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Chesapeake Bay Journal: Veteran Reporter Ad Crable Wraps Up 4 Decades Of Environmental Journalism

By Lara Lutz, Chesapeake Bay Journal

In 2019, the Chesapeake Bay Journal gained a team member in Pennsylvania. Ad Crable, well known for his work at Lancaster’s LNP newspaper, became our newest staff writer.

He had decades of experience writing about environmental topics in the Bay’s upstream watersheds and authored a popular column about outdoor travel.

At the Bay Journal, Ad continued his award-winning work with both news articles and travel features.

Now, after 42 years of environmental reporting, he will retire in January.

We talked with Ad about his career and thoughts on environmental journalism. His work, he said, “has been immensely rewarding and given meaning to my life. I never once dreaded going to work in the morning.”

Question: When and why did you decide to become a journalist?

Answer: I had a college roommate who worked for the student paper. He said, “Come on over and report for us.” So I did. It was serendipitous. I was always drawn to the challenge of using words to tell a story, to explain an issue clearly or do justice to an interesting person. It quickly came to me that this was my calling.

Q: Were you an environmental reporter from the outset?

A: No, my first beats were community news. First at a weekly newspaper in West Virginia, where I learned about true grassroots journalism. Then I went to the Northern Virginia Daily for three years, and I went to LNP in Lancaster in 1982. That’s what brought me to Pennsylvania.

Q: When did you pivot to environmental reporting?

A: I’ve always been passionate for and moved by the outdoors and interested in writing about the threats to our planet. It’s always filled me with purpose. So at LNP, I was always picking up environmental stories. It’s where I first learned about the problems from all those cows in all those pastoral fields. It wasn’t long before I was the beat writer. By the end of my time there, I was almost entirely doing the environment.

Q: What led you to join the staff at the Bay Journal?

A: I was always a big admirer of the Bay Journal. I was impressed by its deep dives into complicated subjects and scientific processes. A combination of in-depth storytelling, which I didn’t see anywhere else, and good writing. And there turned out to be wonderful people working there, too.

Q: What are some articles you’ve written that stand out in your mind?

A: One enduring topic is how to keep soil and fertilizer from running off into streams. I’ve written lots about that. We still don’t have all the answers. It’s thrilling to see the progress being made but frustrating that it’s a persistent problem. There’s no simple solution.

And I’ve learned that you never know what’s going to resonate with readers. I did a fairly small story for the Bay Journal about a high school class that used drones to discover old v-shaped fishing weirs in the Susquehanna River.

It was one of the Bay Journal’s most viewed stories and picked up by press all over the country. I got calls for months afterwards.

Q: Do you have a favorite travel article from your time with the Bay Journal?

A: One of the most interesting places is St. Anthony’s Wilderness, also known as Stony Valley, near Harrisburg. It was unpopulated until they built a railroad there for coal in the 1800s. Once the coal played out, it went to timber, and once that played out, it was deserted again.

One day a year, you can drive through it on the old railroad bed. It breathes the ghosts of a long-gone culture — immigrants with a hardscrabble life. And now for it to be completely quiet and deserted. And so beautiful.

Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges in the job?

A: Getting scientists and policymakers to speak in plain language. So many times, the person in the know can only speak in their rarified scientific language, and it’s hard to translate that for our readers, and even for myself.

Also, the environment is so complex that what’s going on is not always clear. Some of the changes and harms to our planet play out very slowly, and we can be slow to catch on. We can be wrong or misguided in our approaches.

Q: How is environmental reporting different today than in the earlier years of your career?

A: On the positive side, with technological advances, we understand a lot more about ecosystems today. On the negative side, with the shrinking of the press, [fewer] questions are being asked to the detriment of all of us.

Policymakers and bureaucrats feel less obligated to answer questions. And if we don’t have media outlets asking them, the information often won’t be volunteered.

Major state agencies today [direct you to] a spokesperson rather than the expert who can answer your questions.

You have to submit questions and get “answers” that aren’t really answers but wrap things in the way they want it to come out. Transparency has certainly suffered.

Q: What do you think you’ll miss about your work life?

A: I’ll definitely miss the interaction from working with so many like-minded people who have a good sense of humor and are so motivated by what they are doing. It’s a labor of love.

Q: What are you looking forward to in the year ahead?

A: Experiencing day after day without deadlines. More time outdoors at my leisure, reading a book, tinkering in my pollinator garden or just taking walks. Doing things on the spur of the moment. New things, like increasing my birdwatching. And more time in the mountains.

Q: Do you have any advice for the next generation of environmental journalists?

A: Read widely. Check the nooks and crannies. Push to speak directly to people who know what you are trying to write about. Don’t settle for layers of spokespeople.

And what’s left of the media keeps working on even faster deadlines. It’s getting hard to meet the basic tenet of journalism: to report thoroughly and accurately.

I’m not sure how to combat that. It can’t just be about clicks. We need new ways of thinking about how we inform people and convince them that there’s a true need to know what’s going on around them.

[Click Here to see a list of articles written by Ad Crable in the Journal.]

[Click Here to see a list of articles by Ad Crable on LancasterOnline.com]

(Reprinted from Chesapeake Bay Journal.)

Ad Crable Signs Off:

-- LancasterOnline: Ad Crable Signs Off After More Than 37 Years Of Outdoors Columns [PDF of Article]

Just A Few Stories By Ad Crable:

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: Pennsylvania Counties Take The Lead In Water Quality Cleanup Plans

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: Volunteer Laurie Barr Leads Hunt For Abandoned Conventional Oil & Gas Wells In Pennsylvania

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: Environmental Group Files Lawsuit To Ban ATVs In PA State Forests

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal - Dozens Of Ancient Eel Weirs Uncovered In Susquehanna River

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: Penn State Study: Conventional Oil & Gas Wastewater Spread On Pennsylvania Roads Bad For Health, Land

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: PA Expands Definition Of Environmental Justice Communities, Faces Criticism For Lack Of Power To Stop Harmful Projects