John McCracken

award-winning environmental journalist

United States

John McCracken is a former Midwest Reporting Fellow for Grist.org and winner of a 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award. He reports on industrial pollution and how climate change is impacting agriculture, culture, and rural life in the Midwest and beyond.

He has been published in the Sierra Magazine, Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Great Lakes Now - Detroit Public Television, Bandcamp Daily, In These Times, The Capital Times, Tone Madison, Belt Magazine, Milwaukee Record, Stained Pages News, and more.

His work has been republished in Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Media, Michigan Public Radio, MSN, Mother Jones, and WIRED

In 2022, he won a Wisconsin Newspaper Association investigative reporting award.

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Portfolio

Environmental reporting

Grist
09/23/2022
The Corn Belt will get hotter. Farmers will have to adapt.

The corn on Zack Smith's 1,200 acres is not his future. Smith, a fifth-generation farmer working the land near Buffalo Center, Iowa, a town of almost 900 near the Minnesota border, knows the climate is changing and, in the future, it will be too hot and dry for a crop like corn.

Grist
11/01/2022
A new tax credit for biogas could be a boon to factory farms

When Maria Payan's son was screened for cancer, she knew he had to leave home. The Payan family lived in Delta, Pennsylvania, a rural community of fewer than 1,000 people near the southern edge of the state, bordering Maryland.

Grist
10/26/2022
As drought chokes Mississippi River, barges carrying grain shipments have nowhere to go

This story is part of the Grist series Parched , an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems. Harvest time has come, but ongoing droughts have left farmers with nowhere to send their grain. The Mississippi River, which carries 60 percent of the country's grain exports, has reached historically low water levels.