QUEST Community Science Blog Author: Ann Dickinson

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Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, "from the Sierra to the sea." Before moving to California almost five years ago, Ann served as Sally Brown Fellow in Environmental Literature at the University of Virginia, where she taught undergraduate seminars on literature and the environment and coordinated an ongoing reading series featuring nationally prominent nature writers. Prior to that, she spent a year as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's field station on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, studying how young leaves defend themselves against herbivores. Ann grew up hiking, camping, skiing, and canoeing in Utah and-- as the daughter of a librarian and a biologist-- developed a love for books and the outdoors. She has degrees in English Literature from Swarthmore College and the University of Virginia.


Website: http://www.bay.org/


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    Have sewage, will travel

    May 6th, 2008 by Ann Dickinson

    Unless our sewage happens to end up in the Bay and in the headlines, most of us probably never give a second thought to where our wastewater is headed each time we run the tap or flush the toilet.

    To learn more about the travels of sewage, I took a tour of the Las Gallinas Valley Sanitary District treatment plant led by Plant Manager Matt Pierce. The plant has been in operation for about 50 years and serves over 30,000 residents in north San Rafael.

    After leaving sinks and showers throughout the District, wastewater travels through a network of pipes and pump stations. Once the sewage arrives at Las Gallinas, it passes through an inlet screen and a grit chamber, which together remove much of the dense, inorganic material-”like diamond rings,” Matt jokes.

    A lot of what happens at the plant is not that different from what happens in your compost pile: “It’s basically bacteria at work,” Matt points out. (The much bigger challenge for sanitation districts these days are all the unnatural things we’re putting down the drain: household chemicals, personal care products, pharmaceuticals.)

    From the grit chamber the sewage heads into a series of clarifiers, where gravity causes the organic solids to settle out. The biosolids pass through a thickener and then an anaerobic digester-the most, ahem, aromatic stop on our tour. After further thickening in storage ponds, the sludge is injected into a disposal field.

    Meanwhile, the liquid from the clarifiers travels through two biofilters, where rotating arms spray the water over rock beds. The organic matter in the wastewater is a feast for microbial slime living on the rocks. In the nitrification tower, more microorganisms break down the ammonia in the water. In the final stages of treatment, the wastewater is chlorinated to kill any remaining bacteria, then dechlorinated since the chlorine is toxic to many aquatic species. Finally, the treated water is sprayed onto District fields or discharged into Miller Creek where it flows to San Pablo Bay.

    The District has done a lot to minimize the environmental impacts of its operations. The plant is powered by a field of solar panels. The methane released in the sludge treatment process is captured and used to generate power and heat the digester. Some of the treated wastewater supports acres of fresh and saltwater wetlands-in fact the District’s land is a favorite local gem for walkers and birders. And in a partnership with the Marin Municipal Water District, more than a million gallons of treated wastewater are recycled daily for landscape irrigation and other projects.

    There are plans to make even fuller use of the reclaimed water. The Bay Institute-in partnership with the Sonoma County Water Agency, Las Gallinas, and three other North Bay sanitation agencies-has developed a plan to use recycled water for wetland and creek restoration and for agricultural irrigation. Legislation sponsored by Congressman Mike Thompson to establish the program passed the House late last year; Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced similar legislation that we are hopeful will pass this year.

    With California’s growing demands for water, such creative means to conserve and recycle are critical to helping prevent this precious resource from just going “down the drain.”


    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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    38.1048, -122.561

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    Sticking up for the little guy: the California freshwater shrimp

    April 7th, 2008 by Ann Dickinson

    This year the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) will celebrate its 35th anniversary. Under the ESA over 1,350 species are listed in the United States as threatened or endangered, including over 300 in California. This includes a number of “celebrities” of the conservation world such as the humpback whale and California condor, but also dozens of much more low profile species. Around our offices, we have a particular soft spot for the California freshwater shrimp (Syncaris pacifica), the impetus for our Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed (STRAW) Project).

    The California freshwater shrimp is 10-legged crustacean in the family Atyidae.

    Found only in a handful of Bay Area creeks, the shrimp is a detritus feeder that prefers glides (calm, slow-flowing sections of streams) with undercut banks, exposed roots, and overhanging vegetation. Adult females produce relatively few eggs-about 50-120-that stick to the mother’s pleopods during winter incubation. The young measure about 6 millimeters and are released in late spring or early summer. They grow rapidly, reaching up to 2.5 inches as adults and ranging in color from translucent to rusty red.

    The species’ closest cousin, the Pasadena freshwater shrimp (Syncaris pasadenae), went extinct in the 1930s, leaving the California freshwater shrimp as the only representative of its genus. The California freshwater shrimp was listed under the ESA in 1988. Recently the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service issued its 5-year review of the shrimp’s status. The report concludes that the species is not ready for delisting, as it still faces many of the same threats as 20 years ago: loss of habit due to agricultural activities and development, water pollution, water diversions-even the construction of recreational summer dams for swimming and fishing.

    But there is also good news in the report. At the time it was listed, the shrimp was known from 17 streams; it now has been found in 23. In one of these, the number of shrimp surveyed increased from 1,878 in 1991 to 4,407 in 2000. Many of the streams in which the shrimp is found have watershed management plans in place. And the report also acknowledged the ongoing work of STRAW to restore more than 50,000 linear feet of stream bank, creating new habitat for the shrimp-not to mention other native species.

    When Congress passed and Richard Nixon signed the ESA in 1973, a little freshwater shrimp was not at the forefront of their minds. But there is an inspiring sense of democracy in the ESA as written: It empowers citizens to petition or sue the government to protect species. And it doesn’t discriminate between the big, showy species and the small and obscure-but equally unique and imperiled-ones.

    According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, since 1973 the ESA has protected 99% of listed species from extinction. National Endangered Species Day is coming up May 16. Find out about ways to help celebrate.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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    Where have all the salmon gone?

    February 28th, 2008 by Ann Dickinson

    Run down

    Recent news headlines have been full of Chinook salmon, but sadly the same cannot be said of Central Valley waterways. This fall, only about 90,000 Central Valley Chinook salmon returned to their home rivers and streams to spawn, down from more than 800,000 just a few years ago.

    Like most salmon, Central Valley Chinook are anadromous, spending the bulk of their lives in the ocean but hatching and returning to reproduce in freshwater. The journey from the Valley through the Delta and San Francisco Bay to the Pacific, and back again, has always been a long and arduous one. In the past half century it has become even more difficult as the fish have increasingly faced an obstacle course of dams, pumps, and dewatered rivers and creekbeds.

    Central Valley Chinook salmon populations include four runs-winter, spring, fall, and late fall-with each spawning not only at different times of the year but in different parts of the watershed. The dawning of the age of dams hit the winter and spring runs the hardest, cutting the fish off from their historic spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the watershed. Both runs are now listed under federal and state Endangered Species Acts.


    The fall run, which spawns lower in the watershed, was less impacted by dam construction. In recent decades it has numbered more than 10x all the other runs combined and has been the mainstay of the California coastal salmon fishery. Now, even it appears to be in serious trouble: The count of 90,000 salmon this year was the second lowest on record and well below the minimum conservation target of 122,000 set by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Also alarming is that the number of 2-year-old “jacks” returning was just 2,000, down from a typical count of 40,000. Since most spawners are 3-year-olds, these early returners are considered a good predictor of the size of next year’s run.

    Ocean conditions are one factor in the salmon decline, with rising water temperatures and more unpredictable upwellings-possibly resulting from global warming. But scientists are also pointing to overexploitation of our rivers and Delta-the “highway” for migrating salmon. The abrupt decline in the salmon population comes concurrently with the collapse of other fish species dependent on the Delta ecosystem, including delta smelt and longfin smelt. The salmon returning to spawn this year would have been juveniles headed to the ocean in 2005, the year Delta water exports hit a record high.

    Between unfriendly ocean conditions and the degraded condition of the watershed, the salmon are facing a double whammy. But, as Bay Institute Senior Scientist Tina Swanson points out, “Apart from rolling back global warming, we can’t really control ocean conditions. What we can do is drastically improve conditions within the watershed so that more adults can spawn successfully and more juveniles survive the journey to the ocean.”

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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    Live! from the Green Carpet

    February 4th, 2008 by Ann Dickinson

    January and February are exciting months for movie buffs like me. And no, I’m not referring to Golden Globes, Oscar nominations, or Screen Actors Guild awards. I’m talking about two wonderful “green” film festivals, both right here in our own watershed: the recent Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, and the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival.

    For The Bay Institute, this year’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival was particularly exciting because it included the first public screening of “Taking Root,” a film-in-progress about our STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed) Project. I recently talked to David Donnenfield, who is co-producing the film with Kevin White (Kevin also has two films in this year’s Ocean Film Festival: Restoring Balance: Removing the Black Rat from Anacapa Island and Returning Home: Bringing the Common Murre back to Devil’s Slide Rock.) I asked David how the two came to be making a movie about kids working to save an endangered freshwater shrimp.

    Taking Root is part of a larger project entitled How on Earth, which began with the goal to survey the spectrum of restoration work happening across the country. David and Kevin wanted to look at projects large and small, in different regions and involving different constituencies and different issues. They also were interested in documenting projects initiated by kids-one of the things that drew them to our STRAW Project, founded in 1992 by a class of fourth-graders.

    David attended film school at UCLA (after he “got the bug” while starring in a high school film), but says he was always more interested in social issues than theatrical production. As to why he finds the topic of environmental restoration of particular interest, David points to the late environmentalist David Brower’s 3-part concept of “Global CPR”– Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration. While we’ve all heard about conservation and preservation, David notes, “We felt that very little of the story of restoration had been told.” That’s a critical oversight, since “in the face of worldwide environmental decline, there is less and less to preserve but more to restore.”

    In talking about their process for making films, David explains that they do a lot of research up front to understand the issues, the players, and how the story fits into the “big picture.” But there is also that sense of “serendipity and discovery” when they actually get out into the field, and that’s a large part of what they bring back to the editing room.

    And, in fact, editing is the next big challenge for Taking Root. Production on the full-length film (which will run about 1/2 hour) is nearly complete, but David and Kevin are still raising funds to complete the editing. Meanwhile, folks around our office are already looking forward to next year’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival, where we hope to be nibbling organic popcorn and cheering the completed film’s premiere.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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    Nursing the marsh-upland transition zone back to health

    December 27th, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    In the North Bay, a new nursery is lending Mother Nature a hand.

    On a recent foggy morning, I drove up to the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge to tour their native plant nursery with biologist Giselle Block and nursery manager Leia Giambastiani. The Refuge hugs the northern reaches of the Bay (If you’ve driven across Highway 37, you’ve seen some of it). Historically this was part of one of the most extensive wetland systems on the West Coast. Here at the Bay’s ecologically rich fringes, habitats shaded one to the next, from open water, to mudflat, to tidal marsh, to upland. During extreme high tides, marsh inhabitants like salt marsh harvest mouse and California clapper rail–both now endangered–sought refuge in the marsh-upland transition zone, where native plants provided cover from predation.

    Over the past 150 years, the marsh-upland transition zone has, so to speak, gone the way of the wetlands. Now, with plans to restore 100,000 acres of the Bay’s lost wetlands in the coming decades, scientists also are turning their attention to the critical habitat just above tide line. These days, as a result of our radical re-engineering of the Bay landscape, the transition zone is often on man made levees.

    Once reconnected to the Bay, tidal marshes can do a lot of the work of restoring themselves, as seeds and nutrients travel in on the tides. But the transition zone is not so lucky. Without sources nearby, many seeds don’t have a way to get there. Even if they manage the journey, native plants face stiff competition on levees from weedy invaders. Here’s where the Refuge’s nursery comes in, raising from seed native plants such as yarrow (Achillea millefolium), blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus), seaside woolly sunflower (Eriophyllum staechadifolium), and western goldenrod (Euthamia occidentalis), then marshaling volunteers to help remove invasives and plant the natives. In 2007–just its second year–the nursery propagated over 4,000 plants.

    What makes this restoration work particularly exciting is that it is truly science in action, an ongoing experiment still working to answer a variety of questions: what’s the best way to get rid of invasives? (Different projects around the Bay have experimented with using a plastic sheeting to “cook” the weed seeds–solarization–and using concentrated salt water from salt ponds to poison them–salinization). Which native plants fare best on the levees, a relatively harsh environment with soils that may differ from natural transition zones? Should the new plantings be left to do their thing, or do survival rates significantly improve with mulching or fertilizer?

    And what happens when, as a result of climate change and sea level rise, you run out of levee? Giselle Block points out that no doubt there will be new levees in new places. By working now to create habitat, there will be local sources for seeding new transitions zones, and–hopefully–there will still be clapper rails and salt marsh harvest mice to seek refuge there.

    The Refuge and The Bay Institute are partnering to develop more opportunities for volunteers to assist with propagation of native plants at the nursery, invasive removal, and restoration plantings. For more information, contact Leia Giambastiani (707-769-4200, giambastiani@bay.org).

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

    latitude: 38.1528, longitude: -122.492


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    Oil Spill Adds Insult to Injury

    November 28th, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    Adding more straw to the Bay’s back.

    Image source: Jim M. Goldstein, JMG-GalleriesTalk about kicking someone when they’re down down.

    When the Cosco Busan collided with the Bay Bridge earlier this month, spilling 58,000 gallons of heavy-duty bunker fuel into the Bay, it was a heartbreaking reminder of the Bay’s vulnerability.

    But what makes the spill even more upsetting is that it is not the only injury the Bay is enduring: it’s a spike against the already roaring background noise, another burden on an already severely stressed ecosystem. In the past 150 years, about 85% of the Bay’s tidal marshes have been drained or lost to development. About a third—and in dry years double that amount—of the natural freshwater flows that feed the estuary are diverted instead to farms and cities. In effect, the loss of wetlands and massive diversions of freshwater inflows have compromised the Bay’s natural immune system, making it less resilient in the face of disaster. To make matters worse, every year we are “spilling” about 3 million gallons of oil into the Bay and its watershed via polluted runoff and emissions. (Similarly, in the ocean only about 5% of the oil comes from big tanker spills; much more comes from runoff, routine maintenance, and emissions.)

    As both a major shipping port and critical wildlife habitat, the Bay is at risk for an even more catastrophic spill. Obviously we need stronger regulations and stiffer penalties to prevent future spills. But we also need to continue working everyday to restore the Bay’s wetland habitat and freshwater inflows, and to reduce pollution, so that our Bay will be better able to protect and heal itself.

    It was heartening to see the public outpouring of concern for the Bay in the wake of the spill. Now it only remains for us all to harness that energy to continue working for a healthy Bay, even as the media coverage of the spill fades away.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

    latitude 37.8002, longitude -122.379


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    Fish tale: The Old Man and the PCBs

    November 1st, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    When it comes to our health, the Bay-Delta’s fish are flunking out of school.

    This past Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle Magazine featured an eye-opening story on Cambodian subsistence fishers in Stockton and the health concerns they face from a diet dependent on Delta fish. The piece illustrates how water quality in the Delta is an ecosystem issue and a public health issue and an environmental justice issue as well: The Delta’s subsistence fishers–who often come from among the area’s immigrant populations–face disproportionate exposure to contaminants in Delta fish.

    Like the Delta, the Bay supports numerous recreational and subsistence fishers. But they, too, need to be cautious about how often they indulge in a fresh-caught meal from the Bay. For The Bay Institute’s San Francisco Bay Index–a “report card” on the health of the Bay released in 2005–our scientists crunched numbers from Bay monitoring projects. They found that 80% of the common sport fish caught in the Bay exceeded EPA screening levels for human consumption for at least one contaminant. That was actually an improvement from our previous report card, which looked at data from the year 2000 and found that 94% of fish sampled exceeded screening levels.

    The contaminants studied include mercury, an element that occurs naturally in the Coast Range. Historic mining of mercury and gold released substantial amounts of mercury into the Bay’s watershed, where it continues to wash downstream to the Bay and persist in Bay sediments. They also include “legacy” contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and Chlordanes, poisonous chemicals whose manufacture is now banned or restricted but which, decades later, continue to hang around in the Bay environment. All of these contaminants are absorbed by plankton and biomagnify as they move up the food web, concentrating in the flesh of the larger sport fish favored by anglers. In humans, their effects can range from neurological disorders to developmental abnormalities to cancer.

    How much Bay fish is too much? California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment recommends that women past childbearing age and men eat no more than two meals per month of San Francisco Bay sport fish. Women of childbearing age and children are advised to eat no more than one meal of Bay fish per month.
    The good news is that decades of efforts to implement the Clean Water Act have reduced direct discharges of pollutants to the Bay. The bad news is that polluted runoff and sediments continue to be a problem, and reduced freshwater inflows and the loss of wetlands have crippled the Bay’s abilities to absorb and filter contaminants. In addition, more than century of pollution has left its impact on the Bay–an unhappy legacy still finding its way onto our dinner plates.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

    latitude 37.9783, longitude -121.371


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    To bay or not to bay?

    October 19th, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    Can you imagine what San Francisco Bay looked like 15,000 years ago?

    Actually at that time– during the last ice age– San Francisco Bay wasn’t a bay at all. Instead, it was a valley dotted with grazing antelope. Hills jutted up here and there (destined to become the Bay’s islands). The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers of the Central Valley joined forces in the vast marshy Delta, flowed west through a 300-foot deep gorge in the Coast Range (now the Golden Gate), and across a broad coastal plain to the ocean. California’s coastline was out past the Farallon Islands.

    With the end of the ice age and the melting of the great ice sheets, the oceans began rising. By about 10,000 years ago, the rising Pacific had intruded through the Golden Gate and begun to form the Bay. (This wasn’t the first Bay, by the way. During the Pleistocene, as the ice sheets alternately retreated and advanced, San Francisco Bay was alternately flooded and drained as sea levels rose and fell.) By 6,000 years ago, tidal influence had extended to the Delta.

    Around the shallow margins of the newly formed Bay, tidal marshlands began to form. Between Vallejo and Novato about 55,000 acres of cordgrass and pickleweed took hold. In the south Bay was another wetland tract totaling about 50,000 acres and due south of where the city of Fairfield now resides were another 60,000 acres. As enormous as these expanses of marsh were, they were dwarfed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta. Forming a jagged triangle with apexes at Sacramento, Antioch, and Tracy, the Delta spanned a massive 345,000 acres. For 4,000 years, the wildlife of these wetlands thrived in the rich waters of the Estuary.

    More recently, the Bay landscape has undergone further radical change– though on a much shorter time scale and due to man-made rather than natural forces. What had existed for four millennia was destroyed in the geologic blink of an eye. In about 100 years beginning in the mid-1800s, 92% of the Estuary’s wetlands were drained. Of San Francisco Bay’s original 196,000 acres, only 35,000 acres remained by 1960. The devastation of the Delta was even more complete, with only 10,000 acres left by mid-century.

    Some of those drastic man-made changes are now beginning to be changed back, with a goal to restore 100,000 acres of the Bay’s lost wetlands in the coming decades– the largest coastal wetland restoration project in the United States.

    The Bay Institute’s Bay Restoration Program Manager Marc Holmes recently spoke with “Your Wetlands” about the Bay’s changing landscape and current restoration efforts. You can learn more by listening to the podcasts:

    Changing landscapes

    Restoring the landscape

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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    Simple things YOU can do to help the Bay

    October 4th, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    If you’re like me, when you’re doing the dinner dishes you normally aren’t thinking about the fate of the delta smelt, the little native fish that is one of several in steep decline and facing extinction. And yet for millions of Bay Area residents the two things–dishwashing and delta smelt–are connected. In fact, choices we make everyday on dry land–in our homes and yards, on the road, and in our schools and offices–have implications for our aquatic neighbors. The good news is, by taking some simple steps in our day-to-day lives, we can make a difference for the Bay and its watershed… and the species that live in them.

    Be a smart water user

    On average, Californians use about a third more water than necessary due to leaks, inefficient appliances, and overwatering. Clearly, we can do more to reduce our need to divert water from our imperiled streams and Estuary. Remember that there is an ecosystem at the other end of your tap!

    Learn to monitor your household water use so you can find and repair leaks. Replace old washing machines and toilets–the biggest water users in your home–with more water efficient versions. Choose native plants better adapted to California’s climate, avoid overwatering, and water in the evening or early morning when less is lost to evaporation. And don’t forget to turn off the faucet when shaving, brushing teeth, or washing those dinner dishes. For many more ideas, visit the California Urban Water Conservation Council website and take the “h2ouse tour.”

    Don’t pollute the Bay

    San Francisco Bay is the “drain” for 40% of the surface area of California. Each year, thousands of tons of toxic chemicals flow into the Bay. In the past, most of the toxics came from point sources–the local discharges that we generally associate with factories and sewage treatment plants. Today, as a result of the Clean Water Act and other regulations, we’ve done a good job of cleaning those up. Our bigger challenge now is non point source pollution–all the runoff from contaminated creeks, urban storm drains, farmland, and our own streets, gardens, and driveways.

    To help make a difference, properly dispose of house and garden chemicals (or better yet, use safer substitutes)– never dump them in storm drains or household garbage. Use “Bay Friendly” gardening methods. Support local organic growers. Don’t litter–cigarette butts and other garbage dropped on pavement frequently end up in storm drains, and ultimately in rivers, wetlands, and the Bay. And drive less–particles and gases in air pollution can end up in rainfall and in the Bay, so bike, walk, carpool, or take public transportation instead.

    Stay tuned for more tips, share your own suggestions below, or visit www.bay.org/SimpleThingsYouCanDo.pdf.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”



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    Extra! Extra! Keeping climate change in the headlines

    September 20th, 2007 by Ann Dickinson

    Global climate change is arguably the biggest news story of our times. But from a glance at the headlines, you might not know it.

    Recently I attended the Society of Environmental Journalists conference at Stanford, an annual national gathering that brings together journalists, environmental scientists, policymakers, and activists to discuss environmental issues– and how the media covers them. One of many highlights was a panel on “Covering Climate Change,” which yielded my favorite blog headline of the event:

    “So, this editor walks into a bar with three climate scientists…”

    Of course, as the discussion made clear, the culture gap between science and journalism is no joke. Climatologists Stephen Schneider and Heidi Cullen, social psychologist Jon Krosnick, and Sacramento Bee editor Rick Rodriguez explored how scientists and news media can better work together to educate the public about the global implications of climate change.

    That pesky, ongoing language barrier between scientists and journalists was one crux of their conversation. Science deals in details and caveats; news likes bold, declarative headlines. Science is comfortable with postulation; news likes facts. Science has patience for lengthy processes of experimentation and peer review; news operates on tight deadlines and wants to know “the very latest.”

    In regards to climate change, scientists have criticized journalists for giving too much weight–in their efforts to be “fair and balanced”– to a small cadre of naysayers. From the journalists’ perspective, it can seem like scientists are being evasive and contradictory about the exact when, where, and how of the impacts of climate change.

    Then there is the question of what’s new. Can the media–so used to fast-paced news cycles–adapt to a story unfolding over decades? “You have to move the story forward,” editor Rodriguez told the scientists. Professor Krosnick put the challenge back to the journalists, urging them to find ways to stick with the story: “If you decide there is nothing new, I can guarantee you will take the public with you.”

    The good news is that everyone seemed on the same page when it came to two critical points: scientists and journalists share the burden of communicating climate change to the public, and a more climate literate public is critical as we confront this huge challenge. And concrete steps are being taken to get there. In a pre-conference event, 18 news execs met with top climate scientists for a full-day roundtable to discuss ways to provide more effective climate change coverage. The conference also saw the announcement of The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.

    Top climate modeler Jerry Mahlman has said, “I’m beginning to suspect that global warming is dynamically much less sexy than people want it to be.” Let’s hope scientists and journalists find ways–sexy or not–to keep a public weaned on sound bites engaged for the long haul.

    Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”


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