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Jim Bruggers walks through the mountains above Salida, Colorado.
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| Chris and Jim Bruggers |
June 18, 2026 — By now many of you know that we lost a lion of environmental reporting and our community, Jim Bruggers. He died peacefully earlier this week of a rare and aggressive cancer, surrounded by family, including his wife Chris, herself a beloved member of SEJ's staff for three decades. At 68, Jim was one of the great builders of our organization and of the field. SEJ member Connor Giffin's remembrance in yesterday’s Louisville Courier-Journal, where Jim covered the environment beat, traces his decades of work and the impact on the communities his reporting served.
Many of us knew Jim through that work. Through his decades at the C-J, and later at Inside Climate News, where he was still filing this spring (his last piece ran on Earth Day), he held the region's biggest polluters accountable and gave voice to impacted communities. As one environmental advocate put it, he wrote for "the folks who are downhill, downwind and downstream."
Charles Bethea's 2019 New Yorker profile, “Shrinking Newspapers and the Costs of Environmental Reporting in Coal Country,” chronicled Jim's departure from the C-J with a compelling subhead: “A year ago, the last Kentucky newspaper staffer dedicated to the environmental beat full-time left his job. He was not replaced.”
Jim was also one of the most consequential leaders in SEJ's history. He joined in 1992, and served 13 years on the board, including as president from 2000 to 2002. During his presidency, the board created our annual awards program, and he established our Freedom of Information (FOI) Task Force to defend reporters' access after 9/11. In recognition of his commitment and dedicated work, SEJ awarded him the David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award, our highest honor for volunteer service.
We will honor Jim in a way that reflects all he gave to us as an organization and community, with plans to memorialize his key role in advancing environmental journalism. Please share your memories and photographs of Jim to sej@sej.org and to SEJ-Talk. Our condolences go to Chris, and to everyone who loved him and learned from him.
Molly Peterson
President, SEJ Board of Directors
Aparna Mukherjee
Executive Director
On behalf of the SEJ board and staff
See also:
- "James Bruggers, Who Brought Passion and Kindness to Environmental Reporting, Dies at 68" by Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News, June 19, 2026
- "Longtime Kentucky environmental journalist James Bruggers dies" by Liam Niemeyer, Kentucky Lantern,
