Cally is an independent writer, editor and radio reporter, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a contributing editor at High Country News, the environmental magazine for the American West. She covers climate science, ecology, land management, environmental policy and politics, and various other things that pique her curiosity, like the minimum wage and BASE jumping. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Science Magazine, Modern Farmer and aired on Chicago Public Radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In past lives, Cally was a High Country News staff editor, worked with American RadioWorks, the Utne Reader, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival, studied radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and served on the Board of Directors for KVNF, public radio for Western Colorado.
In 2014, her work was recognized with two major awards: a Kevin Carmody Award for In-Depth Reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. The Science in Society judges had this to say:
Cally Carswell takes a seemingly simple question — why do trees die? — as her point of departure for a probing, nuanced examination of the subject of climate change as it bodes to affect Earth’s forests. Carswell’s portraits of four scientists and the trees they study, the trees they love, carry us outward from the Los Alamos mesa to temperate and tropical woodlands around the world, and downward into the intricacies of tree physiology, stress, adaptation, and mortality, as well as the dire consequences that will come with dying forests. Her keen ear brings those scientists alive through their candid comments, and her measured, astute account of recent work in the field moves beyond the first-order concerns about changing climate and forest loss to a central ecological truth: Things are complicated. It’s a high tribute to Carswell’s skills and intelligence that, notwithstanding those complications, she makes arboreal life and death not just engrossing but dramatic.
Email Cally | [email protected]
Follow me on Twitter | @callycarswell
Awards & Honors
2015 Frank Allen Field Reporting Award, Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, to support coverage of assisted evolution of coral reefs threatened by climate change
2015 Recognized by the Audubon Society, Women Greening Journalism
2014 Science in Society Award, National Association of Science Writers, for “The Tree Coroners.”
2014 Kevin Carmody Award for In-Depth Reporting, Small Market, Society of Environmental Journalists. Second Place for “The Tree Coroners.”
2014 Metcalf Fellow for Marine and Environmental Reporting
2013 Top of the Rockies, Society of Professional Journalists: First Place, Science Reporting for “The Tree Coroners.”
2013 Top of the Rockies, Society of Professional Journalists: First Place, Agriculture Reporting for “Farming on the Fringe.”
Part of a reporting team that won the 2012 Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers and the 2012 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism for our coverage of long-distance animal migration.
2011 Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources Fellow
