Best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues
AWARD YEAR: 2005
AWARD NAME: The Whitman Bassow Award 2005
RECIPIENT: Alan Burdick
AFFILIATION: Farrar, Straus And Giroux
HONORED WORK: “Out of Eden: an Odyssey of Ecological Invasion”
Unsettling and poetic, “Out of Eden” is a dark travelogue into a subject that is obscure but portentous: the insinuation of invasive species into environments where they would not be without the assistance of human beings. In exotic landscapes and in his own backyard, Burdick builds his reporting on the stories of ecologists working the intersections of natural and manmade ecologies. Indeed, this absorbing account of plants and animals emigrating to new environments raises essential questions about what it means to call the natural environments “natural.”
Citation for Excellence:
Craig Cheatham
KMOV-TV St. Louis
“La Oroya: Metal Smelting in the Andes”