Whitney Pipkin

Journalist

Washington, DC area

A staff writer for the Chesapeake Bay Journal and a freelance journalist whose freelance work has appeared nationally in The Washington Post, National Geographic, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine and Civil Eats and in regional publications such as Virginia Living, Northern Virginia and Arlington magazines. Pipkin has served as guest editor for Edible DC’s summer 2016 and fall 2018 issues. She also writes content and studies for WomenWork.net.

Whitney Pipkin

Journalist

Washington, DC area

Featured
Energy demands for Northern Virginia data centers almost too big to compute
The growing presence of data centers in Northern and Central Virginia is causing an unprecedented spike in projected energy use for the region. A sharp increase in the use of energy-hungry artificial intelligence inside the centers is driving it up even f
Bay Journal
Featured
The Future is Low Fertility (and why we should care)
I’m not sure how to answer the question, “Did you always want to have three kids?” It’s the sort of birthday-party small talk that catches me off guard as my mind wanders somewhere between what’s for dinner and what’s due this week at work. The number of
Common Good | Magazine
Common Good Magazine
Featured
Dolphins 'all over the place' in Chesapeake Bay
Hundreds of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are spending their summers in Chesapeake Bay waters. And now, with the help of crowd-sourced sightings reported each of the last four years, researchers are beginning to understand when and where these mesmeric marine mammals are likely to emerge. While dolphins have had a presence in the Bay since the late 1800s, researchers think they are arriving in larger numbers than before.
Bay Journal
Environment
Featured
Rising waters trigger change for DC's Tidal Basin
A visit to the Tidal Basin in the District of Columbia should deliver sweeping views of cherry trees heavy with pink and white blooms this time of year, drawing millions of onlookers to the concrete shorelines annually. But not this spring. For the second straight year, festival organizers are warning people to stay away, encouraging them to visit virtually.
Bay Journal
Environment
Featured
Microplastics: The grand reach of our tiny plastics problem
Tiny pieces of plastic are in our water, in our air, in our food, in our drinks, in our bodies, and, increasingly, in our headlines. Seemingly everywhere researchers have looked, they’ve found microplastics. I wrote a big report on the subject for the Abell Foundation.
Abell Foundation
Environment
Featured
Menus of the Future Should Be Difficult to Decipher
By some estimates, the United States already has lost 90 percent of the fruit and vegetable varieties that would have been available in the early 1900s. Today, humans look to four crops — wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans — to provide 60 percent of our calories, tapping into just 1 percent of the diversity still available to us.
Heated
National
Featured
Is air cleaner on other side of the block? Museum, residents to test theory
Summer temperatures in Richmond can be 16 degrees hotter in a downtown ward than in a wealthy, tree-lined neighborhood five miles away. But the citizen scientists who found that out in 2017 now hope to answer a new question: Does the quality of air that citizens breathe also depend on their ZIP codes?
Bay Journal
Featured
Grown-Here Grains
Turns out, it takes more than a village to resurrect a local grains economy.
Edible DC
Magazine Writing
Featured
This Wine Guy Is Helping Put Georgian Food on Americans’ Radar
How an American convert to Georgian orthodoxy became an evangelist for the country’s culture. Supra, the first Georgian restaurant in Washington, D.C., has lately been a focus for Noel Brockett’s traditional Georgian feasts, where friends, family, and strangers pay $125 to partake in what, to him, is a sacred act.
Heated
National
Featured
Follow These Tips to Cut Back on Food Waste
There’s something about the freshness of fall that makes us want to overhaul our kitchens. Maybe it was watching those crunchy summer greens go limp in the vegetable drawer or the realization that last week’s molded sliced turkey won’t make it into this week’s lunch boxes. Let’s not even talk about the carton of milk that curdled in the fridge during back-to-back vacations last month.
Heated
National
Featured
Your Hummus Habit Could Be Good For The Earth
Hummus is having a heyday with American consumers, and that could be as good for the soil as it is for our health. Formerly relegated to the snack aisle in U.S. grocery stores, the chickpea-based dip has long starred as the smooth centerpiece of Middle Eastern meals and, increasingly, plant-based diets.
NPR
National
Featured
Livestock fencing needs to pick up pace in Shenandoah Valley
Time seems to slow down in the Shenandoah Valley, where the pastoral act of raising livestock for a living appears as unchanged by the years as the emerald-green hills on either side of Interstate 81. But almost a decade has passed since Virginia first set a goal to have farmers build fences along nearly every Chesapeake Bay-bound stream that livestock could otherwise access in the state.
Bay Journal
Environment
Featured
How to eat with your morals, while staying on budget
CAVA, Taco Bamba and Haute Dogs have figured out the formula to provide health-conscious, fast-casual food at an affordable price. Technically, people could braise short ribs, grill chicken souvlaki and roast a seasonal mix of vegetables by 5 p.m. so their kids can have choices on the way to hockey practice—but it’s not likely.
Northern Virginia Magazine
Magazine Writing
Featured
The South had something worth saving
Rick Middleton didn’t fancy himself an environmental lawyer when he graduated from Yale Law School in 1971. That category didn’t exist. The United States had only just commemorated its first Earth Day, and the future founder of the Southern Environmental Law Center still felt like a fish out of water in New England’s semi-industrial corridor, pining for the bucolic valleys around his Alabama hometown of Birmingham.
Bay Journal
National Environment
Featured
The Lucketts Ladies
“Sorry for the mess,” Suzanne “Suze” Eblen says as I step across the threshold into the Design House at The Old Lucketts Store north of Leesburg. “We’re in the throes of redecorating.”. I chuckle, imagining her saying the same phrase any day of the week about the house she and her business partner, Amy Whyte, have overhauled 140 times so far, selling everything within its walls at weekend events 10 times a year.
Virginia Living
Magazine Writing
Featured
White Horse Mountain worth the millions paid to protect it
Hugging the slow s-curves of road winding into a mountainous sliver of West Virginia’s Hampshire County, I remembered why they call this portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed “wild” — and why clean water advocates were desperate to keep it that way.
Bay Journal
Travel Environment

About

Whitney Pipkin

Whitney Pipkin is a staff writer for the Chesapeake Bay Journal and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared nationally in The Washington Post, National Geographic, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine and Civil Eats and in regional publications like Virginia Living, Northern Virginia and Arlington magazines. Pipkin has served as guest editor for Edible DC’s fall 2018 and summer 2016 issues. Her cover story for Edible's spring 2019 issue won two honorable mentions from the international Hermes Creative Awards. Her work for the Bay Journal earned 1st and 2nd place in Environmental Reporting in 2019 and 2021, respectively, from the MDDC Press Association.