Environmental Journalism

Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and-science writer with strong interests in a variety of topics, including climate change (especially geoengineering), extinction, traditional natural history, space sciences, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and improving science communications.

The winner of a Whiting Award, Christopher Cokinos is the author of two literary nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, both from Tarcher/Penguin.Hope Is the Thing with Feathers won the Glasgow Prize and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. For The Fallen Sky, he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to participate in a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica, and that book was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize.

His books have been featured and praised in such venues as "All Things Considered", People magazine, the Boston Globe, Nature, Science, Natural History, among others; His poems, reviews, aphorisms and essays have appeared widely in such publications as Poetry, Science, Birder World, Hotel Amerika, Orion, The New York Times and The American Scholar; His essays have won the John Burroughs natural-history essay prize and the FineLine Lyric Prose Prize from Mid-American Review
He contributes to both the Los Angeles Times and High Country News His current book project is a history of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  In May 2011 he left Utah State University, where he taught for nine years and founded and edited Isotope magazine, to join the MFA program and the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, where he is an Associate Professor.

Carol Schwalbe is the Soldwedel Family Professor of Journalism and an associate professor in the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, where she teaches editing and science journalism. From 2002 until 2010 she taught editing, magazine writing and online journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Her scholarly research focuses on the role of images in shaping ideas and public opinion during the early years of the Cold War, ethical concerns about publishing violent images and the visual framing of the Iraq War on the Internet. Her professional writing has appeared in National Geographic publications. She worked as a senior articles editor for National Geographic magazine, a senior articles editor for National Geographic Traveler, an online producer for the National Geographic website and an editor-writer in the book division.

Alan Weisman teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. Much of his writing is about how the environment, economics, international relations, and human society and culture intersect. He is the author of An Echo In My Blood, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico, and We, Immortals. His reports, set in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Antarctica, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle and Far East, have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Audubon, Mother Jones, Discover, Condé Nast Traveler, and in several anthologies. They have also aired on National Public Radio and Public Radio International. He is a senior producer for Homelands Productions. His current projects include research on the future of energy, and his forthcoming book The World Without Us, which discusses what the Earth would be like without human beings.

Lisa Button teaches The Cat Scan, a class that produces an online magazine, and serves as internship coordinator.

She holds a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in journalism from the UA. She has worked as a freelance writer, copy editor and translator.

In 1989 she founded and became editor of Tucson Parent, a bimonthly newspaper. The next year the publication added an annual resource book for families. She sold the company in 1996. Button later taught journalism and was the newspaper adviser at Green Fields Country Day School for seven years. During that time her students won the Division 1A Best Newspaper Award three consecutive years. While at Green Fields, she initiated a mentorship program that paired students with news media professionals.

In past semesters Button has taught Press and Society, Publication Design, Reporting the News and El Independiente, a capstone course. In 2009 she became director of the Journalism Diversity Workshop for Arizona High School Students.