from Texas Petrochemical's flare that gradually increased in frequency.
Clearly, Houston's chemical industry must remain an object of close scrutiny on Cappiello's environment beat. And she remains convinced that her reporting – and journalism generally – can make a difference, even in a climate where news often tends to be shaped by the commercial values of profit-driven media conglomerates.
The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst newspaper chain, "is the poster child – one of many poster children -- " for contemporary working conditions, Cappiello said. "We have a small staff, we have tight budgets. But what this series shows is that you've got to get the most bang for your buck. We got a lot of bang out of this. Certainly more than if we spread that $20,000 out somewhere else."
What the series' success shows, said Cappiello, is that "there's hope that you can set the agenda, and that agenda does not necessarily have to come from your readers." If the paper had done a market survey on topics its audience most wanted to read about, petrochemical industry releases or even air pollution probably wouldn't be high on the list, she said. But the huge response to her story from all strata of the public revealed that the interest was there, and perhaps people just didn't realize it.
 |
| Houston Chronicle reporter Dina Cappiello and photographer Carlos Antonio Rios |
She also applauds the Chronicle's public-service commitment, citing the decision to translate the entire series into Spanish for an audience that typically does not subscribe to the paper yet that is impacted by the findings. In today's tight financial climate, "that shows some hope," said Cappiello.
While the Chronicle's willingness to devote major resources to an in-depth investigative story may be unusual in contemporary journalism, Cappiello encourages fellow environment reporters, even those young in their careers as she is, to pursue such stories.
"Investigative reporting is essential to covering the environment," she emphasized. "Trust your journalistic sense," she advised. Share it with your editors. "Don't be afraid to ask, to pitch. You may be turned down, but you may not be turned down."
However, she stressed that it is essential to create a record of credibility and reliability first. "It doesn't matter that you have a degree in journalism from Columbia. It's about what you put in the paper…You have to set some kind of precedent. Every bit of your work reflects on you. Do your homework; do good work every single day. That gets you the people who will talk to you."
"In Harm's Way" is a finalist for the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, bestowed annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Dina Cappiello recently returned from New Orleans where she analyzed the National Response Center database for spills following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
After Katrina, CU Geographer Gilbert White's Work Commands New Attention
By Erika Engelhaupt
When levees broke in New Orleans and water started gushing in, many Americans were stunned to learn the city—and the country—weren't ready. Outside Louisiana, leaders from the president on down said they couldn't have imagined such chilling devastation. But Gilbert White already had, decades before.
Back in 1942, White, a geographer who would later found an influential natural hazards research center at the University of Colorado, was writing about how floods could wipe out cities, and he started to push for better planning. A pioneer in approaching solutions from a whole-environment perspective, he emphasized the need to look at more than just building a levee here or a floodwall there.
White built a long career traveling the world, helping nations improve how they manage water and plan for floods. It would be decades, though, before his message would be taken seriously at home.
Now 93, White is known as the "father of floodplain management" and received the 2000 National Medal of Science for his leadership in this field. Reflecting on his lifetime of work, White said he hopes it has made a difference. "It's hard to get people to think ahead," he said.
In 1942, White finished his doctoral dissertation, Human Adjustment to Floods, at the University of Chicago. He was already working for President Franklin Roosevelt's Bureau of the Budget, after spending the Depression years in the New Deal administration's natural resources planning efforts. America was at war that year, and White, a devout Quaker, was a conscientious objector who worked with refugees in France instead of taking up arms.
White recognized that wartime technology came to dominate the American approach to problem solving. American bombers and fighter planes were the first line of defense against Nazi Germany. The war pushed forward development of jet airplanes, radar and penicillin. Most Americans believed that science and engineering, along with American muscle, could solve most problems.
Then, as now, cities faced floods. In the 1940s, city planners and engineers were eager to push forward with technological fixes. American ingenuity seemed to be enough to ensure safety. The Tennessee Valley Authority had built dams across seven states for flood control and hydroelectric power as part of the first massive development plan of its kind in the nation.
Within the president's administration, White started preaching that such a command-and-conquer approach to protection from environmental onslaughts would backfire. Instead of a relentless focus on building new structures, White promoted stewardship of the landscape. Instead of spending large sums to rebuild after a disaster, White suggested planning ahead to reduce future impacts. He said flood-prone areas should adapt to flood hazards, by keeping people and property out of harm's way when possible, and building flood-resistant buildings when needed.
Such thinking flew in the face of traditional military and engineering approaches, and the Army Corps of Engineers resisted White's ideas for many years. But eventually his perspectives took hold even there. Over the years, ecological and interdisciplinary approaches to land and water management became more popular as resource managers learned from the mistakes of dams that failed and drainage projects that destroyed wildlife habitat. In 2001, the Corps established a complete collection of White's work—more than 4,000 publications and work papers spanning more than 50 years—at the Corps' Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria, Va.
The Corps' collection includes a written introduction that reflects a new attitude. It reads in part, "Gilbert White's influence on floodplain management practice in the United States can hardly be overestimated … [His] work demonstrated that flood control structures not only occasionally fail the standards of reliability set by planners but can actually increase the damage done when unsuspecting people risk lives and money to develop the land supposedly protected."
After the war, White established an academic career. As a professor at the University of Chicago, White asked his class one day if anyone knew of a place in the West where he could take his children to work on a ranch, as he had done as a boy in Wyoming. One student said Boulder, Colo., was a nice place with ranches. White listened, and leased 1,000 acres near Boulder for $150 for the summer. He later returned to Boulder permanently, joined the faculty at CU, and founded a center here to study and plan for natural hazards such as flooding.
That center, the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, is a vital presence on the CU campus today.
Boulder was a natural place to study flood risk, as Boulder has the highest flood risk in Colorado, according to White. Thousands of homes and businesses in Boulder are vulnerable to the kind of flooding that happens on average once a century, which Boulder is currently overdue for, while thousands more would wash away in a bigger flood, the kind that happens more rarely but which is bound to devastate Boulder eventually.
The "100-year flood level" is the standard used in federal flood regulations, but given that bigger floods happen every 500 years or so, White thinks the mandatory flood zone level should be expanded to include that risk.
White has worked to prepare Boulder for the next big flood. In 1994, he created the Boulder Creek Flood Notebook, a detailed set of questions that researchers and volunteers will answer to describe what happens during and after the next big flood to hit Boulder.
That day has not yet come, but right now, the entire country is thinking about disasters and flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
White said he was surprised the federal government didn't do more to deal with levee safety and educating the public about what to do before a hurricane hits. He criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now placed under the new Department of Homeland Security. "In the interest of [counteracting] terrorism, they have put more people at risk," said White.
White said New Orleans must now "consider not only the social benefit of protecting people from floods, but also maintaining the natural ecosystem." While he said the people who really know that region need to form the specific plans, White said planners need to consider the whole landscape. "It's not just a question of do we build a levee or not, but how do we make wise use of the floodplain?"
Over the years, White's principles have woven their way thoroughly into the fabric of urban planning. His ideas may influence the way New Orleans is rebuilt, even if White is not directing the process.
The next generation of urban planners in New Orleans is learning from White through his papers. Robert Collins is an assistant professor and department chair of Urban Studies and Public Policy at Dillard University in New Orleans. In his department's courses on land-use planning, White's work on floods and planning is peppered throughout the course. "Any planner would know his name," Collins said.
Sylvia Dane, Emergency Management and Planning Coordinator for CU, has known White for 17 years. "He is the most amazing person I've ever known," she said. "He has such a strong voice because of his modesty; he can bring stakeholders to the table and they will listen."
White now lives in an airy, spacious condominium above the west end of Pearl Street in Boulder. Ironically, he chose to live in one of the most flood-prone parts of Boulder. In the kind of flood that happens on average once every 100 years in Boulder, White said that area will flood up to the rooftops of one-story buildings.
"Someday Boulder will be seriously flooded," White said. "It's just a matter of time."
When that day comes, White will be ready. He had the building built with only a garage and entryway on the first floor. He predicts the brick building will stand, and perhaps White will look out the window and decide whether his town listened.
For more on Gilbert White, the Gustavson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Colorado, visit his biography Web site.
When levees broke in New Orleans and water started gushing in, many Americans were stunned to learn the city—and the country—weren't ready. Outside Louisiana, leaders from the president on down said they couldn't have imagined such chilling devastation. But Gilbert White already had, decades before.
Back in 1942, White, a geographer who would later found an influential natural hazards research center at the University of Colorado, was writing about how floods could wipe out cities, and he started to push for better planning. A pioneer in approaching solutions from a whole-environment perspective, he emphasized the need to look at more than just building a levee here or a floodwall there.
White built a long career traveling the world, helping nations improve how they manage water and plan for floods. It would be decades, though, before his message would be taken seriously at home.
Now 93, White is known as the "father of floodplain management" and received the 2000 National Medal of Science for his leadership in this field. Reflecting on his lifetime of work, White said he hopes it has made a difference. "It's hard to get people to think ahead," he said.
 |
| Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography Gilbert F. White (Photo/ Ken Abbott, CU-Boulder) |
In 1942, White finished his doctoral dissertation, Human Adjustment to Floods, at the University of Chicago. He was already working for President Franklin Roosevelt's Bureau of the Budget, after spending the Depression years in the New Deal administration's natural resources planning efforts. America was at war that year, and White, a devout Quaker, was a conscientious objector who worked with refugees in France instead of taking up arms.
White recognized that wartime technology came to dominate the American approach to problem solving. American bombers and fighter planes were the first line of defense against Nazi Germany. The war pushed forward development of jet airplanes, radar and penicillin. Most Americans believed that science and engineering, along with American muscle, could solve most problems.
Then, as now, cities faced floods. In the 1940s, city planners and engineers were eager to push forward with technological fixes. American ingenuity seemed to be enough to ensure safety. The Tennessee Valley Authority had built dams across seven states for flood control and hydroelectric power as part of the first massive development plan of its kind in the nation.
Within the president's administration, White started preaching that such a command-and-conquer approach to protection from environmental onslaughts would backfire. Instead of a relentless focus on building new structures, White promoted stewardship of the landscape. Instead of spending large sums to rebuild after a disaster, White suggested planning ahead to reduce future impacts. He said flood-prone areas should adapt to flood hazards, by keeping people and property out of harm's way when possible, and building flood-resistant buildings when needed.
Such thinking flew in the face of traditional military and engineering approaches, and the Army Corps of Engineers resisted White's ideas for many years. But eventually his perspectives took hold even there. Over the years, ecological and interdisciplinary approaches to land and water management became more popular as resource managers learned from the mistakes of dams that failed and drainage projects that destroyed wildlife habitat. In 2001, the Corps established a complete collection of White's work—more than 4,000 publications and work papers spanning more than 50 years—at the Corps' Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria, Va.
The Corps' collection includes a written introduction that reflects a new attitude. It reads in part, "Gilbert White's influence on floodplain management practice in the United States can hardly be overestimated … [His] work demonstrated that flood control structures not only occasionally fail the standards of reliability set by planners but can actually increase the damage done when unsuspecting people risk lives and money to develop the land supposedly protected."
After the war, White established an academic career. As a professor at the University of Chicago, White asked his class one day if anyone knew of a place in the West where he could take his children to work on a ranch, as he had done as a boy in Wyoming. One student said Boulder, Colo., was a nice place with ranches. White listened, and leased 1,000 acres near Boulder for $150 for the summer. He later returned to Boulder permanently, joined the faculty at CU, and founded a center here to study and plan for natural hazards such as flooding.
That center, the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, is a vital presence on the CU campus today.
Boulder was a natural place to study flood risk, as Boulder has the highest flood risk in Colorado, according to White. Thousands of homes and businesses in Boulder are vulnerable to the kind of flooding that happens on average once a century, which Boulder is currently overdue for, while thousands more would wash away in a bigger flood, the kind that happens more rarely but which is bound to devastate Boulder eventually.
The "100-year flood level" is the standard used in federal flood regulations, but given that bigger floods happen every 500 years or so, White thinks the mandatory flood zone level should be expanded to include that risk.
White has worked to prepare Boulder for the next big flood. In 1994, he created the Boulder Creek Flood Notebook, a detailed set of questions that researchers and volunteers will answer to describe what happens during and after the next big flood to hit Boulder.
That day has not yet come, but right now, the entire country is thinking about disasters and flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
White said he was surprised the federal government didn't do more to deal with levee safety and educating the public about what to do before a hurricane hits. He criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now placed under the new Department of Homeland Security. "In the interest of [counteracting] terrorism, they have put more people at risk," said White.
White said New Orleans must now "consider not only the social benefit of protecting people from floods, but also maintaining the natural ecosystem." While he said the people who really know that region need to form the specific plans, White said planners need to consider the whole landscape. "It's not just a question of do we build a levee or not, but how do we make wise use of the floodplain?"
Over the years, White's principles have woven their way thoroughly into the fabric of urban planning. His ideas may influence the way New Orleans is rebuilt, even if White is not directing the process.
The next generation of urban planners in New Orleans is learning from White through his papers. Robert Collins is an assistant professor and department chair of Urban Studies and Public Policy at Dillard University in New Orleans. In his department's courses on land-use planning, White's work on floods and planning is peppered throughout the course. "Any planner would know his name," Collins said.
Sylvia Dane, Emergency Management and Planning Coordinator for CU, has known White for 17 years. "He is the most amazing person I've ever known," she said. "He has such a strong voice because of his modesty; he can bring stakeholders to the table and they will listen."
White now lives in an airy, spacious condominium above the west end of Pearl Street in Boulder. Ironically, he chose to live in one of the most flood-prone parts of Boulder. In the kind of flood that happens on average once every 100 years in Boulder, White said that area will flood up to the rooftops of one-story buildings.
"Someday Boulder will be seriously flooded," White said. "It's just a matter of time."
When that day comes, White will be ready. He had the building built with only a garage and entryway on the first floor. He predicts the brick building will stand, and perhaps White will look out the window and decide whether his town listened.
For more on Gilbert White, the Gustavson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Colorado, visit his biography Web site.
CU Biologist's Bug Brigade Victorious in Knapweed War
By Carolyn Barry
In 1997, Boulder County officials challenged Tim Seastedt to find a way to beat back one of the most noxious and pervasive weeds in the West.
Eight years later, the University of Colorado ecologist has declared victory against diffuse knapweed on his 160-acre test plot near Superior—and he believes his method can bring the weed under control throughout the region. His secret weapon? A couple of little weevils.
"We threw out a few hundred bugs against a few million knapweed plants," said Seastedt, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at CU, and research fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "The odds were not really fair."
But it turns out that the odds were really against the knapweed.
Seastedt said since he introduced his "gorgeous little insects"—the seedhead weevil and the knapweed root weevil – in 1997, they have multiplied from hundreds to billions. At that density, he said, no knapweed could survive their onslaught.
Diffuse knapweed is the most aggressive of the four knapweed species found in Colorado. Not only does it destroy native grassland, it is unpalatable to most grazing animals.
Introduced with alfalfa crops from Eurasia in the early 1900s, this invasive weed found few natural enemies in North America. It now thrives in semi-arid grasslands of the West, where it has colonized more than 3 million acres, including 145,000 acres across Colorado's Front Range.
Generating tens of thousands of seeds per plant, diffuse knapweed rapidly builds its population in a new area. The weed also spreads its seeds great distances as a tumbleweed.
Herbicide spraying has been ineffective because knapweed's plentiful reserve of seeds in the soil allows more plants to grow in the place of those that were treated, said Seastedt.
Previous biological controls have also been unsuccessful. By 1996, 10 insect species had been released in Colorado, to little effect.
But Seastedt said his addition of the two new weevil species made the crucial difference. Seedhead weevil larvae attack knapweed's reproductive output by consuming its seeds, while the adults weaken it by devouring the foliage. "The root weevil," said Seastedt, "is the icing on the cake to the bio-control story." Root weevils inhabit the roots, preventing knapweed from flowering until the insects are mature. This delay in the plant's life cycle allows seedhead weevil numbers to increase to a level where they consume vast amounts of seeds.
"Once you shut down its seed production to a low level, it does not have the ability to persist in density," said Seastedt.
From 1997 to 2000, Seastedt found that the number of seeds per square meter on his test plot fell from 4500 to fewer than 10. The population of young knapweed plants also decreased from 50 per square meter to less than one. Consistent low numbers since 2000 and a lack of knapweed on his test plot this year makes Seastedt confident that the reserve of seeds has been exhausted and diffuse knapweed has been brought under control.
Another part of the success story is the weevils' ability to migrate throughout Boulder County, negating the need for a widespread controlled release. The weevils have been so successful that Seastedt said they have almost eaten themselves out of house and home. Seastedt said he is currently working with a city council member from Lyons, however, to coordinate the release of the insects there.
Other areas in North America have reported similar results. Scientists in Oregon, Montana and British Columbia have also had success at controlling diffuse knapweed with these little weevils. As for the pesky plant, "We've moved it from the noxious to the obnoxious list," Seastedt said.
In 1997, Boulder County officials challenged Tim Seastedt to find a way to beat back one of the most noxious and pervasive weeds in the West.
Eight years later, the University of Colorado ecologist has declared victory against diffuse knapweed on his 160-acre test plot near Superior—and he believes his method can bring the weed under control throughout the region. His secret weapon? A couple of little weevils.
"We threw out a few hundred bugs against a few million knapweed plants," said Seastedt, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at CU, and research fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "The odds were not really fair."
But it turns out that the odds were really against the knapweed.
Seastedt said since he introduced his "gorgeous little insects"—the seedhead weevil and the knapweed root weevil – in 1997, they have multiplied from hundreds to billions. At that density, he said, no knapweed could survive their onslaught.
Diffuse knapweed is the most aggressive of the four knapweed species found in Colorado. Not only does it destroy native grassland, it is unpalatable to most grazing animals.
Introduced with alfalfa crops from Eurasia in the early 1900s, this invasive weed found few natural enemies in North America. It now thrives in semi-arid grasslands of the West, where it has colonized more than 3 million acres, including 145,000 acres across Colorado's Front Range.
Generating tens of thousands of seeds per plant, diffuse knapweed rapidly builds its population in a new area. The weed also spreads its seeds great distances as a tumbleweed.
 |
| Diffuse knapweed "tumbleweeds" along a Front Range fence (Photo/Tim Seastedt) |
Herbicide spraying has been ineffective because knapweed's plentiful reserve of seeds in the soil allows more plants to grow in the place of those that were treated, said Seastedt.
Previous biological controls have also been unsuccessful. By 1996, 10 insect species had been released in Colorado, to little effect.
But Seastedt said his addition of the two new weevil species made the crucial difference. Seedhead weevil larvae attack knapweed's reproductive output by consuming its seeds, while the adults weaken it by devouring the foliage. "The root weevil," said Seastedt, "is the icing on the cake to the bio-control story." Root weevils inhabit the roots, preventing knapweed from flowering until the insects are mature. This delay in the plant's life cycle allows seedhead weevil numbers to increase to a level where they consume vast amounts of seeds.
 |
| A Cyphocleonus (lower left) and Larinus weevils on a knapweed plant(Photo/Mark Giebel) |
"Once you shut down its seed production to a low level, it does not have the ability to persist in density," said Seastedt.
From 1997 to 2000, Seastedt found that the number of seeds per square meter on his test plot fell from 4500 to fewer than 10. The population of young knapweed plants also decreased from 50 per square meter to less than one. Consistent low numbers since 2000 and a lack of knapweed on his test plot this year makes Seastedt confident that the reserve of seeds has been exhausted and diffuse knapweed has been brought under control.
Another part of the success story is the weevils' ability to migrate throughout Boulder County, negating the need for a widespread controlled release. The weevils have been so successful that Seastedt said they have almost eaten themselves out of house and home. Seastedt said he is currently working with a city council member from Lyons, however, to coordinate the release of the insects there.
Other areas in North America have reported similar results. Scientists in Oregon, Montana and British Columbia have also had success at controlling diffuse knapweed with these little weevils. As for the pesky plant, "We've moved it from the noxious to the obnoxious list," Seastedt said.
 |
| Professor Tim Seastedt ruminating in the field (Photo/Tim's Web site) |
CU Grad Denny Wilkins Honored by SEJ
Dr. Denny Wilkins, associate professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., was known as an exacting copy editor during his days around the J-School at CU in the 1990s. No doubt his prowess was honed during years of the same work in the newspaper business, before he came to Boulder to pursue his doctoral studies.
Wilkins received his Ph.D. in media studies in 1996, but he can't get away from copy editing. In fact, it helped garner him the 2005 David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
About 10 years ago, Denny offered his proofreading services to SEJ when he caught a typo or two in the SEJournal, SEJ's quarterly publication. He has continued to police SEJ material for grammar and punctuation errors since, and has moved up substantially in the ranks at the journal. He was appointed to the editorial board and now serves as chairman. He has repeatedly declined offers to be paid for his work.
An article on SEJ's web site announcing Wilkins' award includes his reaction when he learned of his selection: "I'm shocked, stunned and flattered that you would honor me this way. I'm just an old copy desk hack who likes to run down errant commas. To me, this award represents the service and dedication of current and past editors of the journal, its editorial board and the selfless members who write for the journal."
The Stolberg Award was created in 1998 to recognize SEJ members who "epitomize the volunteer spirit of its namesake, David Stolberg, one of SEJ's founders," according to the web page article.
We at the CEJ send our warmest congratulations to Denny.
Another SEJournal editorial board member also has ties to CU: Elizabeth Bluemink was a Ted Scripps Fellow from 2002-2003.
Wilkins received his Ph.D. in media studies in 1996, but he can't get away from copy editing. In fact, it helped garner him the 2005 David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
 | Denny Wilkins (Photo/Craig Melvins) |
About 10 years ago, Denny offered his proofreading services to SEJ when he caught a typo or two in the SEJournal, SEJ's quarterly publication. He has continued to police SEJ material for grammar and punctuation errors since, and has moved up substantially in the ranks at the journal. He was appointed to the editorial board and now serves as chairman. He has repeatedly declined offers to be paid for his work.
An article on SEJ's web site announcing Wilkins' award includes his reaction when he learned of his selection: "I'm shocked, stunned and flattered that you would honor me this way. I'm just an old copy desk hack who likes to run down errant commas. To me, this award represents the service and dedication of current and past editors of the journal, its editorial board and the selfless members who write for the journal."
The Stolberg Award was created in 1998 to recognize SEJ members who "epitomize the volunteer spirit of its namesake, David Stolberg, one of SEJ's founders," according to the web page article.
We at the CEJ send our warmest congratulations to Denny.
Another SEJournal editorial board member also has ties to CU: Elizabeth Bluemink was a Ted Scripps Fellow from 2002-2003.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)