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At the Society of Professional Jounalists awards ceremony last night in Louisville, biggest ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ moments came after a couple of brief power outages caused by thunderstorms. We couldn’t really hear the ruckus outside, insulated as we were in a room at the Louisville Zoo, chatting loudly in a room just above an orangutan, tapir and other endangered or threatened species in the Islands exhibit.

Then came the rapid-fire award announcements. I won 2nd place in the Continuing Coverage in the Newspaper/Wire category for my environmental reporting at LEO. I’ve been trying to forge something of an environment beat there, and I guess I have in the eyes of judges in some midwestern state somewhere.

It was fun being a freelancer at the event, having ties to more than one publication. The schmingling (schmoozing + mingling) was good. So were the brownies. Another freelancer buddy of mine, about eight months pregnant, wondered aloud who would get the story out first if she went into labor during one of the power outages. We decided it would probably be the bloggers.

So I got curious about the feasibility of green-collar jobs in Louisville, my fair city. It turns out there’s potential, but not necessarily momentum. Read the results of my asking around in this week’s Louisville Eccentric Observer.

Spring is in full effect in much of the country, and it’s prime time for hunting. Hunting wild plants, that is. Check out my brief primmer on the subject for Get Out! Magazine, which is aimed at outdoorsy types in the Ohio River bioregion. The article’s also got plenty of pretty photos (not mine), and I must say weeds never looked so tasty.

The Green for All’s conference on green-collar jobs was a great place to learn about efforts all over the country to make them a reality. I wrote a round-up of the experience posted at Grist. I’ll continue to report on the subject, including an upcoming piece about what’s happening in my own city.

I’ll be covering the Dream Reborn conference in April 4-6 in Memphis. I’m looking forward to meeting many of the people who have been making a push for “green collar jobs,” which they say are good for the poor and good for the planet, not to mention the national economy. They include people like Van Jones with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, and Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx in New York.

The program shows forums on topics ranging from environmental justice to food security, as well as media primers for activists. The online description notes that “Special emphasis will be placed on ecological solutions that can heal the Earth while bringing jobs, justice, wealth and health to ALL of our communities.”

Green collar is not quite there, but well on its way to reaching buzz word status, especially since the President Bush signed the Green Jobs Act of 2007 into law in December, authorizing up to $125 million for state and federal job training programs.

It’ll be great to learn a bit more at the conference about how viable a green economy is, and what’s happening around the country to make it a reality. Organizers are trying to pin down and clarify just what makes a green collar job now, before the definition becomes too watered down and fuzzy.

A fun article I wrote for Get Out! about Leave No Child Inside. It’s a clever play on you-know-what, spawned by the efforts of the guy who brought you “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

Get Out! is a great webzine covering outdoor lifestyle the Ohio River basin with utter disregard for geopolitical borders.

This is going to be, in a word, awesome. I’ve been awarded an Environmental Reporting Fellowship at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in May. Journalists will spend a week learning about “tropical ecosystems … deep background in tropical ecology to enhance the accuracy of reporting on science and environmental issues.” There will be opportunities to interview scientists and other specialists working at the congressional-chartered nonprofit.

This particular journalist will be sure to spend some free time soaking up information about medicinal indigenous plant species.

New! Check out my essay on environmentalism and diversity in the current issue of Utne Reader, originally published in the November/December issue of Orion Magazine.

See other recent work in the ‘This Just In‘ section of this site.

I’ve been invited to participate in a symposium at the Garrison Institute in New York. According to the description, it will go a little something like this:

April 11-13 Garrison Institute’s Initiative on Transformational Ecology kicks off its Satyagraha Project, an exploration of Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent struggle, satyagraha or “truth force,” part of lineage of thought which also includes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the new context of climate change and the deep social and environmental changes we must make in our time.

Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? If you’re in the area, consider attending the free public event April 13 in New York City. The website has more information on the time, location, and some of the absolutely fascinating presenters I look forward to meeting.