Susan White peered through her Skype hookup in Brooklyn at the journalists and scientists gathered on the other end of the connection in West Michigan.
“Can I first say hello to Steve?” the executive editor of InsideClimate News asked. “Steve, we’ve never met, but I feel like I know you.”
Stephen Hamilton, a scientist at Michigan State University’s Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, Mich., had just finished explaining the environmental fallout from a pipeline that had ruptured in 2010, polluting the nearby Kalamazoo River and its wetlands with Canadian tar sands oil.
His acknowledgement of the greeting was brief. But the exchange spoke volumes. Hamilton, an ecosystems ecologist and biogeochemist, had the expertise, local knowledge and independence to be a valuable source on the story that InsideClimate News had dubbed “the biggest oil spill you’ve never heard of.”
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A group of Chicago youth journalism students recently traveled to the University of Notre Dame to learn how to find Asian carp without actually catching them.
The workshop was a collaboration of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and We the People Media’s Eco Youth Reporters program.  The students met with David Poulson, the center’s associate director, and traveled to Notre Dame with their instructor, award-winning journalist Kari Lydersen.
The effort is funded by the McCormick Foundation.
The students learned about checking the water for the DNA of the invasive fish whose huge appetite can change entire ecosystems. At Notre Dame’s Linked Experimental Environmental Facility the youth met with scientist Chris Jerde.  He explained the difference between DNA taken from fish and eDNA taken from the environment.
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