You shoulda been there.

If environmental journalism is in your blood, you really shoulda been there.

It was a "feel good" event by and large.

Not the don't worry/be happy/smiley face kind of feel-good event. Just an overall feel good/good feeling thing.

That's not to disparage it in any way, not in the least. There was substance aplenty to go along with the good feelings that pervaded.

The Society of Environmental Journalists' (SEJ) annual meeting last month in Baltimore attracted an astounding 840-plus registrants overall, some 500 of them a core group there for the bulk of the meeting, and not just one-day walk-ins and the like.

Amazing. In a location, Baltimore, let's face it, which despite its charms is not known as the garden spot of the Western world. In a headquarters hotel which by any reasonable interpretation can't claim services and ambience one might expect for a steep $169 a pop (even if the elevators had been working efficiently). In an economy anything but healthy and conducive to edi-tors' wanting to pay travel, lodging, food, and registration expenses for their environmental reporters. In a political climate steeped in war talk, and in a local climate a'tither with a sniper run amok.

But they came. They talked. They listened. They heard. They schmoozed. They met afresh and met anew. They taught, and they learned. And they enjoyed.

Amazing. Any number of factors could have conspired to unravel this year's meeting. Think again: The economy. Newsroom's shrinking travel budgets. The waning environmental news hole. Growing war talk. The high cost. The sniper.

Any one or any combination could have. But none did.

SEJ national conferences -- there have been a dozen of them in all -- have reached a status analogous to Philadelphia's famed Robin Hood Dell, or the Washington, D.C., area's Wolf Trap Farm Park: the performance need not be all that great for the experience to have been enjoyable and well worth the price of admission.

Not that the "performance" itself in Baltimore was lacking, by the way.

There were the well-crafted SEJ environmental journalism awards. Kudos to all involved, winners, finalists and, most of all, program planners and organizers. Keep it up. (See related story on winners and finalists.)

Spouses. (Note the transition here, a "segue," the au courant might say.) I don't know about yours, but I do know about mine. And my experience is that spouses ask the darnedest questions.

"Who were the bigshot journalists there?" she asked upon my return home. I suppose she was thinking of the John Stossells or, more likely, Bill Moyers of the journalism world.

They were all big-shot journalists, I was tempted to answer, but didn't. "And any laying claim to be one will be in New Orleans for the next SEJ meeting too."

Big shot? I don’t know about that. What I do know is that there was the reconvening of old acquaintances and of new colleagues in this small and increasingly close-knit community.

If environment and journalism are in your blood -- or at least in your pay check -- you shoulda been there. And you will be next year, even if it means paying your own way and doing so on your time, as do so many of the journalists attending these SEJ meetings.

That, in itself, says a lot about it. You really shoulda been there.