Michael Dahlstrom
Michael Dahlstrom is Environment Editor at Yahoo News Australia, reporting on wildlife, animal welfare and the points where human activity collides with the natural world. He works as both journalist and documentarian, specialising in environment stories for a broad mainstream audience. His coverage focuses on making environmental issues and animal welfare relatable, often framing stories around what happens when humans and nature meet. He is a registered wildlife and native bird carer, and that practical experience with injured and orphaned animals shapes the way he reports on their treatment and survival.
Human–nature collisions and animal welfare
A recurring thread in his work is close attention to individual animals as a way of showing wider environmental stress.
In a story about a tick-ridden koala’s excruciating last moments during drought, he uses devastating photos and detailed description to illustrate how changing conditions can push wildlife to breaking point. He profiles a mob of kangaroos that remain near a carer’s home during bushfires, showing how animals respond to and are threatened by extreme weather events.
His reporting on wombat burrows blocked during rabbit control work exposes how well-intentioned pest management can trap and kill native animals when ecological realities are overlooked. In coverage of Glenelg spiny crayfish heads dumped on a roadside, he emphasises that the remains belong to a critically endangered protected species from a family that has existed for millions of years.
Wildlife risk, safety and human behaviour
Dahlstrom frequently uses incidents involving risk to pets and people to explain how living alongside wildlife is changing.
When five dogs in the Sydney area are hospitalised after snake bites, he frames the story as evidence that snake season is arriving sooner in many parts of the country and highlights the implications for pet safety. His account of sailors abandoning an Australian‑flagged yacht after striking a whale in open water uses expert comment and data about ship strikes, including estimates that vessel collisions kill or injure around 30,000 whales each year. Stories about toxic rat bait sold in supermarkets link everyday consumer choices to lethal consequences for wildlife, underscoring how routine human behaviour can create “walking dead” animals in surrounding ecosystems.
Corporate decisions, regulation and the environment
Another consistent focus is the way corporate decisions and rules made far from the field shape environmental outcomes. In a piece on Woolworths ending its relationship with a Tasmanian slaughterhouse, he traces how the change means Tasmanians will no longer be able to buy locally raised and slaughtered beef at the supermarket and examines the impact on local producers. His reporting on council rules that slow Rainforest Rescue’s oxbow restoration in the Daintree unpacks how regulations designed to protect agriculture can now hinder efforts to remove invasive weeds and re‑establish native rainforest. Coverage of Domino’s quietly deleting a controversial word from its pizza website shows he is attentive to how brands respond to public pressure and reputational risk, even when the story sits on the edge of his environment remit.
Formats, tone and role within Yahoo News Australia
As Environment Editor, Dahlstrom works across investigative reporting, features, short‑form stories and breaking news, curating environment content and commissioning pieces while maintaining his own reporting slate.
His environment pieces are written for a broad audience and often sit at the intersection of news and human interest, using accessible language and vivid detail from people on the ground. Stories about koala rescues, kangaroo behaviour around bushfires and wildlife carers’ experiences show a preference for sources who work directly with animals, mirroring his own background as a registered wildlife carer.
Articles that follow regulatory failures, supermarket product choices and council mistakes demonstrate a willingness to confront institutions when their decisions harm animals or ecosystems.
4 more environment journalists.
Adelaide Lang
Adelaide Lang combines climate reporting with courtroom and Indigenous-focused journalism. She reports for The Daily Telegraph, with work also appearing in The Canberra Times, and contributes guest pieces to National Indigenous Times. Her environment coverage focuses on climate-threatened islands, community resilience and how policy decisions affect people facing direct environmental risks. She follows local campaigns, adaptation efforts and political pressure while keeping the human effects clear. Lang also covers court proceedings involving public officials, including the trial of State MP Gareth Ward over historical sexual and indecent assault charges. Her reporting examines how allegations are tested in court and how the justice system handles accusations against people in power. With more than five years in digital media and courtroom reporting, she writes clear, factual accounts of events, legal processes and their consequences.
Ashleigh McMillan
Ashleigh McMillan is a breaking news reporter at The Age. She stands out for covering the environment through public events, infrastructure and everyday city life. Her reporting tracks how protests, policy decisions and sudden incidents change routines, public safety and the spaces people move through. She covers fast-moving stories across Victoria, with a focus on community tension, access and the lived effects of official decisions. Her work includes protests and public demonstrations, crime and courts, transport and ticketing changes, traffic experiments, weather, and environmental conditions in the city. She reports on what people see and feel on the ground, with attention to victims, commuters, residents and the practical consequences of legal and infrastructure decisions.
Bareket Falk
Bareket Falk uses environmental stories to show how growing bodies handle physical stress, especially heat, during exercise. She is a pediatric exercise physiologist and kinesiology professor whose work focuses on how children, adolescents and adults respond to activity across growth and development. She writes evidence-led explainers for The Conversation that test assumptions about children’s vulnerability and turn decades of exercise science into clear, practical guidance. Her core piece looks at how children and adults cope with extreme heat, walking through basic thermoregulation and challenging the idea that children are automatically more fragile. Her journalism draws directly on research into blood flow, sweating, body size and growth, keeping technical detail tight and translating findings into concrete behaviours such as pacing activity, seeking shade and hydration. She is interested in how physical activity interacts with maturation, body composition and recovery, and uses data to check myths about kids’ risk.
Bec Lorrimer
Bec Lorrimer is a visual journalist and picture editor who tells environment stories through photography and careful image selection at the Guardian. She works at the intersection of climate coverage and visual editing, using picture-led formats to show how global heating and other environmental pressures play out in everyday life. Her environment beat centres on picture galleries that track the lived experience of climate extremes, including record high temperatures in South Korea, with in pictures sequences that foreground the scale of global heating over text-led analysis. She also contributes to monthly roundups of the strongest photos and human-centred features such as a nursing home story, focusing on people and places under pressure. As a global visual editor and assistant picture editor on international fronts, she selects images across environment, politics, culture and general news, drawing on her background as a photographer, video director and photo producer.