Susanne Rust and Matt Drange, Toxic Trail: how a landmark cleanup program leaves its own toxic legacy. This story was a collaboration between The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and The Guardian US, 17 March 2014. “The landmark Superfund program is supposed to clean up the country’s toxic waste. But as one site in Silicon Valley shows, it’s leaving behind its own legacy of environmental problems.”
February 20, 2014
An Accident Waiting to Happen: derailment of oil trains in Glacier National Park
Elizabeth Royte, An Accident Waiting to Happen. OnEarth, Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, 20 February 2014. “As oil trains derail across the United States, a windswept—and vulnerable—stretch of Montana’s Glacier National Park underscores the folly of transporting crude by rail.”
October 29, 2013
Breathless and Burdened: Dying from black lung, buried by law and medicine
Chris Hamby, Breathless and Burdened. The Center for Public Integrity, three-part series, 29 October, 30 October, and 1 November 2013. “This yearlong investigation examines how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung, even as disease rates are on the rise and an increasing number of miners are turning to a system that was supposed to help alleviate their suffering.” This series won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. One part of the three-part, 25,000-word series was produced in partnership with the ABC News Investigative Unit, whose work included an in-depth Nightline segment.” Updates from The Center for Public Integrity, 30 September 2015: “‘Sweeping reforms’ proposed for black lung benefit program” and “Johns Hopkins terminates black lung program.”
Winner of the 2014 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
July 19, 2012
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
Bill McKibben, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Rolling Stone, 19 July 2012. “Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe–and that make clear who the real enemy is.”
June 26, 2012
The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of, Parts 1-3 and Epilogue
Elizabeth McGowan and Lisa Song, The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill you’ve Never Heard Of, Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Epilogue: Cleanup, Consequences and Lives Changed in the Dilbit Disaster. InsideClimate News, 26-29 June 2012. “[This project] began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issues, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil.”
May 6, 2012
Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home
Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe, Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home. Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2012. Six-part series published between 6 May and 30 December 2012. This series won the Nieman Foundation’s 2012 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. “The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries — Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers — waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.”
Winner of the 2013 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
August 30, 2010
Covert Operations: The billionaire [Koch] brothers who are waging a war against Obama
Jane Mayer, Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. The New Yorker, 30 August 2010. “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.”
September 27, 1962
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962): Pesticides Are Killing Birds and Mammals
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 27 September 1962. Elizabeth Kolbert: “As much as any book can, “Silent Spring” changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts, and the banning of a long list of pesticides, including dieldrin.” Silent Spring was first serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962.
Part I of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 16 June 1962, can be read here.
Part II of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 23 June 1962, can be read here.
Part III of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 30 June 1962, can be read here.
August 1, 1890
The Treasures of the Yosemite
John Muir, The Treasures of the Yosemite. Century, August 1890. From Tony Perrottet, John Muir’s Yosemite, Smithsonian, July 2008: “In 1889, in his early 50s, Muir camped with Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of Century magazine, in Tuolumne Meadows, where he had worked as a shepherd in 1869. Together they devised a plan to create a 1,200-square-mile Yosemite National Park, a proposal Congress passed the following year. In 1903, the 65-year-old Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt were able to give Secret Service agents the slip and disappear for three days, camping in the wild. It was during this excursion, historians believe, that Muir persuaded the president to expand the national park system and to combine, under federal authority, both Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, which had remained under California jurisdiction as authorized by Lincoln decades before. Unification of the park came in 1906.”