The Chickahominy Report

News about Earth, Atmosphere, Water, and Life

Welcome to The Chickahominy Report

Kids play at Lake Rawl­ings

Two kids play along the shores of Lake Rawl­ings in Brunswick Coun­ty, Va. (Copy­right © 2006 David M. Lawrence)

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. — My name is Dave Lawrence. For most of my life, I have lived a dou­ble life as a jour­nal­ist and sci­en­tist, with both tracks sep­a­rate, and most of the focus on science.

About 15 years ago, I decid­ed to try to com­bine the two into one — to become a sci­ence jour­nal­ist — but as with my pre­vi­ous efforts, the attempt to com­bine the two did not work out as planned.  Both tracks were still large­ly sep­a­rate, and most of the focus was on sci­ence, either as a researcher, envi­ron­men­tal man­ag­er, or teacher.

The frus­tra­tion over my inabil­i­ty to focus on writ­ing burst its banks in the past few months. That frus­tra­tion, cou­pled with my grow­ing inabil­i­ty to get along with col­lege admin­is­tra­tors, has inspired me to write more. Over the past few months, I have fin­ished my sec­ond book, been award­ed a con­tract for a third, and filed two sub­stan­tial fea­ture arti­cles for the jour­nal The Lancet Infec­tious Dis­eases.

With the new book con­tract and oth­er writ­ing com­mit­ments, I have plen­ty to do, but there is one thing I haven’t done to my sat­is­fac­tion — my ide­al job, which is writ­ing about the envi­ron­ment and the outdoors.

This brings me to The Chick­a­hominy Report.

The Chick­a­hominy Report will be a blog that I hope fills a niche — to report on envi­ron­men­tal research and pol­i­cy devel­op­ments, with a focus on the Mid-Atlantic region. I can­not promise unbi­ased cov­er­age on these vir­tu­al pages, but I do promise to tell you the truth as I see it: a truth derived from evi­dence and the appli­ca­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic method rather than unques­tioned assump­tion and dog­ma. I will try to save any rants for my per­son­al blog, Notes from the Abyss. I like­wise promise to be as time­ly as my chaot­ic and dis­or­ga­nized life allows.

I hope this exper­i­ment proves worth­while. It should at least be fun.

– David M. Lawrence

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