S1, Ep2 | 2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

Amy [00:00:10] Hello and welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about talking about climate. We take a crack at intersectional justice oriented media criticism for climate coverage. I'm Amy Westervelt.

Mary [00:00:21] Right. And I'm Mary Heglar. As we mentioned in our last episode, we're gearing up to going biweekly in 2020, but we're going to spend the rest of 2019 taking a look back at the past few years and how much climate storytelling has changed recently, because it really has. Right?

Amy [00:00:38] Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember when you could barely even say climate change in a story.

Mary [00:00:42] (laughs).

Amy [00:00:42] It's really true! And it's really changed a lot. Specifically in the Frump era. And we wanted to do a recap of the whole Frump era. But we'd be here forever. So we're gonna break it up a little.

Mary [00:00:53] Yeah. We really would. In this episode, we're going to focus on 2016 and 2017 and next time we'll look across 2018 and review it and then we'll do an episode on 2019.

Amy [00:01:04] Then it'll be 2020 and we'll be every two weeks! Try to think of these recap episodes as sort of snippets. We're humble enough to know that there's no way that we got our hands on all the great climate writing that's out there.

Mary [00:01:16] Exactly. And if there's something we missed in 2016 and 2017 that you thought should have been discussed, please tweet at us, we're at realhottake and we're bound to miss some great stuff.

Amy [00:01:27] That's right. Okay. Should we get started?

Mary [00:01:29] Yeah, let's do it.

Amy [00:01:41] So, Mary, how was your 2016?

Mary [00:01:45] Not great.

Amy [00:01:48] Really?

Mary [00:01:52] It really felt really bad.

Amy [00:01:56] I felt like a yearlong hangover.

Mary [00:02:02] Yeah, actually, I in 2016, I found myself waking up with more existential dread than I do now.

Amy [00:02:10] Yeah. Actually, climate is a big part of what has been very, very wrong with this presidency. But it like it. It was like barely even discussed in any of the debates. Not in the primary at all, like..

Mary [00:02:27] Do you remember that debate? That was all about that one guy in that red sweater that was like undecided between Hillary and Donald Trump.

Amy [00:02:36] Yeah.

Mary [00:02:36] And this is like a real late in the election. And everybody became obsessed with him. And it was like not one word about climate in these debates that I can recall. I do remember being like, really happy when Bernie Sanders brought it up. And one of the debates, it was like his opening statement. I was like, beautiful.

Amy [00:02:55] I know. And even I feel like even the environmental reporters were not talking that much about what he would do to roll back any kind of regulations on the oil industry. You know, he he talked about withdrawing from Paris is like part of his one of his campaign promise.

Mary [00:03:22] So, you know, really, I guess what's disturbing is that I see those exact same people now who are so dismissive and so smug in 2016 being just as dismissive and just as smug today. And so I'm like do you not learn?!

Amy [00:03:39] Right.

Mary [00:03:39] I think the rule should be if you laughed more than you cried in 2016, you need to listen more than you talk in 2020, that is the fucking rule.

Amy [00:03:50] That is a great rule! You know, kind of in keeping with our subject here, which is climate coverage, there was a huge shift in climate coverage from 2016 and 2017. And I think, yeah, you know, the election definitely played into it. And some of the pieces that we're going to talk about today certainly did too.

Mary [00:04:12] Yeah. So when I was doing the research for this episode, I was struck by a lot of stuff. First of all, one of the things that really stuck out to me is that I was still seeing a lot of articles that were relying really heavily on the individual action frame, which now I don't feel like I see that as much anymore. It's far more widely accepted that we need collective action, that we need political action, that this is the fault of industries and corporations. But when I was looking for articles from 2016, that wasn't all them. What I was finding, I was finding a lot of like you should recycle and you should compost and you should like cut your carbon foot right in these different ways. And even the ways I was seeing for people to cut their carbon footprints were really like not even the biggest things you could do as individuals. I wasn't seeing as much about like stopping flying. It was more about like what you do as a consumer on the day to day level, which I found that really interesting.

Amy [00:05:16] Yeah, yeah. It was still really like around just like buying different stuff, that's the key.

Mary [00:05:24] Yeah, exactly. Because you're a consumer, not a citizen. But we know that that's wrong.

Amy [00:05:28] Yeah, I know.

Amy [00:05:29] I feel like some of the pieces in 2016 were like the ones that did talk about climate straight on and talked about, you know, and we're kind of some of amongst some of the earlier ones talking about the path that we are on and what that might look like. And all of those ones were like eerily prescient. I just.

Mary [00:05:52] Yeah, yeah.  For example, ProPublica did this story on Houston's perfect storm and it pretty much predicts Hurricane Harvey

Amy [00:06:02] Yeah, it's crazy. The little map that they have where they're like and then there's these chemical plants and if they get hit …I was like oh my god, all of that happened, and not that long after that story came out!

Mary [00:06:12] Exactly. They came out and were like, look at science, predicting the future in a very eerie way.

Mary [00:06:21] I know another one that had that effect for me. I want to read a little bit from this by Jeff Goodell.

Mary [00:06:28] And the title is Can New York be Saved in the era of global warming, which I highly recommend everybody going back to read.

Amy [00:06:37] Oh, this gives me a chance to debut our new Sound Effect for reading excerpts. Here it is. [wind chime]

Mary [00:06:48] If it is going to survive fortifying New York will require more than just walls. It will require a radical rethinking of the relationship between the city and the people who live in it. If the central role of government is to keep people safe, what happens when people realize they are not? What is the government's role in keeping people out of harm's way? How does the government compensate people whose properties are underwater? The Dutch architect who led the team that designed the Blue Dunes and who has done as much thinking about how to live with water as anyone compare sea level rise to other transformative catastrophes such as the dustbowl, a partly manmade natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role that government plays in ensuring the long term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. We're going to need a new deal, he says. It's going to require a rethinking of the social construct contract in America.

Mary [00:07:47] Does that remind you of anything happening right now? Anything at all?

Amy [00:07:51] I know it's crazy, I know!

Mary [00:07:53] Yeah. So I thought that that piece super interesting.

[00:07:57] Another thing I was seeing when I was looking back was that we were just starting to put the pieces together around climate refugees. As it relates to, you know, these waves of migrants coming from Latin America and really all over the world. That was like I don't remember. I started seeing climate refugees as a term in 2017. I didn't see it so much in 2016 and in a lot of journalism. And again, might have missed some stuff.

Amy [00:08:25] Well, it's interesting because climate refugees was a big thing in 2009 and then it totally disappeared. You know, there was this. There were all these stories about it in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit.

[00:08:41] There were all of these stories about the Maldives and about Tuvalu. And there were activists that were there, you know, like holding signs up about like art, like we're going to be underwater soon, you know.

Amy [00:08:54] And then in the U.S., there was the indigenous village of Kivalina in Alaska. That actually was one of the first big lawsuits against fossil fuel companies because their village was disappearing because of glacier melt and sea level rise. And that was in 2009, 2010 ish. So there was like a bunch of stories around it. And that was also the first time you started hearing about climate reparations like that actually started to come up around Copenhagen. And then it just like totally disappeared within a year.

Mary [00:09:28] Do you know why?

Amy [00:09:28] The whole like, well, I … think It was mostly because of the climate gate scandal. So I don't know if you remember.

Mary [00:09:34] I don't remember. It's like one of those things that I keep seeing people mention and I don't know…

Amy [00:09:43] OK. So this is it was it was wild because it was basically like a "hack" of a bunch of high level IPCC climate scientists. So climate scientists who were working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its annual reports and like all of that stuff around 2008, 2009 and in in like the months leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, which was in 2009, there were all these leaks of emails and they were totally like it was all like this completely manufactured scandal where it was like, you know, gotcha scientists like, you know, turns out They're still really uncertain about climate change and they're colluding to try to make it seem like they're more sure than they are.

Amy [00:10:37] And, you know, kind of took like bits and pieces of people's emails and and cobbled them together to to create this non scandal. But it was enough. I mean, at that time, the we had Obama in office and Congress was in control of Democrats. And so it was the the first time in recent history, kind of since Kyoto, that there was a real chance that we might have like a binding global climate treaty. And so the fossil fuel guys were going frickin nuts, like the spending on ads and lobbying and all that stuff is just off the charts in the lead up to Copenhagen. And then here comes climate gate.

[00:11:21] And like honestly, it's totally one of those things where you're like, how did this work? Because it was so obviously bogus and it was clownish. But it worked. And it was it was like the thing that was it was actually like a really key kind of modern turning point on climate action where like it really seemed like something was going to happen. And there again, it's like there were a ton of youth activists. You know, this is why sometimes, too, now when people are like, oh, if we just get Democrats in charge, it'll be fine. I'm like, well, history says no.

Mary [00:11:53] Yeah. I think it's also like why we see people on the …. Well I wouldn't call it the far left like people who want to preserve the plant aren't far anything. BUT  you see a lot of folks in the environmental space, in the climate space, looking at candidates for office really hard. And I think there's a lot of for lack of a better term trauma or I like broken promises. Some people who have really like that, they were gonna get somewhere at some point and then finding out that they're absolutely not getting somewhere. And it's just really hard to believe in political power.

Amy [00:12:36] Yeah. There's some baggage there.

Mary [00:12:37] In case you hear some hissing in the background, I have a very old apartment with a very old heater, which means I'm very lucky to have heat, but I can't control this thing.

Amy [00:12:47] It's a literal hot take.

Mary [00:12:55] (laughing) But yeah, another one of the trends that I saw in the research for this show that actually kind of cracked me up in a very sad way was all of these people still thinking that Donald Trump might become presidential?

Amy [00:13:11] Oh right, like he was going to rise to the occasion.

Mary [00:13:14] Remember Van Jones, and that whole like the night he became president.

Amy [00:13:18] Oh, I still have. Oh, my God. I have not gotten over that yet. Yeah. Yeah.

Mary [00:13:22] But I think this put a lot in the in the articles about the cop that here the COP of 2016, which was held in Morocco.

Amy [00:13:32] [record scratch noise] COP is short for conference of parties. It is the decision making body responsible for monitoring and reviewing the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But when people say things like, you know, the COP in Morocco or the COP in Copenhagen, they mostly refer to these global climate conventions where representatives from various countries are trying to come up with a global treaty. The COP has met annually since 1995. So that's how long people have been trying to get some sort of global agreement on climate policy. The Kyoto Protocol was the first agreement to come out of a COP that seemed like it could actually move the needle globally on climate change. It was torpedoed by the efforts of industry and various Republican groups. And George W. Bush pulled out of it officially in 2001. And the only one that has been drafted and actually stuck is the one that was written in Paris. And then, of course, the United States pulled out of it. [record scratch noise]

Mary [00:14:43] I saw a lot of article saying like, oh, he might rise to the occasion.

Mary [00:14:46] And then I was also seeing these articles that were saying that the U.S. was going to become a pariah state and that Donald Trump attitude toward the climate might turn out to be a good thing by motivating everyone else to take action. And we know how that turned out.

Mary [00:15:04] But it just it almost seemed like people weren't even believing it when they were saying it. They just sort of had to find some silver lining, some way to find something. Yeah.

Amy [00:15:15] Yes. Speaking of outrage, remember Scott Pruitt?

Mary [00:15:18] Who? God Scot Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, Rick fucking Tillerson, Rex Tillerson. My what I will never, ever, ever forgive him for is making Rex Tillerson not that bad of a guy like I remembered there was one point where, like, he seemed like the adult in the room, like Rex Tillerson is going to save us. And I was like, what kind of gaslit-ass shit is this?

Amy [00:15:49] Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Rex Tillerson, who's who's like most recent public appearance, was testifying in the Exxon fraud trial jury about the time that, you know, he was CEO of Exxon as they were like lying about climate change impacts. Yeah, I mean that guy. But then Scott Pruitt and his and his his secret phone booth. Oh my. Remember. Yeah. I don't remember if that came out Probably hadn't come out yet in 2016.

Mary [00:16:23] No, it came out in 2017. Scott Pruitt was out of office the summer of 2017. He did not last long. All of this shit happened really, really fast and that's why we all have whiplash now. [**Correction: Pruitt resigned in 2018].

Mary [00:16:40] I got to say that we started to see some real strides in climate storytelling from 2016 2017 and starting with the summer of 2016. There was this flurry of major climate coverage. It thought it seemed like what Donald Trump was elected. There was a rush to cover the subject and take a lot more seriously like I was seeing article after article after article and really big news organization. It was also a really big year for climate action. That's the year Amy Brady's first climate fiction column came out in the Chicago Review book. So I think that was a pretty big milestone.

Amy [00:17:23] Yeah. Totally. That was huge because before that I feel like, you know, CliFi, climate fiction existed, but it was sort of like it was just it was kind of like a niche thing and honestly. OK. So there was one guy that pitched me on CliFi like years ago, like starting 10, 15 years ago. And he always just seemed like a little bit nutty. So I feel like 2017 was sort of the year that climate fiction became a real thing.

[00:17:54] Yeah, it matured!

[00:17:54] With like real plots, just like a variety of types of story. Yeah.

Mary [00:18:01] And I think that also was the year that The Great Derangement came out, which is Amitav Ghosh's really great essay collection about why is climate not in all of our stories. It was published in 2016. So you're kind of in the same same time frame.

Amy [00:18:23] 2017 was also the year that we started to see more people talking about how we talk about climate change, especially on the emotional and psychological front. Doctor Renee Lertzman has been talking about that for a long time and she wrote a piece in Sierra magazine called How Can We Talk About Global Warming?

Mary [00:18:45] I haven't read that.

Amy [00:18:46] Yeah You know, she wrote a book a little while back called Environmental Melancholia. That was sort of talking about tackling climate grief and then and then has kind of focused on this space of of the psychology of environmental news for a while. Anyway, I feel I feel like 2017 we start to actually see more of these kinds of conversations start to emerge in the coverage on climate, which we hadn't been necessarily seeing much.

Mary [00:19:21] Yeah. And the the range of emotions, which means the range of language got much, much, much bigger. And yeah, it was a groundbreaking year for climate coverage. a lot of people did some really amazing work.

Mary [00:19:40] Before we get into that, I think we also got to recap some of the issues that caused a lot of that shift to happen. With so much happening, so much shit like Donald Trump and his fucking goons like come into office and with a straight god damn face and were like, you know what, fuck y'all, y'all clean water and clean air, you're fucked again.

Amy [00:20:05] We're going to get rid of the EPA.

Mary [00:20:08] We're going to poison ourselves to own the fucking libs. Hard to get this shit like they pulled out of Paris. They straight up tried to eliminate the EPA.

Amy [00:20:18] They deregulated every fucking thing totally. I know the guy that was in charge of the EPA transition team for Trump is this guy named Steve Milloy, who has been basically trying to kill the EPA since it was born.

Mary [00:20:36] The moment that haunts my dreams the most is when he pulled out of Paris and he had like that big reception on the Rose Garden and it was crazy fucking hot. And there was a band that played the whole time. Yeah. And it just felt so much like the Titanic.

Mary [00:20:51] Another big political event going on in 2016 and 2017 was Standing Rock.

Mary [00:20:59] And I've got two pieces that I want to talk about from that phrase. I want to acknowledge that there are some really great coverage on Standing Rock from Unicorn Riot and Mother Jones. I think they might have teamed up, actually. Yeah. And Unicorn Riot covered every second of it. It was really fantastic and really brave because it got extraordinarily violent on the part of the state. Yeah. Against protestors, you know.

Amy [00:21:29] Totally. I know.

Mary [00:21:30] And the piece I want to read from is the eviction letter to the Army Corps of Engineers by Harriet Frazer of of the Sioux Nation.

Mary [00:21:43] [wind chime] I take your letter as issuing a direct and irresponsible threat to the water protector. It appears to further empower the militarized police force that has been brutalizing and terrorizing our water protectors while imposing the blame and the risk on unarmed, peaceful people. We have pleaded for the protection of the United States. Your letter makes a grave and dangerous mistake. Federal efforts to de-escalate the violence should be aimed at the wrongdoers, not at our peaceful peace people.

Mary [00:22:16] And. I just wanted to read that piece. And in the words of someone actually on the ground there of.

Amy [00:22:26] Yeah.

Mary [00:22:26] The disproportionate violence and the disproportionate blame for that violence, because they would straight, do stuff that was caught on camera, and then claim they didn't do it.

Mary [00:22:35] And then the footage came out and it was like, oh, you just straight up lied.

Mary [00:22:41] And it was just totally far cry from what you see at most by climate marches or invite Earth Day. You know, demonstrations and what happens basically when it's mostly white people.

Amy [00:22:53] Right. Right. Yeah.

Amy [00:22:55] And actually, this Standing Rock, I mean, I think it's really important for people to kind of like look back at these stories and we'll post links to these in the show notes, because this is the origin of what we're seeing now, where you have pipeline companies working with groups like ALEC, which like writes, you know, legislation that they then just give to politicians and actually passing laws that criminalize protests. This was the thing that made them kind of start thinking this way, that we really have to crack down on these protests because guess what? If oil companies don't have access to as much cheap indigenous land as they want, which is pretty much like what they've done for decades, they keep this whole thing of running pipelines this way, in that way all over the country, in between Canada and the U.S. and wherever doesn't work anymore.

Mary [00:23:48] Right. And where these pipelines go missing, indigenous women tends to happen.

Amy [00:23:55] Yeah, right. Yes. Yes. You end up with these things that they call "man camps," which are like these giant camps of, you know, workers. And there's a huge incidence of women being assaulted, battered, raped, gone, missing, murdered. All of that.  Sometimes it happens as a result of protests. Sometimes it happens just as a result of there being like large groups of men isolated in an area where there aren't that many women. And they kind of take women, you know.

Mary [00:24:28] Right. And it's not just like they take women. They take very vulnerable, unprotected women, women who are marginalized, who they know the police don't care about. Basically.

Amy [00:24:39] Right. Right. That they won't be tracked and they won't be prosecuted.

Mary [00:24:44] Yeah. Yeah. The other piece I wanted to read from is by Julian Brave Noyce Cat in The Guardian.

[00:24:56] It's called I Was Arrested for Protesting and a reason I wanted to read from that. So Julian is an indigenous man from, I believe, Canada by way of California.

Mary [00:25:08] And so for me, in the wake of the Trump election, it was like, oh, my guy like this. This needs to be taken more seriously. I started to take like direct action a lot more seriously, whereas before it was like I would never, ever, ever go to prison on or go to jail on purpose. And so it wasn't something I ever thought about as a black woman. And then after he was elected, I was like, oh, maybe that's something I need to start considering and say, oh, yeah, exactly. Maybe it's come to that.

Mary [00:25:38] And so I was really drawn to this essay because he does make that choice as as a man of color to go to jail on purpose. And he's also he's doing his protests in New York City, but is also tied to Standing Rock.

[00:25:59] [wind chime] My upbringing, idealism and outrage did not prepare me for the experience of arrests in the paddy wagon with my arms zip tied behind my back. I felt guilt, regret and fear.

[00:26:11] My body was no longer my own. My time belonged to someone else. My mother was worried half to death. My future job prospects were diminished. I, an Ivy League graduate now, had assumed the guise of yet another young man of color with a criminal record. Very real consequences descended from extraction into a land of hard facts. Down here, they felt heavy. My girlfriend, who faithfully waited up all night on the street outside the jail for my release, was exhausted and annoyed.

[00:26:44] Why did you do that? Here I mustered a zealous response full of youthful conviction. But deep down I was asking myself the same thing. [wind chime]

Amy [00:26:56] I mean that the full essay is really great because yeah, I think this idea that like a that it's like time to take a stand and be that like. Yes, it might cost you something.

Mary [00:27:07] Yeah. Is really important because some people more than it costs others.

Mary [00:27:13] And so yeah. I just want to take a second to talk about the writing of Julian's piece because so I get really annoyed when I meet people who know me from, you know, something I've written and they think they meet me and they think I'm in my 20s because I'm like, I'm too good of a writer to be in my 20s.

Mary [00:27:28] And then I read people like Julie who's like, you know, he IS in his 20s and he is like a really fucking good writer. And it's like, oh, right. YOU couldn't write like that. That doesn't mean someone else can't.

Mary [00:27:41] But one of the things that I love that he does here is the way that he treats the women, even in these just like couple of sentences here.

Mary [00:27:49] The women that he talks about here are complicated and he writes for them in a way that they feel like real people. Even in this just couple of sentences like you can't first of all, his girlfriend's a real one for waiting outside, but also is like a real person.

Amy [00:28:18] Yes, totally. And his mother being worried sick about him like, you know, that feels really real.

Mary [00:28:21] Yeah, I can just see that phone call. Whereas like, was it worth it? Was it worth it? Was it really worth it?

Amy [00:28:28] Totally.

Mary [00:28:29] Yeah. Really? Yeah. So I love that piece.

Amy [00:28:32] I feel like in addition to all of these political events that were happening, the other thing that was kind of the signal breaking through noise on climate change in 2016, 2017 was just the number and severity of disasters.

Mary [00:28:46] Yeah, they're just coming at us. Hot and heavy. Yeah. And like one right after the other. Right. Right. There were. Yeah. Just to name a few.

Mary [00:28:55] There were these really devastating landslides in Columbia, S.C., Sierra Leone in 2017, really a historic flooding in Louisiana and China in 2016. And then of course, there was that horrible slew of hurricanes in 2017. Irma, Harvey and Maria and also. Right. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 was really horrible.

Mary [00:29:22] And then, yeah, I wanted to ask you, as a lifelong Californian about the wildfires in those areas, the wildfires.

Amy [00:29:33] Yeah 2016 was the first year that people kind of like admitted that it's no longer wildfire season. It's just all year round. Yeah. It was just unbelievable. You know, and it was another year, I think it was like, you know, the third year in a row that was like the hottest year on record. Most firefighting wildfires and the most acres burned in like, you know, just it was it was it was relentless. Yeah.

Amy [00:30:00] And it's only it's kind of it was kind of the year too that you started to hear firemen and like the Cal Fire chief talking a lot about how this was climate change. There was a guy who was the Cal Fire chief then. His name's Ken Pimlott. And he I think he just retired last year.

Amy [00:30:21] But he made the rounds of all the like, local morning news shows in California. And he's straight up said like, I've been a firefighter for 30 years. Like conditions have changed because of climate change. And like, it's no longer a season. This is year round now, this is life.

Amy [00:30:41] Which was unheard of in 2014, 2015, which is not that long ago, like you couldn't even say wildfire and climate change in the same story and you certainly weren't a seeing like a. Bunch of firemen saying it. You definitely were not getting like the fire chief on, you know, like, good morning, L.A., you know?

Mary [00:31:04] Yeah. So the other big, huge disaster I wanted to talk about in a little bit more detail was Hurricane Maria, which I mean, I can still remember those images quite harrowingly. I remember. Just seeing a storm of that size, like it looked terrifying just on the radar. I remember seeing the pictures from space and it just seemed like a continent moving across the ocean.

Mary [00:31:38] And I think what's important to remember about how it was able to devastate Puerto Rico so harshly is not only just Maria itself but it came on the heels of Irma. And that meant that Puerto Rico had just accepted lots and lots of people seeking refuge from the neighboring islands. And so resources were already depleted. Things were already running scarce.

Mary [00:32:03] And. I think it was the longest it's the longest blackout in U.S. history, I don't remember how long it lasted, and I would not be surprised to find out. There are places in Puerto Rico there are still suffering from blackouts or unreliable energy at the very least.

Amy [00:32:24] I actually have been doing some reporting in Puerto Rico. And they I mean, it was crazy. Like the vast majority of people ….that hurricane hit in September of 2017 and the vast majority of people did not have power until like Christmas time in December. So, I mean, that's nuts. Yeah. You think about that.

Amy [00:32:44] And I feel like there's this way that people talk about it here where it's like, oh, well, a couple months, Puerto Rico, it's sunny and tropical. It's fine. You know, I mean, it's like, no,.

Mary [00:32:54] No, not at all. That's not. No. Yeah.

Amy [00:32:57] And also, it was it was the thing where this is actually there's an interesting thing in Puerto Rico where they they started doing this hashtag awhile back. That's like I it's hashtag forty five hundred or something like that because they even before the ridiculously low death tolls were upgraded to, you know, close to 3000 people. People in Puerto Rico were saying it's way more than that because you had all of these kind of slow deaths where there were tons of people who didn't have access to medication that they needed.

Mary [00:33:31] Right. Or treatment that they needed.

Amy [00:33:34] I talked to this one woman who her dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer like a month before Maria, who was supposed to start his treatment the day that it hit and couldn't start it for four months. And it was too late by then. They were like, oh, you can't, the time for treatment is past.

Mary [00:33:57]  I want to read from this piece by Eric Holthouse in Greece and Mother Jones. I think they might have teamed up for this. That gets into some of these ripple effects.

Mary [00:34:08] So the title is This is how Puerto Ricans are talking about climate change. And what he did for this piece is like he did a little bit of framing up top. But what he really did was interview folks in Puerto Rico or who had people in Puerto Rico as part of the diaspora to talk about their experiences and just quoted them verbatim, which I thought was a really great approach, especially at that point in time. So here's some of the snippets from that piece.

Mary [00:34:40] [wind chime] It's the first time I saw pictures, and it's absolutely horrifying. For the past week, our only way of learning what was happening around us was through the radio. They kept mentioning the word disaster and your mind would create scenarios, but in no way does it compare to the absolutely heartbreaking reality.

[00:34:59] Another person says, how do you rebuild a whole island? I don't even know what that means.

[00:35:06] Another one says one thing that's happening is people are saying if you have a phone and you have a signal, just take a picture of people and say PR, we are OK. Just posted on social media. And hopefully it will arrive to whoever knows that person. And the last person says we've been desperately trying to find out, find a flight out for my grandmother with Alzheimer's, who is in a nursing home in precarious conditions. I fortunately managed to get a flight from my grandmother this Friday to my aunt's house in the U.S., only to find the airlines keep canceling presale flights because airplanes would have to fly over empty. And no one knows when the airport will actually open to commercial airlines. They keep pushing the day and officials info is scarce. Millions of vulnerable people are stranded.

Mary [00:36:01] It was really all of these like ripple effects that you don't think about and reading this, like, I don't want to center myself in this story. But like so much of it spoke to me of Kert. My experience in Katrina, which again was not in New Orleans, I was not on the front lines of the worst parts of Katrina by any stretch of the imagination. But I relate it so hard to this idea of the the only way you knew what was happening was through the radio and remembering listening to the radio with like, you know, your ears all the way perked up, just hoping you're gonna find something out in like the hopelessness of just post a picture and maybe it'll get to somebody almost like a message in a bottle.

Mary [00:36:55] We should probably go into what what we've been calling our foundational pieces of these of 2016, 2017, and kind of what we mean by that is like these were some of the most influential pieces of that year or they tied together a lot of themes for that year.

Mary [00:37:14] So I think is pretty unequivocal. Probably the biggest piece related to climate for 2017 was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells in New York magazine.

Mary [00:37:29] So we're gonna start there and I've got to make a confession, which is that I did not read this article when it came out.

Mary [00:37:38] It's a feel like a bad person for that.

Mary [00:37:46] But I have reasons, OK? I did not read the article when it came out because like we were saying at the top of the episode, look, 2017 was rough.

Mary [00:37:55] It was a real rough year. It was the year that my climate grief kind of like spiraled back into shock and I couldn't handle it.

Mary [00:38:05] Okay. Like I couldn't handle that. There was this article out there making these really big waves and really showing you what climate change was going to look like. And I remember people talking to me about it and telling me I really needed to read it and they would describe it for two seconds. I'm like, oh, I don't need to see my nightmare on a page right now. I don't think I can handle that.

Mary [00:38:24] That's what I see when I close my eyes.

Mary [00:38:27] I don't need to see it written down on a piece of paper. I don't think I can, you know, wake up in the morning if I've seen that. So I avoided it, to be quite honest.

[00:38:37] And I don't know if David is listening to this, but I'm sorry!

Mary [00:38:43] But I did read it in preparation for the show. And I I've got to say, like, reading it with 2019 eyes is really an interesting experience.

Mary [00:38:53] I liked it quite a lot. And that's probably a reflection of me being in a better place with my climate grief. So I'm just gonna read my favorite excerpt now.

Mary [00:39:10] [wind chime] Surely this blindness will not last the world we are about to inhabit. We're not permitted in a six degree warmer world. The Earth's ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them weather, a constant swarm of out of control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts. The planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often and we'll have to invent new categories with which to describe them. Tornadoes will grow long, longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future. Going forward, we will see in his wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists often talked often about deep time, the perception they had contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock base then of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as dream time or everyone when the semi mythical experience described by Aboriginal Australians of encountering in the present moment and out of time pass. When ancestors, heroes and demagogs crowded an epic stage, you can find it already watching footage in an ice of an iceberg collapsing into the sea. A feeling of history happening all at once. It is. [wind chime]

Mary [00:40:41] So I feel like, yeah, somebody issued a dare to him to be like make a data dump but make it poetic.

Amy [00:40:49] I feel like the really important thing about this piece too, was that it kicked off like a shit storm in the climate media universe where a bunch of climate scientists actually got really mad at David Wallace Wells and sort of accused him of being like, irresponsible? For telling people how bad things could get. Which was super strange because it was sort of like if you'd been following climate for a while at that point, like you already knew that.

Mary [00:41:21] Yes. You know. And that's the other thing I think about. I know that the Twitter brawl over this was massive. Like it was a really big fight. And. Having, you know, been at the center of a Twitter fight that I assume was much, much smaller. I know it was much, much smaller than this is like what I think people don't remember about the person they're dragging or attacking on Twitter is is a person.

Amy [00:41:47] But then it was also very much like, you know, it was a little bit of a gatekeeping thing and whatever. But I do feel like in doing this, he and I think because, you know, he was he's the deputy editor of New York magazine and he's a straight white guy. And he is someone with like, you know, a fair amount of influence and platform and all of that kind of stuff. It really opened the floodgates for just other types of climate.

Mary [00:42:14] Right.

Amy [00:42:15] And I think a really important.

Mary [00:42:16] Right. You know, and that's the way. Another thing to note, though, is that I don't know that anyone else could have weather the storm that he weathered. Who if not, you know, a straight white guy with whatever amount of privilege.

Amy [00:42:33] Right.

Mary [00:42:33] I don't think a woman of color could have opened those floodgates.

Amy [00:42:36] Right.

Mary [00:42:37] And I think about that with my own writing. Because I talk about fear about climate change with a different emotional range than I think was allowed before the uninhabitable.

Mary [00:42:49] And I also want to draw attention to something else I loved about this article is that he he acknowledges the impacts of colonialism and how that spread this infrastructure of extraction around the world.

Mary [00:43:05] And that is something that I don't remember seeing in a lot of pieces certainly not in these like established outlets, certainly not by a lot of white guys. And it's really important to hear white guys telling that side of the story and giving it legitimacy and giving it legs, which like it fucking sucks that we need white guys to do that. But to the extent that we do need them to, it is good to see them doing it. And even as much as I was avoiding this article when it came out, I couldn't avoid it. It was that big of an of an influence. And one of the things that happened in my off Twitter experience that was super freaking annoying was like all of these people who had kind of relegated me as the obnoxious, hysterical person at the dinner party. All of a sudden wanted to talk to me about climate. And it was like, oh, so that's so cool, Dennis.

Mary [00:44:07] You read an article in a magazine written by a complete fucking stranger that you've never met. And he talks about climate change, but you take him seriously, but you don't take me seriously. Even though you've known me for a goddamn decade.

Mary [00:44:22] Cool. Yeah. So fucking cool. Yeah.

Mary [00:44:28] But also at the same time. I'm glad it happened. I'm glad that person got climate woke. I'm pissed off that it took, you know, someone you don't know to wake you up. But that is a personal vendetta.

Amy [00:44:38] Yeah.

Mary [00:44:38] Dennis and I are working through that. Okay.

Amy [00:44:43] Dennis.

Mary [00:44:44] Fucking Dennis. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but still.

Amy [00:44:51] Sit down, Dennis

Mary [00:44:56] But no, I like I. Yeah, it was. It was hard not to take notice of this article and the influence that has had ever since.

Mary [00:45:07] So yeah. I was not on Twitter, let alone climate Twitter at the time. And I knew that there was like a Twitter brawl happening over this article. There were.

Amy [00:45:19] Yeah, there was a lot of you know. There were. Yeah. So I've I have I've been on Twitter like a ridiculously long time as most journalists have been. Also like I was in San Francisco when Twitter launched, so you know if you were a journalist in the Bay Area at that time, you were on there.But anyway, so I was on Twitter when that story came out, but I actually saw more people talking about it on Facebook. Remember when people had conversations about things on Facebook? I saw like a lot of people fighting about whether this article was like helpful or.whether it was like overstating things or not.

Mary [00:46:15] Right.

Amy [00:46:16] And honestly, I kind of just watched it going like, I'm just glad like this many people are talking about climate change period.

Mary [00:46:22] Right.

Mary [00:46:24] I also like as far as the scientific precision goes, I certainly get the scientific nuances. Importing and making sure that things are correct is important. And I am by no means want to like quibble with like whether whatever fact was right or not. Like, I know part of me wants to do that. But I am very curious about who is the person who needs to know the science down pat. Right. Like needs to know every single nuance. Like it really matters if they know whether the ocean turns bright red or burnt orange at whatever degree of war. Who is that person who needs to know that level of detail, gets their science from New York magazine?

Mary [00:47:10] Who's that?

Amy [00:47:11] Exactly right.

Amy [00:47:19] You know what's weird about that too? And like, I'm just I'm just like kind of like having this realization as your saying that I feel like a big part of the the backlash from some of the scientific community was that before this article, really none of the climate reporters had tried to talk about science in any way other than just like a scientific report came out. Here's what it's like. Yeah. Yeah. Like basically if climate scientists had sort of been the only ones interpreting the science for the public. Right. And here comes David Wallace Wells, who is a newcomer to climate coverage entirely at that point, doing that, too. And I think they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey. Oh, yeah. You know, I feel like you almost you really didn't see that much long form narrative climate journalism before this story came out.

Mary [00:48:15] Yeah. Like you didn't see a lot.

Amy [00:48:17] And you definitely didn't see a lot of stories that were connecting like institutional racism, colonialism and climate. And especially in like I mean, you did see it in some niche publications, but you didn't see it in in the sort of mainstream publications. Yeah. New York Magazine or The New Yorker.

Mary [00:48:37] Yeah. So that's actually a good segue in to another piece that I would call foundational for these two years, it was a series in Bitch magazine called The Least Convenient Truth. It's a four part series by Bani Amor. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. And I just want to read a quick excerpt from it.

Mary [00:49:08] [wind chime] The "it's not race it's class" crowd might have to be reminded that people were once considered property because of their race and were exploited for their capital, just like the land they worked in a capital, this white supremacy. There is no respect for life. Justice. Centricity of whiteness, which deems that the economic value of white labor so supersedes that of other races and the effects of capitalism on the land is inconsequential. But all this makes me wonder about the colonizers. I get capitalism, but if your goal is long term domination, wouldn't you be in favor of environmental sustainability?

[00:49:46] Turns out not, because they knew in the end people of color would be the ones paying the highest price for the environmental consequences of settler colonialism. [wind chime]

Mary [00:49:57] So I designated this piece here because I there's been a lot of scholarship on the connections between climate change and colonialism and slavery and racism, but it's generally lived in books and scholarly articles. You didn't you didn't see a lot in actual in journalism, so to speak.

[00:50:24] And I thought it was really interesting that Bitch gave her. That sounds strange to say, but Bitch magazine gave her this four-part series and you know, I think there are a lot of really great points she made in it.

[00:50:40] She talks about the connections between infant mortality. She talks about the connections, you know, long term with colonialism and so on and so forth. What struck me as I was reading it was that there was still a tone of was very clear that Bani is as much a scholar as she is a journalist.

[00:51:03] So there's an academic tone in there, and I think that that was probably the way the outlets were approaching this type of subject matter, was that it was it still felt very heady to people and therefore they sought out academics maybe.

[00:51:17] There also is a tone of snark in this writing that I both understand and kind of want to tease through a little bit, because I think that women are often put in positions where we are expected to be snarky with our writing.

Amy [00:51:38] Right. And. Right.

Mary [00:51:40] Yeah. I wonder if you've had that experience as well.

Amy [00:51:45] Yeah, I mean, I think there's a thing that happens where women are either expected to sort of keep our opinions or conclusions out of writing entirely and sort of just present the information and let people make up their own minds. Or if we do have an opinion or come to a conclusion, we're sort of encouraged to to be like snarky and sassy.

Mary [00:52:11] Catty

Amy [00:52:14] Yeah. Which ultimately has the effect of undermining the argument that we're trying to make.

Mary [00:52:19] Yeah.

Amy [00:52:20] You know, and like I just don't see that happening with a lot of pieces written by men who are sort of encouraged to seriously investigate issues and critique them in an evidence based way.

Mary [00:52:37] You know, and another thing I notice.So when I write. We talked about this before. A lot of my pieces are originally, you know, kind of angry or they're, the results of panic, to be quite honest My first draft a lot of the time will sound very snarky. And so when I see women writing about these really heartbreaking subjects, what she is writing about is heartbreaking here, on my second reading, what I don't. I don't see snark. I see scar tissue because it is really, really painful. And so.

Mary [00:53:16] Right.

Mary [00:53:16] I encourage everyone to read these pieces and to like see the pain behind them as much as there is anger, because the anger is justified, of course. And I'm sure she wrote right in the voice that she wanted to write it in. But I think there's also a lot of pain behind the snark

Amy [00:53:41] Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting.

Amy [00:53:47] I feel like that is maybe a good segue into this finding middle ground series that I think was kind of a key piece in 2016, 2017 too. And it's written by a woman of color. And I feel like it's it's actually it's interesting because definitely race and class come up quite a bit throughout this series. But it's never like it's never the sort of obvious focus. They're all narratives.

[00:54:21] And to me this is interesting because this is also like around the time when I think the media was doing what I call the like media Trump apology tour, which was like in the wake of the election, all these national media outlets were like, oh, no, we've done a terrible job of covering like everything but the coasts,  and there, were just like tons of these series, both in radio, like NPR was doing it a bunch and a lot of national outlets were running these like profiles of basically like Trump people, you know, like we need to understand these people. But in the middle of that, Meera Subramanian, who is a great climate journalist and a woman of color, worked for Inside Climate News on this specific project, looking at what's happening with middle America on climate change and how are people in rural places actually being impacted by climate change and are they seeing it as climate change and what's happening, whatever in this way that I felt like actually sort of genuinely helped to paint a picture of like, look, this is happening, whether you believe it or not, you know, and  she also did a good job of tying together lots of narratives into one massive series that like really gave you a snapshot of how the country is being affected. So here's a bit from one of these pieces which was looking at flooding in North Dakota and how it was impacting farmers and sort of looking at this constant cycle of drought and flooding.

[00:56:09] [wind chime] I walk in the front door of Byron Carter's house as others are entering in the back and coda, the dog can decide which way to direct her barking. I'm in Divide County, North Dakota. But borders seem a little meaningless here. Last summer's drought, which was calamitous for Byron and the other farmers and ranchers, now filing into his kitchen, leaked over into Canada to the north and Montana, to the west. By April of this year, they're on the cusp of a new season. And Byron has gathered his neighbors, defined as anyone living within a 30 mile radius in this sparsely populated corner of the state, so we can talk about drought and climate change.

Amy [00:56:47] So I love this. Like she she does a really good job, of giving you a sense of these people without doing the thing of like Byron is six foot two with sandy blond hair and you know.

[00:57:02] Yeah.

Mary [00:57:05] Yeah, I know you feel like you can still see him without that level of detail.

Amy [00:57:09] It's good, right? I know initially when I saw this series announced, I was like, oh, another one of these. And then I started reading it and I was like, oh, God, I'm so glad that they hired Meera to do this, because I feel like in the hands of any other writer, it would have been another one of these like Trump apology tour pieces. But she really turned it into a real snapshot that was helpful.

Mary [00:57:34] Another piece I wanted to talk about is by Alex Steffen in the Nearly Now, which I think is a medium publication. The title is The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down, which great title.

Mary [00:57:51] So I don't have like a long excerpt that I want to read from this. Just like a couple of snippets, because what Alex does really well is he is a master at reframing the debate. He does it really well on Twitter. If you're not following him, you should be.

Mary [00:58:07] And I think he coined the phrase predatory delay right?

Amy [00:58:10] Yeah.

Mary [00:58:11] Yeah. Tell us what that means for folks who don't know.

Amy [00:58:14] It's like it's sort of like the next phase of climate denial. So initially, you know, the oil companies were sort of like climate change isn't happening at all. And then it became like, well, it's happening, but we're not sure when it's going to happen or how bad it's going to happen. And we don't want to make any sudden movements in the energy system before we have more information. So this idea of like sort of continuing to enable the status quo, you know, well past the point where it starts to become genuinely dangerous for people.

Mary [00:58:47] He came up with that term.

Amy [00:58:49] Yeah, predatory delay. good right?

Mary [00:58:54] It really is. So I want to read a couple of snippets from this piece.

Mary [00:58:57] So he a lot of the time you hear people say 2016 is like the hottest year on record. Alex doesn't do that. Alex says it's one of the hottest years experienced since the dawn of agriculture.

Amy [00:59:09] Wow.

Mary [00:59:18] Yeah. I Actually thought the hottest year on record is like the strongest way you could say that. But he found a stronger way to say it, which I think is awesome.

Mary [00:59:26] He also has a way of explaining like economic and industry terms in a way that you can really understand. So an example of that is:

Mary [00:59:37] Economists call these taking externalities because externalities sounds better than destruction for profit.

Mary [00:59:44] It's like a masterful way of reframing that in like anybody can understand that he's like basically what he's saying there is this is not complicated. You can absolutely understand.

Mary [00:59:56] And another snippet, he says, but specific companies, places and systems are particularly vulnerable to sudden deep failure when larger systems around them shift. We call them brittle. Brittle systems often do not recover when they break. An ancient forest, dried out by years of climate driven drought is brittle. It can burn to ashes on a firestorm and take centuries to regrow. Bridges collapse and are not easily razed. Towns are swept away in floods. Islands are lost to rising seas.

Amy [01:00:29] Mm hmm. Yeah.

Mary [01:00:30] So, yeah. He's just such a good linguist, I guess is the word. It's like a writer doesn't even get to it. He's just like redefines the whole debate. And that's something we that desperately need.

Amy [01:00:46] Yes, it's rhetoric. Rhetoric. I've been very interested in that, like the history of rhetoric and like how certain rhetorical frameworks are used and by whom and when it's effective and when it's not. And I think I'm pretty sure that Alex is like, you know, maybe even like a scholar of that, because he does, it's like he's so masterful.

Mary [01:01:11] Yeah. Yeah. It's really amazing to read his work. But unfortunately, in this piece, I started to have a couple of problems.

Mary [01:01:22] So for one, I started to feel like it at different points. He his audience didn't include me–by the way he used we.

Amy [01:01:33] No.

Mary [01:01:34] Yeah, exactly. At one point he says like we all take this capacity for granted. I was like I don't and I don't know anyone who does, so. I don't think you're talking to me. It's like, oh, I thought we were in on it together. Turns out I'm right in it. And then I'm out. Yeah, that's a that's like a shitty feeling when you're when you're reading something.

Mary [01:01:55] I think that's something that happens in a lot of climate coverage. Is this abuse of we. And I'll be completely honest. I have to police myself with that, too, because it's so insidious in our language. So like it it just kind of struck me in this piece. Another thing that was coming up for me as I was reading it was there was just like all of this this tone of inevitability of the system will change.

Mary [01:02:24] It has no choice. And that is. And first of all, I don't agree with that. Right. Like, if all we had to do was be right and then inevitably things would you know, the course would write itself.

Amy [01:02:38] Right.

Mary [01:02:39] Like inevitably, renewables are obviously the best choice. And so therefore, the market has no choice but to surrender to them. If that were the case, we wouldn't be in the predicament that we're in now. And I also feel like that comes with you can only say that with a certain level of privilege.

Amy [01:02:56] Right.

Mary [01:02:56] Because basically what that boils down to is all we have to do is be right and then sit back and wait. Right. And if that were the case, then.

Amy [01:03:03] Yeah, I mean. Yeah, yeah. It's that whole thing of like this. I think I mean to me I think that is like where the sort of belief that the system like the systems that are in place will fix the problem. It's like that. You can only have that belief if the systems that are in place have like pretty much always worked for you.

Mary [01:03:24] Right. And that's kind of like always struck me about the climate space of like, well, yeah, we've got our charts, we've got our data. We're right. And we're just gonna prove that we're right. Right. It takes more than just being right because so many of the biggest atrocities in history have been demonstrably wrong.

Amy [01:03:44] Right.

Mary [01:03:44] Like slavery was based on shitty science.

[01:03:48] Yeah.

[01:03:48] Colonialism was based on shitty science that could have very and was very easily proven wrong. But that didn't stop it. Sometimes you got to be more than just right. And I don't think that Alex in this piece is advocating for us to just like sit back on our heels and do nothing.

Mary [01:04:05] I mean, I think he's actually a pretty vocal advocate for making noise. But I just picked that up, this tone of like it's inevitable the market's going to surrender to renewables and they just don't know it yet. I picked that up in this piece and on his broader presence and his broader platform. He certainly advocates for doing more than sitting on your ass and waiting for the windmills somewhere.

Amy [01:04:31] Right?

Mary [01:04:33] Right. But that is something I would offer for the tone of this piece.

Amy [01:04:38] OK, so this one is from Robinson Meyer in the Atlantic. It's called Democrats are shockingly unprepared to fight climate change. And it basically lays out like that hi, we need something to address climate change and we need some framework, some some mix of policies in the same way that like Medicare for all has become a rallying cry for health care.

[01:05:01] Or like, you know, focusing on the dreamers has become a stand in for immigration reform. Like all of these things. You know, we we sort of talk about climate change in this vague way still.

[01:05:14] Ifwe talk about it at all.

[01:05:18] Right. Exactly. Because remember, again, in 2016, in the election, you did not have to have a climate policy to run as a Democratic candidate. And it did not really come up in any of the presidential debates, not one. And like to go from that to now where like every candidate, the Democratic primary has to have a comprehensive climate policy is is actually like a huge difference. So anyway. OK. Here he is in the Atlantic.

[01:05:55] [wind chime] In sum, many Democrats have coalesced around a single phrase, if not quite a policy to accompany it and promised to deliver it the next time they're in power. And even if some Democrats see Medicare for all as a base play as a slogan more likely to be deployed in Vermont than Colorado, it remains a policy focused promise about future governance. The party has similar promises for other issues, too. On immigration, it can promise the DREAM Act on LGBTQ rights, the Equality Act. I suspect that many voters, including most rank and file Democrats, believe that there is a similar strategy on climate change. They think there's some bill waiting in the wings that would address the issue.

[01:06:37] They trust that Democrats have a legislative plan to resolve climate crisis and that the party only needs to be granted control of Congress to pass it. But nothing of a similar scale exists. And some of the Senate's most vocal Democrats on the issue resist formulating one. [wind chime]

Amy [01:06:53] It's so fascinating to me that like that really was the state of play was and then here all of a sudden, here comes the Green New Deal.

Mary [01:07:01] Yeah. Here comes a blue wave. And then here comes the Green New Deal. And also a shout out to Rob for saying climate crisis in 2017.

Amy [01:07:14] Totally. That might be like the first use of that in especially in like a publication like The Atlantic.

Mary [01:07:21] And somebody on Twitter can definitely let us know.

Mary [01:07:26] What I loved about this essay is that reading it was like reorienting.

[01:07:32] It was like, I don't know if it's the red pill or the blue pill. But like, I felt very un gas lit after I read it because it's a long essay and he goes through like, yeah, how did we get here?

[01:07:44] You know, like what was he like in 0 8? Like he does talk about Copenhagen, I believe.

[01:07:50] What was what was climate policy like under Obama? What were we expecting with the next election where we now, like, he really like walks you through it and then walks us through like. Yeah. But we don't have a road map from here. Like, obviously, he doesn't know what's going to happen after November of that year.

[01:08:07] But yeah, I if you're feeling confused of how where we're at and how we got here like very much read this. Hard recommend.

[01:08:20] It's like one of those oh shit essays.

Amy [01:08:23]  Yeah. I love too that it sort of calls into question this idea that like oh the people in charge will know how to fix it, you know.

Mary [01:08:32] And everybody sort of just like nobody's doing this right. And then you get to the front of the plane and it's a bunch of penguins flying the damn thing. That's a flightless bird!

Amy [01:08:57] We're just about done with our wrap up of the year, and we're gonna we're gonna share with you kind of our favorite pieces from this time. So, I mean, I I actually feel like despite the fact that, you know, it was kind of like slow to get started. By the time we got all the way through the end of 2017, there were a lot of really great pieces to choose from.

Mary [01:09:24] There really were. And so what we mean by stand out piece is basically just like one that really stuck out and resonated with us and that we love. There's no rubric for it.

Amy [01:09:38] There's no rules. There's no nothing. There's. Right.

Mary [01:09:41] Like, I just picked something that made my heart sing and made me feel seen and just something I loved. And there are a lot of things I love from these years. But, you know, you only pick one. So.

Amy [01:09:53] Yeah. Yes, OK.

Amy [01:09:56] Do you want to read yours for. Yeah, sure.

Mary [01:09:58] I'll go first because a little bit of a disclosure as I kind of made this year. This episode, 2016 and 2017 for the sole purpose that I got to pick this piece.

Amy [01:10:11] Really? That's so cute!

Mary [01:10:13] So I love it. It's so, so much.

Mary [01:10:18] It's called it's an essay called Endlings.

Mary [01:10:20] It's by Harriet Riley. And it was published in Island magazine in September in 2016. And it actually kind of gives voice to actually why I avoided reading The Uninhabitable Earth.

[01:10:40] [wind chime] Reading this report didn't give me a conscious sense of dread.

[01:10:43] Like most environmental papers do. Instead, I felt a deep, primal pain, a disturbance in the force. That's how I realized that I was in mourning, too. I'm a climate scientist. But for the past nine months, I hadn't read a thing about climate change. Friends would email me links to articles and I would delete them telling myself that I was too busy or that I already knew that study. But the truth was I was avoiding it because all the news was bad. I'd worked on the issue for years, going to U.N. summits, prepping lab reports, writing articles. I dedicated myself to it night and day for a decade. And every new article felt like a fellow doctor telling me about a cancer patient, how they were getting worse had they been in remission. But it had come back, how it happened, assess the size, how they found a new drug. But it wouldn't be on the market for another 10 years. How it was growing and changing and shifting and spreading and how we had to prepare for the worse. So I stopped reading. I started working on other issues. I snuck away from the bedside because nobody wants to watch the patient die. The Living Planet Index was the first climate paper I had read all year, and sure enough, it led to an eye scratching skin tearing dirt in hair rubbing outpouring of grief. I'm not the only one. We call it a climate depression. Yes, that's a weather joke. And it's the main reason for the unusually high burnout rates amongst environmentalists and sustainability experts. But new research from around the world shows us not just professionals who succumb. Carrie Nygaard, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon, ran a study in which she asked people whose talents had been impacted by climate change to describe how it made them feel. They spoke of fear, frustration, anger, hopelessness and guilt. One of the most telling responses came from a participant living near a river. It's like you want to be a proud person. And if you draw your identity from the river and when the river is degraded, that reflects on you.

[01:12:55] Climate change destroys your sense of self-worth. [wind chime]

Amy [01:13:02] So yeah this whole essay is so, so good.

Mary [01:13:06] It is a masterpiece. It is. First of all, like I'm lowkey kind of mad at her that she's a science.

Amy [01:13:16] I was JUST gonna say that. God, you're a climate scientist and you're an amazing writer. I definitely couldn't.

Mary [01:13:22] Just like, who are you?

Amy [01:13:23] I could not, like, dip into science and be like, fucking brilliant

Mary [01:13:32] So I met Harriet at a dinner party, and that is how I found out about this essay. And she also introduced me to your podcast. Drilled.

Amy [01:13:41] Really? So another reason to love Harriet.

Mary [01:13:48] She's she's great people. And this the way she makes you like just feel the way she's feeling.

Mary [01:13:54] And then also in the in the essay, there's another character, a friend of hers, who's like searching out this, the last of a given species you have. You just have to read the whole thing. But she does this really great job of making you feel what they feel and see what they see.

Mary [01:14:14] And getting to this point of being able to trust hope another time and being able to like find ways to be productive even when you're in, you know, the throes of the biggest depression and ways to be ways to cope with it and also adjust ways to not run away from it. Yeah. Yeah, I thought it's just such a gorgeous piece of writing and I go back and read it all the time, so.

[01:14:43] Yeah. Yeah. No, it's so good. OK. Mine is this piece from Samanth Subramanian in New York Times magazine's climate issue in April 2017.

Mary [01:15:00] Was that there first climate issue?

Amy [01:15:00] I was just going to say that it might have been their first one. I cannot find confirmation of that. So if anyone knows, give us a shout on Twitter. But but it was definitely like, you know, pretty early climate issue.

Amy [01:15:35] It's talking about how Singapore is basically sinking from sea level rise and that the one of the solutions to this is to import a bunch of sand and basically create more land.

[01:15:53] And I loved it because I feel like it did. This thing that I think is like really effective in climate narratives, which is like telling a very specific and sort of surreal story that really gets at a more universal thing, which is that like the way that humans are trying to address climate change is often absurd and like and often sort of perpetuates the same kind of problematic thinking that created the problem in the first place. So it's like he never says those things, but the story sort of shows you that.

[01:16:30] So in this scene that I'm going to read from, he's going around with this guy who's been helping out with the sand stuff and he's like showing him, you know, all of these different areas. And so, OK, so here he is kind of describing what he's seeing.

[01:16:50] [wind chime] The wind rose and fell in heavy gusts, limbs, hair tousled, even indoors, grew still more animated. He pointed out a manmade hill eastward along the coast from the marina where trucks and earth movers milled about. This was the Changi  Airport reclamation, more than a thousand hectares of land designed to hold the new airport terminal and its three runways. In trying to edge closer, we must have wandered into sensitive waters. A loud speaker screamed from the naval base, punctuated by three types of sirens. You are entering a prohibited area. Please clear it now. Lim instructed me to pull at various ropes, and we tacked hurriedly out a couple of hours after we cast off. We came upon Tee Kong Island, sitting in the street between Singapore and Malaysia, owned by the former. But nearer the latter, the two countries bickered over reclamation activities here in 2002. It took three years of negotiations before Singapore could proceed. The part of the island where Singapore's army units train was a smoky smudge on the horizon. Our boat nuzzled against a rock wall that marked out reclamation work. The wall began on the northern coast of the island and eastward to the sea and then looped back to a point on the southern coast. In outline, it resembled a porpoises nose. That's odd. Boom said there's no one here. No trucks, no security guards, no bulldozers. Maybe they've stopped work because of a shortage of sand. Lim held the boat steady while I waded into the shallows for a better look. Careful not to trespass on the island. The rocks underfoot were slick, and I barked. Mission. How does it look? Lim called. A few feet from the outer wall was an inner one, and packed between the two with sand. Lovely, pristine sand. The color of milky Ovaltine. It was held firm and tight in its sleeve of rock. Its surface so level that had I walked on it, I might have been the first visitor on undiscovered land. Trapped beyond the inner wall was a low pool of water. Yet to be filled in around us, the only idol in the sun ready to challenge Singapore's ingenuity with its patient adamant rise.

Amy [01:18:58] So I love this.

Mary [01:19:08] It's really, really good.

Amy [01:19:09] And I love this last line I think is so nice that like this that the ocean is like just sitting there and wait, like. Right.

Mary [01:19:17] You know, my favorite line was pristine sand, the color of milky Ovaltine. When the last time you heard about you, you really. The climate article in any article in the descriptor.

Amy [01:19:31] Oh, I know. It's really good. Yeah. I really liked it. And I liked that it was, you know, about a part of the world that we don't necessarily hear that much in sea level rise stories. And in that it kind of calls into question this idea that like ingenuity.

Mary [01:19:48] Exactly. You know, we'll find our way out of this problem or that nature can somehow be tamed because like it's trying to tame it is kind of how we got here.

Amy [01:20:05] Exactly! That we're gonna use the same tactic to solve the problem that created it. Like when has that ever worked, guys. And yet here we are still.

Mary [01:20:14] He does a really great job of showing and not telling and of this is an excellent example of storytelling.

Amy [01:20:25] Yes. Yes. Totally.

Mary [01:20:28] I'm gonna have to go back and look at this more closely.

Mary [01:20:40] So chronologically, 2016 wasn't really that long ago, but as we can see here, it really was.

Mary [01:20:49] And although the story of climate change has gotten so much darker as the impacts have intensified, the storytelling, though, has gotten just so much better.

Amy [01:20:58] Yeah, it's totally true. And you can see the power of that storytelling feeling the activism, too. From Sunrise movement Gretta to even the Green New Deal a lot in 2013 was a very different year and that's where we're going to get into in our next episode.

Mary [01:21:13] So listeners, make sure that you look out for that episode.

Amy [01:21:17] Yes. As a reminder, we're going to do another year in review for 2018 in the next episode. And then the episode after that is going to be 2019 in review. Then in 2020, we're going current

Mary [01:21:30] We'll be coming out every two weeks. And if you like what you heard so far, make sure that you leave us review, please. And if you don't …. maybe keep that shit to yourself.

Amy [01:21:40] Links to all the articles we discussed in this episode will be in the notes and you can find them on our Twitter.

Mary [01:21:50] Yeah. We're trying to I, you know, keep it updated, keep current articles coming out. And if you're not following us on Twitter, you can fix that. You can find us at real hot take. You can also find me at at Mary Heglr. That's H-E-G-L-A-R  and you can find Amy at at Amy WESTERVELT. We have very creative Twitter handles.

Amy [01:22:13] Yeah, true. True. We really do. All right. Well, talk to you all soon. Please send us your favorite articles from 2018 at our Twitter handle. And looking forward to talking to you again. See you next time.

Mary [01:22:27] Bye.

CREDITS [01:22:36] Hot Take is written and produced by Mary Ann Hagler and me, Amy WESTERVELT. It's distributed by the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. Our theme song is New Frontier by Flashing Lights. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at hottakes at Critical Frequency. Dot org that's hot takes plural with your questions about climate storytelling or articles you'd like to see discussed on the show. Thanks for listening.