SEJournal is providing full coverage of all eight of the day-long tours from the annual Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference, April 15-18, in Chicago. In Part 2, contributors Meg Duff [18], Nathaniel Eisen [19], Nhung Nguyen [20] and Marlowe Starling [21] provide detailed reports from tours focused on the transitioning steel industry, microgrids, climate-friendly crop practices and evolving Midwestern agricultural systems.

Also check out the first round of tour coverage and read all the great work [17] from our team of early-career freelance journalists, part of SEJournal’s live #SEJ2026 Live conference reporting.

As the Trump administration and its allies seek to stifle free speech and paint protest as domestic terrorism, Voices columnist Yessenia Funes argues that environmental journalists must heed the impact on the environmental movement we cover. Start with what happened in Standing Rock, which swept back into the news this spring. Funes explains the connection, and where we may be headed.

As the Iran war effectively turns the Strait of Hormuz into a bottleneck for much of the world’s oil and natural gas, the price of gasoline in the United States has spiked, creating inflationary worries. So it’s a good time for journalists to remind their audiences of the overall environmental impacts of fossil fuels. TipSheet has more, including 10-plus story ideas and reporting resources.

Bugs may get a bad rap, but a serious possible global decline in their populations is making clearer what may be lost for ecosystems and human societies. Issue Backgrounder peers beneath the detritus to find what insects do, how we try to kill them and how they survive, and why it’s so hard to pin down the data around their shifting numbers.