SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Using The Written Word To Protect The Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

I was thrilled to just be informed that I’ve been honored as “Environmentalist of the Year” by the Long Island Sierra Club. As a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury, for decades I’ve taught Environmental Journalism and spend several classes in presentations about John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

Muir is especially known for crusading for creation of Yosemite National Park—with his one-on-one three-day camping trip there in 1903 with President Theodore Roosevelt having a great influence on Roosevelt, a conservation-minded Long Islander, not too incidentally. It’s been called the “camping trip that changed the nation.”

Saving wilderness was Muir’s mission. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he wrote. He and the Sierra Club were instrumental in the preservation of many great natural places. 

Important for the Environmental Journalism class is that Muir emphasized the use of the published word to raise public awareness. He wrote 12 books and 300 articles—his first article, “Yosemite Glaciers,” was published in 1871 in the New York Tribune. 

Thus, I tell my students, Muir and other early writers on nature—Thoreau, Emerson and Long Island’s own Walt Whitman—provided a base. And then came, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” her expose on the dangers of pesticides, which laid the foundation for the contemporary practice of what became to be called environmental journalism. 

It was 1962 that I got my first job as a reporter, on Long Island, at the Babylon Town Leader, with my first major assignment looking into the plan of public works czar Robert Moses, a Babylon resident, to build a four-lane highway the length of Fire Island. 

I began combining what’s now called investigative reporting with environmental journalism in many articles challenging the Moses scheme and pointing to preservation with a Fire Island National Seashore, created in 1964.

I went on that year to the Long Island Press and after a few years of daily cops-and-courts reporting was back with a focus on mixing investigative reporting and environmental journalism.  John Hohenberg, professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was to update what had been a standard journalism textbook that he wrote, “The Professional Journalist,” adding: “It has not taken the nation’s newspapers very long to demonstrate their effectiveness as crusaders to protect the environment. Through their accomplishments, they have gone far toward making up for the long years during which they neglected the issue. It has seemed to make no difference whether a paper is large or small; if it has a public-spirited publisher, a determined editor and a talented and devoted staff, it can—and does—obtain results.” I was elated that he then mentioned my work and that of three other journalists.

I’ve continued to combine investigative reporting with environmental journalism now for more than 50 years—in books, on TV (hosting the TV program “Enviro-Close-Up” for 27 years, visit wwww.envirovideo.com) and on radio, in magazines and newspapers, and in recent years on the Internet on which you are reading this column. 

A lot of my work has been done nationally and some internationally, and this has included breaking the story of how the next mission of the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle involved it lofting a space probe fueled with deadly plutonium. This sparked one of my books, “The Wrong Stuff,” and TV documentary “Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens.” I detail accidents that have happened in the use of nuclear power in space by the U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russia. I was invited to speak in Russia and made a series of presentations through the 1990s into the middle 2000s including at the Russian Academy of Sciences. I would not accept an invite now with Putin imposing totalitarianism, and journalists—and environmentalists—in enormous peril. 

But my home and the subjects of much of my journalism have been on Long Island—why the honor from the Long Island Sierra Club is so gratifying. The club has 6,000 members in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

As I’ve continued the combination of investigative reporting and environmental journalism I started with the Fire Island stories, for 25 years I challenged the plan to build 7 to 11 nuclear power plants on Long Island. Today, after the strong activism of folks at the grassroots and stand-up opposition by governmental leaders, Long Island is nuclear-free. 

Long Island is a wonderful environment—but there are many environmental threats still. Applying to the island’s green environment the remarks of journalist, inventor and diplomat Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and founding of our republic—we have it if we can “keep it.”

A Smithtown angle on this: I was asked, in the preparation of an article the Long Island Sierra Club is putting together, about what might have been my early background involving the environment. I quickly noted a lot had to do with the Boy Scouts in which I was very active growing up in St. Albans, Queens. Very instrument: camping as a Scout and becoming an Eagle Scout, succeeding in getting the Nature merit badge and other merit badges involving the outdoors. My Explorer Scout advisor was Floyd Sarisohn who exactly a decade earlier had become an Eagle Scout in the same Troop 50 in St. Albans. And my ties with Floyd and his wife, Bernice, who moved out to Commack and Floyd started a law practice here when I went off to Ohio to college, were even closer than that. My family—my folks and brother and me—lived on the top floor of a two-family house on Francis Lewis Boulevard in St. Albans. Below on the first floor lived Floyd and Bernice (before they had their two children).  It was so nice, having met a girl from Huntington Beach at college, getting married at 19 and settling in Suffolk in 1961, to reunite with Floyd, my Scouting mentor, and Bernice. Floyd became a judge and Smithtown Democratic chairman. 

The Sierra Club award ceremony will be held on Saturday, March 24, at the Suffolk County Environmental Center in Islip.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.