CONTRIBUTION
Carlos Fresneda (Madrid, 1963) is currently the Paris correspondent for newspaper El Mundo. Having arrived in the French capital six months ago, he speaks admiringly of the city’s green transformation, describing it as like living in his own “little paradise.” He previously worked for the same newspaper in London, New York and Milan.
The journalist spent his childhood in Carabanchel – “in the Calle del Campo, because back then that was where the city really ended.” Despite being surrounded by a mostly urban landscape, he always felt the pull of nature. “That love of nature, reinforced by the contact I had with Adena (now WWF/Adena) and CODA (now Ecologistas en Acción) led me to write on the creation of the Manzanares Regional Park or the problem of radioactive radon gas in the Madrid sierra. And the experience taught me that this was a whole field of journalism still to be explored, while I continued to keep a close eye on day-to-day local news.”
After starting his career at El País, Fresneda joined the founding team of El Mundo in 1987, where he combined the busy role of correspondent with writing about environmental issues. “I have had the bad luck that, wherever I went, the situation ended up getting complicated. In Italy, for example, I lived through a harrowing period with the mafia killings of Borsellino and Falcone, but I also witnessed the birth of the Slow Food movement with Carlo Petrini. Environmental news has served me as an antidote, one that stopped me becoming the sad chronicler of daily life. Now I try to focus on the solutions side and tell personal stories,” he relates.
Some of these reports on the protagonists of the environmental news were written for El Mundo’s environmental supplement Natura; others were published in his blog Ecohéroes, a section on the newspaper’s website. He interviewed scientists like atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, marine biologist Sylvia Earle, the climatologist James Hansen, a pioneer in alerting to climate change, and activists such as Jane Goodall, Paul Hawken and George Monbiot. In addition to his press work, he is the author of a literary environmental trilogy consisting of La vida simple (1997), Ecohéroes: 100 voces por la salud del planeta (2020), and Un siglo verde (2023). He is now contemplating a new project: a book to be titled La ciudad posible, for which he plans to visit cities that are prefiguring the future, not only in the global North, but also in Latin America (Medellin, Curitiba), Africa (Freetown) and Asia (Singapore, Chengdu).
Asked about his models in environmental reporting, he mentions two previous winners in the same award category: the writer Joaquín Araújo and El Mundo’s first ever environmental correspondent, Gustavo Catalán Deus, who sadly died this year. He also talks about Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente’s influence on a whole generation in thrall to his nature program El hombre y la Tierra, while highlighting three books that directly shaped his vocation as an environmental journalist: Biophilia, by Edward O. Wilson, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman and Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake.
For the awardee, the biggest challenge in environmental reporting is the lack of space press being given to these issues: “It seems the climate world is only of interest when a disaster happens, then it drops off the pages. It is particularly difficult to find space to report on possible solutions, because the thinking is still that if it’s not bad news, it isn’t news at all.” For this reason, the correspondent calls for the return of environmental supplements like those which newspapers ran before the 2008 crisis.
Fresneda admits that we are going through a period of global gloom, as the United States turns its back on major climate agreements and treaties. He believes nonetheless that there is still “light at the end of the tunnel and, above all, people doing work that, sooner or later, will end up bearing fruit.”
Picture: Miguel Fresneda