Marla Cone

Marla Cone is a deputy editor who supervises CalMatters’ coverage of environmental issues. She is one of the nation’s most experienced environmental journalists, and her work has won several national awards, including two Scripps-Howard Meeman awards. Previously Marla was senior editor/environment at National Geographic Magazine, where she was one of the editors of the gender project that was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. She spent 18 years as an environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she covered air pollution and then pioneered the environmental health beat. She also was a senior editor for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, where she led an initiative investigating Trump administration science policies. She is the only journalist awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, which she used to research the world’s most contaminated people and animals in the Arctic. Her book Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic was a finalist for a National Academies Communications Award. She taught at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she was the first Hewlett Foundation fellow for environmental journalism, and she was a founding member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Among her most intriguing moments were narwhal hunting with the Inuit in the northernmost community on Earth, in Qaanaaq, Greenland; tracking three-month-old polar bear cubs in Svalbard, Norway; exposing how flame retardants were exponentially growing in human bodies, including in breast-fed infants; and exploring the creation of the first electric concept car from a major automaker, which General Motors inappropriately named the Impact.