The Society of Environmental Journalists' 12th annual conference in Baltimore (October 9-13, 2002) attracted 846 total registrants, about 322 of them SEJ members and students. Signs were that the vast majority went home well-satisfied with the camaraderie, field trips, and wall-to-wall information sessions and general goings-on.

A first-time SEJ environmental journalism awards program (See winners and finalists article.) distinguished this year's conference, and indications are that the awards could well become a permanent fixture at SEJ conferences. The award winners and finalists were chosen from a pool of some 260 entries, far exceeding program planners' expectations.

Along with the recognition paid to numerous media organizations, SEJ conference managers also recognized 10 years of professional service by the group's Executive Director, Beth Parke, who is widely seen as a mainstay in helping secure the growth and financial well-being of the organization and in helping maintain the journalistic principles underlying the group.

In addition, a first-time Saturday evening "SEJ Coffeehouse" -- featuring artistic, literary, and other creative talents of SEJ members -- appeared to have gotten a welcome response, as did a Rachel Carson program on the closing day.

SEJ's newly elected Board of Directors chose Dan Fagin of Newsday to succeed Jim Bruggers of the Louisville Courier-Journal as the next SEJ President. A long-time veteran newspaper environmental reporter, Fagin continues the tradition of the SEJ presidents having come from "ink-in-the-veins" print media backgrounds and affiliations.

In a brief telephone interview, Fagin said he sees SEJ's immediate challenges as involving a need "for consolidating the huge changes and expansions of the past few years, specifically the awards program, the Web site, and "EJ Today," the group's daily compilation and web-posting of key articles published over the past day.

"These are all new and impose quite a strain on the staff and the organization," Fagin said. "They are all things that haven't yet reached their substantial potential."

"Part of the challenge is sort of a marketing job so that members and potential members are aware of these resources and use them to their fullest," Fagin said.

"The other side of the equation is the financial side," he said in outlining challenges he expects as SEJ president. "There too, we've done a terrific job, but there's always recognition that these things can be cyclical. We don't want to ignore the possibility of lean years in the future, so we've been kicking around ways to expand the fledgling endowment fund to insulate ourselves from year-to-year."

Fagin said he sees no overriding need for major changes in SEJ operations, saying "Things have been going very well in terms of board/staff/member relations, remarkably smooth." He pointed to the awards program's and other program's having stimulated membership growth to more than 1,300 and said much of that growth has come in the active category of working press. He said he envisions "huge opportunities in the academic and associate membership categories."

As for the meeting itself, the conference formally opened with a plenary panel discussing taboo topics -- population, rampant consumerism, and other underlying forces -- generally thought to be under-covered by mainstream media. Several panelists insisted that American culture and society are in many ways unsustainable.

Former U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, generally considered the founder of Earth Day, discussing sustainable development, said, "This is the first time that the media have accepted silence as the response to the challenge of the century." The American Enterprise Institute's Nicholas Eberstadt said many environmental reporters have a "blind spot" when it comes to economic literacy.

USA Today National Editor Lee Horwich, offering what he characterized as a "reality check," challenged the reporters at the meeting to anticipate the likely reactions in their newsrooms "if you go back and pitch a sustainability story to your editor."

"What will work," Horwich said, is if reporters deal with "how it matters to the people we are writing for."

On whether the media avoid coverage of population-related issues, a number of journalists throughout the meeting said concern over potentially appearing to be insensitive to ethnic differences, or appearing flat-out racist, inhibits many U.S. reporters and editors from dealing with a "population crunch" in which immigration plays a key role.

"If they report on immigration issues, if they say that, you're characterized as a racist and that has silenced everything," Nelson said. "Nobody wants to talk about it because they're scared of the charge of racism."

Tom Yulsman of the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism, in a question and answer session, said he is often skeptical of public opinion polls and surveys. "I place more emphasis on what people do than on what they say," he said, pointing to commuters apparently willing to put up with hellish commutes in order to afford a larger house in distant suburbs.

"Are we living the lives we're living because we really want to live them that way?," he asked rhetorically.

Countless smaller concurrent sessions appeared to be generally well-attended, an outcome probably not entirely attributable to the rainy weather that persisted throughout much of the conference. But a few individual sessions appeared to some to be oddly skewed, with one "side" of the debate outweighing the other. At a Saturday plenary luncheon, for instance, the Bush Administration's Council on Environmental Quality Chairman, Jim Connaughton, could barely hold his own against two "certifiably green" congressmen -- Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Republican Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland -- and League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan, whose political action committee regularly endorses far more Democrats than Republicans. Even some who found Connaughton's substantive points unpersuasive may have felt empathy for his being badly outgunned and out-numbered.

If that panel were tilted toward the environmentalist position, another was clearly tilted against. In a panel billed as an insider's look at the big 10 environmental groups, activists who represented anti-environment, conservative, free market, and libertarian views -- Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor and the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred Smith -- were pitted against the head of Greenpeace U.S., John Passacantando.

With Passacantando running 45 minutes late for the 75-minute session, it fell to a soft-spoken Greenpeace press officer to try to hold the fort against the far more assertive Taylor and Smith. That the session was moderated by conservative (The True State of the Planet) author and Reason magazine correspondent Ron Bailey only further skewed the session, leaving some attending reporters to wonder just what was going on with the panel in the first place.

Overall, such oddities were the exception, and those attending the SEJ 12th annual conference appeared well-satisfied with the experience. The group's next annual meeting is scheduled for September 10-14, 2003, in New Orleans, La.