Five Questions for the Fellows: Cat Jaffee

The Ted Scripps Fellowships have been bringing award-winning environmental journalists to CU Boulder for 28 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.

How are you enjoying the fellowship?

I love it. My only complaint is that it's too short, but I can totally see how it's a life-changing experience. It's too soon to say, but I think this is, for sure, one of the coolest things I've ever done. There's something very different about giving myself space and time to reflect on who I am, how I show up in the world, and what I want to do in this life. I think in a society that chases experiences, this is definitely top of the list.

I also think it's really encouraging to go down the rabbit hole and follow tangents and interests; you're in classes and learning interesting things every day, but you don't have to do the homework necessarily, or the tests. I think it actually gets to the heart of what education is all about – which is curiosity. It cultivates an ethos of curiosity, not just about the world around you, but the inner world. The fellowship puts an emphasis on seeing where the journey takes you.

Your project focuses on exploring the overlap between repairing human bodies and ecosystems. Can you tell me about how you became interested in that topic?

In 2020 I was diagnosed with cancer, which we found because I also had malaria and dengue fever, which I had contracted on a reporting trip in Angola. That reporting trip was also about this water system called the Okavango Delta that wasn't behaving in ways that it had historically. There were all these reasons why the water was changing in the way it was flowing. As I was exploring the science around the system and looking at ways that people were talking about water systems, I started seeing similar medical terms and explanations also being used around repairing my own body.

I wanted to explore the biotech, the ethos, the philosophy, the culture, and the mentality of how we fix things in a more intersectional way. I was excited to have this overarching theme to my work and then use the fellowship to build relationships with professors and try to find the stories underneath that. As far as tech goes, everything from geoengineering to geosciences to rewilding, there couldn't be a better place than CU. It's just so incredible in terms of all the different kinds of labs and research and experts that are here.

Are there any professors or classes in particular that have been helping develop your project?

Ben Hale's Environmental Philosophy course has been incredible for me. I'm working on reporting a story with Paul Sutter, an environmental historian, and I'm auditing his class. Michael Pappas’ Natural Resource Law class has been really helpful for me in understanding land management. Then I took this medical geography course that really helped me understand the interconnection between place and medicine. Especially the way that Colleen Reid teaches it. It's thinking about the implicit connections of environment and public health, and how the individual versus the collective has changed over time. She's such an incredible professor. I took these classes because I was interested in them, but every single one of them is connected to my project.

How have the other fellows impacted your project and experience?

I think something cool about our class is that everybody has their own medium. So each of us has such a different approach but obviously share a lot of the same ethos and inspiration. Like many of us were really inspired by the New York Times’ award-winning story “Snow Fall.” I have a dream that the five of us could do a collaborative project, each bringing some element. I think I've also been really inspired just to learn about everybody's journeys and I think the challenge of power has been core to all of our work. It reminds me of my own values and the kind of work that I want to do out there. So that’s been really helpful in calibrating my moral compass.

What do you like to do for fun here in Boulder?

I'm a really big dancer here, which is kind of hilarious because I don't look like a dancer and I don't really have good beat, but I dance probably two to three times a week. I dance at Streetside Studios and Avalon, I do West African dance, hip hop, West Coast swing, and Salsa. I live in Chautauqua with two Border Collies so I'm in a number of run clubs, I climb up the Flatirons pretty regularly, and I’m in Chautauqua at least twice a day hiking. I also spend a lot of time animal tracking while I'm up there because it's such a vibrant natural space. I feel like my life is intertwined with bears. I spend so much time with bears and lately wild turkeys and owls. Seeing all the different phases of seasons and how every day is so different there, I really have built such a strong relationship with that place.