As part of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, award-winning journalists have been coming to CU Boulder for 21 years. Fellows embark on a year of courses, projects, field trips, seminars and more — taking advantage of everything university life has to offer. This series is a chance to get to know this year’s cohort of talented journalists beyond what a typical bio page will tell you.
Stacy Feldman is the co-founder of InsideClimate News (ICN), a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit news organization providing reporting and analysis on climate change, energy and the environment. Serving as executive editor from 2015 to 2020, she’s spent the past 13 years helping to build and lead ICN as it transformed from a two-person startup to an operation with nearly 20 employees and a model for national and award-winning non-profit climate journalism.
As a fellow, she is studying new approaches to local journalism that could help people connect environmental harm and injustice to their own health and their communities’ well-being, and founding a local news outlet in the process.
1. Why did you choose to cover environmental topics, and is there any memory that stands out as formative in your decision?
I really fell into environmental journalism and I'm very grateful I did. I had recently finished graduate school at Columbia in New York City, and I had the fortune of meeting David Sassoon, who is the founder and publisher of InsideClimate News. This was 2007, and he was just about to start this new climate reporting effort, and I had the opportunity to join him, for which I'm very lucky. I spent 13 years there helping to build what started out as a two-person blog and grew into a still small, but very mighty, news outlet.
From our very early days of blogging, I was immediately sucked into the climate issue. I was challenged intellectually by it, and I still am. The climate crisis, at its core, is quite simple -- fossil fuel burning and the greenhouse gas effect, junior high science in many ways. But the solutions to this crisis are incredibly complex.
Addressing climate change really requires a wholesale transformation of some of the biggest and most powerful industries on earth, and many of them don't want to transform. So they've done everything in their power to avoid that, including misleading the public on the gravity of the problem and undermining public trust in science.
So, the climate issue is more than an environmental problem. It's more than an economics problem. And this is where the challenge comes in: It is a profound political problem. It's a campaign finance problem. It's a filibuster problem. It's a Big Tech and misinformation problem, and on and on. It touches every aspect of our lives.
Journalistically, there are just so many stories to tell, and the challenge--the experience--that struck me most has been figuring out how to tell these stories in a way that will resonate with people. How do you move the needle in terms of public understanding? I find it very fascinating. And obviously, it's urgent.
2. What do you think is the most important environmental story happening right now?
It's not necessarily a single story, but I would say the lasting impact of the systematic unraveling of climate and environmental regulations by the Trump administration, from the very smallest actions to the biggest. Now, many of these attempts were blocked by the courts after legal challenges, but even when the administration did not successfully undo certain regulations, it often successfully delayed them. And there's no time for delay, especially on climate of course, because that reduces our ability to tackle these challenges at every level of government and society.
Related is the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, which again delayed, slowed, and undermined global climate action at the exact time when we needed every country, particularly the largest polluters, to drastically and dramatically ramp up, rather than dilute, their ambitions. We lost irreplaceable time. What impact will that have on future generations?
3. What is the most surprising thing you have learned at CU or in the Boulder community since you started the fellowship?
I've never lived in a place where the people who live there have so much pride in their community, who love it, who recognize there are challenges and problems, but who deliberately choose to live there. I think they feel that way for many reasons. Certainly the access to a robust outdoor life is very unique and rare.
There seems to be sort of a satisfaction in the Boulder lifestyle, which is addictive. At this point, it's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else.
Is there anything you haven’t liked about being here?
No. That’s an honest answer.
4. What has been the most helpful part of the Scripps Fellowship so far?
Well, I think the most helpful part for me has been the ability to slow down and pivot--to get off the treadmill and press pause--and have a truly immersive learning experience. That is rare in our business, and in most businesses.
I'm hoping this fellowship will become the springboard to the next phase of my career. I’ve become really interested in community journalism and all the innovation happening around it, and I get to learn about that fulltime now. I’m developing a foundation of knowledge to be able to start something new in that realm here in Boulder, a local news outlet that I hope will become a community asset. The courses are a critical part of that. The fellowship is a critical part of that. Boulder at large is a critical part of that. But having “free” time is also a really, really critical part of that.
5. What do you like to do outside of journalism?
I have a husband and also two little kids who take up a lot of my time--and I’m happy they do. They’re clever, and curious, and a lot of fun.
I also love the outdoors. I hike and, since I’ve been here, I’ve started trail running and bought my very first road bike. I’ve even gone rock climbing, three times now, which I would say I sort of hate and love at the same time. I don’t see mountain climbing in my future, but, you know, I’m trying!