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GoGreenNation news

SEJ 2022 Focus on environmental Justice

Christine Heinrichs
News Feed
Monday, May 16, 2022

A Roseate Spoonbill flew over our heads as our group of about 20 assembled in the parking lot of the High Island Bird Sanctuary in Texas. We caught our breath. Welcome to SEJ 2022, the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference.

A Roseate Spoonbill flew over our heads as our group of about 20 assembled in the parking lot of the High Island Bird Sanctuary in Texas. We caught our  breath. Welcome to SEJ 2022, the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference.

The birding tour was one of nine all-day tours to kick off the annual conference. Birds, Conservation, Diversity and Inclusion brought several of the conference’s themes together. Other tours explored sustainable fishing; the implications of climate change solutions for Houston, the Oil and Gas Capital; wildfire; clean energy; flood protection; environmental racism in Houston’s Ship Channel; corporate stonewalling to climate threats; and changes to highway construction to consider environmental justice. 

Just under 600 journalists, experts in these subjects and generalists filling in their background, gathered in Houston March 30-April 3 for the conference. SEJ worked with the Uproot Project, a free network for journalists of color who cover the environment. Uproot is a professional organization to support career advancement among journalists of color. SEJ awarded 26 Diversity Fellowships to attend the conference. 

In my 20th year of SEJ membership, I greeted old friends, those who had led the organization in earlier years. Experienced conference attendees were matched with first-timers. Mine were three young women, full of energy and ideas. 

That vibrant energy powered the conference. SEJ’s work to broaden its ranks with minority journalists is succeeding. More black and brown faces mixed at meals and inspired discussions during sessions. 

Rice University sponsored the conference. Houston prides itself on being the Energy Capital of the World. Thanks to its location at low elevation on the Gulf of Mexico, it floods frequently. Sea level rise puts its oil, gas and petrochemical plants at risk, along with those of neighboring Louisiana. Flooding and chemical contamination disproportionately affect communities of color.

THE WORK OF REPORTING

The focus was on helping reporters do their job of standing in for the public and providing information that their audiences, in their personal lives as well as their political lives, need. News affects how the public navigates climate crises, from the immediate of fire and flood, to the policy side of breaking through industry-packed political functions. 

Sessions included digital tools to deal with hacking, doxing and working with data to track toxic contamination, oil and gas extraction, mining and mapping environmental justice. 

ENERGY TRANSITION

Clean renewable energy is key to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate crisis. Sessions explored various strategies forward, such as hydrogen as a green fuel. Sammy Roth, energy reporter for the LA Times, raised questions about hydrogen production products such as nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; as yet unknown costs; pipeline requirements; and the danger of explosion. He called it “a combination of hope and skepticism.” 

Natural gas, promoted as a clean alternative to coal, is another fossil fuel. Industry lobbying has opposed laws requiring new construction to be all-electric, which can be produced from renewable sources. Advocating for substituting one fossil fuel for another prolongs the transition to clean fuel.

Carbon capture, use and sequestration sounds like a solution, but as Sara Sneath reported for Southerly, that path is fraught with pitfalls. No carbon capture plant has met its goals, and many emitted more greenhouse gas (GHG) than they captured. Preventing the production of GHG is a more direct route to reducing GHG.

OCEAN ISSUES

Oceans got attention in an all-day workshop, plenary discussion and related sessions. Oceans have absorbed substantial carbon, but at the cost of acidic changes that affect the animals and plants for which they are habitat.

Plastic pollution contaminates water and beaches. According to The Nurdle Patrol, policy and business practices, and stopping plastic production at the source can reduce this aspect of ocean trash.

Sea level rise is already causing regular flooding in coastal areas. the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA)’s sea level rise viewer shows Gulf Coast petrochemical facilities can expect to be inundated.

“Failure to plan is planning to fail,” one participant said.

Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, executive director for Bayou City Waterkeeper, made the case for the Personhood of Water, as a way to advocate for the environment. Corporations have legal standing in court. “It sounds a little radical, but it might be what we need right now,” she said.

RELIGION AND CLIMATE CRISIS

Participants examined the spiritual side of their work in sessions on religion. Katherine Hayhoe, who has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, is a climate change scientist serving as chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. She speaks from a Christian perspective.She quoted examples of Bible scripture to support stewardship of God’s Earth and caring for the poor. 

WHAT'S OBJECTIVE

Journalists overflowed the session on When the Truth is Not Neutral: The Myth of Absolute Objectivity in Reporting. The panel was led by Emily Holden, founder and editor in chief of Floodlight, and included LA Times’ Sammy Roth and Sara Shipley Hiles, associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Roth devoted one of his Boiling Point newsletters to discussion of the issue. 

Traditional journalism required early climate change coverage to include “both sides” in news stories, even though editors and reporters understood that climate change was questioned only by a fringe group of scientists. Their efforts were later unmasked, as paid work for fossil fuel companies, in Merchants of Doubt. Journalism’s struggle to call Donald Trump’s false and misleading pronouncements “lies” indicates the continuing issues for reporters.

While environmental reporters separated themselves from the advocacy of 20th-century environmentalists, using objectivity as a shield served the power structure and obscured the real stories. No one questions that political reporters favor democracy or that education reporters favor good education. It’s not controversial to be in favor of a clean environment. 

“Advocating nothing is advocating for the status quo,” Holden said. 

Framing environmental transition stories as Jobs vs. Environment is inaccurate. The workforce is not the industry. Renewable energy creates new jobs, and fossil fuel jobs are declining. Policy makers are in position to address the transition.

Holden recommended reporters read their own stories with an eye to asking, Did I miss the message? The historic journalistic View from Nowhere objectivity is being re-evaluated, to a View from Somewhere.

How reporters cover the news, what stories editors select, the words and images we choose to tell the stories, continue to evolve. One of the guidelines I like to use is, How would I tell a friend what happened? Sessions like this one, bringing thoughtful journalists together for frank, if uncomfortable, exchanges, strengthen all of our work. 

TOURING AND PARTYING

Saturday afternoon mini-tours invited everyone out of the conference center, to see Prairie Chickens, paddle kayaks around Kickerillo-Mischer Preserve, bike the bayous, take a pontoon boat on Buffalo Bayou, or take a walking tour around Houston or the Rice campus.  

Rice put on a party Saturday night, with art events and live music for dancing.

BREAKFAST AND BOOKS

The Houston Arboretum set up tables for breakfast under the trees. Historian Douglas Brinkley discussed the political background of his new book, out in November, Silent Spring Revolution. It’s the third in his environmental politics trilogy, from Theodore Roosevelt, through Franklin Roosevelt, to this volume, covering World War II to 1973. It explores the legacies of Rachel Carson, JFK and LBJ in the “great environmental awakening.”

A panel of Rice professors who have written books followed. Two have experienced Houston’s flooding, and wrote about how that affected them and their neighborhoods. Dan Cohan, who teaches civil engineering, found that his entire curriculum needed revision after he studied climate change.

RECORDINGS AVAILABLE

Most sessions were recorded and will be made available to the public through SEJ. Some are already available, thanks to Bernardo Motta.

‍

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of
Christine Heinrichs
Christine Heinrichs

Christine Heinrichs writes from her home on California’s Central Coast. She keeps a backyard flock of about a dozen hens. She follows coastal issues, writing a regular column on the Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery for the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Her narrative on the Central Coast condor flock will appear in Ten Spurs 2021 edition.

Her book, How to Raise Chickens, was first published in 2007, just as the local food movement was starting to focus attention on the industrial food system. Backyard chickens became the mascot of local food. The third edition of How to Raise Chickens was published in January 2019. The Backyard Field Guide to Chickens was published in 2016. Look for them in Tractor Supply stores and online.

She has a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Oregon and belongs to several professional journalism and poultry organizations.

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If folks could understand exactly what EJ is within our government from the perspective of someone who led the work, I believe they would understand what we all stand to lose. In the United States, we still have communities that do not have access to safe and reliable drinking water or access to sewer systems that are forced to pipe their waste into yards, ditches, or a nearby stream. There are communities across our country where, regardless of national air quality standards, people are breathing in things that cause cancers, asthma, cardiovascular issues, and pulmonary disease, among many other afflictions. There are communities in our country, in rural and farming areas out west and in Alaska and in our oldest cities, that face pollution levels many of us would refuse to live next to and certainly wouldn’t want to raise our children around. Yet people do. Every single day. 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Many communities don’t have sewer service because they are in rural areas where poverty has persisted for generations, neighbors are spread out over square miles, government agencies are not used to working with one another, and the very geology under the community makes digging a trench or situating a traditional septic tank cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. Sources of air pollution wound up in many places because they’re close to ports, railroads, highways, raw materials, and labor. Pollution made these places cheap, so low-income communities moved in and schools were built. More new pollution sources also came to these communities because they didn’t have the political power to say no, and our government institutions had neither the will nor an interest in protecting them. As a result, the U.S. has sacrificed whole communities — Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income white — by allowing multiple dangerous sources of pollution to build up in already contaminated places and starving them of government resources without giving a second thought to the fact that we shouldn’t have families living and growing in those same places.Solutions to these problems must come from the bottom up, and they involve every person and every entity that has a stake in the problems and the solutions — community leaders and organizations, government at every level, philanthropy, academia, nonprofits, and the private sector. At EPA, the EJ program brings together all of these actors in pursuit of community-driven solutions to the problems standing between the community and their vision for their future. The EJ program supports communities that have never been involved in forming broad, complex collaborations, especially when so many of the necessary partners have typically been in opposition to them. The tough truth is many communities in our country have not been served well by our government, its systems, and its structures. They do not serve well those communities that have limited capacity to fight for a cleaner environment and future, those that aren’t near our centers of power, or those that have been targeted, forgotten, and marginalized throughout our history because of their skin color, their language, or how much they earn. The way we clean up the environment has been baked in over 50 years. 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EJ staff lift up their voices and realities when they go back to their colleagues at EPA, or a state capitol, or city hall, or a Tribal office and tell them what’s going on and ask them to do something differently, something new, something maybe a bit hard. As you’d expect, that is 99 times out of 100 a really tough sell. But that’s the job of the EJ professional, and they are damn good at it. Few bureaucrats have both the bravery and stamina to go into those hot rooms time and time again to face really angry human beings and absorb enough of their fire until folks get to a place of having a constructive conversation. Few bureaucrats’ jobs are to try to change the way everyone around them does their job so that it benefits more and more people in our country. Few people would take on a lifetime commitment knowing they will rack up way more losses than they ever do wins and come back again and again with a smile to try once more. Few bureaucrats regularly have their work — their passion — mischaracterized and abused as something nefarious or threatening when all they are trying to do is make our country work, and work well, for everyone. That is what we — our government, our country, our society — stand to lose if we lose environmental justice from EPA. We will lose the vanguard of courageous, talented, committed civil servants who work every single day to make our country better for everyone. We will lose the ones who are willing to represent our government in its toughest moments. We will lose the ones whose faces are often the first that communities across our country encounter that make them feel heard and understood by their government instead of ignored and pushed aside. The ones who make every person in this country feel that their government might actually treat them with the respect and dignity we all deserve. The ones who also work to make their government actually treat everyone with that respect and dignity. That is not just a loss for the communities that depend on our government to do better for them. That is a loss for all of us. It is a lost opportunity for our society to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our democracy to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our country to finally be one of equality and fairness. It is a loss we cannot afford to accept.

Editor’s note: A version of this op-ed was originally published on Matthew Tejada’s LinkedIn profile.There is a lot of misinformation out there, much of it quite intentional, about what environmental justice, or EJ, is.As a result, billions of dollars in funding and technical assistance that flows directly to communities and their partners has been jeopardized and the EPA EJ staff who oversee the use of these funds have largely been put on leave. The work of making our government more just —– work that has been pursued for decades —– has essentially been wiped from our federal government in a matter of weeks. The staff who’ve been put on leave were responsible for listening to the concerns of people across the U.S., supporting tribes and states and local governments in solving some of our most complex health problems, responding to emergencies to make sure the most vulnerable communities receive the help they need, and working to make sure the federal government serves everyone in our country.Critical tools such as EJScreen that were used for everything from transportation planning to disaster response have been taken offline. Powerful forums for the American public to engage their government, such as the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) and National EJ Town Halls, have all been put on ice. For almost 11 years, I had the honor of running EPA’s environmental justice program. It pains me to see the dismantling of this flagship program for advancing equity and justice in our society. If folks could understand exactly what EJ is within our government from the perspective of someone who led the work, I believe they would understand what we all stand to lose. In the United States, we still have communities that do not have access to safe and reliable drinking water or access to sewer systems that are forced to pipe their waste into yards, ditches, or a nearby stream. There are communities across our country where, regardless of national air quality standards, people are breathing in things that cause cancers, asthma, cardiovascular issues, and pulmonary disease, among many other afflictions. There are communities in our country, in rural and farming areas out west and in Alaska and in our oldest cities, that face pollution levels many of us would refuse to live next to and certainly wouldn’t want to raise our children around. Yet people do. Every single day. Oftentimes, these are the only places they can afford to live or where they feel safe and have community and history. All people, no matter their ZIP code or bankroll, should be protected from pollution. This is as true for working class white communities as it is for migrant farmworker communities and residents in centuries-old Indigenous villages and historic African American neighborhoods. Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash Helping these communities become safe to raise a child in, to clean up pollution, to develop economically and build their capacity, to come together to have a hopeful vision of their future: this is the mission of environmental justice in our government.The challenges facing these communities are the toughest to crack — they are complex, entrenched, and long-lived beyond most folks’ imagination. Many communities don’t have sewer service because they are in rural areas where poverty has persisted for generations, neighbors are spread out over square miles, government agencies are not used to working with one another, and the very geology under the community makes digging a trench or situating a traditional septic tank cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. Sources of air pollution wound up in many places because they’re close to ports, railroads, highways, raw materials, and labor. Pollution made these places cheap, so low-income communities moved in and schools were built. More new pollution sources also came to these communities because they didn’t have the political power to say no, and our government institutions had neither the will nor an interest in protecting them. As a result, the U.S. has sacrificed whole communities — Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income white — by allowing multiple dangerous sources of pollution to build up in already contaminated places and starving them of government resources without giving a second thought to the fact that we shouldn’t have families living and growing in those same places.Solutions to these problems must come from the bottom up, and they involve every person and every entity that has a stake in the problems and the solutions — community leaders and organizations, government at every level, philanthropy, academia, nonprofits, and the private sector. At EPA, the EJ program brings together all of these actors in pursuit of community-driven solutions to the problems standing between the community and their vision for their future. The EJ program supports communities that have never been involved in forming broad, complex collaborations, especially when so many of the necessary partners have typically been in opposition to them. The tough truth is many communities in our country have not been served well by our government, its systems, and its structures. They do not serve well those communities that have limited capacity to fight for a cleaner environment and future, those that aren’t near our centers of power, or those that have been targeted, forgotten, and marginalized throughout our history because of their skin color, their language, or how much they earn. The way we clean up the environment has been baked in over 50 years. Changing a policy, bringing in new and different data, challenging stale legal interpretations, and getting bureaucrats out of their cubicles and out into other spaces where they can take in the realities of how different people live in different communities is the work of environmental justice in our government. Photo by UUSC on FlickrIt is a difficult job confronting some of the toughest challenges in our society. EJ staff are often the ones who get the call to be the first government face in a room full of people who are beyond angry because they just found out that generations of their children have been playing on land full of lead. Or they learned that their drinking water is full of arsenic. Or they heard that yet another incinerator or metal shredder is moving in across the street. Or that they yet again are not going to get the funding to fix their sewers. 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Few bureaucrats regularly have their work — their passion — mischaracterized and abused as something nefarious or threatening when all they are trying to do is make our country work, and work well, for everyone. That is what we — our government, our country, our society — stand to lose if we lose environmental justice from EPA. We will lose the vanguard of courageous, talented, committed civil servants who work every single day to make our country better for everyone. We will lose the ones who are willing to represent our government in its toughest moments. We will lose the ones whose faces are often the first that communities across our country encounter that make them feel heard and understood by their government instead of ignored and pushed aside. The ones who make every person in this country feel that their government might actually treat them with the respect and dignity we all deserve. The ones who also work to make their government actually treat everyone with that respect and dignity. That is not just a loss for the communities that depend on our government to do better for them. That is a loss for all of us. It is a lost opportunity for our society to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our democracy to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our country to finally be one of equality and fairness. It is a loss we cannot afford to accept.

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Climate Groups Sue Over Trump’s Orders to Expand Offshore Drilling

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration. Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which […]

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration. Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal. “The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts.” “Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish,” said Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. “Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.” In the first lawsuit, local and national organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center took aim at the president’s revocation of Joe Biden-era protections for 265 million acres of federal waters from future fossil fuel leasing. Trump signed an order withdrawing the protections just hours into his second term. Another related challenge, filed by many of the same groups, calls for a court to reinstate a 2021 decision affirming protections from nearly 130 million acres in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. “The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,” said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney at the organization Defenders of Wildlife, which is a plaintiff in the case. “Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry’s profit.” The lawsuits will probably be the first of hundreds of environmental lawsuits filed by green groups against the Trump administration. During his first weeks in office, Trump has already rolled back a swath of Biden-era environmental protections while freezing green spending programs—part of his pledge to boost the fossil fuel industry. Trump says the US must boost fossil fuels—which are responsible for the vast majority of global warming—to meet demand and ensure that the United States remains a global energy leader. The US is currently producing more oil and gas than any other country in history. The Guardian has contacted the White House for comment about the litigation.

Climate
Water
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Climate Change Is Shrinking Glaciers Faster Than Ever, With 7 Trillion Tons Lost Since 2000

A new and massive study finds that climate change is melting the world’s mountain glaciers faster than ever

Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world's mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.The world's glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annual from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week’s journal Nature.And the last few years, the melt has accelerated even more, hitting a record 604 billion tons (548 billion metric tons) lost in 2023, the last year analyzed.The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. In all, the world's glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice (6.5 trillion metric tons) since 2000, according to the study.“The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be accelerating,” said William Colgan, a glaciologist for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and one of about 60 authors of the study.Glaciers in Alaska are melting at the fastest rate of any of the 19 regions studied, losing about 67 billion tons (61 billion metric tons) of ice a year, producing the biggest net ice loss, the study found.In the past 24 years, Central Europe’s glaciers have lost the highest percentage of ice of any region, now 39% smaller than they were in 2000, the paper said. Colgan said he worries most about the Alps because “elevated summer temperatures have been hammering the Alps. ”Fifteen years ago, scientists were worried most about the Andes and the Patagonia glaciers, but the Alps have shrunk so fast they could eventually disappear, Colgan said.“Glaciers are apolitical and unbiased sentinels of climate change, and their decline paints a clear picture of accelerated warming,” said Gwenn Flowers, a professor of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who wasn't part of the study.University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who also wasn't part of the study, said glaciers shrank and grew in the past for local, well-understood reasons that were not climate change. What's happening now is different and clear, he said: “It’s due to greenhouse gas increases caused directly by coal, oil, and natural gas burning. ... No amount of rhetoric, tweeting, or proclamation will change that.”Scambos, Flowers and other outside scientists called the assessment sobering and accurate but not surprising.Colgan said that many places — such as those in the U.S. West — are seeing extra water now from fast-melting glaciers and benefiting from that boost, but that will soon disappear as the glaciers melt beyond a point of no return.Melting glaciers contribute more to sea level rise than ice loss in either Greenland or Antarctica. Only the expansion of water as it warms plays a bigger role in sea level rise, the paper said.The overall glacier loss rate is similar, if maybe slightly less, than that found by earlier and less comprehensive studies. But this new work will probably trigger new predictions that will be even gloomier in the future because of better information and worsening warming, Colgan said.“If you’re losing 5.5% of the global ice volume in just over 20 years, clearly that’s not sustainable,” Colgan said. “That's going to catch up with you.”The more than 600 billion tons of glacier loss in 2023 “sounds incredible now, but it might sound pretty normal in 10 years from now,” Colgan said. “Mountain glaciers as a whole can flip into collective ice loss pretty darn quick.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Climate
Mountains
Science

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