Life is funny. Thirty years ago, when I was a college freshman, I was most passionate about partying, skateboarding and writing for my school newspaper. This is when I fell in love with journalism. I wrote articles about the nuclear freeze movement in Europe, why I was an atheist, and about student government shenanigans. The…Continue Reading…
This is a fun and exciting announcement to make. It’s been nearly four years since I launched Collide-a-Scape midway through my fellowship at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ). Initially, I had thought I’d blog on the intersecting cultural/environmental issues specific to the Southwest. Of course, since it was my blog, I had license…Continue Reading…
My wife, bless her heart, goes the extra mile to protect our two boys from ubiquitous nasties, like BPA chemicals, pesticides, and high fructose corn syrup. It’s a fairly impossible task to avoid such exposures in the modern world. Still, the kids have a virtual organic food diet and all our household cleaners are eco-friendly,…Continue Reading…
The cantankerous Jerry Coyne, in a recent post, takes issue with popular “science-lite” books that offer superficial analyses of and solutions to social problems or””most disturbing to me””superficial descriptions of scientific work. This is a recurring bugaboo for scientists. It springs from a deeply rooted attitude that science journalist Deborah Blum aptly described here. So which authors have…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, Nature’s online editor set off a mini squall with this Guardian column, titled “Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism.” The response from the science blogosphere was pretty negative. For some reason, this surprised me–well the darts thrown at the piece by many writers did, anyway. I kinda got into it a bit…Continue Reading…
Thanks for being a reader, and thanks to many of you for making this site a lively exchange of interesting perspectives, particularly on climate change related issues. Early next week, I’ll have a post up elaborating on a few new wrinkles to the blog. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you on something. What particular…Continue Reading…
If you recall, last week I expressed some dismay that a three part series on global warming in Scientific American magazine was financed by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. To my surprise, no journalistic watchdogs (or science journalists) rose up to publicly question this unusual arrangement. But Bud Ward at the Yale Forum on Climate…Continue Reading…
The Washington Post has a regular column called “The Fact Checker,” by Glenn Kessler, a longtime Post reporter. It’s a relatively new feature. Earlier this year, Kessler described the column’s origins and purpose: My colleague Michael Dobbs started the column during the 2008 [Presidential] campaign and now, in 2011, The Washington Post is reviving it as…Continue Reading…
If you read Andy Revkin’s dispatch from this one-day conference in London on the Anthropocene concept, you’ll discover: I’m attending because of a quirky role I played almost 20 years ago in laying the groundwork for this concept of humans as a geological force. I’m starting to think Andy is the Zelig of the environmental…Continue Reading…