On the Passing of NYT reporter John Holusha

Environmentalists and thoughtful people everywhere lost a compatriot last week with the passing of John Holusha, a longtime New York Times business reporter. 

John Holusha arrived in New York in the late 1980s from the New York Times’ Detroit desk. Throughout the 1990s and until 2004 or so, my colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council and I spoke often with John, collaborated with him on stories, and we read his work regularly.

John was among the first mainstream business reporters to pick up on the economic development potential of clean technologies and he wrote often and valuably about the intersection of business and environmentalism. In the early 1990s John wrote about battles at the Federal Trade Commission as environmentalists and industry reps fought over the meaning of proliferating eco-labels. John, a realist, would probably not express much surprise at the fact that the issue of eco-labeling that he wrote about almost twenty years ago remains ineffectively addressed by the FTC to this day.  

John wrote about recycling, real estate, anything having to do with business, the more technology it involved, the better.  I was one of a number of sources who provided background briefings for John on various environmental issues and I spent time doing that during NRDC’s behind the scenes battle with various agencies in the Clinton White House. This was back in 1993 and 1994, as we worked to draft a first-of-its-kind Presidential Executive Order that would require federal executive branch agencies to buy environmentally preferable goods and services.  After we won the battle to get the Executive Order signed by President Clinton, John wrote the front page New York Times article about it.

A number of us at NRDC also worked with John throughout the 1990s as he followed and wrote about our project to develop a recycling paper mill in the South Bronx. An environmental remediation project anchored by a newspaper recycling mill, the paper recycling project was also designed to help stimulate green jobs in an economically depressed area.

John broke the story about that South Bronx paper recycling mill, known as the Bronx Community Paper Company, in a front page Business Section article in May of 1994. It was a lengthy and accurate description of the project, accompanied by a large, above the fold photo, and although John was a fan of the paper mill project, his article was balanced in giving voice to the project’s small group of detractors, and realistic about the hurdles we faced.

John was as interested in engineering and finance as he was in politics and environmental policy.  The Bronx recycling mill was designed by the artist Maya Lin, an aesthetic aspect of the project that John particularly liked. His positive and inspiring support for the vision behind the paper mill project encouraged many of us to believe that our noble endeavor would succeed. After all, because of his work our project literally passed “the front page test”.

John was an insightful and fair reporter, two traits among many that made him so widely trusted.  Although John was trained as an engineer, he caught on early to the fact that along with the technical and financial hurdles to sustainability, there are also many cultural barriers, and that cultural impediments to sustainability might be the most potent barriers of all. He was a realist.

John was not without his bias, and he didn’t pretend to be. To his credit, John’s personal bias was humanitarian and empathic. Commenting to me over lunch one afternoon, he mused about the Bronx paper mill project’s humanitarian vision. Besides making money by recycling paper, the project was designed to help alleviate poverty in New York City, provide social and medical services, and finance a homeless dormitory and a book store. Financially, from a business point of view, it was a heavy lift. John admired its technical features but its social vision seemed to appeal to him most: “I know I’m supposed to be neutral” he said, “but I really hope this project gets built.”

I am certain that there are many, many people out there who have similarly warm tales to share about John Holusha’s smart, professional and humane approach to his work. He was a very decent, sweet man. His much-too-soon passing is a loss, and I extend deepest sympathies to his family from all of John’s friends and admirers at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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