SEJ 2009 Annual Conference

Dave Poulson on Reporting While the Money's Being Spent

On his own blog Cover the Planet, SEJ member Dave Poulson wonders if "success in environmental journalism [can] be measured by the absence of environmental reporting awards" for unearthing fraud, or simple waste, after a project's budget has been spent.

"A nice plaque for unearthing a fiasco may be a sign of quality journalism. But where’s the plaque for doing the reporting that kept a disaster from happening? Is that not also watchdog journalism in the public interest?"

The Obama Administration has proposed nearly a half billion dollars this year as a downpayment on what could be a multi-year, multi-billion dollar restoration effort.

This bonanza has cash-starved agencies and interest groups scrambling with a new problem: How do you responsibly spend such a huge environmental investment?

It should also have Great Lakes journalists scrambling with a big question: How do you responsibly report the spending of such an investment as it unfolds?

It’s a question that I asked a panel which examined the new effort at the SEJ conference.

Read more at Cover the Planet >

Character Sketches: Francesca Lyman's drawings of Al Gore, other guests

One SEJ member has eschewed a digital camera to record 2009 conference moments, in favor of a small Moleskine notebook and colored pencils. 

Francesca Lyman put her leads to good work yesterday, capturing former Vice President Al Gore, White House staffer Nancy Sutley, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, and the other guests (including moderator Andrew Revkin) at the Friday morning plenary, in these wonderful sketches.

Former Vice President Al Gore

See Tim Wheeler's post about "the brief 'town hall' moment during the Q&A."

Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, and Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Polar bears? Censorship? Al Gore, Phelim McAleer Joust at Enviro Journalism Conference

Image Credit: NOAA

Those who were at Al Gore's keynote address to SEJ's 19th annual conference Friday witnessed the brief "town hall" moment during the Q&A, when a questioner sparred with Gore over whether he would acknowledge alleged errors in his Oscar-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth." 

The questioner challenged Gore's characterization of polar bears as endangered and asserted the bears' numbers were on the rise.  Gore and the questioner jawed back and forth briefly; then the questioner was asked to yield the microphone to other questioners and sit down.  

He refused, clinging to the mic, until the sound was cut off.

The questioner was Phelim McAleer, co-director/producer of an independent film, "Not Evil Just Wrong," which purports to tell "the true cost of global warming hysteria."  His verbal jousting with Gore already is being portrayed on conservative blogs as another example of Gore dissembling.  McAleer tweeted Friday about having his mike cut off as he tried to pose difficult questions to Gore, who's become a lightning rod to conservatives opposed to doing anything about climate change.

Some may wonder how he was able to get in a position to try to pick a public argument with Gore.  Others may wonder why he was cut off..

Endangered No More? The impacts of loosening protections for wolves

When it comes to protecting his new-born calves from wolf predation, Minnesota cattle rancher David Radaich has found that deer are some of his best friends. Radaich loses one to five calves a year to wolf predation. He tried using guard dogs, but that didn’t work. Fencing his 1,200 acre farm would be too expensive, he says.

But, he says, local fawns are born at about the same time as his calves, and when wolves have plenty of fawns to eat they are less likely to kill calves.

Radaich discussed wolves and their listing under the federal Endangered Species Act with fellow panelists Adrian Wydeven, a mammalian ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Bob Irvin, senior vice president for conservation with Defenders of Wildlife.

The panelists agreed that in the Great Lakes region, a listing under the Endangered Species Act is not helpful to the further recovery of the species. Primarily, the delisting of wolves in the region will give more options for dealing with wolves that kill livestock.

However, said Irvin, the northern Rocky Mountain region is a different population with different habitat and recovery issues. The Great Lakes wolf population benefits from a more contagious northern forest ecosystem, as well as the fact that wolves were never completely extirpated from the region, and recovered primarily through wildlife management policies, rather than a re-introduction program.

Can the northern Rockies state of Wyoming learn something about wolf management from Wisconsin, which, according to Wydeven, has as many deer hunters as Wyoming has people and supports more wolves in a state with a much smaller area? These panelists emphasized the differences, and implied that the northern Rockies wolves have the more difficult path to travel to reach the point where a rancher, a state biologist, and a wildlife advocate could all sit down and agree that their removal from the Endangered Species list is for the good of all.

Conference Speaker Video-Reports from Madison on Environment & Security

How can you use online video in your reporting?  Here's an example: a video report filed from the conference by Geoffrey Dabelko, a speaker on today's 'climate and national security' panel, for the Environmental Change & Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Follow Gore's keynote on Twitter with #SEJ [UPDATED]

Update: Wispolitics.com has a write-up of former Vice President Al Gore's speech; audio of his speech; and audio of the question and answer session.

Other coverage:

Gore, speaking in Madison, congratulates Obama (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Gore says climate change at 'political tipping point' (Wisconsin State Journal)

Al Gore Delivers Speech to Science Journalists in Madison (WISC Madison) 

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If you're not here at the SEJ 2009 annual conference to hear Al Gore and the other speakers in this morning's plenary, follow along with those of us live-tweeting the speeches.  

The twitter tag is #SEJ; there's a link at the top of the right column of this page!

Pilots prepare to guide whooping cranes on migration to Florida

A busload of groggy but resolute SEJ members left Madison at 5:00 am on Thursday to visit Necedah Wildlife Refuge, where scientists and pilots are readying this year's batch of whooping crane chicks for the trip to Florida. The young birds will be following ultralight aircraft, riding the vortices off the plane wings. Weather did not permit us to see an actual training flight, but we did hear the resonant call of the cranes, which can be heard for 4 miles, and we saw two pairs of cranes flying and foraging out in the wetlands of Necedah.

Whooping cranes have gone from a low of just 15 individuals to roughly 250 wild birds, with the help of scientists like John French, Research Manager at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, who  joined our tour. He explained how the center hatches and raises chicks, which are attended by scientists in whooping crane costumes to encourage their charges to imprint on birds, not people. When close to fledging, the chicks are transported to Necedah, where similarly costumed pilots mount ultralight aircraft and encourage the young birds to follow them through the air.

At migration time--and departure is planned for this Sunday--the planes and birds head south, stopping at night in the yards of carefully selected homeowners along the route. The young cranes overwinter in Florida and then fly back to Wisconsin without guidance in the spring, having learned the route in a single trip. Their journey back is carefully monitored by scientists, who retrieve the few individuals that lose their way and bring them back to Necedah.

We also visited the International Crane Foundation (ICF) center in Baraboo, where we saw representatives of all 15 of the world's crane species, a collection of cranes used in breeding operations, and a nursery facility. Nine chicks raised at ICF will be released this month at Necedah, hopefully to follow adults instead of planes on their trip to Florida.

Many thanks to Matt Mendenhall of Birder's World, who organized the trip.

 

CSI Madison: Lab investigates the mysteries of wildlife disease

Local authorities want to know why a gray fox lay immobile in someone’s Wisconsin backyard. The fox was put down and its body was sent to the National Wildlife Health Center Laboratory, in Madison, Wisc.

There, Carol Meteyer, a wildlife pathologist at the lab, began to unravel the fox’s mystery. On a steel table in her basement lab, she began a necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the fox’s remains. Each of the fox’s organs held a possible clue to what had caused the fox to act so oddly.

She drained urine from the fox’s bladder so it could be tested for the tell-tale crystals of antifreeze poisoning. A cat and a raccoon had died in the same area at about the same time, and antifreeze, while toxic, tastes sweet to animals, and they will drink it if they find a puddle of it. Meteyer did not find crystals in the fox’s kidneys, which would also occur if the fox drank anti-freeze, so she put antifreeze poisoning lower on her list of possible causes.

Infections tend to cause a swollen spleen, and this fox’s spleen looked normal, Meteyer said. The fox’s stomach was empty, so other types of poisoning dropped lower on her list as well. Poisoned animals often have a stomach full of human food, like stew, Meteyer explained, that the poisoner has spiked. Diarrhea is often a sign of canine parvovirus, but she found no diarrhea in the fox’s bowel.

That left canine distemper as a likely cause. Meteyer would look for virus inclusions, basically bumps, on the fox’s inner eyelids and bladder. Distemper can also leave tell-tale clues in the brain, she explained.

Meteyer was part of one of four teams of researchers who explained their work at the lab to our conference tour group. The lab deals with all sorts of wildlife diseases, from plague to West Nile virus to white nose syndrome in bats to monitoring for avian influenza. These researchers not only diagnose illnesses, but sometimes they discover new disease-causing organisms in the process. The lab’s job doesn’t stop with diagnosis, but goes on to containment strategies, and even vaccines.

Meteyer’s work with the fox was not done by the time our group left the building, but it offered an example of the wildlife disease mysteries explored at the National Wildlife Health Center.

Quagga mussels and cladophora: Partners in eco-crime

The EPA's Lake Guardian, based in Milwaukee.

Nature is full of heartwarming stories about partnerships. One of my all-time favorites is the three-way mutualism between Western ponderosa pine trees, tassel-eared squirrels and mycorrhizal fungi. The trees house the squirrels in their branches and the fungi on their roots. The mycorrhizae break down nutrients in the soil for easier absorption by the tree roots, and the trees supply sugar to the fungi. The squirrels eat the fruiting bodies of the fungi, called truffles, then defecate the spores throughout the forest, thereby inoculating new trees. Everybody benefits; forest health improves.

Pan east about a thousand miles to the Great Lakes region. Lurking beneath Lake Michigan is another partnership that's just as impressive. But its effects on the Lake Michigan ecosystem are anything but beneficial, at least the way we perceive a healthy freshwater scene.

Earlier today, about 30 SEJ attendees toured the University of Wisconsin's Great Lakes Water Institute in Milwaukee. We also cruised the lake for a couple of hours aboard the EPA's research vessel, called the Lake Guardian. Of all the research, I was most struck by new insights into the efficient relationship between quagga mussels and an algae called cladophora.