William (Rocky) Kistner | Special to the Post-Dispatch Dec 11, 2025
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund.
ST. LOUIS — A five-year effort to mark Missouri’s most notorious slave prison will come to fruition next month, when a bronze historical plaque will be installed on the exterior of the Stadium East parking garage across from Ballpark Village and Busch Stadium.
Historians say the parking garage, owned by InterPark Holdings, is located on the site of a slave prison once owned by Bernard M. Lynch, a nationally known trader of enslaved men, women and children. Lynch operated several “slave pens” in pre-Civil War St. Louis, with the largest one beneath the site of the garage.
The project’s backers are planning a ceremony in late January to unveil the new marker. On game days in the summer, they say, thousands of Cardinals fans will pass by the 20-by-16-inch bronze panel on the parking garage on Broadway; it will include text and a photo of one of Lynch’s brutal slave prisons.
“From 1849 to 1861, Lynch held enslaved people here in inhumane conditions, buying and selling them in St. Louis and in other markets across the South,” a mockup of the plaque reads in part. “On September 1, 1861, the Union army seized his slave pen and transformed it into a Confederate prison.”
Among the project’s supporters was the Missouri Historical Society, which agreed to contribute to the text and design of the marker and help preserve it after the installation.
“We are the preserver and the keeper of St. Louis’ history, and that includes even some of the more dark sides of history,” said Cecily Hunter, a historian with the society’s African American History Initiative. “We’re hoping that this will serve as a site for public education and remembrance.”
Remnants of Lynch’s prison cells survived in the basement of the Meyer Brothers Drug Company warehouse until 1963, when the building was destroyed to make way for the Cardinals’ first Busch Stadium downtown. A Lynch slave pen marker that was installed on the warehouse by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce was taken down and never replaced.
Historians say Lynch imprisoned thousands of people, many of whom were sold to buyers and shipped down the Mississippi River to work in the cotton and sugar cane fields of the deep South. After Lynch fled St. Louis at the outbreak of the Civil War, he worked in the mercantile business in Louisiana, according to former Missouri State Archivist Kenneth Winn, who helped write the text for the new marker.
Winn said Lynch later got married and joined the White League, a white supremacist paramilitary organization formed in the South after the Civil War. Lynch died a “happy man,” Winn said.
The endeavor to create a Lynch slave pen markerwas spearheaded by a group of politicians, historians and academics who came together after George Floyd’s killing in 2020. Two state representatives at the time, Trish Gunby and Rasheen Aldridge, called for the Cardinals to help pay for a plaque that would acknowledge one of the prison’s original sites, across the street from the stadium.
Gunby said she became aware of the issue after seeing a photo of Ballpark Village in a New York Times Magazine article by the 1619 Project. The article showed where Lynch’s largest slave prison operated 165 years ago, near the corner of Broadway and Clark Avenue.
“When I saw that image, I remember a feeling of being shocked and sad that this history had been lost,” Gunby said.
The marker, she said, “is how we move forward as a community in terms of addressing the racial injustice in our region.”
Supporters say Gunby was the force who kept the project alive over the past five years. “I was just kind of the thorn that kept prodding everybody,” she said.
Although Cardinals executives expressed initial support for the project and attended meetings with the group, they never agreed to fund it as a stand-alone project and ultimately decided against participating, according to Gunby and others involved in the discussions. Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Gunby says she and her team continued to press for support from historical institutions. The logjam broke earlier this year, when the Missouri Historical Society agreed to get involved. Also, this fall, the Missouri Foundation for Health agreed to fund the cost for making the marker, estimated to be about $5,000.
The foundation’s involvement “is deeply rooted in our being an anti-discrimination institution and recognizing the link that structural racism has to present day health disparities in Black people,” it said in a statement. “The intergenerational trauma that the legacy of slavery caused is still relevant and continues to highlight persistent systemic issues and impact public health in Black communities.”
InterPark, which owns the garage where the plaque will be installed, also helped make the project a reality, supporters say. InterPark could not be reached for comment.
Geoff Ward, professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University and director of the WashU & Slavery Project, worked with Gunby and others to create the Lynch slave pen marker. He says markers are an important way to bear witness to historic events.
“They convey information about the past — where we are and what’s happened here — but promote values in the present and future,” Ward said. “They convey respect for group experiences and the stories that deserve to be told, and in that sense they elevate certain values in the public sphere.”
For more information about the River City Journalism Fund, which seeks to support journalism in St. Louis, go to rcjf.org.
The news media routinely fail to point out what causes global warming and which elected officials are funded by the oil and gas industry
Rescue workers were still searching for bodies buried in twisted piles of brush and tree trunks along the Guadalupe River when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stepped up to the microphones in Kerrville on July 7. “Texas is grieving right now. The pain, the shock of what’s happened these last few days has broken the heart of Texas,” he said, adding that he had just picked up his daughter at a nearby summer camp a week before.
Cruz’s press conference was one of the first public acknowledgements of the horrific devastation triggered by a record-setting flood that inundated an area of the central Texas Hill Country known as Flash Flood Alley. The rain-swollen Guadalupe River swept hundreds of campers, tourists and residents to their deaths in the early morning hours of July 4, including dozens of young girls attending Camp Mystic who were trapped in water that rose more than 20 feet in just a few hours.
There were few answers for how it could have happened. Cruz advised Hill Country residents to look to their churches to heal their wounds and rebuild, providing little solace for a shell-shocked community.
Cruz also warned that it was not the time to cast blame for the tragedy. “There will be those who blame President Trump,” he said. “After rebuilding, there will be a natural process to figure out what happened.”
Since the initial days of the disaster, “figuring out what happened” has focused mainly on emergency response efforts and flood warnings. But there has been little to no focus on what caused the Guadalupe River flood or other similar extreme weather events, which is something scientists figured out years ago. Warmer air from global warming holds more moisture, which causes more torrential downpours, worsens floods, and turbocharges hurricanes. And that global warming has been largely caused by burning coal, oil and gas, a fact that seems to get little mention these days.
It is no surprise that Cruz and other top elected officials from the Lone Star state would refrain from making that scientifically proven connection. After all, they are the recipients of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry and, in turn, have been blocking government action on climate change for decades. But it is a surprise that the news media, too, largely failed to adequately inform the public that the recent flood in Texas—as well as other extreme weather events—result from a climate crisis driven by human activity. That failure enables Cruz and other officials who benefit from the fossil fuel industry’s largesse, if they acknowledge that climate change is happening at all, to chalk it up to a natural phenomenon that we can’t do anything about.
Oil and gas industry’s point man in Congress
Cruz, a major supporter of President Trump’s “drill baby drill” energy policy, is currently the biggest recipient of oil and gas industry funds in Congress. In the 2024 election cycle, the Texas Republican raked in more than $1 million of the industry’s contributions, according to the nonpartisan group Open Secrets. That was nearly twice the amount received by the second-biggest oil and gas industry-funded senator, Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming. The 2024 election cycle was no anomaly. Since 1990, Cruz has been the second-largest recipient of oil and gas contributions in the Senate, pulling in more than $5.5 million. Only former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney received more.
Just a few weeks ago, Cruz backed provisions in the Senate version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would cut energy credits for the booming wind and solar industry, despite the fact that Texas is the top state for wind energy production and the nation’s second-biggest solar power producer, which together account for 53,000clean energy jobs. Cruz’s provisions, which were in the final version of the bill Trump signed into law on July 4, will likely raise energy costs and cripple clean energy projects.
As the oil and gas industry’s point man in Congress, Cruz is not above spreading outlandish falsehoods about environmental advocates who have been pressing state and federal officials to address the climate crisis. “We’re witnessing right now a systematic campaign against American energy,” Cruz asserted at a congressional hearing last month. “There is a coordinated assault by the radical left, backed and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, to seize control of our courts and weaponize litigation against our energy producers.’’
The idea that the Chinese Communist Party is funding U.S. environmentalists to attack the U.S. fossil fuel industry is of course ludicrous. It is more likely that China, which is outpacing the United States in clean energy and electric vehicle innovation, would applaud Cruz’s efforts to hold U.S. clean energy back.
Certainly, Cruz is not the only politician in the pocket of the oil and gas industry in Texas, the nation’s top oil and gas producer. Gov. Greg Abbott also is paid handsomely by the industry, receiving more than $1 million in donations in the 2024 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, and that was just a drop in the oil barrel. A 2021 Associated Press (AP) investigation found that oil and gas industry donated more than $26 million to Abbott between 2015 and 2021.
“Oil and gas built and enriched Texas, and with that its politicians, including those who became president,” AP reported. “But none has reaped campaign contributions on the scale of Abbott, who in six years in office has raised more than $150 million from donors, more than any governor in U.S. history.” The sector that donated the most? Oil and gas.
In any case, the Texas Republican Party controls the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature, and its official platform minces no words. It proposes abolishing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, supports reclassifying carbon dioxide as a “non-pollutant,” and opposes what it calls “environmentalism, or ‘climate change’ initiatives that obstruct legitimate business interests and private property use.”
News media largely silent on the fossil fuel connection
Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving up global temperatures and wreaking havoc with the climate, mainstream news organizations all too often fail to point out the link between fossil fuel emissions and extreme weather disasters. Likewise, they fail to mention the financial ties elected officials have to the fossil fuel industry.
A case in point is the recent coverage of the Guadalupe River flood by The Washington Post, which has done award-winning reporting on the link between climate change and fossil fuel emissions in the past. This time, its reporters barely mentioned it. Since July 4, when the flood began, the paper has published at least 30 articles on the disaster and the growing problem of flooding. But it wasn’t until July 16 that the paper finally ran a story, on its front page, that mentioned the role fossil fuels play. Even then, however, it mentioned the link only in passing and buried it on the jump page in the twelfth paragraph. Moreover, the way the sentence is written is ambiguous. “Human-caused fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect,” it reads, “have caused global temperatures to rise close to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.” The sentence makes it seem as if “fossil fuel emissions” and “the greenhouse effect” are somehow two different things when they are directly related.
The Post’s blind spot on this key point is nothing new. The news media have long disregarded fossil fuel’s link to the climate crisis. For example, a 2019 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reviewed 600 New York Times articles from 1980 to 2018 and found virtually no mention of the basic facts of climate change, including its connection to fossil fuel emissions.
“We have this major problem: that people don’t seem to have a solid grasp of the fundamental ideas,” said study coauthor David Romps, a Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. “And why would that be? There has been a well-funded campaign to spread misinformation and sow doubt about global warming, which has been very successful.…
“After you finish school, you learn about science primarily through the news,” he added. “And if you are not getting appropriate context from that news coverage, you are going to be confused.”
The Times has not improved much since the 2019 Berkeley study. Since July 4, the paper has published more than 70 Texas flood and flood-related articles and briefs. They all mention climate change, but only one article posted on the Times’ website on July 5 and “The Morning” newsletter emailed to subscribers on July 6 pointed out that fossil fuel emissions cause it.
Broadcast networks are equally at fault. A March investigation by Media Matters, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks mainstream press coverage, found that only 9 percent of the climate-related segments on broadcast news programs in 2024—28 out of 324—mentioned fossil fuels, slightly less than in 2023, when they cited it in just 12 percent of the segments.
The news media must do better
Journalists could easily make the fossil fuel connection in every climate-related story simply by stating something like: “Scientists say human-caused climate change is principally fueled by burning fossil fuels. Experts say not enough is being done to reduce fossil fuel use to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.” They also could easily mention where politicians get their money. That information is readily available online.
Pretty simple stuff. But most news organizations don’t take the time or space to report that information, leaving the public in the dark. If the news media don’t report the cause of the climate crisis, people will not get the information they need to protect themselves from the hazards of an increasingly dangerous world.
This month’s disaster in Texas’s Flash Flood Alley is just the latest of many examples of why it is critical for the news media to inform the public, not only about the cause of the climate crisis but also about the solutions for it. Likewise, reporters should hold elected officials accountable by reporting whose interests they represent. Given that we now have an administration that is doubling down on fossil fuels and kneecapping renewables, it is that much more imperative that the mainstream news media point out the facts about mounting climate threats. Otherwise, disasters like the recent one in Texas will happen again, with more campers washed away from their bunks in the middle of the night.
This story first appeared on Substack’s Money Trail..
Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Kindra Arnesen and her Louisiana fishing community have a lot to celebrate this Earth Day. (Photo courtesy of Kindra Arnesen)
Kindra Arnesen and her family have spent their lives fishing for shrimp and finfish in the coastal waters of the Louisiana bayou. She’s proud of the Cajan culture that makes Louisiana seafood famous the world over.
But the scrappy Plaquemines Parish fisher has faced down more than her share of existential threats. First, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the entire region. Five years later, the massive BP oil rig disaster, which poisoned the Barataria Bay fishing grounds and sickened her family and neighbors. Then, more recently, a $3-billion, coastal restoration plan to divert the Mississippi River that would imperil the shrimp and oyster grounds that sustain local fishing towns.
Fast forward to earlier this month. Just when all seemed lost, two blockbuster decisions came like bolts out of the blue on the same day, giving the Arnesen family and the rest of the local fishing industry something to celebrate this Earth Day. One was Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s last-minute decision to pause the Mississippi River diversion project, the other was a potentially precedent-setting $744.6-million rulingagainst Chevron by a Plaquemines Parish court.
Both decisions gave Arnesen more confidence that her fishing community will ultimately survive, but it took a long time for her to get there. Locals say it’s unlikely that anyone in her shoes could stand up to the political and corporate forces that oppose them. So far, she has proved them wrong.
Against all odds
Arnesen, now 47, admits that at times it has been overwhelming to take on such daunting challenges. Besides more powerful hurricanes, increasing competition from shrimp imports, and oil industry pollution, the looming river diversion project could have easily delivered a knockout punch to Louisiana’s fishing community, she says. Her family often considered moving out of the bayou to fish somewhere else.
“I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to want to put us out of business,” Arnesen told Money Trail. “It was like everyone was trying to shut down domestic seafood…. It feels like there’s a global effort to remove wild fisheries.”
The first shock that nearly put her family out of business came from Mother Nature in 2005, when the climate change-turbocharged Hurricane Katrina barreled into the Louisiana coast, smashing into her home town of Buras with a direct hit of 20-foot waves. The storm tossed fishing boats like toys onto the tops of bridges, destroying many of the buildings of Plaquemines Parish, which juts into the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans.
In 2010, Arnesen had to deal with a human-caused catastrophe when BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up 40 miles off the coast, spewing millions of gallons of oil laced with toxic chemical dispersants into local fishing grounds. The disaster was Arnesen’s political wake-up call. She wound up becoming a fishing community leader in its fight over compensation for medical and emotional damages, compensation she says BP will never fully pay.
This decade, Arnesen has had to engage in yet another battle. State politicians had long been planning to use billions of dollars of BP oil spill fines to build one of the world’s largest river diversion projects to flush land-building Mississippi River sediment into the rapidly disappearing marshes of Barataria Bay. Louisiana lost 2,000 miles of coastline since the 1930s and now loses about 29 square miles of coastal land each year. Most of that loss is due to sea level rise, natural land subsidence, and oil and gas operations, particularly the pipeline canals that companies carve into the bayou like spaghetti on a plate.
Coastal fishing communities feared the $3-billion river diversion project would doom their livelihoods. Studies show the flood of polluted river water would alter the marsh saltwater environment and destroy lucrative shrimp and oyster beds, as well as potentially kill off thousands of bottlenose dolphins from deadly skin lesions caused by freshwater flooding. Fishermen and marine mammal scientists were particularly outraged when state officials, with the support of some high-profile environmental groups, successfully lobbied Congress in 2017 to grant the diversion project a waiver from the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow it to legally injure and kill dolphins.
Many of the environmental groups that lobbied for the waiver are grantees of the diversion plan’s deep-pocketed champion, the Walton Family Foundation. Over the last decade, the foundation has doled out millions of dollars to the Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Restore the Mississippi River Delta and other environmental nonprofits. The Walton foundation also has awarded grants to Louisiana news organizations to cover coastal issues, including the river diversion plan. Some of those news outlets published stories and editorialsfavoring the project.
A sea change in the bayou
After years of debate, state and federal agencies greenlighted the diversion project and construction began in August 2023. Earlier this month, however, progress came to a halt when Gov. Jeff Landry, who grew up in the bayou, pulled the plug—at least for now.
Landry, who took office in January 2024 after serving as state attorney general, is no fan of the diversion plan. He questioned the need for a project that is bleeding red ink and facing fishing community lawsuits. On April 4, he announced that he was suspending construction for 90 days while his administration conducts a reassessment, which he suggested could lead to a much more modest version of the plan. “It’s to a point you cannot afford to build the large diversion,” Gordon Dove, head of Landry’s Office of Coastal Activities, told the Fox affiliate in New Orleans.
That was just what Arnesen and her community wanted to hear.
April 4 also was a big day in court for fishing towns across the state. Arnesen spent most of the day at a Plaquemines Parish courthouse waiting to see if a jury would hold one of the biggest oil companies in the world liable for damages. It was the culmination of a 12-year-old lawsuit filed by the parish against Chevron, whose drilling operations ravaged the parish coastline.
Oil and gas operations off the coast of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana have caused extensive damage to the bayou. (Photo: Julie Dermansky)
“It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop,” Arnesen said. “Then, when they read the verdict, my friends stood up and broke out crying…. It sends a huge message to the [oil industry] defendants in other suits.”
In its landmark decision, the jury ruled that Chevron violated its original permits requiring the company to restore coastal wetlands that sustained extensive damage to their original condition. The jury awarded Plaquemines Parish $744.6 million, which—factoring in interest—could ultimately reach $1 billion.
A harbinger of things to come?
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, is one of a number of legal experts who say the court ruling could have a significant impact on other oil and gas damage cases. “This is one of the largest verdicts ever awarded for environmental damage,” he told the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans, “not only in the United States, but globally.”
The decision, which Chevron will likely appeal, should provide a major boost to 40 other damage lawsuits filed by Louisiana parishes against oil companies for allegedly violating their operating permits. It also could bolster the three dozen state, county and city lawsuits against oil companies that allege they deceived the public about the threat their products pose and seek compensation for climate change-related property damage. Two weeks ago, President Trump signed an executive order to try to stymie those efforts to hold the oil industry accountable.
“This [Chevron] case sends an important signal,” said Kathy Mulvey, a climate litigation expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Dozens of communities are stepping up and taking action, … [and] with the backsliding on climate at the federal level, it’s heartening to see local cases pursuing corporate accountability. Louisiana is on the front line.”
That’s exactly where Arnesen has been, and it’s where she plans to be. But she’s not claiming victory just yet. On April 16, the state approved a new $2-billion coastal restoration budget that includes some funding for the diversion project, although officials were mum about restarting construction and hinted that money could be earmarked for other coastal protection projects.
Even if the state cancels the diversion project, Arneson is fully aware that the oil industry, rising seas, and ever more destructive hurricanes will continue to put her and her fishing community at risk. Giving up, however, is not an option. Fishing, she says, is what sustains her and her neighbors.
“I’ve attempted to grow into a person who has a voice,” Arnesen said. “But it’s very taxing to stand in the middle of a burning house. If we don’t do something, we will lose harvested seafood forever.”
Rocky Kistner, Money Trail’s associate editor, previously worked as a reporter and producer at ABC News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, HuffPost, Marketplace and PBS Frontline. He is a board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, which administered the Walton Family Foundation’s coastal reporting grants to the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate until this year.
A little more than a month ago, Plaquemines Parish officials were toasting a landmark $745-million judgment against Chevron for damaging the marshes and coastal fishing areas of Louisiana.
The celebration of their rare victory was cut short on April 26, however, when an inactive, 83-year-old oil well off the southern Louisiana coast suddenly burst, gushing a toxic brew of oil and gas into the bayou’s marshlands and fishing grounds.
The U.S. Coast Guard and a state emergency response team scrambled to shut off the well, but were hampered by shallow waters in the remote Garden Island Bay area of the bayou. It took them nine days to finally stop the flow of oil and gas.
Money Trail has confirmed that the well was first drilled in 1942 by Texaco, then called the Texas Company, according to the Coast Guard and documents on file with the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (LDNR). Texaco continued to operate the well until 2000, the Coast Guard told Money Trail.
Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001 in a merger valued at $36 billion. The Texaco brand name is no longer in use.
LDNR records indicate that the oil well was operated by a succession of several smaller companies and was last owned by Spectrum OpCo, an oil and gas operator in Louisiana owned by Spectrum Energy, which is based in Houston.
The emergency response effort included at least 170 personnel, a dozen oil skimmers, and several miles of boom. On Sunday, the Coast Guard said it had recovered more than 70,000 gallons of oily mix from the well and that cleanup operations were underway. It also said it has launched an investigation into the well’s status and what caused the accident.
Spectrum emailed its first public statement on Sunday after the well had been closed. “Spectrum OpCo sincerely regrets the incident and its potential impact on our neighbors” its statement read in part, “and remains fully engaged and resolutely committed to assisting with the cleanup.”
So far there are no reports of major wildlife impacts, although the blowout occurred near a wildlife preserve and there are concerns about the threat it poses to endangered turtles and shrimp fishing grounds.
“ It’s just pristine wetlands as far as you can see, and now there’s this huge black scar,” Justin Solet with True Transitiontold WWNO public radio. “It’s like a gaping wound from the pictures I’ve seen. It’s just reminiscent of what happened 15 years ago during the BP drilling disaster.”
Why wasn’t the well plugged properly?
Questions remain about why a well first drilled during World War II was not permanently plugged a decade ago after it was no longer in use. The Coast Guard confirmed to Money Trail that the well was not permanently capped to enable an owner to restart production in the future. “The well was reportedly secured via closed valves in 2016,” the Coast Guard said in an email. “No cement was poured or injected to plug and abandon the well at that time.”
“It’s been years since we had a major oil spill like this,” Patrick Harvey, director of Plaquemines Parish’s emergency preparedness office told Money Trail. “But we get a lot of smaller spills reported, maybe a couple hundred a year.” That said, other, even smaller, spills from poorly maintained and constructed wells—especially ones built decades ago—are common and are not reported at all.
Selling out to the devil
Plaquemines Parish Councilman Mitch Jurisich, a powerful voice in the Louisiana fishing industry and chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, has argued for more oversight of the oil industry, which studies show has significantly damaged the state’s coastal fishing grounds.
He worries about the thousands of unplugged and abandoned wells that litter the bayou’s rich marshes and fishing grounds that could explode without warning. Studies suggest there could be as many as 14,000 abandoned wells that were not properly plugged and shut down across the state and offshore that would cost at least $30 billion to properly plug and close.
“We sold ourselves to the devil when we allowed all these oil companies to come in here,” Jurisich said in an interview with Money Trail. “We have laws that they were supposed to restore everything to the way they found it…. Now look what’s happened.”
Jurisich was a major force behind the fishing industry’s opposition to a $3-billion Mississippi River diversion project supported by the state and a handful of environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund and National Wildlife Federation, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Studies show the massive project would have damaged shrimp and oyster fishing and threatenedthousands of dolphins.
The state has since backed off its river diversion plans and new information has come to light questioning the amount of land it would have created. (See Money Trail’s coverage of the river diversion plans posted last month.)
Big oil companies dodge cleanup responsibility
Jurisich says the new Plaquemines Parish oil spill is yet another example of a major oil company selling a less-productive well to a smaller company that does not have the resources to pay for an expensive cleanup. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, he says.
“When the big oil companies sell off to the smaller ones, that removes them from liability,” Jurisich said. “That’s just the way it works.”
Other Louisiana communities are hoping the courts will help them restore the damage the industry has inflicted on their coasts. Currently there are 40 lawsuits filed by coastal communities against oil and gas interests awaiting trial. If Plaquemines Parish’s $745-million court victory does indeed set a precedent, oil companies that have despoiled so much will have to finally pay for what they have done.
Rocky Kistner, Money Trail’s associate editor, previously worked as a reporter and producer at ABC News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, HuffPost, Marketplace and PBS Frontline.
Two major American universities are in the news, thanks to the spadework of a number of small, independent news and research organizations.
Newly unearthed documents reveal that the oil and petrochemical industries spent millions of dollars to influence research at Louisiana State University (LSU), a school that has outsized influence over how the public perceives the oil industry’s activities in the Gulf of Mexico, where more than 90 percent of the nation’s offshore oil and gas is produced.
According to a joint investigation by Floodlight, Louisiana Illuminator, and the WWNO and WRKF public radio stations, LSU researchers received at least $44 million between 2010 and 2020 from ExxonMobil, Shell and other oil and petrochemical companies to provide research on plastics recycling, carbon capture and other industry-related issues and suppress any mention of climate change or Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.”
The investigation was assisted by Data for Progress, a nonprofit think tank that published a report in 2023 documenting how much researchers at more than two dozen universities, including Berkeley, Brown, Harvard, MIT and Stanford, received from six oil companies between 2010 and 2020. Now LSU can be added to the Data for Progress list.
Not only do LSU researchers take fossil fuel industry money, the university also gives companies—if they pay $1.25 million each—the right to decide what research the university’s Institute for Energy Innovation pursues, according to an April 2024 exposéby The Lens, a New Orleans-based publication. The institute, established with a $25-million grant from Shell in 2022, also will give fossil fuel companies a seat on its board for a $5-million fee.
When it comes to science for sale, LSU is not the only school making news. An emeritus University of Louisville professor’s research, funded by BP and ExxonMobil, is being used by the companies to reject medical claims by workers sickened by oil and chemical dispersants when cleaning up the 2010 BP oil spill, according to a storypublished last week by Drilled. Microbiologist Ronald Atlas allowed the two companies to review and edit his work, which supports the companies’ contention that the toxicity of the oil from both the BP spill and the 1989 Exxon Valdez aaccident in Alaska has declined and the two ecosystems could recover.
Universities have been selling science for decades
The fossil fuel industry funds academic research as a key part of its decades-long campaign to confuse the public about the reality and seriousness of climate change. Some trace the campaign back to a 1998 industry memo outlining a multimillion-dollar plan to promote scientific uncertainty by funding seemingly independent research. “Victory will be achieved,” the memo stated, “when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science.”
The coalition that drafted the memo included Chevron, Exxon (which merged with Mobil the following year), and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s largest trade association.
The campaign has continued unabated since. Last year, the Senate Budget Committee released a damning report detailing oil industry efforts to spread climate disinformation by funding, among other things, “free market” think tanks and academic research. The committee’s report included a revealing memo written by a BP executive. “Our policy programs at Harvard and Tufts,” the executive wrote, “provide BP access to unparalleled expertise at the forefront of research in the areas of climate change science, technology, and policy.”
Industry-funded research has had its desired effect, according to a study published last September in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. “We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” the study concluded, “and that universities’ lack of transparency about their partnerships with this industry poses a challenge to empirical research.” And now with the Trump administration threatening to cut federal research dollars, universities could become even more dependent on corporate funding, which comes with strings attached.
Meanwhile, the lawyers representing workers and residents harmed by the BP spill are battling a phalanx of oil industry lawyers, consultants and scientists using tried-and-true tobacco industry tactics to deflect blame and delay liability. After years of seeking compensation, many of the workers suffering from chronic health problems have received little or no financial assistance from the company.
How EPA chief Zeldin became a cheerleader for “Drill baby drill”
By Rocky Kistner March 7, 2025
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, Arizona, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Last year, Lee Zeldin was a washed-up former four-term congressman from Long Island who had lost the 2022 New York governor’s race to incumbent Kathy Hochul. A former member of the bipartisan House Climate Caucus, Zeldin ran a somewhat middle-of-the-road race to try to unseat the popular Democratic governor. So, when President Trump tapped Zeldin just after the election for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, some considered him to be a moderate choice. After all, he was in the House Climate Caucus, so how bad could he be?
Just after Trump announced he had picked him, Zeldin proclaimedhis intentions in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “We will restore U.S. energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the U.S. the global leader of AI,” he said. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
In January, during his Senate EPA nomination hearings, Zeldin also expressed concern about the threat of climate change, stating the United States must act with “urgency” to address it. But that concern did not last long.
A week after being confirmed as EPA administrator, Zeldin toldBreitbart News that predictions of climate change ending the world have “come and gone,” adding that the EPA would push for strong economic policies to make the United States “energy independent” and “aggressively pursue an agenda powering the Great American Comeback.” He made no mention of clean energy.
Later in February, any hope for moderation was further dashed when Zeldin called for eliminating the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” a critical scientific finding which enabled the agency to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act by determining that planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The new administrator also cut popular diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and social justice programs based on Trump’s executive orders.
This was not a surprise to members of Congress who know Zeldin’s record well. “I think, clearly, everybody likes clean air and clean water. My opposition to Lee Zeldin is founded on where he’s likely to be on a different issue: climate change,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said on the Senate floor last month. “In that context, I have nothing against Lee Zeldin personally, but the likelihood of him standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is essentially zero.”
Just last week, Zeldin called for an investigation into the Biden administration’s handling of billions of dollars of green grants, citing unsubstantiated reports of waste, fraud and abuse and comparing it to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”Until that investigation is completed, he froze $20 billion in green grants, which could bankruptGreenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grantees, experts say.
The freeze is “going to be very devastating, especially for smaller businesses that really don’t have a lot of funding through which they can [wait] out months of not getting access to the money that was awarded to them,” Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program, told Utility Dive. “They will go bankrupt because they do not have a lot of cushion here, and they will obviously have to lay off people, and the benefits from the projects themselves for communities will not go forward.”
65 percent EPA cut may be a “low number”
Despite criticism from virtually all quarters about the devastating impacts of budget cuts, Zeldin has stood his ground, adopting the harsh rhetoric of his new boss. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin posted on X in a video last month. Zeldin also pledged to do his part to eviscerate the federal workforce by proposing to slash EPA’s budget by 65 percent, which would boot tens of thousands of employees into the streets, including staff who work on some of the most critical environmental health and safety issues across country.
Zeldin said that massive cuts are just a starting point. “I think that the EPA can save even more than 65 percent of our budget year over year,” Zeldin told Spectrum News late last month.
What would a 65-percent EPA budget reduction mean in real terms? Let’s look at the numbers. In fiscal year 2024, EPA’s budget was nearly $9.16 billion, slightly smaller than it was in FY1970, the year it was founded, in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. A 65-percent budget cut of its FY2024 budget would leave the agency with only $3.2 billion. Without a doubt, it would cripple the agency.
Zeldin supports the assertion that environmental regulations are a hindrance to business. “Providing every American access to clean air, land, and water is a vital goal,” he posted on X, “but we can’t ever do it in a way that suffocates our economy.”
In fact, studies show that the benefits of environmental safeguards far outweigh their costs. For example, studies show such major environmental laws as the Clean Air Act provide societal benefits that outweigh costs by 10 to one.
Zeldin’s call for draconian federal budget cuts and regressive environmental policies are nothing new for anyone who has followed his career closely. Judith Enck was EPA’s New York regional administrator when Zeldin served in the House. “If you are a fossil fuel company, a plastics company, a chemical company—you’ve got to be pretty happy with this appointment, but it’s going to be an environmental disaster for the rest of us,” Enck told Rolling Stone. “They want to weaken Clean Air Act regulations by removing the part of the law that requires the EPA to set health-based air quality standards.”
A quick look at Zeldin’s recent past illustrates Enck’s observations. Zeldin was a drill, baby, drill guy long before Trump picked him seemingly out of nowhere. The League of Conservation Voters gave him a paltry 14 percent lifetime voting score in 2022. And during his unsuccessful bid for New York governor in 2022, Zeldin ran on a plan to expand fossil fuel energy by overturning the state’s ban on fracking. He argued that the fracking ban former Gov. Andrew Cuomo put into place in 2014 was harming rural parts of the state.
“When I talk about reversing the state’s ban on the safe extraction of natural gas and approving new pipelines, that’s a lot of jobs, that’s a lot of revenue,” Zeldin told Politico days before the election. But Zeldin’s pro-fossil fuel message was a loser, and the oil and gas industry did not give him much support at the time. That, however, was about to change.
A magnet for fossil fuel support
After he lost the 2022 governor’s race, Zeldin focused on his consulting business, Zeldin Strategies, whose clients paid him well to represent their interests in a variety of conservative causes. According to his financial disclosure statement filed in January of this year, Zeldin made $775,000 in salary plus $1 million to $5 million in dividends from his consulting firm over the past two years. A chunk of that money—more than $120,000—came from writing opinion columns for a range of news outlets, including Fox News, Newsday, and the New York Post. Zeldin reported that the funding for these handsomely paid opinion pieces came from such fossil fuel-friendly PR firms as DCI Group and CSC Advisors. The Republican lobby shop CGCN paid him a whopping $25,000 for just one column in Real Clear Policy criticizing environmental, sustainable and governance (ESG) investing.
But Zeldin landed an even more lucrative connection to the fossil fuel industry via Texas oil and gas fracking magnate Tim Dunn, a major Trump campaign donor. According to Zeldin’s financial disclosure statement that cover his earnings since 2023, he received more than $140,000 from America First Works (AFW), a conservative political advocacy group that played a crucial role in drafting Trump’s executive orders. Zeldin currently sits on the AFW board as an emeritus member. AFW’s sister organization, America First Policy Institute, founded in 2021 by Dunn and other Trump advisors, appointed Zeldin chair of its China Policy Initiative last year.
A huge fossil fuel-industry booster, AFPI opposes government action on climate change and programs promoting clean energy. “The U.S. must resist build-nothing climate alarmists, who undermine our nation’s ability to replicate our economic and environmental success on the world stage,” one of AFPI’s energy essays asserts.
Dance with them that brung ya
Last year, AFPI founder Tim Dunn sold his lucrative Texas oil and gas company CrownRock to Occidental Petroleum for about $12 billion. Observers say that sale will make the Christian-right donor even more powerful in state and national politics.
“Money is power in Texas politics,” University of Houston professor Brandon Rottinghaus told the Texas Tribune. “Dunn’s already shown willingness to spend big to imprint his ideological religious beliefs on the GOP. With more money, he’s likely to pour gas on the fire.”
Getting rid of the EPA’s endangerment finding would definitely provide more gas, since Dunn is no fan of climate regulations. “It would be ideal if we could get rid of this ‘CO2 as a pollutant’ business,” Dunn said at a 2023 AFPI event, adding that a Trump presidency could use executive orders “to curb all this silliness about CO2 emissions.”
Lee Zeldin is no doubt paying attention to people like Tim Dunn. As they say in the Lone Star State, you gotta dance with them that brung ya. It’s clear Zeldin has perfected the Texas Two-Step.
The author, Carlos Carabaña, in the field. For the story, his team worked more than seven months, obtained various confidential documents and archival video, took 10 field trips and interviewed 30 cancer patients and others.
For decades, inhabitants of Hidalgo near Mexico City have been poisoned by toxic chemicals and sewage contaminating the waters flowing toward the Endhó dam. Toxic sewage from Mexico City and industrial corridors created an environmental hell for Hidalgo residents over the past 40 years. Although the authorities knew that the water from their wells was contaminated, sickening the residents, they simply ignored them.
A team of more than a dozen journalists and videographers documented this powerful but neglected story for Mexico’s Channel N+ Focus. It was awarded Third Place, Outstanding Feature Story, Large, for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ 22nd Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment. Judges called it a “strong production of this otherwise shockingly unknown story. Through excellent use of archival footage, previously unreleased documents and powerful, heartbreaking imagery, this story shone a light on and gave voice to people living in and imperiled by an atrociously polluted environment.”
SEJournal recently caught up with investigative reporter Carlos Carabaña of N+ Focus by email to talk about the award-winning project. Here is the conversation.
SEJournal: How did you get your winning story idea?
Carlos Carabaña: We were searching for stories about “huachicoleo de agua” (basically, people who steal and sell water) in Tula, Hidalgo, and a source told us about the Endhó Dam. So we went on a field trip to the area. After meeting and talking with some of the 15,000 residents who had been abandoned for decades by the government and local administration, we decided it was a story that needed to be told.
SEJournal: What was the biggest challenge in reporting the piece and how did you solve that challenge?
Carabaña: The biggest challenge was to decide which findings and stories to include in the piece and which ones to omit. The environment and health issues concerning the Endhó Dam have been going on for decades and have affected so many people; some findings, stories and problems had to be ruled out even though they were quite shocking.
Another challenge was trying to get a reaction from the authorities. We had several confidential documents that proved that the three levels of government knew about these problems, including the fact that seven water wells were poisoning the 15,000 residents. The authorities, who knew about it from a series of studies conducted in 2007, 2010 and 2018, simply ignored it as cancer deaths in the region tripled.
SEJournal: What most surprised you about your reporting?
Carlos Carabaña
Carabaña: Seven water wells that supply the communities of the Endhó Dam have been contaminated with heavy metals for decades because of sewage and waste from Mexico City, several industrial corridors and hospitals, a refinery and a thermoelectric plant. After several demonstrations and protests by residents of the Endhó Dam, the government built five water treatment plants. In 2019, the government held a big inauguration party and told the residents that they could finally drink from the wells; but the government handed over water treatment plants that were unfinished and nonoperational.
OK, so maybe the government didn’t give a damn about these 15,000 people. But, telling the residents that they could drink the water when they, the government, knew it was contaminated with heavy metals, … that’s evil.
SEJournal: How did you decide to tell the story and why?
Carabaña: After three field trips to the area and some key findings, we made a list of the core issues that affected the Endhó Dam: issues related to health, water, scarcity, poverty and so on. We then analyzed which were the best stories to convey each issue, determined how to present the key findings, and added background and context.
We are a TV channel and an on-demand platform, so we have to produce two different pieces: a five-minute video for the news program and a 15-minute video for the on-demand platform. Also, we wrote a story for our media internet outlet. We decided to do these three complementary pieces to reach the maximum audience and be able to tell the story in a proper way.
SEJournal: Does the issue covered in your story have a disproportionate impact on people of low income, or people with a particular ethnic or racial background? What efforts, if any, did you make to include perspectives of people who may feel that journalists have left them out of public conversation over the years?
Carabaña: Most of the 15,000 Endhó Dam residents have low incomes. It is the abandonment of an entire community: First, their lands were taken away, then their water was contaminated and finally they were left to die alone. An abandonment by the three levels of government and by administration after administration. Sewage and wastewater from Mexico City, several industrial corridors and hospitals, a refinery and a thermoelectric plant have created an environmental hell north of Tula.
This contamination reached the Endhó Dam’s drinking water wells, and for decades has poisoned, drop by drop, thousands of human beings. We tried to give the residents the space to tell their stories and we contributed with context, background and investigative findings about how this environmental hell was created.
SEJournal: What would you do differently now, if anything, in reporting or telling the story and why?
Carabaña: I would have increased the range of diseases to look for among the health problems of the area. Basically, with the help of a local organization and using the INAI platform (Mexican Freedom of Information Act), we searched federal files for statistics on cancer and respiratory diseases. I would have liked to search for more diseases and over a wider range of years.
SEJournal: What lessons have you learned from your story?
Carabaña: As we say in Spanish, “Piensa mal y acertarás” (or “Think the worst and you won’t be far wrong,” according to the Collins dictionary). As I said before, I can understand if government officials and agencies didn’t solve the problem of the contaminated drinking water due to budget problems or a lack of political power. But the government told the residents that the problem was solved when they knew that the water was still poisoning the community. That sounds like some kind of supervillain plot.
SEJournal: What practical advice would you give to other reporters pursuing similar projects, including any specific techniques or tools you used and could tell us more about?
Carabaña: Build a great team. In N+ Focus, our investigation bureau, journalists work for months alongside producers, and we make creative decisions together. From the start, we involve the product design area, so they can contribute to the research with ideas. In the bureau, we speak to each other about our investigations, so if someone has a source or an idea about how to access information, we contribute. We have great leaders who trust our work. Effort, analysis, trust in your partners, methodology and, the most important tool, patience.
SEJournal: Could you characterize the resources that went into producing your prize-winning reporting (estimated costs, i.e., legal, travel or other; or estimated hours spent by the team to produce)? Did you receive any grants or fellowships to support it?
Carabaña: This work was carried out over more than seven months. We obtained various confidential documents using transparency and source work tools. We analyzed the public agenda and databases, and went on 10 field trips to the affected area. To document the abandonment of the 15,000 residents by the various governments and administrations, we interviewed 30 cancer patients, other people affected and scientists. We also searched the archive of the television station and found journalistic reports — from the 1980s — on this contamination.
SEJournal: Is there anything else you would like to share about this story or environmental journalism that wasn’t captured above?
Carabaña: The importance of following up. The carrying out and publication of this investigation led the authorities to sit down again with the people affected, after having ignored them for almost three years. Resources were allocated to operationalize the water treatment plants that were delivered incomplete. Additionally, the working groups with the Ministry of the Environment and other authorities were resumed, in order to set up an environmental restoration program for the Endhó Dam. The new governor of Hidalgo, Julio Menchaca, promised to address the health problems of the residents.
Throughout 2023, we have continued to report on these political commitments: publishing stories about the deadlines, about the state of the projects and working groups, and asking politicians about specific deadlines. We plan to do so until all these commitments have been fulfilled.
Carlos Carabaña is an investigative reporter from Galicia, Spain. From 2012 to 2015, he lived in Berlin, where he worked on stories about migration issues and depopulation. Since 2015, he has been living in Latin America, based in Mexico, covering issues relating to environmentalism and climate change, human rights, politics and violence, with reporting in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala. He was part of the research bureau of mexicopuntocom and El Universal. Since 2022, he has been working at Focus, the research bureau of N+.
A screenshot from the first-place winner of the large market feature story prize from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ 22nd Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment, “What Do the Protectors of Congo’s Peatlands Get in Return?” by Ruth Maclean and Caleb Kabanda, with photography by Nanna Heitmann, for The New York Times.
Inside Story: The Battle To Protect Congo’s Vast Peatlands
One of the world’s largest carbon sinks has long been protected by local communities in the Congo forests. But invading logging operators threaten this invaluable natural resource. New York Times reporter Ruth Maclean and journalist Caleb Kabanda teamed up to craft an award-winning, in-depth story about peatlands, an important element of nature that experts say is critical in the battle against climate change.
Judges with the Society of Environmental Journalists annual awards program were greatly impressed with the story’s richly character-driven, cinematic narrative, its detailed reporting, character portrayals and strong aerial and video components. They awarded it first place for Outstanding Feature Story, Large, in SEJ’s 22nd Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.
SEJournal recently asked Maclean and Kabanda about the project by email. Here is the conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
SEJournal: How did you get your winning story idea?
Ruth Maclean
Maclean: The Congo Basin peatlands have been on my mind for a while but I had no idea what story I would find when I went there.
Kabanda: I was contacted by Ruth Maclean. She told me that she would like to come to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to report on the peatlands in the Congo Basin forests. She asked if I was available to work with her. I felt very excited because I found the idea and the story great, very interesting and very helpful to the whole planet, and to the whole of humanity. I had already heard about peatlands but didn’t know what they looked like. So, it was a great opportunity to visit the peatlands to witness with my own eyes what they look like and learn more about them. I made some phone calls and learned that no single journalist nor even DRC government officials have ever visited the Congo’s peatlands. Then, I told Ruth that her idea and story were fabulous because we would be the first journalists to report about it and get to witness what peatlands look like.
SEJournal: What was the biggest challenge in reporting the piece and how did you solve that challenge?
Maclean: Logistics and bureaucracy. I solved it with the help of the amazing Caleb Kabanda, my collaborator on the story.
Kabanda: The biggest challenges in reporting the series were getting permissions from the security services (the Congolese national intelligence agency that is the Congolese FBI) and accessibility. The peatlands are located in very remote areas, very far in deep Congo Basin forests, where you need to travel by plane, four-wheel-drive vehicle, speed boat, wooden boat and also travel long hours during the day and sometimes at night on foot under the rain in a deep jungle forest, crossing rivers, falling into mud, getting hurt sometimes by thorns and sometimes being stung by ants, in areas where there is no cellphone reception.
I got media accreditation to enable us to cover the story and I navigated the security services, explaining to them why it is important to inform the whole world about the importance of peatlands and forests to humanity, but also by gaining the trust of local communities, known as peatlands’ protectors, to talk to us, to explain to us what they know about peatlands and also take us to the peatlands. We convinced the local chiefs, along with local communities, that we want to spend much time with them. We want to see how they live and interact with peatlands. We want to learn from them what they know about peatlands. We want to learn what peatlands mean to them, what peatlands mean to the whole of humanity. After talking to them and explaining clearly what we came to do, they were convinced and open to telling us their stories and answering our questions. They allowed us to cover their daily activities in the peatlands, at home and more.
SEJournal: What most surprised you about your reporting?
Maclean: The desire of communities living around the peatlands to protect them for the world, despite having almost nothing themselves.
Kabanda: What personally surprised me is first, to see that the peatlands’ protectors (local communities living in remote forests around the peatlands) are well-informed about the role and the importance of peatlands and forests to the planet and to humanity. They explained to us how the forests and peatlands contribute to fighting against climate change. They showed us how peatlands and forests contribute to their daily living, in terms of feeding and treating their families. Second, I noticed that local communities are willing and managing to protect peatlands and forests but, unfortunately, they are very limited. They regret that polluters continue polluting the world and are demanding the peatlands’ protectors protect the forests and peatlands, but get nothing in return.
SEJournal: How did you decide to tell the story and why?
Maclean: In a long narrative with multimedia elements, because I was working with the incredible photographer Nanna Heitmann, had a brilliant editing team at The New York Times’ Headway, and because I encountered such great characters and was able to witness their struggle to protect the peatlands in person.
SEJournal: Does the issue covered in your story have disproportional impact on people of low income, or people with a particular ethnic or racial background? What efforts, if any, did you make to include perspectives of people who may feel that journalists have left them out of public conversation over the years?
Maclean: The whole story was focused on some of the poorest villages in the world. It was very important to listen to them and try to faithfully represent their perspectives.
SEJournal: What would you do differently now, if anything, in reporting or telling the story and why?
Caleb Kabanda
Maclean: There are so many angles I would have kept following, if only I had had more time.
SEJournal: What lessons have you learned from your story or project?
Maclean: To focus on people when doing environmental stories.
Kabanda: Peatlands and forests in the Congo Basin are in danger if no alternative measures are taken to protect them. Local communities survive from these peatlands and forests: Their main resources are forests and peatlands; they cut trees from the forests for firewood, making charcoal and planks. Local loggers and mainly international logging companies, conspiring with some corrupt individuals from the Congolese government, are badly and illegally exploiting timbers from the Congo forests. And most of the local communities earn their livings by fishing in peatlands, which poses a small-scale destruction threat to peatlands.
SEJournal: What practical advice would you give to other reporters pursuing similar projects, including any specific techniques or tools you used and could tell us more about?
Maclean: I would encourage other reporters to spend hours with their interviewees if possible and really try to listen.
Kabanda: For reporters intending to cover similar projects in the DRC and most of the African countries: Get legal permits/media accreditation for reporting. Get all required permissions, stamps and signatures from government and security services. Be positive in navigating local security services. Be patient in handling all the bureaucracies. Navigate local authorities and local communities to get their trust. Identify the best characters with good knowledge, well-informed about the area or the region. Get to know the customs of the local communities to facilitate good communication. Always remember to assess the security situation of the area of reporting. Work with a local professional fixer or local journalist who is professional in navigating any situation and who has a good array of contacts. With any obstacles, remain positive, patient and courageous.
SEJournal: Could you characterize the resources that went into producing your prizewinning reporting (estimated costs, i.e., legal, travel or other; or estimated hours spent by the team to produce)? Did you receive any grants or fellowships to support it?
Maclean: Two weeks on the ground, several more writing it up, thousands of dollars.
Kabanda: Reporting in DRC is very expensive. Media accreditation and a filming permit are extremely expensive. Plane tickets, car rental, boat rental and hotels are very expensive. Most of the infrastructure is almost dead. There are more bureaucracies and harassment from the security services, which always slows down the reporting.
SEJournal: Is there anything else you would like to share about this story or environmental journalism that wasn’t captured above?
Maclean: The Congo peatlands need and deserve much more attention.
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. Previously, she worked for The Guardian and The Times of London, reporting from Africa, Europe and Latin America for 15 years. She aims to provide nuanced coverage of the 25 countries she covers, with a focus on the people living in them.
Caleb Kabanda is a freelance journalist, camera operator, field producer, professional fixer and first aid responder for international reporters, filmmakers, movie stars and researchers. He is based in Goma in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and has worked with reporters from the BBC, National Geographic, The Washington Post and many others.
Editor’s Note: View a video interview with Maclean about her prizewinning story below.]
William (Rocky) Kistner Special to the Post-Dispatch Jun 13, 2024
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund.
ST. LOUIS — Robin Proudie remembers working concessions at the old Busch Stadium as a teenager, selling popcorn and peanuts to hungry baseball lovers. Her favorite memory is the seventh game of the Cardinals’ 1982 World Series. After the final out, she joined hundreds of frenzied spectators who poured on the field to congratulate the new champs. She remembers star shortstop Ozzie Smith picking her up in celebration.
But there is a part of Busch Stadium history that Proudie only recently learned about, a dark history linked to the building that was so dear to her. Historians say some of St. Louis’ most notorious slave prisons — known as the Lynch slave pens — sat near the intersection of South Broadway and Clark Avenue, where the new Busch Stadium, Ballpark Village and the InterPark Stadium East garage are now clustered.
Thousands of men, women and children were held in Bernard M. Lynch’s underground slave prisons before the Civil War, incarcerated in rooms with dirt floors, no beds and bars on the windows. Some were chained to basement cells, waiting to be sold to local buyers or “down river” to work in cotton and sugar cane fields.
Remnants of the prison cells survived in the basement of a large drug company warehouse and office building until it was torn down in 1963 to make way for the baseball stadium where Proudie worked as a teen.
“I had no idea…I’ve parked in that garage,” said Proudie, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Descendants of the St. Louis University Enslaved. “This is hallowed ground with people’s souls. It needs to be acknowledged publicly that their lives mattered.”
If pictures are worth a thousand words, what are videos worth? Whatever the answer, most will surely agree these nine short videos are priceless, representing the first-place winners in the Society of Environmental Journalists 22nd Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.
In their own words, journalists and producers describe what drove them to pursue and tell their stories, and the valuable impacts they have had.
Sean Peoples, a creative director and filmmaker with Think Out Loud Productions, has produced videos of SEJ award winners over the past three years, and he relishes the chance to talk to the award winners about the ways newsrooms and journalists work to come up with high-impact stories. “It’s really an iterative process a lot of the times to come up with stories that are this powerful,” Peoples said.
To highlight some of the reporting insights of these winners, we’ve distilled their video comments to key points focused on how they chose to report their stories. You can click each thumbnail to view the full video, as well as visit links below each to find out more about the project and to read comments from SEJ judges.
Story insight: The environment as a “true crime” story
The Washington Post’s “Amazon Undone” series, which won first place in the large-market investigative reporting category and later the top award for outstanding environmental reporting, took a whole-system approach to looking at deforestation in the planet’s largest and most vital rainforest, explained SEJ judges. Each article meticulously walked the reader through a contributing factor to the rapid deforestation of the Amazon.
But for one of its elements, the team took an unusual tack — retracing the steps of the most high-profile Brazilian murder cases in 2022. Terrence McCoy, The Post’s Rio de Janeiro bureau chief, remembers what prompted the choice: “We found a man who had been executed out there and his hands have been tied together and he just had been left in a ditch. That discovery helped to solidify that the story of the destruction of the Amazon isn’t like other environmental stories.”
For McCoy, the story of the Amazon is in many ways a crime story; as he put it, a story of mass criminality on a continental level, a crime story that has complicit officials, feckless law enforcement and murderous elements of violence. To tell the story in a fresh way to grab readers, McCoy’s method was to make it “breathe like true crime stories.”
Story insight: The environment as a “river” of ideas
AnuOluwapo Adelakun, an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker and policy researcher working on underreported issues in Nigeria, began reporting on how foreign beverage companies were using the country’s powerful Osun River as their water source. She quickly realized the river itself would become a central character in her reporting.
In winning SEJ’s small-market first-place award for outstanding investigative reporting, judges were impressed that Adelakun let the river guide her storytelling throughout, adding depth and emotional resonance to the reporting. “By amplifying the voices of the artisanal miners and demonstrating how their basic survival is contrasted with the exploitation by foreign corporations,” judges said, “the video educates viewers and humanizes those directly affected by it.”
“The Osun River is a very important river in southwest of Nigeria,” Adelakun recalled. “The people of the Osun have a spiritual belief that there is a goddess of fertility and so they also rely on that river as a spiritual symbol. … People are dying right now and if we don’t do something about it then nothing is ever going to be done, so ultimately I let the story take me where it wanted to.”
An investigation into the health and environmental effects of the chemical PFAS by the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne was a “Herculean effort,” said SEJ judges who awarded him first place for outstanding beat reporting in a large market. They noted in part his year-long review of thousands of court documents, government records and scientific studies. ”This is a shining example of the finest kind of journalism.”
Hawthorne said an editor found a memo he wrote on PFAS and sewage sludge that dated back to 2009. “It’s a culmination of a lot of years that I’ve been fortunate enough to be in this job at two different newspapers. I’ve been doing it long enough that I can return to a story that I first started writing about almost 20 years ago.”
But Hawthorne said it was how he handled that long trajectory and the more recent flood of information that made the difference. “I’m not the kind of person who writes about everything that’s moving. I’m going to try to go where nobody else is going, … to try to find some nugget of information data records that shine a light that is meaningful to my readers.”
When Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Dance set out to report on how climate change is impacting communities in the Chesapeake Bay area, he decided to zero in on ways that communities were being affected differently. Judges were impressed with the breadth of his reporting that explained the diverse impacts of climate change: “We commend his sharp eye for how climate change and environmental neglect have exacerbated inequities between Black and white communities. … Dance shined light on a remarkable range of issues weighing on the greater Baltimore area.”
Dance said he purposefully looked for these differences as a critical part of the story: “Of course climate change is a global issue, environmental injustice is a global issue, but I tried to just stay focused on how those larger forces were playing out in my backyard and in our readers’ backyards. That’s what local journalism is so good at and so important for, showing the examples that are right under your nose that exemplify these larger issues the world is dealing with.”
Story insight: Environmental risks outside the headlines
New York Times reporter Raymond Zhong was well aware of the punishing droughts and fires that devastated California in recent years, but when he caught wind of some interesting new research on flood risks in the Golden State, he jumped at the opportunity to tell a story that hadn’t received much attention. It was fortuitous timing. Five months after his story appeared in August 2022, California was pummeled by a torrent of atmospheric rivers that turned the drought-plagued state into raging rivers and storms that killed more than 20 people. More atmospheric rivers have flooded the state this year.
SEJ judges were especially impressed with the story’s multimedia presentation that “captivated and educated readers in and outside California and spurred state officials to invest in research on flood risks. … ‘The Coming California Megastorm’ is, quite simply, extraordinary explanatory journalism of remarkable clarity and lasting import.”
Zhong said he simply did what all good reporters do, dig into stories in ways no one else is covering. “California flooding was not exactly at the top of people’s minds. … But part of what we should do as journalists is to elevate things that aren’t necessarily in the headlines every day and keep them in the conversation.”
Story insight: Powerful interests that inform important debates
Inside Climate News reporter Nicholas Kusnetz tackled one of the most controversial climate policies involving carbon capture technology, an attempt to bury greenhouse gasses underground, helping reduce oil and gas emissions that are major contributors to climate change. Although carbon capture had bipartisan support among industry and the Biden administration, Kusnetz felt there was a need for more in-depth reporting to get to the bottom of this emerging technology.
“You had all this money, all this interest from this really powerful industry that has been the biggest source of climate pollution, paired with the fact that there wasn’t really much coverage,” Kusnetz said. “So that was really what made me want to go and do this.”
Kusnetz was particularly interested in concerns about environmental justice impacts in communities that didn’t have the resources to understand the potential threats carbon capture could pose: “They were still sort of figuring out what they were going to be saying about this because it was dynamic and developing. So that was the place where I think the series at least aims to try to inform that debate.”
According to SEJ judges, Kusnetz more than accomplished his mission, shining light on a complicated topic with powerful interests driving the debate. “His reporting showed how the oil industry lobbied to shape climate policy toward carbon capture and storage. The result was more than $12 billion in federal spending from the bipartisan infrastructure bill and, last year, tens of billions more in potential loans and tax incentives for this controversial and largely unproven technology.”
Story insight: Environmental news inextricably linked to people’s stories
New York Times reporter and West Africa Bureau Chief Ruth Maclean had heard of the importance of the Congo Basin’s vast network of peatlands that sequester huge amounts of the world’s carbon, but she wanted to find out more about this important global resource. Maclean and her team traveled to the marshy peatlands threatened by deforestation, where local villagers protect the forest from loggers who threaten to destroy the rainforests and unleash sequestered carbon into the air.
Maclean spoke to researchers tracking the peaty treasure buried deep in the Congo. But the most important story, she said, is told by the people who live there. “My way into it is just to look at the people and try to meet them and understand a bit who they are and listen to their stories. … At the end of the day, we’re talking about the environment that we have to live in and look after, and it’s just inextricably linked with people.”
SEJ judges were floored by the beauty of the story narratives and the cinematic quality of the visuals of this story: “The exhaustive and detailed reporting, flecked with moments of dark humor, was complemented with great aerial and video components — readers felt like they were in the village, grappling with a thorny, high-stakes issue that’s both global and local. ‘Peatlands’ was at once satisfying in its execution of a narrative arc and left the jurors hungry for more.”
Reporting insight: Environmental stories focused on communities at risk
Journalist Anne Marshall-Chalmers heard about an unreported story from a fire expert that intrigued her. According to her source, small fires in California were having devastating impacts on low-income mobile home communities. Many of these people, she found, were being pushed out of urban areas and moved to high-risk, fire-prone areas.
As Marshall-Chalmers investigated further and traveled to mobile home communities in rural Lake County, she found out about a UCLA researcher who was gathering data on this topic. All of the information and reporting fit together to make a powerful story that broke new ground: “It really exposes the intersection of the lack of affordable housing and a warming planet,” Marshall-Chalmers said, “and how those two can create really difficult situations primarily for low-income people who are forced into areas that are more prone to burn.”
SEJ judges said Marshall-Chalmers “investigates a much-overlooked aspect of the human and housing cost of wildfires in California. … The narrative voice and choices keep the reader captivated until the end and have us all asking questions that we may not have asked before.”
Reporter Isaac Stone Simonelli was part of a student-led investigative multimedia project that examined poorly documented oil and gas industry methane emissions that are huge contributors to climate change. The unique collaborative project was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State’s Cronkite School. Its stories were featured in nearly 200 news outlets, including the AP and Inside Climate News, and included detailed maps, a podcast and a documentary that revealed unknown methane releases.
“The Gaslit investigation was a fact check,” Simonelli said. “We wanted to compare how much gas the satellites were showing as being flared to what state regulators or actors in the oil and gas industry were saying was being burnt off at these sites to see if those two matched up.” The investigation included various teams of reporters focused on health and environmental impacts, and the economics of flaring and gas, as well as a data team.
Simonelli said comprehensive projects like these help launch young journalists’ careers: “It’s training the next generation of investigative reporters on how to really tackle ambitious, important projects. We’re sinking our teeth into stories that will have an impact.”
SEJ judges agreed. “Each story in the series added to the narrative thread of the series. ‘Gaslit’ was a unanimous first-place winner.”
Rocky Kistner is an independent journalist based near Washington, D.C., a co-editor of Inside Story for SEJournal and a board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Over the past four decades, he has written environmental stories for a variety of newspapers and national magazines, and produced environmental stories as a staff reporter for ABC News, Marketplace/Minnesota Public Radio and as a producer for PBS Frontline. Some of his stories can be found on his website www.TheRockyFiles.org.
