Nieman Reporter Focuses on Environment

In 2001, a research team in Manhattan discovered unexplained levels of polychlorinated biphenyl toxins in samples of human breast milk. To pinpoint the underlying cause, the team needed to find a control group isolated from the pollutants of a heavily industrialized city like New York City. So they packed up and headed to the Canadian Arctic.

Journalist Richard Lister, a British Broadcasting Corporation World Service broadcaster, former State Department reporter, and current affiliate at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, got to go along for the ride.

“The team went to the Arctic thinking these people lived far from factories,” Lister recalls. “But actually, they had five times as many toxins because they were eating fish and ocean mammals that were full of them.”

This insight into the pervasive chain of pollution was one of many turning points that inspired Lister to delve into environmental journalism in the midst of a career that has taken him to over 40 countries and brought him face to face with everything from turmoil in the Balkans and famine in Ethiopia to the O.J. Simpson trial.

Today, Lister is at Harvard with his wife Philippa Thomas, another BBC journalist and a Nieman fellow. The Foundation gives affiliate standing to its fellows’ spouses.

Capitalizing on his affiliate status, Lister has chosen to audit several Earth science and environmental history courses to enrich his understanding of the issues he hopes to cover when he resumes his role as a BBC reporter.

“We’re dealing with either potential catastrophe or potential opportunity, and nobody as yet has found a way to sort out satisfactorily which one it will be—or if it must be both,” he says of the current climate crisis. “I just have the sense that at this moment there’s really no more important issue in terms of its impact on people around the planet.”

COPY TASTING

Immersed in American Studies at the University of Manchester in England, Lister might never have discovered his passion for broadcast journalism if he hadn’t ventured across the pond to Pennsylvania State University for his junior year of college.

At Penn State, he co-hosted a weekly comedy radio show called “Absolutely Live,” working with about 20 peers to write and deliver sketches over the undergraduate airwaves.

“I suppose I enjoyed the creative energy of it, working with a group of like-minded people,” he says. “The instant reaction—being able to talk to a large number of people at once and have them react to what you were doing—was very exciting.”

After college, he ran with his radio momentum and started applying for journalism training courses, largely through the BBC. When he landed a job as a local radio reporter, he was thrown into the world of broadcast journalism full-speed ahead as a “copy taster,” pulling and comparing stories from press agencies.

“You’re expected to do everything—produce, write, cut the tape,” he says. “You get to do an awful lot very quickly.”

But when he joined the BBC World Service radio team—the arm that broadcasts to the rest of the world—he says an even steeper learning curve was in order. Not only were the stories much bigger, involving places “you barely knew existed,” but reporting to international audiences proposes a unique challenge, Lister says.

“It’s relatively easy to report your country’s politics to people who live in your country,” he says. But reporting to the world outside Britain’s borders made him “think more deeply about what the story was and what was important about it.”

While he says he got up to speed on what was happening globally “pretty quickly,” making the adjustment from covering local court cases or duck pond preservation projects to covering political upheaval in Zimbabwe was no small feat.

Working out of Westminster, Lister’s World Service phase was also the one in which he met his future wife. The couple has managed to coordinate several career relocations so that they’re always based out of the same city—a plus for their eight-year-old son.

Lister’s coverage shifted across the Atlantic when he became a United States affairs analyst working on stories that the BBC heard about before people in the U.S. were even awake.

“I had one of the first internet connections in the BBC,” he remembers of this period in the mid-1990s. “I don’t think people really knew whether or not the internet would be important enough for everyone to have it.”

He next made his television debut, working for BBC World TV, which Lister says initially was “sort of a terrifying experience.”

“Suddenly you’re working with an editor and a producer and they both have different ideas about what each piece should be like,” he says. “It was a good lesson about working with colleagues.”

But it was only a matter of time before Lister relocated from the West London television center to a new perch up-close-and-personal with American politics: Washington, DC.

A VERY BUSY TIME

Lister says international travel was one of the allures of broadcast journalism, but it wasn’t until he became the BBC’s U.S. State Department correspondent that his passport started to really get a workout.

“I went to at least 40 countries with [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright,” he says. “At least half of them more than twice. It was a very, very busy time.”

Lister was one of eight to ten journalists who routinely shipped out with Albright. He says that despite competing to assemble the best broadcast, those exhausted journalists shared quite a bond.

“When many people on the plane would be sleeping, we’d have to be writing or filing stories,” he says. “In 24-hour news, everybody expects you to be able to file all the time.”

Radio—and occasionally TV—broadcasts could be a struggle in some foreign locations, he remembers, juggling language barriers, technical difficulties and transportation obstacles. But reporting from North Korea, Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan—“everywhere, really”—had rewarding elements as well.

“It gets the adrenaline running,” he says. “The buzz is knowing that you’ve been able to produce a story under very demanding circumstances, and do it in a way that people find interesting, or informed, or intelligent.”

Environmental issues were not an intentional focus of Lister’s—but after covering mudslides in Venezuela and earthquakes in Turkey, he started to develop an interest in natural disasters and questions of sustainability.

A trip to Barrow, Prudhoe Bay, Kaktovik, and the Arctic Village in Alaska involved reporting on possible drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Inuit on the edge of the Wildlife Refuge were, much to Lister’s surprise, in favor of drilling that might disrupt caribou migration patterns because of potential job opportunities. But south of the mountain range, where families relied on caribou for survival, opinions were very different.

“So many big environmental stories are not black and white,” Lister says. “And these issues are multidisciplinary in their impact. ... Really no area of the planet is not affected in some way by environmental change, access to water, access to power, and so on.”

‘OFF THE TREADMILL’

As a Nieman affiliate, Lister has explored everything from climate change in Medieval European history to modes of energy production, in addition to auditing a seminar called “This Land is Your Land: North American Environmental History,” taught by History of Science Lecturer Conevery B. Valencius.

Topics in this class include the role of waterways in the creation of federal power, the Native American dispossession of the Great Plains, and the portrayal of industrial intrusions into the environment in literature, poetry, and music.

“I think if we look out the windows of where many of us live and work, it’s hard to see a deeper history because so much of our present is asphalt and pressure-treated glass,” Valencius says. “Tracing the root of how we got to various situations, whether it’s our dependency on fossil fuels or the concentration of humanity into cities, gives us a sense of what kinds of changes or alterations we could possibly make.”

The Nieman Fellowship—which includes 24 fellows and their families each year—encourages fellows and affiliates to attend creative and nonfiction writing seminars, journalism discussions, and community events.

Lister has greatly enjoyed getting “off the treadmill” of 24-hour reporting, which has allowed him to read for pleasure, dabble in fiction writing, and meet other fellows who he says are awe-inspiring and “humbling.”

“Lots of these journalists are based in dangerous places,” he said. “It’s one thing to report on popular events in Zimbabwe and then get on a plane and leave—but that just pales in comparison to some of the things these journalists have to do every day.”

Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation—who was himself a Nieman fellow studying urban affairs and urban renewal in 1966—said the program sees an explicit connection between education and journalism.

“The press is covering a very complex world and they draw great value from the learning that goes on in Harvard classrooms to help them become more knowledgeable and authoritative in the subjects they’re covering,” he says.

Auditing classes is not a one-way street for the Nieman fellows and affiliates, Giles said.

“The fellows bring into each class their experience, their knowledge, their cultural values,” he said. “We get notes from professors every semester saying how much the contributions of the Niemans are appreciated.”

Lister, in fact, is going to be answering questions about environmental journalism in an upcoming session with interested students in Valencius’s seminar class.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Valencius says that her class discusses the use of science in environmental arguments and the discrepancy between scientific consensus and public views regarding climate change.

“Looking at the role of environmental arguments in writing for the public in the last 150 years helps us understand how we would get to a point where Americans have such a different view of science than the scientists do,” she says.

What’s more, Valencius adds, books like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” show how writing can cast a familiar-seeming world in a revolutionary light.

“I see all kinds of media—books, online sources, blogs—as some of the most powerful forces shaping the material world,” she says.

Lister said he feels the debate about climate change has shifted from whether or not the climate is changing to what we can do about it—though he acknowledges that there are still individuals focused on the first debate.

But for Lister, the facts are straightforward.

“If you mess around with any chemical formula, it will change the outcome of the formula—and we are messing around very seriously with the chemical formula of the atmosphere,” he says. “It’s bound to have some kind of impact.”

But the challenge of environmental reporting, he says, is selecting what’s reasonable to include and what can be left out.

“Do you include the views that some people think the climate isn’t changing?” he asks. “All journalists really have a mission to explain, a responsibility to try and gather the best facts you can about a particular issue and disseminate them in a way that’s clear and comprehensive and fair.”

The historical perspective introduced in some of his classes has contextualized environmental issues in a powerful way, he says.

“It’s tempting to think about climate change as a recent phenomenon, but actually in other ways it’s always been there,” he says.

“The sad truth is that we’re better at wreaking environmental change than any generation that preceded us in human history—the best, or the worst,” he says. “For a journalist, that means that I should be in business for some time.”

—Staff writer Julie R. Barzilay can be reached at jbarzilay13@college.harvard.edu.