Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award–winning CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti, FCRH ’05, was completing Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America in August 2023 when “Mother Nature … wiped another American town off the map,” he writes in this vivid, unsettling book.
Less than 24 hours after “a wildfire ripped through postcard-perfect Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui,” Vigliotti and his Los Angeles-based national news team were on a deep-sea fishing boat “carving a coast-hugging path through the swelling Pacific.” It was the only way to bypass police roadblocks that residents told him were “less about protecting people from danger than preventing journalists from documenting a crippled emergency response and growing humanitarian crisis.”
Vigliotti got his start as an undergraduate at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station. Since graduating in 2005, he has reported on “historic hurricanes, thermometer-shattering heat waves, record-breaking droughts, megawildfires, back-to-back ‘hundred-year floods,’ unprecedented blizzards, and never-before-seen mudslides,” he writes.
In the book’s four sections—fire, water, air, and Earth—he examines the conditions of each of these catastrophic events and the consequences of government inaction. He blends the harrowing stories of “everyday Americans” struggling to survive in “a habitat threatening to erase their ways of life” with scientific context and glimmers of hope from conservationists.
The result is a persuasive call to make the changes needed to save our home before it’s too late.
