James Bruggers, Who Brought Passion and Kindness to Environmental Reporting, Dies at 68
Key takeaways
- Republish James Bruggers at Point Reyes in Marin County, California.
- The cause of death was a combination of thyroid cancer and pneumonia, said his wife, Chris Bruggers.
- He spent the final seven years of his career at Inside Climate News, where he covered the Southeast and focused much of his work on the impacts of coal mining, petrochemical development and plastics pollution.
Why this matters: environmental and climate reporting with long-term consequences.
Republish James Bruggers at Point Reyes in Marin County, California. Credit: Courtesy of Chris Bruggers Related As a Plastic Waste Plant Violates Pollution Rules, Its Owner Makes the Case for a Second Location Looking to Jesus and Buddha, a Kentucky Passionist Priest Finds Hope Amid an Enveloping Global Environmental Crisis Houston’s Plastic Waste, Waiting More Than a Year for ‘Advanced’ Recycling, Piles up at a Business Failed Three Times by Fire Marshal Share This Article Republish Most Popular Emergency Drawdown at Flaming Gorge Hits Its Recreation Economy Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges ‘We Just Want Clean Water’: Residents Sue a North Carolina County Over Landfill Contamination James Bruggers, whose decades of dogged reporting shined a light on polluting corporations, inadequate regulations and the people who fought against them for environmental justice, died Tuesday at a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. He was 68.
The cause of death was a combination of thyroid cancer and pneumonia, said his wife, Chris Bruggers.
Bruggers’ journalism career stretched back to his high school newspaper in Saginaw, Michigan, and brought him to reporting jobs in Montana, Alaska, California and Louisville, where he was an environmental beat reporter for the Courier Journal from 1999 to 2018. He spent the final seven years of his career at Inside Climate News, where he covered the Southeast and focused much of his work on the impacts of coal mining, petrochemical development and plastics pollution. Bruggers retired last year but continued to contribute stories to Inside Climate News through April.