Karl Grossman, an author and educator who for more than 50 years has tirelessly advocated for both the environment and journalism, will be honored on Saturday afternoon at the Sag Harbor Cinema in a fund-raiser hosted by former New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.
Mr. Grossman has written books on environmental and energy issues and continues to write weekly columns for Long Island newspapers and online. For 47 years he was a full professor of journalism at the State University at Old Westbury, including in environmental journalism. He was co-anchor of the evening news at WSNL-TV, Long Island’s first commercial television station, as well as program host at WLIW-TV and chief investigative reporter at WVVH-TV.
A former columnist for The Star, Mr. Grossman is perhaps best known for dogged reporting on nuclear power. In 1986, shortly after the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in January of that year, he reported in The Nation that the spacecraft’s next mission was to loft a space probe filled with 24.2 pounds of plutonium-238. Had the Challenger instead blown up on its May 1986 mission, “it would not have been six astronauts and teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe dying, but many more people,” he wrote in 2021.
He is the author of “The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet” and “Weapons in Space,” among several other books, and wrote and narrated “Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens,” a television documentary, and other programs.
The latter two, Mr. Grossman recalled last week, examined why NASA was moving to nuclearize space exploration. “Part of the reason was Star Wars,” as the Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by President Reagan in 1983 and canceled 10 years later, was popularly known. “At the time, it was very much predicated on nukes in space,” he said, “orbiting battle platforms with hypervelocity guns and laser beams. The power source, the high-energy weaponry, would be actual reactors on these orbiting battle platforms.”
In 1991, during “one of these pushes that seem to occur every several years, a nuclear renaissance,” he was at an event in Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to Steve Jambeck, a TV camera operator and director. “He and his wife” — Joan Flynn, an activist with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom — “were very committed environmentalists,” Mr. Grossman said.
Mr. Jambeck had seen Mr. Grossman’s documentary on the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, Conn. “He said, ‘I’d like to work together,’ ” Mr. Grossman remembered. “I said, ‘I’d love to,’ and asked when we should start.” Right now, was the answer. “We went to a little room in the hotel, he set up a camera and lights, and in the middle of the night we started doing a documentary, ‘The Push to Revive Nuclear Power.’ ”
“Out of this happenstance came an effort to start a nonprofit TV initiative,” he said, to create programming about “subjects you don’t see normally on TV.” With Mr. Jambeck, Ms. Flynn, and Frank Melli, a producer and editor, he founded EnviroVideo.
Today, EnviroVideo runs on almost 200 cable television systems in 40 states, and on major satellite TV networks and online. Since 1991, it has produced more than 700 programs, and it is the production arm of the nonprofit Envision Environmental Media Center. Its programming can be seen at envirovideo.com.
Saturday’s talk and screening will run from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Tickets cost $100, available at gofund.me/b755ea208. Larger donations will be welcomed, and donations are tax-deductible. There will be food and a cash bar.
