South of the border

Conference shows Knight Center's commitment to international training

an editorial by jim detjen

Jim Detjen is a professor and director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He is the founding president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and was president of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists from 1994 to 2000.

In January, a group of 16 journalists from throughout Mexico agreed to create a new national organization of Mexican environmental journalists. The formation of the new organization came at the conclusion of a three-day seminar in Mexico City on “Air Quality and the Environment.”

The conference, held January 14 to 16, was organized by the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism in cooperation with the International Center for Journalists and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas.

The conference was the result of more than 18 months of hard work and detailed planning. Like many international endeavors, it took time to navigate around significant cultural and language barriers. But by virtually any measure I believe the conference was an outstanding success.

We brought together about two-thirds (40 out of 60) of all the Mexican journalists who write about environmental issues. Our keynote speaker was Mario Molina, an expert on Mexico City’s air pollution and the co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry. We brought in more than 20 top Mexican and American experts to speak on sessions dealing with air quality, Mexico’s new access to information laws, resources for Mexican environmental journalists and computer-assisted reporting. The conference received extensive news coverage by Mexico City newspapers and television stations.

The conference could not have been held without the assistance of Susana Guzman, a Mexican graduate student at Michigan State University; Barb Miller, the Knight Center secretary and Rob Taylor, director of science and environmental programs for the International Center for Journalists.

This gathering marked the first time that the Knight Center has organized a conference in Latin America. One of our goals is the development of excellent environmental journalism in a country that faces serious environmental problems.

I believe that the new Mexican environmental journalism organization will play an important role infostering increased coverage of air and water pollution, loss of plants and animals, urban sprawl and other issues. The journalists elected as their leader Miguel Angel de Alba Gonzalez, a journalist with 30 years’ experience who now works as a reporter in Leon, a city 250 miles northwest of Mexico City.

During the last nine years the Knight Center has played similar roles in training environmental journalists around the globe. We have either organized or participated in environmental journalism conferences in Canada, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, England, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Egypt, South Africa, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, China and Australia.

We were instrumental in the founding of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists, which is headquartered in Paris, and in drafting the first ethics code for international environmental journalists. We’ve also carried out research projects on environmental journalism in several developing countries.

To give you an idea of our international outreach and research activities, let me highlight a few of the projects we will be involved in during 2004:

• Some of the journalists who participated in the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism's workshop on air quality and environmental journalism in Mexico City in January 2004.

  Both Dave Poulson, assistant Knight Center director, and I will be teaching overseas courses in the summer of 2004. Dave will teach a seven-week course in Australia and I will teach a six-week course in England, Ireland and Scotland.
• The Knight Center will host its seventh Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute for 25 American and Canadian journalists from June 1 to 5.
• The center will assist in planning the International Federation of Environmental Journalists’ conference in Mumbai, India in December 2004.
• We will continue our work supporting environmental journalism in Mexico and perhaps other Latin American countries. As part of these efforts, we hope to publish the findings of Susana Guzman’s research on Mexican environmental journalists and to continue to operate PAL-NET, a listserv for Mexican environmental journalists.
• We will work with several other organizations to develop online training courses for environmental journalists around the globe. This is a painstaking and time consuming process that we hope will provide journalists in Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries with valuable journalistic resources.

Environmental problems don’t respect political boundaries and are rarely contained within one nation. Air pollutants circle the globe and contaminate people and the environment in all areas, including polar regions. Illegal trafficking in endangered species, global warming, decay of the ozone layer and other issues are worldwide in scope. They require an educated group of trained journalists to vigorously report about these topics and keep them in the public eye.

BACK TO TOP