“Environmental Journalism is Fundamental to Create Awareness of the Challenges We Are Confronting.”

September 15, 2016

Journalist and environmental activist, Stuart Sender, gave a workshop on Environmental  Journalism along with his Guatemalan filmmaker colleague, Marvin del Cid to dozens of Dominican reporters and media experts. The workshop, part of the Dominican Republic Environmental  Film Festival 2016 (DREFF),  was held at Funglode in Santo Domingo.

Dozens of Dominican reporters and environmentalists attended the workshop, which focused on environmental issues. Both visiting professionals are journalists and producers.

The workshop included dynamic exchanges among participants and the exhibition of part of their work, as examples of how one should, and must, communicate in the media on the topic of the environment.

With specific recommendations, the two speakers stressed the importance of understanding scientific language and knowing the facts having to to do with the environment and climate change in order to be able to explain situations in the context with the many available media outlets.

They also offered examples of how environmental  journalism has played a key role in high-level policymaking decisions.

Director of Communications at Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (Funglode), journalist Elina María Cruz, opened the meeting in which Marisel León, director of the EcoRed Development Program thanked the DREFF for organizing the event, calling it “such a necessary training course.” Alberto Pujols, provincial director of the Ministry of Environment of La Romana, attended the workshop with a group of reporters from the province.

Workshop speakers:

Stuart Sender is an Oscar nominated filmmaker, television writer and journalist. Among other film titles, he produced and directed the documentary “Prisoner of Paradise” nominated for an Oscar. It also won the prestigious Grierson Award for Best Documentary, nominated by the Directors Guild. Stuart Sender served as chief executive producer on “The Garden,” nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary. He began his career with CBS News, then worked as a producer of the weekly PBS series South Africa “Now,” which won the Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism and a New York Emmy for best news program. He was head of production of the documentary “Mandela: Free At Last.” He is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Dominican Republic Environmental Film Festival (DREFF).

Marvin del Cid, originally from Guatemala, holds a degree in Communication Sciences and has extensive experience in the visual and multimedia area. He worked for several media outlets in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Currently, he is working as an editor at Grupo Diario Libre in the Dominican Republic. He has exhibited his photographic work on five occasions, four individual and one group show. He has won several prizes for photography in the Dominican Republic as well as abroad, including special mention in the Epifanio Lantigua Tourism Award in 2013 for his work in Dominican Treasures; winner of Epifanio Lantigua journalism award in 2014 in the category of Sustainable Tourism and winner of the EWEA (Europe) Photography award in the Americas category. He is the director of the film “Biodiversity in the Dominican Republic.”

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