Maybe If People Paid Attention To Environmental Journalists? Toxic Tampa Bay Waste Latest Example

[hatrack]

I've been a member of a worthy non-profit, The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), since one year after its 1991 founding. Every once in a while, I pester its 1,200 members to consider a special award for I-told-you-so reporting—honoring an environment reporter who shouts into the winds of political clout or simple indifference to a looming disaster.

Arguably, the best-known American example of this is Mark Schleifstein, the veteran New Orleans scribe who said his Times-Picayune boss dismissed his hurricane warnings as "disaster porn" until Hurricane Katrina nearly took New Orleans off the map. I wrote about Schleifstein and several more exemplars in a 2017 piece for Ensia, "Forewarned."

This month, a new entry came in—one with a roughly 18 year lead time. In 2003, St. Petersburg Times reporters Craig Pittman, Julie Hauserman, and Candace Rondeaux filed a story about gypsum "stacks," the benign-sounding name for highly acidic waste heaps from phosphate mining operations. The reporters followed a twisted tale of bankruptcies, lax government oversight, and a potentially major threat to ecologically sensitive areas of Tampa Bay. Their focus was the waste area called Piney Point. In March, the warnings about Piney Point became reality. About one-third of the nearly half-billion gallons of highly contaminated water had leaked from the site.

When Pittman followed up on the site this year, he did so from a decidedly different platform. His 30-year career at the paper (it's the Tampa Bay Times now) ended with a staff reduction last year. He's now a columnist for the nonprofit startup Florida Phoenix. So since no Pulitzer Prize yet exists for I-told-you-so, let's award our first mythical prize to Pittman, Hauserman, and Rondeaux. It's no comfort to journalists to be vindicated in this way, but it's a useful reminder that we often ignore their warnings.

EDIT

https://www.dailyclimate.org/environmental-journalism-2652494671/bio

[NNadir]

1. I don't.

In my experience most journalists can prattle on for years and years and years about Fukushima, but very few of them, in my experience, ever remark on the 19,000 people who die every day from air pollution.

I just leafed through their table of contents for the SEJournal Online for 2021. There is not one mention in any headline of the death toll from air pollution. Not one. But of course, there's lots of "renewables will save us," talk. We hit for the week beginning April 4, 2021, 419.28 ppm of CO2, this in a century where "renewable energy will save us" has become a religion equivalent to "Jesus will save us."

That's a fact. Facts matter.

19,000 people is very close to the number of people who died in the Sendai Earthquake from seawater, which is also something journalists seldom mention - if they mention it at all - in passing, but very few of them, if ever, compare that to the number of people who died from radiation. If someone, anyone, is shown to have died from radiation in this event, they will declare it headline worthy.

If "Environmental Journalists" were really interested in finding out who is responsible for the fact that people are delusional about climate change, in particular, and the daily death toll from the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, a mirror would be an outstanding device for them to use.

I stand by my contention that one cannot, in general, get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course. This includes "environmentalist journalists" from Bill McKibben right on down to Tim Lange.

If history will not forgive us - and it won't - our "journalists" certainly played a role in the outcome.

[UpInArms]

2. Link to 2003 article

From the Archives: Bending the rules at Piney Point, a $140-million mess

Published July 6, 2003

The warning signs were clear: The Piney Point fertilizer plant was headed for disaster.

State regulators knew in 1995 that the owner, Mulberry Corp., was struggling. If it went under, the state would be stuck with hundreds of millions of gallons of highly acidic wastewater in towering gypsum stacks perched on the edge of Tampa Bay.

A review of hundreds of files by the St. Petersburg Times found that the state, instead of intervening, bent the rules by not closing the gypsum stacks as the law requires and by not acting on warnings that the owner was in financial trouble.

A bad situation soon become dangerous. State officials finally took control in 2001 – after the owner walked away.