The environment as affected by the oil and gas industries

Dillon Bergin

Dillon Bergin covers the environment for Searchlight New Mexico, focusing on the state’s booming oil and gas industries. He has written about immigration and migration, climate change, and food for the New Republic and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was a Fulbright Germany Journalism Fellow from 2019 to 2020. A proud Midwesterner from South Bend, Indiana, he’s spent the last four years between Philadelphia, where he went to school, and Freiburg, Germany where his heart resides. For Searchlight New Mexico, Dillon investigates the way the state’s oil and gas industries affect New Mexico’s land, water and wildlife, and the impact of these industries on the health of New Mexicans.

Searchlight New Mexico

Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit investigative news organization that specializes in social justice issues. Our mission is to focus high-impact journalism on topics of local, regional and national interest in order to allow the public to see into the remote recesses of government and to expose abuses of power. We launched in January 2018 with a mandate to cover child and family well-being in New Mexico, which is by all measures - child poverty, child abuse, education, parental incarceration rates, drug and alcohol abuse - the worst place in America to grow up. We write deeply reported, narrative stories that address intractable problems and in just 18 months we have won major state and national journalism awards. More importantly, our work has triggered legislative proposals, major policy changes, and a statewide commitment (led by the new governor) to child well-being.