2007 Oakes Award Winner

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contacts:
Arlene Morgan, 212-854-5377 or am494@columbia.edu
Clare Oh, clare.oh@columbia.edu

Columbia Names Awardees of 2007 John B. Oakes Prize for Environmental Reporting

New York, December 14, 2007 — The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced today that the Los Angeles Times and the Times Picayune of New Orleans were selected to share the John B. Oakes Award for best reporting on the environment in the newspaper division, while Harper’s Magazine captured the prize for magazines.

The New Orleans paper was recognized for its three-day series, “Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast,” reported by Bob Marshall, Mark Schleifstein, Matt Brown and photographer Ted Jackson.

The judges cited “Last Chance” as a comprehensive, easy-to-understand look at the on-going problem involving the washing away and subsidence of the wetlands buffering densely populated metropolitan New Orleans. David Ropeik, one of the judges, said the series vividly illustrated how “rapidly a bad situation is getting worse.”

The series was recognized for offering solutions to the loss of the barrier islands and wetlands and for its use of interactive online graphics that demonstrated the land loss in Louisiana coupled with the multimedia presentation of experts on coastal restoration.

The Los Angles Times won the Oakes award for the second year in a row with “Blighted Homeland,” a series by Judy Pasternak which detailed the contamination of Navajo lands in Utah from waste left behind from uranium mines Pasternak detailed how over decades “Navajos inhaled radioactive dust from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce dessert winds. They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit mines that filled with rain. They watered their herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the meat.”

Pasternak was cited for exhaustive reporting and compelling writing that put a human face to the peril that silently has affected the Navajos who built homes on the reservation, which once housed the uranium mines that fueled the nation’s nuclear weapons program, including the Manhattan project. While no definite link has ever been established between the contamination and cancer deaths, the story documented how the cancer death rate on their Navajo Ojito, Utah reservation double from the 1970s to the late 1990s.

Columbia Professor Don Melnick, one of the Oakes judge, called the series “emblematic of so many other environmental problems resulting from greed, government inaction, and political interference.”

The two newspapers will share the $5,000 first place Oakes prize.

In the magazine competition, McKenzie Funk story “Cold Rush: The Coming Fight for the Melting North,” which appeared in Harper’s last fall, took home the first place $5,000 prize.

Judge Peter Dykstra said the story captured the Oakes prize because it did not fall into a “predictable” pattern. “With a style that is both authoritative and good-natured,” Dykstra cited Funk for showing “us that global warming may be opening up a new battlefront. The rapid warming of the Arctic is revealing an easy northern shipping route, new and potentially huge oil supplies (just what we need to slow global warming!), and a possible geopolitical turf war for control of the soon-to-be open waters of the North. In a thoroughly engaging piece, Funk cautions that global warming may not just unleash the worst nightmares of scientists, but of generals and diplomats as well.”

OnEarth Magazine was a finalist in the magazine division for “Canada’s Highway to Hell,” which documented the huge environmental cost of extracting fossil fuel from tar sands.

The Oakes Award will be given out on Monday, Feb. 11, 2008 at the School of Journalism, 116th and Broadway in New York. For more information on the awards and the program, which will be free to a limited number of reporters, email Arlene Morgan, associate dean for prizes and programs and director of the Oakes Prize, at am494@Columbia.edu or consult the Oakes website at http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/events/oakes.

About the Oakes Award