Meet Grace Fiori: Buffalo Fire’s new environment and agriculture reporter

Massachusetts native brings sensitivity, passion and on-the-ground experience to the role

It’s a long way from Amherst, Mass. to Bismarck, culturally as well as geographically. But Grace Fiori, Buffalo’s Fire’s new environmental reporter, is taking the leap in stride. The recent University of Massachusetts graduate, who began on July 8, had barely landed when she got her first story, and a big one: The Environmental Protection Agency was hitting Marathon Oil Co. with a historic $64.5 million civil penalty for air quality violations on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

Investigating the environmental impacts of the oil and gas industry was on Fiori’s to-do list, but she didn’t expect to start on that quite so soon. She credits the quick turnaround of that story with her membership in a journalistic collaborative called the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. Editor Tegan Wendland alerted Fiori to the EPA announcement.

“It obviously became apparent immediately that it was a very significant moment in time, because it is one of the largest, if not the largest, settlements for emissions for stationary sources,” said Fiori, “and it is one of the only times in recent decades that an oil and gas producer has been really held accountable for the effects that they’re having on the environment and the communities that live near their operations.”

Growing up in Central Massachusetts, Fiori’s principal connection with the environment stemmed from her immersion in agriculture. She grew up surrounded by farmlands, her first jobs being on those farms, and she quickly developed a fascination for growing food and exploring food systems and all they entail.

“Everything is involved in food, and food is involved in everything: social, political, economic. It’s also a very emotional topic; people have a lot of personal connections with eating, growing food, and working with the land. It’s a very intimate experience, and it just really lends power and impact when we’re talking about all these issues, and so I just find it’s a universal experience, and a great way to frame things.”

One of the farms she worked for was a part of the international World Farmers Organisation, which among other things connects immigrant and refugee farmers with land to grow culturally relevant crops.

“That experience definitely opened my eyes to the disparities in the food system — but disparities is such a small word to describe the food system and the issues that it faces,” she said. That’s also where she began learning about the importance of food sources like amaranth, considered a weed by industrial farmers but with a millennial history as a rich food source by Indigenous peoples as well as immigrants.

“Indigenous peoples have always known amaranth as an incredibly nutritionally dense, multi-purpose, resilient crop,” she said. “Traditional ecological knowledge is just starting to be recognized by mainstream scientific environmental organizations as not only legitimate but also essential to addressing the issues facing our climate and landscape today. The agricultural industry is recognizing that incorporating first foods and approaches to growing is going to be necessary to mitigate climate change and feed the population.”

Fiori says she found her way into journalism thanks to excellent journalism teachers at her high school. “I knew I liked to write, and there’s just something so special about hearing people’s stories,” she said. “It’s always been real-life stories that hold so much power and sway to me.”

At the University of Massachusetts, based in the agriculturally rich Connecticut River Valley, she continued to be immersed in a farming environment, and she focused her education on her two great passions: journalism and sustainable agriculture, earning a double major in the two subjects. She took on the role of managing editor of the university newspaper, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, but still found time to work on local farms.

The impacts of climate change really came home for her there in a powerful way. She witnessed the impacts of a devastating flood on the farms where she worked in the Connecticut River Valley. And at an internship at the Harvard Press, she reported on a family with a generations-old orchard that suffered a complete wipeout of their stone fruit crop and much of their apple crop due to unseasonably heavy rains and late-season frosts.

“They were so vulnerable with me, and shared how impactful that had been, and how exhausting it is to have no safety net,” she said. “We often romanticize farming and agriculture and that whole way of life, but farming is so unpredictable, and to have it consistently be escalating, you don’t really think about that.”

Looking ahead to her first job, Fiori decided to apply to Report for America, a national service program that places young journalists into newsrooms around the country to report on under-covered issues. That’s how she ended up at Buffalo’s Fire, which is receiving her as its second RFA reporter. Education and Indigenous Democracy reporter Adrianna Adame is Buffalo’s Fire’s first.

Fiori says she is looking forward to immersing herself in an entirely new environment and getting to know key players in the tribal communities and in the community at large, beginning with a follow-up to the Marathon story.

“There have been community organizers on Fort Berthold and North Dakota as a whole that have been advocating for air quality standards and testing and data collection for environmental impacts of the oil and gas industry on Fort Berthold and in the state,” she said. “It wasn’t just the EPA who discovered this development, and so hearing about their findings, where they’re going, what they can see the next steps being is critical.”

She is looking forward to meeting with local community organizers to learn about the issues they are confronting in terms of the environmental impacts of local industries. Agriculture, too, remains a central theme. “I’m very excited to learn about local food producers, food sovereignty initiatives, local food access, and ways that different tribal communities are practicing that in their homes,” she added.

Fiori brings a high level of sensitivity to her work, and is eager to hear ideas and input from community members.

“I understand the power of people’s personal stories, and that they’re theirs. And that’s a very important thing to give away to a journalist, especially someone who is a stranger and a new person. And at the foundation of that is building relationships, and just being able to connect.

“I see the purpose of journalism is to honor communities, and to celebrate communities,” she added. “And sometimes you honor a community by holding the power players and the stakeholders accountable.”