Marla Cone

Marla Cone, one of the nation's most experienced environmental journalists, reported for newspapers for 30 years, including 18 at the Los Angeles Times. At the Times, she was the senior environmental writer and pioneered a beat that focused on explaining scientific information on the risks that pollutants pose to public health, wildlife and ecosystems around the world.

Cone has been the recipient of numerous awards for her reporting. She has twice won the Scripps Howard Meeman Award for environmental reporting and served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists for nine years.

Her book, Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, published by Grove-Atlantic in 2005, was a finalist for the National Academies' Communication Award--the nation's most prestigious science journalism award. In 1999, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, which is usually reserved for scientists, to explore contaminants that are spreading to the Arctic and endangering the people and animals of the far north.

Cone was the University of California-Berkeley's first teaching fellow in environmental journalism, and she taught at the Graduate School of Journalism there for two semesters. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and now lives in Long Beach, Calif., with her husband and son.