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October 6, 2003
[This program first aired September 15, 2003.]

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· Project for Excellence in Journalism;
· Range management in Arizona forests;
· ASU science program featured in Arizona elementary school
In-Studio Guests:
Tom Goldstein, Frank E. Russell chair in ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication;
John Brock, ASU Professor of Applied Biological Science;
From ASU's Center for Solid State Science: David Wright, Research Scientist, and Michael McKelvy, Director, Goldwater Materials Science Laboratory.

>> Michael: Tonight on "Horizon," journalists and democracy, is the press transforming how we view the world? A return to basics, preventing catastrophic wildfires in a natural way. And learning about science can be fun. Just ask these young students. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant.

>>> The Project for Excellence in Journalism says the crisis in journalism is a crisis of conviction. The project is part of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Tom Goldstein is the former dean of that school. He is an author, a journalist, a lawyer, and now the first Frank E. Russell chair in Business and Journalism here at ASU. Tom, it's good to see you.

>> Tom Goldstein: Good to be here.

>> Michael: Welcome to Phoenix.

>> Michael: What's the Project for Excellence in Journalism?

>> Tom: That's a group of journalists who were concerned about the future of the profession, and it was part of the reform movement that started six, seven years ago, got some very generous funding from some foundations, to look at the direction of journalism. It became an introspective force, and it continues on.

>> Michael: With stories like Jason Blair, are we getting any better or is it getting a lot worse?

>> Tom: It's a good question. I mean Jason Blair, certainly a spotlight has been focused. Jason Blair is the reporter for the "New York Times" who made stuff up. And he was audacious. He would be writing stories that were supposed to be taking place in Texas, Virginia, and he wrote them from the news room, and he was able to get away with it, and maybe because of the boldness that that happened, and I certainly think that's an aberration.

>> Michael: But it happens over and over and over again.

>> Tom: Periodically.

>> Michael: Well, yeah.

>> Tom: The press is a spotlight, and we pay a lot of attention. It certainly should not have happened and certainly not at a place like the "New York Times." I mean, about 20 years, there was an instance at the "Washington Post," a young lady named Janet Cook --

>> Michael: That's the first one really that I --

>> Tom: who made up a story about a young drug addict, an 8-year-old, Jimmy, the story was called "Jimmy's World" that was awarded a Pulitzer prize until it was discovered that she made up something about her background and the prize was rescinded. What happened with Janet Cook and 20 plus years later with Jason Blair are remarkable. And it sometimes seems we haven't learned anything, because he made up stuff about his background. They never checked his credentials going in. He was a good writer. He got by on -- he got by. And what happened in that situation, I mean, there was a systems failure, and I mean, there have been efforts to correct it, but I suspect that 10 years from now if we're sitting here, there will be something, a similar instance, and I think it's been an important reminder for the press in general. I suspect every news room in this country has examined its practices to make sure it can't happen.

>> Michael: Is part of the problem -- it seems like -- I think both of us go back unfortunately, a long way.

>> Tom: I'm even longer than you.

>> Michael: It seems like in the past 10 years or so, we have redefined news. News used to be "man bites dog." I had a good feel for what news was and more importantly what news wasn't when I first started in this business.

>> Tom: I think that's probably true.

>> Michael: I'm not sure that we really got any idea what news is any more.

>> Tom: Well, let me just put a little bit of a different context. I think in some ways, journalism is far better today, far, far better today, than when we began. And to be sure, the notion of what's newsworthy and news has changed. I started in New York at the "Associated Press," and went to the "New York Times," and there were speeches. Any time a public official uttered words at a hotel room, we were there to cover it. That doesn't happen anymore. There is a much subtler more nuanced coverage of public events. I think that's to the good. We live in a context -- I mean, things are relatively new. -- the 24-hour news, which has a relatively small audience, has transformed notions of the timeliness of news. You can read newspapers and the word "yesterday" doesn't appear anywhere, which was certainly different from 15 years ago.

>> Michael: Here's what I think makes the public suspicious, because I think they think, well, now, hold it, why did you pick this seeming innocuous story to devote a lot of good column inches to? I'm not necessarily arguing that the quality is worse, instead of these and these, and I think that's what leads to a lot of suspicion, this is a stacked deck. >> Tom: I think you make a valid point. I think what journalists need to do at all different levels is explain their decisions. They need to make those decisions transparent. This is important because. It's not important because we just make an arbitrary decision today. We think this is important because. And they should be forced to justify themselves. And it's stories -- I mean, as I say, generally, the press has good grades. There are lots of exceptions, but generally, a lot better. Higher quality. People entering the field, much better trained than they used to be.

>> Michael: Public approval ratings, though, for journalists -- I think the only --

>> Tom: They are dim.

>> Michael: The only question might be lower would be lawyers.

>> Tom: I'm not sure about that. They are close.

>> Michael: Congress is in there someplace.

>> Tom: You have to grin and bear that because it is disturbing. It's something that needs to be addressed, but journalism is pretty good. But again, there are exceptions. This summer, you've seen the coverage of the Kobe Bryant accusations.

>> Michael: Yeah.

>> Tom: Now, he did it or he didn't do it, and there is going to be a trial, which presumably will come to as close to the truth as possible. But until that happens, this is a content-free story. And to watch the number of cameras -- well, it's mostly television, but there is a lot of print there, too, covering this story is embarrassing.

>> Michael: Let's get back to the 24-hour news stuff you were talking about. That is a voracious monster. You've got to feed it minute by minute, and I would submit that that leads to at least some elements of what we're talking about.

>> Tom: There is a wonderful book written at the dawn of the age of television by a historian named Daniel Borsten. He was referring to radio. It was the beginning of 24-hour news radio. He said what can you do? You get on the air and say, well, in the last half hour, nothing happened? And so when you have --

>> Michael: You've got to fill the void somehow.

>>Tom: You feed the beast. And then the competitive pressures, well, they are doing Kobe, we're going to do Kobe, and that's because of a slow news cycle. When you break out of slow news cycle, that vanishes.

>> Michael: Tom Goldstein, it's a pleasure. Appreciate your stopping by and sharing some thoughts with us.

>>> There are expensive ways to reduce the threat of wildfire, and there is a cheaper more natural way. Producer Larry Lemmons tells us about a pilot project over the summer that uses a traditional solution to chew on a modern problem.

>> Jay Begay: Most of the goats that we brought down, we bring them down were thin because they didn't have enough feed on the reservation, and when they came down here, they -- you could see the change in them. They are gaining a lot and even the babies, you know, this year's babies are about the same size as last year's kids that were born last year.

>> Reporter: Jay Begay's job is the kind common a century ago. He is a goat herder. Hiden in the hills and dales, just south of Prescott, Begay, two other goat herders and working dogs attend this collection of Angorans, Nubians, and Bores.

>> Jay: We keep each other company and of course, the goats keep me company also. And you learn a lot from the goats also. And, you know, during the day, it makes me think about a lot of things, you know, when you are just out here quiet, but over all, it's been fun.

>> Reporter: Fun and productive. The Navajo Nation's 600 goats are currently chewing up 170 acres of potential wildfire fuel. The goats are being fed in a time of drought. The National Forest Service is saving money and keeping the fire risk down. In the middle is Alert Incorporated's Karl Jacobson, who won the bid for this pilot program. He brought the goats and Prescott flora together.

>> Carl Jacobson: If you notice across the way here, you can see the contrast of where the goats have been and where they haven't. On the far side of the highway, notice how green and heavy the brush is. And on the near side, you can see the gray areas where the goats have been. So all of that brush, the heavy stuff has been eaten out, and if a fire started, they could put it out very quickly because it wouldn't spread fast.

>> Reporter: Mike Creach is a forest management specialist for the National Forest Service. He has experience in range management. He says he jumped at the chance to try out this project when forest managers gave the go-ahead.

>> Mike Creach: On an economical standpoint, this project, using the goats, is a good alternative. For example, brush crushing is using mechanical methods to treat brush and is expensive, and today, the price per acre for brush crushing is $500, plus or minus, per acre. We're able to maintain this brush using goats at $170 or so per acre, and that's comparable to what we can use fire to maintain the vegetation. Fire in some places is even cheaper, but in the urban interface, it's right around $200 per acre to burn, because we have so much risk that we have to mitigate, smoke management, time of year, weather conditions, are all factors in burning. So, burning isn't always a good option for us. And so what I'm trying to develop with using goats is a tool that can be used almost anywhere economically to maintain our very expensive mechanical treatments.

>> Reporter: Creach says Alert Incorporated won the project because they not only had the best bid but formed a partnership with the Navajo people. He says it's not an expensive operation after initial costs.

>> Carl: The initial expense of getting the goats here is heavy. You have to have a place for your herders to stay. You have to have a compound that you can keep the goats in at night. You have to have facilities for water. You have to have a way to get the water to them. It's not like a permanent lease where you can set up permanent water and permanent fences. This is -- you are on the move continually, and so it's expensive. Once you get the initial investment, then it's not quite as expensive. My goal out of this is, you know, I'm not looking at this as a business. I've had my businesses. I've retired. This was something to do for fun, but if we can get a grant for the Begay family to where they can set up and do this as an ongoing business, it will have been a success.

>> Reporter: Here the goats can feed on chapparel and other shrubs. Goats are well-suited to this project because of the way they browse.

>> Mike: They are a browsing, heads-up eating animal. What they've been hired to do is to remove 80% of the leaves and fine twigs off the chapparel plants in this area. And the reason we want that is to form a fire break where if we get a major fire coming through, there could be flames as high as 16, 20 feet in untreated chapparel. It'll hit this area and drop it down to flame lengths of a foot, three foot.

>> Reporter: Residents who live near the area certainly appreciate the project.

>> Mike: These are -- the blue polygons are the brush crush and goat project that's in place right now. The yellow polygons next to them are where we broadcast burn. The main thing here is maintaining the brush crush, which is a fuel break, to protect the community of Ponderosa Park.

>> Reporter: On this day, about a month remains of the six-month experiment and Creach says it's been a great success.

>> Mike: So far the response has been just fabulous. They've done their job very well. They've utilized 80% of the brush as they've gone through it, and as we expected, though, the brush has regrown, kind of followed behind them and regrown, but it's still capable of lowering the flame lengths were fire to get in here, even with the new growth on it. That new growth will not burn very easily.

>> Tom: Good girl, Lacy. You're a good girl. Come here, baby.

>> Reporter: Meanwhile the dogs are working harder and the goats are getting fatter.

>> Tom: You are a good Ol' girl. You do good. You do good. The Nubians are getting fat, aren't they?

>> Reporter: Jay Begay says originally he intended to only bring his goats here, but he ended up being a goat herder, too. It's been a reflective experience, living on site, working the dogs, and protecting the goats from predators. His involvement promotes a unique relationship between the Forest Service and the Navajo people, one in which each helps the other.

>> Jay: It gives a chance for the. Owners on the reservation to rest their land, and they've had some rains. It gives a chance for the grass to grow back and, you know, the goats are having -- have plenty of feed to eat, and I guess it gives them a break because a lot of the owners are, you know, the elders, 60s, 70s, and I think if this project didn't come up, I think most of them would have sold off their herds, their flocks, and so it's been great, you know. All of the owners really like the project, the idea of having their animals fed and you know, they are doing good things for the forests, and the Forest Service is doing a good thing for the Navajo goat owners. It's a win-win situation.

>> Michael: Here to talk more about the value of using range management in forest environments is ASU Professor of Applied Biological Science, John Brock. John, how are you?

>> John Brock: I'm doing quite quell, thanks.

>> Michael: Now, some of the video, the closeups of the goats that we saw there, it looked like they were going more for the leaves. They weren't leveling the plant, they were going for the leaves.

>> John: They are selective grazers. They prefer shrubs, but they are selective when they do that, so they don't tear down the whole plant. They take the leaves and more tender parts of the plant first.

>> Michael: It's not a riding lawn mower, that's for darn sure. Is it a good thing?

>> John: Yeah, it's quite good. It's a natural way, you could say, for doing some vegetation management, as compared to herbicides or mechanically controlling the thing or controlling the pest species.

>> Michael: Most frequent use of it in the fire break context? Are we trying to clear a broad area between maybe development and forest?

>> John: That's a very commonplace where it's used. Southern California has used quite a bit. All the way in California and then into Oregon, they use it for clearing like under power lines and so on. More in Texas, it's used -- goats are used more as a wide-scale landscape treatment. Here we're looking at it primarily as a fire management tool to reduce the amount of fuels that could buffer a residential area, say, against the adjacent wild land, yeah.

>> Michael: Could you also apply it to an area where you simply want to reduce the fuel load under the trees?

>> John: Yeah, that would be another good application of this.

>> Michael: Down sides?

>> John: Down sides? Well, with any concentrated livestock grazing, if they are there too long, you can get soil loss. So the idea here is a short duration of grazing intensity, and then move them off so they have a period of recovery in the vegetation, so we don't get a lot of bare soil exposed for erosion. A second down side could be vectoring of disease to other animals out there. This is more of a problem with sheep. Sheep will vector a blowfly that gets into desert big horn sheep. In this particular case, the other possible down side would be that these goats will eat the same preferred species as some of the wildlife species. In a study done on the Tonto Forest by Lake Roosevelt several years ago, they found that the goats preferred the same browse species that deer do. So you get a dietary overlap for a wild species that may or may not be benficial to them in their habitat.

>> Michael: Can you adjust that at all? You talked about the fact that you weren't going to leave them for a long time you were going to move them on.

>> John: Very typically what is done, is short duration grazing. They'll be there 7 to 10 days to defollowiate the shrubs, and then we move them on to a another site. So you can manipulate the time period and relieve those kinds of competitive effects, sure.

>> Michael: Now, why don't environmentalists go nuts about this or perhaps they do. We normally think of grazing as -- everybody has been real nervous about grazing in the last 20, 30 years.

>> John: Well, primarily it's more of a natural way to do things than to use a herbicide or come in and mechanically remove the vegetation, then you really end up with erosion potential. It's a natural way to get things done than synthetic chemicals or to use, you know, use limited amount of fire, prescribed fires that could escape.

>> Michael: Do you have enough goat fertilizer that you may cause things to grow more rapidly?

>> John: You mean like their leavings?

>> Michael: Yes, or their droppings?

>> Well, not too much. Most of our soils in Arizona are nitrogen poor anyway. The fertilization affect would be beneficial to the system.

>> Michael: John Brock, I appreciate the insight on goats.

>> John: Thank you very much.

>> Michael: For many of us, the world of science can be a scary, intimidating place. That is especially true for children. To help demonstrate that science can be fun, a team from ASU has taken its show on the road to elementary schools, and it is getting rave reviews.

>> Science itself is just a story that we create to help us understand the world we live in. About 14 years ago when I first started at ASU, my supervisor and I, Dr. McKelvey felt it was a good thing to share some of the things that we do in the laboratory with schoolchildren, and there were times when he would bring children to the labs and perform science demonstrations, and when I came on board, I suggested that maybe I would take some equipment out to the schools and bring the show to them. I started out by going to my son's kindergarten class. Since then, we have grown into a fairly large outreach program.

>> Matt's program became known as "science is fun," and it's kid friendly approach was met with considerable enthusiasm right from the start.

>> We discovered that there was a huge demand for this kind of interaction from the university in the classroom with schoolchildren of all ages, and we have a show now that is designed for the needs of kindergarten all the way through seniors in high school.

>> Reporter: Because the demand became so great, Wright a researcher at ASU's Center for Solid State Science and McKelvy, Director of the Goldwater Material Science Labradorries, were unable to keep up with requests for the program, so they decided to look for help.

>> Being at a university, we have access to large numbers of students, and so we partnered with the Service Learning Program, who has an extensive educational outreach program to the community, and we created a new internship called the science is fun internship.

>> They were using undergraduates as interns, getting course credit to go out to local schools and work with students individually on biology, English and other subjects. So we struck up a collaboration where David and I would do the training of interns and then the interns would be able to go out and do the demonstrations for the students.

>> Well, before I started, I didn't know that much about it. I had heard that it was related to science, and I'm very interested in science, and I heard that it was interacting with kids, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see how I can impact other people's lives and kids.

>> Reporter: Amber Townsend is a chemical engineering student who in addition to making a contribution to the community is developing valuable communication skills in the course of her demonstrations.

>> Now, I just put air in this balloon. That required work from me, right?

>> Yeah.

>> We're really into dialogue and getting the students to talk back and asking them what they think will happen before we do it or making them understand the differences between the different processes that we explain and just -- we want to get their idea of what they think is going to happen, show them what happens, and then explain to them what happens. You can see them understand. It changes their thinking on certain things. It's great to see.

>> Reporter: The Science is Fun program can be beneficial to interns who may be considering a career in education.

>> Many of them are education majors who will later come to be in the classroom as teachers. So we're giving them a taste of what the classroom experience is like, especially teaching science. So the interns can help to become skilled at meeting the needs of various age groups in delivering scientific information.

>> Now, how many blades do you see?

>> Three.

>> Is that right?

>> Yes.

>> Reporter: Wright and McKelvey are committed to the idea that science education needn't be the traditionally dry or intimidating ordeal that students come to dread, and that science class, regardless of the grade level can be entertaining as well as challenging.

>> Reach up and grab the silver handles and hold on.

>> Science is something where there are so many toys, demonstrations that you can do, that the students can interact with, inquire about, get excited about. It's something that just lends itself to native curiosity, and that's one of the things that we try to impart to the students through science is fun.

>> Reporter: A future goal of the program with support from the National Science Foundation is to integrate more fully the Science is Fun presentations into regular classroom curriculum, but even when it is an isolated event, the value of a school science demonstration cannot be overestimated, as there is no telling when any given encounter with a student will have far-reaching consequences.

>> When I was in 7th grade in a small town in Wyoming, there was a scientist that came to my school, and he impressed me with several demonstrations, and this impressed me so much that I thought, I need to learn more about this, and once I started learning more about science, I became excited about it, and the rest is history for me, and now I work in a scientific laboratory in the Goldwater building.

>> At this point in time, our country is short, at best, gravely short, in terms of scientific and engineering talent for the future. The future is going to be more technologically based. If we don't get students excited now and see that it can be a lucrative and fun career, the economy, I think, of the United States and the world will suffer.

>> Reporter: As gratifying of the prospect of inspiring a future generation of scientists may be, Wright and McKelvey can take more immediate satisfaction from their efforts one at a time.

>> The looks on the students' faces, I think, is probably suggestive of most of the value in the project. You see them begin to imagine, to dream, to really understand that science is fun, that science is something that is all around them, and that they can really better understand their world and have more fun when they think about it that way.

>> Michael: Thank you very much for joining us this evening on "Horizon." I'm Michael Grant. Have a great one. Good night.

 

 

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