An aware society is one of the best weapons against climate change. Sustainable solutions can only advance if voters and policymakers understand what’s at stake. From vanishing biodiversity to the widespread intensification of destructive weather patterns, that’s where environmental journalists play a decisive role in acting as the bridge between scientists and the general public. The Hitchcock Project presents its second collaboration with the “Discover Science” podcast, in which Hitchcock Project reporter Shelby Herbert guest hosts a feature-length interview about best practices for climate communication with renowned science journalist Andrew Revkin and University of Nevada, Reno professors Sudeep Chandra and Zeb Hogan. This podcast is available on all major listening platforms.
This podcast was originally published on Nevada Today on November 16, 2022. A full transcript of the podcast audio is available below.
Interview Transcript
Andrew Revkin:
Okay. Yeah. (Singing).
It took a thousand generations for our species to rise. He opened up the ground…
Shelby Herbert:
An aware society is one of the best weapons against climate change. Sustainable solutions can only advance if voters and policymakers understand what’s at stake. From vanishing biodiversity to the widespread intensification of destructive weather patterns, that’s where environmental journalists play a decisive role in acting as the bridge between scientists and the general public.
This is the Discover Science Podcast, a forum in which we speak with some of the world’s leading scientists and researchers about the big issues impacting our lives. I’m Shelby Herbert, a graduate student at the Reynolds School of Journalism. I report for the Hitchcock Project for Visualizing Science and KUNR Public Radio. And I’m interested in engaging popular audiences with environmental topics.
Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge a recent statistic from Climate Central. Where could this conversation better take place than in Reno, Nevada, which was recently identified by the organization as the fastest-warming city in the United States. We are all here today in the Reynolds School radio studio to speak with Andrew Revkin. That’s who you heard on the guitar just a moment ago.
Andrew Revkin:
(Singing).
Shelby Herbert:
He’s a renowned science journalist, author, and educator. He’s covered a variety of environmental topics, including the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the changing climate of the North Pole. Andrew is also the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at the Columbia Climate School. Welcome to our show, Andrew.
Andrew Revkin:
It’s awesome to be here.
Shelby Herbert:
I’d like to welcome my two co-hosts, Professors Zeb Hogan and Sudeep Chandra. Dr. Chandra is a professor of limnology here at the University of Nevada, Reno, director of the Ozman Institute for Global Studies, and director of the Global Water Center.
Dr. Hogan is a professor of biology and a director of the Wonders of the Mekong Project. You may know Zeb from the popular National Geographic television show, Monster Fish with Sudeep Chandra. Together, Doctors Chandra and Hogan are leading cutting-edge research in an effort to protect our planet’s aquatic ecosystems. Thanks for being with us here today.
Sudeep Chandra:
Hey, thanks for having us.
Andrew Revkin:
Thank you.
Shelby Herbert:
All right. So Andrew, what topics are on your radar right now?
Andrew Revkin:
I focus on the general question of how we navigate this century with the fewest regrets. That’s basically my daily question. So it depends. Right now, I’ve just been writing about Brazil’s upcoming election and the prospect that the president could steal the election if he loses, which to me is a sustainability issue because of the Amazon rainforest and the people who live there already in deep peril under the last four years. And another term or whatever he would choose to be in office for would be really bad.
But at the same time, I’m tracking the Horn of Africa drought, where hunger has been explosively growing. Not just because of the drought, but because of the war in Ukraine. Driven again by politics, which disrupted one of the great bread baskets of the world. Ukraine’s farmers supply a huge chunk of the calories consumed in North Africa. I did one recently on how the first half of this Atlantic hurricane season has been ridiculously sleepy. It was supposed to be an active season and basically, it’s like crickets. Which is good, but it also reinforces how science is always a work in progress.
Zeb Hogan:
Andy, I’m curious. How do you find your stories typically? Do you seek out the stories or do they find you? What’s the typical process?
Andrew Revkin:
It’s really a whittling process. There’s an overabundance of stories. Sometimes it’s random-ish, but all I’m just trying as hard as I can amid this flood to back off each time and say, “Well, is what I’m writing going to measurably or at least possibly change some trajectory? Is there some utility to what I’m writing?” To get beyond the gee-whiz factor. To get beyond… I try to just be rigorous about does this matter?
Sudeep Chandra:
And yet, thematically, it sounds like a lot of the topics you just mentioned and others that you’ve written about always revolve around some idea of sustainability, whether it’s sustainability of society, the environment, activities, and you have a podcast on that topic as well.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was at a meeting in New York City, some conservation biologists were there. I think it was someone at the Wildlife Conservation Society who had organized it and the name of was Sustain What? And I thought that is such a great question and I wrote a piece about that at the time because words like sustainability or even phrases like climate emergency have no meaning until you start to ask questions. Whose emergency? Sustain what? As opposed to “we need sustainability”. So that’s partially journalistic, but partially just a function of my eagerness to get to the root of things. It’s all about building some sense of a trajectory through this complexity.
Shelby Herbert:
On that note of emergency and alarmism, do you have any critiques of just the ecosystem of journalism right now?
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s not just because I’ve had 35 years on the beat. It’d be very easy to say, I’m the great beard going, you idiot, all you youngsters, you don’t know. There’s some basic fundamental principles that are being forgotten in journalism right now, which are to back off from the thing that’s happening, whether it’s a chunk carving off of an iceberg or a horrible drought emerging in North Africa and saying, okay, what do we know about what’s driving the problem? And the problem really isn’t in the atmosphere. The problem is on the ground where people are. So asking the most basic questions, who, what, where, why and how, has gotten forgotten too often. A recent paper came out, two different papers in the last few weeks, one on Greenland one on Antarctica, Thwaites glacier, both of which are losing ice and sea levels are rising for centuries to come.
These are facts as durable and hard as this table. The big question is how soon, how much. The sea levels of the world on average rose about 10 to 12 inches in the last hundred years and New York City wasn’t going to go, oh my God, because the cities grow and they change their coastlines. So the rate is what matters. But a lot of these stories and a lot of the headlines are “10 inches from Greenland now inevitable.” New news from the Doomsday Glacier in Antarctica,” without asking the key question in this case, which is when or how soon. And I would like to just see some of those basic principles get back into journalism, and if it’s just about click bait, to me, it’s the difference between popularity and utility and it’s actually counterproductive in the end because if you’re constantly pummeling your audience with overly simplified visions of these environmental problems, they disengage.
Sudeep Chandra:
I think those same lessons can be applied not just in journalism but in science. When we’re scientists who are trying to study the environment, there’s often discourse that we can have within the science community, but what gets lost is the discussion of variability or uncertainties that we might see and rather than being alarmist in our abstracts or scientific findings of “this could be the big issue, but here’s the doom and gloom,” there could also be a signature of hope or of some uncertainty of what needs to be done to refine our understanding of things. Then I think there’s that nice lesson learned between both what you just described in journalism, but also how we might practice science and present our information at public meetings and have discourse around the topics, but do it in a way that’s efficient so we’re not dragging science out to have these conversations for long periods of time.
Andrew Revkin:
One of the key things that I think I missed also, largely because some environmentalists, there’s an eagerness to get attention. Obviously, the things we know are bad enough, right? The sea level change for hundreds of years to come is locked in. Big changes in heat waves. As anyone here knows, the hotter you get the easier it is to get into a new record terrain and there’s no stopping. One of my long-time sources on heat, she hates the “no new normal” thing because she says it’s not like we’re going to a new normal. The new normal is relentless change. If you just focus on how much of this heat wave is from human-driven pollution and you have big debates about that, you’re missing the other key factor which is to put vulnerability in the foreground. Who’s vulnerable to heat? We’re not all vulnerable to heat. Farm workers are way more vulnerable, so at the end of your food chain leading to your plate is some deep injustice and danger when it comes to heat, and that leads to many actionable steps, both policy and individual actions that can make a difference.
Who down the block from you is an old person whose income is so low that they can’t afford to run their air conditioner? There was a recent study, a young researcher, Destiny [inaudible 00:08:52], she has studied what happens in households related to your income and your decisions about energy, and she’s found in urban areas in the United States, poorer families let the inside temperature rise four to seven degrees hotter than rich families before they turn on the air conditioner, and that leads to health outcomes, asthma, all kinds of things. So that’s a really important thing to know, and it gets you away from this idea, well, how much of global warming is our fault? We could talk about that forever because there are significant uncertainties in some of these aspects.
Zeb Hogan:
Andy, have you been able to do the type of stories that you’re talking about? Because obviously one reason that the Greenland ice sheet is in the news, hurricanes are in the news, fires, heat waves, those are the news that we expect. Are you able to do those deeper stories that look at it from a different angle or?
Andrew Revkin:
Well, if I was still at the New York Times, it would be a lot harder to do them. I was in a newsroom for well virtually all of my professional career, and selling a story within the newsroom, it requires a heat factor. Literally. There was a journalism professor at Columbia when I was there, way back in the early eighties, a male mentor who talked about what you called the Mego factor, M-E-G-O. My eyes glaze over. And to me it’s as if you’re staring at your editor in a Star Wars movie and the blast shield comes down over their helmet. It’s literally an eye-glazing thing. Oh, didn’t we write about Greenland last year? We write about the stock market every fricking day. Can we get normal about writing about the climate every day?
Zeb Hogan:
Quick follow-up question. You’ve worked for a number of different media organizations. What’s in your toolkit that served you well throughout your career?
Andrew Revkin:
So the toolkit to me along with that thing I do now about utility is to look more clearly at what is the story. That’s what leads me to a formulation. That’s really how disaster risk scientists look at the world. As Diana Lieman, a wonderful scientist just retired from the University of Arizona geographer, but a climate scientist also. She said too often we think of risk as a change in the hazard that’s like, as I said earlier, how hot is the heat wave, when risk is really the change in vulnerability or exposure. The risk is how vulnerable you are. So I just use risk. And risk is basically the hazard, fire, flood, heat, times exposure, meaning how many people or how many things that matter are in the way, factoring vulnerability. Because you could have 10 million people in a rich city that’s designed to resist flood and it’s so a storm is no big deal, but if you have 10 million people in a poor city living in flood plains, the exposure and vulnerability are what determine if it’s a disaster or not.
So that’s just a formula I try to use when I’m looking at a heat wave. To me it’s about who’s vulnerable, not always this global warming or the other thing of course, how do we relate to the climate system mostly, as you all know here through water, what’s the least clear thing in climate models in terms of what’s going to happen on a hotter planet? The way the water cycle responds. In general, we still don’t have a lot of clarity on what happens with water. In Africa along the equator, this band from Ghana across through the Horn of Africa, the models are divided on whether it gets wetter or drier by 2050 in a heating world.
Sudeep Chandra:
What’s interesting to me and the way you phrase that, but also in terms of how we might think about science and the word conservation science or societal resilience or something, is also thinking deeply about those risks and vulnerabilities and just planning for them. That’s the exciting part I think the science can bring even despite those uncertainties that we might have, at least in conservation biology, if we’re thinking about species, sometimes unfortunately legally we might be thinking about single species or things like that, but if we’re thinking about systems, just knowing that there’s some vulnerability or risk to human population or the attacks that we love the species is an opportunity to then guide us to the future. And I think having science is the knowledge backing the guidance is just key to understanding our future and how we’d respond. So yeah, assessing vulnerability can happen in multiple ways, whether it’s through society and people to the systems and their services to just planning for uncertainty in order to guide us into the future. It’s okay to do that.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. And looking for win, wins to its credit, the federal government rolls out a new website pete.gov, and it has a daily estimate of how many tons of millions of people in America or today will experience dangerous heat. I think it was 60 million. That’s great. When I wrote about it though, I said, we should also have cold.gov. I literally said, let, and I looked, no one’s using that URL because cold kills people around the world and in the United States.
There’s all these debates about whether it’s more or less, but it’s clear to me that excessive heat and excessive cold are not what you want to deal with. There’s a really interesting study that showed here are all the things you could do that can bolster community resilience to both extreme heat and extreme cold at the same time. They’re all the same insulation of houses in poor neighborhoods helps you resist both extremes. But heat is in the headlines because it’s global warming and heat, heat, and again, if you use a risk approach you go, oh wow, that’s cool. We can do all these things with all that money from the infrastructure bill that can benefit both. But you have to talk about both too.
Zeb Hogan:
You mentioned something earlier about stories that make a difference. Do different stories make differences in different ways? Does it depend on who a story might reach telling a different story at a critical time? How do you assess that?
Andrew Revkin:
Well, this gets to something I was saying on campus earlier about what is the product of journalism? Is it a story? Is it the sausage factory that produces stories and are those the things we use? Presuming that is the instrument of change. There are times when that’s true, but for complex issues like resilience to extreme heat and cold, the story is just the starting point to what would have to happen to have a community shift to having more resilient approach to those things. Journalism isn’t really well set up to play a role as the convener of the subsequent conversations. When I was at the Times, I was tired of having to fit the knowledge I was absorbing about climate change and solutions into a story. I learned about the merits of interacting with your audience when I was at the North Pole in 2003 and an editor Passingly said, “Hey, let’s do a Q and A with readers,” they put up a note saying, Andy Revkin living on the sea ice at the North Pole with some scientists, you have some questions.
And she called me on the SAT phone and read me the questions and I recited to her the answers and she typed them in the computer and they got on the website and I thought, this is really cool. I’m here to write a story, but I’m engaging with people. And when I went to Greenland in 2004, I did a bloggish thing and when I went to the climate talks in 2005 in Montreal, I did a podcast 2005, it was a long time ago for a podcast. And what the podcast was, I was going around talking to climate youth who were there the day without social media to amplify them. I was amplifying them by giving them the microphone and as they were discussing their emotional impact of seeing all these gray-suited diplomats not doing anything. And that built in me the importance of not just the story but the conversation, shaping it. Who’s not in the conversation, who can’t afford the paywall, the New York Times? I
Sudeep Chandra:
I think what’s really exciting about being with both the two of you, professor Hogan, who’s studying monster fish on the planet and trying to conserve these rivers, and you as an environmental journalist, is the passions clearly come out too behind these topics. So you just mentioned, oh, I did a Q and A on the New York Times via a SAT phone, but in today’s time period, it’s something I’m not adept at doing. But the two of you are just amazing this way it’s like you take a story from the field, you do a short video and then you upload it into social media. And I think to me that’s an expression of the science, but it’s also an interaction in informing a public that might get interested about river conservation or about sustainability on different topics. I just want to give you kudos for being so amazing both of you for doing that.
Andrew Revkin:
Well it’s really cool about what you guys are doing and the Mekong project particularly is the attuning it to the audiences that matter regionally along the Mekong is so much part of what we want to have happen.
Shelby Herbert:
Real quick, Zeb could you introduce the wonders of the Mekong Project?
Sudeep Chandra:
Yeah. Sudeep and I are co-PIs on a project that’s funded by the US Agency for National Development implemented by the University of Nevada Reno. It’s now an eight-year project and it focuses on the many values of a healthy, connected Mekong river biodiversity, fisheries, cultural importance, and then what makes it probably most unique is a communication component. I think that’s unusual for a university project, unusual for a USA funded project to have such a large communication component.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. Well, and that’s all I’m scouring the world for examples like that. There is a longstanding project called Digital Green that started in India and it’s basically building a YouTube network, a way for farmers to tell their stories about their production innovations to other farmers in local languages with local contexts that build trust and are way more likely to, and get that knowledge of a different seed or different approach to farming to their peers than if some white-suited scientist came out in the field and said, this is what you should do.
Shelby Herbert:
You mentioned earlier that audiences are a little bit allergic to that complexity just doesn’t really work well in the pitching process. And I was wondering, when you’re approaching solution-oriented topics, how do you talk about this stuff, sustainability, renewables, things like that in a way that upholds their virtues without overwriting the drawbacks? So for instance, you’re researching lithium in Nevada right now. That’s the stuff we’re going to put in our EVs someday, hopefully. But it’s very controversial here for a lot of interesting reasons I’m sure our biologists could speak to.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah, and the justice community is really focused on how this relates to the needs and rights of communities around there, around the mine and along the supply chains. And this is an area that’s hugely important to grapple with and really tough, and it’s the area where stories I think are least useful as the tool and where engagement is useful. There is this project called Rural Climate Dialogues, rural Energy Dialogues. It was in Minnesota and the upper Midwest, but the idea was to spur community discussions around topics like the future of energy, the future of climate impacts, and doing that facilitating it is a skill set that’s not really abundant yet. There are scientists I know are working to professionalize this to make it a thing, to be a facilitator of resilience dialogue.
And I think that model is really promising, but it’s not story, it’s sharing stories. It’s examining storylines and narratives with different motivations, different senses of precaution, same thing over nuclear power. And I’ve got good friends who are totally pro-nuclear. I’m all for expanded safe nuclear power and my wife is not. So we love each other for the rest of our life, but we can have that difference. So finding ways to look for the cooperative opportunities. Journalism can do it if it doesn’t, it will fade in utility and become a form of entertainment more than journalism.
Zeb Hogan:
You bring up a good point. How do you involve people that are an important part of this story but don’t want to be part of a story? We deal with this in winners in the Mekong where a lot of local communities, they’re critically important to what we’re doing, but they might not necessarily want to be the focus.
Sudeep Chandra:
There are numbers of things going on, right? So there’s communities that want to be involved in the sustainability of a resource because of the reliance on it, yet the social and societal construct and the type of democracy that might be within a country or a system doesn’t allow them to be as active. Brazil could be an excellent
Andrew Revkin:
Oh, for sure.
Sudeep Chandra:
Activity in this, so how do you involve people without involving them but making sure they have a voice or do you?
Andrew Revkin:
Well, I think that’s where data come into play. It’s anonymized. The autonomous sensors you use on the rivers are really interesting that way because you have the community support for the process. And I think if I remember correctly, they can track certain fish, these giant fish get a name and they become a source of pride and that doesn’t involve direct contact that could imperil somebody, which I know is certainly in Brazil. Bruno Perera and Dom Phillips were murdered by Fish Mafia and they were only in the news because they’re outsiders. I wrote the book about murder of Chico Mendes in 1990 and there’s a lot of that. So you don’t want to be in public quite often. Technology can play a big role and journalists do that too with anonymous sources and stuff. There’s ways to go forward. There’s one other model for complexity.
Amanda Ripley, I’m a big fan of her, she’s a writer who maybe three or four years ago was commissioned by the Solutions Journalism Network to write about how do you report complexity in ways that can engage people not cause them to fuzz out. And it was fascinating. She reported out this question and talked to mediators who deal with disputes and there’s these interview techniques that are the antithesis of what journalists do, especially radio journalists, you want the sound bite, right? Too often as reporters, we’re interviewing people waiting for the thing we want them to say.
In fact, there’s a great YouTube video. It’s like a compounding of many things in 60 Minutes where the reporter says, that must have been shocking. It was shocking, right? Where you’re literally setting the set ball, set it up. So she’s reported on these techniques where you’re basically asking the person to go deeper. You say, tell me more, or what did that make you feel? So even the way we interview can be changed in a way that can give the story more depth and more emotional content and more humanity. And people do engage on those stories ultimately.
Shelby Herbert:
Do you think we underestimate our audiences at all?
Andrew Revkin:
To a certain extent, I think yes. Although our audiences unfortunately are captured, hijacked by these platforms, Facebook and Twitter and the like that are really designed to distract and divide them or confuse them.
Shelby Herbert:
Some span of just evaporated.
Andrew Revkin:
So just your capacity to find reliable contents is limited unless you’re looking for it. What I’m hoping is there’s some way for the platforms to become more responsible. I don’t know, that’s a tough one.
Sudeep Chandra:
But there’s also a part of society that tunes out to that. I mean, some of us go seek knowledge and others are looking for it. And so the nice thing about the mediums of the technologies we have today is they’re somewhat timeless. People can go back and look at your stories, for example, or see wonderful videos of Zeb trying to conserve these rivers in large fishes. It’s almost like we’ve taken a technological leap and jump for if people are willing to go search for information and there’s some of that that does go on, we have to trust in that.
Andrew Revkin:
And I do think Stonybrook University, other schools have whole curriculum now in media literacy. Maybe having news literacy, your relationship with your phone is something you can start to learn at an earlier day.
Shelby Herbert:
Zeb and Sudeep, are there any trends in science communications that jump out at you is particularly frustrating?
Sudeep Chandra:
From my angle, we work on projects that are international in scope, but also local, trying to conserve Lake Tahoe as an ecosystem and societal benefit for the recreational economy. That’s $5000,000,000 for the region while trying to preserve its clarity and natural resources. And what’s tough for me is exactly what Andy described at the top of the podcast, which was this gotcha moment whenever we’re talking with people and it’s almost exhaustive because then the scientists who are trying to communicate information, some of us almost fall into that waiting for the short sound bites. And I am dreaming of a time that we talk about the variability and perhaps vulnerability, but more importantly to do it because there’s limited resources to protect things now than there used to be.
There’s so many issues going on. I guess what I end up seeing now is scientists are starting to play into what journalists want and then that really hurts my side because it then plays into directing resources towards things that only benefit the science community or the institution that the scientists are backing. And that’s a very dangerous road. So I want to encourage my fellow scientists to start thinking about science communication and journalism classes and some philosophy and morality around the type of science that we do related to conservation biology.
Andrew Revkin:
Remember whenever, when was the water summit?
Sudeep Chandra:
So we had to summit up at Lake Tahoe where we had Andy and a bunch of premier international scientists around mountain ecosystem change in 2015.
Andrew Revkin:
Right at the end of the Obama administration. And we’re standing by the water there and the scientists were taking a break and putting their feet in the clear waters of Lake Tahoe and I was videotaping and he said, the science ends up being twerked, including the funding by how the media are creating this landscape around the downside of things. And as you said, I think we’re not looking at where the sky is not falling. Where is the sky not falling? Where are the resilient communities? Where are the resilient ecological communities? What can we learn from those? And that’s something that both the media and science community and funders of science, it’s worth them thinking about that because the spotlight of the news, it favors the dire, it favors conflict and dispute. It doesn’t favor things that are more subtle. And if we bias everything we’re doing toward that light, then we’re missing huge opportunities.
Sudeep Chandra:
Yeah. And the nice thing about thinking about, let’s loosely use the term resilience for mountain community is an example. Finding out where there are the opportunities to conserve taxa or conserve societies or maybe where people have to migrate and move because of big variability and changes that also gives opportunities. It’s much like what we have today and thinking about our space adventures. Maybe we can go to Mars, maybe we can go back to the moon or maybe we can just find places on the planet that science informed on where we have resilient places for biology, for society and for services. And I think there’s a lot of that’s still new to be discovered for a young scientist. For sure.
Shelby Herbert:
To flip something Sudeep said a minute ago about scientists becoming communicators, taking these journalism and philosophy classes. Andrew, do you believe that it’s important for journalists to become more scientifically literate? You yourself have a background in biology. To cover this issue, what proximity do you think a journalist needs to have to hard sciences?
Andrew Revkin:
It’s a really important question. And some of the best science writers I know had no training in science. John Nobel Wilford, the famed journalist at the Times who wrote Man Walked on the moon today, he had no background in science, but he had a background in asking good questions and not being taken for a ride and not being beholden necessarily to a narrative. Just again, those basic principles of journalism. What am I seeing? What am I not seeing? Who’s accountable if anyone, and not catching hold of some particular agenda. At the same time, I think we would have a better time in this century if people had a better understanding of how science works. I don’t really care that the people know the structure of DNA. I’d like them to know how that insight emerged and how it’s a push-me-pull-you process and how it’s ugly and it’s normal for dispute to be part of science.
And that uncertainty in science is a form of knowledge that one thing that it’s not, oh, we don’t know anything. There’s a difference between an ignorance and uncertainty. If we could somehow build that a little bit more into our educational flow, I think we’d be a little better off. It’s still a tough go because when push comes to shove, we still fall back on more of our reflexes. And as someone here said, loyalty is a substitute for knowledge that you’re more loyal to a leader and dictatorships particularly and knowledge goes out the door. And we’ve seen so many examples of bad things happening. Unfortunately, the behavioral science is pretty dark.
I once wrote a piece where I said the scariest science is not when I was on the North Pole sea ice with the cracks forming underneath me. And it wasn’t when I was in the middle of the Amazon talking to murderous cattle ranchers. It was when I stumbled into the behavioral sciences and learned among other things that more science literacy doesn’t shift people’s understanding of global warming toward the end of the spectrum of belief. And I use the word belief consciously that the people who have the most basic science literacy are at both ends of the spectrum of views on global warming, dismissive and alarmed. So as a journalist, that’s a really tough medicine to absorb because it says, oh, writing more explanatory, Pulitzer Prize winning articles doesn’t change people.
Sudeep Chandra:
Andy haven’t said, I as a young scientist, I like to think I’m young. I’ll start that again. I’m a scientist and-
Andrew Revkin:
You’re a young scientist
Sudeep Chandra:
And I’m just wondering how do we approach things so we can inform through science and the variability and uncertainties, but we inform a public so we’re not reaching the same audiences. And this is something that I struggle with because I want to reach audiences of different backgrounds because science to me is a way to guide our future. How do we do this? Is it through social media and alternative forms of communication?
Andrew Revkin:
No. No. No. It’s through looking at the landscape of the issue. And I’ll give you an example from the wonderful reporting done in 2015 by John Sutter who was at CNN. He found the single most skeptical county in America on global warming. It was Woodward County, Oklahoma, your home state.
Sudeep Chandra:
My home state.
Andrew Revkin:
Yup. Yup. Yup. So Woodward County, Oklahoma is ground zero for climate disbelief. And he went there just in an open way and started interviewing people on the street. And there’s this one guy who at the beginning he says he works for an oil company, he thinks God controls the environment. So at this point you’re listening going, okay, so here’s the punchline that he had half of his roof covered with solar panels and he was going to do the rest of the roof. He wanted to get off the grid entirely. He said, so if you go into that community with your climate crisis placard, you’re turning him off right away. But if you say, wow, that’s pretty cool. You got solar panels in your roof, or wouldn’t it be great if everyone could do that? And then you start talk about the impediments and well, what would we do locally? And where he is now, I’d love to circle back and see.
Sudeep Chandra:
And you’re meeting someone with similar commonality obviously.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. So you can find true gentle exchange through an open inquiry can make progress.
Zeb Hogan:
You just reminded me of something that happened to me. It seems hard to believe now, at least to me, but one of the journalists that I really enjoyed working with, his name is Seth Middens. He works for the New York Times. And this seems unbelievable, but he got in touch with me. He went into the Cambodian Department of Fisheries one day and just went up to someone and asked them what’s going on that’s interesting with fisheries in Cambodia. And through his connecting with the Cambodian Department of Fisheries, he got connected with me and he ended up doing three wonderful stories, one on large fish, one on the importance of fish migrations and one on the importance of the to Sap Lake and it’s ecological uniqueness. He’s not a scientist. And I mean, to me that feels like good journalism. And I don’t know if very many people do that anymore.
Andrew Revkin:
It doesn’t have to be the end of those days. The Earth Journalism Network is a young global network of environmental writers and dozens of developing countries, and they’re learning some interesting techniques for geo journalism, data-driven journalism. And they’re out there eager to tell stories that matter. And so I work with the Global press, which is a network of female journalists in developing countries. And what I did for them was an exercise and how to think about climate risk as opposed to climate change. And it illuminates countless stories that you wouldn’t think about otherwise. Why does our village keep flooding as opposed to, oh COP 27, the next climate treaty is coming up. What is my country’s position on that? Which too many stories are driven by those things.
And that’s not how the world works. It’s not going to determine success or failure. The success or failure at these climate meetings is determined by things that happen on the ground. It’s not because some politician is being pressured to have greater ambition. I love those terms they use. So you need to have greater booster ambition that it doesn’t, ambition can be boosted by lowering the cost of change. And it’s not boosted by some diplomat saying you need to boost your ambition.
Sudeep Chandra:
Do you mind if we switch gears for a second?
Shelby Herbert:
Sure.
Sudeep Chandra:
What I love about Andy is this very thoughtful conversation we’re having around journalism, the importance of science, the utility of science, complexities around reporting the science. But you’re also a noted artist and you’re a musician. And what’s fun about just experiencing some music with you last evening is the idea you’ve played music with all people and including Pete Seger, and then you have your own songs that are originals and you played with a band. What’s it like having this journalism side of you, but working your artistic side? Is there a complexity around that?
Andrew Revkin:
Well, it was a conflict of when I was the New York Times, they had all these ethics rules about stating your opinion on stuff when you’re in the newsroom. I literally joke sometimes when I have this song Liberated Carbon. It’s a history of our relationship with fossil fuels. But I used to joke, I need to put a paper bag over my head now as it was on stage. So I’m not singing this as a New York Times reporter. It didn’t align well. But for me it fills in a niche in my existence that seems natural despite what I said about stories, having their limitations. I love stories, obviously we all do. And songs are just another way to approach information that doesn’t necessarily fit into a story. Liberated Carbon could be a story. It took a thousand generations for our species to rise, period. It’s true. But gathering and hunting was no way to get by. Yes. Right.
Sudeep Chandra:
So it’s storytelling based on facts with great musical envelopes around.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. Anyway, it’s really fun. And then being around people like Pete Seger, for those who don’t recall, he was one of the great figures in 20th-century music who wrote wonderful songs and drove environmental cleanup of the Hudson River and just an incredible human being. Got to spend roughly 20 years playing frequently with him, mostly in an informal way.
Shelby Herbert:
How’d you guys meet?
Andrew Revkin:
We were neighbors in the Hudson Valley and there was a monthly potluck supper at the Beacon Sloop Club, little Shack on the waterfront. And they talk about local politics, about environment and then how come the instruments.
Shelby Herbert:
That’s amazing.
Sudeep Chandra:
That’s pretty exciting,
Shelby Herbert:
Sudeep, does your science inform any of your creative pursuits?
Zeb Hogan:
I’ve spent a lot of my life with the television shows and so that was a very natural connection. So I work with National Geographic on these television shows about Big Fish and those shows were informed by my work as a scientist. So that was a very natural connection.
Sudeep Chandra:
To Zeb’s credit. He is also an excellent photographer and shoots video and just really pulls things out when we’re in the field in a way that most people, most scientists I don’t think are able to do.
Andrew Revkin:
And that work is so valuable. When I was a kid, well, Jacque Cousteau was this French explorer. He wasn’t a scientist actually. He was an explorer and an engineer, and he had this crew. Then they went around the world on this little boat, the Calypso, and he ended up writing a book that I loved and had this popular TV show, I think it was Sundays, every Sunday. And that popular content, just him putting a camera underwater and going, pulled me completely into a love of the ocean along with living with proximity to the ocean. And I think you have to have it all. You have to have that direct experience as well. But this work, what you did with Monster Fish is just great.
Sudeep Chandra:
Hey, and so for the record, you had some amazing time on the ocean when you were younger.
Andrew Revkin:
Yeah. Getting out of college. Well, I grew up on Rhode Island. We always had a boat in the family sailboat, not nothing big or fancy, one of the most home built. And I loved skin diving. The bar mitzvah present I still own is a divers mask from Christo’s company, US divers. And getting out of college, I got a fellowship that allowed me to study in the South Pacific. My project was to look at man’s relationship to the sea in different island communities. This is that as a 22 year old, I’m in the South Pacific and seeing the world. And that’s actually what led me to be want to be a journalist, taking photographs and keeping an inadequate journal.
I got to New Zealand and I was going to go back to do some of the other parts of the project, go to Newfoundland and the Caribbean. But there was a boat at the dock that needed crew and they were sailing around the world. And I raised my hand. This came aboard and they interviewed me. And so I played guitar. The skipper, he was a harmonica player and he said, you’re hired.
Sudeep Chandra:
Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s how I hire people too, if they play music.
Andrew Revkin:
So I joined the crew, this punky boat, the wander less, no less. And we sailed 15,000 miles, 17 months from New Zealand to what used to be Yugoslavia with lots of adventures in the middle.
Shelby Herbert:
I caught part of this story last night, but you played a song at the North Pole?
Andrew Revkin:
Oh yeah. There’s an old ballad from the 18 hundreds about a British explorer, John Franklin, who as they say, he went to the Arctic three times and only came back twice, which is not how things, you don’t want things to go that way. And his whole crew, they all vanished. And at any rate, the song was about his disappearance and the search for him. And I was camped on the sea ice. This was a temporary way station maintained by the Russians for tourists. And it was a camper, barely heated. It was probably 10 degrees inside with a little heater. And we were there for eight hours. And so I started singing and I sang that song Floating on the sea ice near the North Pole, 30 miles from the North Pole.
Shelby Herbert:
No one with you was superstitious, I hope.
Andrew Revkin:
No, this video, it’s on, it’s YouTube.
Shelby Herbert:
That’s awesome.
Andrew Revkin:
It was homeward bound. As we cross the deep while swinging in my hammock, I fell asleep, dreamed a dream. And I thought it drew concerning Franklin and his sailing crew.
Shelby Herbert:
Love it. Bravo.
Zeb Hogan:
You said that your sailing trip inspired you to become a journalist?
Shelby Herbert:
Yeah.
Zeb Hogan:
In what sense?
Andrew Revkin:
I’m just seeing things that I grew up as a kid being the sort of, did you see that or did you hear that? And 21 days at Sea crossing the Indian Ocean, we got into Djibouti and scattered and I rounded a corner and there was shop that had a big pile of leopard skins next to it. I took a photograph of that and I wanted to share that with the world, sustainability, the word in 1980 was still the kind of newish, but I’m looking at this going, this is not sustainable. Why is there a pile of leopard skins in this desert place? And so that’s what drove me forward.
Shelby Herbert:
So speaking to sources of inspiration, and I’m not saying this to flatter you, I promise, but one of the most impactful pieces of journalism for me actually came from the Columbia Climate School. I think in 2015 y’all broke this story about internal communications at Exxon. There was just this discrepancy between what was happening inside the company, acknowledging climate change and their communication strategy, disrupting public understanding of the reality of climate change, knowing that this massive corporate influence is something we’re up against as journalists. I mean, how do you think we approached this Goliath?
Andrew Revkin:
I think that that was the project of the journalism school. It was some media partners and it was really good work. Relying on some external environmentalists who had been probing with freedom of Information Act for a long time, and they found a mother load. Imposing transparency where transparency doesn’t want to exist is a fundamental part of journalism. I think that and earlier work, dating back to 1998, Jack Kushman at the New York Times broke a key story about a meeting with consultants around distorting the climate picture. So it’s been a long process of revealing this work. And Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway wrote the book, Merchants of Doubt, all building forward to that additional detail that came out in that project. I think it is what you have to do. It’s an essential part of shifting the public understanding of what these companies do and don’t do.
And hopefully it’s nudging them toward better practices in the future. They’re not going to close up shop. We’re not going to have a world without Exxon Mobil or Shell or BP anytime soon. But having more than nudging, keeping those processes up is crucial. It isn’t the solution to the climate problem though. It’s one facet of a enormous challenge. And the sooner journalism and the rest of it convey that dimension gives you a sense of where to focus your energy and not just run up against the wall all the time. Yelling and screaming and getting your head and not understanding why the wall’s not changing.
Shelby Herbert:
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Andrew. Any parting thoughts?
Sudeep Chandra:
Andy, you’re amazing human. I just want to say it. Thank you for taking the time to come visit the University of Nevada, engage with our staff and students and just share stories and experiences. So thank you. It takes energy.
Andrew Revkin:
It does. Thanks for the opportunity though. It was worth, this is my first flight in 930 days coming here.
Shelby Herbert:
Wow.
Andrew Revkin:
And I chose this. So I’m here because I care about what’s going on here too.
Shelby Herbert:
It’s an honor and it’s an honor to be in this room with you all. Thank you all so much.
Zeb Hogan:
Thank you.
Shelby Herbert:
And a big thank you to our Discover Science Podcast listeners. We hope you’ll join us again next time.
Andrew Revkin:
(Singing).
