Abrahm Lustgarten

Environmental Reporter

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter with a focus on the intersection of business, climate and energy. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American west, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and received the 2016 Keck Futures Initiative Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (One story, “End of the Miracle Machines,” in the series is highlighted at Showcase.) Before joining ProPublica in 2008, Lustgarten was a staff writer at Fortune. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired, Salon, and Esquire, among other publications. He is the author of two books: Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster and China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet. The second project was funded in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Lustgarten earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003 and holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cornell.