Nurturing the next great environmental writers
“I guess I should draw a map of China.”
Alex Baron is standing in front of a large rectangular chalkboard in a spacious second-floor meeting room in the library at Bread Loaf, and he’s talking to about a dozen folks who are arrayed around a long conference table (actually six smaller tables pushed together). Most of the people in the room have laptops open, but no one is pecking away at the keys at this moment; they are all focused intently on the young man in jeans and a windbreaker, who is in the midst of crudely sketching the world’s largest country.
“This is an awful depiction, but you’ll get the idea,” he says, as he begins tracing China’s two main river systems—the Yellow and the Yangtze. “OK, I need to jump back several centuries. One of the most important events in Chinese history is the building of the Grand Canal ...” For the next several minutes, Baron embarks on a brief tutorial on the longest—and oldest—artificial river in the world, China’s Grand Canal, which stretches more than 1,700 kilometers from Beijing south to Hangzhou. And then he builds up to the big story. “So, North China has terrible water shortages, and the Chinese are working on a plan to divert water from the Yangtze north to the Yellow.” Essentially, it’s Grand Canal, Part II, an exceedingly ambitious and possibly quixotic attempt to “tilt China on its side.” What’s at stake? “Quite possibly the very survival of North China,” Baron says.
Alex Baron is one of 10 recipients of the Middlebury Fellowships in Environ-mental Journalism, a highly competitive and prestigious program designed to support yearlong reporting about environmental issues by aspiring journalists. Of the 10 young men and women (including two current Middlebury students) culled from more than 150 applicants this year, Baron is perhaps the least experienced journalist. He’s actually a hydrologist, though he does edit a hydrology journal, and his command of his material lends a strong air of confidence to his presentation.
The 2008 fellows have gathered at Bread Loaf for the start of their fellowship. After several days of workshopping, they’re on their own until they reconvene next April, in Monterey, California. During the intervening months, while balancing work and school responsibilities, they will depart for locales near (the Adirondacks) and far (Colombia, Bangladesh), returning home with notebooks full of material.
But back at Bread Loaf, the fellows’ stories are still incubating. The first few workshops function as a magazine editorial meeting. During Baron’s presentation, his peers pepper him with questions. They ask for more detail, they ask about the scope of the story, they ask about narrative structure. Finally, Bill McKibben, the Middlebury scholar-in-residence who directs the fellowship program with Chris Shaw (himself a journalist and author), chimes in. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “You have to be able to describe to folks how huge and weird this thing is. To have it make sense, you may have to run this movie backwards, explain this desperate thirst in the north. ... You have the makings of one hell of a story.” — MJ