SEJournalSpring 2008, Vol. 18 No. 1

In this issue:

Tarbell: first to take on big oil

Environment books of the year

Oil on the Brain tracks crude to gas

Conference agenda sneak peek

FOIA successes

A quarterly publication of the

Society of Environmental Journalists

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SEJournalSpring 2008, Vol. 18 No. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS featuresNation’s First Investigative Reporter Drilled Deep on Big Oilby Steve Weinberg page 4

Publishing Paradoxby Bill Kovarik page 7

Market Warms to Climate Change Books in 2007by Bill Kovarik page 11

SEJ Gains Ground for Press Freedoms, Informationby Joseph A. Davis page 12

Inside Story: Lisa Margonelli Interview page 18by Bill Dawson

columnsScience Survey: New Government Effort to ProduceMore Data on Toxic Chemicalsby Cheryl Hogue page 9

The Beat: Long-form Stories— Enterprise & Investigative—Still Making Markby Bill Dawson page 13

SEJ News: Annual Conference page 14

President’s Report: Don’t Leave Climate Change, Environmentto “Boys on the Bus”by Tim Wheeler page 21

E-Reporting Biz: OK, It’s Time to Play the Climate Change Cardin the Campaignby Bud Ward page 22

Media on the Moveby Mike Mansur page 23

Bits and Bytes: Web Tools Help Negotiate the Information Explosionby David Poulson page 25

Research News Roundup: Studies Look at News Bias & Internet’sImpact on Coverageby Jan Knight page 27

Reporter’s Toolbox: Slideshows Can Highlight Big Projects,Offer Readers Moreby Casey McNerthney page 29

Bookshelf Book Reviews begin page 31

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 3

COVER PHOTOThe Trans-Alaska Pipeline inwinter near Fairbanks, Alaska.Photograph by Lance Hankins © 2007,www.lancehankins.com via www.flickr.com

The mission of the organization is to advance public understanding of environmental issues byimproving the quality, accuracy and visibility of environmental reporting.

Editor: Mike Mansur

Assistant Editor: Bill Dawson

Design Editor: Linda Knouse

Photo Editor: Roger Archibald

Section Editors

BookShelf: Elizabeth Bluemink

Research Roundup: Jan Knight

E-Reporting Biz: Bud Ward

On-line Bits & Bytes: Russ Clemings

Reporter’s Toolbox: Robert McClure

Science Survey: Cheryl Hogue

SEJ News: Chris Rigel

The Beat: Bill Dawson

Editorial Board

Robert McClure (chair), Elizabeth Bluemink, A. Adam Glenn, Bill Kovarik,

Mike Mansur, David Sachsman, JoAnn M. Valenti, Denny Wilkins

SEJ Board of DirectorsPresident, Timothy Wheeler

Baltimore SunFirst Vice President/Program Chair, Christy George

Oregon Public BroadcastingSecond Vice President/Membership Chair, Cheryl Hogue

Chemical and Engineering NewsSecretary, Peter P. ThomsonIndependent Journalist

Treasurer/Finance Chair, Carolyn WhetzelBNA

Future Conference Sites Chair, Don HopeyThe Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

James BruggersThe Courier-Journal

Chris BowmanThe Sacramento Bee

Jeff BurnsideWTVJ-TV

Dina CappielloClimateWirePeter Fairley

Independent JournalistRobert McClure

Seattle Post-IntelligencerMark SchleifsteinTimes-Picayune

Representative for Academic Members, Bill KovarikRadford University

Representative for Associate Members, Rebecca DaughertyIndependent Journalist

Founding President, Jim DetjenKnight Center for Environmental Journalism, Michigan State University

Executive Director, Beth ParkeAssociate Director, Chris Rigel

Visit www.sej.orgSEJournal (ISSN: 1053-7082) is published quarterly by the Society of Environmental Journalists, P.O.Box 2492, Jenkintown, PA 19046. SEJournal accepts unsolicited manuscripts. Send story ideas, articles, newsbriefs, tips and letters to Editor Mike Mansur, Kansas City Star, mmansur@sej.org. The Society of Environ-mental Journalists (SEJ) is a non-profit, tax exempt, 501(c)3 organization funded by grants from foundations,universities and media companies, member dues and fees for services. SEJ does not accept gifts or grants fromnon-media corporations, government agencies or advocacy groups. Its membership is limited to journalists, ed-ucators and students who do not lobby or do public relations work on environmental issues. For non-membersubscription information see www.sej.org under publications.

SEJournal© 2008 by the Society of Environmental Journalists.

When Ida Minerva Tarbell beganher invention of investigative report-ing slightly more than 100 years ago,that two-word journalistic term so fa-miliar today did not exist. Neither didthe term “environmental reporting.”

The book that locked in Tarbell’s contribution to contempo-rary journalism does not look especially impressive today. It restson an out-of-the-way shelf, one of millions of volumes in acavernous university research library. Its green cover is faded now,after decades of steady wear, occasional abuse, and, ultimately,lack of use. It is still mentioned in early-20th-century-Americahistory courses on campuses. But few have read it from beginningto end, all 815 pages of dense type.

This is a shame. The book is arguably the greatest work ofinvestigative journalism ever written. The History of the StandardOil Company, published in 1904, is its unprepossessing title.

The book created a social maelstrom that built and destroyedreputations, altered public policy, and changed the face of thenation. This was the era of the great robber barons. Powerful mencolluded to create even more powerful monopolies. By the dawnof Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, however, there arose a cadreof devoted journalists and publishers intent on uncovering the

perfidy of the economic juggernauts, including corporateenvironmental degradation.

Tarbell worked as a staff writer for McClure’s Magazine,founded by an energetic, determined Irish immigrant namedSamuel Sidney McClure. The magazine succeeded during the1890s and into the new century against huge odds. For readers ofmagazines circa 2008, think of McClure’s as a combination of TheAtlantic, Harper’s and Mother Jones.

A woman of formidable intelligence and character, Tarbelllabored at a time when men dominated the realm of journalism.The tycoon John Davison Rockefeller, born into a broken family,had built an empire on black gold and had become the wealthiestindividual of the Gilded Age. With impressive business savvy andupright character, Rockefeller served as the guiding force withinStandard Oil Company, the nation’s most sprawling corporate“trust,” a term out of fashion today except as part of the word“antitrust.”

In many ways, it seems like Tarbell was destined to write theStandard Oil exposé. She was born in northwestern Pennsylvaniajust two years before the first major strike of underground oiloccurred almost in her family’s backyard. The Drake Well wassuch an extraordinary discovery for its time that Ida Tarbellconsidered it a “sacred spot” from the moment she learned of it asa child. Indeed, she tended to romanticize the Drake Well

4 SEJournal SPRING 2008

Nation’s

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By STEVE WEINBERG

discovery and what followedfrom it. She would write,“Here we have demonstra-tions of the enterprise andresourcefulness of Americanmen in adapting what theyknew to unheard-of industrialproblems, of their patienceand imagination in adding byinvention, by trial and error,a body of entirely newmechanical and commercialadvices and processes.”

Tarbell’s emotionalattachment to the oil regionof her childhood did notcompromise her accuracywhen writing about it. Schol-ars who came after her haveverified over and over theaccuracy of her accounts. Inthe year 2000, for example,Brian Black, a member of thePennsylvania State Univer-sity history faculty, acknowl-edged his debt to Tarbell’sresearch in his book Petrolia:The Landscape of America’sFirst Oil Boom. “The writingand spirit of Ida Tarbell roselike a beacon guiding mebeyond the romance andriches to the human andnatural story available in theoil country of Pennsylvania,”Black said.

(Not so incidentally, Black’s own book contains graphicaccounts of how the exploration leading to oil boom towns harmedthe local environment, sometimes beyond redemption. “Certainly,

residents of company orindustrial communities arebeneficiaries of a living madefrom harvesting resources,”Black reflects, “but they are alsosubject to the inevitable declineof their social and naturalenvironment. Indeed, tradition-ally, these earliest industrialcommunities have almostalways been abandoned by theindustries that created them. Toooften a mode of production orland use moves on, and thehuman communities are leftwith nothing in a place that hasbecome desolate or evendangerously contaminated.”)

Paul H. Giddens, a historyprofessor who became a Tarbellacolyte after meeting her atAllegheny College, her almamater in Meadville, Pa.,documented with precision hernever-ending fascination withthe culture of oil in books suchas The Birth of the Oil Industry.Giddens grasped that Tarbellcould never escape the influenceof oil, a “strong thread weavingitself into the patterns of her lifeever since childhood.” Heremotional and intellectualinvestments in the oil culture ofher youth made it impossible forher to ignore the colossus who

would soon dominate the oil industry, and all of American life.Tarbell’s experiences growing up in the oil region of Pennsylvaniawould make her confrontation with Rockefeller all the more shot

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 5

First Investigative ReporterDrilled Deep on Big Oil

“A woman of formidable intelligence and character, Tarbell laboredat a time whenmen dominated the realm of journalism.”

Finding a satisfying niche at McClure’s Magazine in New York City, Tarbell workedlong hours as a reporter and an editor. Her portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte andAbraham Lincoln made her a household name and set the stage for the biggestinvestigation of her career.

IIDAM.TARBELLCOLLECTION,PELLETIERLIBRARY,ALLEGHENY

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indeed with a capital “T.”BeforeherexposéofRock-efeller, she researchedthe lives ofN a p o l e o nBonaparte andA b r a h a mLincoln. Thebooks that arosefrom this researchconvinced her thatTruth about the actions andmotivations of powerfulhuman beings could bediscovered. That Truth, shebecame convinced, could beconveyed in such a way asto precipitate meaningfulsocial change.

Tarbell’s research into the life of Rockefeller convinced herthat good and evil could be embodied simultaneously in oneindi-vidual. Reducing Rockefeller to a symbol of good or evil would

be a biographical sin in itself.Although Tarbell was at timesruthless when chronicling Rock-efeller’s life, she did not makethat mistake; she did not distorthis accomplishments into a sen-sationalistic paradigm of goodor evil. In fact, she titled thefinal chapter of her exposé “The

Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.”Rockefeller presented a substantial challenge to Tarbell.

Unlike Bonaparte and Lincoln, he was alive and at the zenith ofhis power. He had no intention of letting a journalist—and a merewoman at that—question the way he had amassed and used hisfortune. Tarbell’s biggest obstacle, however, was neither hergender nor Rockefeller’s opposition, but rather the craft of jour-nalism as practiced at the turn of the twentieth century. Sheinvestigated Standard Oil and Rockefeller by using documents—hundreds of thousands of pages scattered throughout the nation—and then amplified her findings through interviews with thecorporation’s executives and competitors, governmentregulators and academic experts past and present. In other words,she proposed to practice what today is considered investigativereporting. Indeed, she invented a new form of journalism.

The History of the Standard Oil Company influenced the U.S.Supreme Court—where the justices mandated the breakup ofmultinational trusts—as well as in the court of public opinion,where Rockefeller’s reputation disintegrated. So far during thetwenty-first century, no journalist’s exposé has led to the breakupof Wal-Mart or Microsoft or led to Sam Walton or Bill Gateslosing his sterling reputation as a private-sector demigod. Plentyof journalists, however, have delved into these modern-day trustsandtheir controlling founders, thinking that perhaps the publishedresults will serve as the successor to The History of the StandardOil Company.

SteveWeinberg’s narrative about the collision course between IdaTarbelland John D. Rockefeller, Taking on the Trust, has just been published byW.W.Norton.Weinbergwrote this essay exclusively for SEJ.

through with drama later.Tarbell’s book, which began as a McClure’s Magazine series,

brought her fame and established a new form of journalism knownas muckraking. She became a model for countless journalists, anddespite the passage of more than a century, her work remains anexample of how a lone journalist can uncover wrongdoing.Moreover, through her exposé, Tarbell forever tarnished thepeerless reputation of Rockefeller.

Reading Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company is aremarkable experience; in many ways it seems that it could havebeen composed only yesterday, not more than a century ago. Themost dramatic of all her dramatic discoveries involved thecollusion between Standard Oil and the railroads, a vital form oftransportation back then. Many citizens and their electedrepresentatives believed railroads should act in the public interest,especially given that their tracks often ran through previouslypublic land. But Rockefeller and his colleagues at Standard Oilturned railroad officials into their minions, gaining a significantcompetitive advantage as the behemoth corporation shipped oiland its byproducts all over the nation and across oceans.

The strangleholds that Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart and BillGates’s Microsoft demonstrate in their business realms arereminiscent of the sway held byRockefeller’s Standard Oil. Theenvironmental consequences ofenergy exploration have notchangedmuch, either.

Tarbell’s book played a sig-nificant role in my owncareer. In addition to practicingthe craft of investigative journal-ism since 1969, I have studied it carefully—in large part becauseI served as a spokesman of sorts for that branch of journalismwhile serving as executive director of InvestigativeReporters and Editors (IRE). Based at the University of MissouriJournalism School, IRE serves thousands of members around theUnited States and increasingly around the world. The techniquesTarbell used to gather information about a secretive corporationand its evasive, powerful chief executive taught me that a talented,persistent journalist can penetrate any façade through closereadings of government documents, lawsuits and interviews withknowledgeable sources inside and outside the executiveoffices.Tarbell’s methods have allowed me to train investigativejournalists around the world while directing IRE and ever since.

The most importantof many factors thatdrove Tarbell year afteryear into the 1940s, heroctogenarian decade, canbe stated simply: apassion to discover anddisseminate the truthabout political, economicand social issues. Shebelieved that researchcould lead to anapproximation of Truth,

Tarbell’s research into the life of Rockefellerconvinced her that good and evil could beembodied simultaneously in one individual.

Ida Tarbell rarely relaxed, and often shefelt guilty for putting her work aside. Hersecond home, in rural Connecticut,which she shared with her sister, pro-vided her a peaceful retreat for writingand research away from the demands ofNew York City.

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ARBELL COL

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Rockefeller, who believed that hisBaptist faith accounted for muchof his success, strolled on Fifth Av-enue with his only son, John Jr.,on Palm Sunday 1915.AM

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6 SEJournal SPRING 2008

The new SEJ book award, along with plans for anincreased emphasis on environmental books at this year’s SEJannual conference in Roanoke, VA, are reflections of an increasinginterest in environmental book publishing among SEJmembers. Yet trends in the national marketplace of ideas seemparadoxical.

Two environmental books have topped the bestseller list inrecent years— Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Glenn Beck’sAn Inconvenient Book. (See page 11). That both would rise to thetop of the market may seem to be a bit of a paradox.

But here’s another puzzle. While environmental awareness isat or near a peak, the number of new non-fiction environmentalbooks published each year has declined. The apparent high-watermark was 2001, with 3,571 new books. In 2007, only 2,840 newenvironmental books were published. (See page 8).

The slight declines may be temporary, or even irrelevant, giventhe creativity, range and depth of recent new environmental books.In recent years, new titles have reached from the comic to thecosmic, from highly personal to social, and from individual narra-tives of exploration to hardnosed scientific exposition.(See Environmental Books of the Year 2007 page 8).

Slight as they might be, the numbers are a concern. It’s notjust a reflection of the overall book market, according to ChuckSavitt, president of Island Press, a non-profit publisher thatspecializes in environmental areas.

“One would have thought, given the attention to climate andthe resurfacing of environmental issues, that there would have beena lot more interest in books on the subject,” said Savitt.“Unfortunately, we haven’t seen it.”

Comparing the environmental book trends to overall trends inthe book industry is not easy. The U.S. Census reports a modestone percent annual increase in overall book sales for the past fewyears, but the Book Industry Study Group estimates that overallbook sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006.

And according to the Department of Labor, the average Americanhousehold spent more on reading ten years ago than today ($163 in1995 versus only $126 in 2005).

There are various theories for the mossbacked market inenvironmental book publishing. Savitt believes it may be due toissue fatigue and the easy availability of reference information onthe web.

Literary agent Amanda Mecke of Litchfield, Conn., thinksthere might have been a peak of interest around Al Gore’s bookand movie. Now, the market may be going back to more of anequilibrium point.

Photographer Gary Braasch has another perspective.“Environmental books are always a hard sell — unless you are

Al Gore,” said Braasch, whose book Earth Under Fire takes thecamera to the front lines of climate change.

“I have noticed during the Bush administration a downturn inphoto requests on environmental subjects from magazines whenMr. Bush started the war,” Braasch said. “I also experienced thisduring his dad’s administration when the Gulf War started, and thenrecently a slight uptick as the news about global warming and thefailures of the Bush Administration in various programs arebecoming better known.”

A few bright spots stand out for environmental bookpublishers. Universities are ordering more environmental books,

even as supplementary texts for courses outside environmentalscience. And environmental issues are getting more respect fromreviewers at many major newspapers and magazines.

“There’s definitely an interest in climate (issues), but peopleare not interested in reading more books that scare them,” Savittsaid. “They get enough of that from newspapers and TV and radio.”

What speaks to the market these days, Savitt and others say,are books about action and personal experience.

In short, hope sells. Some examples:• Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argue in Break

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 7

Environment,a hot topic,addressed infewer books

publishingparadox

Feature

By BILL KOVARIK

continued on next page

This list of books was not selected through any comprehensive ormethodical review process but rather with the assistance of openrecommendation from SEJ members on the SEJ listserve, SEJ-Talk.

Peter Annin, Great Lakes Water Wars, Island Press

David Beerling, The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’sHistory, Oxford University Press

Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr.James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, Dutton

Gary Braasch, Earth Under Fire, University of California Press

John D. Cox, Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What ItMeans for Our Future, Joseph Henry Press

Gwyneth Cravens, Power to Save the World: The Truth AboutNuclear Energy, Knopf

Kevin Danaher, Jason Mark and Shannon Biggs, Building theGreen Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots, PolipointPress

Brangien Davis, Wake Up and Smell the Planet: The Non-Pompous,Non-Preachy Grist (magazine) Guide to Greening Your Day,Mountaineers Books

Devra Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Basic

Bill DeBuys, The Walk, Trinity University Press

Through that the environmental movement must focus onbuilding the politics of shared hope rather than fear.

• Jay Inslee’s Apollo’s Fire includes strong narratives of thingsbusinesses and communities are doing about climate.

• Penny Loeb’s Moving Mountains presents a dramaticnarrative about women leading the fight against mountaintopremoval mining in Appalachia.

• And Thomas Friedman’s Green is the New Red, White andBlue, due out next August, is expected to focus on the “greenestgeneration.”

Personal narratives have also proven fascinating toreaders. Julian Crandall Hollick’s Ganga, about travelingalong the Ganges River, and Peter Thompson’s Sacred Sea,about a journey to Lake Baikal in Siberia, are recent ex-amples of the environmental travel genre.

Some ideas seem natural, taking off so quickly thatthey become part of the language. Michael Pollan’s book,Omnivore’s Dilemma, led to a new word for local foodpreference, “locavore,” that became the word of the year2007 for the Oxford American Dictionary.

New 2007 books also included exposés like MarkSchapiro’s Exposed, about the lack of US regulation oftoxic chemicals and how it affects U.S. trade relations.Also in the genre of investigative journalism and historyare Devra Davis’ Secret History of the War on Cancer

and Cape Wind by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb.Inevitably, some environmental books are aimed by

authors to sadden us or force us to contemplate elementsof the natural world that are lost or at risk and, possibly,inspire action. David Wilcove’s No Way Home: The De-cline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations describes air,land and water migrations from Alaska to the Serengeti.Similarly, Calum Roberts’ Unnatural History of the Seadescribes the decline of the seas and fisheries throughhistory.

Finally, if you are looking for a book that will evoke depres-sion akin to a Eugene O’Neill theatrical production, nothing thisyear could serve better than Alan Weisman’s The World WithoutUs— a book that frankly contemplates the end of humanity andthe eventual recovery of natural systems.

But wait. If hope sells, why is Weisman’s book doingso well? In February 2008, it had an Amazon rank of 236.

It’s the perfect paradox.

Bill Kovarik, an SEJ board member, teaches environmentaljournalism at Radford University.

Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela M. Doughman, eds., ClimateChange: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and OurGrandchildren, MIT Press

Josh Dorfman, The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy,Stylish, Green Living, Stewart, Tabori & Chang

John Duffield, Over a Barrel: The Costs of U.S. Foreign OilDependence, Stanford Law Books

Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, BostonReview Books

H. Bruce Franklin, The Most Important Fish in the Sea, IslandBooks

Eban Goodstein, Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction:How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming, Vermont

Al Gore, The Assault on Reason, Penguin

Peter Grose, Power to People, Island Press

Paul Hawken, How the Largest Movement in the World Came IntoBeing and Why No One Saw It Coming, Viking

Mayer Hillman, The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent GlobalClimate Catastrophe, Thomas Dunne Books

Gary Holthaus, From the Farm to the Table: What All AmericansNeed to Know About Agriculture, Univ. of Kentucky

ENVIRONMENTALBOOKS OFTHE YEAR 2007(From the Environmental History Timeline www.environmentalhistory.org)

8 SEJournal SPRING 2008 continued on page 10

New Government Effort to Produce More Data onToxic Chemicals

We don’t have a lot of information about many of theindustrial chemicals that are in our air, water and soil, or those thatare increasingly found in our blood.

This dearth of data often leaves audiences hanging when jour-nalists report about pollution and biomonitoring. Toooften, scientists just can’t tell us what the presenceof Chemical X in our bodies means.

This information is scarce in part becausetesting chemicals to see if they cause toxic

effects — like cancer or birth defects — takes along time and is expensive. For instance, an ex-periment to determine whether a substance can causecancer in laboratory rodents costsbetween $2 million and$3 million and takes about two years to complete. TheU.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), a worldleader intesting chemicals, has done studies on onlyabout 2,500 substances over the past 30 years.

But the situation is starting to change. In February, two U.S.government research agencies agreed to collaborate on new testingmethods that could revolutionize the field oftoxicology. These new techniques are expected to helpscientists learn why some chemicals make people sick.

Thecollaboration,betweentheNational InstitutesofHealth(NIH)andtheEnvironmentalProtectionAgency,shouldproduceheapsof informationabout tens of thousands of industrial chemicals. This, in turn, could lead tothe regulation of more chemicals, invention of safer substitutes, and,ultimately, healthier people living in a healthier environment. It will alsoprovide loads of new data for environmental journalists to use in informingthe public.

The federal effort is fundamentally changing how chemicalsare tested for toxic effects. The new methods rely on human cellscultured in laboratory dishes and computer technology to rapidlyassess what causes toxicity in those cells. The buzzword “high-throughput” is used to describe these new techniques. It meansdoing lots and lots of small-scale tests really fast.

This marks a big shift from past practice. For decades,toxicologists have studied the effects of chemicals by feeding orinjecting laboratory animals – mainly rats and mice – with a rangeof doses of a substance.

Researchers look for effects in the animals, such as weightloss or a shorter life than their peers who didn’t get exposed to thechemical (the “control” animals) or those in the experiment thatgot a smaller dose. At the end of study, researchers examine theanimals’ internal organs for possible problems. In sometoxicology tests, rats or mice are given the chemicals and theiroffspring are studied for harmful effects.

These traditional toxicology studies on animals, sometimescalled in vivo techniques, take years to complete and are extremelyexpensive. Animal welfare proponents find these studies abhor-rent and lobby hard to stop them.

The new methods – called in vitro techniques – hold promiseforscreening tensof thousandsofchemicals forpotentially toxiceffectsandfor reducing the need to use animal testing. These procedures allow

scientists to determine how genes, proteins and biologicalpathways are influenced, for good or for bad, by exposure tochemicals. This helps researchers to pinpoint the key steps in thedevelopment of diseases such as cancer.

The collaboration is designed to vali-date the new methods for toxicity testing.It will begin by focusing on chemicals thatalready tested through traditional means.NTP, located at the National Institute ofEnvironmental Health Sciences in

Research Triangle Park, N.C., and EPA arecontributing traditional toxicity data on 2,800

chemicals to the project. The compoundsinclude industrial chemicals and ingredients in pesticides,

cosmetics, plastics and herbal supplements.Government researchers will use the new

techniques to figure out why these substances are toxic.The effort will fine-tune thecomputerized tests and demonstrate that theyare as good as, or perhaps better than,

experimenting on rats and mice.The National Human Genome

Research Institute, part of NIH in Bethesda, Md.,has the equipment to run the “high-throughput”

tests. Until now, this NIH program has focused on testing com-pounds that could prevent development of diseases like diabetes orbreast cancer. In the new program, the research institute will dothe opposite by studying exactly how toxic chemicals disturb bio-chemical pathways and cause disease.

EPA expects to release the first comparisons of traditionaltoxicity tests and results from the new procedures to the public

later this year.

Cheryl Hogue reports from Washington, D.C.,for Chemical & Engineering News.

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 9

MEDIA CONTACTS

Raymond MacDougallNational Human Genome Research Institute,(301) 402-0911 macdougallr@mail.nih.gov

Robin MackarNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National

Toxicology Program, (919) 541-0073 rmackar@niehs.nih.gov

Bob CassellEnvironmental Protection Agency

(202) 564-3326 cassell.robert@epa.gov

Science Survey

By CHERYL HOGUE

Whew - just in time!I wouldn’t want tohidemy natural beauty

in a laboratory.

Julian Crandall Hollick, Ganga: A Journey Down the Sacred River,Island Press

Christopher C. Horner, The Politically Incorrect Guide to GlobalWarming, Regnery

Joy Horowitz, Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly HillsHigh School, Viking

Mark Harris, Grave Matters: A Journey through the ModernFuneral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, Scribner

Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’sClean Energy Economy, Island Press

Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, eds., Ignition: What You Can Doto Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, Island Press

Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and theDestruction of Civilizations, Simon & Schuster

Penny Loeb, Moving Mountains: How One Woman and HerCommunity Won Justice from Big Coal, KY

Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide toGlobal Warming, Knopf

Chris Mooney, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battleover Global Warming, Harcourt Inc.

Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: RethinkingEnvironmental Aesthetics, Harvard

Bill McKibben, Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook forTaking Action in Your Community, Holt

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities andthe Durable Future, Times

George Monbiot and Matthew Prescott, Heat: How to Stop thePlanet from Burning, South End Press

John R. Nolon and Daniel B. Rodriguez, eds., Losing Ground: ANation on Edge, Environmental Law Institute Press

Michael Novacek,Terra:Our 100-Million-Year-OldEcosystem—and theThreats ThatNowPut It at Risk, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear TippingPoints in Climate Change, Beacon Press

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food And the ComingCrisis in Agriculture, New Society

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Penguin

Alan Rabinowitz, Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight toSaveTigers in a Land of Guns, Gold and Greed, Island Press

Trish Riley, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Green Living, Penguin

Callum Roberts, An UnNatural History of the Sea, Island Press

Elizabeth Rogers , Thomas M. Kostigen, The Green Book: TheEveryday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time,Three Rivers Press

David de Rothschild, The Live Earth Global Warming SurvivalHandbook: 77 Essential Skills To Stop Climate Change, Rodale

William Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How HumansTook Control of Climate, Princeton University Press

David Sandalow, Freedom From Oil: How the Next President CanEnd the United States’Oil Addiction, McGraw Hill

Debra Schwartz, Writing Green, Apprentice House

Mark Schapiro, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of EverydayProducts and What’s at Stake for American Power, Chelsea Green

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From theDeath of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, HoughtonMifflin

Fred Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years,Rowman & Littlefield

Henrik Svensmark, The Chilling Stars: the New Theory of ClimateChange, Totem

Peter Thompson, Sacred Sea:A Journey to Lake Baikal, OxfordUniversity Press

UN Development Program, ed., Human Development Report 2007:Climate Change and Human Development—Rising to theChallenge, Palgrave Macmillan

Peter D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the MassExtinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About OurFuture, Collins

Thomas Raymond Wellock, Preserving the Nation: The Conserva-tion and Environmental Movements, 1870-2000, Harlan Davidson

Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne Books

David Wilcove, No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s GreatAnimal Migrations, Island Press

Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, Cape Wind: Money,Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for our Energy Future onNantucket Sound, Public Affairs.

E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, WWNorton & Co.

continued on page 23

10 SEJournal SPRING 2008

ENVIRONMENTALBOOKS OFTHE YEAR 2007(From the Environmental History Timeline www.environmentalhistory.org)

continued from page 8

MarketWarms toClimate Change Books in 2007

In 2006, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth dominated The NewYork Times best seller list. But in 2007, Glenn Beck’s swaggeringrebuttal, An Inconvenient Book, topped the same list with the ideathat climate change is “the greatest scam in history.”

While Beck’s book has little chance of outselling Gore’s bookover the long run, the paradox illustrates a larger problem in theenvironmental publishing industry: serious science is a hard sell.

Joseph Romm, author of the 2006 book Hell and High Water,worried in a Grist post a few months ago that the deniers “arewinning the war of words.”

So, how true is that? How are those 2007 climate booksdoing?

We checked the Amazon sales ranks and the LexisNexusnewspaper hits and TV mentions. We came up with the followinglist. It seems that Romm is partly right – climate deniers are stillgetting a lot of attention. But the picture is mixed.

One thing to notice is that the skeptics and contrarians maybe selling more books, but they aren’t getting as much media at-tention as scientifically oriented authors. The sustained discussionseems to be taking place around the actual science rather than thedebunkers of science. Beck, Lomberg, Singer and others seem tobe appealing to a shallow audience pool.

CLIMATE BOOKS 2007(For Amazon sales ranks, low numbers are best; for Lexis-

Nexis newspaper and transcript mentions, high numbers are best.)

BOOKS BY SKEPTICS AND CONTRARIANS:Glenn Beck, An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the

World’s Biggest Problems. (119 Amazon, 196 newspapers, 230TV transcripts)

Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’sGuide to Global Warming (1,377 Amazon, 19 newspaper reviews,9 TV transcripts)

Fred Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years(3,267 Amazon, 82 newspaper reviews, 2 TV transcripts)

Henrik Svensmark, The Chilling Stars: The New Theory ofClimate Change (19,305 Amazon, 6 newspaper reviews, 0 TVtranscripts)

SCIENCE-BASED CLIMATE BOOKS:Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (2006 book, Feb. 2008 rank)

(4,097 Amazon, Tens of thousands of reviews and transcripts; toomany to count)

David de Rothschild, The Live Earth Global WarmingSurvival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills To Stop Climate Change(14,906 Amazon, 30 newspaper reviews, 31 TV transcripts)

George Monbiot and Matthew Prescott, Heat: How to Stopthe Planet from Burning (21,528 Amazon, 8 newspaper, 1 TV)

Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting Amer-ica’s Clean Energy Economy (22,247 Amazon, 151 reviews, 7 TV)

Chris Mooney, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and theBattle over Global Warming (43,906 Amazon, 48 newspaperreviews, 7 TV )

Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, andthe Destruction of Civilizations (51,849 Amazon, 48 reviews,4 TV)

Gary Braasch, Earth Under Fire (55,599 Amazon, 13reviews, 0 TV)

Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change(69,685 Amazon, 12 reviews, 0 TV)

BillMcKibben,FightGlobalWarmingNow:TheHandbook forTak-ingAction in YourCommunity (99,735Amazon, 22 reviews, 1 TV)

Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, eds., Ignition: What YouCan Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement(107,596 Amazon, 20 reviews, 0 TV)

John D. Cox, Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change andWhat It Means for Our Future (122,960 Amazon, 3 reviews, 0 TV)

Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela M. Doughman, eds.,Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and OurGrandchildren (143,681 Amazon, 1 review, 0 TV)

Mayer Hillman, The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent GlobalClimate Catastrophe (603,000 Amazon, 0 newspapers, 0 TV)

WINTER 2008 CLIMATE BOOKS IN PRINT:Robert Henson, The Rough Guide to Climate Change, 2nd

Edition (Amazon, 31,480)Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear

Tipping Points in Climate Change (Amazon 32,000)

Bill Kovarik, an SEJ board member, teachesenvironmental journalism at Radford University.

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 11

Feature

By BILL KOVARIK

12 SEJournal SPRING 2008

Feature

SEJ’s efforts to roll back some of the government secrecy thathas made reporters’ jobs more difficult over the last decade wonsome ground since last year.

Working through its First Amendment Task Force, often withother journalism groups, SEJ’s advocacy of open governmentposted successes on a variety of fronts. In fact, SEJ has often ledthe way for other groups.

Sunshine Week 2007 Audit Project

Every March, journalism and open-government groupscelebrate “Sunshine Week” — a beehive of projects promotingbetter public access to information. In 2007, the national projectwas an audit of state and local government compliance withemergency planning disclosure requirements under EPCRA, theEmergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act.

EPCRA requires every community to have a “LocalEmergency Planning Committee,” which must draw up a plan forchemical emergencies and disclose it to the public on request.Under the audit project, reporters from more than 100 news mediaoutlets across the country visited their local LEPCs and asked fora copy of the emergency plan. The audit found that only 44 percentof LEPCs nationwide were following the law on disclosurehttp://www.sunshineweek.org/sunshineweek/audit07.

The idea for the project came from SEJ’s WatchDog Project,and SEJ worked with groups like the American Society ofNewspaper Editors and the Coalition of Journalists for OpenGovernment, who coordinated the nationwide network of projectvolunteers. The upshot was many more local emergency respon-ders becoming more aware of their disclosure responsibilities.

FOIAUpdate Bill Enacted; Implementation Next

Five years ago, when the Freedom of Information Act wasunder attack and new exemptions were multiplying in the name ofhomeland security, the fight was to keep FOIA from being eroded.The idea of actually strengthening it seemed like a pipe dream. Yetafter almost three years of legislative effort, a FOIA-strengtheningbill originally introduced by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and PatrickLeahy (D-VT) went the distance and was signed into law byPresident Bush on New Year’s Eve 2007.

The bill was modest in its ambitions — although it didestablish some mild penalties for agencies who do not meet the 20-

day deadline for responding to FOIA requests. (Agencies who blowthe deadline can’t collect search or copy fees.)

President Bush signed the bill without any statement orceremony, after his Justice Department and Office of Managementand Budget had opposed many of its provisions.

SEJ was one of many journalism groups who helped inform peopleabout the bill and called on the record for Congress to pass it.

But more effort may be required to force the executive branchto implement the new law. The bill’s sponsors and journalismgroups complained that Bush’s 2009 budget proposed moving theFOIA “ombudsman’s” office from the National Archives to theJustice Department, saying Justice had been an advocate for lessdisclosure. Congress may ignore Bush’s request, but it could causedelay in getting the ombudsman’s office up and running.

Photography Fees and Permits in Parks

The Interior Department’s efforts to require permits and feesfor news photography in parks got a warning shot across the bowfrom the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2007— largely at SEJ’s instigation.

SEJ President Timothy B. Wheeler testified before thecommittee, chaired by Nick Rahall (D-WV), saying Interior’sproposed rule for “commercial filming” represents an unwarrantedinfringement on journalists’ ability to cover natural resource issueson public lands. Other groups also testified with concerns aboutthe proposed rule, including the Radio and Television NewsDirectors Association and the National Press PhotographersAssociation.

The Interior Department has not finalized the rule. But SEJleaders are hopeful that SEJ’s comments — along with the hearing— will prompt Interior to revise it.

Farm Bill Secrecy on Animal ID System

SEJ’s FirstAmendment Task Force won another success — at least atemporary one — in defeating language in the Farm Bill that would havemade it a crime to publish the address of a feedlot.

The language was meant to cloak in secrecy almost allinformation in the National Animal Identification System— anill-starred federal effort to track food cattle, pigs and poultry fromcradle to grave. The system is ostensibly meant to keep the publicsafe from diseases like Mad Cow (or its human version). But when

SEJ Gains Ground for Press Freedoms, Information

continued on page 30

By JOSEPH A. DAVIS

Layoffs and buyouts. Orders for shorter stories. Proliferatingblogs. MoJos (that’s “mobile journalists” for the uninitiated)hunting for breaking news.

That’s not all there is to American newspapering in 2008, ofcourse, but such developments seem to foretell a future fornewspaper journalism that’s dominated by the quick and the terse.

In an ideal world, a greater emphasis on immediacy andconcision wouldn’t necessarily mean a reduction in newspaperstories and projects that are labor-intensive, long-form, in-depth,explanatory, context-heavy, investigative, or some combination ofthose qualities – in a word, enterprise.

Even so, no newspaper journalist – or any thinking personwho’s aware of the current ferment in Amer-ican newspapers, for that matter – shoulddoubt that such a reduction, if it’s not alreadyhappening, could well be on the near horizonif current trends continue.

Enterprise work costs money. Some-times, it’s money spent on stories andprojects that just don’t pan out. Money thatcould be spent on snippets of streaming videoor other website features to lure the eyeballsof potential customers away from YouTubeand MySpace and the myriad other manifes-tations of the New Media that newspapersnow compete with for an audience.

Regardless of whether enterprisereporting in newspapers is or is not on the

wane, such journalism continues to show upin a variety of forms – in unexpected, as wellas predictable, places.

In the Winter 2008 issue of SEJournal,The Beat presented evidence of an apparentupsurge in various kinds of magazinejournalism on the environment. This install-ment focuses solely on investigative andother enterprise journalism with a hard-newsedge, produced recently by one traditional magazine and a diversearray of other Old and New Media outlets working the broadjour-nalistic territory beyond the pages and Web sites of daily newspa-pers.

It’s no surprise that The New Yorker would be weighing inwith a long explanatory piece explaining and weaving together the-complexities of measuring carbon footprints, setting up carbon-trading systems, reducing tropical deforestation, and more in itsFeb. 25 issue.

The magazine is synonymous with long-form non-fiction,after all, and some of the most memorable environmental

reporting to appear anywhere has been published in its pages overthe years by writers such as John McPhee and Elizabeth Kol-bert.

The Feb. 25 climate change story, “Big Foot” by MichaelSpecter, ranges from the British supermarket chain Tesco’sproject to put carbon labels on all its products, to the floor of theChicago Climate Exchange, to a discussion of how logging inBrazil and Indonesia might be reduced.

The article features arresting passages such as this one:“Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming themodern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither thegoals nor the acceptable emissions limits are clear, however,

morality is often mistaken for science.”It’s probably fair to say that a long

investigative piece on Sen. James Inhofe,the Oklahoma Republican who calledmanmade global warming a “hoax,” wouldnot be expected by most people unfamiliarwith it to turn up on a website called TheDaily Green: The Consumer’s Guide to theGreen Revolution.

That assumption would be under-scored by a cursory glance at the animatedsuccession of headlines on the site’s homepage, which recently included “GreenRemodeling,” “Green and Gorgeous,” and“30 Days to Green Your Diet.”

But assumptions can be dangerous, asall journalists know. The Daily Green, aproduct of Hearst Digital Media, publisheda report on Jan. 11 that dug well beneaththe surface of the assertion by Inhofe’sstaff in late December that “over 400prominent scientists from more than twodozen countries recently voiced significantobjections to major aspects of the so-called‘consensus’ on man-made global waring.”

Examining the names that accompanied that claim the DailyGreen investigation concluded that the ranks of the 400-plusindividuals included “economists, amateurs, TV weathermen andindustry hacks.” Extensive annotated lists of the “prominentscientists” were included in the presentation. The main story waswritten by Dan Shapley and prominently credited research byMark V. Johnson of AOL’s Propeller.com.

CNN describes its hour-long program “CNN: SpecialInvestigations Unit” as a “long-form investigative series” thatfeatures “CNN’s top correspondents delivering in-depth hours onpressing issues currently in the news.”

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 13

Long-form stories - enterprise andinvestigative - still making marks

The Beat

continued on page 24

By BILL DAWSON

Beat story urlsThe New Yorker article:http://tinyurl.com/32aoum

The Daily Green article:http://tinyurl.com/2g8kh4

CNN story transcript:http://tinyurl.com/2z4gzt

CNN blog:http://tinyurl.com/ysn3gg

Circle of Blue project:http://tinyurl.com/34xvc5

Schneider blog:http://tinyurl.com/33c26t

Center for Public Integrity story:http://tinyurl.com/2x2982

The agenda for SEJ’s 18th Annual Conference — Oct. 15-19—continues to develop as a number of stars in the journalismcommunity have committed, including legendary author WendellBerry and former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards.

Berry, the noted fiction and non-fiction author and widelyacknowledged conscience of the region will join SEJ attendees onSunday, Oct. 19, to read his work and discuss the writing lifeduring the morning craft session. Joining him will be Ann Pancake(author of Strange As This Weather Has Been), Erik Reese (LostMountain) and others, including many SEJ authors.

Another speaker familiar to SEJ members: Edwards, host ofthe Bob Edwards Show on XM satellite radio. Before moving toXM, Edwards spent 24 years as host of NPR’s Morning Edition.He will moderate the opening plenary session on Friday, Oct. 17,on the use of coal as an energy source.

Experts on all sides, including Don Blankenship, theoutspoken and controversial president of Massey Energy (invited),American Electric Power CEO Michael Morris, and Big Coalauthor Jeff Goodell will debate whether coal, which providesslightly more than half of this country’s electricity, should have arole in America’s energy future. Panelists will debate theeffectiveness of carbon sequestration; mining’s toll on workers,mountains, streams and forests; and whether the U.S. should finda way to wean itself from this fuel.

A breakfast plenary session will address the environmentaljustice movement. Since its inception in the 1980s in NorthCarolina, the movement has drawn attention to the inequitableenvironmental risks that many African American communitieshave long been forced to bear. In Appalachia, these sameinequitable risks have been borne by poor white communities.Noted expert Robert Bullard will lead a diverse panel discussingwhere the movement came from and where it’s headed.

SEJ’s annual awards ceremony will honor some of the mostimportant environmental stories of last year. Co-hosts for thepresentation will be Philippe and Alexandra Cousteau ofEarthEcho International, ocean explorers in the tradition of theirgrandfather Jacques Cousteau, and Jeff Burnside, SEJ boardmember and reporter at WTVJ NBC 6 Miami.

Among concurrent sessions running on Friday and Saturdaywill be computer labs and craft workshops offering hands-onexperience with audio, video, podcasting, mapping, and turningdata into stories. Other sessions will cover mobile media, searchengine strategies, blogs, social media, citizen journalism, crowd-sourcing and entrepreneurial media projects.

Eight tracks of concurrent sessions will bring experts,advocates, policymakers and others together to discuss coal,energy, climate, water, land, environmental health and the nation,and will also include craft sessions like freelancers and book

publishers pitch-slams and many how-to sessions, from Energy101 to being your own FOIA lawyer.

Thursday tours continue to be conference favorites amongattendees, this year traveling to nine extraordinary destinations inthe Appalachian mountain region for hiking, kayaking, or learningabout energy issues like wind, nuclear and mountaintop removalmining.

The tour line-up for the Roanoke conference

Almost Level I: Cutting Down Mountains for CoalLarry Gibson’s piece of Kayford Mountain used to be the

lowest peak for miles. Now it’s the highest. There’s no better placeto see the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining – a practicethat is feeding a growing demand for coal and leveling widestretches of Appalachia.

What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For?CanWe Sustain Them?The Southern Appalachians provide a rare look at the chang-

ing face of America’s forests. The tour will look at how foresters,community groups and others are spurring a new take on sustain-able forestry; the U.S. Forest Service’s struggles to balancerecreation demands with timber operations; invasive species

literally eating away Appalachian hillsides; and emerging “niche”forest products that could bolster rural communities.

Rural Energy: Wind, Hydro and Development inthe HighlandsVirginia’s Western Highlands are some of the most pristine

rural mountain regions left in the Eastern U.S. Bath and HighlandCounties are among the least populated east of the Mississippi,with county seats of fewer than 300 residents. But, like much of therural U.S., these counties face new development pressures fromenergy industries and vacation home speculators. Highland County,with only a $7 million annual budget, has approved a $60 millionwind power project. Construction is set for this year, and if built,it will be the first industrial wind power facility in the state ofVirginia.

Healthy Food ShedIn the wake of global warming concerns and food-borne

illness outbreaks with mounting evidence pointing toward indus-trialized agriculture, consumers are starting to pay attention to howtheir food is raised and how far it travels. Farmer, writer andspeaker Joel Salatin is the poster child of the local food andfarming movement. The tour will visit Salatin’s 550-acrediversified Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley andshow why his spread is, in the words of Michael Pollan, “one of themost productive and sustainable farms in America.”

ANational Treasure at Peril – the Blue Ridge ParkwayWhy are the Blue Ridge Mountains “blue"? The tour will travel

Wendell Berry, Bob Edwardsamong confirmed speakers

SEJ News

14 SEJournal SPRING 2008

SEJ’s Annual Conference

SEJ conference manager,Jay Letto, stands in front ofthe J-Class train at theVirginia Museum of Trans-portation, the site of the2008 conference Saturdayevening get-together.

PHOTOCOURTESY

BILLKOVARIK

continued on page 17

1. Register on-line at www.sej.org/go/conference2008.htm2. Credit card customers may fax forms to: (517) 485-41783. Mail conference registration and check payable to SEJ to:

Convention Management Services, Inc.SEJ Conference500 Business Centre DriveLansing, MI 48917USA

Early discount postmark deadline is Aug. 15, 2008.Walk-in registrations are welcome at the full rate.Registration can be confirmed only when payment is received.

Cancellation Policy: If you cancel your registration in writing by Sept. 15, 2008, you will receive a full refund less a $50 processing fee. No refunds for cancellation requests received after Sept 15. Non-attendance does not constitute cancellation. Mail or fax your request for cancellation to Convention Management Services Inc.

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SPRING 2008 SEJournal 15

16 SEJournal SPRING 2008

Ticketed Events Requiring Pre-registration (No Extra Fee):Please check all that you plan to attend. Pre-registration and tickets are required to attend. Bringing a guest requires additional fee. I plan to attend ...with guest(s) Wednesday Dinner Reception $0 (Add $35 for each guest) Friday Network Lunch $0 (Add $25 for each guest) Saturday Lunch and Plenary Session $0 (Add $30 for each guest)

Meal Preference (SEJ cannot guarantee dietary options will be available at every event.) Vegetarian Vegan Dairy Free Gluten Free

Guest name(s) (please print)________________________________________________________________________________ Total Guest Fees $ ___________

Events Requiring Pre-registration (Extra Fee):(For Thursday tours, indicate a first, second, and third choice. Do not add money for second and third choices.)

Thurs., Oct. 16 First Choice Second Choice Third Choice1. Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal $302. What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them? $303. Rural Energy: Wind, Hydro and Development in the Highlands $304. Healthy Food Shed $305. A National Treasure at Peril - the Blue Ridge Parkway $306. Old River, New Challenge $557. Journey Down the James $558. The Appalachian Trail - Land with a Past $309. Nuclear Power from Ore to Volts $30

Additional Events Self Guest(s)Wednesday Workshop: Climate Change and our Energy Future in Rural America $60Saturday Breakfast Plenary Session: Environmental Justice and the Poor $25 (Add $25 for each guest)Saturday Night Party: All Aboard! $35 (Add $35 for each guest)Sunday Bestsellers Breakfast * $25 (Add $25 for each guest)Post-Conference Tour: From the Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay (Sun. Oct. 19 - Wed. Oct. 22)* $325 (includes Sunday breakfast)* if you are attending the post-conference tour, do not pay for the breakfast. It is included with your post-conference tour fee.

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THANK YOU FOR REGISTERING FOR SEJ’S 18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE!

A confirmation form will be mailed to you upon receipt of your registration. Please check the brochure or www.sej.org for information about the program agenda; our host, Virginia Tech; lodging and transportation; conference exhibitors; and more.

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along lush ridgetops that were over-forested in the 1900s to the most pho-tographed site on the parkway, Mabry Mill. The early 1900s community-gathering place today operates as a restored gristmill, sawmill andblacksmith shop. As the parkway approaches its 75th anniversary, how-ever, America’s Favorite Scenic Drive faces environmental issues andfederalbudgetaryshortfalls resulting in57unfilledstaffpositions.Airpol-lution emanates from coal-fired power sources, the mightyhemlocks are dying, and flourishing development blocks scenic views.

Old River, New ChallengeThe New River, a misnomer if ever there was one, is one of

the world’s oldest rivers. It’s also among the most beautiful. We’llpaddle canoes 6-8 miles past towering cliffs and rolling meadows.At the put-in, ecologists from Virginia Tech will conduct anelectro-fishing demonstration and provide a brief presentation ofthe New’s diverse aquatic species. After taking out, we’ll drive ashort distance downstream to where the local power company isplanning to landfill coal-fired power plant ash in the floodplain ofthe New. Speakers will address the controversial issue ofmanaging coal combustion residues. Note: mild whitewater rapidsare on this run. Basic canoeing skills are preferred.

Journey Down the JamesThis tour will track the E. coli and nutrient trail from

mountain farms to the Chesapeake Bay on a canoe journey downthe James River. Nutrient and sediment runoff impacts waterquality for everyone and farming in the mountains affects the bayhundreds of miles downstream. Attendees will paddle down about10 miles of river, through farmland and pristine forest. This trip issuitable for beginners, but expect to be on the water between fourand six hours with several breaks.

The Appalachian Trail – Land with a PastLike great chunks of the Appalachian Trail that goes from

Georgia to Maine, the roughly 11 miles of the trail’s CatawbaRidge section pass over land that once held buildings. The jewelof this ridge is a rocky overlook, McAfee Knob, federallyprotected since 1987. The trail protection project marked a back-wards progression of sorts, from developed to backcountry— areclamation of industrial and residential lands. Attendees will hikethe trail to McAfee Knob and see the Catawba Valley below,which is slowly being invaded by houses.

Nuclear Power from Ore to VoltsThere are five stages in the life of nuclear power:

Mining,processingore, enrichment of uranium to commercial orweapons grade, fuel fabrication, and utilization in a nuclear powerplant. This tour covers the nuclear cycle with visits encompassingthree of these stages. We’ll visit a 1,000-acre farm, once owned byThomas Jefferson, and now proposed as the U.S.’s first uraniummine outside the Southwest. Next, we tour a fuel fabricationfacility and a full-scale nuclear plant training center, owned by theFrench nuclear giant AREVA NP, Inc. We’ll watch an actualproduction run from delivery of the enriched uranium through tothe 12-foot-long nuclear fuel rods that power the nation’s 104commercial reactors. At the training center, we will see the insideof a nuclear power plant, with full-sized cutaways of steamgenerators, reactors, and other equipment.

Further details on the tours and sessions for SEJ’s 18thAnnual Conference will be posted on www.sej.org as they becomeavailable. Please check the website often for updates.

Conference concurrent session line-up

THE CRAFT• The Freelance Pitch-Slam• Covering Tragedies and Disasters• Environment Reporters of the 21st Century• Book Publisher Pitch-Slam• Energy 101: A Primer for Reporters• TV and the New Media• Covering Climate Change Without Getting Whiplash• The Dating Game: Connecting Scientists and Journalists• How to Be Your Own FOIA Lawyer• Getting the Goods: Using Court Records forEnvironmental Investigations

COAL• Coal Around the Globe• Carbon Sequestration: Silver Bullet or Black Hole?• Almost Level: Mountaintop Removal Overview• Beyond Coal: Strategies for Appalachian Reclamationand Renewal

ENERGY• Must We Grow? Conservation, Green Lifestyles andAlternative Energies• Take Two: Nuclear Power Reconsidered• Biofuels: Beyond the Steel Cage Debate• Is Energy Independence Green? Liquid Coal, Tar Sands,Natural Gas and More...

THE CLIMATE• Close Quarters: Can Controlling Population Growth HelpStabilize the Climate?• Climate Change and Agriculture• After Tomorrow: Can We Adapt to Climate Change?• Climate Change and Emerging Legal Challenges

THE WATER• Are the Oceans Already Lost?• Water Quality from the Headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay• Dams: Past, Present and Future• Ends of the Earth: Polar Science and the Environment

THE LAND• Sharing Life on Earth: Biodiversity in Appalachiaand Beyond• Animal Business: Wildlife Trafficking andInternational Law• Joy Ride or Ecocide? ATVs on Public Lands• Suburban Decay: The Sub-prime Mortgage Mess as anEnvironmental Story

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH• The Rollercoaster World of Toxicology• Women’s Environmental Health Issues• Toying with Toxics: Childhood Exposure to Chemicals• Workers and the Environment: Asbestos and OtherOccupational Hazards

THE NATION• Environmental Policy, Public Opinion and the Election• Broken Bridges and Straight Pipes: Aging Infrastructureand the Environment• Environmental Justice and the Economy: From Cap-and-Trade Concerns to Green-Collar Promises• The Clean Air Act’s Unfinished Business

SPRING 2008 SEJournal 17Watch www.sej.org

Conference continued from page 14

Details of People’s Lives

By BILL DAWSON

Lisa Margonelli is an Oakland, Calif.-based freelancejournalist, a fellow of the New America Foundation, and the authorof Oil on the Brain, a book that describes “petroleum’s long,strange trip to your tank."

Margonelli has written for publications including the SanFrancisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover and Jane. Shewas a recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and anexcellence in journalism award from the Northern CaliforniaSociety of Professional Journalists.

Recently issued in paperback, Oil on the Brainearned wide praise when it was first published in2007. Reviewers’ comments included this one byThe Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin:

“Before reading Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on theBrain, I never would have called the process ofenergy production ‘fascinating.' But thisthoroughly engrossing and entertaining booktravels to the heart of Texas and across continentsto show exactly how the gas in our tanks gets there– as well as its financial, social and environmentalcosts."

Q: Tell me a little about yourself –especially how you decided to become ajournalist and writer.

A: I grew up in rural Maine and I’ve alwaysbeen interested in oral histories—from familystories to Studs Terkel’s books. In college, I usedoral histories as often as I could when doing workin history and American Studies. After college, Imoved to Japan and spent the next four years inAsia. While there I felt that news and magazine accountsoversimplified what I saw and heard.

When I returned to the U.S., I got an internship at PacificNews Service writing about the Pacific Rim and immigration. Iimmediately loved reporting and I continued to use oral historiesin my work. I worked on a collection of oral histories of immigrantkids, then used the same approach to write about health,technology, economics, and Eastern European filmmakers, amongother things. “Oil on the Brain” also used people’s life stories togive a portrait of the oil supply chain.

Q: You’ve said your interest in oil, as a subject for yourwriting, dates to a magazine assignment in 2001 to coverSaddamHussein’s birthday party in Iraq.And you’ve said the

idea for the book arose as a result of a subsequent reportingtrip to Alaska for another story, when you looked down fromyour airplane on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Please elaborateon how those seeds grew into a book examining, as the subtitlesays, “petroleum’s long, strange trip to your tank."

A: The months of April to June of 2001 were very surreal.First I went to the bizarre birthday party in Iraq— where oildetermined everyone’s destiny—and then to Alaska, where a groupof native Americans in a remote town called Arctic Village wastrying to keep oil development out of ANWR (the Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge)—and prevent oil from becoming partof their destiny.

I had seen the Alaska pipeline before, but thistime I saw it as a giant straw connecting me and mypickup truck in San Francisco literally to the ends ofthe earth. I wondered how I could use so much oil andknow so little about the stuff – its chemistry, geology,economy, politics, culture. I had the beginnings of anobsession, and at first I decided to write articles aboutoil that were unexpected – for example, what does anoil spill look like to a scientist? Then I thought maybeI’d write a travel book about oil-producing countries,but the more I researched it became obvious that abook about oil needed to be a full story connecting thegas pump to the cultures at the other end.

I wrote a long proposal that involved both historyand a fair amount of travel. When the publisher boughtit, they said, “You know you can’t start in 1850 – itneeds to start now.” So my proposed first chapter wasout the window. I realized that an obvious beginningwas the gas station, which was quite close by, andoffered, I hoped, a portrait of the gasoline consumer.From the gas station, the book evolved into an

exploration of the supply chain.

Q: Book editors often want authors of non-fiction topresent what’s called “an argument." This is a concept thatmay be unfamiliar to some newspaper reporters and magazinewriters who want to try their hand at book writing. Does yourbook make an argument? What is it? Was it a premise youstarted the project with, or something that grew from yourreporting?

A: I didn’t start with an argument. I started with a lot ofquestions, and a feeling that there was a bigger story in oil than anargument that it was either good for the economy or bad for theenvironment. I really set out to find stories and ideas that I hadn’t

Inside Story

Freelancer Lisa Margonelli reveals how focusing onpeople’s stories can reveal a complex story beyond the facts.

18 SEJournal SPRING 2008

heard before – in particular, things that made me uncomfortable.Once I’d found those stories, I realized that I’d found an argumentwithin them: Oil costs far more than we pay at the pump.

In the U.S. we pay subsidies to the oil industry, of course, butwe also have to pay for kids with asthma, environmental damages,military costs in the Middle East, global warming, and in lostfuture opportunities. Our confused sense of oil’s domestic cost haskept the political logjam over CAFE (Corporate Average FuelEconomy) standards and energy policy static for decades.Overseas, the costs of oil are higher – human rights, poverty,corruption, war and a feeling of hopelessness.

I came to believe that because the oil market is global,environmental damage and human rights abuses now aretransmitted directly to the cost of gasoline at the pump. You can seethis happening when Nigerian youths attack an oil installation andthe gas price jumps here. Because of this and because of globalwarming, among other reasons, we need to completely re-under-stand oil’s cost in a more holistic way. We need to make bigchanges. I wanted to tell this as a visceral story, rather than anargument, and the book format allowed me to do that.

Q: A few practical questions that maybe helpful to aspiring book writers among SEJour-nal’s readers: Was it hard to sell the book idea to apublisher? Your reporting lasted a staggering pe-riod of almost four years and took you on journeystotaling 100,000 miles. How did you pay for thisdaunting enterprise? Doing other writing duringthat period? Book advance? Fellowship? All of theabove?

A: Many editors were interested in the proposal,but only one bid on it, which meant I didn’t really havethe money to do the traveling I’d initially proposed. Idecided to keep doing a column I did for the SanFrancisco Chronicle online, try to get magazineassignments when I could, and to go as cheaply as possible.

In China, Venezuela and Nigeria I stayed for more than amonth, figuring that time would allow me to understand what washappening at a deeper level. My favorite hotels were $15 a night,and the cheapest was $6. Fortunately, I was really obsessed withthe process of getting entry to petroleum installations, and withferreting out the complexities of the story, and that made thefinancial strain less of a slog than it really was.

At one point I wrote 5,000 words about asphalt for BicyclingMagazine, which funded me for a few more months. In the fall of2005, the New America Foundation