Author Archives: Dave Poulson

Tomato seeds, environmental justice and globalization

Guntra Aistara. Image: Central European University

Guntra Aistara. Image: Central European University


By Eric Freedman
We often refer to the importance of planting seeds – the seed of an idea, the small acorn that births the giant oak. But can seeds, real seeds, germinate into a revolution?
That’s what happened in a grassroots – or tomato roots – uprising in Latvia, a West Virginia-sized former Soviet republic laying between the Baltic Sea to the west and Russia to the east.
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Faculty study social media coverage of typhoon disaster

Bruno Takahashi

Bruno Takahashi


Knight Center Research Director Bruno Takahashi is examining how journalists used social media to cover last November’s typhoon in the Philippines.
The study is called “Social media uses in the face of disasters: An exploration of journalistic practices among media and communities impacted by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.”
He is collaborating with Edson Tandoc, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who is now in Tacloban City conducting interviews for the project.
The researchers are also working on a content analysis of tweets about the disaster.
Their work is supported by a recent grant from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

A day in the field beats one in court, but environmental journalists have to find a way to cover key decisions

GreenGavel-300x262By David Poulson
You may have caught this weird judicial twist in a recent story on the Knight Center’s environmental news site: A Wisconsin judge ruled that manure was not a waste but a valuable commodity.
That’s no surprise. Anyone with a backyard garden knows that.
But providing that legal stamp produced a counter-intuitive outcome. It meant that an insurer was on the hook for damages when a farm polluted nearby wells with that valuable manure.
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