The Society of Environmental Journalists website is a great spot for beginning environmental journalists to begin their search for story ideas and to see what has already been written on a specific topic.
SEJ has been around for 20 years and has continued to grow even with the decrease of environmental journalists. Every day SEJ highlights environmental headlines that are being printed and aired around the nation. For example, some of today’s headlines include “Obama to Announce High-Speed Rail Plan Post-Speech”, “EPA to Investigate Cluster of Birth Defects in Kettleman City, Calif.”, “Scientists Link Flame Retardants and Reduced Human Fertility”, and in New Jersey “Pompton Lakes Cancer Study Widens.”
Also included on their website is a library of information. Included in their library are blogs, a list of books, a climate change guide, industry trends, reporting tools, source lists, and teaching tools. There is even a section on how to be a freelancer. Beginning environmental journalists could use these links to hone their skills when they’re out in the field, especially using the reporting tool which has a link to US EPA terms of environment, which is a list of commonly used acronyms and abbreviations from the EPA.
SEJ also offers workshops and conferences for their members so these members can learn the newest techniques in their field.
John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Margaret L. Knox, and Barry Lopez have all written their own views on the value of land.Muir believed that all of nature belonged to God. Austin who was a feminist loved how nature could grow wild. Leopold was a man who loved animals and he restored a prairie in Wisconsin to its original condition without human contact. Knox is just a regular journalist doing her job concerning the environment and decides to write most of her stories about the federal government that likes to purchase all of the land. Lopez believes that people cannot own the land, the land belongs to Earth.All five of these authors have a closeness to the environment that they love to express through their writing. If they were to see what has happened with our Earth today, I don’t think any one of them would be very happy. If Muir’s belief was that nature belonged to God, he would hate all the construction that is being planned on the barrier beaches in Navarre and Pensacola Beach. Leopold would feel the same way as Muir because he loved all the animals and with all this building it would destroy some animals’ habitats.I feel the same way as these authors. Even if I’m not a treehugger, I do love animals and I would hate for them to lose their homes. The county is going to be doing all this building but do they really need these new industrial buildings.
I’m definitely not one of those crazy health freaks or tree huggers but when someone comes out and tells me that our water isn’t “safe” to drink, I’m going to go a little crazy. I do recycle, when I’m at home that is, but I never really paid attention to the water that I drink.When Chasidy Hobbs came in to speak with us, she told us that we could even see what chemicals are in the University’s water. She said it was high in radium, which is highly radioactive. That scared me. I drink the water from the water fountains on campus; I take a shower using the water on campus. I would like to know how much radium I’m getting exposed to.According to the EWG report on UWF’s water, radium exceeded health guidelines along with six other chemicals. Hobbs also said that radium can’t even be removed using a water filter so that means that the PUR water filter my roommate bought isn’t helping us against that pollutant. Thanks UWF for the radioactive water.
Chasidy Hobbs is the newest coastkeeper for Emerald Coastkeeper, which is the local chapter of the Waterkeeper Alliance. She is also an instructor and advisor at the University of West Florida.
Waterkeeper Alliance is an international non-profit group dedicated to monitoring bodies of water.
“Our jurisdiction is from Perdido Bay by the Alabama line to East Bay by Panama City,” Hobbs said. “We work predominantly in Escambia County because that’s where our headquarters are.”
She had hoped her first major project to fight against would be the off-shore drilling issue affecting the state of Florida, but before she could even touch that issue, the Environmental Working Group water report came out.
The EWG rated Pensacola’s water number 100 in the list of 100 water utilities in the United States. That meant that Pensacola’s water was the worst water in the U.S.
EWG is a non-profit organization based out of Washington, D.C. They collected data from water companies throughout 45 states and the District of Columbia.
“EWG rated big city water utilities based on three factors: the total number of chemicals detected since 2004; the percentage of chemicals found of those tested; and the highest average level for an individual pollutant, relative to legal limits or national average amounts, including for the most common pollutants,” according to the EWG report.
Hobbs is planning a panel discussion to be held on February 10th at Pensacola Junior College to discuss how to regulate the water. Some issues that they will discuss will include the use of a water filter and what can actually be removed by these filters.
“Well I’m curious just what can be removed with a filter,” Hobbs said. “I know radium isn’t coming out, that’s one that cannot be filtered out.”
There are over 60,000 chemicals found in the water around the U.S but less than 100 of those are regulated by the government. According to the EWG report, there were 45 pollutants found in Pensacola’s water and of those 45, 21 of them exceeded health guidelines.
For more information on Emerald Coastkeeper visit their website at www.emeraldcoastkeeper.org and for more information on the EWG report visit www.ewg.org.
