Len Ackland

OccupationsEmployersWriting careerGenreJournalismNotable workMaking a Real Killing (1999)Notable awards

Len Earl Ackland (born 1944) is a journalist and retired journalism professor from the University of Colorado Boulder. He was founding director of the Center for Environmental Journalism in 1992.^[1]

He graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a bachelor's degree in history, and from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies with a Master's degree. He was a humanitarian worker, RAND researcher and freelance writer during the Vietnam War in 1967-68. He was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the Des Moines Register, where he won The George Polk Award in 1978 for a series on discriminatory mortgage lending, or "redlining." He was editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists when it won the 1987 National Magazine Award for a special issue on the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In 1991 he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder.

Awards

• 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship^[2]
• 1990 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation research and writing grant
• 1987 National Magazine Award, as editor
• 1987 George Polk Award
• 1988 honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago.

Works

• Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West University of New Mexico Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8263-1877-0; 2002, ISBN 978-0-8263-2798-7
• Credibility gap: a digest of the Pentagon papers, National Peace Literature Service, 1972
• "Assessing the Nuclear Age", co-editor, Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1986
• "Why Are We Still in Vietnam", co-editor, Random House, 1970

References