Five Questions for the Fellows: Ben Cathey

The Ted Scripps Fellowships have been bringing award-winning environmental journalists to CU Boulder for 29 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.

Prior to the fellowship, you were working as a meteorologist in Knoxville. How has the transition been to being a fellow? 

I'm really getting the chance to pursue these stories on wildfire and arson and indigenous firefighting that I've wanted to do for years – that the daily grind of TV, news, and weather really didn't allow for. I suppose what's similar is there's a lot of autonomy in both. I'd been doing TV, weather and climate for almost 15 years, and I built a pretty successful routine and a successful career that afforded me a lot of autonomy. Here at the Scripps Fellowship, you have a lot of autonomy over your time, classes, networking, events, reading for classes, whatever it may be. It's been a nice time to find my interests again. I think a lot of journalists deal with burnout at this point in their career, and that's certainly something that I was feeling, and this has helped recharge my tank.

Currently, you are working on stories related to wildfire causes and the use of AI to detect and prevent arson. What is the most interesting thing you have learned so far reporting on these stories during the fellowship?

I knew about this former FBI agent and now professor who had been studying arson and AI since 1974. I didn't even know AI was a thing then. Once I got here, I realized that brand new research was showing that arson is way more common than was previously thought of in wildfires. I mean, there's tens of thousands of additional fires that were just never solved, that they think were arson, and they were using AI to solve that puzzle. And the thought is that AI could soon be used to predict these crimes before they actually happen, which is just kind of a game-changing thing to me, not only to prevent fires and devastation, but the ethical concerns are really interesting and compelling.

Which, if any, of your classes have been helpful to your fellowship project?

I found this drone class. It's called Geography 4003, UAS for Earth Observations, but the professor calls it the drone class. It’s been really helpful, not just to help with or to aid in getting video for stories, but the professor, Nic, also teaches you how to overlay data that you can pick up with a drone instrument. There's a lot of uses when looking at wildfires. I could fly at 400 feet up over an old burn scar and show potentially where the flames stopped, or why certain species of trees were able to survive, or maybe why some homes were able to survive too.

What is a book that you've picked up this semester that you've really enjoyed? 

One of the other fellows, Amanda, gave me an early print edition of a firefighter memoir that she got while working at NPR. I hadn’t heard of this book, When it all Burns by Jordan Thomas, and it talks about his experience as somebody coming from academia and going into really elite firefighting with the Los Padres Hotshots. The book helped shape my project in some ways, like a lot of the front-line firefighter stories have been told, and they're really compelling, and obviously it's very dramatic, but it maybe it led me to want to chase a story that hasn't been told as much.

Lastly, what do you like to do for fun in Boulder?

I thought Boulder was outdoorsy before I got here, and then I quickly learned I've got a lot of catching up to do. One of my first days here, I did a solo twelve-and-a-half mile hike up to the Devil's Thumb, and then we had a mixer at the fanciest hotel in town an hour later. I've also loved exploring these little towns around Boulder, like Nederland and Rollinsville, and I’ve been to Estes Park a bunch of times. That's been really fun.