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.

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.

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

By Wendy Redal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Origins: Yulsman's new book explores the universe and our place within it

By Wendy Worrall Redal

(For an excerpt from Origins visit Tom's Web site.)

Tom Yulsman was raised in Brooklyn, but his soul is most at home in the wild landscapes of the Utah desert. Here, camped in the quiet amid red sand and rippled rock, the Milky Way smeared across the night sky, Yulsman has pondered ultimate questions about the Earth, the universe and humanity's meaning within the cosmos.

He imagines the same sorts of questions must have preoccupied the Barrier Creek Indians who visited Utah's Horseshoe Canyon 4,000 years ago, the artists behind a line of huge petroglyphs inscribed into a stone wall, the figures human-like but clearly supernatural beings. Did these ancient ancestors also feel a connection to a world beyond their everyday lives in this place, as Yulsman has?

One thing is certain: humans now know an enormous amount about the universe in which we occupy a tiny space. How the universe came to be and where we fit within it is the story Yulsman unfolds in his book, Origins: The Quest for our Cosmic Roots. Published by the Institute of Physics, the volume will be available in bookstores this spring.

Yulsman, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been a career science writer. Formerly the editor of Earth magazine, he has written about "every scientific topic under the sun - the AIDS virus, geology, climate, environmental issues," and with each new subject, his interest in the natural world has grown.

"My fascination just kept expanding into bigger and bigger realms of nature," Yulsman recounts, explaining how he went from writing about Earth-based phenomena to studying the cosmos. He began working on Origins in 1996, when astronomy and astrobiology were intimidating fields he knew little about.

Origins is intended for general readers, whom Yulsman seeks to "infect with the same fascination with nature" that drove his research. The book is for "anyone who's ever looked up at the night sky on a clear night and had those thoughts…'Where did this all come from?'" He hopes his book will strike a chord with the kind of readers who bought Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time but found the material difficult. "That includes me," Yulsman acknowledges. He set out to write a book that would grapple with the same subject matter but in a much more accessible manner.

Yulsman's artful prose and narrative style make it easier for the curious layperson to gain an understanding of some of the most complex physical aspects of the universe's emergence and structure. He uses metaphor and analogy to make concepts approachable.

He also peppers the book liberally with fascinating people: scientists at work, immersed in research and debate. Origins' characters are not just planets, galaxies, quarks and neutrons, but mathematicians, physicists, cosmologists, astro-chemists, theoreticians of astronomy, geologists, even meteor hunters, all engaged in an effort to unravel answers to really big questions: "How could the universe have exploded from nothing? What put the dynamite in the Big Bang? How did galaxies come to be? How do solar systems form? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, how did Earth become an oasis of life - one that has produced a species intelligent enough to ask these questions?" Through visits and interviews with scientists engaged in cutting-edge research on these most profound issues, Yulsman shares with readers the amazing things we have learned.

He also reveals that knowledge doesn't descend in a vacuum. "We think that science happens in big NASA press conferences or in scientific journal articles," says Yulsman. Not the case. Rather, it is achieved through conversation, give and take, surprise epiphanies, testing and re-testing of theories. Yulsman tells one story about two scientists he accompanied to the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii, engaged in a spirited debate about the Orion Nebula at 3 a.m. atop the volcano's rim. "That's where the real science happens," Yulsman points out -- there, in the exchange of ideas between a couple of guys in fleece jackets, not in sterile labs by science nerds in white coats.

It is this emphasis on the people involved in the quest to figure out the cosmos that sets Origins apart from other titles on similar subject matter, says Yulsman. Most books are written by scientists and tend to deal exclusively with the science, he explains. As a journalist, he is able to tell stories and use anecdotes to bring alive what can often be a very abstract set of ideas.

Yulsman's humanistic emphasis unites the materialism of cosmology with the rare -- perhaps unique -- place of people within the universe. "Why is it that Earth alone has sustained an incredible diversity of life?" Yulsman ponders within Origins' pages. "There aren't many books that put that together with cosmology," he contends, though he sees it as a logical linkage.

"I don't make a distinction,"says Yulsman, between the "environment" and the cosmos, "between Earth systems and these bigger systems Earth is a part of." Studying the universe is an outgrowth of studying the natural environment, in his view.

"My interest in environmental issues is part of my fascination with nature, to help people understand…their impact in this big scheme of the natural world." Ultimately, his mission as a journalist, and his goal with Origins, is to foster that understanding: "You must understand nature if you're going to come to any recognition of your place in it."

"Humans are not just a spark flying up from a campfire" in the cosmic realm, Yulsman has come to believe. After spending six years thinking about the immense scale of things in nature, he says he "realized that that's not an accurate picture."

"In a way," he contends, "biologists -- Darwinians -- have done us a disservice, telling us we're just another branch on the evolutionary tree, no more significant than the e-coli in our guts…It's pretty amazing, actually, what humans have done in understanding this sprawling cosmos. Humans are part and parcel of the biosphere…but they are a pretty darned amazing manifestation of it."

Reflecting on that marvel, Yulsman cites "legendary astrophysicist" Frank Shu, who has suggested that it would be a "tragedy of cosmic proportions" if all memory of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, all the cultural achievements of humankind, were to be lost, were human life to be extinguished.

The new thinking among many scientists, according to Yulsman, is that "the Star Trek vision of the universe may not be right: intelligent manifestations of biospheres may be really rare…In the end there's this humanist perspective that's surprising."

"How is it," Yulsman asks in Origins' preface, "that we humans, unlike any other species, as far as we know," can make the remarkable connections we have?

"Consider this," he continues. "According to cosmologist Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz, 60 orders of magnitude separate the size of the very tiniest thing that makes sense and the very biggest thing we know about, the universe. It turns out that we humans are more or less mid-way in size between these two extremes. And that is pretty much ideal for intelligence…From our vantage point in the center of the cosmic space scale, and with the intelligence that this may have made possible, we are ideally placed to understand the story of the cosmos and our place in it."

It is that story, by turns beautiful and mind-bending but always astonishing, which Yulsman's Origins tells.

Wendy Worrall Redal is the program coordinator for the CEJ and editor of Connections.

New edition of Ackland's book available

The recent paperback edition of Len Ackland's Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2002, picks up where the hardcover edition left off in 1999.

Readers learn more about a recent study of workers poisoned at the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory located 16 miles from Denver, said Ackland, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism. They learn that the 10-square-mile site where the factory buildings sat is going to become a national wildlife refuge, despite continuing controversy about the cleanup levels for radiological and other toxic waste at the facility. And they recognize that the most enduring and potentially devastating legacy of Rocky Flats resides in the nuclear weapons that were manufactured there and still exist in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The history of Rocky Flats is a case study of this country's nuclear weapons enterprise, and the lessons that emerge from this history remain to be learned. Making a Real Killing should be read by anyone concerned about the Bush administration's threat, in its national strategy statements, to use nuclear weapons even as it decries their possible possession by Iraq, North Korea and other nations. The Cold War has ended, but the Nuclear Age is far from over.

Yulsman named co-director of CEJ with Len Ackland

Tom Yulsman, who joined the Center for Environmental Journalism as deputy director in 1996, will now be co-director of the program with Len Ackland, who has directed the CEJ since its 1992 founding. Each will take primary responsibility for current CEJ programs and initiatives while continuing to collaborate on overall activities. For example, Yulsman will run the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment and will take the lead in seeking new funding opportunities and developing student programs. Ackland will be in charge of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism and a new initiative called the Nuclear West Project. The Center for Environmental Journalism has accomplished a lot during its 10-plus years of existence and hopes to do much more in the future. This leadership restructuring is intended to help accomplish this.

Institute on the Environment Covers Wide Range of Issues

How soon can the United States rely on wind power for a significant portion of its energy needs? What debates exist over how best to manage wildfire risk on national forest lands? How are scientists attempting to measure global warming more accurately? What happens when free trade agreements such as NAFTA leave loopholes for environmental degradation that the public is unaware of?

Twenty-five journalists who attended the third annual Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment at the University of Colorado at Boulder from May 13-18 addressed these questions and others during the intensive week-long event designed to increase their knowledge about a range of crucial environmental issues. The institute covered key current topics such as climate change, energy policy, public lands management, environmental toxins, and the environmental impacts of global trade agreements. Participants heard from a range of experts including top scientists, academics and policy analysts.

Journalists also got a hands-on session with the university’s new environmental information database, an online resource developed as a joint project by the University Libraries at CU and Center for Environmental Journalism. The site is called “Environmental Resources on the Web.”

Dr. Susan Avery, director of CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, served as institute director for the third year. Her lively opening address aimed to help journalists interpret scientific information more effectively. Avery used a case-study format, as if she were a scientist talking to the press about drought conditions in the West, and asked journalists to identify the headline and focus for the story based on the data she presented.
In addition to sessions on the CU-Boulder campus, participants took three field trips. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, journalists learned about the latest developments in photovoltaics, wind power and biofuels. Climate change topped the agenda during visits to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratories and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where journalists conversed with leading scientists.

A third field trip focused on public lands issues. Journalists visited the alpine reaches of Rocky Mountain National Park, stopping en route at one of city of Boulder’s vast Open Space tracts to examine an ecosystem at the urban-rural interface. The group made a final stop at a water diversion tunnel near Estes Park, which moves water from the Colorado River drainage on the Rockies’ Western Slope across the Continental Divide to the heavily populated Front Range on the east side. Presentations by scientists along the way focused on the impact of growth on biodiversity, national forest policy debates, elk management issues in Rocky Mountain National Park, and problems with water availability and usage in a dry yet rapidly growing region.

Institute participants came from a variety of geographic locales and media settings including the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Albuquerque Tribune and High Country News papers, several magazines including Audubon and U.S. Water News, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and various freelance backgrounds.

Institute participant Robert Braile, senior fellow with the Institutes on Journalism and Natural Resources and former environment correspondent for the Boston Globe, had high praise for the program: “You gathered an intelligent group of journalists and speakers, put them in one interesting and informative arena after another, and allowed our conversation to evolve through the week, becoming deeper and richer with each passing day.”

The Institute, hosted by CU’s Center for Environmental Journalism, is funded by a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Application information for the 2003 Institute on the Environment will be available on this web site later in the fall.