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.

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

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM CLUB TAKES FLIGHT
—Emily Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


CU SCIENCE WRITER CRACKS THE BIG TIME
—Wendy Worrall Redal

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

Amanda Haag already has clips from both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Markels Joins Morning Edition at NPR

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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

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

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

Alex Markels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Glick Chases Climate Story from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean

By Emily Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former Ted Scripps Fellow and freelance writer, Dan Glick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journalists Help Tackle Climate Change Conundrum

By Emily Cooper

In a sunny conference room, seated along two long tables scattered with papers, soda cans and reading glasses, the Senate Committee on Climate Change and a panel of global warming experts face off. Legislators chat, rustle papers and mill around as each panelist in turn raises his or her voice to be heard above the fray.

At one end of the room, a television cameraman records the proceedings. At the other end, three more journalists listen intently to the people at both tables.

The scene looks real enough at first, but then the subtle details sink in. Nalgene water bottles outnumber soda cans on the cluttered tables. The television camera is a handheld video camera. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wears a heart-shaped badge with the words “Big Oil” written on it. And Inhofe is…a woman?

Sen. Inhofe (aka Rosner) listens to a colleague and waits patiently for lunch.

The mock congressional testimony on Feb. 26 was staged by members of the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded fellowship program that throws together 13 University of Colorado students pursuing graduate degrees in the natural sciences, social sciences and journalism. The goal of the initiative is to help the fellows learn—and teach each other—about climate change science, policy and communication.

Alan Townsend, a biologist and CU professor who is one of the two directors of the initiative, said that although there are a number of climate change-related programs that combine the natural and social sciences, CU’s fellowship is the only one he has heard of that includes journalists as well.

He recalled how he and CCSI Co-Director Jim White, a geochemist and CU professor, first worked out the details of the grant application over beers at a Mexican restaurant. He said they decided they needed to expand their thinking beyond the natural sciences, incorporating social sciences and policy as well. Then the truly novel idea came.

“We remembered that there’s this really good Center for Environmental Journalism here, and that that’s really the conduit to the people,” Townsend said. “We weren’t sure at the time how we would incorporate it, but we just thought it would make a lot of sense to at least explore the possibility.”

Sen. Buck White of Montana (aka Townsend) questions a member of the panel about carbon sequestration.

Townsend and White approached CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman for help. When they submitted their grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1999, incorporating journalists had become part of the plan. NSF awarded them a five-year grant, enough to cover an initial planning year followed by two two-year fellowship cycles. The grant began in the fall of 2000; the fellows in the program now are the second group to participate.

For Hillary Rosner and Amanda Haag, the two journalists in the group, the climate initiative was an excellent fit. Rosner had been a journalist for almost 10 years, first on staff at the New York Post and The Village Voice, then later as a freelancer. Much of her writing had focused on the technology boom and the Internet, but she found herself wanting to write more about things that mattered to her—in particular, the environment.

“I wanted to go back to school really badly, to get a kind of base in environmental studies,” Rosner said, “but I just didn’t want to walk too far away from the rest of it [freelancing and journalism].”

The press corps (with Haag in the center) listens dispassionately to the procedings.

Haag came to the fellowship from the opposite direction. She had been working for several years as a biologist in California, and had even spent two field seasons doing research in Antarctica. But eventually she decided she wanted to get out of the lab and move towards writing, as a way to communicate about science to the general public.

She applied mostly to graduate programs that focused on science writing. CU’s program was a “long-shot” because it was a journalism program with an environment (not science) emphasis.

“At that time I was really struggling with the issue of totally walking away from science,” Haag said.

For both Haag and Rosner, the climate initiative helped tie their interests together.

But the fellowship is no small commitment. Fellows meet weekly for a three-hour class, which sometimes includes guest lectures by climate change experts. Townsend and White led the classes last year during the first semester, arranging speakers and giving lectures to help bring the fellows up to speed on the science and policy issues surrounding climate change.

Since then, the group has become more involved in the direction of the meetings. In addition to hosting three mock congressional hearings last spring, they also broke into groups to research the political, cultural and business backgrounds of the U.S., China, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, with the goal of figuring out how an international climate change policy might take all countries’ situations into account.

And unlike many university classes, the fellows’ work is more than just theoretical. This year they’ll be pulling together everything they’ve learned to complete their final project: a new curriculum for an undergraduate-level course on climate change. The course will take an interdisciplinary and global look at climate change, with the goal of encouraging students to draw their own conclusions about the problems and their solutions. Some fellows may even get to try their hand at teaching parts of the course, which is slated to be offered beginning next fall.

Haag acknowledged the issues around climate change are complex, and there are no easy answers.

“There’s not going to be some eureka moment when you’re like, ‘That’s it!’” she said.

But if the fellows’ experience is any indication, people from many different academic backgrounds can learn to work together.

“We thought this would be hard, and I think we’ve learned it’s harder than we thought,” Townsend, the co-director, said.

But it’s also encouraging.

“The basic idea can work,” he said. “People can start to learn across those boundaries and talk to each other effectively, and I think that’s starting to happen.”

Thanks to the hard work of the fellows and their faculty advisors, undergraduates at CU will soon have the chance do the same.

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.

Burning news: covering wildfires subject of fall CEJ seminar

By Josh Blumenfeld

Extreme drought, low humidity and an abundance of fuel combined to create a 2002 wildfire season that wildfire historian Stephen Pyne has called "the equivalent of the perfect storm." Covering this story required, among other things, close cooperation between public information officers at the fire scene and the media.

Last November 14, the Center for Environmental Journalism brought together two public information officers and four journalists to describe their experiences during last summer's wildfire season as part of the CEJ's fall symposium. Speaking to about 30 journalism students, the panelists discussed the problems faced by public officials who have information and journalists trying to get this information - often under extremely stressful and rapidly changing conditions.

"Safety is the top priority," said Justin Dombrowski, wildland fire management officer for the City of Boulder Fire Department. "This can result in a lack of access to a fireline or a lack of timely information due to rapidly changing or unexpected environmental conditions." Dombrowski noted that the PIO has two, sometimes conflicting, duties when dealing with the media during a wildfire: providing timely information and access while at the same time ensuring the safety of the journalists along the fireline.

Pam Gardner, assistant director of public government affairs for the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region, agreed with Dombrowski. She noted that while a good PIO is sensitive to news deadlines, a fire is not. This requires flexibility by the media. While Gardner realizes that this is difficult while under a tight deadline, it is necessary for safety along the fireline.

To foster better communication during wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the Incident Command System in the 1970s, which established a standardized chain of command during a wildfire. The incident commander has the final say about all fire fighting decisions. The information officer is near the top of the command structure and answers to the incident commander.

During a wildfire, the information officer is responsible for much more than media relations. According to Gardner, the PIO also is responsible for internal communication for firefighters and the command staff; conducting community relations and meetings; dealing with elected officials and handling governmental relations; supervising and organizing staff, supplies and documents; and dealing with accidents, incidents and fatalities along the fireline. Understanding that giving information to the media is only one of the PIO's responsibilities will help the media get their story, Gardner and Dombrowski said.

Still, Gardner said, the number one rule of the PIO is that "the media will always get there before you do."

Representing the media on the panel were Alex Stone and Cory Lopez, radio reporters with Denver's 850 KOA, Robert Weller of the Associated Press and photojournalist and CU adjunct professor Kevin Moloney. All four have extensive experience covering wildfires.

Stone and Lopez both completed a 32-hour wildland firefighting training course and received a "red card." The card, along with special protective equipment, allows them onto the front lines of a wildfire. Both Stone and Lopez noted their frustrations getting access to the firelines, especially when dealing with local sheriff's officials. Addressing Dombrowski and Gardner directly, Lopez said, "Let us help you get the story out."

Bob Weller spent last summer covering the Hayman Fire and the Big Elk Fire, among others. To Weller, the biggest problems in covering a wildfire are editors (especially editors in the East who don't understand Western wildfires and the distances involved), cell phone reception and the people in charge of controlling access to the fireline.

"It's a hell of a lot of fun to go inside the fireline," Weller said. "But it can be a big waste of time."

Weller's biggest piece of advice to reporters covering a wildfire is to watch what you say and where you say it.

"You might have just gotten a great story," he said. "But don't go into a bar and brag about it when there are folks who have just lost all they had."

Photojournalist Kevin Moloney covered last summer's wildfire season for the New York Times. The nature of his work added additional challenges to his reporting.

"A photojournalist MUST be on the scene," Moloney said. "The only picture the editor wants is that big, flaming tree with firefighters in front hacking away with axes."

The flames are not the only dangerous part of a wildfire, according to Moloney. Many of the individuals on the scene are curious, nervous, high-adrenaline people who all want to be in the center of the action.

"You take all these type-A's and put them together, things are going to get a little tense," Moloney said. "Sometimes I think they should just slurry-bomb Valium onto the site."

Whether this summer's fire season will be as active as last summer's is unclear. What is clear, though, is that through better communication between PIOs and the media, a better understanding of the process of fighting a fire and, above all, patience, the story of the fire will get out.

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

Former Scripps Fellows help expose the truth behind Lynxgate

By Josh Blumenfeld

Former Ted Scripps Fellows Dan Glick and Paul Tolme helped expose the truth behind one of the biggest environmental stories of 2002: Lynxgate.

You don't remember Lynxgate? Here's a quick summary.

According to The Washington Times, which broke the story just before Christmas 2001, wildlife biologists in Washington state allegedly planted clumps of Canadian lynx fur in the Gifford Pinchot and Wenatchee national forests to make it appear that this threatened species resided in these areas. The intent of the scientists, said the Times, was the closure of these forests to logging and recreation under the Endangered Species Act.

The problem was, the story just wasn't true.

"The great irony was that many journalists cited Lynxgate as scientists manipulating data, when it was really journalists manipulating facts for their stories," Tolme said.

In an article published in the May/June 2002 edition of Extra, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Tolme showed how this inaccurate story was used by right-wing media as a tool to attack environmentalists and the Endangered Species Act. Tolme followed the story as it jumped from the Times to more mainstream media, including the Associated Press, the Rocky Mountain News and the Wall Street Journal.

After reading the first round of stories, Tolme began investigating the story as a freelancer for Newsweek.

"I saw that the players involved had an anti-endangered species agenda," Tolme said. "This raised my radar."

While Tolme was investigating the story, Outside magazine had contacted Dan Glick about writing a Lynxgate story. According to Glick, Outside believed the Times story and wanted Glick to find out why the scientists had faked the data.

"I looked at the people going after the environmentalists and I knew it was all the usual characters," Glick said.

Glick's article, "Debunking Lynxgate," appeared in the April 2002 issue of Outside.

The work by Tolme, Glick, Ted Williams in Audubon magazine, Lynda Mapes of the Seattle Times and others, revealed the truth about Lynxgate.

The lab used to verify lynx hair had made mistakes in the past, said scientists involved in the lynx study. To check the accuracy of the lab, the scientists submitted several control samples in 1999 and 2000, including hair from captive lynx and hairs plucked from a stuffed bobcat named "Harry." Unfortunately, the national lynx study doesn't authorize using control samples, and the scientists were disciplined and removed from the study.

The story would have ended there had someone not tipped off The Washington Times in mid-December 2001 about the incident. The Times interpretation was one of activist environmentalists using the Endangered Species Act as a tool to prevent access to Washington state forests. From there, the story gathered momentum as industry groups and conservative lawmakers used the story to attack endangered species policies and environmentalists.

As Glick wrote in his Outside article, ". . . the bigger picture here should give pause to anyone concerned over how easily politics trumps science inside the Beltway."

Thanks to the work by former Scripps Fellows Glick and Tolme, along with their colleagues who also were willing to dig for the truth, Lynxgate has faded into obscurity. However, the next Lynxgate may be right around the corner.

"You're always appalled at how the bad reporting sticks," Tolme said.

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