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

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Former Ted Scripps Fellow Vicki Monks took first-place honors in the
largest environmental journalism contest in North America. Monks won the
top prize for Outstanding Radio Reporting, Large Market from the Society of Environmental Journalists for her National Public Radio story on industrial contamination of Indian lands in Oklahoma.

The story aired earlier this year on the NPR program "Living On Earth."

SEJ announced the award winners Sept. 28 during the organization's annual conference
held this year in Austin, Texas. The contest attracted 240 entries nationwide. The first- place award included a trophy and $1,000 prize.

Two other former Fellows were also honored at the ceremony at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel: Daniel Glick was part of a National Geographic magazine reporting team that took second place in the Outstanding Explanatory Reporting, Print category for its package of stories on global climate change, while Daniel Grossman garnered third place with reporter John Rudolph for their American RadioWorks story, "Climate of Uncertainty," in the same category that Monks won.

Contamination from the Continental Carbon plant near Ponca City, Okla., is so severe that pure white sheep have turned black (Photo/Vicki Monks)

Monks' prize-winning story examined contamination from a carbon black production facility near Ponca City, Okla. and the failure of Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality to control the pollution. Judges called the story "a riveting account of how industrial pollution has affected Native Americans in Oklahoma."

At the SEJ awards ceremony, Vicki Monks encouraged reporters and editors to pursue environmental stories in Indian Country

In her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Monks encouraged other journalists to pursue environmental stories in Indian country. "You can find a wealth of stories that are largely unreported," she told the assembled reporters and editors.

Monks left Santa Fe, NM this past summer to work on a book about Indian Country in Oklahoma one hundred years after statehood. The Fund for Investigative Journalism is backing her continuing project on environmental threats to Indian lands with a $6,000 research grant. She is also teaching broadcasting this semester as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Both Glick and Grossman continue to cover climate change. Glick traveled to Kaktovik, Alaska in October to track the effects of a warming climate on polar bears for a chapter he is writing in an upcoming book for The Mountaineers press.

Daniel Glick and friend stand atop a melting Arctic ice pack

Bill Moyers Exhorts Environmental Journalists to Stay the Course

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Calling George W. Bush "the Herbert Hoover of the environment," veteran television journalist Bill Moyers told fellow journalists that only they are left "to open the eyes of the country" in an era of unprecedented corporate and political assault on the natural world.

In a speech both inspiring and sobering but always passionate, Moyers addressed several hundred members of the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual conference October 1. Speaking on his alma mater's campus, the University of Texas, he said it was up to journalists to uncover the news that the forces of power would rather keep hidden, even though the current level of collusion between those forces is making investigative reporting on the environment a daunting challenge.

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.

"Something Smells Funny": Covering the Chemical Industry With Award-Winning Reporter Dina Cappiello

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Emmett Dunn lives in a modest ranch house in Southeast Houston's Manchester neighborhood, a working-class residential area that borders the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel. A fence divides Dunn's back yard from the Texas Petrochemical refinery, though it does nothing to protect Dunn from the plant's noise, odors and toxic gas releases that he blames for stunting the vegetables in his small garden plot and turning his new white roof charcoal-gray in less than two years.

The refinery's flare burns just a few hundred yards beyond Dunn's property line. When its emissions are highest, usually during rainy or stormy weather that prompts more accidental releases, or "upsets," Dunn notices that his eyes and throat burn. He also guesses that the skin lesions that have bothered him for the past few years are connected to what's coming out of the stack.

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.

CU Grad Denny Wilkins Honored by SEJ

Dr. Denny Wilkins, associate professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., was known as an exacting copy editor during his days around the J-School at CU in the 1990s. No doubt his prowess was honed during years of the same work in the newspaper business, before he came to Boulder to pursue his doctoral studies.

Wilkins received his Ph.D. in media studies in 1996, but he can't get away from copy editing. In fact, it helped garner him the 2005 David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

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.

Pittsburgh Surprises Environmental Journalists at Annual SEJ Conference

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Emily Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallingwater (Photo/Harold Corsini)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentuck Knob (Photo/Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

CEJ at SEJ: Scripps Fellows and CEJ Staff Participate in Field Trips and Panels at Society of Environmental Journalists Conference

When one thinks "wildlife refuge," one doesn't usually picture a Superfund site. Yet the Aberdeen Proving Ground is both. This former military installation in Maryland, where the Army once trained for chemical warfare, harbors a toxic stockpile of World War II-era mustard gas, threatening local neighborhoods through contaminated soil and tainted groundwater.

As the military continues efforts to clean it up, wildlife, including bald eagles, have made the site their home. It's an incongruous connection - yet military lands here and elsewhere have become some of the nation's most important havens for threatened plants and animals.

CEJ Director Len Ackland learned more about Aberdeen and similar sites on a field trip during the 12th annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference, held in Baltimore Oct. 9-13. Ackland's tour was one of several up-close excursions organized for journalists, in addition to an array of panels on key environmental issues. The Aberdeen visit, entitled "Hold the Mustard: Greening of the Military," was co-hosted by former Ted Scripps Fellow Dave Mayfield ('00-'01) of the Norfolk Virginian Pilot, where he covered military issues before his fellowship.

This year's Ted Scripps Fellows joined Ackland, CEJ staff members Tom Yulsman and Wendy Redal, and two CU environmental journalism master's students for five intensive days in and around Baltimore. While Redal studied the near-demise of the Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery on a journey to the EasternShore, Fellow John Flesher and MA student Josh Blumenfeld learned more about another body of water in peril: Washington, D.C.'s polluted Anacostia River, which they explored from canoes.

Flesher, an AP correspondent based in Traverse City, Mich., said the Anacostia offered "a cautionary tale for those who fail to protect rivers from storm sewer and agricultural runoff - a matter of concern in my stomping ground of northern Michigan."

Other field trips visited British Petroleum Solar's manufacturing facility, redeveloped industrial "brownfields" sites and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where scientists are working to reduce the U.S. food supply's "environmental footprint" through such developments as technologies to treat dairy manure and keep hormones in livestock waste from entering streams.

At conference headquarters in the Wyndham Hotel, journalists examined a broad range of environmental subjects. Panels and roundtable meals allowed for lively, sometimes heated, conversation between participants and presenters.

Fellow Elizabeth Bluemink, who covers environmental health issues for the Anniston (Ala.) Star, said the conference sessions she attended "were packed with vigorous debates about topics such as particulate pollution, cancer clusters and global trade. It was stimulating to sit and talk with other journalists who deal with similar issues."

A keynote event at the conference was a spirited exchange between two key members of Congress and President George W. Bush's top environmental advisor about politics and policy, especially with regard to energy, in the post-9/11 era.

Other sessions focused on the craft of environmental reporting, including "blind spots" on the beat, better ways to pitch stories to editors and ways to make complex science accessible and intriguing.

Yet the conference wasn't all serious study: CEJ staff, Scripps Fellows and former fellows met for beer and crab cakes at a couple of local watering holes, indulged in cannoli and cappuccino in Baltimore's Little Italy and discovered the impressively rejuvenated Inner Harbor by water taxi. An evening reception hosted by SEJ at the Baltimore Aquarium was also a highlight, as conference participants listened to a live jazz combo and marveled at seahorses, sharks and myriad creatures of the deep in spectacular aquatic settings.

A Trip Down Washington's "Forgotten River"

By Josh Blumenfeld

The weather was appropriate for a trip down one of the most polluted rivers in America, and a steady drizzle fell from a gunmetal sky.

The temperature hovered in the 60s as we arrived at the Bladensburg public boat ramp near the Maryland - Washington, D.C., border for a five-mile canoe trip down the Anacostia River toward its meeting with the Potomac.

This trip was one of several field excursions planned for the first day of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting in Baltimore, Md., October 9 - 13. Our group was composed of about two dozen journalists from across the nation, and we huddled at the water's edge for a briefing before hitting the water.

Our guides down the river were Robert Boone, founder and president of the Anacostia Watershed Society, and Jim Connolly, director of the Anacostia Watershed Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring and protecting the Anacostia River.

Along the way, we were joined by David Baron, an attorney with Earthjustice, and Bob Nixon, founder and executive director of the Earth Conservation Corps. These two organizations also have worked to stem the degradation of what was once one of the most important trading rivers in colonial America.

Native Americans were living at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers long before European settlers arrived in 1608. According to the Anacostia Watershed Toxics Alliance, the name Anacostia is derived from the Native American term anaquash, which means "trading center."

Four hundred years of clear-cutting, development, sewage, and sedimentation led to the virtual death of the Anacostia. By the 1980s, the river was choked with garbage and raw sewage, and many of the remaining native plants and animals were contaminated with PCBs and chlordane.

Unlike the Potomac River, which has received more than $5 billion worth of clean-up funds over the past four decades, according to figures compiled by the Earth Conservation Corps, the Anacostia has been Washington's "forgotten river." This is partly due to the fact that the Anacostia flows through some of the poorest neighborhoods in the District of Columbia.

As we paddled down the slow tidal current, Bob and Jim described some of the work done to restore the river.

Since the late 1980s, Anacostia Watershed Society volunteers have removed more than 400 tons of debris and more than 10,000 tires from the river. Tens of thousands of trees have been planted, and improvements to sewage and storm drains have significantly reduced the amount of waste entering the river.

In the 1990s, the Earth Conservation Corps began an ambitious project to reintroduce bald eagles to the Anacostia. Under the direction of Bob Nixon, executive director of the Earth Conservation Corps, a small group of inner city youth devoted several years to cleaning the river and creating suitable eagle habitat.

The first eagles were released in the mid-1990s, and today almost a dozen bald eagles once again reside in the nation's capital.

However, the bald eagle reintroduction came at a high price. Several members of the Earth Conservation Corps were killed in gang-related violence during the project. Some of the released eagles bear the names of the dead youth - "Tink," "Bennie," and "Darrell."

After three hours of paddling we pulled off onto a side tributary for lunch at the Kenilworth Marsh and Aquatic Gardens. "Don't touch your mouth, wipe your nose, or rub your eyes before washing your hands thoroughly," we were admonished, a reminder that the river is still a long way from being free of sewage and other toxic substances.

Over lunch, Bob Boone described some of the problems he encountered when he first ventured into the neighborhoods along the Anacostia to solicit volunteers for his clean-up efforts.

"Being white, I wasn't too welcome at first," he said. "But, once the residents and community leaders saw that our mission was to clean the river, they came around."

Today the Anacostia Watershed Society relies on thousands of local volunteers for its clean-up efforts and has a strong working relationship with the community.

Almost 200 bird species call the Anacostia home, and great blue herons and egrets stalked the river's edge while ducks, gulls, terns, and kingfishers floated and flew between the banks. We finally saw one of the bald eagles as we paddled past the National Arboretum after lunch.

Just before the take-out point at Anacostia Park near RFK Stadium, we paused to look at one of the reasons for the Anacostia's troubles. Recessed into the bank behind some scraggly bushes was a large concrete opening. The concrete around the opening was chipped and weathered, but the large red warning sign over the opening was still quite fresh.
This was one of several sewage overflow openings that line the Anacostia and through which stormwater and raw sewage are flushed into the river during periods of heavy rain.

While improvements have been made to the Maryland and District of Columbia sewage and runoff systems, the water of the Anacostia still has high concentrations of fecal-coliform bacteria and other wastes.

By the time we reached the Anacostia Park take-out point next to Pennsylvania Avenue, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was fighting through the clouds. Over the past six hours we had covered five miles, almost 85 percent of the Anacostia River's navigable length. As we took our canoes out of the river, we also took out mounds of trash we had collected -- our small contribution to the on-going restoration of America's "forgotten river."

Josh Blumenfeld is a Master's student in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Lawyers say Activist Judges are Undoing Environmental Protections

By Kathleen O'Neil

Several Supreme Court judges have recently narrowed their interpretation of important environmental laws that had allowed federal agencies to protect disappearing habitats and species. One such decision has left federal agencies unable to protect wetlands, as they had for 30 years, and no new law is in sight to restore those protections.

A panel of lawyers discussed the trend Oct. 12 at the Society of Environmental Journalists 12th Annual Conference in Baltimore. They said while some states- and landowner-rights activists applaud the new interpretations, the change could have a big impact on at-risk species.

"Little-known decisions have put environmental regulatory protection of wetlands and endangered species at risk through court activism," said Eric Glitzenstein, an environmental attorney based in Washington, D.C. "Extreme conservatives who get that chance are trying to re-make the law," he said.

Judges engage in activism when they strike out in a new direction in interpreting laws passed by Congress, something liberal judges have traditionally been accused of using to broaden environmental laws, he said. But several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are reversing that.

Steve Nickelsburg, also an attorney for a D.C. law firm, explained that many environmental protections evolved from a clause in the U.S. Constitution that grants Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. Since pollution, habitats and animals do not recognize state boundaries, and have economic implications, the federal government's right to regulate and protect them has usually fallen under this clause, he said.

Federal protections for wetlands, for instance, were established in 1972 as part of the Army Corps of Engineers' right to control dredging and filling of navigable waters in addition to the Environmental Protection Agency's wetland protections under the Clean Water Act.

"Over the last 25 years, the Corps and the EPA expanded it to cover areas further and further upstream," Nickelsburg said. However, a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling last year invalidated the Corps's authority to protect isolated, non-navigable waters and wetlands used by migratory birds.

"The court said Congress didn't intend to protect migratory birds," Nickelsburg said. The recent decision allows the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) to fill more than 200 small ponds and lakes to create a large municipal landfill, according to a National Resources Defense Council report to which Glitzenstein contributed.

The court's decision indicates that Congress should create a specific wetlands protection statute, instead of leaving wetlands under the Clean Water Act's protection of navigatable waters, Nickelsburg said.

Glitzenstien said he and other environmentalists are very concerned about the long-lasting, permanent effects the new interpretation will have on wetlands throughout the country.

"As a result of this Supreme Court decision, we are losing thousands and thousands of acres of wetlands," he said, since no state regulations are being created to take over their protection.

The Supreme Court is also scheduled to hear a similar case this year that may indicate the court's intent to also cut back on the Clean Water Act's protections, according to Steve Quarles, an environmental attorney practicing in Washington, D.C.

"Much of our law is not specific enough to not allow extensive judicial interpretation," Quarles said, but added he doesn't think there is enough political support now to create stronger environmental laws, because landowners don't want to have to restrict development or make modifications at their own cost to protect species.

"The federal government doesn't want to coerce landowners to save habitat," Quarles said. "The only other choice you have is to pay for it, with a dedicated source of funds to protects those lands and those species."

Patrick Parenteau, professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont Law School, agrees there is little political support for a new national wetlands law or even new state laws.

"Thirty-five states have no laws protecting wetlands; 15 states do have them. The ones that don't want to pass them haven't," Parenteau said. Of the nation's 105 million acres of wetlands, 60 percent could fall under the SWANCC decision as isolated waters that are no longer protected, he said.

The best alternative, said Glitzenstein, is to educate people about judicial activism and to encourage them to participate in elections of judges.

"Judges can be from many backgrounds, but their alignment with a particular ideology - like when private property rights and maximizing profits are held more highly than other rights including community rights, or the Endangered Species Act - these are fundamental beliefs that should be debated in the open," Glizenstein said.

Kathleen O'Neil is a Master's student in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.