Between the persistent drought and over-extraction by humans, the Colorado River is gasping for water. The states that make up the Colorado River Basin are looking for solutions to maintain their water resources. 

The basin quenches the water demand for 40 million people, including large metropolitan areas outside of the basin itself, such as Denver, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

Water is also removed from the river as an impact of climate change. Drought has had a chokehold on the Colorado River Basin for twenty years, and increasing temperatures only make matters worse.

The science of weather is complicated, but it’s enthusiastic science journalists like Tom Yulsman who work to break down the details. Yulsman is currently a professor of journalism and director of the Center of Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

His piece “The Great Drenching” takes apart the different atmospheric and oceanic factors that led to California’s overwhelming precipitation from mid-December 2022 to mid-January 2023. A La Niña phenomenon had been projected for those months, which typically means dryness for California. The overwhelming rains were an anomaly.

“The ocean and atmosphere intersect with each other in so many ways—in such powerful ways,” Yulsman said. 

In a way, this feels like the class I’ve been waiting to take. Ever since I noticed that environmental science topics I study in class bleed into my fiction writing, I wanted to explore this intersection of writing and the environment.

How could I write about the environment that both highlighted urgent issues also didn’t overwhelm or sensationalize? How do I explain ecological concepts (be it climate change or trophic levels) in an accessible manner? I’ve been playing with how to do it in fiction, but I also need to learn how to do it journalistically. And it’s great to have classmates and professors to help me along instead of me just scribbling around in my notebook having the lurking sense that I don’t quite know what I’m doing.

Our professor asked us what environmental reporting meant to us. I should’ve seen this question coming, but I couldn’t quite come up with a coherent answer during class. So here’s my attempt to remedy that.

Environmental reporting is not only about covering what’s happening in the natural world with scientific accuracy, but also exploring the human relationship with nature. When I first learned to make basic food webs, humans were never included in them because we’re just a different category altogether. While there is merit in seeing how ecology functions without humans, it’s undeniable that humans, as a species, have touched every aspect of nature. As a journalist, I feel that it’s critical to explore these relationships, how they have changed, and how they ought to change as we work towards solving environmental issues.

I’m also very excited to see different environmental philosophies. I have my own set of beliefs when it comes to the environment and where humans fit into the equation, but learning how others approach our relationship with nature would help expand my perspective. So here’s to a semester of environmental reporting!

Figuring out a topic is always the hardest part…