Co-sponsored by Yale Environment 360 and the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale.
About Andrew Revkin
Andrew Revkin is a prize-winning reporter and author who has spent a quarter of a century covering subjects ranging from the assault on the Amazon to the Asian tsunami, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. He has reported on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times since 2003. That year, he became one of the first journalists to file stories and photos from the floating sea ice around the North Pole. Throughout his career, he has focused relentlessly on the century-scale challenge of providing energy for a growing human population without overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. His first stories on the human influence on climate came in 1985, three years before the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the media largely ignored this building story until recently, Revkin continually covered the science and politics of global warming in more than 500 magazine and newspaper stories, two books, and a prize-winning Discovery-Times documentary, “Arctic Rush.”
His reporting on the politic struggles over climate policy has consistently led all competitors. In 2005 and 2006, he exclusively exposed efforts by political appointees to rewrite government climate reports in the White House and prevent NASA scientists from conveying their views on warming. His stories were quickly followed by the resignations of two officials. He has been a pioneer in multimedia journalism, blogging, podcasting, and shooting still and video imagery for stories from far-flung places. One of his pictures, of a scientist trudging in darkness and a blizzard on the North Slope, won an Award of Excellence in the Pictures of the Year International competition in 2005. In October 2007, Revkin created Dot Earth, a Times blog on climate, development and the environment (nytimes.com/dotearth). The blog has built a magazine-size audience (~400,000 monthly views). He has also carried his journalism to a new generation. Revkin’s most recent book is The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Kingfisher, 2006), the first account of global and Arctic climate change written for the whole family. The Washington Post concluded simply: “Bundle up and read.” It was named both an outstanding science book and social studies book by the Children’s Book Council.
He has written two other books. The Burning Season (1990; 2004 updated edition, Island Press) chronicles the life of Chico Mendes, the slain leader of the movement to save the Amazon rain forest. The prize-winning book was published in 10 languages, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was the basis for the prize-winning HBO film of the same name, starring Raul Julia and directed by John Frankenheimer. Revkin also wrote Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (1992), which accompanied the first museum exhibition on climate change, created by the American Museum of Natural History. The Los Angeles Times said the book “takes a devastatingly quiet tone that proves far more effective than the bludgeon-the-reader-with-guilt brand of environmental journalism.”
In 2008, he was awarded one of journalism’s top honors, the John Chancellor Award, for more than two decades of pioneering coverage of the science and politics of global warming. His work has won most of the top honors in science journalism, including the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and two awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His first magazine feature, on the worldwide death toll from misuse of the herbicide paraquat, won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. He has been honored in academia for his sustained focus on climate and energy, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2007 from Pace University, a Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts in 2008, and the 2007 Sol Feinstone Environmental Award from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Before joining The Times, Revkin was a senior editor of Discover, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and a senior writer at Science Digest. He has contributed freelance articles to the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, AARP’s magazine, Conde Nast Traveler and many other publications. Revkin has a biology degree from Brown, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia, has taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Bard College and has written two book chapters on journalism and the environment. He lives in the Hudson River Valley with his wife and two sons. In spare moments, he is a performing songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who occasionally accompanies Pete Seeger at regional shows and plays in a folk-blues band, Uncle Wade (myspace.com/unclewade).