Timothy Lesle - Reporting and Other Projects

Timothy Lesle

FOR AN UPDATED LIST OF PROJECTS AND REPORTING, PLEASE VISIT MY CURRENT PROJECTS PAGE AT
http://telesle.net/blog/projects/.

You will be redirected there momentarily...

FRONTLINE/World

China: Green Dreams. A not-so-model village. 1 February 2008. "The village of Huangbaiyu in rural northeast China was supposed to be a model for energy-conscious design. The initial project was to build 400 sustainable homes, a collaboration between the U.S. architect William McDonough and the Chinese. But something went awry." A three-part audio slideshow investigation I produced as a Frontline/World Fellow.

Undermined. 4 October 2007. "What began as an investigation of environmental degradation turned into a story of whole villages being literally undermined by an aggressive coal industry -- and of people who faced brutal retaliation when they blew the whistle..." Reported by Duane Moles, Tim Lesle, and Wu Nan. The report was also part of a 2007 student Emmy award-winning magazine program.

The New York Times Magazine

Sailing an Oil Tanker. 10 December 2006. "2006 has been a good year for the California-based company KiteShip, which makes 'very large free-flying sails'--basically, giant traction kites that harness the wind to pull very large free-floating objects."

North Gate News Online

Proposition 87: Four articles on the proposed oil tax to fund alternative energy and the ensuing advertising campaign--at $155 million, the most expensive in California history. November 2006.
1) Big Money Battles Over Oil Tax. 2 November 2006, the curtain-raiser story. “This is the first initiative I’m going to vote for in a long time. I’m going to have to violate my rule against voting for all initiatives except for the initiative that abolishes other initiatives.”
2) Oil Tax Popular in Bay Area and 3) Voters Appear to Be Rejecting New Oil Tax. 7 November 2006, the election night updates. “It screams the self-righteousness that comes with oversimplification.” "Gas prices are the ultimate pocketbook issue."
4) Californians Reject Oil Tax, but Observers Think the Issue Will Resurface. 8 November 2006, the wrap-up. "Prop 87 had the right end but the wrong means.”

Angelides Reaches out to Chinese-American Voters. 26 October 2006. “Angelides visited the Sweet Mart on Washington Street as part of his handshake tour of local merchants. Owner Daniel Lo, 52, seemed surprised by the visit. After Angelides left, he laughed and said, 'They help us, we help them.'”

Death of San Leandro Woman Remains a Mystery. 21 October 2006. “Sonia Ilustre wanted to establish a neighborhood watch program."

Residents Cope as Violence Swirls Around Them. 16 October 2006. “When Markel Abram walks in his West Oakland neighborhood, his 6-foot-9-inch frame is hard to miss. He gets a steady stream of shouts and honking horns. People are saying hello.”

San Francisco Considers Foot Patrols to Beat Crime. 2 October 2006. “There’s no reason why people need to be dying in one of the most sophisticated cities on the planet.”

Tenderloin Fights Gritty Image. 21 September 2006. “The veteran actor Martin Landau recently walked the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood wearing a rumpled brown trench coat, a carefully creased fedora, and a look of exasperation.”

Bonus: Supervisors Oppose No-Match Immigration Measures. 12 September 2006. “We’re not required to check immigrant status. And we like it that way.”

The Planet

Making a Just Transition. September/October 2006. “We’ve been running so fast chasing the American Dream because that’s what the rest of the world tells us that we want and need."

Hot or Not? Climatologist Stephen Schneider on how industry has manufactured 'uncertainty.' September/October 2005. "In political reporting, where there is no standard of who is right or wrong because you’re reporting on philosophy, you give roughly equal weight to these two sides and you let them duke it out. When you apply that model to science, you end up in the cacophonous disaster we have now. Because in science, there aren’t two sides."

Witnessing the World Through Words: Poet Robert Hass on Poetry and Nature. July/August 2005. "I think that the old formula of the civil rights and anti-war movements—which was pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will—seems to me really necessary right now."

Thinking Big and Small: Designing the Next Industrial Revolution. An interview with William McDonough. July/August 2005. "Set the goal as being relatively simple. Our goals start with a tone poem, which is that we love all the children of all species for all time. And we think that there is no end game. What we’re looking for is the infinite game—the game we get to play forever."

Getting Somewhere on the 'Bridges to Nowhere.' January/February 2006. "In August, [Alaska Representative Don] Young bragged that he stuffed the 2005 federal transportation bill 'like a turkey,' with billions of dollars of spending, including two proposed bridges in Alaska."

Building Environmental Community One Canyon at a Time. January/February 2006. “When you see what you stand to lose, then you learn to love it. If we’d never had to fight to protect this place, a lot fewer people would even know about it.”

States Take Lead on Mercury, Global Warming. July/August 2006. “Minnesota is the 'Land of 10,000 Lakes.' You basically don’t find a body of water in Minnesota that doesn’t have mercury contamination in the fish.”

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science

From Space Travel to Social Justice: An Interview with Freeman Dyson. Fall 2001. "This Orion Project was a crazy idea. I think it could have worked, technically. It would have covered the globe with radioactivity, so that wasn’t such a good idea. And I could see that from the start, that this problem with radioactive fallout would be the showstopper in the end. It wouldn’t fly because of the fallout problem. But still, apart from that, it was a great idea."

China Digital Times

As a contributor to China Digital Times, I get to fall behind on my blogging duties there in addition to my own blog. CDT is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project. It aggregates news and publishes material translated from Chinese. Since I definitely can not translate from Chinese, I highlight interesting English-language resources and articles online.

Wired

I worked at Wired Magazine's research desk in 2007 and helped out on issues 15.08, 15.09, the "Geekipedia," an almanac of ideas and people prominent in the Wired universe.

U.S. Geological Survey

I worked at the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Region campus in Menlo Park in 2002 and 2003. Check out the North America Tapestry of Time and Terrain, a never-before-published geologic/shaded relief map of the entire North American continent. You can see cool features like the Manicouagan Crater and the Snake River Plain. I helped with some of the map production and created much of the original web site, though it has since been incorporated into the National Atlas and reformatted. It incorporates the older U.S. Tapestry of Time and Terrain.

I also created several illustrations and photocomposites for a book about the relationship between geology and wine called The Winemaker's Dance: Exploring Terroir in the Napa Valley, by Jonathan Swinchatt and David Howell.

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science

I was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science. It features research and writing produced by students at Dartmouth College. Originally intended to be a straight scientific journal, I successfully pushed for the inclusion of essays, interviews, and other non-technical articles (basically, the stuff people would read). While much of my time was consumed with the establishment, administration, and fundraising necessary to keep the publication operating, an editorial highlight was the opportunity to conduct a long interview with the Freeman Dyson (also featured above in the Reporting section). If you are looking for my remembrance of the late Half Zantop, Professor of Earth Sciences, you can find it here. We started DUJS in 1999 and it publishes still.

back to telesle.net