Mexican Environmental Journalists Chart a New Course

            The Mexican Environmental Journalists Network elected new leaders and laid out an ambitious work plan for the coming weeks, months and years.

            Nineteen members of La Red Mexicana de Periodistas Ambientales (REMPA) attended the organization’s second national conference, held at the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes May 29-June 1, 2008.

Members elected Valentina Martinez Valdés of the University of Veracruz to be president of the organization. She succeeds Miguel Ángel de Alba, who served as the organization’s first president for more than three years.

Ms. Martínez Valdés holds a Masters degree in scientific communication from the Technical Institute for Higher Learning in Monterrey and a biology degree from the University of Veracruz. She is currently communications coordinator for the Center for Tropical Research at the University of Veracruz, and plans to pursue a master’s degree in Sweden and a PhD. in Great Britain.

Ernesto Bolado, a founder of SuMar, an environmental communications group in the Gulf of California, and organizer of several journalism training projects, was elected REMPA’s secretary, and de Alba was chosen as treasurer. Selected to be advisors for the group were Eduardo Viadas, the media officer for the North American Commision for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), based in Montreal, and Miguel Ángel Torres, an information and communications director at the national statistics institute in Aguascalientes.

REMPA was launched at an air pollution workshop in Mexico City in January, 2004. Since then, its membership has climbed to 56 persons and its listserv circulation to 167. At the mid-2008 conference, members adopted a work plan drafted by Bolado that will keep the new officers busy. Their tasks include drafting a refined mission statement, long-range activities goals, logotype alternatives, a membership directory and identification of potential sponsors. Members decided to limit REMPA communications to one listserv known as PAL-Net, and to close down a secondary listserv set up recently under Google Groups.

Talli Nauman and Miguel Ángel Torres, co-directors of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, reported on REMPA’s three news conferences on forestry issues, which members organized over the last six months in Toluca, Aguascalientes and Zihuatenejo. In the coming months, Nauman said, REMPA plans to hold at least one more forestry press conference, most likely in Cancun. Francisco Castellanos, a Morelia-based reporter for the magazine Proceso, also proposed a seminar on the Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Michoacan.

A key feature of the meeting was a multi-faceted discussion of important aspects of successful organization building. REMPA member Dalia Morales, an expert in traditional community organizing, presented her experiences as director of community radio collaboration in Oaxaca. Science and Environment Program Director Rob Taylor, of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), shared stories of failed environmental journalism associations in South America and the capacities that make Mexico more successful; and the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) former President Emilia Askari, related the steps taken to establish and strengthen the international membership organization.

            Before their organizational discussions, members visited the national headquarters of the national statistics institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografia e Informática, INEGI), where they heard presentations on environmental accounting in the GDP, hydrological mapping, and how journalists can access useful data from INEGI online or on compact disks. The visit was followed by an explanation from Viadas about the geopolitical tools and opportunities available to journalists through the CEC.  After their organizing tasks, about 12 REMPA members and supporters visited an ecotourism project on June 1, assisted by the inter-agency National Forestry Commission (Conafor). The tour took them off-pavement up onto a plateau west of Aguascalientes. There they enjoyed a meal of menudo (tripe stew), saw creatively designed adobe visitor cabins and sampled adventure travel activities, including a hanging-cable bridge and a “Zipline” cable slide across a reservoir.

            The REMPA conference was part of a series of activities sponsored by Ford Foundation-Mexico, with ICFJ administrative oversight.  Other activities in the series are the news conferences, a journalism workshop on community forestry in Oaxaca, and development of resources that have been posted on the Spanish section of SEJ Internet Web site.