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Ezra David Romero understands the struggles of those disproportionately impacted by climate change.<\/p>\nEzra David Romero understands the struggles of those disproportionately impacted by climate change.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in a poor, marginalized community in Northern California\u2019s Central Valley,\u201d says Romero, an environment reporter for CapRadio<\/a> and an alumnus of Metcalf Institute\u2019s 2019 Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists<\/a>. \u201cI think that\u2019s why I focus on those communities because I came from there.\u201d The son of Christian missionaries, Romero saw how people lived in the U.S and in other parts of the world and knew he wanted to tell their stories.<\/p>\n He graduated from Fresno State in 2012 with a journalism degree and has spent most of his career covering all aspects of climate change including impacts on the livelihoods of farmworkers and on people forced from their homes by raging wildfires.<\/p>\n Romero had just embarked on a 10-month podcast, TahoeLand<\/a>, in 2018, investigating how climate change is altering Lake Tahoe, when he applied for Metcalf\u2019s Workshop. The podcast won top honors by the Public Media Journalists Association and a National 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award for digital reporting within the project. He and his team were interviewing dozens of scientists about climate models and projections and needed the tools to interpret and translate that information for their news audience. He also wanted to avoid oversimplifying the data. \u201cThe Metcalf Workshop helped me understand how scientists arrive at their conclusions,\u201d says Romero. \u201cI was able to write a stronger piece because of the fellowship.\u201d Romero adds that he continues to reap the benefits of his Metcalf experience. \u201cI use the information I gained from the fellowship almost every day.\u201d<\/p>\n The award-winning journalist enjoys covering what he calls \u201cthe nerdiness of climate change\u201d and how environmental decisions affect people. His reporting has covered legislative action on everything from droughts and water shortages<\/a> to plastics pollution and stories about the direct investment of funds into low-income communities to mitigate climate impacts. His most recent piece focused on the invasion of bark beetles<\/a> in California forests in the wake of wildfires that burned a third of the state\u2019s giant sequoias.<\/p>\n In his story, Racist Removal of Native Americans in California is Often Missing from the Conversation<\/em><\/a>, Romero explores the consequences of the forcible removal of thousands of indigenous people from California in the mid-19th<\/sup> Century and how this affected wildfires. Native Americans used managed burns to keep wildfires in check for generations. The genocide that killed 16,000 Natives resulted in overgrown forests that provided excess fuel for dangerous wildfires, a situation exacerbated today by climate change. \u201cI wanted to highlight the knowledge of Indigenous people,\u201d says Romero. \u201cI wanted to hear from Native American people and learn their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Romero\u2019s sights are set on a future project to analyze all aspects of California\u2019s ambitious climate change goals and \u201ccreate a blueprint\u201d for the best way forward for California. He plans to base his reporting on interviews with scientists, policymakers, and people on the ground to explore the origins of the climate crisis, the gaps in data, and \u201cimagine\u201d what climate reform might look like. \u201cCalifornia and the world are facing all of these issues, and there are so many theories and ideas,\u201d he says. \u201cI want to hear what people are doing, highlight the gaps in the data and explore how we get there.\u201d<\/p>\nread more alumni profiles<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Environment reporter Ezra David Romero understands the struggles of those disproportionately impacted by climate change. \u201cI grew up in a poor, marginalized community in Northern California\u2019s Central Valley,\u201d says Romero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2201,"featured_media":19987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969","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=19969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19975,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969\/revisions\/19975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}