Pittsburgh Surprises Environmental Journalists at Annual SEJ Conference

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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 But that picture is long outdated, as CEJ staff and this year's Ted Scripps Fellows discovered while attending the 14th annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Pittsburgh Oct.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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