"Robert Redfield, an HIV/AIDS researcher and clinician who has weathered his share of controversies over his long career, will soon become the next director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."
Decades after the nation’s capital began its historic cleanup, sanitary sewage still occasionally swamps the Potomac River. Are sewage systems also dumping human waste and other pollutants into waterways near you? This week’s TipSheet has the background on the problem of combined sewage overflow, as well as resources for finding out what’s happening near you.
While environmental themes were less prominent at the Sundance Film Festival this year, our correspondent JoAnn Valenti unearthed ecological messages from documentaries that explore the emergence of climate change refugees in the face of sea level rise, the escape from modernity into wilderness and the confrontation of environmental threats by young innovators.
Coal ash can contaminate surface and ground water with toxic heavy metals. But as this week’s TipSheet reports, Trump deregulation aims to loosen EPA rules on its disposal. That may mean a big local pollution story. If journalists can find the data, that is. The latest on the new rules, plus resources for coverage.
There’s little cause to celebrate upcoming Sunshine Week for those who cover Trump administration environmental agencies. The latest WatchDog catalogues how the EPA has adopted a secretive approach and displays frequent hostility to the news media, including with a troubling series of attacks on individual journalists.
As new research reminds us that pollution often disproportionately affects poor and minority communities in the United States, a long-standing mapping tool from the EPA can help reporters explore and discover those environmental justice stories nearest them. The latest TipSheet explains the problem, and walks you through the mapping app.
A hard-nosed account of Monsanto and its controversial and popular herbicide Roundup comes in a new book by a former wire service reporter, who pieced together documentation and fact-finding from over 20 years to make a case there was a dangerous cover-up. BookShelf reviews Carey Gillam’s “Whitewash.”
Covering local infrastructure projects often means covering energy and the environment. This week’s TipSheet offers a companion to our special backgrounder on the national infrastructure story emerging out of Washington. We’ve got dozens of resources and links for finding infrastructure news and information from Congress, executive agencies, infrastructure organizations and environmental groups.
Somewhere near you is a toxic waste site. And as the EPA brings the Superfund cleanup program back into its sights, TipSheet helps you cover this perpetual problem. Info on cleanup funding and priority-setting, resources to locate nearby sites, questions to ask to dig into your Superfund story and more.
After an EPA Superfund settlement was rebuffed by a small town, a local environmental advocate goes to jail while executives behind a chemical plant contamination remain free. In the latest Q&A for our Inside Story column, we hear from investigative reporter Sharon Lerner of The Intercept about the complex challenges of telling this award-winning tale.
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