Great Lakes journalists: Can you spare 10 minutes?
Although I get to be the editor here at Great Lakes Echo, my day job is the associate director at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
Echo is among many of the duties I juggle. Another is figuring out ways to help professional journalists/reporters/writers/broadcasters/bloggers/freelancers/communicators better report on the environment. To that end, the Knight Center is involved in a National Science Foundation effort to improve literacy about climate change. We’re part of a regional effort to build and support a network of formal and informal climate change educators.
It’s a bit of a nifty shift to define journalists as informal educators of the public. But it’s by no means a stretch.
As part of our involvement, we’re asking journalists in the Great Lakes region to complete a brief survey that will help inform our outreach efforts. So if you’re a U.S. or Canadian journalist – a term we define broadly – who at least occasionally reports on environmental issues within the Great Lakes region, we are asking for your participation in this survey.
And just what is the Great Lakes region? We are interested in your response particularly if you’re reporting within a boundary of roughly 100 miles outside of the Great Lakes watershed – not the lakes, the watershed. But don’t sweat the distance, if you believe you’re within the region – especially if you write about the Great Lakes themselves – we want to hear from you.
The information we glean will help improve our programs and perhaps your reporting.
Great Lakes Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
If you are a journalist and can spare 4 hours, please be my guest aboard the Schoolship Inland Seas on Grand Traverse Bay on May 23. The 77′ schooner leaves the dock at 9 am and will return at 12:30pm. You will be aboard with students from Northwestern Michigan College as we sample the bay for fish, plankton, benthos, perform water chemistry tests and collect weather data for the NWS. You can sign on by e-mailing me at tkelly@schoolship.org. More info on our program is at schoolship.org.
If May 23 does not work for you, contact me anyway. We can arrange an alternate date to fit your schedule.
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I’d like some journalists to help my cause. My research says that the N.Y.P.A. use of an “Ice Boom” is killing the Lower Great Lakes. It does this by stopping an essential action in nature that has gone on for thousands of years. Disrupting the natural conveyor of nutrients from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario has caused huge problems. My info web site at http://www.bantheboom.com summarizes these effects. Another glaring problem is the accelerated erosion because there is no longer the replenishment part of the annual cycle. Botulism, famine, food chain collapse, top soil loss, destroyed spawning beds. This disaster has it all. I don’t know if this is the best place to vent but I will eventually find the right team of people to help. Please Google me, Joe Barrett/Ice Boom for the whole story. Thank You. Joe Barrett
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