By Eric Freedman
Bell’s Brewery is experimenting with growing hops next to its facility in Galesburg
From recently cleaned stretches of the Kalamazoo River to a craft brewery committed to environmentally sound production practices, Southwest Michigan is the site of many environmental commitments – and challenges. Continue reading
Knight Center director Eric Freedman’s study of dangers facing environmental journalists was recognized as a Top Faculty Paper at the 2018 Association for Journalism & Mass Communications annual conference.
The award came from the organization’s Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Division.
For the study, “In the Crosshairs: The Perils of Environmental Journalism,” Freedman interviewed journalists from five continents who had been arrested, interrogated, sued, harassed, physically assaulted or threatened for their coverage. It explored the impact of such situations, including the psychological effects on these journalists’ sense of mission and professional practices.
Freedman said environmental journalists around the globe are at heightened risk because environmental controversies often involve influential business and economic interests, political power battles, criminal activities, and corruption, as well as politically, culturally, and economically sensitive issues concerning indigenous rights to land and natural resources.
By Eric Freedman
Is it true that nobody likes roadkill except scavengers – mostly animals but occasionally human. (More on human scavengers later.)
Nope.
“Learning from Death, my new article in Earth Island Journal, began, as do all stories, with an idea. This one had been germinating for a couple of years after I wrote an article for Great Lakes Echo about a roadkill study in Ontario.
I wondered: What if somebody human other than scavengers likes roadkill? What if the splatter, the gore and the stench don’t matter? What if there are scientists out there who find something valuable in things that the rest of us swerve to avoid?
Lab assistant Ricki Oldenkamp prepares the lymph nodes of a white-tailed deer for analysis in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Disease Lab at MSU. Image: Tony Cepak.
I headed to the database Web of Science, typed in “roadkill” as my search term and, voila, there were studies from Canada and the U.S., Uganda and Portugal, Norway and Brazil, Argentina and Brazil and elsewhere written by researchers who’d found scientific gold in blood, guts and DNA. I read a dozen or so of them and crafted a pitch to the environmental magazine Earth Island Journal. Here’s how I began my inquiry to editor-in-chief Maureen Nandini Mitra, with a working title of “Splush! Thwap! Blam! Ugh!” and a working lead of:
Squished squirrels. Pulverized pigeons. Skewered skunks. Dismembered deer. Chopped-up chipmunks. Flattened frogs. Eviscerated elk. Violated voles. Blasted bunnies. Crushed cats. Mangled moose. Blistered butterflies. Ravaged ravens. Smushed snakes. Motorists swerve to avoid them. Bicyclists wrinkle their noses and hold their breath when pedaling past them. Rats and raptors feed on them. And scientists study them.
She said yes. Continue reading
Eric Freedman
By Eric Freedman
If we want international visitors to understand what makes America so special a country, we need to do more than talk in lofty terms about constitutional rights and economic opportunities. We need to show them more than Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington or New York City.
They need to see our national parks – the oldest and most extensive such system in the world. After all, cities are cities. The skyscrapers of Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo and Dubai are much of the same, but no place else has the geysers of Yellowstone, the grandeur of the Grand Canyon and the towering giants of Sequoia. Continue reading