Seattle-based correspondent Brett Walton has a habit of adding extra days to his reporting schedules. In this FEJ StoryLog, Walton shares how he used one such buffer to stretch a grant and produce not just one story on California’s small drinking water systems, but a second on the aftermath of wildfire on another town’s water system, plus finish a third pending project on household water debt.
Sometimes on the environment beat, what seems like an old story is perpetually new again. That’s the case with waste incineration, finds the latest TipSheet. Rather than being reduced, incinerators are just being transformed, with the ongoing burning of plastics especially troubling for the environment and public health. Get the backstory on where the regulatory regime may have holes, plus key reporting angles and story ideas.
"The construction of former President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border desecrated Indigenous cultural sites, hurt wildlife, destroyed vegetation, dried up key water resources, exacerbated the risk of flooding and triggered erosion that has left mountain slopes “unstable and at risk of collapse,” according to a new report."
"Even amid a disaster-filled summer marked by record heat, climate misinformation continues to spread online at alarming rates. Some experts fear it could slow progress at COP28."
"Drought is making it harder for golf lovers to justify the game’s copious use of water".
"Critics of the federal program say it encourages more carbon-intensive farming and are calling for Congress to lower subsidies for big, wealthy producers."
"The Dakota Access oil pipeline’s future remains uncertain after the Army Corps of Engineers on Friday released a long-awaited draft environmental study that will help determine whether it receives an easement needed to keep operating."
"I was sitting in solitude earlier this summer in an Adirondack chair in my backyard, when I realized I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. Thanks to the app I’d just downloaded on my phone — the popular and free Merlin Bird ID — I learned just from listening that I was surrounded by more than a dozen species of birds."
"A climate scientist ignited controversy Tuesday when he claimed that he withheld key details of his wildfire research to fit “preapproved narratives” on climate risks in order to be published in one of the world’s most esteemed science publications."
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