CEJ Colleagues Discover Louisiana’s Environmental Riches and Challenges at Annual SEJ Conference

By Wendy Redal

The silver pontoon boat chugged slowly through the swamp, slicing through the opaque water that wends its way among marsh grasses and knobby cypress knees. Its passengers, poised at the rail, looked intently into the thick vegetation, searching for the telltale wake that would reveal an alligator slithering from its nest.

Though elusive, gators abound in Louisiana’s swamps, as do marsh deer, snowy egrets and myriad other birds often seen from the deck of Captain Frenchie’s boat as it explores the recesses of Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, a 22,770-acre preserve contained wholly within the city limits of New Orleans. Frenchie is a wiry Cajun with a thick French accent whose roots in the swamp extend back nearly as far as some of the aged, moss-draped trees. He works in partnership with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that administers the refuge to share the bayou’s abundant treasures, often inaccessible on foot, with visitors.

"Captain Frenchie," Cajun boat pilot and storyteller extraordinaire, shares an intimate moment with his baby alligator.

Four Center for Environmental Journalism colleagues were aboard a recent cruise with Frenchie as part of their visit to New Orleans for the 13th annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference held Sept. 10-14. Ted Scripps Fellows Kim McGuire and Vicki Monks, graduate assistant Emily Cooper and CEJ program coordinator Wendy Redal toured Bayou Sauvage on one of several SEJ field trips designed to educate conference participants about Louisiana’s diverse environmental challenges.

CEJ Program Coordinator Wendy Redal pets a baby alligator, held by Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks.

In this case, the issues involve how to protect these lush natural wetlands in the face of encroaching development. Once slated for infill in the 1980s to make way for a new suburban shopping complex, Bayou Sauvage was set aside as a wildlife refuge in 1990. It has remained remarkably wild, despite two freeways transecting it and a garbage dump on its flank. For many New Orleans school kids who never get outside the concrete bounds of their inner-city neighborhoods, a field trip to Bayou Sauvage is as exotic as an expedition to the equatorial jungle and a chance to see up-close the beauty and value of nature, perhaps for the first time.

Other excursions brought CEJ staff and fellows face to face with an array of pressing environmental issues. On the “Coast 2050” tour, Co-director Tom Yulsman, Monks and Redal followed a thin, sinking highway down Bayou Lafourche to the Gulf of Mexico, at which point the road was but inches above the water’s incursion into the marsh. There, they learned about the massive consequences of Louisiana’s eroding coastal wetlands, from disappearing fisheries and threatened oil and gas pipelines to the prospect of New Orleans’ demolition in a major hurricane, without the protective barrier accorded by a more intact coastline. Journalists aboard the field trip also got details of the $14 billion federal restoration project the state is seeking to turn the destruction around.

McGuire, whose beat at her home paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, includes extensive coverage of environmental toxins, attended the “Chemical Corridor” excursion, subtitled “‘Cancer Alley’ or Environmental Hype?” The journalists on board toured a chemical plant and met with industry officials, government regulators and public-interest watchdog advocates in an effort to better understand how health risks are being addressed in one of the nation’s most active chemical manufacturing regions.

McGuire said the most powerful part of the tour for her was the discussion about environmental justice. Participants went into some of New Orleans' most impoverished neighborhoods and met residents who were seeing their communities dissolve as people moved away to escape pollution from petrochemical companies.

"It was an incredibly moving experience to listen to some of the elderly residents talk about how difficult it was to decide to leave their family homes," McGuire said.

Other field trips covered Louisiana’s troubled oyster industry, trade-offs between economic benefits and environmental liabilities of oil and gas exploration in the state, and a canoe journey to see the impact of toxic sludge on Bayou Trepagnier, a Mississippi River tributary named a National Scenic River in 1973 but which had been a dumping ground for untreated refinery waste for decades.

Conferees also attended a broad slate of indoor sessions at the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown New Orleans, including a panel discussion on President Bush’s nominee for EPA administrator, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt.

Each year, the five Ted Scripps Fellows in residence at the University of Colorado attend the SEJ conference with CEJ staff. Fellow Eric Frankowski was honored this year at the conference’s annual Reporting on the Environment Awards event with a nod for best small-market reporting in print.

Many former fellows were also in attendance, including Daniel Glick, a 2000-2001 fellow, who was on hand to sign copies of his new book Monkey Dancing as part of an SEJ-sponsored author-signing event.

Wendy Redal is program coordinator for the Center for Environmental Journalism.

Scripps Fellow Eric Frankowski Takes SEJ Reporting Award

By Emily Cooper

When this year’s Ted Scripps Fellows traveled to New Orleans for the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference, they had a winner in their midst.

At the opening night awards banquet, Fellow Eric Frankowski and Bruce Plasket, Frankowski’s colleague while he was at the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call, won the SEJ’s top award in the “Small Market Reporting—Print” category for their contribution to a series on the Cotter Corporation, a uranium milling company near Cañon City, Colo.

SEJ judges noted the series was “an exemplary investigative series on nuclear contamination, an issue of national significance.” They also commended the reporters for their “elegantly lucid writing.”

The series arose from a controversial proposal by Cotter to store hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive soil from the cleanup of a New Jersey Superfund site in its tailings ponds, themselves already a Superfund site. The project grew to include stories on Cotter’s record of safety and health violations, its history of accepting radioactive materials for onsite storage, and the economic future of uranium milling.

The Cotter series was two and a half months in the making. During that time Lehman Communications Corp., owner of the Times-Call and five other Colorado papers including the Cañon City Daily Record, freed a four-person team that included Frankowski and Plasket to work on the project full time. Frankowski said he spent the first couple of weeks just reading background material, including “unknown hours” on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s website.

Frankowski and Plasket also interviewed Cotter executives, mill employees, anti-Cotter activists, and state health department officials. One of their key sources was Deyon Boughton, the widow of Cotter’s former chief chemist, whom Frankowski called “a fountain of knowledge.”

“The biggest eye opener for me was the kind of effort and resources it takes to do something good,” Frankowski said, noting that the entire newsroom had to work longer hours to make up for the missing reporters.

But the effort paid off. In addition to the SEJ award, the Cotter series also won the Scripps Howard Foundation’s prestigious National Journalism Award for Environmental Reporting.

Frankowski plans to use of the knowledge he gained from his Cotter research for his Fellowship project, which will examine the effects of uranium mining and milling for the University of Colorado’s Nuclear West project.

Emily Cooper is a master’s student in environmental journalism at CU and the graduate assistant for the Center for Environmental Journalism.

The Beast in the Garden Examines the Interaction of Humans and Mountain Lions on the Front Range

By Emily Cooper

In January 1991, Scott Lancaster, an athletic 18-year-old, went for a run in the middle of the day near his high school in the Denver suburbs. He never came back. Days later, when a search party found Lancaster’s body in the woods within sight of I-70, they also found his killer: a healthy, 100-pound male mountain lion.

“This was something that the experts would have told you was not supposed to happen,” says David Baron, author of the new book The Beast in the Garden, a study of the complex relationship between mountain lions and humans in Colorado’s Front Range. But Baron, a former Ted Scripps Fellow, contends in his book that there were a few experts who weren’t at all surprised.


In 1988 in nearby Boulder, two University of Colorado wildlife biologists had been studying the behavior of mountain lions and growing increasingly concerned. Michael Sanders and Jim Halfpenny noted that as the giant cats moved back into the area—following their prey, the deer—they became more comfortable around humans. They came out in broad daylight. They ventured into yards. They started eating people’s pets.

Sanders and Halfpenny warned that as the cats’ fear of humans lessened, they would become more dangerous. Lancaster’s death, the first documented case of a mountain lion killing an adult in at least a century, was just what the researchers had feared.

“In hindsight, it signaled the beginning of a kind of trend,” Baron says.

And for Baron it was the spark for the story he wanted to tell.

Baron hatched the idea for his book while he was a Scripps Fellow during the 1998-99 academic year. He had already done a few pieces on human-predator interactions for National Public Radio, and he had a vague idea that he wanted to write more about the growing number of conflicts between humans and predators. In Boulder, he researched his topic and wrote a story for the Boston Globe Magazine. The main subject for that story was Andy Peterson, a man who survived an attack by a mountain lion in April 1998, near Denver.

Baron was worried that Lancaster’s death, which happened almost eight years before, was too outdated for his book. But he decided that the story, combined with Halfpenny’s and Sanders’ research, was compelling enough to carry the narrative.

By the end of his fellowship year Baron had found an agent for his idea. He moved back to Boston and his job at NPR and spent the next year working on his book proposal. In August 2000, with a modest advance in his pocket, he left his job and started writing. But even working on the project full-time, it took two and a half years to complete.

Baron says one of the biggest challenges for him was the writing itself. The 15-year public radio veteran says he “could count on one hand” the number of newspaper articles he’d written before he jumped into what would become a 288-page project.

In radio, writing needs to be simple and short. Baron says that even a long radio piece looks short on paper. “Just figuring out how to fill that space” was hard, he says.

And then there was the research.

“I interviewed so many people you can’t believe it,” he says.

In his book, Baron described the scene of Lancaster’s death in vivid detail. He relied on interviews, police reports, photographs, and even a video taken at the crime scene to give life to his story. More than 150 people are listed as “witnesses” in the back of the book; even more provided background information. He also had an entire file cabinet filled with factual information: predator-prey interactions, human persecution of predators, history of the Front Range, deer behavior.

Even juggling all that information, Baron found a way to make his writing flow. Publishers Weekly wrote that Baron’s book “reads like a true crime thriller,” and Baron says “to the extent that it’s a good read,” he agrees. But he cautions that it doesn’t mean his conclusions are simple or straightforward.

He says what emerged for him during his research is the certainty that conflicts between people and wildlife are inherently complicated. People tend to polarize around the issue, with some saying habitat encroachment is our fault and we should move out, and others arguing that predators are pests that should be moved or killed. Baron says he thinks the truth is somewhere nearer the middle.

He says the problem is not just that there are too many people living in the predators’ habitat. In some cases, there are more predators now, too. To illustrate, he points to black bears that are now living within 20 miles of New York City, where they haven’t been for 150 years. He says changing demographics of people and wildlife mean there is no single answer to solve conflicts.

“Where the wildlife should take precedence, we should tread lightly,” Baron says. But there are other places “where it’s too late,” and predators need to be kept in check.

Last February Baron sent the manuscript off to his publisher, then went back to work for NPR through the spring and summer. He is now a visiting scholar at Boston University’s Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism.

Baron says writing his book was “a very satisfying experience,” and one that he would like to try again in a year or so. He’s mysterious about his next topic, hinting only that he wants to tell a true story about the Amazon in the 19th century.

But for now, he’s just glad he’s finished.

“I would like to say I really loved writing the book,” he says, “but that would be a lie.”

Author David Baron

Former Fellow Dan Grossman Traces Climate Change to the Ends of the Earth

By Emily Cooper

If you wanted to get to Antarctica’s Palmer Research Station, you would first need to travel to Punta Arenas, Chile. From there, a ship equipped to break through 3-foot thick ice would take you through Drake’s Passage, known for some of the choppiest waters on Earth. Along the way, you’d dodge icebergs and pass through narrow channels carved from rock and ice. You wouldn’t see any vegetation, but wildlife—seals, whales, and all kinds of sea birds—would likely be abundant. When you arrived at Palmer Station, you’d find a small outpost of five buildings, with space to house about 40 people in the summer. By the time you disembarked, you would have been aboard the ship for almost a week.

The trip to Antarctica is one that few people, and even fewer journalists, have made. But Dan Grossman, freelance science journalist and former Ted Scripps fellow, can count himself among that small number. In the past year, Grossman has reported on climate change from two places at almost opposite ends of the Earth—Antarctica and Greenland.

On his first approach to Antarctica, at the end of last year, Grossman said he was awed.

“[It was] stunningly beautiful—craggy mountains falling right to the sea, covered with snow.”

Anvers Island, where Palmer Station is located, sits offshore from the Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks up from the continent like a hitchhiker’s thumb. It’s about 1,700 miles from the South Pole, almost as far north as you can get and still be in Antarctica. And in January—mid-summer in the Southern Hemisphere—temperatures can climb into the 50s. Grossman says there were days that he wore short sleeves. Meanwhile his wife, living in Boston during a cold snap, battled frozen drainpipes and even a frozen dishwasher.

Grossman’s interest in climate change began over a decade ago, when he concluded that “climate change was the most important environmental topic.” In particular, Grossman was interested in paleoclimatology—the study of ancient climates—and both trips were intended to observe ice core research sites. Ice core research involves deep drilling into glacial ice in an attempt to learn what climates were like thousands of years ago. But the National Science Foundation, the governmental body that gives grants for journalists to visit Antarctica, rejected his application two years ago to study ice core drilling there.

Grossman planned to reapply last year, but the only ice core research Americans were doing in Antarctica at the time was on a moving transect of an ice sheet that was simply too difficult for him to reach. In the meantime, he’d read an article in the journal Science that piqued his interest in the impact of climate change on ecosystems. So when he came across the work of Bill Fraser, a researcher who has studied Adélie penguins for 30 years and believes they’re being impacted by global warming, Grossman realized it was a story that should be told. NSF liked Grossman’s new plan, and on Dec. 30, 2002, Grossman found himself aboard the R/V Laurence M. Gould, chugging toward Palmer Station.

Adélies are endemic to Antarctica, and their numbers around Palmer Research Station have declined sharply in recent years. Fraser suspects the decline is due to climate change. The birds are highly evolved for life in Antarctica, and as global warming has led to more snow and less ice, Fraser says the populations around Palmer Station have not adapted well to the new landscape.

Grossman says the Adélies still haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, noting that they could signal what will happen to many other species as climate change continues.

“[The Adélie story] still hasn’t been reported on” by anyone else, Grossman says. “I’m the only journalist who knows about it.”

Grossman’s trip gave him material for several stories about the Adélies. His profile of Fraser will appear in the December issue of Audubon. Two other stories about the penguins have been accepted by Scientific American and Radio Netherlands.

But Adélies weren’t Grossman’s only topic of research in Antarctica. During his five weeks there he met scientists studying penguins, giant petrels, sponges, and krill, a tiny crustacean that’s the base of the food chain in Antarctica’s icy waters. Grossman himself was the subject of interviews for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate, and The Boston Globe. He also collected interviews, photographs, and natural sound, and kept a journal for a multimedia website he created in collaboration with WBUR.

“[Antarctica was] one of the most fun experiences in my life,” Grossman says. The food was excellent, the people were interesting, and he got to attend weekly lectures and fun classes—including one that inspired him to tie-dye his pajamas. And, perhaps most important for a freelancer, the trip was relatively stress-free because NSF arranged the whole thing for him.

Journalist and antarctic explorer Dan Grossman shows off his cold weather gear and recording equipment.

Greenland, on the other hand, was “a completely different trip.” This time, Grossman wanted to make sure he got to see an ice core drilling site. His plan was to create another multimedia website for WBUR, but to do so he needed to broaden his focus. So he started looking around for other topics that interested him and would appeal to the station’s audience. A biological research base at Zackenberg station in northeast Greenland; a lemming research camp on Traill Island off the Greenland coast; and Tasiilaq, home of an Inuit hunter, rounded out his plans.

Unlike in Antarctica, Grossman had to make all of his own arrangements for the trip, which could hardly be called standard travel agent fare. He had to contact the researchers, set up interviews, and arrange flights to remote locations. In all, he made five or six stops to visit as many research sites—an itinerary that required at least 20 plane flights.

Language problems also made some arrangements difficult. The scientists Grossman wanted to visit hailed from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, France, and Germany. He says that even though English is the international scientific language, and everyone he dealt with spoke it to some degree, it was hard to figure out before he got there exactly what people were doing—not to mention who was in charge. And for their part, Grossman said not everyone could understand exactly why he was coming, or what he intended to do.

But once he arrived, in July of this year, Grossman says everyone he worked with was helpful. He speaks especially warmly of Benoit Sittler, a French scientist who has been studying lemming populations on Traill Island for the past 16 years. Sittler and his tiny staff of four lived in a camp that consisted of a few tents and one closet-like building that functioned as a mess hall. Yet they welcomed Grossman “like they were inviting me into their homes.”

“It felt amazingly open-hearted,” he says. “They were happy to have me there as a guest.”

Grossman also made it to NGRIP (Northern Greenland Ice Core Project) just as scientists prepared to pull up a 120,000-year-old ice core—the oldest ice specimen in the northern hemisphere. There Grossman experienced hospitality of a different sort, as the scientists, along with a group of journalists and other invited guests, celebrated the end of the seven-year project with champagne and caviar in the middle of the ice sheet.

At Zackenberg station, nestled in an arid valley at the foot of the Zackenberg Mountains, Grossman saw another long-term project in the works. The station was founded in 1995 on the belief that tracking the impact of climate change on an ecosystem requires at least 50 years of data. Although scientists there are hesitant to draw conclusions after only eight years, they are making some predictions based on climate change modeling. One researcher says the unique ecosystem of the northern Arctic region might be in jeopardy.

As in Antarctica, Grossman tracked the progress of his Greenland trip—as well as a side trip to Iceland—on WBUR’s multimedia website. He also sent some stories on the ice core project to the BBC and CBC. Since returning to the U.S., he’s continued to use what he’s learned to create more in-depth pieces about his trips. In addition to the stories about the Adélies mentioned above, a story about Zackenberg station will run on the German radio station Deutsche Welle.

Grossman says his experiences have altered the way he thinks about climate change in at least one important way: While his focus was once on ancient climates, he now considers the ecological impacts of climate change as well, and how significant those impacts are.

“A year and a half ago, I had never thought much about that,” he says. “It’s a new focus for me.”

For future reporting, Grossman plans to stay with his theme of human impact on ecosystems. He’s hesitant to say exactly where he plans to travel next—but he does offer a general direction.

“I’m looking at some reporting much closer to the equator,” he says.

Visit the websites tracking Grossman's adventures at www.wbur.org/special/antarctica and www.wbur.org/special/dispatches/greenland.

Stewart Udall Inaugurates Interior Secretaries Speaker Series at CU

By Amanda Leigh Haag

“Rock Star.” “Dashing.”

Not the usual way one would describe a self-confessed farm boy with the southwestern high desert in his blood. But that’s exactly how colleagues characterized the charismatic former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall when he spoke Sept. 24 at the University of Colorado’s Glenn Miller Ballroom. Udall opened the 2003-2004 series on the role of Secretaries of the Interior in shaping the American West. The event was hosted by The Center of the American West in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

Udall spoke to a packed auditorium about his 1961-1969 terms as secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and his role as champion of the American environmental movement. He humbly credited his vision and success to “leadership coming up from the grass roots” and “a country that was ready for it.”

Laced throughout Udall’s acknowledgement of his landmark environmental legislation was an impassioned gratitude for the “wonderful bipartisan politics” of the 1960s. Udall is known for initiating the Clean Air Act and the Wilderness Act, among other pieces of landmark environmental legislation, and for valiantly withdrawing mining and homesteading claims to protect Native American rights.

Dressed sharply with a classic bolo tie, 83-year-old Udall’s appearance and his down-to-earth demeanor reflected his Western heritage. Charles Wilkinson, co-founder of The Center of the American West, aptly quoted Udall as he introduced him by saying, “When you grow up in a small farming town and you raise your own food, you’re close to the ground and close to the animals.”

Udall later reflected on being a “Depression kid,” brought up on the principle that “the country’s better off when the community is more important than the individual.” These all-American values shaped his politics and his dedication to the environmental movement, according to Udall.

Interior Secretary Udall with President Kennedy. (Photo courtesy of the Stewart Lee Udall Collection, University of Arizona.)

Throughout the evening, Udall credited his legislative success to the political climate of the 1960s, during which he had an open slate to work with. Kennedy, preoccupied with the Cold War, handed full rein to Udall to manage natural resources.

Udall discredited the assumption that legislation must come from the “top down” in order to command action in government, at least during his terms. “Did the initiative come from the government? It came from the streets. They just burst in my door, and that was a wonderful time,” he said.

Udall’s repeated praise of the utopian bipartisan politics of the 1960s contrasted sharply with his opinion of the rise of partisan opposition that followed. In a question-and-answer session afterward, Udall reflected on the current state of polarized politics and its obstruction to environmental legislation. He asked solemnly, “Do you hear the words ‘Leave behind a legacy’ much today?”

Quoting the “Ask not” inaugural address of President Kennedy, Udall pointed out that the theme of Congress today is “What tax breaks can we get?” not “Is it good for the country, the people?”

But with character living up to his celebrated introduction, Udall ended on an optimistic note, imploring the younger generation to “just demand action” and to “ask what you can do for your community.”

Amanda Haag is a master’s student in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado and a student associate of the university’s Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative.

Weevils Wage War on Invasive Weed

By Amanda Leigh Haag

Within a mile of the sprawling suburb of Superior, Colo., a war is being waged. In sight of shopping malls and town homes, an army of hungry insects is bearing down on its adversary: a noxious weed, known as ‘diffuse knapweed.’

University of Colorado biologist Tim Seastedt led a class of CU journalism students through the battlefield in September. Standing amidst native wild rose, prairie grass and skeletal remains of knapweed, he explained how he monitors the progress and counts the casualties. His insects, called ‘biocontrols,’ have reduced the invasive knapweed on the Superior study site from 30% cover in 1997 to perhaps a tenth of 1 percent cover today, according to Seastedt. Popping open the remains of a knapweed shoot, Seastedt revealed its inhabitant: a thriving weevil. “He was gonna sit inside that stem all winter. But now I’ve rained on his parade,” said Seastedt.

In 1997, Seastedt released a small platoon of plant-munching insects: a few hundred in number, they consisted of a species of stem-boring weevil, two species of gall flies, one species of root-feeding beetle and one species of root-boring weevil. Today, his troops number in the billions and have dispersed across roughly 10,000 acres of land in Boulder County. “Wherever there is knapweed in Boulder County, there now are bugs,” said Seastedt.

According to Seastedt, diffuse knapweed arrived on the scene “with a vengeance” in the 1980s. This member of the sunflower family was introduced from Europe and Asia and has made itself at home in Boulder County open spaces. In the absence of natural predators, the opportunistic weed has infested 83,000 acres along the Front Range, according to Boulder County figures. Seastedt estimates that knapweed can overtake up to 50 percent of grazing lands and prairies by displacing native plants. Cattle dislike knapweed, making it a grievance to ranchers. Disturbed soils from cattle ranges, development sites, and off-trail hiking are especially vulnerable to invasion.

When Seastedt got involved, Boulder County was footing a $50,000-$100,000 bill each year to control knapweed via broadcast spraying of herbicides. A nearby resident with multiple chemical sensitivities attempted to enlist Seastedt, exclaiming, “They’re gonna spray the prairie!” Seastedt declined to get involved until he learned that the county was not monitoring the effects of the herbicides.

Seastedt observed that while the chemicals would knock the knapweed back for a year, the rogue weeds would show right back up again within a couple of years. Seastedt noted, “The prairie is a kind of sink—the reason the weed is out there is because of the seed source.” Essentially tumbleweeds as adults, knapweed can “tumble and bounce a quarter mile across the landscape, most of the seeds hopping out along the way.”

Seastedt had a hunch that the biocontrols might help cut back knapweed. So he talked Boulder County into an experiment: to release his insect brigade on 157 acres of ‘prairie turned knapweed’ near Superior.

Six years later, Seastedt speaks fondly of his insects. On this experimental slice of restored prairie, knapweed has retreated, its seed survivorship reduced to a fraction of 1 percent. Referring to the seed casualties, Seastedt said, “My poor little weevils got up in the spring with nothing to eat. Where’s lunch?” Since knapweed reproduces purely by seed, seed casualties are fantastic news. According to Seastedt, the diminished seed survivorship has also been observed on the 10,000 acres of Boulder County that have been stormed by the insects.

That the insects singled out knapweed has been fortuitous for Seastedt and Boulder County. So far, the insects have only had eyes for knapweed and not natives such as prairie grass. This may hold enormous promise for Seastedt’s biocontrol brigade to treat knapweed across the state. Kathy Damas, Integrated Pest Management Coordinator for the City of Boulder, stated that she thought Seastedt’s experiment had been a great success and that the city had chosen not to broadcast-spray diffuse knapweed this year.

Amanda Haag is a CU master’s student studying environmental journalism and a participant in the university’s Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative.