Blogs & Ecology

photo: Phil Thomas

Image source: Metcalf Institute

This year's Metcalf Institute Diversity Fellowships in Environmental Reporting, were awarded this morning. The awards are given to minority journalists early in their careers to encourage diversity and excellence in environmental reporting. Environmental journalism is still a relatively new field and as climate change becomes a daily topic of conversation many newspapers and media outlets are scrambling to find reporters who can not only cover the issues but understand the science enough to translate what it means to the reader.

Last December TreeHugger covered artist Michael Townsend and his four year long secret occupation of the Providence Place Mall in Rhode Island. Now Salon picks up the story:

Four years after the mall opened, Yoto, Townsend and six friends in their art collective, called Trummerkind ("children of the ruins" in German), vowed to spend a full week at the mall that had transformed their city, to use the mall as an actual public space while surviving sans commerce.

"The mall has something really positive to offer, something that has nothing to do with shopping," Townsend told me.

Built in 1895 on a rock outcrop in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, the house was abandoned in the 1940’s until it was bought by Henry Wood in 1961. What a great story. I’d live there, for sure. Lotta work maintaining it, though. Read the article and see the slideshow in the NYT