By TIM WHEELER
A journalist's job is to follow the facts and call them as they appear, no matter which side of a debate they may favor. In the past year, as president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I've often found myself explaining to various people and groups that the only cause for which SEJ advocates is more and better coverage of the environment.
by Mark Bowen,
Dutton, 336 pages, $25.95
Reviewed by Craig Pittman
On June 23, 1988, a scientist named Jim Hansen spent five minutes talking to a Senate committee. Hansen said he was 99 percent sure the Earth was getting warmer because of the greenhouse effect, and he predicted that 1988 would turn out to be one of the warmest years on record.
Althoughhe spoke inanIowa-bredmonotone, Hansen's testimony electrified the committee hearing.When he tried to leave,Hansen was surrounded by reporters.
By Devra Davis
Basic Books (2007), $27.95
Reviewed by JenniferWeeks
In 1971 President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, formally launching a war on the second-leading cause of death in the United States. The legislation promised more funding and targeted government support for cancer research. "The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease," Nixon urged in his State of the Union Address earlier that year.
By Steve Nash
University of Virginia Press, $22.95
Reviewed by Christine Heinrichs
Environmental change manifests in ways so different, its fragments can seem unrelated. Steve Nash's 15 feature articles, brought together in book form, stitches the fragments together, telling a dramatic story of the changes rippling through our world.
By Mark Schapiro
Chelsea Green Publishing, $22.95
Reviewed by Susan Moran
In the quagmire of the Iraq war, the United States has lost credibility as a world leader. In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro offers another version of the erosion of American leadership. In this case, it's how the U.S. government has gone from one whose environmental laws and regulations were once a model for other nations to one whose standards have fallen so far below those of even some developing nations.
By CASEY McNERTHNEY
Every story has moments that get left out in the retelling. Sometimes those moments are what reporters remember most, but have a hard time describing in a print news story.
Because of the Internet, those moments—both in images and audio—now can be shared with the readers.
The inflections in a source's voice, the photos that help explain, the odds and ends you collect that would normally be buried on your desk – those now have a place in an online slideshow.
By JAN KNIGHT
The Internet has transformednewsaboutoil spills by providing accounts that rivet global attention and go beyond official versions of the disasters, a recent study suggests.
Specifically, environmental groups' increasingly sophisticated Internet use has expanded the ways in which oil spills are framed. Via their websites, email and blogs, the groups have interrupted official efforts to control information about the spills and mobilized local and international action, according to the study.
By BILL DAWSON
Lisa Margonelli is an Oakland, Calif.-based freelance journalist, a fellow of the NewAmerica Foundation, and the author of Oil on the Brain, a book that describes "petroleum's long, strange trip to your tank."
Margonelli has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover and Jane. She was a recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and an excellence in journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.
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