Makenzie Stamets
Makenzie Stamets covers the tension between outdoor recreation, environmental risk and public policy, with a focus on how changing conditions on public lands affect the people who use them. Her reporting centers on live fire seasons, extreme weather and accidents in popular recreation areas, alongside the rules and decisions that shape those landscapes. She is an outdoor intern at the Statesman Journal, filing a mix of breaking news, service journalism and reported features across the environment and outdoors beat.
Wildfire seasons and emergency response
Stamets’s most visible work tracks Oregon’s wildfire seasons in real time, translating incident reports and agency briefings into clear updates on what is burning and who is affected.
She covers individual fires such as the Grasshopper Fire and Austin Fire in detail, noting acreage burned, growth patterns, and the status of nearby destinations like Bagby Hot Springs and forest campgrounds. Her stories routinely spell out closures, evacuation levels and the practical implications of emergency declarations, including the invocation of the Emergency Conflagration Act for fast-moving fires.
She also steps back to show scale, documenting when wildfires near modern records for acres burned or when danger sits at extreme levels across large portions of the state. In these pieces she combines hard numbers, official warnings and on-the-ground changes, giving readers both immediate safety information and a sense of how a season is unfolding.
Outdoor accidents, search and rescue and weather hazards
Beyond fire, Stamets closely follows incidents in wilderness and river corridors, treating outdoor accidents as part of the environmental beat. She reports on searches for missing hikers, including cases in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness where a McMinnville man was ultimately found, laying out timelines, terrain and the agencies involved in the rescue.
She covers fatalities at popular sites such as Punchbowl Falls, detailing how a cliff fall occurred and how responders reached the scene, while naming the specific features that draw people there. Her weather pieces track shifts from high heat to incoming rain, explaining how forecasts change conditions for wildfire risk, recreation plans and roads.
Across this strand of coverage, she keeps the focus on concrete events, the response from search-and-rescue teams and the ways extreme conditions turn familiar destinations into higher-risk environments.
Public lands policy, wildlife and drought
Stamets also works the policy and wildlife side of the environment beat, showing how national decisions play out on specific landscapes. Her reporting on the effort to rescind the federal roadless rule explains the extended public comment period and offers clear guidance on how people can weigh in, linking a technical rule to the trails and forests where they spend time. She follows proposals to remove protections for wolves and spells out what those changes mean in Oregon, focusing on habitat, hunting and the relations between predator management and rural communities.
Her coverage of wild horses in drought conditions examines an emergency rescue plan that was postponed because of a lawsuit, connecting legal arguments to the immediate welfare of animals and the scarcity of water on the range. She brings energy policy into the same frame with stories about geothermal projects and funding approvals, noting how new development is sited on or near public lands.
Taken together, these pieces show her interest in the full chain from policy text to ecological impact to public participation.
Climbing history and outdoor recreation culture
A distinctive part of Stamets’s portfolio looks at the culture of outdoor sports, especially rock climbing.
Her features on Smith Rock State Park trace how the area helped shape modern rock climbing and the evolution of sport routes, integrating history, local figures and the physical characteristics of the cliffs. She writes about how the park’s history has influenced climbing styles and ethics, situating current use within decades of experimentation and development.
These stories lean more on narrative and context than on immediate risk, but they still sit within her larger focus on how people interact with specific landscapes and how recreation, conservation and access intersect.
4 more environment journalists.
Alan Halaly
Alan Halaly is a water reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal who treats the Colorado River as a working system, not a backdrop, making its governance, infrastructure and risks central to his beat. He covers how policy decisions and infrastructure projects shape the region’s water future, linking high-level choices on the Colorado River, dams, mining and data centers to everyday consequences under mounting heat and growth pressures. He reports deeply on new laws, lawsuits and regulatory shifts, focusing on on-the-ground impacts. His coverage spans Colorado River cuts, Hoover Dam operations, extreme weather, heat and parks, septic system rules, workplace and public health risks, lithium and gold mines, protected landscapes, data centers, AI infrastructure and public funding. Previously he reported for metropolitan dailies, digital outlets and public media, including the Miami Herald, WUFT, The Daily Beast and Miami New Times, with work recognized by Hearst, ONA and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Alejandra Borunda
Alejandra Borunda reports on how climate change affects human health for NPR. Her work treats global warming as a direct cause of physical and mental health risks. She covers extreme heat, including undercounted deaths, lost sleep and local efforts to track heat-related fatalities. She also reports on wildfire smoke, hurricanes, disease spread such as dengue fever, trauma, stress and unequal health impacts. Her stories examine how communities protect themselves and recover, as well as practical solutions involving climate-resilient crops, agriculture and diet. Before NPR, she wrote about climate science and environmental issues for National Geographic, including glacier retreat, shade and heat inequity, and shrinking ice-fishing seasons. A former climate scientist, she combines field reporting with scientific data to connect atmospheric research to everyday risks, choices and people’s lived experiences.
Alex Lubben
Alex Lubben is an environment reporter at The Times-Picayune/The Advocate who connects climate risk to policy, industry and community change. He covers Gulf warming, flood protection, coastal restoration, wetlands litigation, industrial projects such as SpaceX’s possible expansion, invasive species and local ecosystems. His reporting tracks how law, politics and corporate decisions shape levees, drainage, marshes and long-term resilience. He also examines climate relocation, housing and labor, showing how hurricanes, floods and wildfires displace vulnerable communities and expose gaps in government systems. He works on a small environment team and brings an investigative background to document work, data analysis, legal and policy research, and field reporting. His work has appeared in VICE News, The Center for Public Integrity, The Nation, Jewish Currents and NBC News.
Alex Wigglesworth
Alex Wigglesworth reports on how climate, land use and public policy shape California communities. She covers the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert for the Los Angeles Times and is part of its environment team. Her beat includes wildfires, megadrought, extreme weather, desert development, conservation, wildlife, industrial hazards, aging infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. She has covered Western Joshua trees, desert tortoises, beaver-led restoration, toxic lead pipes, air-quality concerns after industrial fires and the effects of nuclear war on food systems. Earlier, she was a general assignment reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. She combines breaking news with detailed reporting grounded in scientific studies, modeling and expert interviews. Her work connects fires, drought and other hazards to climate change, while examining how agencies, companies and land-use decisions affect people and ecosystems.