BILL KOVARIK, PHD
HISTORIAN, JOURNALIST, PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION
BOOKS
Ethyl: A history of the public health conflict over leaded gasoline 1921- 2012. (1993)
Bison Press, 2010 (from 1982 first edition, with revised introduction)The Source: A global history of sustainable energy (2013) (Alternate working title: Billiant)
HISTORY OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION AND THE MASS MEDIA
- A Survey of Central American News Media Hardware, Intercommunication and Development needs: Paper presented to the Eighth Annual Conference on Intercultural and International Communication, Miami, Fla. Feb. 22, 1991. These are the results of a study by the International Center for Foreign Journalists concerning media technology needs in Central America.
- Dr. North and the Kansas City Milk War, Public Health Advocacy Collides with Main Street Respectability, Paper to The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) 1989. This is about a New York physician and public health expert who used yellow journalism tactics to force pasteurization on the milk industry of Kansas city in the 1920s.
- The editor who tried to stop the Civil War: Hezekiah Niles and the New South describes the efforts of one Baltimore editor to reconcile opposing views in the 1820 - 1833 period. He clearly foresaw civil war and proposed a course of economic development for the South which was, perhaps not surprisingly, adopted after the war by Southern progressives, including Atlanta editor Henry Grady. The paper was published in American Journalism in 1992 and has been slightly updated since then.
- Mother of the Forest concerns a gigant ic redwood tree near what is now Yosemite Park, and how its destruction in 1853 outraged Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune, and led to the cre ation of the national park system. This is a chapter from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict with Mark Neuzil .
- The Radium Girls is the story of six dying women who sued a dial-painting factory for knowingly exposing them to dealy radium in the 1920s. It is also the story of how Walter Lippmann of the New York World helped th em. This is also a chapter from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict with Mark Neuzil. ( Resource for 2013 PBS documentary)
- Environmental History Timeline helps remind us of the traditions of reform and the roots of conservation. This was originally a guide for our use when Mark Neuzil and I wrote Mass Media and Environmental Conflict in 1996. Since then it has taken on a life of its own on the web.
- The confluence of newspapers and the environment in the early 20th century Looking at the news coverage of selected public health and conservation issues in the 1899 - 1932 period, we see a striking bipolar distribution, indicating a revival of Progressive era concerns late in the 1920s and the ubiquity of environmental controversy. This is a paper from the 1998 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.
- Green Crusaders and the News Media: Exploring the Lost History of Environmental Conflict Before Silent Spring Presentation to the Communication Studies Seminar Series Virginia Tech September 25, 1998
- Niles Weekly Register Encyclopedia of Journalism History, 2006 -- Niles' concept of news embraced the broadest scope of human experience. His Register kept close track of economics, technology, science, medicine, geography, archaeology, the weather, and many stories of human interest. There was, for example, a dog who rescued another dog from a river. There was the case of a blind woman restored to sight, and another of a slave who killed himself rather than be sold at the slave market. Niles printed many items about ballooning and predicted that someday man would build machines to fly (although he doubted that steam engines could propel them).
- Greenpeace Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, 2009 -- Greenpeace raised street theater and protest tactics to a new level using global media. The effect, according to Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, was a “mind bomb” – that is, an action that would create a dramatic new impression to replace an old cliché. The most obvious example of a “mind bomb” was to overturn the image of heroic whalers to that of heroic ecologists risking their lives to save the gentle giants of the sea. This approach caught the world’s attention and dramatically changed the political terrain for commercial fishing and whaling operations after Greenpeace’s first whaling protests in June of 1975.
- E.W. Scripps and Science -- 2011 -- The unconventional ideas behind the founding of the Science News Service and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. (In Revolutions in Communication).
BIOFUELS AND RENEWABLE ENERGY HISTORY -- Gas wars, corn belt visionaries and the fuel of the future
- The Ethyl Controversy, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993.
- Agenda Setting in the 1924 - 1926 Public Health Controversy over Ethyl (Leaded) Gasoline, AEJMC, 1994. One of the nations first controversies over public exposure to dangerous chemicals. The American oil industry, uncomfortable with even the mildest criticism, blamed the media for its own problems.
- Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead In the Context of Technological Alternatives Society of Automotive Engineer, 1994. In effect, the oil industry falsely claimed in Public Health Service hearings that there were no alternatives to leaded gasoline. These falsehoods were later acknowledcged in legal documents, including private histories of the Ethyl Corp. and court documents in an anti-trust case. In fact, paving the way for alternatives (such as ethanol) was the "original special motive" for leaded gasoline.
- Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future takes an urgent modern theme -- that of finding renewable energy sources -- and asks an historical question. What was known about alternatives and why were they discarded? The paper was published by the Society of Automotive Historians in 1998.
- Chemcases: Fuels and Society, NSF Funded chemistry education project, Kennesaw State University, 2001. The fuels section is one of several concerning scientific issues in modern culture.
- ETHYL The 1920s Environmental Conflict Over Leaded Gasoline and Alternative Fuels, Paper to the American Society for Environmental History Annual Conference March 26-30, 2003 Providence, R.I.
- Late Lessons, Early Warnings, Express TV (Denmark) - Award winning documentar has interiew with Dr. Kovarik
- Ethyl leaded gasoline: How a classic occupational disease became an international public health disaster,” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, October 2005
- Looking South: The world ethanol industry is booming – thanks to the Brazilian example, Com Ciência Ambiental (Sao Paulo, Brazil), winter 2007.
- Ethanol’s first century: Blending programs in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, paper to the 30th International Symposium on Alcohol Fuel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 2006.
- National Public Radio interview with Dr. Kovarik about biofuels Feb 15, 2007
- Back to the Fuel of the Future, Life Sciences Symposium, University of Missouri, March, 2007.
- Special Motives: Automotive Inventors and Alternative Fuels in the 1920s Paper to the Society for the History of Technology, Oct. 19, 2007
- Biofuels: History and public debate, (Slide show) University of Maryland School of Public Policy, April 11, 2008
- Biofuels in History, for World Cafe at Concordia University Montreal, Nov. 20, 2010 and Missouri School of Journalism, Food, Fuel and Society conference, Oct. 12, 2010.
- The Source -- The lost history of sustainable energy / Sketches for a book under development for publication in 2012.
- The history of biofuels -- for CABI, the international development information organization, summer 2012.
DOCUMENARY VIDEO
Freedom Fuels documentary takes an in-depth look at renewable fuel sources, such as bio-diesel, ethanol and vegetable oil. And now for some shamelsess self promotion: Among the stars -- Willie Nelson, Daryl Hannah, John Stewart and Bill Kovarik.
