Been awhile since I’ve posted; about the same time I stopped posting, school let out for the summer. Since then I must have been preoccupied by work at News Journal… but also with personal stuff.

My reporting gig is only 20 hours a week. It’s a good thing I don’t have many expenses. I’ve been learning quite a bit, though. Like how to take care of a bedridden grandfather. It’s not easy.

How about some samples of my work?

May 23, 2009 — Allegedly, a boy’s mother stood by and watched as the babysitter burnt all her son’s fingers as a “punishment” for smoking. The babysitter later told this to a woman she had never met, and, voila, landed herself in jail. I interviewed the whistleblower.

Currently I have been investigating pollution in Clinton County. The EPA is a veritable treasure trove, and as of yet they’ve never given me any problems getting information. The question is finding the information I want. EPA is so divided, broken up into a million different parts and jobs and filing systems and online systems.

It seems impossible to navigate at times, but I think I just made a contact who can help me slog through the muck. She used to be an environmental journalist, but now she works for Ohio EPA, helping environmental journalists find the information they need. Cool job, huh?

Expect a detailed report on pollution in and around Wilmington in the next several weeks, as I’ll be out of the office 5 days for a conference and my investigative stuff has to be wedged into my normal coverage itinerary.

Speaking of the conference, I hope to blog it (and tweet it) along the way. It starts next Thursday, June 11, and it’s the big annual conference for the premier investigative reporting society in the U.S., Investigative Reporters and Editors. Basically hundreds of awesome reporters getting together and hearing speeches by some of the best. I hear Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, is speaking.

Now, I certainly don’t mean Earth-worship. Just Earth-love, good for you and good for me. That’s what this blog is about.

Hmm… I can’t think of a way to frame this link, I just have to show it to you: Activist Fail. This is when you know you’ve gone too far. …Then again, I dunno. Do you feel sad that a 250 year old organism, whose biomass was 1,500 times your own, was killed to supply you with extra-soft toilet paper or tissues? I do. That’s why when I can get away with it, I sneak in some of the recycled stuff into our grocery cart.

Davey Woods near Urbana, Ohio. It's the nearest old-growth forest to Cedarville/Dayton/Springfield. Photo from the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources

(Did you know: a general rule of thumb is, the softer the toilet paper or facial tissue, the more virgin and/or “old-growth” timber was used to produce it?)

Who knows, maybe those people in the video have gone too far, essentially lowering God (if they think there is one) below nature. But that wasn’t necessarily apparent in the video.

Now that some of my Cedarville audience thinks I’m crazy, I’ll tell them why loving the Earth is not. This article, from the journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, features a condensed version of the Christian philosophical justification for caring for the environment. (And the author, Fred Van Dyke, knows his stuff. Look at his bio on the first page.) The piece is 15 pages of text, but you only really need to read the first 3-4 for the good stuff. As an added bonus, the article describes that Christians are actually on the forefront of the environmental movement.

Read it? Good. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is and live this stuff out. The respect of the entire scientific and intellectual worlds is at stake.

As you have been reading the past few days, I’ve been making suggestions specific to our school. They’ve stemmed merely from my eco-research over the years intersecting with life at this school. But today I found a rather objective treatment of college eco-valuation.

The College Sustainability Report Card rates the 300 schools in the U.S. and Canada with the largest endowments, so Cedarville is not included.

But I’ll be looking at their criteria to get ideas for our up-and-coming environmental organization. I’m the VP of this group, and we’re hoping to hash everything out over the summer to ensure a functioning organization this fall. The president, Allison McClain, is doing marine biology with the Smithsonian Institution in Maryland this summer. I haven’t figured out what I’ll be doing (I know, it’s a week away, right?) but whatever it is, I’ll be writing as usual. Maybe I’ll work as a farmhand on an organic vegetable farm.

I think that’s the most interesting thing about this new environmental org — we pull in people from all disciplines. Out of our current group of officers, we have at least the following areas of study represented, maybe more: literature, biological sciences, communication/journalism, philosophy, law, international affairs, business, environmental studies.

I’m holding out for a studio art gal or a piano performance guy.

Stay tuned for daily “CU/Green” updates! I plan to present the ideas to our University President when they’re all finished. Why do they appear daily rather than all at once? Because after a couple weeks of you reading this site regularly, it becomes a habit. Muahaha! No seriously, I study Communication, and I know for a fact that people tend not to read blog posts longer than a few hundred words. So I’m out at 287.

I’m among the founders of a new environmental organization at my University, which will largely be developed over the summer. I had been thinking, we ought to have some thoughts about what institutional changes the University should strive for.

So I started a list.

It spans several blog posts and comes in the form of a “campaign” that our administration can adopt. I call it, “CU/Green.” Simple, to-the-point, and contains a computer character, which is always helpful when promoting something new and exciting. (only half kidding there.)

I’ll be working on turning this massive list into a series of blog posts in the near future. So look out.