Jim Morrison's stories have appeared in dozens of pubs including Smithsonian, The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post. Winner, Excellence in Reporting 2021, ASJA.
Climate Change Forces Cities to Consider Retreat
An exhaustively reported story outlining the need to begin discussing managed retreat from threatened areas including the coasts and inland floodplains.
Climate Change Turns the Tide on Waterfront Living
The city doesn’t use that politically explosive term, the Voldemort of climate adaptation. Planners here and elsewhere refer to it as the “r-word.” They’re happy to talk about the other r-word — resilience, which includes projects like sea walls, retention ponds, rebuilding wetlands and improved storm-water capacity. Retreat signals surrender, while resilience screams reassurance: Don’t worry. Stay. We’ll protect you. That medicine goes down easier. It has been embraced by dozens of cities an...
North Carolina Bald Cypresses Are Among the World’s Oldest Trees
"There is no other place on Earth like this," Angie Carl says. Her voice carries across the swamp of North Carolina's Black River as we sit floating in kayaks at the knees of our elders, an ancient stand of bald cypress trees.
Following markers of neon-pink ribbons tied to branches, we've paddled to this remote stand to recreate a journey that Carl took eight years ago guiding David W. Stahle, a University of Arkansas scientist. Carl is the fire and coastal restoration manager for The Nature ...
An ancient people with a modern climate plan
For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.
At the ceremony’s conclusion, single salmon are ferried by bo...
A Bold Plan to Save the Last Whitebark Pines
The high-altitude tree is vital to its ecosystem, but it’s being decimated by a fungus. Its admirers are fusing old and new methods to bring it back.
Melissa Jenkins usually doesn't take pictures on hikes in Montana's Whitefish Range. Here, the whitebark pine that she works to restore has been so decimated by a fungus that gray skeletal ghost forests reign, haunting symbols of a once widespread species. But last summer, she paused to snap a shot of survivors flanking the trail, ragged but def...
As Norfolk weighs storm protection plan, Black residents want more say
NORFOLK — Kim Sudderth went to a meeting of community leaders from the city’s low-income, largely Black Southside last week to hear about the $2.6 billion plan to protect Norfolk from storms and hurricanes.
She left seeing red.
A representative of Norfolk’s Office of Resilience explained that the neighborhood on the south side of the Elizabeth River would be protected by natural shorel...
Norfolk moves ahead on sea wall project to protect against storms
A 2015 corps study targeted Norfolk because waters are rising faster here than elsewhere in the country, putting the city at risk sooner. The corps later identified cities including Miami and Charleston, S.C., as facing existential threats. Those cities, pioneers in addressing the urban climate threat, are finding that protecting themselves from storm surges is more than a design and engineering problem. It is a complicated and evolving mix of science, social justice, urban planning and finance.
How ‘Daylighting’ Buried Waterways Is Revitalizing Cities Across America
For a century, Jordan Creek cut across downtown Springfield, Missouri. As in so many other 19th-century cities, the waterway was a founding centerpiece of the town. But over the decades, the creek regularly unleashed a tantrum of flooding into the city’s commercial heart. By 1927, residents had tired of rebounding from one watery attack after another. They created tall concrete banks to cage the creek. When that wasn’t enough and the area flooded again five years later, the city entombed the ...
Norfolk has a plan to save itself from rising seas. For many, it’s a $2.7 billion mystery
Public discussion over the largest infrastructure project in Norfolk’s history has left residents and business leaders with more questions than answers. Have officials told the whole story?
By Jim Morrison
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
The meetings to discuss Norfolk’s $2.7 billion storm risk plan were on opposite sides of the Elizabeth River, a month apart in March and April 2023.
The first gathered leaders of some of the city’s poorest Black neighborhoods on the south...
A proposed Army Corps change could affect hundreds of billions in federal funding
As Norfolk’s $2.66 billion storm risk plan moved toward approval by the City Council last spring, residents of the city’s poorer, Black neighborhoods on the Southside grew heated when they learned wealthier neighborhoods would get protective floodwalls, but they would only get natural solutions like grasses and oyster reefs.
The reason was simple: The analysis done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed their homes weren’t worth protecting with the more expensive concrete walls. For decad...
Norfolk leaders, losing patience, consider new options for stalled casino project
Council may entertain other developers, while pressure grows from state lawmaker
By Jim Morrison
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
A scaled-down Norfolk waterfront casino proposal is facing choppy waters from city leaders who have lost patience with the much-delayed project.
Norfolk City Council members in a recent closed session discussed options for scuttling the city’s agreement with the Pamunkey tribe, which submitted an application for a phased development with a $150 ...
A Virginia food bank and a farmer cultivate an innovative alliance
Elisha Barnes leaned over the steering wheel of his blue 1961 Ford tractor as workers from the local food bank trudged through a muddy field and dumped baskets of sweet corn into the bucket. “The rain and the heat is pushing this corn real hard,” he said.
When he planted during the second week of May, Barnes worried that it was too late. Now, some of the corn was ready days before the ...
In Norfolk, an environmental headquarters plans to live with the water, then surrender to reality
For Marjorie Mayfield-Jackson of Norfolk’s Elizabeth River Project, signing a groundbreaking agreement to tear down the organization’s new $9 million headquarters when waters rise too high was bittersweet.
“It’s hard to not even have had the grand opening yet and we’re talking about celebrating taking it down,” she said.
When, decades from now, time and tide can no longer be denied, the nonprofit will surrender the 6,500-square-foot Pru and Louis Ryan Resilience Lab in a final act of adaptati...
A New Generation of Satellites Is Helping Authorities Track Methane Emissions
Hugo, Iris and a growing complement of public and private sentries orbiting overhead and scheduled for launch have opened a new era of fighting the climate crisis by tracking methane leaks from landfills, pipelines and mines. The new generation of satellites will allow better measurements of such leaks over time and help the public hold countries and corporations accountable to their promises to reduce greenhouse gases.
As rainstorms grow more severe and frequent, communities fail to prepare for risks
Lack of a current, national rainfall database means some states use 60-year-old statistics as they design roads, bridges, and dams that are supposed to last 50 years.