Category Archives: Speakers

Wildfires are changing and the way we report on them should change too, says experts

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By Clara Lincolnhol

Clara Lincolnhol

This is the 5h in a series of feature stories on environmental topics by Knight Center students who attended the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Urban wildfires differ from those that burn through remote forests, and forest management won’t stop them from happening, fire ecologists at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference said.

Fire historian and author Stephen Pyne says we’re dealing with a fire crisis. There’s too much bad fire, too much combustion and not enough good fire, he says.

“We have broken the serial ice ages of the Pleistocene and transformed a minor interglacial into a fire epoch — what I call the Pyrocene,” Pyne said.

The major culprit for increased “bad fires” is human fossil fuel combustion which contributes to climate change and makes wildfires more intense, he said.

Thinning forests is a way to prevent out-of-control fires, but those treatments are rarely done near communities and structures, rendering them unhelpful to deal with the problem of urban wildfires, said Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forestry organization.

These methods are called “fuel treatments” because they attempt to eliminate natural overgrowth and an abundance of kindling materials that fires use to grow and spread.

Thinning and logging can also create problems and contribute to the problem of “bad fires” since deforestation releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

Brian Kittler, the chief program officer of American Forests, says building fire-resilient communities requires preparing the communities and not just the forests nearby.

Updating zoning laws, infrastructure, using ignition-resistant materials while building and having defensible space around one’s property are more effective than “fuel treatments,” he said. Continue reading →

New age of safety measures for environmental journalists reporting from the Amazon

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By Shealyn Paulis

Shealyn Paulis

This is the 4th in a series of articles about reporting skills by Knight Center students who attended the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Reporters working in or focusing on the Amazon rainforest are forced to take extreme safety measures while doing so. That’s because their coverage threatens industries seeking to exploit  the region’s resources and populations.

At the 2025 conference of the Society of  Environmental Journalists in Tempe, Arizona, this topic was presented by representatives from the nonprofit organization Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji); security manager Valeria Oliveira and project coordinator Reinaldo Chaves.

The panel was hosted in two languages, Portuguese and English, and was part of an effort to answer why journalists in certain regions, like the Amazon, are put into such dangerous positions and how those threats are combated in the field.

Attendees were guided through a presentation on how Abraji funds, trains and mentors reporters investigating environmental crimes in the Amazon, leading to eight successful investigations thus far. Their organization advocates transparency and prioritizes journalists’ ability to have creative freedom to deliver the stories they want, but reinforces that physical security is the most important aspect of their work.

Latin America is the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmental journalist, according to a 2022 study by the international organization Committee to Protect Journalists.. The Amazon region is under particular stress, according to Reuters. In the past decade, over 200 incidents against journalists, such as threats, kidnappings and murders, have been documented. Continue reading →

Cultivating a culture of climate adaptive capacity

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This is the 4th in a series of articles about reporting skills by Knight Center students who attended the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

By Mia Litzenberg

Mia Litzenberg

Experts are looking beyond climate resiliency to build adaptive capacity, a process for navigating changes to cultural lifeways that promotes living well – not just bouncing back.

The ability to be climate-resilient suggests that people will bounce back to their previous ways of life – a paradigm that is being reshaped altogether.

“I’m keenly aware of the problematic word ‘resilience,’ especially as an academic,” said Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Executive Director Patricia Solís. “We often are now using adaptive capacity to signal that it’s a building process.”

Patricia Solis discusses her work on climate adaptation at Arizona State University. Credit: Mia Litzenberg

Solís spoke on the panel “Beyond Worst-Case Scenarios: Building a Vibrant Subculture of Climate Adaptation” at Arizona State University in April. The panel was part of the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Panelist Nabig Chaudhry, the director of climate adaptation strategy at the climate literacy nonprofit Probable Futures, said there are two things that can be done to address climate change.

While the first is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through mitigation, the second is to build adaptive capacity.

“We’re seeing a lot of new ideas pop up of how we can rebuild these systems, hopefully back in the future, that are better because they have been torn down,” Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry said the goal at Probable Futures is to step beyond the predominant climate narrative that most people don’t have a hand in solving the climate crisis and that it is a perpetual apocalypse where everything falls apart. Continue reading →

From plagues to dinner platters?

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This is the 4th in a series of feature stories on environmental topics by Knight Center students who attended the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

By Julia Belden

Julia Belden

Journalism – environmental and science journalism in particular – demands from its practitioners a curiosity that often lands one in unusual places.

Out of a myriad of mini-tour options at the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Tempe, Arizona, I chose to visit the laboratory facilities of the Global Locust Initiative.

Apparently, attracting conference attendees to visit a basement lab full of locusts was a tough sell.

Of the hundreds of environmental journalists swarming Arizona State University’s campus for the week, I was the only one to attend this insect-themed tour.

It’s a shame, really. Despite their abundance, variety, and ecological and economic importance, insects rarely inspire thoughtful, nuanced press coverage.

Locust meet & greet: a dream for an animal nerd like me!

Here in the United States, most people are familiar with locusts only in Biblical terms. (Fun fact: it’s thought that the Moroccan locust, Dociostaurus maroccanus, is responsible for the swarms depicted in the Old Testament.)

But in the Global South, locusts swarms can cause catastrophic damage to agriculture – so much so that in 2019-21 desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) swarms landed on a United Nations list of global disasters.

“Locusts don’t attack people directly, they don’t spread disease. The thing that makes them incredibly dangerous is their voracious appetites,” research scientist Rick Overton tells me as we prepare to enter the lab.

Along with ASU professor Arianne Cease, Overton co-directs the Global Locust Initiative, leading a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers and collaborating with stakeholders from 40 countries to develop strategies for locust management.

“We affectionately call it ‘Hoppertown,’” Overton says of the laboratory, which is home to tens of thousands of locusts, representing three to six species from around the world, depending on research needs.

The lab adheres to strict standards set out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS). Continue reading →