With fishing season underway in the United States and Canada, fish consumption advisories are also on the hook. That means potential stories for environmental journalists. The latest Reporter’s Toolbox points you to state-by-state data sources and walks you through how to best explain them to your audience. Plus, a bonus story tip.
It’s a site of stunning natural beauty. It’s also the place with America’s worst income inequality. A new book details how Wyoming’s Teton County elite have, perhaps unwittingly, used their extreme wealth to remake the region through conservation easements and donations to environmental causes, but remain blind to the needs of the area’s poorer residents. The latest BookShelf review explains.
"B.C. is considering a proposal for a new coal mine, planned in the heart of critical habitat for the endangered Quintette caribou herd in the province’s Peace region."
"Titanic swarms of desert locusts resembling dark storm clouds are descending ravenously on the Horn of Africa. They're roving through croplands and flattening farms in a devastating salvo experts are calling an unprecedented threat to food security. On the ground, subsistence planters can do nothing but watch — staring up with horror and at their fields in dismay."
"Three states that ask the EPA every year for permission to use a pesticide proven to harm bees are using emergency exemptions as a backdoor way to evade pesticide rules, an environmental group argues."
"EPA published a proposal in the Federal Register yesterday that critics described as an assault on minority communities coping with the public health legacy of structural racism."
"In northern Cambodia, giant ibis, white-winged ducks and other rare species have helped ecotourism take flight in recent years. Just two decades after their near extinction, the population of giant ibis has grown to about 300 birds, bringing in thousands of visitors to remote areas of the country. This tourism has provided an important economic catalyst, generating critical revenue for rural communities and conservation initiatives."
"An unnamed senior political official at the Interior Department twice violated their ethics pledge through contact with a scientist working for their former employer, according to an internal watchdog report."
"When the U.S. Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package back in late-March without a cent devoted to green industries, clean energy companies were understanding."
"Efforts to undermine climate change science in the federal government, once orchestrated largely by President Trump’s political appointees, are now increasingly driven by midlevel managers trying to protect their jobs and budgets and wary of the scrutiny of senior officials, according to interviews and newly revealed reports and surveys."
