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

Two Former Fellows Win Colorado Book Awards

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates on Former Scripps Fellows

Grossman Earns Top Science Writing Honors

Dan Grossman’s radio documentary, The Penguin Barometer, won the American Institute of Biological Sciences’ Broadcast Media Award in February. The documentary, which was broadcast by Radio Netherlands in November 2003, describes how scientists around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change on ecosystems. In announcing the award the judges called Grossman’s piece “outstanding for a wide range of data, non-cliched use of scene setting, use of humor, and a broad diverse voice.”

Grossman’s Web site on Antarctica, WBUR Journeys to Antarctica, won the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last November. Click here to read about Grossman’s recent exploits reporting on climate change from Antarctica and Greenland.


Bowles Honored for Work on Pollution Story

Jennifer Bowles and two of her colleagues at The Press-Enterprise of Riverside (Calif.) won second place this spring in the Associate Press News Executives Council’s annual contest for newswriting and photography. Winners were chosen from more than 1,000 entries from AP member newspapers in California and Nevada.

Bowles’ story, “As Regulators Watched, Pollution Seeped In,” detailed how chemicals from a rocket testing facility contaminated land that was set to become a housing development. It was published in 2003.

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.