BIOGRAPHIES & PROFILES
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Tom Knudson
Tom Knudson has worked at The Bee since 1988. In 1991, he wrote a series of stories on environmental damage to the Sierra Nevada, "Majesty and Tragedy: The Sierra in Peril" for which The Bee won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for public service. His reporting was a major impetus for the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (1996), the first comprehensive government report to examine the environmental condition of the Sierra Nevada. Knudson also won a Pulitzer for national reporting at the Des Moines Register in 1985. His last major projects for The Bee were "Environment, Inc.,"(2001) an investigation into the business practices of the environmental movement and “State of Denial,” (2003) contrasting California's strict environmental protection policies at home with the environmental destruction caused by its use of resources - namely oil and timber - from abroad. In 2004, Tom received the regional Environmental Media Award from the Reuters Foundation and World Conservation Union for his “State of Denial” series.
From Sierra in Peril (Sacramento Bee, 1991) John Muir said it best. The Sierra Nevada, the naturalist wrote a century ago, “Seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen.” Remember those words. Savor them like old wine. Share them with young children. For Muir’s words no longer hold true. Today, California’s Sierra Nevada – one of the world’s great mountain ranges – is suffering a slow death. Almost everywhere there are problems: polluted air, dying forests, poisoned rivers, vanishing wildlife, eroding soil and rapid-fire development. Even Muir’s holy ground, Yosemite National Park, is hurting: much of its forest has been damaged by ozone. Remarkably, the problems have drawn little attention, masked in part by the enormity of the range. The Sierra Nevada, after all, stretches for 430 sky-scraping miles along the eastern edge of California, spanning 18 counties, nine national forests, a half-dozen climatic zones and three national parks. At first glance, these mountains seem invincible. Up close, it’s another story. Just as Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians subdued Gulliver, so, too, are we bringing down a giant. The vulnerability of this majestic mountain range was the central finding in an eight-month investigation by The Bee, involving more than 200 interviews, 10,000 miles of travel and the examination of a small mountain of government reports, scientific studies and other documents. There are no official estimates of overall environmental damage to the Sierra Nevada for one small reason: No government agency, university or environmental group has taken an exhaustive look at the entire range. The Bee’s investigation, though, uncovered plenty of reasons for concern. Across the range, one can find an assortment of unsettling scenes, including heavily logged forests, barren, eroding soil, silt-choked streams and scenic vistas fouled by air pollution. The investigation also found that, in many cases, it is we Californians who are to blame.
From Environment, Inc. (Sacramento Bee, 2001) Dear Friend, So begins a fund-raising letter from one of America's fastest-growing environmental groups -- Defenders of Wildlife. Using the popular North American gray wolf as the hub of an ambitious campaign, Defenders has assembled a financial track record that would impress Wall Street. In 1999, donations jumped 28 percent to a record $17.5 million. The group's net assets, a measure of financial stability, grew to $14.5 million, another record. And according to its 1999 annual report, Defenders spent donors' money wisely, keeping fund-raising and management costs to a lean 19 percent of expenses. But there is another side to Defenders' dramatic growth. Pick up copies of its federal tax returns and you'll find that its five highest-paid business partners are not firms that specialize in wildlife conservation. They are national direct mail and telemarketing companies -- the same ones that raise money through the mail and over the telephone for nonprofit groups, from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to the U.S. Olympic Committee. You'll also find that in calculating its fund-raising expenses, Defenders borrows a trick from the business world. It dances with digits, finds opportunity in obfuscation. Using an accounting loophole, it classifies millions of dollars spent on direct mail and telemarketing not as fund raising but as public education and environmental activism. Take away that loophole and Defenders' 19 percent fund-raising and management tab leaps above 50 percent, meaning more than half of every dollar donated to save wolf pups helped nourish the organization instead. That was high enough to earn Defenders a "D" rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy, an independent, nonprofit watchdog that scrutinizes nearly 400 charitable groups. Pick up copies of IRS returns for major environmental organizations and you'll see that what is happening at Defenders of Wildlife is not unusual. Eighteen of America's 20 most prosperous environmental organizations, and many smaller ones as well, raise money the same way: by soliciting donations from millions of Americans. But in turning to mass-market fund-raising techniques for financial sustenance, environmental groups have crossed a kind of conservation divide. No allies of industry, they have become industries themselves, dependent on a style of salesmanship that fills mailboxes across America with a never-ending stream of environmentally unfriendly junk mail, reduces the complex world of nature to simplistic slogans, emotional appeals and counterfeit crises, and employs arcane accounting rules to camouflage fund raising as conservation. Just as industries run afoul of regulations, so are environmental groups stumbling over standards. Their problem is not government standards, because fund raising by nonprofits is largely protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. Their challenge is meeting the generally accepted voluntary standards of independent charity watchdogs. And there, many fall short.
From the Prologue to State of Denial (Sacramento Bee, 2003) Half a hemisphere separates the headwaters of the Amazon River and the frostbitten northern latitudes of Canada. But the two landscapes have one thing in common. You can see it along a muddy rain-forest road in Ecuador, in the silver glint of a pipeline snaking through the grass. North of Edmonton, Alberta, a different sight catches your eye: an old-growth forest of spruce, pine and aspen shredded by a dusty maze of logging roads. That oil pipeline and those logging roads are linked, via quiet rivers of commerce, to the largest concentration of consumers in North America, to a culture that proudly protects its own coastline and forests from exploitation while using more gasoline, wood and paper than any other state in America: California. With 34 million people and the world's fifth-largest economy, California has long consumed more than it produces. But today, its passion for protecting natural resources at home while importing them in record quantities from afar is backfiring on the world's environment. It is exporting the pain of producing natural resources - polluted water, pipeline accidents, piecemeal forests and human conflicts - to the far corners of the planet, to places out of sight and out of mind. California is the state of denial. "There is a disconnect going on," said William Libby, a professor emeritus of forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, who lectures and consults on forest issues around the globe. "We consume like mad. And we preserve like mad." Since the days of John Muir - the California naturalist whose writings and ramblings helped kindle the conservation movement just over a century ago - concern for the environment has been a cornerstone of California life. And seldom has conservation touched California so deeply as during the past 10 years. Since 1992, environmental rules have eliminated or sharply reduced logging on 10 million acres of national forest land in the state - an area 13 times larger than Yosemite National Park. In the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, 3.5 million acres were declared wilderness in 1994 - an expanse half again the size of Yellowstone National Park. And while that conservation legacy will enrich Californians - and California ecosystems - for generations to come, its reach also extends far beyond the Golden State.
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