By Eric Freedman
The Knight Center is awarding $2,000 grants to four Michigan high schools for collaboration between their journalism and environmental science classes.
The winning projects were selected in the center’s third statewide competition.
The Knight Center also matches the schools with professional journalism mentors to work with the students and teachers for guidance and advice on the projects. Continue reading
The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism has awarded two $3,500 documentary grants to MSU faculty-student teams.
The winning projects were chosen from proposals submitted in a campus-wide competition:
In addition to public dissemination of the projects, the Knight Center will use the documentaries on its website and for presentation in classes, workshops and other center activities.
This is the fourth year of the center’s grant competition.
Knight Center for Environmental Journalism students interview Eugene Bourgeois and Marti McFadzean, leaders of two Kincardine, Ontario, organizations opposing the Deep Geological Repository, a nuclear waste storage facility proposed at the site of Bruce Power. They met in the cabin Bourgeois built from reclaimed timber. Image: David Poulson
By David Poulson
I had tried for weeks to arrange a meeting of my environmental journalism students and First Nations officials during a field reporting trip to Kincardine, Ontario.
I came close. But now things were falling apart. Just before we hit the road last semester, tribal officials phoned to say they decided not to meet with us to talk about a controversial radioactive waste disposal plan on Lake Huron’s Bruce Peninsula. They wanted to assess their community’s reaction to the plan before speaking about it with outsiders.
Our three-day Canadian roadtrip was part of a Knight Center environmental journalism class on transboundary issues. The plan was to directly learn of some of the environmental challenges that the U.S. shares with Canada. At the same time, the half-dozen students would gather ideas and sources for classroom assignments and for our center’s news service which carries stories relevant to the eight states and two provinces bordering the Great Lakes.
An angler at the Flint River. Image: Rocío Cano Muñoz
By Rocío Cano Muñoz
Next to the Flint River in Flint, Michigan, is a park full of trees with a plaque that commemorates the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.
The sound of the water flowing through that river and the nature around it, helps explain why that plaque is there. Near a red bridge, people photograph the landscape. Nearby, men fish while, standing and looking at the water cascade or they sit and wait for a bite.