October 29, 2009
Award winning journalist to speak on the ‘new’ polluters
Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent, will speak on Who Are the New Polluters at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, in 130 Kane.
When the Clean Water Act was passed in the 1970s, the focus of the Environmental Protection Agency and the public was on big industrial polluters – chemical plants, steel mills, copper smelters, wastewater treatment plants. The enemy was Them, with a capital T — Big Industry.
Today, the problem and the villains have changed, thanks largely to economic development and the sprawl that surrounds American cities, large, medium and small. Scientists now point to the ecologically damaging runoff from highways, parking lots, malls, suburban developments, any and all of the hard surfaces used in development as the largest single source of toxic waste flowing into Puget Sound and other iconic American waterways. In short, we’re all the “New Polluters,” and Smith will talk about the new and daunting challenge this poses for policy-makers and ordinary citizens.
Smith was with the New York Times for 26 years, serving as a correspondent for the paper in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the American South. In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1976-1988, he was The New York Times Washington bureau chief and chief correspondent.
Smith began creating documentaries for PBS in 1989 with an adaptation from his best-selling book, The Power Game. His second documentary series, Inside Gorbachev’s USSR, broadcast on PBS in 1990, built on his experience as Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times in the 1970s, on his best selling book, The Russians, and on his subsequent coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. Inside Gorbachev’s USSR won the duPont-Columbia grand prize in 1991 for the most outstanding public affairs production on U.S. television.
More recently, Smith has taken on the subjects such as American education, health care and terrorism.
Smith’s talk, which is a Jessie and John Danz Endowed Lecture, is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. It is part of the “Next City: Sustainable Urbanization” series For more information or to register, visit: http://www.UWalum.com/events/ or call the UW Alumni Association at 206-543-0540.
