a radio listener.


“I heard the name of your organization on


WNYC-FM. Tell me about your work.” Over the next eleven years, his family contributes $200,000+ in general support On the phone again, this time I’m calling Kevin Carmody’s cell phone with a conference question. He’d left it in his front hall. His wife answers. Kevin is missing. The memory of that day is not one that I like to revisit, but you know I always will. Fortunately I have other, sweeter memories of Kevin to crowd that one out most of the time. He’d worked so hard to arrange that Austin conference. There we all are in stitches at the Driskill Hotel, surrounded by all that dark wood and leather, while Molly Ivins is speaking. I can still hear her punch lines. We’ll miss her too.


Faces of those missing


I can see the faces, hear the voices of other remarkable people we’ve loved and lost: Steven Schneider, Mike Dunne, Gary Braasch, Clem Henriksen, Brenda Box, David Stolberg, others. But over there, beyond them, I see some people who will meet through SEJ and get married, and a line of others whose work will bring them acclaim, change the world and lift environmental jour- nalism up to permanent status, permanently valued. My next call is with Mark Schleifstein at The Times-


Picayune. It’s Tuesday August 30, 2005, and the storm surge of Katrina is rising. “I have to go,” he says. “They're evacuating the building, We’re boarding delivery trucks, heading to Baton Rouge.” I’m ordering some gifts now: A pillow for Mark Schleifstein, who will not be sleeping at home for quite a while. Breakfast bas- kets for conference chairs, who may be facing post-conference de- pression; a protection rune talisman for Dale Willman who is packing for a year in Southern Sudan. [Flash forward, please, to 2016. He’s home now.] It’s 2013 and I marvel at the SEJ conference team as Dale, Chris Bruggers, and Jay Letto run the length and width of the Chattanooga Convention center about four hundred times. Chris


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7 SEJournal Fall 2016


has been with me in this SEJ thing from the get-go. Jay predates both of us. Dale, Cindy MacDonald, Randi Ross, Kevin Beaty have come along since. But today it’s show time again. So very many moments like this to recall.


Turning the page


Oh no, this scrapbooking project is suddenly on overload! Pull back the vantage point, to one of those matrix shots with 26 screens, factoring out to the faces of thousands of people, in con- ference rooms, buses, boats, boots and kayaks. With notebooks and microphones. SEJ has an educational mission and I’ve been a beneficiary as SEJ members have explored and covered hundreds of environ- mental issues and public service journalism has endured and changed and made a difference, one story at a time. There’s that slogan on the newspaper box.


“It’s how you


know.” Over there, Joe Davis’ EJToday and message streams from SEJ-TALK are running on my mind’s eye Times Square-style news crawl.


I am overwhelmed in here, so much more where that came from. I raise my arms in surrender. I will never do anything else all day, possibly ever, if this keeps up. Snapping out of it, I’d better make some coffee! I still have a whole lot of work to do for SEJ this year and through transitions to come. Turn the page.


Beth Parke was hired by SEJ’s founding board in September of 1992 and steps down as executive director in early 2017. With equally long-serving conference director Jay Letto and associate director Christine Bruggers and other staff she raised and man- aged several million dollars in program and operating budgets, for annual conferences, regional tours and workshops, SEJ awards, listservs, web site and social media feeds, print and elec- tronic publications, Freedom of Information WatchDog project, diversity initiatives and coverage grants from the Fund for Envi- ronmental Journalism.


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