At ReLeaf 2019 (July 18-20), Saturday’s keynote speaker will be award-winning climate change journalist and Hudson Valley resident Andrew Revkin on “Forest Lessons in a Changing Climate.” The following bio for Andrew was originally published by ProPublica.
Andrew Revkin is the senior reporter for climate and related issues at ProPublica. He joined the newsroom in December 2016, after 21 years of writing for The New York Times, most recently through his Dot Earth blog for the Opinion section, and six years teaching at Pace University.
Revkin began writing on climate change in the 1980s. In the mid 2000s, he exposed political suppression of climate findings at NASA and editing of federal climate reports by political appointees with ties to the petroleum industry. He was the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the North Pole.
Revkin has won most of the top awards in science journalism, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for sustained journalistic excellence and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award.
He has written books on global warming, the changing Arctic and the assault on the Amazon rain forest, as well as three book chapters on science communication.
Revkin is among those credited with developing the idea that humans, through growing impacts on Earth’s climate and other critical systems, had created a geological age of our own making, known increasingly as the Anthropocene. From 2010 through 2016, he was a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, created by the international geological community to assess whether a new geological epoch has begun.
He is also a performing songwriter and for 20 years was a frequent accompanist of folk legend Pete Seeger. Two films have been based on Revkin’s work: Rock Star (Warner Brothers, 2001) and The Burning Season (HBO, 1994). He lives in the Hudson Valley.