Award-Winning New York Times Environment Reporter to Speak at Yale

Andrew Revkin, Environment Reporter for the New York Times, will speak at Yale University on November 12, 6:00 p.m., in the Bowers Auditorium of Sage Hall, 205 Prospect Street.

Revkin’s lecture, “The Hot Seat: Making Sense of Global Warming, from the North Pole to the White House,” is co-sponsored by Yale Environment 360 and the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale.

The event is free and open to the public.

A prize-winning journalist and author, Revkin has spent a quarter of a century covering subjects ranging from the environmental assault on the Amazon rainforest to the Asian tsunami, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole.

In 2008, he was awarded one of journalism’s top honors, the John Chancellor Award, for more than two decades of pioneering coverage of the science and politics of global warming. His work has won most of the top honors in science journalism, including the Communication Award of the National Academy of Sciences and two awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His first magazine feature, on the worldwide death toll from misuse of the herbicide paraquat, won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award.

Revkin has reported on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, mainly covering environmental issues in their social and political context. His blog, Dot Earth (nytimes.com/dotearth), engages the public in a discussion of strategies for balancing human aspirations and the planet’s limited resources. Revkin’s innovative approach to journalism includes blogging, podcasts and video imagery to accompany his stories.

Throughout his career, he has focused on the challenge of providing energy for a growing human population without overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. His first stories on how human activities affect the climate were published in1985, three years before the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Revkin has covered the science and politics of global warming in more than 500 magazine and newspaper stories, two books, and a prize-winning Discovery-Times documentary, “Arctic Rush.”

Revkin’s most recent book is “The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World” (Kingfisher, 2006), the first account of global and Arctic climate change written for the whole family. It was named both an outstanding science book and social studies book by the Children’s Book Council.

He has authored two other books. “The Burning Season” (1990) chronicles the life of Chico Mendes, the slain leader of the movement to save the Amazon rainforest. The prize-winning book was published in 10 languages, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was the basis for the prize-winning HBO film of the same name, starring Raul Julia and directed by John Frankenheimer. Revkin also wrote “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” (1992), which accompanied the first museum exhibition on climate change, created by the American Museum of Natural History.

Before joining The New York Times, Revkin was a senior editor of Discover, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and a senior writer at Science Digest. He has contributed freelance articles to the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, AARP’s magazine, Conde Nast Traveler and many other publications. Revkin has a biology degree from Brown, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. He has taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Bard College.

The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was designed to broaden students’ awareness about the field of journalism and its role in contemporary culture. Established in 1971 through the generosity of Nelson Poynter (Yale, M.A. 1927), the program brings distinguished journalists to campus to give public lectures and meet with students.
Past fellows include Ann Curry, Al Franken, Riz Khan, Charlie Rose, Margaret Warner, Judy Woodruff and Bob Woodward.

Yale Environment 360 is an online magazine offering opinion, analysis, reporting and debate on global environmental issues. The publication features original articles by scientists, journalists, environmentalists, academics, policy makers, and business leaders, as well as multimedia content and a daily digest of major environmental news. Environment 360 is published by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Yale University, and is funded in part by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.