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I was, in the first place, very reluctant to put my name onto what was essentially an effort to raise money, even though it was for a very good cause. But in any case I did agree to it, and I didn't believe for a minute that NRDC could raise a quarter of a million dollars, which is what they did raise, to implement this annual prize -- which, someday, we hope will have the prestige of the Pulitzer Prize -- for a piece of investigative environmental journalism that really promotes or demonstrates an important environmental issue. That prize, which I think now amounts to a $3,000 annual prize has now been awarded four times. We get from about 100 to 150-160 submissions, from all over the country, each year, by journalists who send in their work. Last year's winner was an article on the poisoning of farmland by chemical residue mixed up with fertilizer. This is done innocently, but it's used as a fertilizer. It involves poisonous residue from chemical plants which is sold off and mixed in with the fertilizer. There's no regulation to prevent this but there should be. Nobody's breaking a law in doing this -- yet -- but this is the point: there have been instances in which spreading this kind of fertilizer has absolutely destroyed the crops in various areas of the country. There have been several instances.
Anyway, an article on this point, which was the first time most people had ever heard of this problem, was the winner last year by a reporter from the Seattle Times. A winner in previous years was the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. And a wonderful one a couple of years ago was from the Raleigh Observer dealing with pollution by hog farms in North Carolina. That particular series subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize.
I remember that.
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