The World Is My Sandbox: The Origin Story of Nature’s Griot
I began telling stories as a child, digging through my sandbox in the yard where I would imagine that if I dug long enough and deep enough I could really make it to China. If I found a fractured piece of pottery on my digging expedition, I would weave a tale to anyone that would listen about how it was an ancient artifact from long ago. I was hooked on telling stories to my family and friends and the feeling I got when I knew I blew their minds. My audience for my stories got bigger as I aged. Once I settled on journalism to make a living off my favorite pastime, I had to back up my lines with facts.
Despite this shift, I still got a rush from producing a story and wanted that feeling to have meaning beyond ratings or raises for a job well done. Therefore, once I discovered environmental journalism was a real thing, I focused all my efforts to securing my future in that field. Sharing about the environment hit my highest pleasure points as a storyteller, talking about nature and people’s relationship to it. I first came across environmental journalism while working at CNN in 2011 when I was covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed one of Japan’s coastal nuclear energy hubs. The threat of contamination to people and wildlife on the island and hundreds of miles out to sea was massive. Even though the news cycle moved on, the full extent of the fallout from the radiation was still brewing.
In 2014, I saw the same upswell of environmental interest in Flint, Michigan due to the deliberate contamination of drinking water with lead. I thought for sure environmental justice stories would be a mainstay in the public discourse. I began to notice a pattern. The public had more of an appetite for environmental journalism when a story had a sense of racial or social injustice. I thought to myself—if I could find the right story that checked those boxes then I would have something to pitch.
In the soft and steamy marshes of Louisiana, I found just the story. In 2017—after nine months of research, pitching and revising—I found myself in a town called LaPlace. The home of one of America’s largest slave revolts is now home to America’s largest neoprene factory. The sprawling complex that manufactures the raw, soft, squishy material whose use is ubiquitous from car seats to bandaids also produces a byproduct that is known to cause cancer. The toxin this facility, formerly owned by DuPont, emits is chloroprene. 99% of this poisonous gas in the US comes from this building, and today, the majority-black town suffers from cancer at rates higher than any place in the state.
Once we produced this story, that rush I felt as a child surged within. In this moment, I realized this was the next step in my path as a storyteller—to tell more stories like this. Around the same time, my mentor encouraged me to apply to a fellowship she took part in to help me do just that. The Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellowship, a program at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism, helps incubate the ideas of journalists like me to give their environmental story ideas a boost. The confirmation of this move came when I was accepted into the fellowship to dig deeper in an area I had been interested in for a long time — fishing!