Reporter Heather Gillers impressed me with her many talents in our time together at The Star, but what stood out from the start was her keen instinct for spotting wrongdoing and her doggedness in reporting it.
She’s had two back-to-back Sunday stories that have been absolutely top shelf, the kind of work newspapers once did with great frequency and without rival.
Here’s the paragraph that got me in today’s piece about a massive coal mine:
“Indiana has the highest amount to toxic discharges of bodies of water among all states, according to a review of 2007 federal data … Indiana released 27 million pounds of toxic waste into its waterways that year — 49 percent more than the next highest state and more than 11 percent of the nation’s total.”
This is a nice chunk of information to twin with data on carbon emissions, which also lead the nation.
Just the kind of info one might include when their 8th-graders get ready to study the human impact on the environment this spring!
