Here's a formula for a place environmental journalism can thrive:

Take a beautiful and diverse landscape of beaches and bays, forests and swamps, marshes and coral reefs. Then subject it to the pressures of a rapidly growing population and ever-expanding development.

Such stresses may not be good for Florida's delicate ecosystems, but they energize environmental reporting and commentary at many of the state's newspapers.

That should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of Florida's most famous journalist who writes about environmental issues -- Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiassen, best known nationally for his hilarious mystery novels skewering the despoilers of his native state.

Beyond Hiassen's frequent appearances on the best-seller lists, however, there are other signs pointing to a healthy environment beat in Florida:

-- Since the second half of 1999, membership in the Society of Environmental Journalists has grown nationally by about 11 percent. There was a 90 percent increase in the number of SEJ members from Florida during the same period.

-- In 2002, the Scripps Howard Foundation's Meeman Awards for environmental reporting went to two Florida newspapers-the St. Petersburg Times and Pensacola News Journalin the smaller-circulation and larger-circulation categories. It was only the second time in the award's history that two newspapers from the same state had won in same year.

-- Other newspapers undertake ambitious investigative projects, as well. The Orlando Sentinel, for instance, published a yearlong series, Florida's Water Crisis, in 2002.

-- The Tampa Tribune re-established its Changing Landscapes unit earlier this year as a stand-alone team of reporters, with beats for environment, transportation, growth, weather and water-supply issues, and also a reporter writing about "Old Florida" -- what team leader Jan Hollingsworth calls "sense of place."

-- Columnists besides Hiassen direct attention to environmental issues. One example at a smaller newspaper: Tom Palmer, a reporter who covers environmental and other issues at The (Lakeland) Ledger, began writing an environment column three years ago, alternating explanatory, feature, news and commentary pieces.

The range of environmental journalism being produced in Florida is exemplified by the winners of the Waldo Proffitt Award, presented since 1999 for the state's best newspaper reporting and commentary on the environment. Named for a retired editor (and current columnist) at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune who helped pioneer environmental reporting in Florida in the 1960s, the contest is affiliated with the Florida Press Association and Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, and is administered at the University of South Florida.

Last year, the Pensacola News Journal's Scott Streater won the Proffitt Award for a body of work that included his Meeman-winning series, "Hidden Hazard," describing possible links between that city's high Toxics Release Inventory numbers and above-average cancer rates. The entry also included articles on a power plant's impact on air quality and permit violations by a wastewater treatment facility.

In 2001, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's Tom Bayles and Andy Crain received the award for a series about the beach-building industry, which dredges up sand from the ocean floor to restore beaches in Florida and elsewhere.

The 2000 winner was the Tampa Tribune's Hollingsworth, for reporting on "illnesses linked to malathion spraying, problems facing the Everglades and the sudden, unexplained firing of Department of Environmental Protection directors."

The inaugural recipients of the Proffitt Award in 1999 were Robert King, Joel Engelhardt and Mary McLachlin of The Palm Beach Post, for an explanatory series called "Restoring the Flow in the Everglades."

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Florida's Issues 'Resonate'

"Florida is blessed with a lot of very good journalism, and the journalism we see in this professional competition is no exception," said Edward Jay Friedlander, director of the School of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida. Entries have frequently focused on the Everglades, beach erosion and restoration, water quality, and "general issues of pollution," he said. "Those four types of subjects resonate."

Several Florida journalists say a common theme in many of the environmental issues they cover is the state's population growth.

"Because of high growth, a lot of environmental issues hit here (early), like water and wildlife habitat preservation," Palmer said. The state, he said, "is not what it used to be. I was kid here in the 1950s. The population was two million. Now it's 16 million. There's been a dramatic change."

Julie Hauserman, a state government reporter for the St. Petersburg Times whose specialties include covering growth and the environment, agrees: "The growth has been enormous. It's the root of everything."

A related factor is "the fragility of the system in South Florida," said Hauserman, who won a Meeman Award in 2002 for "Poison in Your Back Yard," a series about arsenic contamination from the use of pressure-treated wood.

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State's Beauty Raises Profile of Beat

Starting years ago, she said, this fragility "helped give the beat a higher profile in Florida in general. Even smaller papers have environment writers. It's so obviously beautiful, and the fact that people come here for the beauty helped raise the profile of the beat."

That trend has continued recently at some newspapers. In Pensacola, for instance, there was no reporter assigned to the environment beat in 1995 when Streater joined as a government reporter. In 1997, he was inspired by citizen complaints before the city council and county commission to investigate a state policy shift that had de-emphasized penalties for pollution violations.

"We found there was really no enforcement to speak of, anywhere," he said. As a result of that reporting, "editors started thinking there were a lot of (environmental) issues out there," and Streater became the environment beat reporter in 1998, with a continuing focus on hard-news coverage.

A more recent example of editors' commitment to environmental coverage was the Tampa Tribune's reinstatement of the Changing Landscapes group as an independent unit. It had been part of a larger Public Life team of government reporters for several years.

"Environmental issues are an extremely high priority for the Tampa Tribune," said Hollingsworth, who is both the Changing Landscapes leader and an environmental reporter. "There's an enormous amount of support from management, a high premium on environmental coverage and a great deal of faith in my decision-making."

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Florida Growth -- 'Everything Seems to Flow From That'

"Our master narrative is growth," she said. "Everything seems to flow from that." With that focus, the newspaper examined a roadway project "at every level from neighborhoods to the big picture," she said, showing that it would essentially open up a wilderness area to new development, "with enormous environmental and ecological implications."

Across Tampa Bay, the St. Petersburg Times also places strong emphasis on environmental coverage, which makes for a robust rivalry with the Tribune in the metropolitan area they share.

As at the Tribune, much environmental coverage at the Times is handled by bureau reporters. Craig Pittman is the environment beat reporter, assigned to cover not just local news but environmental issues around the state. "I'm the only statewide environmental reporter," he said, "which is sad for the state, but good for me. It gives me time to do things right."

One example, Pittman said, was a story on a major company's plans to increase development in Florida's relatively less-developed Panhandle region, which was published last year after he spent five months on research and reporting.

"I think there's more of an acknowledgement (by the press) now about the political aspect of a lot of environmental stories," he said. "A lot are very politically charged and involve debates about what is, to me, the essential question of Florida: How will we grow? Not whether, but how."

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Some Areas of Beat Still Not Thriving

However, Pittman's Times colleague, Hauserman, believes that one shortcoming in an otherwise bright environmental reporting picture is on her own turf. Other reporters on the state government beat in Tallahassee generally "just aren't interested" in environmental issues, she said.

Despite Hiassen's national fame as a critic of rampant development and its allies among Florida's politicians, writers at other newspapers have observed that the Miami Herald places less emphasis on environmental reporting than it once did.

Curtis Morgan, the Herald's environment beat reporter for the last three years, does not dispute that perception "They've been downsizing the staff, so it's is certainly not what it was" in the early 1990s, he said.

While the environment is still "theoretically a full-time beat" at the Herald, Morgan said, he is often assigned to cover other issues. "It's one of the problems I've had, though I understand why editors do it."

Making the job even tougher, the Herald's direct competitor, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, has two reporters who divide coverage of environmental issues-David Fleshler and Neil Santaniello. And another South Florida reporter, The Palm Beach Post's King, wins praise from other Florida journalists for his work on Everglades and water issues as a beat reporter covering the South Florida Water Management District.

Proffitt, the former Sarasota editor for whom the statewide reporting award was named, is a longtime observer of environmental journalism in Florida, and he believes it has slipped over the last decade or so.

While newspapers are generally as interested in environmental reporting as ever, he said, "I think it has declined in recent years, mainly because the major environmental battles being fought now are not to move forward, but just to maintain the status quo."

Some alternative weeklies are doing "a pretty good job," he said, but "one problem up and down the scale is television, which doesn't really get concerned about environmental issues and doesn't want to."

That won't change, he predicted, as long as television stations are owned by "New York Stock Exchange companies not interested in upsetting anybody who might disturb their licenses."

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