If you are like me, you may be more familiar with the news content written by Ross Gelbspan than you are with his name. This “In Memoriam” pays tribute to a dedicated journalist who, over many years of digging, shed sunlight on dark truths the fossil fuel industry has tried to hide from all of us. Through his dogged, fact-finding determination, Ross Gelbspan convinced many skeptics that human activities have fueled a climate crisis, related weather disasters, and public health risks that threaten life on earth.
Long before Gelbspan became known for his reporting on fossil fuel impact on the climate, he was an American journalist covering human rights issues. Wikipedia offers some stories from his earlier career.
“In 1971, he spent a month in the Soviet Union, where he was detained by the KGB after interviewing Soviet dissidents and human rights advocates. His four-part series on the Soviet underground, written for The Village Voice, was reprinted in the Congressional Record. In 1974, he edited a book for Scripps-Howard on the Congressional Watergate Committee hearings. In 1979, the Boston Globe hired Gelbspan as a senior editor. In his capacity as special projects editor, he conceived, directed, and edited a series of articles on job discrimination against African-Americans in Boston-area corporations, universities, unions, newspapers, and state and city government. The series won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984.”
Wikipedia
Gelbspan went on to uncover FBI abuses, domestic aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal, and dangers associated with an aging nuclear power plant in Massachusetts. Through his daily journalistic career, he occasionally reported on environmental topics. This included a four-part series on the global environment in 1992. Then, in 1995, his in-depth article on climate change in Harper’s Magazine won a National Magazine Award and initiated a focus for his journalistic research after he retired from the daily news business.
“I was a journalist, not an environmentalist. I didn’t get into the climate issue because I love the trees. I tolerate the trees. I got into the issue because I learned the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists under the table to say nothing was happening to the climate.”
Ross Gelbspan
This new focus led to Gelbspan’s publication in 1997 of one of the seminal books on climate change, The Heat is On. The Washington Post provides perspective on Gelbspan’s experience with this book and the author’s entire career in its obituary about Gelbspan, Ross Gelbspan, author who probed roots of climate change denial, dies at 84.
“As climate change increasingly became a political dividing line, often with Republicans embracing views that question the causes and pace of a warming planet, Mr. Gelbspan amplified his stance. He described the efforts to devalue the science on climate change as similar to earlier attempts by tobacco companies to cloud the medical reports linking smoking to cancer.
‘It is an excruciating experience,’ he wrote in his book The Heat Is On (1997), ‘to watch the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of pathological denial.’ He described political leaders and companies that pushed climate change skepticism as ‘criminals against humanity.’”
The Washington Post
Artist Robert Shetterly pays tribute to Ross Gelbspan on his website called Americans Who Tell The Truth.
“Climate change is not just another issue. It is the issue that, unchecked, will swamp all other issues. The only hope lies in all the countries of the world coming together around a common global project to rewire the world with clean energy. This is a path to peace–peace among people, and peace between people and nature.”
Ross Gelbspan
Let’s keep the light that Ross Gelbspan shed on climate change shining bright and prevent an obituary for planet earth that no one will be around to write or read.
Ross Gelbspan, born in Chicago on June 1, 1939, died at his home in Boston on January 27, 2024. He is survived by his wife, Anne Charlotte (Brostrom) Gelbspan, two daughters and a sister.
More about Ross Gelbspan:
- You can read several articles by Gelbspan on Grist.org.
- In 1998 Ross Gelbspan spent a writers’ residency at mesarefuge.org. Their website offers a brief bio of the journalist as an alumnus of the center.
- A more complete bio of Gelbspan can be found on Wikipedia.
