A graduate field scientist-cum-multimedia storyteller trains her eye on the confounding challenges of western water, with award-winning student reporting on three family farms that face the draining of critical groundwater basins. Could land that drought makes untenable for farming be restored as habitat for endangered species? That, plus how the “ladder of abstraction” helped her tell the tale. The most recent entry in EJ Academy.
The “underworld” of sewage treatment had fascinated one journalist for years. But it was only after winning a reporting grant that Christine Woodside had the luxury of spending dozens of hours to focus on how one old, malfunctioning plant left a local community appalled and angered. Woodside shares the details in the latest installment of SEJournal’s newest column, FEJ StoryLog.
What will climate change policy look like under a Biden administration? If nothing else, it appears it will be broadly based across a wide range of executive branch operations. This week’s TipSheet walks you through the top 10 federal departments, agencies and spending centers and how they will pivot to focus on global warming.
"On a bright November morning, the writer and photographer Ben Raines launches his fishing boat into Mobile Bay, the city's skyline visible in the distance."
"In an unusual experiment, a coral reef in Mexico is now insured against hurricanes. A team of locals known as “the Brigade” rushed to repair the devastated corals, piece by piece."
"Global soils are the source of all life on land but their future looks “bleak” without action to halt degradation, according to the authors of a UN report.
"On a foggy October afternoon, a strange vessel chugged slowly through the East River’s mist toward Roosevelt Island. It looked almost like it was upside down: three 16-foot rotors, attached on a triangular metal base, sat motionless atop the deck of the rusted barge."
"A decade a"go, the international community pledged to protect 10% of the ocean by the end of 2020, under the auspices of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity."
The Energy Institute at University of Texas at Austin hosts this discussion with Dr. Carey King, Assistant Director of the Energy Institute and Asher Price, reporter for the Austin-American Statesman and 2019 UT Energy Journalism Fellow, on the future of energy infrastructure policy and the prospect for these new measures in the changing landscape of the federal government. Noon-1:00 p.m.
"Acquiring home insurance has long been a mundane but necessary chore. In California, for hundreds of thousands of residents, it’s turned into a labyrinthine quest that leaves people with expensive, bare-bones coverage. That’s because an increasing amount of Californians have been dropped by their regular insurers after years of devastating wildfires that cost billions of dollars and upended the market."
