CEJ Today

Upcoming Events

2007-03-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

3/8-11 Ice Fest (CU-Boulder campus)Ice Fest, an arts and sciences celebration of arts and sciences for the International Polar Year, is March 8-11 on the CU-Boulder campus, offering a wide range of free events open to the public. Highlights include NASA Astronaut Don Pettit at 2 pm Friday, Muenzinger auditorium, Family Day, in and around the ATLAS building on Saturday, "Make a Difference Day," Sunday at ATLAS, with polar films with the International Film Series each night.Additional information: http://cires.colorado.edu/events/icefest/

3/14 @ 5pm “Death by Food: Anthropology of Starvation in a World of Abundance” (Old Main)Dennis VanGerven from the Anthropology Department will talk about nutrition and the physiological effects of starvation. He will explore the relationship between affluence and eating behaviors. The talk will consider the influences of media, nutrition, societal expectations and male and female body image. Don't miss this fascinating presentation! Reception to follow. For more information contact 303-735-6433 or visit http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/wellness.

3/14 @ 5:30pm Genetic Research Panel (UMC 382-386)The Student Association of Prehealth Professionals is hosting a Spring Banquet addressing the impact of genetic research on the Healthcare industry. A panel of speakers from CU and CU Health Sciences Center will lecture on important issues related to this exciting field that will change the face of medicine. Local volunteer organizations will also be present. Bring a canned food donation or $1 for entry.Contact: Ellie ScottAdditional information: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/prehealth

3/16-17 CU Law School hosts National Climate Change ConferenceThe conference is called "The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock," and will be attended by national leaders in the environmental justice field. Colorado Congressman Mark Udall and Jerome Ringo, chair of the National Wildlife Federation and president of the national Apollo Alliance, will speak on March 16 at 4:30 pm. On March 17, panelists will discuss the status of the environmental justice movement, new issues related to climate change and potential policy solutions.Additional information: http://www.colorado.edu/law/centers/nrlc/environmental_justice.htm

Colorado Conferences

2007-03-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

3/17 @ 9am-4pm Getting Published Conference (Hale, second floor)
Don't miss a unique opportunity to hear from and ask questions of published writers representing a wide variety of experiences! You'll hear how these authors have gotten their words in print and learn their tips and techniques. We are offering a 25% discount to CU students. Please visit the conference web site for cost, schedule and other information.
Contact: Registration, 303-492-5148
Additional information: http://www.colorado.edu/ContinuingEducation/pegpconference.htm

3/30-4/1 Green Building Techniques 3-Day Course
CU Boulder's Independent Learning Program in partnership with the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences is offering a Green Building course as part of a new certificate program focusing on Sustainable Building Practices. This three day course taught by green building expert Dan Chiras is designed for anyone interested in the latest green building techniques. The course costs $440.
Contact: Amy Li
Additional information: http://www.colorado.edu/ContinuingEducation/sustainable

Campus Happenings

2007-03-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

3/2 @ 7:30pm Spirits from the Sky (Fiske Planetarium)
This show, produced by the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, provides a never-before-seen journey into the culture of the Skidi Band of the Pawnee Native American Nation. Produced in collaboration with Pawnee Tribal Elders, you will get a glimpse into a fascinating society that was almost lost to history. This landmark show bridges science, history, and anthropology to tell the story of a noble people and their enduring relationship with the sky. "Spirits from the Sky" artfully weaves the changing positions of stars and planets with visual representations of artifacts from Pawnee star and sky lore rituals. With an introduction written and narrated by Pulitzer Prize Winner N. Scott Momaday, the presentation draws upon both archival sources and the personal recollections of the Pawnee Elders.
Please visit http://fiske.colorado.edu/ for more information.

3/6 @ 6-7:30pm Bioneers Screening (Humanities 135)
Paul Hawken's "Biology, Resistance and Restoration: Sustainability as an Infinite Game" and John Mohawk's "Survive and Thrive: Traditional Societies' Lessons" will be shown. Free and open to the public.
Contact: CU Environmental Center, ecenter@colorado.edu, 303-492-8308
Additional information: http://ecenter.colorado.edu/events/index.html

3/8 @ 8:30am-5:30pm Graduate Engineering Annual Research Symposium 2007
The Mechanical Engineering Department will host its annual research symposium March 8 in the Discovery Learning Center, 8:30 am-5:30 pm. CU students will present their research in the subject areas of Microelectromechanical systems, Bioengineering, Thermal/Fluids and Materials. The day is highlighted by "Renewable Energy: The Fuel of the 21st Century," a Keynote Lecture from Chuck Kutscher of NREL at 1 pm.
All are welcome to this free event.
Additional information: http://gears.colorado.edu/

3/9 @ 3:30-4:30pm Geography Dept. Lecture Series (Gugg 205)
Erik Mueggler, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology will be presenting his discussion "Crossing Science and Ritual in the Botanical Exploration of Southwest China".
For more information, please contact the Department of Geography at 303-492-2631 or visit their Web site at www.colorado.edu/geography/.

3/13 @ 1-5pm Global Impact Expo
Global Impact Expo, March 13, 1-5 pm, UMC 235. This is a new event this year showcasing organizations making a positive difference for people, community and our planet! Explore humanitarian/health, non-profit, social service and environmental organizations. Some will be offering volunteer, internship and/or employment opportunities. See how you can make a Global Impact! Sponsored by Career Services, Foothills United Way and Boulder Outlook Hotel. See organizations attending at http://careerservices.colorado.edu/public.cs?studentFairs.
Contact: Career Services, Willard Hall, 303-492-4100
Additional information: http://careerservices.colorado.edu

Heads Up!

2007-02-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Hey journalism students! This sounds like a great way to make your work make you some extra cash:

WIN $500 in Student Writing Contest!
This contest is open to CU Students only and is free to enter. You have nothing to lose! The best part? You may have already written something to submit! We accept papers and projects from classes! $500 prizes for first place in each category. Entries are due by 5 pm on Monday, March 19. Get the complete rules and more information here.

And, if you're up for some nitty gritty environmental justice/climate change talk:

2/23 @ 3:30-4:30pm "Making the Case for Climate Justice" (Gugg. 205)
Maxine Burkett, University of Colorado, School of Law
For almost two decades, the environmental justice movement has been committed to the pressing issues facing low-income and/or communities of color that suffer a disproportionate share of environmental risks. The effects of climate change, which are also predicted to unevenly impact communities of color both in the U.S. and internationally, will compound these conditions. In "Making the Case for Climate Justice" Professor Burkett considers the theoretical and practical implications of climate change, climate policy and litigation on poor and of-color communities in the U.S. and argues for a new environmental justice effort wholly concerned with fashioning preventive and adaptive measures for these communities.

Tomorrow: CPA Job Fair

2007-02-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

From the Colorado Press Association via Alan Kirkpatrick: "This popular event allows newspaper representatives to meet prospective entry-level employees. Publishers, editors and human resource directors will interview seniors (and grad students nearing graduation) in Colorado's college journalism programs."

When: 2 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 22
Where: Onyx Room of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver

Campus Events

2007-02-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here are some events around campus that you might interest you.

2/22 @ 9-11:30 am Gary Hart Opens the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit (Glenn Miller Ballroom)
Gary Hart and a plenary panel of the Rocky Mountain Region's campus leaders will address the challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities for action. Hart will present the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit's opening keynote entitled "The New Security in the 21st Century." The keynote will set the stage for the plenary panel "Campus Leadership for Climate Action." Free for CU-Boulder students.
Contact: CU Environmental Center, ecenter@colorado.edu, 303-492-8308

2/22 @ 6-7:45 pm Hunter Lovins and Davis Orr talk "Cutting Edge Sustainability" (Glenn Miller Ballroom)
Come eavesdrop on a "living room conversation" between two of the most innovative thinkers in the sustainability movement when Hunter Lovins and David Orr present the RMSS Thursday evening keynote. Lovins is president and founder of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and co-creator of the Natural Capitalism concept. Orr is known for his work on environmental literacy in higher education and more recently in ecological design.
Contact: CU Environmental Center, ecenter@colorado.edu, 303-492-8308

2/23 @10 am-4 pm 2007 Green Products Expo (UMC 235)
In conjunction with the 2007 Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit, CU will host a Green
Products Expo. The Expo, organized by CU-Boulder's Environmental Center, will introduce a variety of environmentally responsible products and service options geared toward institutional applications, but also of great interest to the public. The Expo will have featured representatives from industries including lighting, carpeting, furniture, paper, clean energy and more.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
Contact: CU Environmental Center, ecenter@colorado.edu, 303-492-8308

2/22 @ 12-1 pm Lunch Series at the University of Colorado Museum (Paleontology Hall)
Join us as student recipients of the Walker Van Riper and William H. Burt Funds update us on their projects. Lunch provided. Mark Mitchell: "Technological Change in Nineteenth Century Mandan and Hidatsa Pottery," Chris McGuire: "Indicators of Environmental Change: Climate and the Grasshoppers of Colorado," Carey Sheerer: "Aventurando: Exploring Gar-funa Migration to New York City."
Contact: University of Colorado Museum, 303-492-6892

2/28-3/2 2nd Annual Sustainable Opportunities Summit (Sheraton Four Points Hotel, Denver)
The Leeds School's Deming Center for Entrepreneurship will co-host the 2nd Annual Sustainable Opportunities Summit Feb. 28-Mar. 2, at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel, Denver. The Summit brings together corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from various industries to offer practical advice and suggestions to make "green" companies profitable. Speakers include Chancellor Peterson and representatives from Toyota and Nike. More information and a full speaker schedule visit http://www.sosummit.org.
Contact: Patty Graff, patty.graff@colorado.edu, 303-735-4970
Additional information: http://leeds.colorado.edu/entrep/interior.aspx?id=295,411,484,2216

March Law School for Journalists

2007-02-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

When: Tuesday, March 13, 8:30-10 a.m.
Where: Colorado Bar Association, 1900 Grant St., 9th floor, Denver
Topic: Water with Justice Gregory Hobbs of the Colorado Supreme Court and other water law experts.
For more info: Check out this Web site.

The New Newsletter

2007-02-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

At last! It took a while, but all of the Connections and News & Views articles from years past have been transfered to this blog.

The blog is one of two that the Center for Environmental Journalism puts out. It is intended as a forum for students, faculty and members of the CEJ community. Our other blog, Environmental Journalism Now, is a bit more public and will deal with the larger issues of covering the environment.

We welcome your input!

ABC Producer Wonbo Woo talks Ethics

2007-02-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

Wonbo Woo, a producer with ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, spoke in my Media Ethics class this morning. Woo is visiting the J-school as part of the Hearst Professional-in-Residence program.

"Good news is subjective," Woo said. He strives for balance, fairness and accuracy in his daily work. But, he said, it's difficult to know what makes for a balanced story.

He wondered, for example, if a soundbite from a pro-choice advocate should be included in a story about a mother and daughter who spoke out against abortion for religious reasons. From his perspective, the focus of the piece would switch from the lives of these two women to the abortion debate if he included the opposing viewpoint.

When he has just 2 minutes to tell the story, he must be extremely selective about what makes it into the final piece. Pitting someone shouting "Yea" against someone shouting "Nay" may be an effective way of catching the audience's attention, but Woo said it isn't an appropriate way to accomplish his goal.

"Part of my mandate is to help people understand each other better," he said. He especially enjoys working on tight focus pieces that are about characters. He said that they humanize people.

In a time when ratings are as important for news shows as they are for sitcoms, Woo said that some level of idealism is necessary in the business. He hopes that novice journalists hold on to that idealism so they can fight for the stories that may not increase ratings or please advertisers, but are important to tell.

One disturbing trend he's seen is entertainment that resembles news such as ABC's made-for-TV movie "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" and the controversial docudrama "Path to 9/11". He worries that the average viewer doesn't make much distinction between news and entertainment.

This sounds oddly reminiscent of the Halloween 1938 "The War of the Worlds" broadcast.

--Felicia Russell

Former Fellows Updates

2006-06-01T16:16:00.000-06:00

Jennifer Bowles, environmental reporter for the Riverside, Calif. Press-Enterprise, swept the environmental category in this year’s Society of Professional Journalists Inland Southern California chapter awards, taking first, second and third-place wins. Bowles won best environmental story for “Regulators on Location,” an article on the steps movie and commercial productions have to take when shooting in the California desert to limit impact to the fragile environment. Second place went to Bowles’ story “Taking root and taking over,” about the detrimental impacts of invasive plants’ incursion into the California desert. The third-place award was for a story Bowles co-wrote with Lys Mendez called “Septic Tank Turmoil.” The article examined the health impacts of overburdened septic tanks in a working-class community and how pollution from the tanks is traveling down to affect a well-to-do enclave, as well as what a proposed ban on septic tanks in the region would mean for the area.

Elizabeth Bluemink has been writing about the impacts of global warming on Alaska’s Southeast Panhandle in her position as environment reporter for the capital city’s Juneau Empire. Among the observable effects is a decline in yellow cedar in the Tongass National Forest due to reduced snow pack. Bluemink led and co-authored a major project released in August 2005 for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ First Amendment Committee that looked at how the federal government has put up blockades to reporters’ FOIA requests since 2001. The project included a survey of some 50 SEJ members and has received national press coverage. Bluemink also received second-place awards from the Alaska Press Club in 2005 and 2006.

Christine Shenot recently became a project manager at the International City/County Management Association in Washington, D.C., a professional association whose members are local government managers. Her group works on a variety of research and professional development initiatives around particular issues. For Shenot, that has largely involved smart growth, drawing on her experience in her prior post with the State of Maryland where she had worked in the Office of Smart Growth since 2002. Much of her current work involves communications, but her group also puts together training and professional development programs, Webcasts, conference sessions and other endeavors. Her current e-mail address is cshenot@icma.org.

In a Flap Over Bird Flu

2006-06-01T16:11:00.000-06:00

By Felicia Russell

“I can say with near certainty that there will be a flu epidemic next year,” Dr. Sam Bozzette, an infectious disease researcher, declared at the Conference on World Affairs.

Bozzette is a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation, and a medical professor at the University of California San Diego. His current research focuses on HIV/AIDS, but he spoke to an audience of about 50 people in the University Memorial Center at a Thursday afternoon lecture called “Duck!!! It’s the Bird Flu!”

Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people will die in next year’s flu epidemic, said Bozzette. But, this is normal. Every year there is a seasonal flu epidemic, an outbreak that affects a large number of people at the same time. In 2005, 313 people in Denver died from influenza and pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The avian flu is different. This family of viruses is found widely in birds and is very deadly to humans, but hasn’t “learned” how to easily attach itself to the human respiratory tract, said Bozzette.

Worldwide, there have been only 194 confirmed cases of the bird flu in humans, but more than half of the people infected have died from the virus, according to the World Health Organization.

Most of the people who became ill caught the virus from an infected bird or its excrement, said Bozzette. Currently, the virus does not readily spread from one person to another.

However, if the human flu virus and avian flu virus infect the same animal and exchange genetic information, the bird flu may learn how to infect people, he said. Then the bird flu could easily pass from one person to the next.

Scientists and doctors are concerned that the avian flu will become pandemic, infecting people worldwide and jumping easily from person to person.

Will Styler, a CU junior, came to the lecture to learn how he can protect himself if there is a pandemic. Styler lives on-campus in Baker Hall and says that he’s seen how quickly other sicknesses have moved through the student body. He particularly remembers two years ago when a nasty stomach virus kept students hovering over toilets for days.

“I literally watched it walk down the hall,” Styler said.

During the question and answer period, Styler asked Bozzette how students living in the dorms could protect themselves.

Bozzette said that people in communal living settings should avoid any unnecessary social contact such as visiting other dorms. And, everyone, regardless of their living situation, should wash their hands often, he said.

“Sooner or later there is going to be a pandemic,” Bozzette said. “There is going to be another flu pandemic.”

When there is a pandemic it will likely last for four or five months like the 1918 flu pandemic, he said.

“There’s no question that relatively early in a serious outbreak, the healthcare system will be overwhelmed,” Bozzette said.

He recommended that people stock up on household goods in the event of a pandemic so that they can avoid frequent exposure to possible carriers of the avian flu.

“You will encounter people who look perfectly well who are shedding the flu virus,” Bozzette said. Therefore, it’s best to avoid contact with other people as much as possible.

Scientists aren’t sure exactly how the flu virus is spread. Studies indicate that the flu may be passed by touch, virus-carrying droplets from a cough or sneeze, or small particles in the air capable of traveling long distances, Bozzette said.

Bozzette said that more funding and research is needed to help scientists understand how the flu is passed from person to person. This type of knowledge will help communities stockpile the right types of supplies to combat an outbreak.

For example, if the virus is passed in droplets, then a standard medical face mask will be sufficient. However, if the virus moves on small particles through the air a more sophisticated mask will be necessary.

Unfortunately, some things like hospital beds, flu vaccine and face masks may be in short supply.

“We don’t have a lot of things you’d want to have if there were a pandemic,” Bozzette said. “It seems that immunization and cutting down contact on a voluntary basis is about all we can do.”

"Science for Dummies": Science writers share tips on the craft

2006-06-01T16:10:00.000-06:00

By Scott Gates

When it comes to helping the public understand science, sometimes less is more, according to a panel of science writers. The three writers discussed how to communicate science effectively to general audiences during an April 11 session at the 58th Conference on World Affairs in Boulder.

Joe Romig, who teaches astronomy at the University of Colorado where the conference was held, served as moderator for the session titled "Science for Dummies." He stressed that what most readers want is not a highly-technical explanation when it comes to science.

Romig quoted his wife, who may have summed it up best in complaining to him: "I don't want to know how the clock works – I just want to know the time."

Each panelist spoke briefly about his or her experiences in conveying science to the general public before opening the session up to questions and discussion from the audience.

Sidney Perkowitz, who left a research career at Emory University to pursue writing, said he writes for science groupies, or those who like the ideas behind science but don't necessarily want to get bogged down in details. The key to capturing such an audience's attention, said Perkowitz, lies in personalizing the topic while keeping jargon and details to a minimum.

"A significant key to science writing is deciding how much to say, but more importantly how much to leave out," Perkowitz said. "I'm willing to leave out a lot of the detail so the main point makes sense."

Susan Zolla-Pazner followed Perkowitz with a quick breakdown of science basics often misunderstood by the public. The New York-based immunologist often works with students, and applied a classroom technique in asking the crowd to repeat in unison one tricky word: nuclear.

The often-mispronounced word "drives me crazy," said Zolla-Pazner, and is a good example of an otherwise simple term being misinterpreted.

She defined three other basic terms that may not always be clear to those outside the field: hypothesis, scientific theory and scientific law. The basic concept behind a hypothesis – a testable idea – is even misunderstood by some of the professionals who use it every day, she said.

"If it's just an idea and you can't test it, it has no business being in the world of science," said Zolla-Pazner, stressing that before any hypothesis is tested it must be assumed to be untrue. "It's a very different way of thinking, and I have to tell you most scientists forget about that."

The third panelist, Michael Chorost, has written for Wired, The Week and Sky, and recently released a memoir focused on experiences with his hearing, lost and regained with a cochlear implant. Chorost had hearing in only one ear since childhood, and on a business trip lost all hearing in the good ear.

"On the plane ride back home I thought: you know, I might be able to get a book out of this," Chorost said. "I was crushed and thrilled at the same time."

He has gained experience since writing his memoir as a science writer, and stressed the importance of analogy in explaining complex ideas. And following Perkowitz's train of thought, Chorost agreed that on occasion some detail must be sacrificed.

"The best science writers, I think, are the ones that can make mystery enjoyable even if it's not fully explainable," said Chorost.

During the question period, Amy Gahran, a Boulder freelance writer, asked how the public might get more involved in the scientific dialogue.

The panel members agreed that there is already a good deal of interaction between scientists and those outside the field, given that many scientists teach. Chorost pointed out that science writers themselves offer a good deal of feedback, and serve as a valuable bridge between the public and the scientific community.

Perkowitz supported his point, adding that even great thinkers like Einstein can't always write for the public mind. "There's a real difference between a world class scientist and a world class science writer," he said.

Adieu to glacier skiing in the Alps?Seth Masia remembers the Haute Route

2006-06-01T15:04:00.001-06:00

By Seth Masia

In 1461, the scapegrace Francois Villon wrote a hauntingly wistful short poem about the fate of beautiful, beloved women, and it ended with the wonderful line, Ou sont les neiges d'antan? Where are the bygone snows?

For me, they're melting from the glaciers of the Alps. I want to get back soon, with my 16-year-old daughter. By the time she has children of her own old enough to ski those glaciers, they may be neiges d'antan.

Before global climate change began to discernibly diminish Europe's remaining glaciers, in the spring of 1983 I set out to ski the Haute Route, the classic tour from Chamonix, in France, across the top of the Alps to Zermatt and Saas-Fee, in Switzerland.

Glacier skiing on the Haute Route between Chamonix and Zermatt (Photo/wikipedia.org)

Mountain guides often say they can haul any strong recreational skier along the 60-mile Haute Route, but it is serious mountaineering terrain. One day requires 6,000 feet of climbing, and there are several nasty steep couloirs to negotiate. Avalanche is a persistent danger. But most of the mileage follows glaciers, vast and small, and the chief danger is that one may disappear forever into a crevasse.

I invited my buddy Stan Tener along, then (and now) a professional ski patroller at Snowmass, a member of their avalanche control team, and a good climber. Stan had never been to Europe, so he didn't know what he was getting into. We hooked up with photographer Del Mulkey. Del, 20 years our senior, was a former University of Montana ski racer who lived in the South of France and knew a lot more about travel in the Alps than we did. He had already skied the Haute Route a couple of times, and had also skied high into the Himalaya.

At Chamonix, the forecast called for clear weather for at least the next two days. Late in the afternoon we dragged our 35-pound packs onto the Argentière tram and rode up 9,000 vertical feet, high into a clear Alpine evening. We skied 2,200 vertical feet of moguls down to the first of our many glaciers, and skinned up for the short ascent to the fortress-like Argentière refuge.

Well before dawn on April 26, we traversed over to the foot of Chardonnet Glacier. There, we put on our new crampons, tied the skis to the packs, and began the steep 2,500-foot climb to the top of the world. Del climbed like a camel, plodding steadily upward without stopping for rest or water. He ate breakfast on the march, consuming a big chunk of the raw bacon the French call lard. At sunrise we reached the 10,900 foot Col de Choidon and gazed across the top of Europe, the early morning light picking out hundreds of snowy peaks arrayed to the horizons.

Over the next four days we climbed and descended steep couloirs, crossed cols, traversed steep icy avalanche-carrying sideslopes -- and followed glaciers. The glaciers made highways in the sky, long gradual langlauf ascents where we could climb at two miles an hour, and easy cruising descents when we could cover five or six miles in 40 minutes, finishing up with a cold beer in a village inn. We stayed each night in a snug refuge built on some aerie at the head of a glacier, and usually overlooking two or three more. As we ate our high-calorie dinners – goulaschsuppe, fried eggs with beans and potatoes, and fruit cocktail in kirsch – I loved to watch the sun set and see the brilliant white of the glacier surface turn deep blue and then black, while the overhanging rock faces shone with golden alpenglow. And I loved to be out on the trail in the early morning dark, to greet the dawn from the ridgeline and watch the light change again, in reverse.

Mont Blanc's icy massif dominates the French side of the Haute Route (Photo/wikipedia.org)

We covered about 60 miles across Swiss glaciers, closely paralleling the Italian border, and had no close calls with crevasses – though Stan often screamed at me to stay out from under avalanche chutes. We met climbers and skiers from Austria, France, Switzerland and Holland. We argued in good spirits about our choice of route and equipment – Del used fat randonée skis, Stan and I were on skinny "norpine" skis with leather telemark boots.

On the fifth day the weather turned nasty. Unable to see the crevasses in the white-out blizzard, we bailed out to the resort town of Arolla, ten miles short of Zermatt.

The adventure changed our lives. Stunned by the immensity of the Alps, Stan went back to Chamonix a year later as an exchange patroller. He worked through the winter at the Grands Montets, and came home speaking fluent locker-room French. He still patrols, and knocks down avalanches, at Snowmass. And I abandoned the dark canyons of New York. I moved to Truckee and hired on to teach skiing at Squaw Valley, where I could find reliable backcountry skiing into July.

Del died in Paris in December of 2003, full of age and wisdom, red wine and lard.

The Swiss government now reports that their average glacier is retreating at about 50 meters per year. Thanks to global warming, this rate is accelerating, and few glaciers, anywhere in the world, are expected to survive this century. Some of the smaller, steeper glaciers – the Arolla glacier contains only about a third of a cubic kilometer of ice – won't outlive me. One annual report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences says that by 2025, alpine glaciers will retreat to about 45 percent of their 1885 extent. Small icefields make up 25 percent of the total glacial volume – and these will all be gone. The Italian resort of Val Senales had to close its summer operation this August because its glacier simply vanished.

I want to ski what's left, with my kid, while we still can.

Copyright 2005 by Seth Masia
2269 Mariposa Ave
Boulder CO 80302
303.594.1657
975 words/FNAS rights

Conservative think tanks shape public opinion about climate change

2006-06-01T15:03:00.000-06:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

In the Winter 2006 edition of CEJ News/Views we ran a story on a new interdisciplinary course at the University of Colorado called Environment, Media and Culture, offered during the 2006 spring semester to students in journalism, media studies and environmental studies. The class explored the social and cultural factors that shape the way environmental issues are covered by the media and understood by the public.

As a final project, students submitted a research paper investigating an angle or case study of how environmental discourse is socially constructed. The students' research brought interesting observations to bear on the relationship between forces of influence in the public sphere and media coverage of environmental issues. An exemplary project was Scott Heiser's study of the role of conservative think tanks on public opinion about climate change.

He began with this dilemma:

"A broad scientific consensus has existed for many years about the existence of a warming planet due to carbon dioxide emissions and that this is such a grave problem that it demands a policy response from government. Despite this consensus and despite this urgency, nothing resembling a comprehensive and appropriate public policy has been implemented. Why?"

His research offers an answer:

"In a significant way, institutions marked by their allegiance to the American conservative political movement have forestalled any realization of an adequate public policy addressing climate change…What is evident after some study is that a well-funded, well-organized 'movement' has been successful in preventing U.S. action on global warming."

A central part of that effort has been the use of rhetorical techniques and issue-framing that has prevented meaningful action on the issue. Heiser's paper identifies the key role of such communication strategies in the concerted political battle over climate change.

The Center for Environmental Journalism recognizes the value of such scholarship in unpacking the complex matrix of influences that affect how environmental stories are told. If journalists can benefit from the light media scholars can shed on their practices, they can pursue and report stories more self-consciously. Likewise, news audiences, attuned to the myriad efforts to shape the content they ultimately get, can be more cautious and critical information consumers.

Toward that end, we are pleased to present Heiser's work. While an academic term paper is outside this newsletter's regular format, it nonetheless makes for a riveting read. For the full text of Heiser's study, see Fear and Loathing on Planet Earth: Partisan War in an Age of Environmental Crisis. Heiser will be a senior media studies major in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at CU next year.

Summertime, and the Livin' Ain't Easy: Environmental Questions from New Orleans

2006-06-01T14:42:00.000-06:00

by Wendy Worrall Redal

As you drive into New Orleans from Louis Armstrong Airport, signs that things aren't back to normal after Hurricane Katrina are subtle at first: a billboard asks "Got Mold?" Then another: "Call 1-800-AID-MOLD." Then another: "Screwed by your insurance adjuster? Call Bogan & Bogan, Attorneys at Law." There's more litter and debris in the expressway median and along the sides of I-10 than seems right, even in this sub-tropical party city that's not known for being particularly clean. And there is a lot of wayward vegetation along the sides of the highway: tall weeds and scruffy grass that doesn't look like it's seen any grooming in, well, the better part of a year. Driving downtown on I-10, it's evident the roof of the Superdome is still under construction, though a giant banner on the side proclaims "Re-opening 9/24/2006. Go Saints!"

But these are only surface indicators of the lingering havoc wrought by Katrina last August. An excursion into the vast tracts of flooded neighborhoods away from the interstate reveals a landscape that still looks like a war zone, and a host of environmental concerns that will raise questions about health and safety in New Orleans for years to come.

I went to New Orleans in May, part of a team of volunteers from Boulder who spent a week cleaning out and gutting houses, just a handful of the thousands of homes that sit largely untouched since Katrina sunk this low-lying city over nine months ago. I heard amazing stories of escape and heartbreak, emotional trauma and dogged determination to rebuild and renew, even as a new hurricane season threatens to hit New Orleans when she's down – way down.

As a human being, I was moved to the core by the scope of the loss around me: more than 200,000 homes destroyed, displaced families, shattered communities, a unique culture now fractured and profoundly vulnerable.

As an observer of environmental journalism, I was struck by the magnitude of the environmental problems New Orleans faces in Katrina's wake, and how little we are hearing about them – or about conditions in New Orleans generally – in the national news media. The environmental stories spawned by Katrina are myriad, but they don't seem to be getting told outside the pages of the Times-Picayune.

I saw the makings of one story during the drive in: the freeway overpasses that thousands of people huddled on last August were humming with traffic, though underneath the concrete spans lay thousands of derelict cars – dusty, filled with dried mud, dented wrecks long since looted for wheels or parts. This is where most of the city's abandoned vehicles have been stowed, for now, anyway. Some of them are gradually being towed to steel salvage yards, where they will be turned into scrap metal to be shipped to Japan. But what about the rest of the cars? The seats and tires and engine parts that can't be used? We're talking tens of thousands, maybe a couple hundred thousand, vehicles. Will they go to landfills, after whatever is salvageable has been recovered? What landfill can hold all those thousands of cars? How would they get there? What landfills have absorbed all the city's detritus so far?

That last question took on even bigger proportions for me after our first day of work. Our task was to empty out a young family's home in Lakeview, one of the hardest-hit areas that was inundated when the 17th Street Canal levee broke.

While the home's brick exterior looked mostly okay, save for the telltale "bathtub line" eight feet up on its side, a glimpse inside the front door revealed the devastation hidden from the sidewalk view. It also revealed the reason we needed to wear N-95 breathing masks, safety goggles and heavy gloves, as well as long-sleeved shirts, long pants and boots: the inside of the house was a chaotic mess of filth, damp, mud and mold, piles of upended furniture, wood flooring buckling, sodden clothing still hanging in the closets, moldering groceries in the kitchen cupboards. Six feet of putrid water had sloshed around in the house for over two weeks, floating a heavy armoire and dressers and cabinets, CDs and stereo and computer components still lodged on the wooden shelves. The air inside the house was close and dank with humidity and the odor of mold, which crawled up the walls in gray and black patches.

Moldy living room debris after 10 feet of floodwater (Photo/Russ Teets)

We hauled out ruined furniture, soggy mattresses, and countless loads of damaged household goods. In a half-day's time the 15 of us had heaped a rather colossal pile of stuff on the sidewalk out front. It looked like a half-block-long stack of junk, haphazardly mixed and tossed debris, ready for FEMA contractors to scrape up and dump. But we had picked it up bit by bit before we carted it out in wheelbarrows and garbage cans, and it was the tangible record of a family's life: their clothes and books and art and music, their food and dishes and make-up and jewelry. Treasures, now trash. What's treasured now is not what is on the sidewalk.

But where will all the trash go? I became obsessed with the question.

In the case of this home, we hadn't even torn out all the moldy sheetrock, which would have filled another half-block with debris. The owners weren't sure what they were going to do with the house, whether they could qualify for insurance in order to rebuild, so there was no point in gutting it if it was going to be bulldozed.

I learned through the Times-Picayune that plans were in place to re-open at least one closed landfill in East New Orleans, a badly flooded, low-lying part of the city that was once home to many poor residents. Apparently, this was one of many post-Katrina situations in which a quick federal override would circumvent normal channels requiring the environmental impact assessments typically mandated by such a move.

When I considered the kind of debris we had amassed at just four houses by the end of that week, there was no doubt that some of what we tossed out contained toxic substances. There were computer monitors filled with lead, old roof shingles that might have contained asbestos, ragged sheets of linoleum backed with a foul-smelling glue, and bottles of household cleaning agents – not to mention an array of electrical appliances. And while FEMA guidelines indicated that hazardous materials should be separated out, who knew how meticulous most residents, or clean-up crews, were? Surely no FEMA contractor was going to sift through the giant heaps of moldy junk sitting on the sidewalk to be sure any toxic materials hadn't been slipped in.

The contents of a Lakeview home, ready for disposal (Photo/Russ Teets)

If all this stuff was headed to a standard landfill, especially one re-opened in a hurry to help absorb the millions of tons of debris, what about monitoring the soil where these toxins might leach? What about the Vietnamese community that is re-establishing itself in New Orleans East not far from the landfill in question? What about the water table?

Water was another subject that colonized my thoughts as we worked. You still couldn't drink it in the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest-hit part of the city next to the Industrial Canal levee breach whose (former) residents were only just permitted to return to their homes while I was there. Nearly nine months after the hurricane and no potable water in this largely poor neighborhood – assuming you could find a working tap.

A home in the Lower Ninth Ward, eight months after Hurricane Katrina (Photo/Russ Teets)

It was one thing to imagine the miles of empty houses we saw submerged in muddy, storm-churned sea water. It was another – and more accurate – to picture what else the floodwater held. My mind began to imagine the dead bodies floating in the vile water, the oil and diesel and gasoline and Freon and chemicals, the medical biohazard material, the contents of grocery store shelves, the rancid meat… What substances had permeated the soil beneath the grass on which we sat during our lunch break? What about my friend's little vegetable garden outside her home near City Park? Her elevated house escaped flooding, but two feet of that water lay around it for nearly three weeks. Had she no qualms about eating those tomatoes?

Cleaning up polluted soil is one of the tasks any returning homeowner must face. And it can be daunting. First, one has to determine what contaminants are in the soil. Studies have shown that sediment deposited by the floodwaters contains unsafe levels of arsenic, diesel fuel and other petrochemicals, heavy metals, phthalates (chemical used to soften plastics), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), fertilizers and pesticides. Many of these substances are known carcinogens, and many are linked to increased frequency of miscarriages, birth defects, or nervous system effects.

Any flooded area is likely to have dangerous levels of toxic substances, many of which were already at levels that far exceeded what is deemed acceptable by the EPA, since Lousiana's "acceptable" standards are far more lax. The problem is compounded by the extensive oil and chemical industry in and around New Orleans. Floodwaters and hurricane winds caused spillage in many storage facilities, including the release of 1.05 million gallons of crude oil from the Murphy Oil refinery, a spill larger than that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.

The most efficient way to clean up contaminated soil is to remove it, but this requires hiring a contractor to take away a layer of ground, a costly proposition. Common Ground, a grassroots organization founded just days after Katrina hit, has issued guidelines for residents to do their own soil-testing and clean-up far more cheaply.

Residents can take their own samples and have them analyzed using a simple test kit through the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center. Or they can use existing data collected at sites all over New Orleans by various groups including the EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To clean up less expensively, Common Ground recommends using plants, or "phytoremediation," to remove toxins from the soil. Since certain plants absorb certain toxins, drawing them from the soil into their roots, shoots and leaves, one must first learn what's in the soil in order to know what plants to introduce. Sunflowers, for instance, are "hyper-accumulators" of lead, while mustard greens remove both lead and arsenic. Spinach and carrots will remove chromium, copper, manganese and iron, though one would never want to eat any vegetables used to suck heavy metals out of the ground. In fact, once the toxin-eating plants are full-grown, they must be thrown out or treated as toxic waste.

Common Ground also gives details on a "helpful bacteria"-based mold abatement method, which the group claims is more effective in preventing further mold growth than bleach, which is more commonly used. And that raises another question about the long-term environmental health of New Orleans residents: while the presence of mold can be poisonous in a home, what are the long-term effects of standard mold mitigation methods? Are the chemical sealants rendering gutted house frames "safe" really all that safe themselves? How likely is it, given the magnitude of the flooding, that mold spores will be floating in the air in New Orleans for months, years, to come?

The environmental health questions go on: "Can I eat seafood from Lake Pontchartrain?" "Is the concrete safe for my kids to play on?" "Is the mud and dust safe when it is dry?" Pamphlets from Common Ground include answers to these questions and others. And while such inquiries may seem like localized concerns for returning residents of New Orleans, the overall environmental catastrophe that Katrina spawned remains. Above all, it may be prove to be an environmental justice story that no ethical American should ignore, least of all journalists.

Cell Phone Recycler Talks Trash

2006-06-01T14:37:00.000-06:00

By Felicia Russell

Tall and slim, wearing a dark, double-breasted suit, Peter Schindler casually fingered his black Motorola Moto Razr V3 cell phone—which PCMag.com calls "the ultimate see-and-be-seen phone for style mavens who don't care about price."

"For me, I'm very simplistic about phones; I'd like not to own one," said Schindler, 31.

Not one to pass on an opportunity, however, Schindler saw a chance to capitalize on the popularity and perceived disposability of cell phones, and at the same time, do something positive for the environment and community.

CEO and founder of The Wireless Alliance Peter Schindler (Photo/TWA)

Four years ago, Schindler founded The Wireless Alliance (TWA), which has recently partnered with the University of Colorado at Boulder to collect used cell phones. The phones will be sold for parts or refurbishing, and a portion of the money earned will be donated to charities and student groups.

Although he employs just three other men, Schindler says he has big dreams for the future. "I would like to have our 'recycle your wireless phone' logo on the back of every phone with our 1-866 number on there," Schindler says.

The Wireless Alliance's "Recycle your wireless phone" logo (Image/TWA)

He has yet to splash his logo across the back of cell phones everywhere, but it is popping up on the CU campus.

The campus cell phone recycling effort, which is being led by the university's recycling director, Jack DeBell, began in late February with a 3-foot-tall plastic box. This box, bearing TWA's logo, has been placed in the University Memorial Center to encourage students to collect their old phones and donate them to the charity or student group of the month.

Profits from the first round of recycled cell phones will go to the Emergency Family Assistance Association, a Boulder-based group that provides emergency assistance for people struggling to pay housing, utilities and other necessary expenses. DeBell says he hopes that the association's high profile will stimulate interest among other non-profits in the community.

While DeBell says he doesn't really know Schindler, he is optimistic about the program.

"The one time that I visited Peter's Boulder location, I was impressed with the flurry of activity. It reminded me of our offices here. There was a sense of urgency, of excitement, and of potential," DeBell said.

Indeed, Schindler seems to be a font of energy and enthusiasm.

"I first went door to door literally asking my neighbors for their old phones. On my old street—Kohler Drive—I got about 1.8 phones per household. If you multiply this by the number of households using wireless phones, you get between 700 million to 1 billion out-of-use handsets in the United States alone," he said.

Schindler officially started TWA in January 2002. His first client was Midwest Wireless, a cell phone provider that serves people in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.

TWA placed drop boxes in Midwest Wireless stores where customers could recycle their old phones.

"We're quite pleased with his performance and use him as our sole source of liquidation and recycling," said Tim Johnson, the Product Distribution Supervisor for Midwest Wireless.

Although he couldn't put a number on it, Johnson estimated that the recycling program has raised "hundreds of thousands of dollars," which the company then donates to non-profits like United Way and the American Cancer Society.

Johnson said that TWA is an extension of Schindler's personal values, and that it "stands for what he stands for."

"Peter is, among other things, extremely helpful. He is the type of person who will go out of his way to make things happen for you," says Johnson. "He is a generous person with his time and resources."

TWA has also developed a postage-paid mail-back program to encourage people to recycle cell phones they've stashed in drawers and closets. Midwest Wireless and KALW radio in Schindler's hometown of San Francisco are both using the mailing program.

Schindler says he comes from a long line of inventors including his mother, Anita, who developed Brainwash, which he says is the first café-laundromat in San Francisco, and his father, Robert, who retired from the University of California at San Francisco after a career spent advancing cochlear implant technology, which can help some deaf people hear.

Schindler recalls having always had a passion for art and music. He studied art history as a student at CU. After graduating in 1996, Schindler spent a brief time in his home state of California before returning to Colorado to work in the music industry. He worked for a Boulder company that managed the Greyboy Allstars, a band out of San Diego whose music can be heard in the film Zero Effect.

"Then after a while the music industry didn't pay for what it required. So, I got into cell phones. Once I realized the value of used phones and the good I could do by collecting them for donation—environmental reasons, etcetera—I went with that," Schindler said.

According to Schindler, his "stab at the American Dream" has been successful. Although he refused to say what his profits were in 2005, Schindler says that the money generated from selling the collected cell phones to be melted down or refurbished totaled as much as $4.2 million one year. The average inflow, he says, is about $3 million per year.

TWA pays part of that money back to its partners, who can earn 5 cents to more than $75 a phone, but tend to average $2 per phone, says Schindler. He declined to say what percentage of TWA's income is paid back to charities, but says his clients are happy.

"Generally, we like to give back 20 percent of the collection total at the end as a bonus. It is a strategy that has separated me from my competitors when dealing with non-profits," Schindler said. "They love it."

While he wouldn't say if TWA is out of the red and making a profit, records from his 2005 divorce suggest that the company is still in debt. Both he and his ex-wife were responsible for paying up to $100,000 towards the company's debt.

Nestled beside the Avery Brewery in a small warehouse in East Boulder, operating with only four sets of hands, TWA is earning enough to pay Schindler what he calls a "modest" income. According to his divorce records, that totaled $100,776 in 2005.

If trends in the wireless industry continue as they have in recent years, TWA faces a bright financial future.

Over the last 20 years, the number of wireless subscribers in the United States has risen from about 203,600 people to nearly 195 million people, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.

Cell phones have become a valuable tool in American society. However, wireless companies in the United States commonly mark down new cell phones and include the cost in their wireless plan, which makes them appear cheaper than they really are. This also makes them seem more disposable in the eyes of consumers.

In fact, most phones are only used for 18 months before being replaced with newer models, according to a study by Inform Inc., called "Waste in the Wireless World." The high turnover of phones in the United States is generating an estimated 130 million cell phones or 65,000 tons of waste per year.

Many of these phones wind up in landfills where they can become an environmental hazard. Like other electronic equipment, or e-waste, cell phones contain a number of heavy metals that could leach out and contaminate ground water.

A 2004 EPA-sponsored study found that nearly three-quarters of the 38 cell phones tested released enough lead to be considered toxic waste by the government when exposed to landfill-like conditions. Timothy G. Townsend, an associate professor in environmental engineering at the University of Florida, led the study.

"They (the public) should not be concerned about any grave threat to the environment by disposal of (cell phones) in modern lined landfills," Townsend wrote in an e-mail. "But, it is certainly understandable to in general be concerned where wastes that contain toxic chemicals are disposed and whether we should be finding alternatives to toxic chemicals in our products and whether we should do more to recycle them."

At TWA, the two men who do the grunt work of recycling have the task of disassembling cell phones. They check to see that the phone works, erase the memory, take out the batteries, and grind up the sim card, which contains personal information like calendars and friends' phone numbers.

Phones that can be resold are carefully catalogued and sorted into storage bins. Those phones that have become obsolete are tossed into a cavernous box containing thousands of other rejected phones.

Schindler's recycling box of 1990s behemoths will be sent to Reldan Metals Inc., where the phones will be shredded and processed to collect metals like gold, platinum, lead, silver and palladium.

According to Schindler, one ton of ancient cell phones might yield $4,000 to $5,000 in precious metals including gold, platinum, silver and palladium, as well as copper and lead. The metals extracted from cell phones might be used to make CDs, underwire bras, drills, tire irons, sandals, remote control cars, even singing bass trophies, says Schindler.

He estimates that 40 percent of the more than 20,000 phones that TWA collected in February went straight to the recycle box. The newer models in Schindler's warehouse are sold each month to companies that refurbish the phones and resell them to customers using a prepaid wireless service.

Schindler doesn't see the market slowing any time in the near future.

"I hope that I can continue this business of recycling and keep it changing like a chameleon with the technology," Schindler said. "I hope to educate as many people as possible about the right thing to do with their phones."

Forest Service plan would sell prime recreational land near Boulder

2006-06-01T14:28:00.000-06:00

By Karen Romer

Looking west from Wendy Redal's backyard, the snow-covered slopes of Eldora Ski Area come into view. The pine and fir covered face of Mount Pisgah lies to the southwest and the brown slopes of Sugarloaf Mountain to the north.

The beautiful, unobstructed views from her home in the Sugar Loaf community are what first attracted Redal and her husband to this area. But the views may not be unobstructed for long under a federal plan to sell public land.

"You just don't expect that the public land around you might be sold," Redal said.

Hundreds of acres of public land could be sold near Sugarloaf Mountain (Photo/Wendy Worrall Redal)

Redal's home sits on a long, skinny strip of land sandwiched between two parcels of adjacent Roosevelt National Forest. If the Bush administration's proposal to sell 300,000 acres of U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service land is passed, about 720 acres in the Sugar Loaf community may be on the chopping block, including the open space next to Redal's home.

Each of the Forest Service's nine regional offices were notified by the Washington D.C. office to select parcels of land that are isolated, difficult and expensive to manage, said John Bustos Jr., public affairs officer for the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Regional Office.

Bustos cited another item on the list of criteria – parcels that are surrounded by private land. Public and private lands are often intermixed in national forests, which makes them more difficult to manage and gives rise to access issues, Bustos said. This criterion fits the Sugar Loaf community's layout.

Residents, recreational groups, land planning organizations and Boulder County Commissioners strongly oppose the Forest Service's proposal. At question is why certain lands in Boulder County, which have obvious recreational and scenic value and are important wildlife and access areas, have been singled out and what will happen to these lands if the proposal goes through.

The Bush administration hopes to raise $800 million by selling isolated parcels of national forest land, which will be used to fund rural schools and county road projects nationwide. Set to expire Sept. 30, 2006, President Bush's proposed 2007 budget would extend the Secure Rural and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 for another five years.

The Rural Schools Act offsets some of the financial burdens that rural counties face due to decreased federal timber sales. Historically these counties received a cut of timber sale profits and have come to rely on federal subsidies to fund rural school and road projects.

In Colorado, more than 23,000 acres in 11 national forests are being considered. Of the 137,000 acres in Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests in Boulder County, 2,300 acres or 1.7 percent would be sold, according to Mike Johnson, lands and mineral specialist with the Boulder Ranger District.

About 600 residents live in the Sugar Loaf community, which is located in the foothills several miles west of Boulder and covers 19 square miles of forested land that is sprinkled with homes.

"There are a couple of mountain subdivisions, but most people in this area live on several acres of land," Redal said.

Land in the Sugar Loaf community is more fragmented than any other area managed by the Boulder Ranger District, according to the Forest Service's land and resource management website.

"So what they're saying, that it is really fragments of public land, is true," said Redal, noting that this may be one reason why so many acres in the Sugar Loaf area have been singled out.

Redal and her husband own three acres, a long, thin stretch of land about 150 feet wide that is a former mining claim. Many of her neighbors' homes are similarly situated.

The Redal family's home sits amid fragmented parcels of public and private land (Photo/Wendy Worrall Redal)

"It's an old land-use layout in terms of the mixture of private and public lands," Redal said.

"It's true that there's a focus on former mining claims or strips," said Pat Shanks, chairman of PLAN-Boulder County, a nonprofit political action group in Boulder. Perhaps these strips have a little less value to the Forest Service in terms of pristine open space, Shanks said.

Thousands of former mining claims dot the mountains west of Boulder. Under the Mining Act of 1872, prospectors who discovered gold and other valuable surface minerals could stake claims for these deposits and buy the land for $2.50 or $5.00 an acre. Many small mining towns, including Ward, Magnolia and Sugar Loaf, sprung up in Colorado as a result. Many of these former mining claims are now privately owned.

Bob Ruston, a long-time resident of the Sugar Loaf community, calls these former mining claims "picnic spots." These strips of land, which range in shape from rectangular to long, skinny stretches, and are a good place to get out of your car, spread a blanket and have a picnic on a beautiful summer day, Ruston said.

In 1968 Ruston bought three acres from a friend and built his first home here. Several years after moving to the Sugar Loaf area Ruston discovered Dream Canyon.

"It just knocked my socks off," said Ruston, recalling seeing Dream Canyon for the first time. "It's so vast and crennelated."

Dream Canyon, a popular rock-climbing area above Boulder Falls, is slated to be sold by the Forest Service (Photo/Rockclimbing.com)

Dream Canyon is one of the parcels currently proposed for sale by the Forest Service.

The Dream Canyon trailhead is a 5-minute walk from Redal's home and a short distance from Ruston's place. Ruston owns three plots of land, two of which lie several hundred feet uphill from North Boulder Creek, which winds through the steep canyon walls of Dream Canyon before cascading down Boulder Falls where it meets Middle Boulder Creek.

Tucked just off Boulder Canyon, Dream Canyon has numerous bolted routes and steep granite buttresses that make it a popular climbing area. Ruston has talked to climbers ranging from adventurous youths to spry retirees who come to Dream Canyon from as far away as Europe and Asia.
"Often on the 4th of July there are about 200 people (at Dream Canyon), Ruston said.

The Access Fund, a Boulder-based organization committed to maintaining and preserving public rock climbing sites, has identified Dream Canyon and Bell Buttress, a towering wall located just beyond Boulder Falls, on Forest Service maps. In their letter to the Forest Service, the Access Fund requested that any parcels used for climbing, biking, hiking and other recreational purposes be taken off the list. The organization cited the Forest Service's proposal as a short-term fix that would take thousands of acres of recreational lands and natural areas out of the public's hands.

Like Dream Canyon, several of the identified parcels are located within 'high-use recreation areas,' according to the Forest Service's website. These include Eldora Ski Area and Boulder Creek, Caribou and Sugar Loaf geographic areas.

Two 240-acre parcels in the Sugar Loaf community are located in the Boulder Falls vicinity, which is designated as a critical wildlife corridor and an environmental conservation area under Boulder County's Comprehensive Plan.

Just one and one-half miles past Boulder Falls along the cliffs of Boulder Canyon is golden eagle territory. Golden eagles nest in the upper cliffs of several popular rock climbing areas, including Eagle Rock, Security Risk and Blob Rock.

Other areas in Boulder County are also targeted. Four parcels are located in the Magnolia Road area south of Boulder Creek, a popular mountain biking trail and an important migration corridor for elk that winter in the area. Another parcel is located in Eldora near one of the entrances to the Indian Peaks Wilderness. And several parcels abut land crossed by the Peak-to-Peak Highway and Caribou Ranch Open Space.

Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., introduced a bill in May 2005, H.R. 2110, to protect the 'open space characteristics' of lands in and adjacent to Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests along Colorado's Front Range. The bill is now undergoing hearings and testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In the bill Rep. Udall outlines several key reasons why land along Colorado's Front Range needs to be protected. First, lands in and adjacent to Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests provide important wildlife habitat and numerous recreational opportunities. In addition, these open spaces are vital to Colorado's communities, not only for their scenic beauty, but also for their economic impact. As the population continues to grow along the Front Range and more land is lost to development, open space in Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests will be increasingly used for recreational purposes.

Determining which parcels are on the Forest Service's proposed list is challenging.

"They (Boulder Ranger District) weren't being uncooperative, but they weren't going out of their way to tell us where those parcels were," Shanks said.

So PLAN-Boulder County made their own maps based on data they downloaded from the Forest Service's website. These maps, which are posted on PLAN-Boulder County's website, list the location, size and significance of the public lands in Boulder County.

"In terms of actual boundaries, it's been hard to figure out," said Redal, explaining that she had trouble using the mapping program on the Forest Service's website and difficulty locating the parcels within the Sugar Loaf community.

The act of selling public lands to fund a federal program has been sharply criticized by citizens in Boulder County and politicians at local, state and national levels.

Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., both oppose the Bush administration's plan to sell public lands to fund a federal program.

"I continue to be very concerned about the Administration's proposal to sell off pieces of America's permanent heritage of public lands as part of a short-term budget issue," said Sen. Salazar in a press release issued Mar. 29, 2006.

Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., coauthors of the Secure Rural and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, introduced legislation to reinstate the program at its current funding level without resorting to land sales.

Boulder County Commissioners Ben Pearlman, Tom Mayer and Will Toor cited the proposal as being fiscally irresponsible in their letter to Dale Bosworth, forest service chief. 'The federal government has an obligation to live within its means, not sell off a permanent public asset to pay current operating costs of government.'

There is also widespread disapproval among citizens, politicians and local organizations about the Forest Service's process for selecting which public lands would be sold.

The regional offices received quick directions and very little input about how to go about the process, said Jim Maxwell, media relations officer for the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Regional Office.

"Our lands people at the regional office sat down with maps and determined where isolated and scattered parcels are located in relation to forest service lands," Maxwell said. "Our people were only given a few days to do that."

Maxwell agrees that there's been a lot of controversy over the proposed bill.

"It's facing a very uncertain future," he said.

Agricultural Undersecretary Rey contends that the Rural Schools Act was never meant to be permanent. Legislation was passed to help rural counties transition from relying on federal timber sales to finding other economic sources to generate revenues. Rey estimates that the Forest Service will only have to sell about 175,000 acres out of the proposed 300,000 acres to meet its goal of $800 million.

The first cut of national forest lands proposed for sale was included in the President's Feb. 2006 budget proposal and published in the Federal Registry on Feb. 25, 2006. A public comment period, originally set from Feb. 28 to Mar. 30, was recently extended until May 1 to give the public an additional month to comment on the controversial proposal.

"So far we have received around 4,000 comments," said Undersecretary Rey during a telenews conference with the press on Mar. 29, 2006.

Though Rey didn't know the exact breakdown of the letters, he estimated that at least three-fourths of the letters are against the proposal.

"Lots of people we're hoping will comment on specific parcels," said Maxwell so the Forest Service can revisit the list and make necessary changes.

After the comment period ends, the Forest Service will take the comments they receive into consideration while forming their final list. If Congress approves the proposal, they will get very specific about how many parcels will be sold and the method in which they will be sold, Maxwell explained.

The Boulder Ranger District will not speculate on how the Forest Service would implement the proposal until it is given that authority by Congress. Based on the proposal submitted to Congress, the Forest Service would complete an environmental analysis, Johnson said. An environmental analysis is used to learn about important issues and concerns, find alternatives for completing the project and determine the environmental impacts of those alternatives.

It's uncertain exactly how the land would be sold, though the Forest Service says that the parcels would be sold at fair market value as required by law. Fair market value is determined through an appraisal process based on the value of similar properties.

Historically the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have conveyed lands that are difficult or uneconomical to manage through land exchanges rather than sales, according to the Colorado Bureau of Land Management's website.

Under the Bush administration's proposal, this policy would change. Not only would it be more difficult for Boulder County to acquire open space through land swaps, selling national forest lands would result in fragmented ownership patterns – something Boulder Parks and Open Space has worked for years to correct.

Based on a Resource Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement completed in 1986, Boulder County Commissioners decided it was in the county's best interest to acquire all lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. As Boulder County's population continues to grow and push outwards toward the foothills, the county must deal with increased residential development, right-of-way issues and pending Recreation and Public Purposes Act applications.

The Recreation and Public Purposes Act, administered by the Bureau of Land Management, authorizes state and local governments to purchase land at low costs for recreational and public purposes. Under the act, government entities can purchase up to 640 acres per year for recreational uses, such as parks and campgrounds, and another 640 acres for public purposes, such as municipal facilities and schools.

The Bureau of Land Management has agreed to several land exchanges with Boulder County, which involves small tracts of land, namely old mining claims, being exchanged for lands that benefit the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Land exchanges and private conservation easements have created more cohesive patterns of ownership and improved Boulder County's ability to effectively manage its open space program.

During the first exchange, which took place in March 2003, Boulder County acquired 705 acres of public land and the federal government received two parcels, a 165-acre parcel in Boulder County and a 484-acre parcel in Teller County.

In the Forest Service's Feb. 28, 2006 posting on the Federal Register, the Forest Service admits that it hasn't surveyed many of the selected parcels for 'natural or cultural resources specific to this proposal.' This raises the question of who would be responsible for surveying and assessing the land if it's sold.

Ruston estimates it would cost around $100,000 to $200,000 just to survey the land around his place. The Forest Service could send out their own surveying team to each identified parcel, but that process could take years, Ruston said. Instead Ruston surmises the Forest Service will probably leave the surveying process up to the prospective property owner.

"If they do a slipshod job and just draw lines on the map, they'll leave it up to the person who buys it," Ruston said.

This could be an expensive task. While Boulder County Commissioners paid for the surveying and appraisal costs under its land exchange agreement with the Bureau of Land Management, it would be far too expensive for the county to purchase isolated parcels of Forest Service lands at fair market value, especially if appraisal costs are heaped on.

The Boulder County Commissioners stated in their letter to Forest Service Chief Bosworth that working with the federal government to preserve open space through land swaps is an inefficient process. 'The costs of closing on federal land, including survey and appraisal costs, will significantly reduce any return to the Federal treasury,' the Boulder County Commissioners stated in their letter.

Since the passage of the Rural Schools Act in 1999, $1.9 billion of federal funds have been allocated to eligible counties. By 2013, the only guaranteed payments that these counties would receive would be 25 percent of timber sales from forest revenues. The payments will be capped, gradually adjusted downwards over the next five years and phased out by 2013, according to information on the Forest Service's website.

During 2000 to 2006 allocated funds were distributed to counties where Forest Service lands are located. If the Rural Schools Act is extended, these payments would instead go to counties that have been most affected by reduced timber sales.

Though Forest Service lands in Colorado would account for 7.2 percent of the proposed 300,000 acres, only 1.67 percent of the allocated funds would reach the state. And Boulder County wouldn't receive any of these funds.

If the public land next to Redal's home were sold, the property value of her home would decrease. But Redal isn't bothered so much about this aspect. Her main concern is that she'd lose the open space surrounding her home and the beautiful views she loves.

"So this is what President Bush wants to sell – negligible pieces of land with no scenic value," said Redal, with irony in her voice while gazing upward at the steep, creviced walls of Dream Canyon.

Law Seminar to Colorado Plateau Leaves Fellows Spellbound

2006-06-01T14:13:00.000-06:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

On a cool March night atop Black Mesa, a fire crackled against the dark sky. To a circle of rapt listeners, Vernon Masayesva recounted Hopi legends while his guests ate the thin, parchment-like bread traditionally served to visitors, made from blue corn and soot. Every so often his cousin Jerry would stir the fire, sending sparks swirling up around Vernon's head, rising toward the stars above.

The mesa, the guests learned, is the center of the earth for the Hopi people who have lived there for hundreds of years. Beneath it lies a breathing aquifer, drawing in rain and snow and exhaling it in the form of springs. The springs are breathing holes, passageways from the mesa's surface to Paatuuwaqatsi, the sacred water world below.

Out here on the Hopi Reservation, high atop the Colorado Plateau in northern Arizona, Don Hopey was a long way from his Pittsburgh home, where he is the environment reporter for the Post-Gazette. Here, he was a student, and Masayesva was his teacher for the evening.

Don Hopey in Jackass Canyon (Photo/Greg Stahl)

As president of the Black Mesa Trust, Masayesva heads an organization whose mission is to "safeguard, preserve and honor the land and water of Black Mesa." The trust was formed in 1999 by the Hopi people in response to the damage that extensive water withdrawals by the Peabody Coal Company have caused to the Navajo Aquifer beneath Hopi and Navajo lands on the mesa. For nearly 30 years Peabody had been pumping 3.3 million gallons of water a day for its coal slurry operation, causing wells and washes to run dry and ancient springs to vanish, threatening the life and culture of the mesa's inhabitants.

While the Black Mesa Trust relies also on Western science and technology to educate people about environmental impacts, traditional Hopi stories are part of the truth the Trust seeks to impart. For Hopey and the others gathered round the fire, there was power in such poetry.

"It was a magical experience," Hopey said, recalling that night.

As a Ted Scripps Fellow, Hopey visited Black Mesa as part of an 8-day trip around the Colorado Plateau that he and two other fellows participated in during spring break at the University of Colorado. The field tour was a class unlike any other: officially titled Seminar in Advanced Natural Resource Law, the course covered some 2,000 miles of desert, canyon, mountain and mesa while educating students about a range of issues including water, energy, grazing, mining and tribal concerns.

"It was the absolute highlight of the fellowship," said Bebe Crouse, previously National Public Radio's environment editor in Washington, D.C., a position that included a focus on the West.

"No question," Hopey agreed.

Bebe Crouse captures the sounds of the high desert (Photo/Greg Stahl)

Greg Stahl, on leave from the Idaho Mountain Express in Sun Valley where he is the public land and environment reporter, rounded out the Scripps Fellows contingent. The fellows joined 13 CU law students and Professor Charles Wilkinson for the grand high-country loop that took them to Durango, Mexican Hat, Lake Powell, Cedar Mesa, Window Rock, the Grand Canyon, Paria Plateau and Jackass Canyon before returning to Boulder.

Greg Stahl surveys the Colorado Plateau

Wilkinson, who is a Distinguished Professor of Law at CU and an expert on natural resource and public lands issues, has been leading the field seminar for ____ years.

Wilkinson himself is nearly as charismatic a draw as the Plateau's enticing landscapes, according to his students. Typically found in jeans and cowboy boots, admired for his integrity and beloved for his sharp good humor, Wilkinson is the antithesis of the uptight lawyer. His lectures are more captivating narrative than legalese, and the wide-open spaces of the Plateau are a suitably appropriate setting for his teaching.

"Charles Wilkinson's field classes are legendary," said Crouse, who had heard of the professor before arriving at CU to begin her fellowship.

Like Crouse, Hopey was impressed with past fellows' recommendations of his introductory course on natural resources law. After taking that class with her and Stahl during the fall semester, he jumped at the chance to visit the Plateau with Wilkinson.

"He's someone who has a reputation and knowledge of this area that's unparalleled," Hopey said. "Every day on this field tour he gave us these gifts of expertise – from meetings with tribal leaders to out-of-the-way places like Jackass Canyon where tourists never go…His enthusiasm for the subject is infectious."

"He's so completely passionate about this place," said Crouse.

For Stahl, study in the field brought issues alive in a way that doesn't happen in the confines of a classroom.

"There's nothing like cementing textbook reading by seeing what's happening on the ground, " said Stahl. "I can't overstate how much the trip helped me more fully understand the issues we discussed in the seminar."

"It makes everything more real," Crouse agreed, who was able to see places she had assigned stories on yet had never been to, such as Black Mesa and the Navajo Reservation.

Stahl found the camaraderie with the other students equally absorbing. "The classroom atmosphere is sometimes stifling, and it was really nice to get to know people on a more personal level. And that, of course, leads to a freer exchange of ideas."

Given the logistics of the trip, it was inevitable the students would get to know one another well. The group of 17 drove together from Boulder in Wilkinson's SUV, a pick-up truck and several Subarus, staying en route at motels where they sometimes had to share beds, given tight space and a tight budget.

While some of the time they were inside listening to PowerPoint presentations by officials, most of the learning took place outdoors amid the remarkable geological and cultural features of the Plateau.

A moving experience for Crouse was exploring Moon House on Utah's remote Cedar Mesa. The group walked in to the ancient Puebloan ruin with archaeologists and a BLM administrator, and it was "as if we'd discovered it," she said.

"It was a spectacularly beautiful place, even without the ruins," said Crouse, describing the water that had spilled down the face of the slick rock and frozen, leaving icy waterfalls on the stone walls. "It was a really magical, spiritual feeling in there."

The fellows also reveled in hikes up Utah's Dirty Devil River and into Jackass Canyon, which were no small adventures.

The group's guide from the Glen Canyon Institute said, "We're gonna take this little hike – your feet might get a little wet," Crouse said, describing the Dirty Devil trip. They ended up forging their way upstream, pushing against the current, the water above their knees. The reward was an excursion into a maze of swirling slickrock and crenellated canyon walls.

Jackass Canyon was equally dramatic.

Hopey recounted the descent, accompanied by a learned naturalist, into the narrow slot canyon that plummets to the Colorado River on the floor of the Grand Canyon below.

"We had to negotiate these huge rocks that had tumbled down between the canyon walls, which were 150 to 200 feet high."

Stahl reflected that "while the educational parts of the trip were enlightening," it was during such recreational outings that the group really bonded, tossing ideas around in a casual atmosphere while sharing the majesty of the Plateau's natural marvels.

All three fellows concurred that the field tour provided experiences that will transform them as journalists.

Stahl, who is returning to Idaho, comes away with deeper insight into the resource and tribal issues that comprise a fair portion of his beat. There are implications from the Southern Ute water rights issues he studied on the trip, including the massive Animas La Plata dam project, that are significant for his coverage of the Nez Perce and Shoshone-Bannock reservations.

Crouse, too, said she understands "a lot more of the complexities of tribal issues" as a result of her exposure to Wilkinson's classes and the in-person meetings with tribal leaders during the tour.

Especially with regard to water and energy issues, "the tribes are players now," said Hopey. "The energy resources they have on the reservations has given them the power to be players," and that adds a whole new layer in need of understanding, the fellows have come to recognize.

"It's hard to get really good, deep coverage" of the tribes, said Crouse, who appreciates the challenges created by the "cultural divide." "It's a very delicate, difficult little dance," she said, acknowledging she is now more empathetic to reporters who are trying to cover tribal issues.

She also found the field tour helpful context for her fellowship project, a study of the future of ranching in the West. While her focus has been Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington, she said it was illuminating to "go down and look at the places where they are trying to graze cattle" in the Southwest, where water is actually piped in to sustain the herds.

For Hopey, the exposure to mining issues was most relevant. In Pittsburgh, he is far removed from many Western concerns such as grazing permits and arcane water law, but coal mining in particular is a big story in western Pennsylvania.

"My mining stuff is going to be very much impacted" by the fellowship, Hopey said. He is currently working on a coal mining story that takes off from Vernon's campfire oration, discussing the recent shutdown of the Mojave generating plant and resulting closure of Peabody's Black Mesa Mine.

And there were other unexpected connections on the Colorado Plateau with Hopey's life back in Pittsburgh. As the students were entering the Navajo Council Chambers for a presentation, he spotted a guy with two long braids who happened to be wearing a Steelers tie. Instant bond. Hopey discovered that the fellow fan, a Navajo named Frank Seanez, grew up in Pittsburgh and was now an attorney for the Navajo Nation, representing the tribe from its headquarters in Window Rock.

On the Colorado Plateau, modernity is interwoven with timelessness. Science complements myth in a quest to preserve natural resources and ancient ways of life. Policy both protects, and potentially threatens, vulnerable landscapes. These and other lessons the Fellows learned in their sojourn through the pink sandstone and cobalt skies of this vast high desert. While the land may have appeared parched and tormented, beneath their feet streams breathed, and springs bubbled sacred secrets to the surface.

CU scientist says journalists doing better job covering climate change

2006-06-01T13:32:00.000-06:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

In the Spring 2006 issue of SEJournal, published by the Society of Environmental Journalists, Paul Thacker interviews New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin to find out how he thinks the media has covered climate change and what advice for future stories he has to offer. In a similar vein, CEJ News/Views posed those questions to University of Colorado climate scientist Jim White. Here's our story:

One of the great credos of journalism is to seek balance in a story, to cover "both sides." But reporters' dogged tendency to do so on the issue of a human role in global warming has had a detrimental impact on the public's understanding of the subject, say many scientists who criticize media coverage of climate change.

They claim that in this case, giving equal weight to the opposition – the few remaining skeptics with questionable credibility – skews the accuracy of the story by ignoring the broad scientific consensus around a human link.

Fortunately, however, news coverage is improving, said Jim White, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the role of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, and the causes of abrupt climate change. His research has taken him on many trips to Antarctica and Greenland where he collects ice cores that show climate evolution over time. By melting the samples, scientists are able to analyze the atmospheric gas composition that can cause climate to shift.

CU Professor Jim White in his Boulder office (Photo/ Wendy Worrall Redal)

White, who directed CU's Environmental Studies Program until 2005, regards the role of journalism as crucial in helping to foster effective national policy about climate change. He has been actively involved on the CU campus in furthering dialogue between scientists and journalists aimed at creating better public understanding of the issue.

In just the last year White said he has noticed a significant shift in media coverage of the subject.

"The reporting is better because I don't see the 'other side' anymore."

Making an analogy with another topic once vehemently contested in the media, White said, "We've reached the 'cigarettes cause cancer' point; we don't call the tobacco companies for quotes anymore."

White also identified a second major shift that is getting media attention.

"There have been real cracks in the walls of the climate naysaying community" as skeptics are being converted by mounting evidence in the past five years, White said. Trying to further a defense against global warming is becoming an increasingly lonely mission, and journalists are recognizing that.

"As a scientist, it's laughable," said White. "How can you defend against reality?"

One reality that has captured journalists' attention is sea-level rise. White said he has seen a notable increase in coverage of the subject in the past six months, especially with regard to Antarctica's melting ice sheets.

"It's finally one of those things the press is covering and people are beginning to recognize it's a big problem."

The last time the Earth was as warm as predictions indicate it will be 50 years from now was 140,000 years ago, said White. At that time, the sea level was three meters higher than it is now, putting Baton Rouge on the coast and making Orlando a port city.

White also said Hurricane Katrina has been a major influence on the press's new focus. While it's impossible to say conclusively that global warming is to blame for Katrina's strength, White said, the storm was nonetheless a huge catalyst for a growing press interest in warming and rising seas and their effects.

"I've come to appreciate the power of these seminal events," White said. "These are galvanizing events that focus people's attention on the problems."

He also recognizes that the public is better able to grasp something concrete than the uncertainty inherent in the science around climate change. Especially with regard to predicting what may lay ahead, White said, "It's very difficult to portray the needed nuances in future climate." Yet it is a crucial task for journalists.

"The word 'global warming' has been a very effective rallying tool," said White, "but warming isn't the biggest concern, not by far." At issue are likely to be "changes in rainfall patterns and whether we can grow enough food," as well as what he calls "the two big ugly issues in the future": sea-level rise and abrupt climate change.

"The public does not recognize the non-linear element in climate change. They can't comprehend the possibility of a 10-15 degree centigrade change in their lifetime." Yet evidence of non-linear climate alteration is starting to appear.

White is seeing it in his own realm of study. "The glacier [research] community is now recognizing that these big ice sheets like Antarctica and Greenland have very non-linear behavior."

Warming temperatures are melting Antarctica's ice shelves, spawning massive icebergs (Photo/Josh Landis, National Science Foundation)

"To expect climate to behave in steady, predictable ways is nuts," White said. "That doesn't mean we lack predictability -- preferred states -- but the jet stream can change, and it does…the climate comfort zone is going to be invaded."

How can journalists convey an understanding of that concept to the public? White isn't averse to using elements that people can grasp and relate to, like vanishing sea ice and what that means for polar bear habitat and survival.
"Scientists miss that, " White said. "Many of my colleagues complain that it's all about polar bears -- it is all about polar bears, it's all about seals. You use the ammunition you have."

"The media has an extremely important role over the next two decades in helping to get a clear message to the public. That's beginning to happen."

Ultimately, said White, "We need a partnership between media, scientists and political leaders to deal with sustainability" of the global environment.

"Climate is only one issue that will challenge us. We have to deal with water, pollution, overpopulation, nutrients that will sustain us…" While potential crises "sound far off in the future," according to White, the rate and scale of human environmental impact is "exponential." And people don't get that, which is what worries him.

At the heart of the matter is the ethical concern for future generations, White said, which is lacking.

Threatened polar bears have become a powerful symbol of the consequences of global warming (Photo/Dan Crosbie, Environment Canada)

"We're like a 10-year-old with our foot on the gas pedal, but we can't see over the steering wheel. You just hope you don't hit a tree."

In order "to go into the future with foresight and knowledge, not haphazardly," said White, it's going to take a concerted joint effort, one in which journalists play a key part.

"We need a partnership between those of us who study the problems, between those who take the message to the public, and policymakers who have to make decisions," he said.

White said the press must "keep a long-term role in investigating," to be a "gadfly…to make sure scientists and politicians are not trying to pull the wool over our eyes." At the same time, White challenges his scientist colleagues to understand better "the world of the media, what journalists are up against." He lauds programs like CU's Center for Environmental Journalism, which is dedicated to improving reporting on environmental science and fostering better communication between scientists and the press.

Only with such a focus can society begin to define solutions for a sustainable future, said White. "The time frame between when we realize we have a problem and when we need to find a solution" has been collapsed, he contends, and it's up to journalists to help get that word out.

"The press has an obligation to recognize that we are in a very important transition in the human occupation of the planet," said White. "We can't consider ourselves passive riders on Spaceship Earth. We're not passengers, we're drivers…We need to decide soon where we're going to go."

Meet the 2006-07 Ted Scripps Fellows

2006-06-01T13:17:00.000-06:00

Five journalists have been selected as 2006-07 Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The fellowships, now in their tenth year, are hosted by the Center for Environmental Journalism and funded through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The nine-month program offers mid-career journalists an opportunity to deepen their understanding of environmental issues and policy through coursework, seminars and field trips in the region.

Meet the new Fellows:

Jerd Smith is an environment reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and specializes in water and drought issues. She led a team of journalists who covered the science, money, politics and ecology of water in Colorado from 2002 to 2005. The team won several awards, including the Wirth Chair Media Award for Environmental Coverage. Before working at the Rocky, Smith was the business editor at the Boulder Daily Camera, a business reporter and editor for the Denver Business Journal and a reporter and assistant editor for the Colorado Daily.
Anne Raup is the assistant photo editor for the Anchorage Daily News. As a photographer and as part of editing teams, Raup has earned several photojournalism awards, including the University of Missouri's Best Use of Photography 2000 award. Raup has also worked as a staff photographer for the Anchorage Daily News and as the photo editor and a staff photographer for the Standard Examiner in Ogden, Utah.
Anne Keala Kelly is a Hawaii-based freelance journalist and regular radio correspondent for Independent Native News and Free Speech Radio News. She has written for a number of print publications including the Honolulu Weekly and Indian Country Today. Her work focuses on the experiences and perspectives of native Hawaiians. Kelly was awarded the Native American Journalists Association's Best Feature Story 2005 award for her radio program "Native Hawaiians Losing Their Land."
Leslie Dodson is a freelance television correspondent who has worked as a reporter, correspondent, anchor, on-air editor, producer and writer for a number of broadcast companies including CNBC, Reuters and CNN. She has been stationed all over the world: in Atlanta, Tokyo, London, New York and in six Latin American countries. Dobson's award-winning work has focused on international business and economic news and regularly has drawn connections between business and the environment.
Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor for Outside magazine and regularly writes environmental and adventure features for the magazine. He is also a freelancer. He has written for publications including Harper's, Sports Illustrated, Legal Affairs and the New York Times. The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded his New York Times Magazine article "Up In Smoke" first place for Explanatory Reporting in 2005. He has worked as a staff writer and senior editor for the Seattle Weekly and as a reporter for the trade magazine Investment Dealer's Digest.

Since 1997, the Scripps Howard Foundation has provided annual grants for its fellowships at CU-Boulder, named for Ted Scripps, grandson of the founder of the E.W. Scripps Co. Ted Scripps distinguished himself as a journalist who cared about First Amendment rights and the environment.

CU Offers New 'Environment, Media & Culture' Class

2006-02-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

New for Spring 2006, CU-Boulder students have the opportunity to look critically at media coverage of environmental issues in an interdisciplinary course that examines the intersection of communication and culture with the environment. In an era when environmental policy debates are among the most significant global discussions engaging nations, and in which much of the public gets its knowledge and ideas about environmental issues through media channels, the class explores the key role media institutions play in that arena.

The university has long had a strong reputation for its programs in environmental studies and environmental journalism. Through the former, students study environmental science and policy, while the School of Journalism and Mass Communication offers a master's level specialty in environmental reporting. The new "Environment, Media and Culture" special-topics course (JOUR 4871/ENVS 4100/5100) provides the first media-studies focus on the environment.

Designed and taught by Dr. Wendy Redal, former program coordinator for CU's Center for Environmental Journalism, the course emphasizes the social construction of environmental issues and ideas. "While on one level the environment is a natural, material reality," Redal says, "the way it is understood, interpreted and acted upon is a product of how people think and talk about it, often through media channels."

Students in the class use theories about culture and rhetoric to investigate how environmental stories are told, paying special attention to journalism as well as other forms of popular media such as television and film. Case studies are used to focus inquiry, ranging from old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest to genetically modified crops to climate change. The course highlights political dimensions of environmental issues, looking at how issues are "framed" by various interests, including industry, activists and government, in order to communicate with strategic effect.

While the course is intended to be of value for any student interested in communication and environmental studies, it is also designed to benefit journalism students by providing an analytical understanding of the media's role in covering the environment. Knowing more from within a theoretical context about the forces and pressures on communicators and audiences alike, journalists can be better prepared to cover environment issues more effectively, Redal says.

She is excited by her students' range of interests, which are evident in the subjects they have chosen for their final research-paper assignment. Asked to investigate a topic that brings together the course emphasis on environment, media and culture, projects include an analysis of the discourse used to market organic, fair-trade coffee; a survey of how the term "junk science" is fought over by competing voices on the global warming issue; rhetorical battles over how wolf reintroduction is framed in Idaho news stories; and scrutiny of way nature is employed and depicted in SUV ads.

For a detailed look at the content of the new course, see the syllabus for Environment, Media and Culture.

Climate Change Could Push Colorado Skiing Downhill

2006-02-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

Crawford wrote this story for Tom Yulsman's Science Writing course (JOUR 5812) and it ran in Freeskier Magazine.

By Patrick Crawford

Every spring, when winter loosens its grip on the base of Arapahoe Basin ski area, the parking lot of North America's highest ski area turns into what locals call "the beach." Skiers and boarders still arrive at the ski area early, only instead of jockeying for first chair, they fight for a front-row parking spot at the beach.

By mid-day, an oddball collection of diehard skiers and boarders, frequently clad in shorts and baring their pale winter chests to the spring sun, are a few drinks deep into a massive tailgate party at 10,780 feet. Late in the season, more of the day is reserved for drinking, grilling burgers and playing Frisbee than for skiing. Depending on the year, the scene at the beach gets rolling sometime in mid-April and lasts through the Fourth of July.

Beaching it at A-Basin (Photo/Unknown)

While "the beach" is one of Colorado's great spring traditions, nothing scares the ski industry more than the thought that global warming could make the beach more typical of President's Day than Memorial Day.

With a business that survives on the few degrees of difference between rain and snow, some scientists estimate that Colorado's $2.5 billion-per-year ski industry may be facing a meltdown by the end of the century. But ski areas won't concede defeat. Instead, the state's resort operators are using their unique position as business leaders who sell a healthy environment to fight climate change on multiple fronts.

"In the ski industry, we see this as a global issue," says Melanie Mills, Executive Vice-President of Public Policy for Colorado Ski Country USA. "What we can do is to educate, advocate and implement. In other words, educate the public about the issue, advocate at the legislative level, and implement changes at our own resorts."

For the public, discussions about a few degrees of warming on a global scale may seem esoteric, but for skiers and a massive state industry that survives on Colorado's legendary "champagne powder," climate change is a life and death issue.

Every year evidence that the Earth is experiencing human-caused warming grows. According to a 2001 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored assessment of the state of climate science, the global average temperature has increased about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century. The bad news for Colorado's ski industry is that the warming has not been uniform, and the Rocky Mountains have seen a higher-than-average temperature increase.

In September, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a regional environmental group concerned with climate change, released a report that analyzed temperature and snowpack records in five major river basins of the western United States. It found that the upper Colorado River basin, which encompasses much of Colorado's high country, has seen an increase of 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the long-term average.

Given current trends, most climate scientists say warming is likely to intensify. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have been on the rise for a century, and with industrialized nations struggling to control their emissions while developing nations burn ever-larger amounts of fossil fuels, the levels of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are likely continue to rise along with temperatures through the end of this century, according to the IPCC.

Now scientists are working to understand what that means to people on a local and regional level. A 2004 study by a team of scientists using a climate model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., estimates that the Colorado River basin will warm by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2070. The study's authors called this a "best-case scenario," and other models have produced higher estimates. For example, the Canadian Global Coupled Model pegs the increase in the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin region at 5.9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. Models like these are used because they successfully predicted observed historical climate changes when scientists ran tests on past scenarios.

One thing all models agree upon is continued warming in the Western U.S., which would cause a shortened snow season.

"Looking forward about 70 years into the future, the runoff will occur about a month earlier, with more rain at the beginning and the end of the winter," says Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author for the United Nations' upcoming 2007 IPCC report.

However, scientists insist that long-term climate modeling is complex, and uncertainties increase as models become more localized. Climate models can account for major geographical features like the Rocky Mountains, but not the specific topography of an individual ski area, for example. And, all estimates of future warming work off assumptions about the amount of carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere. Tweaking the assumptions about the level of greenhouse gas emissions changes the predictions.

"I think there is less change coming our way than some other people would say," says NCAR researcher Klaus Wolf. "I remain skeptical that the models have a good handle on regional-scale climate change scenarios."

And as far as snowpack is concerned, Wolf says Colorado's elevation works in its favor because the state's high-elevation mountains are so cold. "I'm convinced that we are less vulnerable here at the higher elevations than places that are lower, such as the Pacific Northwest or even the Sierra."

While scientists at climate research centers around the globe continue to improve their ability to make long-term predictions about climate and how weather patterns might change over the next century, the snowsports industry feels that it cannot just wait to see what happens.

Skiing's glamorous image belies the fact that the ski resort operator in some ways has more in common with the Kansas wheat farmer than the New York hotelier. That's because ski areas are massively expensive resort operations fully at the mercy of weather.

"People who own and operate ski resorts do it because they ski," says Molly Cuffe, Director of Communications for Colorado Ski Country USA, the trade organization of Colorado's mountain resorts.

"They love the mountains, they love the mountain environment, and they know that their guests do as well. They know that they're selling the environment, so climate change is something that's very important to the ski industry. "

Keeping Colorado's ski slopes white is integral to the state's winter economy, which climate change may put in jeopardy (Photo/Copper Mountain Ski Resort)

According to Geraldine Link, Director of Public Policy for the National Ski Areas association, the ski industry is somewhat limited in what it can do to adapt to a warmer climate. "There are two things we can do, both of which we're already doing. One is to develop the resorts into year-round destinations by building our summer capabilities. The other is to maximize our snowmaking capabilities."

Unfortunately for Colorado's ski industry, in addition to producing a shorter snow season, warmer temperatures would also make it more difficult for ski areas to compensate for reduced natural snowfall by blowing the manmade kind.

"It's much more economical to make snow when it's cold out," says Auden Schendler, Director of Environmental Affairs at the Aspen Skiing Company. "A degree or so of temperature difference can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs in efficiency,"

Aspen Skiing Company has also added another consideration for the four mountains under its ownership: download lift capacity. In the early and late season, when the snowline is higher on the mountain, many ski areas use their lifts to shuttle skiers up and down from the base area to the snow. If snow stops falling at the base area of resorts, Schendler says, "we may be skiing the tops of the mountains, like we do in early and late season."

But most who make a living off skiing or snowboarding know that downhill lift capacity and snowmaking are just band-aids on a potentially massive problem. Major climate changes could cripple the sport, so many in the business feel that the most important work for the ski industry is to use its sway to affect national and regional environmental policy.

"The ski industry is an interesting, sexy business," Schendler says. "We have a significant amount of lobbying power, and we should be using that."

Colorado's ski industry was a major player in the state's 2004 passage of Amendment 37, which mandates that Colorado public utilities produce a percentage of the state's energy from renewable sources. On the national level, 70 ski areas have put their weight behind the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which, if passed, would force the United States to limit industrial greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010.

Many resorts, especially Schendler's Aspen Skiing Company, have been major innovators in developing environmentally friendly building practices. Aspen aims to have the new base village planned at its Snowmass ski area earn green-building certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. Currently, there are only two buildings in Colorado that meet the strict criteria, one of which is owned by Aspen. Schendler also helped institute a unique system that uses heavy spring runoff to create hydroelectricity.

As global warming raises temperatures in the Rockies, epic powder days like this one may become rare (Photo/Dave Lehl, Vail Resorts)

All of this may signal the beginning of a potentially powerful alliance of what would once have been strange bedfellows: ski areas and environmentalists. That would hardly have seemed possible even a few years ago, when relations between the Colorado resort industry and environmentalists reached a nadir after the radical environmentalist group Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for burning down Vail's Two Elks Lodge. Many far less extreme environmental groups have battled ski area expansions in Colorado in the courtroom.

Today the ski industry has teamed with the National Resources Defense Council on its "Keep Winter Cool" climate change educational program, and the NRDC has assuaged environmentalists about the ski industry in several instances.

"If you look at difference between the relationship between the ski industry and the environmental community 10 years ago and now, it's a sea change," Schendler says. "Part of that is this climate issue. We've found common ground."

But as much as the snowsports industry is doing to promote its own survival, even ski area employees like Schendler know that in a major climate change scenario, the loss of snowsports recreation would hardly be the worst consequence.

"The discussion that the ski industry is threatened by 2050, it's almost silly," he says. "It's like saying, 'you know, if there's a nuclear war, our milk is going to spoil.' The implications of climate change are so profound for society." Compared to problems for agriculture, potentially more intense hurricanes and other possible impacts from climate change, "the ski industry is one little blip. It's important that people say that societally, we're not going to be worrying about skiing. We're going to have a lot bigger problems to talk about."

Former Fellows Updates

2006-01-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

David Baron (1998-1999), author of The Beast in the Garden, on mountain lion-human interaction in Colorado's Front Range, reports that Boston's PBS station, WGBH, has optioned the movie rights to the book. WGBH, which produces a third of all national public television programming including NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience, wants to produce a feature film for broadcast and theatrical release. David currently splits his time between Boulder and Boston where he oversees coverage of global health and development at the radio program The World. Last fall he traveled to Equatorial Guinea to report on malaria control and endangered monkeys. In January, David was in New York to accept a duPont-Columbia Award, broadcasting's equivalent of the Pulitzer, on behalf of The World. The prize was awarded for the show's series on the science and ethics of stem cell research globally. The series is also being recognized with a National Journalism Award for Excellence in Electronic Media/Radio, presented by the Scripps Howard Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 21. The foundation's press release says, "This comprehensive radio report offered a primer on stem cell research, as the interests of science, medicine, politics and religion converge and conflict in the ethical debate over their use. The four-part series examined scientific progress on the research and dramatically different attitudes and practices in China, Israel, Britain and America."

Jennifer Bowles (1998-1999) continues to cover the environment in Southern California's Inland Empire for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Her beat has held some intriguing stories of late, including how a developer of a massive housing project dug up an old World War II fighter that crashed during a training run in 1942 and is now using the federal Superfund law to sue the Army for not completely cleaning up the munitions; and the steps Hollywood takes to avoid harming endangered wildlife while filming TV shows, commercials and movies in the California desert. A Ralph Lauren ad, for instance, appeared to be shot in the middle of a field of Joshua trees but in fact the model was standing at the edge of a parking lot at Joshua Tree National Park. And speaking of Joshua trees, Jennifer has also reported on how invasive plants are taking over the desert and threatening to change the entire ecosystem by pushing out Joshua trees and other native plants because the invaders sprout faster after fires, in turn encouraging more and larger fires.

Paula Dobbyn (1998-1999), who's still reporting for the Anchorage Daily News, has traveled far afield of Alaska lately. In November she went to Ireland to scout out graduate school programs, then to Panama in February for a winter sun break. There she visited Isla Barro Colorado, a tropical forestry research island owned by the Smithsonian Institution where "we saw tons of tropical birds as well as howler and white-faced monkeys. We also did touristy things like taking a tour boat through a couple of locks in the Panama Canal." On the way to Panama, Paula stopped off in Boulder where she stayed with CEJ co-director Len Ackland and his wife Carol for a few days, enjoying time with former Scripps fellows in the area as well as friends she met during her fellowship. Paula was engaged in November; she met her fiance during her fellowship in Boulder. They plan to spend a year in Ireland starting in August, when she will begin grad school. Paula says she is "excited about taking a year off from daily journalism and going back to school again, after a very long time away."

Sam Eaton (2004-2005), who was hired by American Public Media's Marketplace last October to head up the radio show's newly launched Sustainability Desk, was immediately sent to China to report several features ahead of the show's two weeks of live broadcasting from China. He writes that he "covered thousands of miles in a week and a half, visiting everything from gleaming innovation centers near Hong Kong and Shanghai to one of the world's most polluted cities, Taiyuan, where coal dust covers pretty much everything... the flip side of breakneck economic growth. It sure makes it nice to come home to a place like Boulder."

Dan Glick (2000-2001) will be heading to Algeria in September as a Knight International Press Fellow. He will spend 4 months working with Algerian print journalists while living in Algiers with his two kids. In the meantime, Dan continues to cover environmental issues in the West and beyond. Recent stories have appeared in National Geographic on lynx reintroduction in Colorado (January 2006), and the effects of drought on Glen Canyon in Utah (April 2006). Dan also has a piece in the current issue of Audubon on the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction on the White Mountain Apache Tribe reservation in Arizona. In April he is off to Indonesia on assignment from National Geographic to report on gold mining, part of a larger story on the subject that will appear next year.

Todd Hartman (1998-1999) is back on the environment beat full time at the Rocky Mountain News after a year-long hiatus dominated by reporting on a variety of controversies at the University of Colorado, and Homeland Security. Todd managed to get some environmental issues covered nonetheless, producing lengthy stories on conflicts over oil and gas drilling; growing interest in alternative fuels, including ethanol; growth in recycling in the Denver region; the legacy left by a massively polluted corporate hog farm; and struggles with the state's auto-emissions testing program. Todd says, "I love to hear what my fellow Scripps fellows have been up to," so keep the updates coming.

Rebecca Huntington (2001-2002) will be leaving her job as public lands reporter at the Jackson Hole News & Guide in April to begin a freelance career with an emphasis on environmental and science writing. During the past year at the News & Guide, she won first place for in-depth reporting from the Wyoming Press Association for an explanatory piece on the complex management and demands for water on the upper Snake River drainage. She also won second place in the National Newspaper Association's Better Newspaper Contest in 2005 for best breaking news story for an article about a Jackson accountant who calculated the risks of skiing in avalanche terrain in pursuit of fresh snow but ultimately died in an avalanche.

Dave Mayfield (2000-2001) is regional issues editor for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk where he supervises six writers, including the paper's environmental reporter. Dave and his family enjoyed a two-week vacation to Italy last summer and are looking forward to time on the coast of Maine during the summer ahead.

Kim McGuire (2003-2004), who became the environment reporter at the Denver Post not long after her fellowship ended, is engaged to the paper's regional editor, Todd Stone. Kim and Todd worked together in Arkansas before both became transplants to the Rocky Mountain West. They are planning a summer 2007 wedding in Estes Park, Colo.

Michael Milstein (1997-1998) and his wife welcomed son Daniel in November 2004. He's just begun to toddle around, Michael writes, and "he is keeping us very busy." As a Portland-based environment writer for the Oregonian, Michael continues to cover plenty of endangered species and forest issues. A big story he recently wrote on declining numbers of hunters and anglers, bringing about reduced funding for conservation, gained a lot of local interest.

Susan Moran (2001-2002) is teaching magazine writing at CU this semester, as well as keeping a freelance career going with stories in The Economist, The New York Times, 5280 magazine, Newsweek, and other publications. Susan writes mostly about the environment and business/technology, and where they often overlap. Check out her recent articles in The Economist on "The Greening of the U.S. Armed Forces" (December 2005), and a story on Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapons production plant near Denver (Spring 2004).

Paul Tolme (2000-2001) is currently spending several weeks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he says it's hot, and they've got a lot of coffee. The editors of National Wildlife recently awarded Paul the Trudy Farrand and John Strohm Magazine Writing Award, an honor bestowed annually by NWF for the best writing in the magazine. Paul got the award for his article "It's the Emissions, Stupid" (April/May 2005), which highlighed strategies for combating global warming pollution. You can find a link to the article on Paul's web site, under 'environment.' Paul also published a story recently on wolverines for Defenders magazine.

Nadia White (2004-2005) is living in Missoula, Montana, where she is freelancing, working on a book about brucellosis (the subject of her fellowship project), and writing for an education think tank. She recently participated in a 10-day "Salmon Country" expedition along the coast of Oregon, sponsored by Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources. The impact of population growth and dams on salmon was a central focus of the program, during which Nadia and other journalists met commercial fishermen, biologists, canneries folks, law professors and other parties with a stake in salmon issues. In addition to learning many details about a subject in which she had no previous expertise, Nadia writes that "the shape of the problem and how the dialog had shifted, how unlikly alliances came to be forged over time -- those broader lessons learned were also quite interesting."

Ted Wood (2001-2002) writes, "I am now an officially censored photojournalist in Wyoming!!" The project he started during his Ted Scripps Fellowship on the coal bed methane boom in Wyoming recently bore fruit, as well as notoriety, for Ted. An exhibit of his photos opened earlier this year at the gallery of the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming's Powder River basin. The show, "The New Gold Rush: Images of Coalbed Methane," which features Ted's work and that of three other photographers, was scheduled to travel to the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming's largest museum. But after pressure from the energy industry, the museum cancelled the show. This created a huge press interest, says Ted, and the effort backfired. The show is now booked two years out, and will travel throughout the Rockies and to the coasts. For more on the controversy, see the Casper Star-Tribune's article and the story from Planet Jackson Hole. Ted is headed back to Mongolia in July, where he will be putting the final touches on a second set of map/guides and postcards to promote responsible tourism in Mongolia's national parks, a project sponsored by the non-profit organization he co-founded, Conservation Ink.

Christianity Getting Greener

2006-01-31T16:42:00.000-07:00

By Erika Engelhaupt

To some, the phrase "Christian environmentalist" may sound like an oxymoron.

But Christians are not of one political mind on the environment, and a growing movement called "creation care" is greening Christianity, even in socially conservative evangelical circles. In particular, the climate change debate is exposing ideological divides among Christian groups that traditionally have been lumped together as the "Christian right."

While some evangelical leaders face off in battles over endorsing U.S. action on global warming, others believe the mainstream of conservative Christianity is experiencing an environmental awakening.

"The ice is breaking in the center of the community on this issue," said the Rev. Jim Ball, an evangelical pastor at the forefront of the global warming debate. Ball spoke at a panel discussion on creation care at the 2005 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Austin.

Ball is an ordained Baptist minister and a leader in a movement he calls "creation care," a faith-based brand of environmentalism that stresses the responsibility of humans to be good stewards of God's creation. Ball founded the Evangelical Environmental Network, a Christian non-profit organization that publishes Creation Care magazine and campaigns for environmental causes, most famously in the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign, in which Ball drove a hybrid Toyota Prius across the Bible Belt, spreading the word about clean vehicles from church pulpits and Christian radio stations along the way.

The Rev. Jim Ball, a leading green evangelical, promotes "creation care" among churches (Photo/ Kara Ball, Evangelical Environmental Network).

In February, Ball led a group of conservative Christian leaders to create the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a campaign calling on government to enact legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

A statement from the group implored that "Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem." The statement was signed by 86 evangelical leaders, including 39 college presidents, and first appeared Feb. 9 in a full-page New York Times advertisement. Signatories included Todd Bassett, national commander of The Salvation Army, and Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor who authored the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life," as well as several prominent African-American pastors.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative ran this full-page ad in the New York Times (Image/ Evangelical Climate Initiative).

Recognizing that "the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest," the statement urged evangelicals to "engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity's responsibility to address it."

The statement was part of a tug-of-war between church leaders trying to lay claim to the role of mouthpiece for the evangelical community. Ball worked for months crafting a statement opposing global warming with the large and politically powerful National Association of Evangelicals. The group seemed poised to take a strong stance: in 2004, they had crafted an environmental statement claiming a "sacred responsibility to steward the Earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part."

But the NAE finally abandoned the statement on climate change in January after a small group of influential leaders wrote a letter criticizing the effort, citing disagreements among Christians over the "cause, severity, and solutions to the global warming issue." Among them were Focus on the Family head James Dobson, and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. In response to the rebuff, Ball organized the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Climate change is only one environmental concern of Christians among many. Because the poor are often hit hardest by environmental problems like climate change and air pollution, justice issues play heavily into Christian environmental ethics. Evangelical progressives cite a biblical mandate from Jesus to care for the poor and oppressed, and the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign against gas-guzzling SUVs made it clear that some Christians think Biblical values can inform consumer decisions that may affect others.

Best-selling Christian author Jim Wallis challenges Christians to examine their social decisions closely in a moral and biblical context. In his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Wallis argues that the political right has been allowed to hijack faith and moral values, defining moral values narrowly and focusing on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Wallis, who describes himself as a "19th-century evangelical" in the tradition of a spiritually based emphasis on social justice, is the founder of the Sojourners Community, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, D.C.

"I would say that if our gospel isn't good news to poor people, it isn't an evangelical gospel. That's what I believe. I think that's right in the heart of the true evangelical tradition," Wallis told PBS in 2003 on a program called "The Jesus Factor" which examined the growing political influence of evangelicals in American politics.

Broadly defined, evangelical Christians believe in a personal conversion to a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Bible as the authoritative word of God, and the importance of spreading their faith. That leaves plenty of room for a diversity of opinions on the environment, and even on social issues.

Some evangelicals agree with Wallis' premise of protecting the poor but disagree about the best way to do it. Greenhouse gas-cutting measures that might increase energy prices could hurt the poor disproportionately, argues Calvin Beisner, a professor at Knox Theological Seminary and organizer of an opposition group to the Evangelical Climate Initiative called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.

Grassroots action at the local level is the breeding ground for the kind of new Christian movement—or return to traditional Christian values, which Wallis would claim—that evangelicals like Wallis and Ball preach.

Denver-based Eco-Justice Ministries is an ecumenical agency that helps churches in Colorado and across the country get involved in creation care and social justice issues. Its founder, the Rev. Peter Sawtell, an ordained minister in the more liberal United Church of Christ denomination, runs the ministry with a board of directors, teaching clergy how to develop social and environmental ethics in their home congregations.

"We seek the well-being of all humanity on a thriving Earth," Sawtell said.

The group provides educational materials for adults and children and asks partner churches to form leadership teams to coordinate church projects. Materials are available to any church, conservative or liberal.

Last November, Eco-Justice Ministries co-sponsored a conference in Denver with the National Council of Churches where about 70 participants, mostly from Colorado, gathered to learn about regional environmental issues and how to bring environmental concerns into their home churches through preaching, Sunday school lessons and group activities.

At the conference, Sawtell emphasized that "the church is not meant to be a branch of the Sierra Club," but rather that his ministry is concerned with how Christians should live within their faith.

Around Boulder, both progressive and conservative churches are putting creation care into practice. Cornerstone Church pastor Gene Binder who describes his church as "conservative evangelical Christian," says church members are interested in caring for the environment. A more liberal congregation, Community United Church of Christ, has formed an Earth Action Team that helps the church recycle and hopes to eventually get the church powered solely by renewable solar energy.

The Rev. Martie McMane described her hopes for the creation care movement, starting with her congregation at Boulder's First Congregational Church of the United Church of Christ.

"Our church is small and can only do so much for the environment. But think of it like ripples going out; if each person does something, it carries forth," she said.

CU Professor Emeritus Champions 'Eco-Justice'

2006-01-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When Jack Twombly retired in 1990 from his 54-year career as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, he didn't give up teaching. Now a vital 84, Twombly's educational mission is helping Christians better understand the need for stewardship of the environment, or, as it is frequently called in church circles, "creation care."

At the heart of creation care is the concept of "eco-justice," Twombly explained, a situation "where society and ecology both win." The notion embraces the insight that "justice to human beings is inseparable from right relationships with and within the natural order," said Twombly, citing the Rev. William Gibson's book Eco-Justice: The Unfinished Journey.

The biggest challenge to that mission, he said, is that people do not have enough information, an impetus for making more ethical decisions. He seeks to rectify that among churchgoers in his denomination and beyond. Churches took part in the first Earth Day observance in 1970, he said, when "people really began to wake up" about the environment. He hopes the contemporary creation-care movement will have a similar effect.

Twombly, who received a bachelor's degree from CU in 1944 and a PhD in 1959, has been a member of First Presbyterian Church in Boulder for half a century. He currently serves as a liaison for creation-care issues to 44 churches in a regional division of the Presbyterian Church USA, a 19,000-square mile area that encompasses northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska. There are about 60 such appointed "Stewardship of Creation Enablers" nationally, part of the larger Presbyterians for Restoring Creation.

CU Professor Emeritus Jack Twombly (Photo/ Wendy Redal)

In his position, Twombly assists congregations in gaining the knowledge and skills to sustain a "long-term, spiritually vital commitment to God's Creation." That may involve giving workshops, hosting an information table on a Sunday morning, or, in keeping with his own expertise in energy issues, counseling churches on how to save resources and money by converting to compact fluorescent lighting and other means of enhancing energy efficiency. Twombly has also helped sponsor an annual "Bike to Church Day" at First Presbyterian in Boulder, where those who cycle or walk to the Sunday service enjoy a free breakfast to honor their efforts.

Twombly credits retired minister and climber John Wade for inspiring him to get involved in the position back in 1997. He had read about Wade, then the 77-year-old chair of the Sierra Club's Rocky Mountain Chapter, in Sierra magazine. The article outlined Wade's vision for sparking an Earth stewardship movement in the Presbyterian Church through the creation of a network of grassroots positions like the one Twombly now holds.

Twombly's task has not been an easy one, though. While most people say they support environmental protection, they don't have enough facts to push them into behaving differently, he said. Part of the problem, Twombly thinks, is that the U.S. is "only a couple of generations away from the frontier economy." A belief prevails, especially among older people, that "there's always more out there, that resources are infinite." Challenging that perspective is central to Twombly's educational mission.

One of the biggest hurdles is encouraging people to take time to educate themselves, he said. He has found it hard to get individuals to commit even 15 minutes a week to read from an array of accessible publications he would like to suggest. Even when he is successful in persuading parishioners to learn more about environmental problems, "when they do, they find it overwhelming. A lot of people are living in denial," he said, with the attitude that "if we ignore it, it will go away."

He worries that his message may come across as too negative, but he doesn't want to dilute the realities he expects the next generations will face. "You're not a doom-and-gloomer if you study the facts and report them."

It is young people who know the most about environmental problems, Twombly said. When he spoke to a group of CU freshmen in the Honors Program a few years ago, "they were very aware. They're the ones with the biggest stake in it…By 2050, when they're approaching retirement, they're going to be living in a very miserable world" if current trends continue, he said.

Twombly is heartened that environmental consciousness, especially among Christians, is growing.

"We're making progress. But it's not nearly fast enough." Particularly about climate change, "people need a sense of urgency," he said. Global warming is "easily" the most pressing environmental issue Twombly wants to get church members concerned about.

"If this issue is not solved," he said, "all these other issues become somewhat irrelevant."

Jack Twombly with hiking partner Bonaire (Photo/ Wendy Redal)

As a scientist, he is worried about the possibility of abrupt climatic shifts. "Very few things in nature are linear. You approximate it with linear mathematics because that's the best you can do." But he wonders if we may already have moved beyond that linear process with polar ice-sheet melting, a "self-sustaining phenomenon" in which melting ice creates a larger dark ocean surface which in turn speeds up further ice-sheet melting.

It's frustrating to Twombly when people's eyes glaze over at such discussions. He sees in part a "willful ignorance of science," compounded by the Bush Administration's "distortion of reputable science," which troubles him. When he first started in his position with the Presbytery, "I thought if I had impeccable data and presented it well, it would bring people over, rationally…but I've found that you have to get people emotionally and passionately involved."

Twombly thus believes it is crucial how issues are framed. He cites the latest issue of Eco-Justice Notes, a publication of ecumenical Denver-based Eco-Justice Ministries, which observes that people are more likely to respond to pictures of a starving polar bear perched on an ice floe, marooned by ice that has fragmented too early, than to scientific studies. "That gets to people more than a curve on a graph of CO2 and temperature."

It's also critical to take on the economic argument, according to Twombly, who said his professional background in electrical engineering has taught him a few things about energy efficiency. "If we could just get past this mantra that doing anything about global warming would ruin our economy – that's tragically not true."

While he recognizes that a public response is happening, "it's got to happen faster. There's got to be a tipping point where most people get involved."

Far from being daunted, however, he works indefatigably for even small gains.

"There's no choice but to be hopeful," said Twombly, who has 16 grandchildren. "As a retired professor, I have a lot of faith that if people would just become informed, it would make a difference…They have good hearts."

Jack Twombly will be attending the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Conference in New Orleans June 1-4, 2006.

Green Building: Beginning to make dollars and sense

2006-01-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

By Felicia Russell

Boulder's recycling and open space programs have long earned the city national recognition as a leader in the push toward environmental sustainability. These days it's making headlines in the building industry.

The Ted Scripps Fellows and CEJ staff recently took a trip downtown to the historic Citizens National Bank Building on Pearl Street for a backstage look at the green building trend. There they met with Kristi Ennis, sustainable design director for Boulder Associates, an firm that specializes in medical architecture and design.

A room at Boulder Community Foothills Hospital, the first hospital in the U.S. to earn LEED Silver certification (Image/ Boulder Associates).

Ennis told the Fellows about her experience working with the United States Green Building Council's LEED program, which is a point-based system for rating how environmentally-friendly a building is. Her firm designed Boulder Community Foothills Hospital, the first hospital in the nation to earn LEED Silver, which means that the hospital has earned at least half of the green points possible under the program.

To sit in with the Fellows, listen to the CEJ's first podcast.

Former Fellow Updates

2005-10-01T10:52:00.000-06:00

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.

Alumni Updates

2005-10-01T10:51:00.000-06:00

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.

Win, Place and Show: Former Ted Scripps Fellows Capture Top Environmental Reporting Awards

2005-10-01T10:43:00.000-06:00

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.

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

2005-10-01T10:39:00.000-06:00

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.

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

2005-10-01T10:32:00.000-06:00

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."

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

2005-10-01T10:21:00.000-06:00

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.

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

2005-10-01T10:16:00.000-06:00

By Erika Engelhaupt

When levees broke in New Orleans and water started gushing in, many Americans were stunned to learn the cityand the countryweren'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 workmore than 4,000 publications and work papers spanning more than 50 yearsat 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

2005-10-01T10:00:00.000-06:00

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.

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

2005-10-01T09:53:00.000-06:00

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.

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.

Scripps Fellows Updates

2005-04-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Lisa Busch in March received the environment award in the Volvo for Life competition for her work to mend rifts between environmentalists and former pulp mill workers in Sitka, Alaska. She credits her reporting skills for her success in starting Sitka Trail Works, an organization that gives former mill workers new jobs on trail building crews. She’s now president of the organization, which has built over $2 million worth of trails. Details of her work are published online at:
http://www.volvoforlifeawards.com/cgi-bin/iowa/english/heros/hero2004/5380.html.

Carie Call, who lives on Pine Island off Florida’s central west coast, has taken a position as an environmental planner with the Lee County Department of Environmental Sciences. After 20 years in journalism, she says, “I wanted to do more to help instead of just writing about other people helping, and telling other people what they should be doing.” She and her husband, Barry, are still wrangling with banks and insurance companies to get funds to repair the extensive damage to their home sustained during Florida’s brutal 2004 hurricane season. The island was battered by four separate storms. They’ve made progress with helping to restore some of the island’s lush flora, however, taking advantage of fine spring weather to plant lavender, geraniums, passion flowers, and mango, avocado, bottle brush and live oak trees. Contact Carie at cobenchain@comcast.net.

John Flesher just had an article published in a Michigan regional magazine on the theme of environment and religion, a subject he pursued during his fellowship year. Last fall he also wrote a series of articles for the Associated Press on water use in the Great Lakes region, including whether Great Lakes water could ever be diverted to the West.

Dan Grossman won the Media Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and first prize in the in-depth radio reporting category in the Society of Environmental Journalist’s Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment competition. Both awards were for “The Penguin Barometer,” a Radio Netherlands documentary on the impact of climate change on ecosystems. Also check out his most recent endeavor, a multi-media website on people and nature in Madagascar, at www.wbur.org/special/madagascar.

Todd Hartman and Rocky Mountain News colleague Jerd Smith published a 5-part series called "The Last Drop," which detailed the damage Colorado's thirsty Front Range is causing to mountain streams on the Western Slope. The project won a first place award from the American Planning Association and was co-winner of the Wirth Chair in Environmental and Community Development Policy award in the print media category.

John Kotlowski has turned his camera towards the National Parks, seeking to document Americans' relationship with their parks. He writes: “I am looking for the people in these photographs, or signs of them—the parking lots, the cars, the trash, the cameras, the crowds, the umbrellas, and so on." In recent months, his project has taken him to Arches National Park, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and the Great Smoky Mountains. John is also working on a project in Poland, where he is using photography, film and video to document traditional farming villages and the residents' way of life, which persists against the backdrop of corporate farming.

Alumni Updates

2005-04-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

Chelsey Baker-Hauck ('00) is still working as director of the periodicals department at the University of Denver and managing editor of the University of Denver Magazine. Although she mostly writed about science and research for the magainze, she's also been able to dabble in other topics, from snowboarding to classical music. Right now she's working on a feature article about the role of atmospheric aerosols in climate change.

Josh Blumenfeld ('03) took a giant leap north from Wichita Falls, Texas, to start a new job as meteorologist for WKBT, the CBS affiliate in La Crosse, Wisc. "I'm definitely glad to be moving on in my career!" he says.

Meet the 2005-06 Ted Scripps Fellows

2005-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Five journalists have been selected as 2005-06 Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The fellowships are hosted by the Center for Environmental Journalism and funded through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The nine-month program offers mid-career journalists an opportunity to deepen their understanding of environmental issues and policy through coursework, seminars and field trips in the region.

The new fellows include:

Bebe Crouse, environment editor for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. She oversees NPR's environmental and general news coverage in 12 western states and edits staff and freelance environment stories from other regions. Crouse's career includes five years at CBS News where she wrote daily news analysis and commentary for Dan Rather and produced other feature and live segments for the network. She also spent three years as a Mexico City-based independent producer and reporter. Among her journalism honors are the 2003 National Headliner Award for Investigative Reporting for a team-produced look at malfeasance within the U.S. Border Patrol and the 2001 Peabody Award for NPR's team coverage of 9/11. Crouse earned a bachelor's degree in environmental studies and natural science from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a master's certificate in international journalism from the University of Southern California/El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. Her fellowship project involves developing a feasibility plan and outline for a new public radio program focused on environmental issues.
Don Hopey is an environment reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His writing displays a mix of local, state and national investigative stories and issue-oriented outdoor features. He has produced articles about pollution caused by the nation's hazardous waste incinerators, shortcomings in Pennsylvania's regulation of longwall coal mining, and an 80-mile canoe trip through the Wild and Scenic sections of the Allegheny River. Hopey has traveled to Central Europe to research and report about a range of environmental problems. His work has been recognized by a number of local and regional awards. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and studied law at Duquesne University and journalism at Pennsylvania State University. Hopey's independent project will focus on the health and environmental effects of coal-burning power plants.
Jeff Johnson is senior editor for Chemical and Engineering News in Washington, D.C. He covers energy, the environment, science policy, chemical accidents and economics. Topics he has written about include air emissions and the Clean Air Act, mercury pollution, renewable energy from the ocean, cleanups at former Department of Energy nuclear weapons plants and "clean coal." Previously, Johnson worked for Environmental Science & Technology, a monthly environmental science magazine, and the Daily Environment Reporter, a Bureau of National Affairs publication where he covered the environmental activities of Congress. He earned a BS in industrial engineering at California State Polytechnic University and a master's in journalism at the University of Oregon. He intends to write a series of articles on energy and the environment for his fellowship project.
Greg Stahl is the senior reporter at the Idaho Mountain Express in Ketchum, Idaho. Working in rural Idaho, Stahl has covered public land issues such as user conflicts between backcountry skiers and snowmobilers, resource issues such as forest health, and endangered species issues including gray wolf reintroduction. His co-authored series examining a wilderness area designation for the state's Boulder and White Cloud mountains won the 2004 National Newspaper Association's Better Newspaper Contest in the investigative reporting category. In addition to reporting, Stahl coordinates teams of reporters and photographers working on in-depth articles for the twice-weekly newspaper. Previously, his freelance articles ran in publications such as High Country News and Sun Valley Art magazine. He earned a bachelor's degree in English at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo. His professional project will examine water shortage issues and legislative action involving the Snake River and Snake Plain Aquifer.
Andrea Welsh is a correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She writes about trends in Brazil's beverage, auto, mining, and steel sectors. Welsh led the way in writing about Brazil's appeal as a global steel-making center and in covering the country's beer sector during the takeover of a local brewer by Belgium's Interbrew. She previously worked as Latin America reporter for Petroleum Argus, a Houston-based trade publication and covered the oil workers' strikes in Venezuela and the coup against President Hugo Chavez. Prior to that she served as correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires in Santiago, Chile and wrote about everything from capital market reforms to trade talks with the United States. Welsh holds a bachelor's degree in communications from Temple University in Philadelphia and a master's in Latin American studies and communications from the University of Texas at Austin. Her professional project will focus on small-scale sustainable economic projects in the Amazon.

U.S. Environmental Journalism in Critical Condition, Say World Affairs Panelists

2005-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Environmental journalism may be an endangered species, according a panel of media observers at the 57th annual Conference on World Affairs held at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus.

"This Just In: The Environment is Out" was the title of the April 7, 2005, session that featured CNN's Peter Dykstra, executive producer for science, technology, space, environment and weather; Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an international research organization whose focus is an environmentally sustainable future; Marley Shebala, senior reporter for the Navajo Times; and Harvey Wasserman, an environmental activist and senior editor of Free Press Online.

Panelists agreed the session's provocative title was largely not apt in much of the world, but in the U.S., coverage of the environment is threatened as news becomes increasingly commercialized, often nudging environmental stories to the margins or eliminating them altogether.

A case in point, Dykstra said, is CNN's decision to cancel its science, technology and environment show as of May 1, accompanied by a raft of layoffs. Dykstra's own litany of titles is further evidence: they are the result of four other executive producers being laid off. "I said to my bosses, 'You guys want me to be in charge of everything you don't care about?'" he quipped.

What's really needed to jump-start environmental coverage, according to Dykstra, is a major environmental disaster with a visible human and economic toll. Unlike the late 1960s, when Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire as its chemical-laced waters ignited, when the stacks of coal-fired power plants poured inky pollutants into the sky, when Pittsburgh businessmen took an extra white shirt to work, there have been "no dramatic disasters – by TV standards – in the last 15 years," said Dykstra, not since the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound, spreading an oil slick across the pristine wilderness.

And without striking visuals, it's hard to get the public to pay attention, Dykstra observed.

Perceptible environmental problems galvanized public opinion several decades ago, leading to grassroots activism, the nation's first Earth Day, and Richard Nixon's signing of "some of the most inclusive and progressive environmental legislation," Dykstra recounted, citing the passage in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The movement became complacent with success but was re-engaged in the 1980s with the appointment of James Watt as Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary, as well as events like the disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl, the ozone hole and acid rain, all of which "were key by the end of the 1980s," Dykstra said.

The 1990 Earth Day was a major television event, he recalled, and membership in environmental organizations had grown dramatically in the prior decade. "Bush I at least had to pay lip service" to the environment as a result.

But today's environmental crises are different, and that's a problem when it comes to news coverage.

"There are less telegenic but potentially more lethal events taking place" now, such as climate change, Dykstra explained. But since you can't see it, "TV pays no mind…The view from the top in my business is that everything's fine." Alongside a Congress that is "less concerned with environmental values," there is little incentive for news organizations to pursue environmental stories.

And while "TV is lashed to the spectacular visual," Dykstra said, TV stories are getting ever shorter, making it next to impossible to give environmental topics the coverage they deserve. Since the average CNN story is just 55 seconds, he said, the network is unlikely to do a story on the real costs of energy, for example.

He also said "consolidation of media is a real problem." U.S. policy has helped create enormous corporations whose leadership is "generally conservative," Dykstra said, citing News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons as "heavy Republican contributors."

That political persuasion at the helm "shows itself in our failure to cover the environment responsibly," Dykstra said. "Gatekeepers at the top are personally unfamiliar with environmental issues" and thus vulnerable to influence from industry and conservative think tanks. They're more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, he said.

The media also "increasingly focus on the cult of personality." And there is no charismatic figure in the environmental movement to focus on, like Martin Luther King, Jr. was for the Civil Rights movement, he said.

What's gotten lost is the public-service ethos, according to Dykstra, at the expense of making more money. "TV is responding to the standard of entertainment, not the standard of journalism."

"On a global basis," however, "the environment is definitely not out," according to Worldwatch president Chris Flavin. "Environmentalism is growing worldwide," especially in Europe, he said, and most nations' news organizations are striving to cover it. Unlike the current U.S. administration, European ministers "all understand the centrality of environmental issues."

While the U.S. "led the wave of modern environmentalism in the 1970s," it is now one of very few countries without a full cabinet-level department of the environment, Flavin said.

Even China is surpassing the U.S. in environmental awareness, he said. "Seven or eight years ago it was illegal to have an environmental organization in China. Now there are more than 2,000 environmentally related NGOs in China." And most General Motors cars can't be sold in China today because they would be illegal, he added, explaining that China now has tougher fuel-economy standards than the U.S.

Environmentalism is "one of the fastest-growing areas of civil society in the world," said Flavin. "The U.S. is out of step with the rest of the world."

Yet if you ask individuals in the U.S. whether they care about the environment, they say they do, according to Flavin. Citing a recent poll, he said more than half of Americans call themselves environmentalists, and "a majority believes that global climate change is a significant threat."

Yet "clearly in terms of the political fight, environmentalists are not doing all that well in the U.S. today," said Flavin.

Why? His assessment mirrored some of Dykstra's observations. "The problems that got the environmental movement going were really in your face. Rivers were burning, the air was dark, garbage was piling up." Yet many problems today remain out of sight, he said, "mainly affecting minority and poor communities with little political power."

Other problems are big in scale and happening as part of a process, not exactly a draw for the news media's bias toward concrete detail. Flavin cited the loss of biological diversity, the condition of the oceans and global climate change which are "long-term problems unfolding gradually over a period of time and are not that visible to the public."

Such complex problems "feel abstract but clearly have major consequences," Flavin said.

"We're like a frog in water that's being slowly heated up. It will jump out of boiling water, but dies when it's gradually warmed," he warned. "If climate change suddenly erupted the way it was depicted in the film The Day After Tomorrow, people would act."

Compounding the dilemma, and in stark contrast to Nixon, Flavin said, is the "anti-environment Republican president we have today."

Conservative economic and ideological forces have become much more organized against the environment, according to Flavin. He cited examples such as Exxon getting government scientists fired when their findings shed negative light on the company, or the ability of industry to get its people appointed to government oversight positions.

Flavin also pointed a finger at the power of right-wing think tanks to influence media coverage of the environment.

"They've become very successful in providing what they call facts and information…They feed ammunition to Rush Limbaugh and his compatriots, they write speeches for Representatives on Capitol Hill…[It's] a much more organized, well-prepared opposition we have today.

"They're not winning the battle for hearts and minds, but they are winning the political war," Flavin claimed.

Harvey Wasserman concurred. "The sky, if not falling, is certainly heating up…We're in territory now where there's no turning back. We must err on the side of caution," he urged, especially with regard to climate change.

For Marley Shebala's people, the Dine, or Navajo, of Arizona and New Mexico, that's not news. "The people have always understood that you take care of Mother Earth, she takes care of you." But tribal elders have been convening recently to discuss unusual environmental events, such as the season's heaviest snow two weeks earlier, an anomaly that interfered with the tribe's centuries-old ceremonial schedule. They are concerned about the changes taking place, and she, as a reporter, has a duty to explain what is happening.

"As journalists, we are looked at by our people as storytellers," Shebala said.

If environmental stories are not being told, or are being told inaccurately or ineffectively, the public is not being served – on this the panelists agreed.

Far from conceding defeat, however, Flavin offered a set of guidelines to improve media coverage of the environment and garner more attention for environmental issues:

"Don't marginalize issues as 'green.' Talk about the health of the public, the future of the economy. Keep stories mainstream. Don't let the opposition define 'environmentalist' as marginal."
"Carry a positive message," Flavin said. Don't frame environmental stories so they're perceived as "all gloom and doom." "Fear and scaremongering do not work in the long run;" instead, focus on a "bright future," such as environmentally cleaner new jobs. "That's ultimately what motivates people," he said. "It's not that people don't care about the issues, it's that they feel it's become hopeless."
"Talk directly about values. We can't leave values to the right wing and the fundamentalists." Flavin suggested focusing on respect for nature, the value of human health, the welfare of human societies and the world community as a whole, emphasizing a concern for future generations.
"Welcome the religious community," Flavin encouraged, challenging stereotypes that Christians, even of a conservative stripe, are not concerned about the environment. "It's uplifting to see a significant portion of the evangelical community embracing stewardship of the planet," he said.

Wasserman advised linking the environment to the economy as the most effective way to galvanize the public's interest.

What might have happened, he asked, had the U.S. followed Denmark's lead in developing wind power in the 1990s, a decision that made the Danes a wealthy country now that wind energy is a multi-billion dollar industry? Or if U.S. automakers had developed the hybrid vehicle before the Japanese? "Ford did not produce the Prius," and that's as much an economic story as an environmental one, said Wasserman.

Journalists could also cover the hidden health care costs of oil- and gas-based energy production, noting that solar and wind energy are "way ahead in true cost accounting" when you factor in effects of air pollution such as asthma, Wasserman said.

The challenge to improve the public's understanding of complex environmental issues doesn't rest solely on the news media, though. Citizens, too, have a role to play, the panelists contended.

If people want better environmental news, they need to "look for reporting that shows as many voices as possible," Shebala said. In the Native world, that includes "even the voice of the animals."

The tendency of audiences, though, is to gravitate toward coverage that reflects what they already believe, Dykstra noted. It's a growing problem with the rise of blogs and ever more niche-oriented media where even news is now likely to be colored by a self-conscious ideological stripe, as on the Fox network.

Citizens should consult more independent news sources, said Shebala, where journalistic values prevail over a purely business approach. Independent media are able to cover issues that other papers, stifled by corporate pressure, won't.

But corporate media aren't impervious to change, Dykstra suggested. "The media business is incredibly sensitive to criticism." If you don't like what's on offer, you have to "push back from the other direction," he said, citing groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (www.fair.org) as an organized example of such an effort.

Journey into the Earth: Scripps Fellows Tour World's Largest Molybdenum Mine

2005-04-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

More than a half-mile below the surface of Red Mountain in the Colorado Rockies, it's a typical workday for Justin Whetton. He spends most of his 12-hour shift operating a gigantic loader inside a dark tunnel, scooping over 300 buckets of rock a day, hauling it from one shaft and dumping it down another where it falls into huge trucks that take it to a powerful underground crusher.

Whetton makes around $20 an hour for his labor, but each scoop of ore, weighing 10 or 11 tons, is worth $1,000. The value comes from a metal inside the rock, called molybdenum. About 44 lbs. of "moly," as it's known in the industry, is contained in each bucket Whetton moves at the Henderson Mine.

The mine, located below Berthoud Pass near Empire, Colo., is the largest primary molybdenum source in the world. Its owner, Climax Molybdenum, is a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge Corporation, the world's second-largest producer of molybdenum and copper after Codelco, Chile's state-owned mining company. Last year Phelps Dodge produced about 9 percent of the world's moly supply, some 28 million pounds, most of it coming out of Henderson's vast lode.

The Ted Scripps Fellows got a close-up look at a major underground mining operation when they visited Henderson on April 22. Donning hard hats, headlamps, safety goggles and a self-rescuing device designed to provide breathable air in the event of a mine emergency, the fellows and CEJ staff descended some 3,000 feet in a shaft elevator into the bowels of Red Mountain.

Ted Scripps Fellows deep inside Henderson Mine (Photo/Andrew Silva)

Here, as if inside a giant subterranean maze, they boarded tractors that negotiated a warren of tunnels to give them an overview of some of the world's most sophisticated hard-rock mining operations. In the process, they learned a lot about a metal called moly.

While many people have never heard of molybdenum, let alone tried to pronounce it, they have almost certainly benefited from its use. Chemical-grade moly, the pure form mined and milled at Henderson, is used for many industrial purposes. It makes pipelines more corrosion-resistant, acts as a smoke retardant for plastics, and is used in CO2 detectors, fluorescent light bulb tubes, computer heat sinks, and in the orange paint pigment bought by the U.S. Navy.

However high-grade moly is best known as a lubricant. It's used in the manufacture of lower-friction piston rings in the automotive industry, as a spray for bicycle chains, and is added to greases and oils. In Europe, where automobile oil has a higher moly content, you only need to change your car's oil every 15,000 miles, Mine Manager Kurt Keskimaki said, adding that such oil is expected before long in the U.S.

Fellow Nadia White talks to Mine Manager Kurt Keskimaki (Photo/Andrew Silva)

Moly is also used as a catalyst for getting rid of sulfur in petroleum refining, an important function in meeting clean-air standards. In fact, about half of the moly mined at Henderson goes to Houston where it's processed by Criterion, a division of Shell, which is a major buyer.

Production at Henderson began in 1976, following the ore body discovery in 1964. Initially found by Uranium Research and Development, or URAD, who thought it was uranium ore, it turned out to be molybdenum, an enormous deposit. Geologically, it was the perfect set of circumstances, 13 different mineralizing events that kept enriching the deposit with more layers of the purest moly in the world.

It's hard to get a handle on just how much of the mineral makes up the core of Red Mountain, but Keskimaki has the figures: "We sit on 166 million tons of moly ore, 600 million pounds of recoverable moly."

Shaft sinking commenced in 1968. Initial removal began at the 8,100-foot level, but current extraction is now at 7,210 feet. A quarter-million feet of long hole are drilled each year, using more than a million pounds of explosives. Once the ore is crushed at the bottom level of the mine, it's sent on a conveyor belt one mile up to the surface, then 14 miles further on the belt to the mill site across the mountains in the Williams Fork Valley.

Fellows and CEJ staffers marveled at the complex operation as they stood above the gyrating crusher on the mine floor, watching as 80-ton haul trucks, the biggest underground trucks in the world, dumped their load of rock into the crusher's bowl. Like a giant mortar and pestle, the device crunched the ore chunks into pieces of rock 4-8 inches in diameter, small enough to load onto the conveyor belt that whisks the ore over to the mill at about 50 mph. The process was noisy enough that the visitors were glad to have the earplugs provided, and at times the face masks necessary to cut the dust and exhaust that are inescapable amid such operations, despite mitigation efforts.

Mine ventilation is just one aspect of the Climax company's commitment to worker safety. "We move more tons of air in a day than tons of rock," said Keskimaki. That's a lot of air, since 21,300 tons of material are milled daily at Henderson.

Such complex ventilation systems are part of the reason why Henderson is Colorado's second biggest power user after Pueblo's steel mill. The mine and mill, which operate around the clock, use 47 megawatts a day for an average monthly energy bill of $1.5 million – less than half the steel mill's cost. Fellow Sam Eaton said he was "amazed at the amount of energy they use. It's mind-boggling."

Fellows "journey to the center of the Earth" (Photo/Andrew Silva)

The conveyor belts are also power-hungry components of the Henderson enterprise, using 11,000 hp engines to transport the ore uphill to the mill. There, it is processed by separating the moly from its granite casing. First, the host rock is ground down into particles as fine as beach sand. During the milling, water and reagents are added, the latter causing molybdenum particles to float when the slurry is mixed with air. The moly adheres to the bubbles, allowing the metal to be separated from its host. More grinding and flotation further refines the moly concentrate, which at this point resembles ultra-fine, powdery graphite, very shiny and dark gray. In its final form as it leaves the mill, the moly is concentrated to nearly 250 times what it was when it entered as incoming ore. The process doesn't end here, though: the concentrate is filtered, dried and packaged for shipment by truck to further processing plants in Iowa, England and the Netherlands.

What's left over are the slurry remains and ore tailings. These are transported to the 1,000-acre tailing area where the moly-free granite settles and the water goes through an extensive reclamation process to be reused in a closed system at the mill.

Fifteen miles away, the mine sits near the head of the Clear Creek watershed, a region of alpine meadows and crystalline streams. Dealing with industrial wastewater is thus Henderson's biggest environmental stewardship issue. Fellows got a close-up look at the company's state-of-the-art treatment plant built in 1997, which handles up to 1600 gallons per minute from the mine. A million gallons a day are pumped into the plant from underground.

Ridding the water supply of toxic levels of manganese and zinc is the primary goal of the treatment facility. Tony Lucero, Henderson's environmental coordinator, called this "the most prominent operation we deal with from an environmental standpoint."

Calcium oxide is used to raise the pH-level of the water to precipitate out the minerals, which are removed and trucked to the BFI landfill between Golden and Boulder. Sulfuric acid is then added to lower the pH before the water is discharged into Woods Creek.

The company has been so successful that a trout fishery thrives in the stream below the discharge site, and the city of Golden buys Henderson's reclaimed water for its drinking water supply.

Fellow Nadia White appreciated the chance to see Henderson's operations and environmental mitigation up close. "I always find it valuable to go to the site of large industrial activity to get a sense of the scope and the potential economic impact, and the economic contribution to a community."

Even moving millions of pounds of rock a day, Keskimaki estimates there are enough reserves still inside the Red Mountain lode – about 1.5 billion pounds -- to keep Henderson operating for 20 more years.

A building boom and demand for petroleum products in China is keeping current moly demand high, he said, as well as speculation that a parallel Alaska pipeline might be built if additional oil drilling is approved in the Arctic. But eventually the mine's rich reserves will be exhausted. When that happens, a major reclamation effort will be required on Henderson's 12,800-acre site.

Lucero said the most significant reclamation work will take place at the mill, where tailings will be removed and wetlands and dry islands created. The company is working already to thin scruffy forests near the mill where weak trees have succumbed to a pine bark beetle outbreak, leaving vast mountainsides of dead and dying trees.

As for the fate of the mine, it may have a sci-fi future. Keskimaki said Henderson is in the running to be a deep underground laboratory for nuclear physicists to study subatomic particles called neutrinos. Since cosmic rays above the Earth's surface can interfere with neutrino behavior, scientists need to observe them by blasting them at high speeds thousands of feet below ground, shielded by a deep rock overburden. Just thinking about it makes the moly mining process seem downright simplistic.

Keskimaki thinks the odds are good that Henderson could be selected, given its proximity to a major airport and the Denver metropolitan area. In the meantime, mining moly by the thousands of tons continues, out of view of the backcountry skiers and hikers and fishermen who frequent the high country above the mine's expansive underworld.

Check out these Web sites for more on the Henderson Mine, NSF plans to build a deep underground neutrino lab, and what neutrinos are and why scientists want to study them.

Parks Project Unveils Mongolia's Natural Treasures

2005-04-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Even the most well-traveled vagabonds have likely never heard of Altai Tavaan Bogd National Park. Tucked away on the far western fringe of Mongolia, near the juncture of Kazakhstan, China and Siberia, lies a one and half million-acre reserve where glaciated peaks rise more than 14,000 feet above some of the most pristine lakes in the world.

Altai Tavaan Bogd National Park (Photo/Ted Wood)

The park's forests and tundra are home to many species, some endangered or rare, including snow leopards, wolves, argali mountain sheep, ibex and elk. Golden eagles soar above the mountain valleys, where nomadic herders train and use them in hunting, as ethnic Kazahks have done for centuries.

Several outfitters in Mongolia offer visitors the chance to explore this remote backcountry on horseback, stopping to hike through flower-filled meadows and along rivers tumbling with glacial till from ice-bound slopes above. Travelers may be invited to share a cup of mare's milk tea, Mongolia's most common form of hospitality, inside a local family's yurt, the traditional round, felt-covered dwelling most herder families call home.

Traditional Kazakh eagle hunter (Photo/Ted Wood)

Few tourists, even among "adventure travelers," have been privileged to see the Tavaan Bogd peaks, or Mongolia's other magnificent national parks, including Lake Khovsgol, perhaps the clearest lake on the planet. Only a few hundred thousand visitors come to Mongolia each year. That's changing, however, as word is getting out about the country's dramatic natural gifts.

That growing awareness, translated into more tourism that focuses on Mongolia's unique landscapes, may be the key to protecting Mongolia's threatened natural ecosystems. It's the intent at the heart of a novel project launched by two journalists, both alumni of CEJ programs, who are working to provide maps, postcards and interpretive guides for Mongolia's national parks. The goal is to enhance visitors' experiences through education and information while returning profits through the sale of such materials to conservation efforts in the parks.

Writer Jeremy Schmidt and photojournalist Ted Wood, longtime friends and professional colleagues, founded Conservation Ink in 2003, a not-for-profit organization based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., as an avenue to "give back" to the world's threatened natural places they've built most of their careers covering, Wood said.

Their mission is to help developing countries protect their parks through funds made available from publications produced by Conservation Ink, not unlike the support for U.S. national parks that's provided by non-profit associations that return profits from visitor center book and gift shops back to the parks.

Wood was a Ted Scripps Fellow in 2001-02, and both Wood and Schmidt attended the 2001 Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment. It was during the Institute, in fact, that the first germ of their idea began to flower. Mongolia's then-environment minister, and D. Galbadrakh, director of the Mongolian Society for Environmental Education, were also attending the Institute. Wood and Schmidt struck up conversations with them, and learned of Mongolia's needs. Their imaginations began to take flight, and two years later, Conservation Ink was born.

Mongolia is Conservation Ink's pilot project. Like many developing countries, Mongolia's natural beauty and environmental health are threatened by a lack of financial resources. Struggling economically after the demise of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian government is looking to industrialization and resource development as paths to a vital market economy and brighter economic future. Often, however, exploiting natural resources comes at the cost of destroying natural landscapes and fragile ecosystems.

Lake Khovsgol, in northern Mongolia, is one of the clearest, cleanest lakes in the world (Photo/Ted Wood)

Wood acknowledged that while Mongolia's government has made an impressive effort so far in setting aside land for protection, about 13 percent of its total area, the economic pull to go in the other direction is strong. Parks have to be able to pay for themselves if they are to survive.

That's where Conservation Ink comes in. If the group's effort can help prove that a sustainable tourism economy is possible, much of the battle will be won. To make that happen, though, people have to know about places like Altai Tavaan Bogd and Lake Khovsgol National Parks.

Those are the first two Mongolian destinations that Conservation Ink has produced materials for. With a seed grant from National Geographic, Wood and Schmidt took several field research trips to Mongolia, horsetrekking with local guides to experience, study and photograph the parks. They also spent time in the capital, making connections that would lead to the opening of an Ulaanbaatar-based sourcing and distribution office for Conservation Ink.

They brought the first sets of map-guides and postcards back to Mongolia to distribute in the fall of 2004, where they are being sold to park visitors and in shops in Ulaanbaatar. CI is also connecting with tour operators, so they can make the materials available to their clients. The publications will help build regional tourism economies, where infrastructure is also a problem, as well as spreading the word (and images) of Mongolia worldwide through sales over the Internet.

Schmidt and Wood are actively pursuing the additional financial support CI needs to continue its Mongolia work and expand into other countries. Other donors, including USAID, have come on board as word of the non-profit's mission meets a receptive audience.

The initial maps and postcards produced by Wood and Schmidt are gorgeous. The text is enlightening and the photography stunning. Take a first-hand look at them on Conservation Ink's web site, www.conservationink.org, where you can also read in greater detail about the organization and its activities.

Look for an update in the fall edition of CEJ News/Views on Conservation Ink's continuing work in Mongolia during the summer of 2005.

Now 100, Forest Service Takes a Long Look Back

2005-04-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

By Emily Cooper

"…where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run."

Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot's oft-quoted exhortation to the agency he created is the bedrock on which the agency's "multiple use" mission was founded. One hundred years after its founding, the service reflects on the past century in a new documentary entitled "The Greatest Good."

Two Forest Service administrators and one of the filmmakers were on hand April 13 for a screening of the film on the University of Colorado's Boulder campus. Not merely a celebration of the agency's accomplishments, the film is illuminated by the bitter conflicts of the past century over forest fires, the impacts of recreation and—perhaps most contentious of all—logging in the national forests. Without offering any neat answers, the film asks its audience, What really is the greatest good? And for whom?

"We didn't want to make a film that just said, 'Oh boy, Forest Service, aren't you great,'" filmmaker Dave Steinke said during the panel discussion following the film. "Because we wouldn't want to watch that, and I'd assume you [would] not either."

"Multiple use" means that public lands should satisfy a variety of needs of the American people, from conserving open space to generating income. To that end, the 1960 Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act directed the Forest Service to manage the lands for recreation, grazing, timber, water and fish and wildlife—a tall order, and one that has probably never been met to anyone's satisfaction. But even if the act codified the concept of multiple use, the roots of the ideal go back to the agency's founding document, a letter ostensibly written by Agriculture Secretary James Wilson to Gifford Pinchot, but which was most likely authored by Pinchot himself. It was in that letter, written in February 1905 at the founding of the modern Forest Service, that Pinchot's famous "greatest good" quote was recorded.

It was not an idea that came out of nowhere for the man the film called "America's first homegrown forester."

Pinchot came from money, with a family that sent him to study forestry in Europe and later bankrolled the first forestry school in the United States at Yale University. He also had connections, one of his best-known friends being Theodore Roosevelt. Both Pinchot and Roosevelt chafed at the actions of the "robber barons" who were, in their eyes, raping the land of its natural resources for their own financial gain. At the same time, the Interior Department's General Land Office couldn't give federally owned land away fast enough. In response to the two pressures of privatization and exploitation of the public lands, Roosevelt and Pinchot began setting aside forest reserves.

While two previous presidents—Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland—had created some forest reserves, Teddy Roosevelt outdid them many times over. In his second term alone, he set aside upwards of 80 million acres. In 1907 Congress responded to his zeal with the Fulton Amendment, an appropriations rider that took away the presidential power to reserve forest lands. Roosevelt signed the bill, but not before adding another 16 million acres to the national forest system—lands that were designated by Pinchot and his assistant, who circled them on a map the night before Roosevelt signed the bill. These last-minute reserves are called Roosevelt's "midnight forests."

Once the forests reserves had been created, the debates began over how to use them. Americans would never have accepted the idea of forest reserves if the intent was to set land aside for its own sake, historian Alfred Runte said in the film. Instead, Pinchot promised that the land would be used for the people. The 1905 manual, The Use of the National Forest Reserves: Regulations and Instructions, written by Pinchot and his staff, states:

"Forest reserves are for the purpose of preserving a perpetual supply of timber for home industries, preventing destruction of forest cover which regulates the flow of streams, and protecting local residents from unfair competition in the use of forest and range. They are patrolled and protected, at Government expense, for the benefit of the community and the home builder."

But societal values shift, and in the last century the Forest Service has found itself in the middle of a sometimes bitter conflict over how best to use the national forests.

In 1935 a small group of men that included Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall—both of whom had cut their teeth in the Forest Service—founded the Wilderness Society. Concerned with the impacts that roads and facilities were making on the public lands, the men argued for the preservation of some of that land in its "natural" condition.

As early as 1924 the Forest Service, at Leopold's behest, had set aside the 500,000 acre Gila Wilderness as an administrative wilderness area. But in later years, the Forest Service fought against passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Preserving land as wilderness, the agency reasoned, was a single use of the land and didn't fit within the agency's multiple-use mandate.

But there was another reason, too, why the service chafed at the popular legislation. The Forest Service was "used to thinking of itself heroically," environmental historian William Cronon said in the film. And it was also famous for its stubborn can-do attitude that one audience member at the screening characterized as "sometimes wrong but never in doubt." That attitude likely exacerbated the fight that was soon to erupt over logging in the national forests.

In the middle of the twentieth century, more and more people turned to the woods for recreation and solitude. At the same time, the Forest Service was facing immense pressure to "get the cut out," or produce as much timber as possible for the burgeoning post-World War II population and the homes that would shelter them. As hikers and picnickers came face to face with ugly clearcuts in their national forests, a conflict was inevitable.

Before World War II, the average annual timber cut in the national forests was ?? billion board feet [gotta look that number up]. In the 1980s, it skyrocketed to nearly 12 billion board feet per year, which caused a major backlash from many environmentalists and recreationists. That battle mirrored a similar one inside the service itself. Jeff DeBonis, a timber sale planner in Oregon's Willamette National Forest, became fed up with the high timber cut and founded Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, with the goal of pushing the Forest Service to manage its lands in a more ecologically and economically sustainable manner.

Clearcutting in the 1960s, especially in the Pacific Northwest (above), inspired radical environmentalists such as those in Earth First! (below) to campaign against the Forest Service.

Looking back, even some high-level Forest Service employees acknowledge in the film that they went too far during the 1980s. Orville Daniels, former Forest Supervisor for the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests in Montana, said that during those years the agency "went to the dark side" in its attempt to get the cut out. Dale Robertson, Forest Service Chief from 1987 to 1993, said the agency during the timber-hungry 1980s really stretched the multiple-use concept by taking timber at a rate that was not sustainable.

But in the post-film panel discussion, Rick Cables, forester for the Rocky Mountain region, challenged the film's criticism of the agency as a whole, saying the timber frenzy was isolated in one area of the country.

"The Northwest, northern California, Idaho, Montana is where the whole agency got painted with one broad brush—that we all went to the dark side," he said. "And I don’t accept it, personally. Because that never happened to me."

Still, he and other panel members acknowledged that the public is more skeptical of the Forest Service now because of the perception that the service went too far with logging.

"Trust was lost, and that still plagues us," said James Bedwell, forest surpervisor for Colorado's Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland.

That distrust was illustrated by one audience member, who said President Bush's Healthy Forests Restoration Act could be called the "leave no tree behind act." Cables responded that such a characterization is "patently absurd." Still, he acknowledged the public's distrust as an obstacle the agency still has to face.

"The only way that you rebuild trust that I know is you make promises and you keep them," he said.

The Greatest Good is primarily a chronological overview, a history of great men—and a small handful of women—who created the Forest Service of today. For people who care about the public lands, it's a fascinating and enlightening journey. But most intriguing, perhaps, are the questions and the conflicts that it leaves unanswered.

In looking toward the future, filmmaker Steinke said he hopes the next documentary would tell a story about a Forest Service that survived budget cuts, avoided being absorbed into a "Department of Natural Resources," and maybe even managed to expand its land base.

"And it would be really neat to see another Pinchot, and another Leopold, and another [early forester Elers] Koch…" he said. "And I think another Earth First!, and another—maybe not Earth First!—maybe a better Sierra Club, to have that passion, I think, that makes for great story telling."

For more information about "The Greatest Good," including background material, interviews with the producers and upcoming screening dates, see the Web site at www.fs.fed.us/greatestgood.

Leaving Their Mark: A Look at Some CU Environmental Journalism Students Who Are Making a Difference

2005-04-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

CU GRAD STUDENTS "SEND" GRASSROOTS CLIMBING MAG
—Emily Cooper

Sometimes, taking advantage of an opportunity is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. For Annie Burnett and Kasey Cordell, both climbers and students in CU's journalism program, Boulder was the right place, and last fall the right time, to become editors of a magazine that appealed to both of their interests.

Last fall the second-year master's students became editors of a two-year-old women-centered climbing magazine called She Sends. The women added their editing duties to their already crazy schedules as students, teaching assistants, and interns for other publications. But Burnett, who mountaineers, and Cordell, a sport climber and boulderer, are used to taking on huge challenges, and this is one they're happy to embrace.

"She Sends is always the fun work," Burnett said. "It's what I look forward to."

For non-climbers, the magazine's title might require a little explanation. Burnett said the word "send" is climbing lingo that means success.

"[T]o send something is to finish a problem, like, 'You sent that,' or 'She totally sent that,' like she just fired right up that, she finished it. She got through it," she said.

It's also an apt name for a magazine that's been fighting since its beginning to turn a spotlight on a growing segment of the climbing population. Lizzy Scully, a climber and journalist, said she started She Sends two years ago because she was tired of having her story ideas rejected by other magazines such as Rock and Ice and Climbing.

"They almost always said, 'No thanks,' when I suggested articles about women," she said.

From the very beginning She Sends was a grassroots effort. The first issue was a photocopied newsletter with a run of about 400. Volunteers have always been integral to keeping it going—Scully estimates she's had help from about 100 people over the past two years—but it was hard to keep people involved for no pay, and she found herself doing the bulk of the work. By last fall, she was burned out and thinking about letting the magazine go. That's when Cordell, Burnett and the rest of the staff stepped in.

Scully knew Cordell through the climbing community, and Cordell was friends and roomates with Burnett, whom she had met through the journalism school. Both were already interested in writing for She Sends, so when Scully started talking about moving on to other things, it seemed only natural that they would take over for her.

The women became editors of the magazine, working with Scully to put out the seventh issue in winter 2005, then taking off with it on their own. Scully is still involved in the publication, but mostly as mentor and visionary. The new staff, meanwhile, found themselves in charge of a quarterly magazine whose circulation had grown in two years from 400 to 10,000 and had changed from a free publication to one that sells for $3.95. Today it has a staff of eight, plus one intern, with writing and photographs provided by an enthusiastic group of freelancers.

"The only thing we don't have is offices," Burnett said. "[O]ur editorial meetings happen at the climbing gym in a conference room, or at our house."

Scully said she had no qualms about turning over control of her magazine to a new group, because she feels they share the same vision for the magazine that she does. Cordell agreed, but said that doesn't mean the magazine won't continue to evolve.

"My goal is to take the magazine in a new direction but to remain true to the original vision," Cordell said. That vision includes celebrating women climbers and helping build community.

Burnett said what makes the magazine different is that the articles focus not just on climbing trips, but what it's like for climbers to have real lives at the same time. And although it aims to celebrate women climbers, it's not just about women.

"It's got a ton of information about male climbers, female climbers, the hot climbers of the moment, and people that balance climbing with other things in their life like children and families and travel and jobs and things like that," she said.

The approach has hit a chord with the climbing community. Although right now its distribution is limited—it's sold predominently in climbing stores, and mostly in the Boulder area—many other stores, including R.E.I., have shown interest in carrying it. Cordell said she's even gotten requests for the magazine from as far away as Ireland and Canada. And it seems to turn up in the strangest places, Burnett added.

"It's kind of like that little magazine that somebody has in Joshua Tree, or someone's got a hold of it in Indian Creek, or Red Rocks, or someone has it in Yosemite," she said, naming some popular climbing locations. "[You] know about She Sends, if you're in the climbing community. It's just so cool."

But no one, perhaps, is as committed to the magazine as its staff, who often put in long hours for no pay. The editors plan to apply for non-profit status this summer, which would make them eligible for more grant money and maybe even make it possible to pay themselves a little bit for their time.

But Cordell said that for her, it's not really about money. She likes working on She Sends because it gives her the opportunity to do something she believes in, and to collaborate with a committed and talented staff.

"And I like laughing and giggling with them at our editorial meetings," she said.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM CLUB TAKES FLIGHT
—Emily Cooper

Although Christine Dell'Amore was born and raised in Maryland, the second-year master's student has a French father, an aunt in Paris and dual citizenship with the United States and France.

"That always interested me in international issues, and it's always been in the back of my mind that it's something that I wanted to do," she said.

It was only natural that when she decided to go into journalism, she would keep her international focus. So she was disappointed when she arrived at the CU campus and found the journalism school's international opportunities lacking.

Rather than postpone her dreams, Dell'Amore decided to do something about them. In January 2004, inspired by an upcoming conference on international journalism that would take place that spring in Paris, she and fellow student Amarely Quintinilla started the International Journalism Club. Founding the club and registering it with the university allowed them to raise some funds to help them get to the conference.

But the club has proven to be much longer-lived than that. In the year and a half since its birth, the club has twice hosted visiting reporters from Germany, co-sponsored talks by a regional AP reporter in South Africa and an Africa correspondent for the BBC, and, with the help of donations from the Tattered Cover bookstore and the Boulder Public Library, set up a small book collection in the student resource center for people interested in working or interning abroad.

The club has also found allies among the journalism school faculty. Associate Dean Meg Moritz and new Global Media Studies chair Bella Mody help keep club members informed about international opportunities and campus events. Moritz is also organizing the school's first-ever international reporting seminar, scheduled to take place this summer in Hungary. Dell'Amore said the club has helped raise awareness that good internship and work opportunities are available worldwide.

"I think now that [internship coordinators] Alan and Beth are very much more open to it than they were a year ago," she said.

Dell'Amore's international aspirations also extended into her schoolwork at CU. The "professional project" is a semester-long research and reporting project that all master's students must complete to graduate. For her project, Dell'Amore traveled to Jamaica to write a story about the country's experiences with ecotourism. She said Tom Yulsman, her project chair, was supportive but also cautious about her topic choice, warning her that it might be difficult to follow up on her reporting after she returned to Colorado.

"It turns out that of all the interviews that I did—which is over 20—all the people had phones, most of them had e-mail, [so] there was no problem clarifying things or checking with them" on facts or quotes, Dell'Amore said. Instead, the biggest challenge turned out to be cultural—"breaking through the formality that a lot of Jamaicans have in talking about their tourism company" and finding out how they really feel about tourism's impact on their country. She also said she wishes she'd been less intimidated by cultural differences and spoken more to people on the street.

Still, Dell'Amore said she's glad she decided to take on the challenge.

"It gave me valuable experience as an international reporter," she said.

By pushing herself to look beyond Colorado for a story, she learned how to approach reporting abroad, contacting people, figuring out how to get around once there, and all the other details that go into organizing a story from afar.

"I also think it will help saying that I took the initiative and did what most people in my program didn't do," she said, "and despite most people's doubts about my success, it still was successful."

GRAD STUDENT TAKES CLASS ASSIGNMENTS TO THE NEXT LEVEL
—Emily Cooper

For many students, journalism class assignments are a good way to practice the craft of journalism. For master's student Jennie Lay, however, they're also a way to see her name in print.

During her two years in CU's journalism program, Lay published every story she wrote for any of her journalism classes. Through a combination of solid reporting and writing on one end, and persistence in contacting editors on the other, she's seen her stories appear in a wide variety of publications including The Steamboat Pilot, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Steamboat Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, Ski and High Country News. Another story was recently accepted for publication by Westword.

Lay's first published story was an in-depth piece on Referendum A, a controversial initiative that would have authorized the sale of billions of dollars in bonds for water projects in Colorado. She wrote the story as her final assignment for Newsgathering I, one of the school's core course requirements. Sandra Fish, the class professor and an editor at the Boulder Daily Camera, encouraged Lay to submit it to the Camera, and a few days before the election, the story ran. Lay, a resident of Steamboat Springs on Colorado's Western Slope, said she thinks the Camera liked her story because it had a fresh angle—the effects of Referendum A on the Western Slope—and included a lot of sources from her side of the state.

Lay said her coup d'etat was her March 2005 cover story for High Country News. "Drilling Could Wake a Sleeping Giant" detailed the history of Project Rulison, a federal government experiment in using nuclear explosions to free up natural gas, and the effects it could have today on gas drilling in the area. But it wasn't the topic, or its front page placement, that made the story her favorite published piece.

"They were just cool to work with," Lay said of the High Country News editors.

Although they made her do a lot of extra research, much of which never went into the final story, she said it was a very collaborative editing process and it gave her confidence not just in her piece, but in the publication as a whole.

"Their stories have a lot of integrity behind them," she said.

Once Lay had had some stories published, it also became a lot easier for her to sell story ideas before she wrote them. She now freelances frequently for Steamboat Magazine and Ski, where she also worked as an intern.

"It's nice to mix it up between fun stuff and serious stuff," she said.

Lay credits her professors in the journalism program for encouraging her and her fellow students to publish what they'd written for class. She said it hadn't even occurred to her at first that all the work she put into her courses could end up in print. But she's also learned that to be a successful freelancer, you need persistence and a thick skin.

"You have to be not afraid to go back to someone after they've told you 'no' a whole bunch of times," she said.

CU SCIENCE WRITER CRACKS THE BIG TIME
—Wendy Worrall Redal

Most master’s students in environmental journalism might dream of one day writing for The New York Times science section or the esteemed British journal Nature, two publications that would mark the pinnacle of most freelance careers.

Amanda Haag already has clips from both.

Haag, a second-year master’s candidate who is one of two CU journalism students in the university’s Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative [Click here for the story], is still incredulous at her early success.

“It’s almost laughable,” she said, attributing her good fortune to a naïve sense of chutzpah when she opted to pitch freelance story ideas to editors at both publications. Only months before, she screamed at the thrill of seeing her first byline in the Boulder Daily Camera, a story on mining and water contamination in Colorado. But Haag quickly managed to parlay her science knowledge, writing ability and personal overtures into a synergy that has landed her two published features so far, with another story for Nature in the works.

Haag, 29, has a B.S. in biology and five years of lab experience. That background helped her land a four-week mini-internship at Nature’s London office in July 2004, which was the springboard to her freelance assignments for the journal. Typically Nature offers only six-month internships, but a fortuitous meeting between Haag and two Nature reporters at the 2004 AAAS conference provided her the abbreviated opportunity.

Haag traces her success at the Times to another face-to-face meeting. During a quick trip to New York, Haag introduced herself in person to Science Times editor David Corcoran. She’d written ahead, sent clips and asked for a meeting. Corcoran obliged. He told Haag not to get her hopes up, that he rarely used unsolicited freelance work, but said she could pitch unabashedly and faxed her the standard contract. She took that as a positive sign. Her third query was a success.

Haag had learned about the work of Morgan Keay, a 23-year-old biology graduate of the University of Colorado who founded a nonprofit foundation to aid the Tsaatan, Mongolia’s traditional reindeer herders, whose herds are suffering from inbreeding and are in need of genetic diversification through artificial insemination. Haag thought Keay’s project might interest the Times, and she was right. Her story, with reindeer as its focus, ran Dec. 21, 2004, strategically just before Christmas [“Future of Ancient Cultures Rides on Herd’s Little Hoofbeats”].

Haag thinks her story was picked up because it was unusual. “Obscurity and novelty are what work for them,” she said. When Science Times uses freelance stories, they tend to be more narrowly focused, “that you’d have a niche for, that maybe nobody else would find out about.” Haag said the big stories go to staff writers, while freelancers are drawn upon to “tell a smaller, manageable story,” perhaps focusing on the work of only one or two scientists.

Her story that appeared in the February 2005 issue of Nature, “Whale Fall,” featured an even more obscure animal twist and the scientists who study such phenomena. A whale fall is not unlike a fallen tree that becomes a nurse log in a rainforest ecosystem. Bone-devouring worms, bacteria and other scavengers live on whale carcasses at the bottom of the ocean, tunneling into the decaying body to suck fat, lipids and nutrients from the remains, in turn bringing a host of nutrients to the sea floor. Some species scientists have discovered appear to be uniquely adapted to live off whale falls. Haag’s story says scientists now estimate that a whale-fall community may survive for as long as a century.

While a subject like “Whale Fall” may sound pretty esoteric, Haag’s goal is to help readers understand the significance of scientific findings. That desire lies at the heart of her decision to leave the laboratory behind in favor of journalism.

She said she remembers “very clearly when I made the turning point” while a lab technician at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. She was working “ridiculous hours,” isolated with her samples and her equipment, wondering whether this was all there would be to her life as a scientist.

In the lab, Haag said, there is the “one-dimensional ‘doing the work,’” the task of scientific inquiry. “And then there’s translating it: Why would you want to know this? Why does this matter? Why should we care? What does this mean to society?” Those are the questions that animate Haag.

“Scientists think about these things, but it’s not the bulk of their work. As a scientist, your work keeps getting narrower and narrower, and my mind keeps getting broader and broader.”

As a journalist, Haag can indulge the bigger questions. And for someone not yet finished with her degree, she’s already doing it in a big way.

Alex Markels Joins Morning Edition at NPR

2005-04-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When my alarm blasts me out of sleepy reverie at 6:30 a.m., I need precisely two things to start my day: coffee and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.

The news show’s staff, however, has been up far longer than most listeners have, preparing the broadcast from the network’s studios in Washington, D.C. In fact, Alex Markels’ alarm goes off at 4:00 each weekday morning, just enough time for him to grab a coffee, orange juice and Odwalla energy bar before driving or roller-blading to his new job at Morning Edition by 5:00 – he can’t take public transportation because it doesn’t run that early.

Markels, who was a Ted Scripps Fellow in 2004-05, joined NPR in April, moving from his Boulder home and an active freelance career in print to his first major radio stint, in the hubbub of the nation’s capital.

Alex Markels

When he arrives, he checks on breaking stories to include or update for the day’s broadcast. By 7 a.m., he’s working with the producer on the morning’s second feed, keeping track of the wire services and newspapers to make sure nothing is missed. Once noon rolls around, he’s ready to start working on future shows.

Markels, who has plenty of experience in daily newspaper journalism, finds the pace intense but gratifying.

“It’s been a huge transition, more from a process standpoint that a content standpoint. I’m supervising staff, working and negotiating with news desks, and turning stories around in as little as a few minutes. Even in daily news reporting, the news cycle wasn’t nearly so short.”

There’s a special satisfaction for Markels in “hearing a story on the air that we put together five minutes before.”

It hadn’t occurred to him to pursue openings he’d seen advertised at NPR previously, since he had little radio experience. But through contact with an editor Markels had worked with at U.S. News and World Report, NPR came looking for him.

“The fact that I founded a community radio station a while back seemed to be enough to demonstrate my interest in the medium,” he said. Markels launched Radio Free Minturn, a public FM station, from a small town in the Colorado Rockies in 1997.

So far, every story he has been involved with at Morning Edition has been an excursion into exciting new territory. As he arrived in Washington, Pope John Paul II had just died.

“I spent the next two weeks learning everything I could about papal succession,” he said.

His Ted Scripps Fellowship experience has already served Markels in his new role as an editor, giving him helpful perspective from which to evaluate the merit of particular stories.

“If a story breaks, such as the recent Bush administration decision on the ‘roadless rule’ [in national forests], I at least have some context to decide whether it’s worth covering,” he observed.

Markels is enjoying D.C.’s ethnic diversity, free museums and spring flowers.

The downside? Traffic. Oh, and he’s still trying to get some sleep. He’s had plenty of preparation for his taxing schedule, though, as the father of 16-month-old Moses. While Moses may now be sleeping through the night, however, it doesn’t appear that his dad will be doing so any time soon.

Moses Markels contemplates new mischief as mom Holly looks on (Photo/Alex Markels)

Fellows Updates

2005-02-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

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

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

Zeke Adler models his punk hair-do.

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

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

Lucia Joseph says "cheese!"

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

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

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

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

Ted and Conor Wood show off their silly hats.

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

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

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

Alumni Updates

2005-02-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Two Former Fellows Win Colorado Book Awards

2005-02-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norton Seeks 'Common Ground' on Conservation Issues

2005-02-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glick Chases Climate Story from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean

2005-02-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

By Emily Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former Ted Scripps Fellow and freelance writer, Dan Glick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pittsburgh Surprises Environmental Journalists at Annual SEJ Conference

2005-02-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2005-02-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

By Emily Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallingwater (Photo/Harold Corsini)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentuck Knob (Photo/Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colorado Ranchers Hopeful in the Face of Drought

2005-02-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

By Omar Cabrera

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

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

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

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

(Photo/BLM Montana)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alumni Updates

2004-11-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

After graduation Nicole Gordon (’02) got a one-year position as a writer/editor at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Her position has since turned into a longer-term gig so she’s still there, writing about atmospheric science for the public, other UCAR/NCAR employees and the media.

Chelsey Baker-Hauck (’00) is director of periodicals at the University of Denver and managing editor of the award-winning University of Denver Magazine. In 2002, Baker-Hauck received a silver Mercury Award for science writing from the International Academy of Communication Arts & Sciences, as well as bronze awards for profile and science writing from CASE Region VI. In January of this year, she received a gold award from CASE Region VI for science/technology/research writing. A highlight of the past year was interviewing U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton (despite the fact that the interview was whittled from 45 minutes to 20 minutes because Norton was caught in traffic). The resulting profile ran in the winter 2003-04 issue of the University of Denver Magazine. Read it at www.du.edu/dumagazine. Baker-Hauck is renovating a Victorian home in northwest Denver, where she lives with her husband, dog, six ferrets and a very grumpy iguana.

Janine (Wingard) Frank (’00) is working as a writer for Gaiam (www.gaiam.com), writing copy for their Web site and email campaigns. She writes: “I love the company I work for and feel as though I have the ideal job. I also had a baby last spring and now I work from home—it just doesn’t get much better than that!!”

Updates on Former Scripps Fellows

2004-11-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Grossman Earns Top Science Writing Honors

Dan Grossman’s radio documentary, The Penguin Barometer, won the American Institute of Biological Sciences’ Broadcast Media Award in February. The documentary, which was broadcast by Radio Netherlands in November 2003, describes how scientists around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change on ecosystems. In announcing the award the judges called Grossman’s piece “outstanding for a wide range of data, non-cliched use of scene setting, use of humor, and a broad diverse voice.”

Grossman’s Web site on Antarctica, WBUR Journeys to Antarctica, won the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last November. Click here to read about Grossman’s recent exploits reporting on climate change from Antarctica and Greenland.

Bowles Honored for Work on Pollution Story

Jennifer Bowles and two of her colleagues at The Press-Enterprise of Riverside (Calif.) won second place this spring in the Associate Press News Executives Council’s annual contest for newswriting and photography. Winners were chosen from more than 1,000 entries from AP member newspapers in California and Nevada.

Bowles’ story, “As Regulators Watched, Pollution Seeped In,” detailed how chemicals from a rocket testing facility contaminated land that was set to become a housing development. It was published in 2003.

CEJ Welcomes the 2004-05 Ted Scripps Fellows

2004-11-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

Five journalists arrived in Boulder in August to become the eighth class of Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The fellowships are sponsored by the Center for Environmental Journalism and funded through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The nine-month program offers mid-career journalists an opportunity to deepen their understanding of environmental issues and policy through coursework, seminars and field trips in the region.

The new fellows will be ideally located for such studies, as Boulder Valley is home to more than 300 Ph.D.s working in the environmental sciences at CU and major federal laboratories nearby.

The 2004-05 Scripps Fellows pause on campus for a photo with Robert Frost.

The new fellows are:

Sam Eaton, an independent radio producer and reporter from Seattle, Wash. He lived most recently in El Salvador where he produced a bilingual radio documentary for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project examines the condition of Central America and its people two decades after the civil strife that tore much of the region apart. Eaton also has reported on global trade issues from Central America for Minnesota Public Radio's “Marketplace.” Previously, he was a staff reporter for Marketplace in New York City and a staff reporter at KUOW, Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate.

Rachel Odell, environmental reporter at The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., covers public lands management, air and water quality, fish and river restoration and recreation. Before joining The Bulletin in 2001, she covered the environment for the Jackson Hole News in Jackson, Wyo., and freelanced for High Country News.

Liz Ruskin is a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Anchorage Daily News. She covers Alaska issues in the nation’s capital, including the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and logging in the Tongass National Forest, among other energy, environment, appropriations and transportation topics. She previously worked for the Anchorage Daily News in Anchorage for nine years, after beginning her career at the Homer (Alaska) News.

Andrew Silva, environment and transportation reporter at The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., has reported in-depth on water and air pollution, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, desert ecology and the bark beetle crisis in the San Bernardino National Forest. Prior to joining the Sun’s staff, he covered government beats at newspapers in Palm Springs, Riverside and Anaheim, Calif.

Nadia White, state editor at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, oversees development of statewide news through bureaus across the state. Her daily stories include a slate of environmental topics from oil, gas and coal production on public lands to a multitude of wildlife and habitat issues. White’s own work has focused on brucellosis, a livestock disease with enormous impacts on bison and elk in Yellowstone National Park. She traveled to Kazakhstan in 2003 to report on the disease in a comparative context with Wyoming.

Since 1997, the Scripps Howard Foundation has provided annual grants for its fellowships at CU-Boulder, named for Ted Scripps, grandson of the founder of the E.W. Scripps Co. Ted Scripps distinguished himself as a journalist who cared about First Amendment rights and the environment.

Journalists Help Tackle Climate Change Conundrum

2004-11-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

By Emily Cooper

In a sunny conference room, seated along two long tables scattered with papers, soda cans and reading glasses, the Senate Committee on Climate Change and a panel of global warming experts face off. Legislators chat, rustle papers and mill around as each panelist in turn raises his or her voice to be heard above the fray.

At one end of the room, a television cameraman records the proceedings. At the other end, three more journalists listen intently to the people at both tables.

The scene looks real enough at first, but then the subtle details sink in. Nalgene water bottles outnumber soda cans on the cluttered tables. The television camera is a handheld video camera. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wears a heart-shaped badge with the words “Big Oil” written on it. And Inhofe is…a woman?

Sen. Inhofe (aka Rosner) listens to a colleague and waits patiently for lunch.

The mock congressional testimony on Feb. 26 was staged by members of the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded fellowship program that throws together 13 University of Colorado students pursuing graduate degrees in the natural sciences, social sciences and journalism. The goal of the initiative is to help the fellows learn—and teach each other—about climate change science, policy and communication.

Alan Townsend, a biologist and CU professor who is one of the two directors of the initiative, said that although there are a number of climate change-related programs that combine the natural and social sciences, CU’s fellowship is the only one he has heard of that includes journalists as well.

He recalled how he and CCSI Co-Director Jim White, a geochemist and CU professor, first worked out the details of the grant application over beers at a Mexican restaurant. He said they decided they needed to expand their thinking beyond the natural sciences, incorporating social sciences and policy as well. Then the truly novel idea came.

“We remembered that there’s this really good Center for Environmental Journalism here, and that that’s really the conduit to the people,” Townsend said. “We weren’t sure at the time how we would incorporate it, but we just thought it would make a lot of sense to at least explore the possibility.”

Sen. Buck White of Montana (aka Townsend) questions a member of the panel about carbon sequestration.

Townsend and White approached CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman for help. When they submitted their grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1999, incorporating journalists had become part of the plan. NSF awarded them a five-year grant, enough to cover an initial planning year followed by two two-year fellowship cycles. The grant began in the fall of 2000; the fellows in the program now are the second group to participate.

For Hillary Rosner and Amanda Haag, the two journalists in the group, the climate initiative was an excellent fit. Rosner had been a journalist for almost 10 years, first on staff at the New York Post and The Village Voice, then later as a freelancer. Much of her writing had focused on the technology boom and the Internet, but she found herself wanting to write more about things that mattered to her—in particular, the environment.

“I wanted to go back to school really badly, to get a kind of base in environmental studies,” Rosner said, “but I just didn’t want to walk too far away from the rest of it [freelancing and journalism].”

The press corps (with Haag in the center) listens dispassionately to the procedings.

Haag came to the fellowship from the opposite direction. She had been working for several years as a biologist in California, and had even spent two field seasons doing research in Antarctica. But eventually she decided she wanted to get out of the lab and move towards writing, as a way to communicate about science to the general public.

She applied mostly to graduate programs that focused on science writing. CU’s program was a “long-shot” because it was a journalism program with an environment (not science) emphasis.

“At that time I was really struggling with the issue of totally walking away from science,” Haag said.

For both Haag and Rosner, the climate initiative helped tie their interests together.

But the fellowship is no small commitment. Fellows meet weekly for a three-hour class, which sometimes includes guest lectures by climate change experts. Townsend and White led the classes last year during the first semester, arranging speakers and giving lectures to help bring the fellows up to speed on the science and policy issues surrounding climate change.

Since then, the group has become more involved in the direction of the meetings. In addition to hosting three mock congressional hearings last spring, they also broke into groups to research the political, cultural and business backgrounds of the U.S., China, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, with the goal of figuring out how an international climate change policy might take all countries’ situations into account.

And unlike many university classes, the fellows’ work is more than just theoretical. This year they’ll be pulling together everything they’ve learned to complete their final project: a new curriculum for an undergraduate-level course on climate change. The course will take an interdisciplinary and global look at climate change, with the goal of encouraging students to draw their own conclusions about the problems and their solutions. Some fellows may even get to try their hand at teaching parts of the course, which is slated to be offered beginning next fall.

Haag acknowledged the issues around climate change are complex, and there are no easy answers.

“There’s not going to be some eureka moment when you’re like, ‘That’s it!’” she said.

But if the fellows’ experience is any indication, people from many different academic backgrounds can learn to work together.

“We thought this would be hard, and I think we’ve learned it’s harder than we thought,” Townsend, the co-director, said.

But it’s also encouraging.

“The basic idea can work,” he said. “People can start to learn across those boundaries and talk to each other effectively, and I think that’s starting to happen.”

Thanks to the hard work of the fellows and their faculty advisors, undergraduates at CU will soon have the chance do the same.

Ancient Ice May Be Key to Understanding Modern Climate Change

2004-11-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When Ted Scripps Fellows come to Colorado to study, they don’t typically expect to be surrounded by polar ice in 40-below temperatures, even in January.

But such was the case when fellows visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo., on a program field trip. Here, though, the ice was locked inside thousands of thin silver cylinders in a freezer unit within the vast suburban complex that is the Denver Federal Center. Inside each cylinder are data that provide scientists with records of ancient climate patterns.

Scripps Fellows & CEJ staff shiver inside the ice freezer. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

The freezer is at the center of the National Ice Core Laboratory, a facility for storing, curating and studying ice cores recovered from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers of the world. The lab is jointly operated funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.

Its purpose is to get information about the climate history of the Earth, obtained by studying the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Through analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in the layers of compressed ice, scientists can reconstruct past climate states of the Earth, including temperature changes over millennia.

The lab’s technical director, Todd Hinkley, explained that studying past climate fluctuations can help scientists better understand the factors that prompt such shifts and potentially help them predict future climate change.

Ice core samples are more thorough than other means of assessing climate history, including tree rings, coral and sediments from the ocean floor. The lab’s web site explains that “an ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.”

Geoff Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, served as the fellows’ tour guide through the lab. Sporting a ponytail that reaches to the middle of his back and a long, wavy gray beard, Hargreaves looks like a modern-day biblical patriarch. The facial hair comes in handy, he acknowledged, when every bit of extra warmth is welcome for someone who spends as much time as he does in sub-zero temperatures.

National Ice Core Lab curator Geoff Hargreaves sports a rime-coated beard. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

Hargreaves helped fellows don heavy parkas for their foray into the freezer, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of cylinders containing the unique collection that Hargreaves oversees. Once inside, his beard hairs were quickly coated in white frost as he explained how the ice core samples made their way from the Earth’s most remote regions to the Lakewood warehouse.

Polar core samples are obtained from Antarctica and Greenland, drilled from deep sheets of ancient ice that has never melted. Greenland samples offer 1/4 million years of data, while Antarctic cores reveal at least 1/2 million years of information and the ability to extrapolate much farther back.

The oldest site is Vostok in Antarctica, where cores have been drilled to a depth of 3,623 meters, or 2 1/4 miles. Beneath the Vostok ice sheet lies a 1,000-meter-deep ancient lake the size of Lake Ontario, created when the weight of the ice above exerted pressure so strong that the friction melted the lowest layers.

The lab, which is the most comprehensive storage facility of its kind in the world, has more than 14,000 meters of ice available for scientists to examine. The cores, which are 3 to 5.2 inches in diameter, are obtained via a lengthy and expensive drilling process. Gas bubbles do not begin to form until the ice is 60 to 100 meters deep, and it can take three to four years to drill a very deep core at a cost of $20,000 per meter, according to Hargreaves. The deepest cores have been drilled to bedrock.

Antarctica’s severe climate allows drilling only during the southern summer from October through January. The last flight out is at the end of February, when the ice cores are loaded onto a ship bound northward.

Preserving them until they reach Colorado is an involved process. The cores are cut into 1-meter pieces, sealed in plastic bags labeled liberally with arrows to note the “up end,” put into silver tubes to reflect heat-inducing light, then placed into insulated shipping containers and stored under the snowpack until it’s time to transport them. The ice must remain at -15º C or colder once it is out of the ground or the gases within will begin to migrate.

The containers are flown aboard a ski-equipped LC130 airplane to McMurdo Station by a frigid pilot who must fly without heat in order to keep the ice cold enough. There, it is loaded into a freezer on board ship and brought to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it is moved onto freezer trucks and taken to the National Ice Core Lab in Lakewood. Each truck is accompanied by an empty truck that is kept cold, in order to transfer the ice in case of an accident or breakdown. Hargreaves explained that it’s cheaper to pay $2,000 for an extra truck than to lose a single meter of ice, which costs $3,000-$20,000 per meter to obtain.

Once the ice cores are safely ensconced in the lab’s freezer, they are available for scientists to study, either at the lab or another research site. Pieces of ice are sent out in vacuum-insulated boxes that keep the ice at -20º C for a week, in any ambient temperature.

Researchers may examine the ice in solid condition or melt it in order to do core gas analysis. In any case, they receive only a piece of the core sample, not the whole diameter, in order to leave a good portion of it as archive. An archive of the entire Vostok core is kept at the lab, Hargreaves said, since it is the coldest and safest repository in the world.

Paleoclimatologists such as Jim White, a University of Colorado geology professor and scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, rely upon core samples from the National Ice Core Lab to further their knowledge of what causes climatic shifts. White spoke to the Ted Scripps Fellows about his research during a seminar leading up to the fellows’ visit to the lab.

White is particularly interested in rapid climate change. The evidence he has uncovered suggests that temperature fluctuations sometimes occur as abrupt spikes, rather than gradual trends.

White’s research team has studied ice samples from the Siple Dome core in Antarctica to deduce that air temperatures there rose up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades as the last ice age began to wane some 19,000 years ago, the largest and most abrupt warming spike ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

The timing of the warming correlates with an abrupt sea-level rise documented by researchers at Australian National University and with less dramatic warming increases seen in the Byrd and Vostok ice cores from Antarctica.

“The signal we see in the Siple Dome core is so strong, we can speculate it may have been the trigger area for the end of the glacial period,” White said. Because of its coastal location, Siple Dome would have been climatically sensitive to events like partial collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would have caused seas to rise globally.

Understanding events like these can help climatologists get a better grasp on the matrix of forces that influence climate change, especially as they seek to discern the more recent role of human beings in global warming. The ancient ice samples stored at the national Ice Core Laboratory are providing some of the keys to unlock those complex mysteries.

Interior Secretaries Reflect on Legacies During CU Series

2004-11-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Worrall Redal

James Watt.

The name alone is enough to evoke a visceral response among seasoned environmentalists. They remember Watt as the abrasive Reagan-era Interior Secretary in the early 1980s, bent on opening vast tracts of Western public lands for extractive use and returning their control to the states.

James Watt, Interior Secretary from 1980 to 1983 under President Reagan. (Photo courtesy of Center of the American West)

Yet one Watt successor, a Democrat deeply at odds with Watt’s arch-conservative agenda, says he is “positively nostalgic” for the Watt years when compared to the environmental record of the current Bush Administration.

Bruce Babbitt, the centrist Arizona governor who headed Interior under President Clinton from 1993-2001, told a University of Colorado audience on April 20th that Watt “awakened the American people to the need to talk back.”

Despite Watt’s tough rhetoric, though, “not a lot changed,” said Babbitt. “This administration is exactly the opposite. It’s not being done in a frontal fashion but in an incremental way, chipping, chipping, chipping…through technicalities, jargon, minutiae.”

Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton's Interior Secretary from 1993 to 2001. (Photo/Center of the American West)

Babbitt cited marginal changes in the Clean Water Act, for example, that are gradually eroding it while at the same time the administration issues press releases touting “improved administration of the Clean Water Act.” Along with Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives, the environment is being damaged through “incredibly subtle means” that are presented in terms that mask the real intent of regulatory changes, according to Babbitt.

Both Babbitt and Watt visited the Boulder campus as part of the “Inside Interior” series hosted by CU’s Center of the American West and The Nature Conservancy. The series features interviews with former Secretaries of the Interior, whose philosophies and policies have been integral in shaping the face of public lands in the West.

Watt met with the Ted Scripps Fellows, Center for Environmental Journalism staff and graduate students on Jan. 10. He took issue with the way his administration has been characterized, contending that a hostile Washington press corps had not told the truth about his accomplishments.

“If I believed what the press said about Jim Watt, I’d hate him,” he said. Yet he claimed that “in every environmental arena the lands are being better managed” since he was in office. “We’re seeing the restoration of air, land and water values” that are in harmony with human needs.

Watt said he and President Reagan were “conservationists” in the “classic school of [former Forest Service head] Gifford Pinchot.” He defined conservation as “the proper use of the resources for the benefit of the people” both now and in the future. Watt contrasted that approach with the “new philosophy of preservation,” one he thinks tilts the balance too far away from people and their needs. When he took office after a decade of major environmental legislation moves, Watt said that balance was far askew.

“The essence of Western Civilization is that man has dignity above all,” according to Watt. It is that basic tenet, he said, which underlies his approach to environmental issues.

“I would be willing to flood a canyon in the Rocky Mountains so that you would have water in Boulder to drink, even if it killed some animals and destroyed some land,” he said.

He agreed that conservation efforts might ward off the necessity of such tradeoffs, but said they need to be “prompted through market-driven initiatives,” not coercive measures.

“The way to get people to conserve water is to get rid of the subsidies. Kentucky bluegrass in the desert is there because water is cheap,” Watt said.

Secretary Babbitt, on the other hand, argued for the importance of legal and administrative means to ensure environmental protection.

“You have to have a legislative stick to get anywhere,” Babbitt said. “Once you have the power, the legal authority, it’s then imperative…to work to reconcile competing interests in the best way that’s compatible with the legal objective we’re here to enforce.”

Bringing disparate voices together to talk about how to achieve objectives is essential for political success, according to Babbitt. He took such an approach to the Northwest Forest Plan, Clinton’s mandate to create a scientifically driven ecosystem plan to protect 200 species on public lands. To do that, Babbitt said, he insisted that jurisdictional boundaries and agency badges were “left at the door” when it came time to engage in joint planning.

On occasion, however, Babbitt encouraged the protection of special tracts of land through administrative fiat. A vivid example was the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, achieved through Clinton’s use of the 1906 Antiquities Act. A provision in the act grants the President the right to declare as national monuments “objects of historic or scientific interest” on federal lands.

Grand Staircase was really “a product of Dick Morris,” Babbitt revealed, the dramatic environmental initiative that the Clinton pollster said would make a big political impact. While Babbitt said “congressional legislation is vastly preferential to a presidential decree,” he acknowledged the practical value of the “creative forcing” possible through his close relationship with the president.

By Clinton’s second term, Babbitt saw that the way forward on environmental issues was to appeal to the president’s desire for a legacy. At one point he showed Clinton a tally between himself and Theodore Roosevelt comparing their records on acreage set aside for preservation.

“I put their names side by side on a card,” Babbitt recalled, suggesting to Clinton that he could outdo his storied predecessor when it came to protecting land for parks and monuments.

“That was the moment,” Babbitt said. “It was not environment, it was legacy…From that point on I had a mandate.”

It was a mandate in sync with Babbitt’s own sense of a legacy for the American people, one dedicated to “preserving ecosystems [and] protecting creation in all its glory.”

“Multiple use is not the right image for public lands,” he told a receptive audience. Currently, Babbitt said, “the primary purpose of public lands is to drill for oil and gas everywhere. It’s an outrage.

“We can’t drill our way out of this cul-de-sac,” he said, arguing that it was not worth ruining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Colorado Plateau “for a few more weeks” of energy use. Longer-term approaches to energy are essential for a sustainable future, according to Babbitt.

“Climate change is the most ominous environmental threat we face in this century…We have to take dramatic steps to get off of fossil fuels,” he said. He contended that the U.S. must look to nuclear power to “bridge across to a future of renewable energy.”

The only alternative would be to cut our energy use by 75 percent, Babbitt said, “and that isn’t going to happen.” In terms of hard choices, “coal emissions vastly outweigh nuclear risks” in terms of environmental hazards, in his view.

But Babbitt worries the American people aren’t concerned enough about the problem of global warming to make the tough decisions required. He commended the public on mobilizing well in crises, but “short of a galvanizing crisis we’re a society of happy complacency,” a condition that isn’t well suited for responding to “slowly emerging problems like global warming.”

If we continue to do nothing, however, Babbitt suggested a vision of the near future: “There will be no glaciers left in Glacier Park in my lifetime. The Arctic will be a bluewater ocean.” When the snow pack in the Rockies disappears and there is no more “timed sequential release” into reservoirs, “it will be chaos in the watershed of the Colorado River,” and “the Colorado ski industry will have to move to Montana.

“And we can’t even muster our elected leaders to do anything about automobile efficiency,” Babbitt said with a note of despair. “Overnight we could double our fuel economy to 40 miles per gallon and cut our fossil fuel use in half…but our political system is unresponsive.”

Yet he is not without optimism. He spoke of the success of the wolf reinroduction program in Yellowstone, launched in 1995 while he was Secretary. It showed that restoring ecosystems was possible, he said.

In a region where the elk population was “out of control, the wolves just electrified the place,” said Babbitt, who also noted that riparian systems have come back, and beaver and aspen are flourishing.

The wolf, to Babbitt, is “the elegant bearer of a message I want to be heard in the West — of dominant public servitude of public lands.”

For Babbitt, protecting threatened ecosystems is paramount. “The wolf is saying, ‘I have the first right to be here.’ Ranchers will have to learn to make sacrifices.”

Two secretaries, two eras: much historical perspective.

The current Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, is expected to conclude the interview series sometime this fall. The date and time are yet to be announced but will be noted on the Center of the American West’s web site, www.centerwest.org, when they are set.

For transcripts of the previous secretaries’ CU-Boulder talks, go to www.headwatersnews.org/interior.html