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Corbin Hiar inherited his respect for conservation and sustainability from his paternal grandparents. \u201cMy grandparents grew up in the depression in North Dakota and they struggled a lot,\u201d says Corbin, an alumnus of Metcalf Institute\u2019s 2019 Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists. \u201cThere was definitely an ethos they instilled in me to not waste anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
That ethos would eventually fuel a passion for reporting on environmental issues.<\/p>\n
Hiar, who earned a Bachelor\u2019s degree in environmental studies and international relations from Bowdoin College, began his journalism career as an intern for The Nation<\/em>. He went on to report for Mother Jones<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, The Huffington Post<\/em>, the Center for Public Integrity and The Economist<\/em> before. Now he reports for E & E News<\/em>, where he has covered Federal agencies and public health, and now focuses on business and climate change.<\/p>\n In his application for a Metcalf fellowship, he wrote, \u201cone of the biggest challenges I face on my beat is to make sense of the scientific literature and the various interest groups fighting over it\u2026The Metcalf science workshop could help me to both write about public health with more confidence and spot stories lurking in the scientific or regulatory literature that I\u2019m currently missing.\u201d<\/p>\n Hiar credits his Metcalf experience with leading him to a project about the impact of refineries on residential neighborhoods. \u201cOne of the speakers on the last day of the workshop, Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, a former colleague of mine, said some interesting things about looking at local communities, health impacts of refineries, and trying to find the data underlying it,\u201d recalls Hiar.<\/p>\n \u201cI was intrigued,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it just so happened that we were both taking the train from Rhode Island back to Washington, D.C., where we both lived.\u201d That conversation planted the seed for Toxic Zones<\/em><\/a>, a project highlighting the health impacts on communities living near refineries.<\/p>\n Hiar continues to work on the series in collaboration with NBC News Investigates and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. One story<\/a> in particular focuses on residents in a Philadelphia community exposed to potentially dangerous levels of the chemical benzene following an explosion at a nearby refinery. \u201cOfficials gave no formal notice to residents that the same facility had registered among the highest benzene levels of any refinery in the country,\u201d wrote Hiar, citing EPA data.<\/p>\n As Hiar looks back on the training he received at Metcalf\u2019s Workshop, his favorite activity was the opportunity to engage with scientists in a non-deadline setting \u201cand just talk about the work that they do, the issues and environmental challenges that we\u2019re covering, and to get their perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n He also valued the support he and the other journalists felt during the workshop, especially in an age where the news media feels under attack. \u201cTo hear people tell us again and again that what we do is valuable, that they want to help us do it better, was pretty amazing and unexpected,\u201d he says.<\/p>\nread more alumni profiles<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Corbin Hiar, E & E News reporter and alumnus of Metcalf Institute’s Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists, inherited his respect for conservation and sustainability from his paternal grandparents. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2201,"featured_media":14705,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14702"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18155,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702\/revisions\/18155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}