My angle
Climate stories are usually either wonky or dreary. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
When I interviewed New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert about her book, The Sixth Extinction, for Mother Jones, she took something horrifying—the idea that we’re in the midst of a massive extinction—and talked about it with the kind of candor that left me feeling whatever the opposite of depressed is. (Not happy, exactly, but alive.)
At GQ, I sent best-selling author Reif Larsen to Gothenburg, Sweden, the "most sustainable city in the world," to try to get inspired. He struggled admirably to reconcile his feeling of "endsickness"—vertigo induced by impending catastrophe—with the ingenuity he saw in the faces of the people around him, like the student who hooked up a blender to a bicycle to save electricity.
Or take the Cajun Navy. Hurricane Harvey dumps 50 inches of rain on Houston in three days. People are stranded and there aren’t enough first responders to save everyone. So a bunch of crazy Cajuns from Louisiana tow their boats to Texas and start their own vigilante rescue operation. That’s a climate story that gets your blood pumping!
These stories prove to me that there’s a way to tap into human resilience and whatever it is that makes being alive so uniquely interesting, even when—especially when—covering something as bleak as what we’re facing.
There's a way to tell stories about business, nature, and climate without resorting to that all-too-familiar tone of obligation and doom. There’s a way to tell badass stories that make your forearm hair tingle, and do it with bipartisan appeal.
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PS: I am also a novelist—more details on that soon—and I write the occasional substack. You can subscribe here.