Justin O’Neill has an unlikely origin story for a science journalist. He started off as a sports broadcaster in his native Toronto, Canada, but soon realized that beat wasn’t for him. He returned to school, earned a graduate degree in journalism, and began a new career as an audio journalist at NPR in Washington D.C.
The stories he did there — including pieces about gorilla poaching, floods, and bird-watching — caught the ear of one of his senior editors, who encouraged him to apply for a job at National Geographic.
He took the leap — and has been covering science-related topics ever since.
O’Neill was most recently an editor at WAMU 88.5, Washington D.C.’s public radio station, focusing on the environment, transportation, and education beats. He’s spending the 2023-24 academic year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, researching the impacts of coal contamination and environmental justice in predominantly non-White and rural communities in Maryland, Puerto Rico, and Tennessee.
This spring, I spoke with O’Neill about his research project, the path that brought him to MIT, and what he’s looking forward to as the academic year winds down. (The below interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
Alex Ip: What brought you here to MIT?
Justin O’Neill: I found myself wanting to have a better foundation in certain areas of science I was interested in. And so I applied to KSJ. Last year, I was the environment editor at WAMU and found a good, complicated story that would lend itself to some in-depth reporting, and a year of getting to know some of the leading scientists in various fields.
AI: Can you tell us more about that project?
JO: I’m looking at the impacts of industrial pollution on rivers, and the people who live near those rivers.
Coal-fired power plants disposing of coal ash haven’t worked very hard to make sure that chemicals associated with coal ash aren’t leaching into the waters. For years, this stuff has just been sitting on the ground. They never had any liners underneath them.
It’s a good time to be reporting on this because last year, the EPA came out and said that this is going to be an enforcement priority for them. So I’m interested to see what potential regulations come.
But another thing that interests me is that the communities that live with coal ash tend to be rural, less well-off, and non-White. There’s a lot of environmental racism and pollution, and because it’s rivers, downstream effects. People fishing for subsistence will feel the health impacts of pollutants and chemicals in the water much more strongly than people just using the river recreationally.
AI: What are some of the classes you’re taking, and how are they helping you complete the project?
JO: This semester, I’m taking an environmental toxicology class. I’ve been reading all these company reports talking about the chemicals and heavy metals released in the water. The class has helped me understand how those chemicals transport through the environment. Some are happy to be in the water, some evaporate, others just sit in the sediment, and others bind well to other things. I never would have known any of that without that class. I’m also taking a water pollution class, which gives a great overview of all the many issues that face our waterways.
Last semester, I took a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The final project ended up being groups redesigning certain sites dammed and degraded over the centuries around [eastern Massachusetts]. What does dam removal look like? How do you want to repurpose it? That was a good overview in understanding how rivers behave, how rivers move, and the types of impacts that people have on rivers.
I also took a class at Harvard Divinity School. As journalists, we often want to tell stories from a human perspective, but that class was focused on thinking about nonhuman creatures that we share our planet with, what it means to tell their stories, and how to remove some of your human bias. Animals experience everything very differently. What does it mean to be in the mind of another creature? That sort of natural philosophy was interesting, and it was a very different pace than your journalism classes. So I enjoyed that.
AI: I noticed you arrived here with your bike. What’s your experience commuting in the Boston area like?
JO: I became an urban cyclist, somebody who identifies primarily with a city either on my feet or on two wheels, in D.C. I’m pretty impressed with this cycling infrastructure here. It’s been easy to get to know the City of Cambridge by biking. I tend to avoid Mass Ave because I think people drive too fast. There are some quieter neighborhood streets where the pace of car traffic is way slower. I tend to find myself gravitating toward those roads.
AI: What are you most looking forward to for the remainder of the fellowship?
JO: Next month I have a reporting trip to Puerto Rico, where there’s a big grassroots fight with a large international power company taking advantage of poor people and polluting everywhere. I’m excited to hear a different version of the same story I’ve been researching for eight months. Also, it’s always a little exciting anytime you get to travel somewhere and report on something.
I’m also looking forward to finishing my coal ash story. I’ll be working on that for the next several months.
Alex Ip is a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and editor-in-chief of The Xylom magazine.
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