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Hello!

My name is Christiana, an environmental storyteller


About Me

I cover environment, agriculture and energy issues across the Midwest. I hold a master’s from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where I specialized in health, environment and science reporting and data journalism.

My work combines investigative and data-driven reporting with on-the-ground storytelling to show how environmental decisions shape people’s lives in a changing climate.

Recent Work

Chicago Tribune •

As study shows pesticides drifting onto Illinois schools and parks, residents push for better tracking

TREMONT, Ill. — On her 43 acres of woods and reclaimed native prairie in rural Tazewell County, Katie VandenBerg walked the edge of her property, inspecting a line of oaks bordered by miles of corn and soybean fields.
The oak leaves are curled and stunted — damage she believes is tied to pesticide applications on nearby farms. 
Since buying the land three years ago, VandenBerg, whose family has lived in Tazewell County for seven generations, said she has “gone down a rabbit hole” trying to under...
Chicago Tribune •

Lake Michigan communities outraged by proposed rollback of federal coal ash rules

TOWN OF PINES, Ind. — In the herb garden beside her home on Colorado Avenue, Cathi Murray digs through the soil and pulls out two glittering black rocks.
They’re not ordinary stones, she said. They’re pieces of coal ash — waste from coal burned at the nearby Michigan City Generating Station, less than 3 miles away on the southern shores of Lake Michigan.

The rocks and dust she finds in her backyard and along the overgrown right of way behind her home — places where her two daughters played growi...
Chicago Tribune •

At peak time for migratory birds flying through Chicago, birding groups are tracking deadly window collisions

As dawn broke over the Loop, Annette Prince patrolled the streets armed with a lime green net, racing to collect four colorful birds lying dead under glass skyscrapers before seagulls could snatch them up.

It’s like an Easter egg hunt, she said — just not the fun kind.

Every morning during the spring migration season of March to June, Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, leads hundreds of volunteers who scour downtown Chicago searching for migratory birds that have collided w...
Chicago Tribune •

Illinois farmers hope Supreme Court protects state safeguards in Roundup cancer case

Harold Wilken still remembers the moment nearly 30 years ago when he was sprayed with herbicides after a hose broke on his family farm in Danforth, Illinois.

A decade later, Wilken was diagnosed with cancer. He said he believes years of herbicide exposure contributed to his health problems, including tonsil and lymph node cancer.

“I’m done with this,” Wilken said of herbicides.
Today, Wilken grows 4,000 acres of grain, rye, corn and soybeans in central Illinois with his son — without the use of...
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"An Invisible Poison"

Watch my first short documentary about Chicago's lead contamination crisis. The film premiered at Facets Theatre in June 2025. 

"Bai Hokou"

Dzanga-Sangha is a protected wilderness area in the Central African Republic in Congo Basin – the second largest rainforest in the world. In Bai Hokou, a basecamp for wildlife monitoring, World Wildlife Fund researchers track the daily habitats of endangered species like wild western lowland gorillas, forest elephants and agile mangabeys, the only habituated group in the world.

We spent a week in Bai Hokou shadowing the habituation team as they tracked non-habituated Limo gorilla group and mangabeys.

Photos