Category Archives: Writing

Diving headfirst at Bridge Michigan internship

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By Emilio Perez Ibarguen

Emilio Perez Ibarguen

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that my 12 weeks covering the environment at Bridge Michigan are over, but I’d like to think that’s partly due to how busy I was chasing interesting stories all over the state.

From the very start, this internship allowed me to dive headfirst into many different policy debates, research findings and human interest stories. I became adept at learning new concepts on the fly, asking informed questions to experts and translating my reporting into a compelling narrative for readers.

One of the most challenging yet rewarding parts of my internship was going through edits with my editors at Bridge. Most stories I filed involved a consistent back-and-forth, tweaking lines for readability and forcing me to justify every detail I include in my story. While the process could be demanding at times, it pushed me to be more thoughtful in how every line in a story should help the public better understand a topic. Continue reading →

Environmental writer donates books to Knight Center library

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Gary Wilson

Gary Wilson, a widely known environmental commentator and independent journalist from Chicago who has written about the Great Lakes for over 20 years, has donated more than two dozen books to the Knight Center library.

His contribution honors Dave Poulson, the center’s retired senior associate director and founder of Great Lakes Echo, the center’s award-winning environmental news service.

The collection includes books by such Great Lakes authors as Jeff Alexander, Dave Dempsey and Jerry Dennis, as well as pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha’s inside look at the Flint Water Crisis.

Wilson reports on the Great Lakes and related economic and social issues for Great Lakes Now.

Remote sensing satellites are revealing global methane emissions

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Anna Barnes

By Anna Barnes

Methane gas is a cornerstone in the climate change conversation. Reducing emissions is a critical part of mitigation but there is one ever-standing issue of this elusive gas: it’s invisible.

At the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference 2025, one panel focused on locating and mapping methane pools to increase targeted action against the pollutant. The panel, “Revealing the Invisible: How Remote-Sensing Satellites are Transforming Methane Accountability and Climate Action,” included Deborah Gordon, the senior principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) Climate Intelligence Program.

Gordon said identifying methane has always been a struggle for scientists.

“It’s invisible, it’s odorless,” she said. “It wants to escape from any system it’s in. So here I was early on in my career, given a bucket of soapy water and a paintbrush, and I was going around to see where the pressure would form with a bubble that would come.” Continue reading →

Knight Center graduate student delves into the reasons for the decline of butterflies

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PoweshiekSkipper.jpg: The Poweshiek skipperling, a rare prairie butterfly, is one of many butterfly species facing drastic declines in the U.S. Credit: Ruth Thornton.

Knight Center graduate student Ruth Thornton recently completed her master’s professional project titled “Butterflies in decline and saving the Poweshiek skipperling from extinction,” publicly available online on her website.

In the first of a series of three feature articles, Thornton explores recent scientific studies describing a decline in overall butterfly abundance of nearly a quarter between 2000 and 2020 and investigating the causes of the drastic decline, including pesticide use, habitat loss and climate change.

She also talks to experts researching non-chemical control of a prominent insect pest of soybeans to try to reduce the amount of pesticides applied to agricultural fields, a key suspect in the decline of butterflies in the Midwest. Continue reading →