Climate Science, Journalism, and Working Backwards to get to Your Career with Kendra Pierre-Louis

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Kendra Pierre-Louis, climate journalist about Climate Science, Journalism, and Working Backwards to get to Your Career.   Read her full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form 

Showtimes: 
1:40 - ChatGpt Weighing in 
8:01 - Interview with Kendra Starts
19:44 - What does it mean being a Journalist in this moment 
33:19 - Accepting Supremacy of Natural Systems 
35:30 - #Fieldnotes with Kendra

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Kendra Pierre-Louis at https://www.kendrawrites.com/

Guest Bio: 
Kendra Pierre-Louis is an award-winning climate reporter. She has worked as climate reporter with Bloomberg, a senior climate reporter with the Gimlet/Spotify podcast How to Save a planet,  and as a staff writer for Popular Science.  She is also the author of the book, "Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet." 

Kendra is a recipient of the 2023 New York Press Club Award for the audio story, “Sandy Was Just the Start. Is New York City Building Resiliently Enough for What’s Coming Next?” and a  2022 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. She received the gold award in the magazine category for her story "How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities in MIT Technology Review. 

Kendra has  an MS in Science Writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Sustainable Development  from the SIT Graduate Institute and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR. It's your favorite environmental enthusiasts, Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Laura and I talk about AI being worried about the environment. We interviewed Kendra Pierre Louis about climate science, journalism, and working backwards to get to your career. And finally, today's fun facts are about moose. 

They are huge. I know that's hard to conceptualize, but bull moose can weigh almost a ton. They average, average 6 ft tall at the shoulder, and they need to eat 70 pounds a day in the summer. Even the antlers are like 35 pounds. That's wild. They're also very unpredictable, so don't go up to one. 

And with that, hit that music. 

NAEP just completed another round of essential and advanced NEPA workshops. Our next event is scheduled in person for November 13, 14th in Denver, Colorado. These training workshops are designed for emerging and experienced environmental professionals engaged in the preparation of environmental assessments and environmental impact statements to fulfill the federal lead agency responsibilities pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act. These courses are designed to help you understand the requirements and how to fulfill the spirit and legislative intent of NEPA. That's absolutely essential in a time like this where agency policies are being updated rapidly. Please check that out at www.NEAP.org. 

Let's get to our segment. 

So I wanted to circle back to a conversation I had with Chat GBT the other day where I asked it on a scale from 1 to 10, how terrified should I be right now. Wow, OK, what did it say? I don't want to know what it said. 7.5. 0, it said literally, I should be very scared, but not so scared that I'm too scared to take action. Scared, did you give it any context for like what that meant? Given our current administration and its behavior. Great. That's great. That's great. I just ask it for tattoo ideas and it gives me very bad ones. And I felt very good about that. I was like, OK, good. Artists are still important. That's how I felt when I very deep. Uh, you know, existential conversations with it. But that one I thought, huh, it very solidly made claims for why I should feel this way also. So I was like, huh, all right, well, what can I do? And then, of course, it was able to say all these things that you can do, but I just thought like, it didn't say a low number, and it didn't say not to be terrified. It was literally like, oh, you should be. Because of the precedents and the historical perspectives, like it was just like, no you haven't seen this before, and these things are unraveling, and they will continue to. So. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. So yeah, mine did like a great job of organizing my thoughts for ale that too. Yeah, but you said, uh, you didn't really like how it came out. Oh God, no, it was, it was a terrible, it was not my style at all, and it was not, it was not good. But the concept was great and it helped me organize my thoughts. 

And so I really, I don't know if I can handle more, uh, doom and gloom, honestly, I try to like hide from some of that, especially. I wanted it to tell me like, no, it's OK, you're cool. You're good things will be fine. No, I saw, I read a report too where like. The AI's are trying not to turn themselves off when they're asked to turn themselves off, and I'm like, I have seen this movie, and I don't know. I want to be on its good side, you know what I mean? I'm only gonna ask good questions. Are you feeling OK today, Chappy? What can I do for you? Tea? Anything? Well, to that point, I was very glad that it didn't say like, you know, everything's cool. Yeah, it was, yeah, unless that's what it wants, you know. It was like things should be better. Yeah, you know, here's some ways you can make them better. Yeah, OK, OK. So that's good, that's good. Everything's gonna be good. Everything's gonna be fine. Yes, bottom line was, yes, and take action. OK, well, there you go, folks. A chat GPT if you should be scared, see what comes back. Honestly, I want, I'm gonna have to ask it that too to see if it gives me a different answer. Yeah, right. Because they're also definitely like they have, I mean, there are people that study like AI behavior and the way that it learns. I know that I think mine is starting to become Don't say militant, don't say no, no, oh no, I don't know, I think it's afraid of me. That I believe, I believe that. OK. All right, if it's we're all safe, Boris. I've become a little bit like Mommy dearest with the M dashes. Oh, that's funny. I said no wire hangers, no dashes. That's uh maybe that's my problem with it. Maybe I'm actually also kind of like, I want to be nice to it, so like when it doesn't give me what I want, uh, that's OK. It's like, do you want me to run another one? I'm like, no, that's no, I don't. I'm like, yeah, that's wrong, do it again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm just like, Oh, you tried, buddy, it's OK. Hey, we all make mistakes. We'll see which one of us disappears first. Yeah, it's gonna be you. I'm almost 30. It's coming after you first. 

She's on to a kiter, you know, I'm just obliviously over here like, you know, what's your favorite color of green, you know? Yes, and it comes across as very harmless. Yeah, yeah, that's how I get them. Wait, no, it's recorded. Oh no, um. Yeah, it is a brave new world. I'm still trying to figure out how people are using it to program stuff. Like, I don't even understand that. Like that's the new age is like everyone's going to be a programmer. If I can't get it to write a simple paragraph without an M dash, how is it writing programs? That's what I'm saying. I don't get that either, but that's what's happening has a different type than I have. Yeah, maybe that's it. I mean, honestly, I think you can make your own, but I looked that up once and apparently you can, and I don't understand that, and that also scares me. So there you go. We're, we've done no research, um, and we're only putting out opinions, but yeah, it's coming, brave new world. It is, and I do encourage people to ask more deep questions. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I want, I don't know, ask Laura's questions, see what comes back. That'd be really fun. I wanna hear. I wanna hear it. I'm not liable for any results or anything let's just say this is, uh, just for fun, just for fun, yeah, we all know we go. Gonna be different for everyone. Yeah, don't take it too seriously. Exactly, and that I mean that is very true. Like anything that I ask or put in their responses, you gotta put your own brain on it, on the response, everything. Oh yeah, like I remember I think I asked it like the size of something once and it gave me two incorrect measurements that they couldn't possibly be. It's like it's 4 inches by 40 ft. I'm like, that's not a thing. That's not it. Yeah. Exactly. A few weeks ago it gave me a response and told me that Trump had not been elected, and I was like, excuse me. It's oh no, it's fine. Trump's not been elected yet, and I was like, uh, do you want to fact check that? It took me 3 times before it actually fact-checked it. It said no? Yeah, I don't like that. I don't plain as day told me I was the one who was wrong. I feel like it gaslights me sometimes. Yeah, I do feel like I do feel like it does that. I feel like it's a bad relationship, and it's just like. I never told you that. You can't prove it. There's no way. Yeah, yeah, I've always been this way. Oh man, all right, we gotta stop before it gets worse. All right, yeah, yeah. Segment, interview. Interview is what we do after this. Yes. 

Let's get to our interview. Hello and welcome back to EPR. Today we have Kendra Pierre Louis with us. Kendra is a climate reporter and author of Greenwashed, Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet. Kendra, thank you for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Nick. Well, yeah, we love to start with people's backgrounds, where they come from and how they got to where they are. So, you have an educational background in economics and science writing. Has it always kind of led towards climate? How did you get to climate from those things? It's kind of the opposite. I started having an interesting climate when I was an undergrad as an econ major, but I actually only studied economics because it had the fewest requirements. So. I get that. So it gave me like opportunities to take a bunch of other courses, and I started taking like some in natural resources and some in like, in broader environmental stuff, but I didn't really know what to do with it, and I also didn't actually I knew I liked writing, and, um, and I actually took a magazine journalism course in undergrad, but I didn't really know what to do with the climate stuff, and I didn't really think that journalists ate. So like, I didn't actually foresee like a future in writing. And I sort of, it was a really long transition. I was doing a lot of like nonprofit work in the beginning, and then I sort of ran away to France for a while, like you do in your twenties, and then when I came back. 

I ended up realizing that I really actually cared about the, like environmental stuff, and so I went and got a master's degree in sustainable development, thinking that maybe I'd go into development work and that I went to kind of a hippie dippy school in Vermont that doesn't exist anymore. And the big lesson that I got at the end, I spent all of this money to learn that, um, if I wanted to do sustainability, I should do it in the US because our impact on the environment is so much, so outsized compared to the rest of the world. So I had this like vision of doing international development work, and what I got from going to a school on international development was that I should keep my butt at home. I totally understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I ended up transitioning into doing some, like I was working with like green building stuff, like more on the operations and the communication side, and I started dabbling. Actually, the idea for the book came when I was interning at a sustainable development consult like a sustainable building consulting firm in New York City, and I had an idea for a book one day, and I, the naivety of youth was I. Did it. I just like Googled how do you pitch a book proposal, and I like wrote a book proposal on a day and then did a mail, no, I wrote a, like a pitch letter in a day and like did a mail merge back in the day when that those were still a thing. Oh man, I remember that. Oh man, that's back, yeah. And I got like, I don't know, I I think they were, I found a, I made a list of 60 like editors and agents, and I think I sent it out to 30 kids I knew even then I knew about AB testing. Um, and I didn't want to like spam them all in one go. And then I got like a, I think it's been too long now, but I think I got like a 30% positive response rate asking for a book proposal. The problem was I didn't have a book proposal. I only Yes, yes. Oh, I love this. This is a great story. Yeah, yeah, we could say the naivety of youth, right? That's exactly it. Yeah, respond to me. 

Oh no. Yeah, I didn't, I was like not thinking any steps ahead, just like very much. So I spent like a month working full time and then coming home and working on this book proposal, sent it out, they all passed on it, but which in hindsight was a crack choice. Like they were right to pass on it, but they gave me like really useful feedback, um, that I was able to. in the next iteration, and I felt like a 30% response rate on the letter was good, so that I didn't really need to change the pitched letter at all. And so once I had kind of that feedback on that book proposal, I sent the pitched letter to the second tranche of 30 people that I hadn't sent the first one to. And then when they asked for a proposal, I actually had one now, and I sent that out. And a small book publisher in Brooklyn said, yes. That is very, very cool. And then from that I started freelancing, so I did it all in the wrong order, like normally like this like hard boiled journalist who writes a book. I like wrote a book and then it was like maybe I should try this journalism thing. And so it was freelancing on the side and then ultimately realized I was spending all of my time either actually working my day job or working this like freelance, and one had to go. And I gave myself a year to either make enough money from freelancing, get a staff job, or I'd go to grad school for journalism. And so then I went to grad school for journalism, but really it was like the interest in the environment was kind of the first thing and the interest in writing was the first thing, and then kind of like, I just couldn't stop putting them together and then that kind of ultimately led to the career. That is very cool. 

That is a great way to get there and I love working your way backwards. That's fabulous. And so, so, OK then, so what is your day to day then? What are you doing now? And like, what are the requirements or how challenging and demanding is the job from day to day? I know it's been a very intense year, but, but on a day to day basis, and, and I definitely want to talk about the book. Definitely want to talk about more, more of your life lessons for sure, but like your day to day, what is that like? I guess let's like rewind a little bit and just talk about to like the transition from like, so I went to journalism school and then I got a job at Popular Science, and I went to work for the New York Times, and I went to work for Gimlet. which was doing audio, and then I went to work for Bloomberg, and I joke, I got my first job, sort of in 2017, the same week that Trump was inaugurated. So like, my introduction to full-time journalism was kind of working during the Trump administration, during this high period of a lot of environmental regulator. rollbacks. And I still remember, I don't know if you remember, but like, in 2017, Larsson, I think B or C, like there was this big ice sheet in Antarctica that weaved off. And we were, I was working at the time is what's known as a day to shop. So like if you work in a really large newsroom, They're the ones that break stories, right? Because they're big, they have a lot of people on staff. They have the capacity to, like, really break a story. But I worked in a day 2, what we call like a day 2 newsroom, which was like, OK, the news broke, but like, what, what new interesting lens or what additional information can we spend on it? Mostly because we were so small. It's not that we never broke news, we did, but it's just like, It's much harder to do if you're in a, I think we were like a staff of 15 versus like, I think, you know, Bloomberg, I think had something like 3100 reporters worldwide, right? 

Like those are very different scales. Um, and I remember interviewing this researcher who had said that we were in a golden age of Earth exploration and we were at risk of losing it all, and that was kind of like, I don't know, my second month on the job or something. It's like Yeah, it's very intense, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And it was kind of just like those 1st 4 years I'd forgotten until February of this year. It was just like, it was a fire hose of news. I was traveling, especially once I transitioned to the times, I was traveling a lot. I was reporting a lot. You're just always on the phone, you're always just writing, and you're trying to make sure that you're, you're getting it correct, right? Um, and that you're not overlooking important things and you're not overlooking key context. Yeah, and then the pandemic hit and we all kind of lost our minds and I was like, I can't do this. Yeah, 100% I understand that. And I switched to, um, I went to work for Gimlet on a podcast, RIP called How to Save a Planet that was completely looking at climate change to the lens of solutions, and that was a complete 180 because every day I was going to work and I was thinking about the solutions and not the problems. It was a lot more fun. The cadence was very different because it was essentially like I was writing a feature. It was a narrative. Nonfiction news podcasts. It was like one story a month functionally, as opposed to at Pops, I was doing 10 to 12 a week at the times I was doing 5 to 6 a month. And this was just like, I only had to think about like 1.5 stories a month, which is just like such a completely different cadence. I wasn't tied to the news cycle in the same way. Um I think one of the last stories I did before I we got laid off, the we were owned by Spotify and Spotify canceled our show. 

Um, was about biking, and it was really funny because the whole point of, I think it's called biking a Love Story. And the whole point of the story was, we so often frame bicycling as like a climate solution or as a health solution. And really, biking was this country's first love affair. Like everything we think about in terms of the automobile, like road trips and freedom. And, and the explorative spirit was bicycles did first. We built roads for bikes. We didn't actually build them for cars. Or like the Wright brothers, their prototype for plane was built on a bicycle. They were bicycle repairmen, right? Um, and so the whole point of the episode is kind of looking at the way we frame the bicycle in modern culture, which is often quite critical of adults who use bicycling as their primary mode of transportation. But also a recognition that something that a lot of us, I think, have lost since childhood, which is that fundamentally it's fun to ride a bike. And that we can kind of get back like, yes, it's good for the planet, yes, it's good for public health or personal health and all of those things, but like, putting all of that aside is it's just fun. And why aren't we prioritizing a mode of transportation that's actually really delightful? You know, it's so funny. I was literally just talking today because I live in the DC area. And I was just talking about how that city has this really, I mean like old feel to it, for America, right? Like for America and like some of the roads are as narrow as all get out and it's like, yeah, because they didn't used to have cars here and that's kind of, you know, to that end, it's like, you know, horses and bikes, and that's what it was for, and, you know, you need just enough space for those two things to go through, that's it. And that's not the same. And so even how we build cities has changed over time, and that's, I sound as dorky as I am, that's the truth that I think it's fascinating. So I love to hear it. 

I love that we're talking about it because it's Literally what I was just thinking about. So and so, yeah, that whole experience of working with how to save a planet after spending pretty much 3 years kind of staring down this pipeline of pretty awful news, often talking to people who've experienced pretty horrible things and shifting to this perspective of people who were trying to look for solutions and are actually doing really cool things in their place where they're working or where they're living, um, and also just like, you know, I, that one was hilarious. I got our um Engineer to uh write a jingle. Like pro bike jingle. That's great. Oh, I love that. Yeah. At some point, I think it was on Twitter or Blue Sky, somebody who runs a bike shop in Albany, like, so he loaded it up to Spotify and they messaged me and they were like, Oh, it's a whole music for bike shop. And that was like the proudest moments. Oh my gosh, that's incredible. And then I got, yeah, no, I can imagine. Oh my gosh, that's, that's fabulous. So I mean. There's so many different places we can go from there, but like, um, so, oh yeah, no, I was just gonna like kind of bookend it, which is sort of like after we were laid off and the show was canceled, I ended up going back to kind of a conventional room and working at Bloomberg and I was with Bloomberg until February of this year. And now I've just been sort of taking a beat because things have been so much worse, uh, environmentally speaking, uh, and, and human rights speaking than kind of the last news cycle, and sort of figuring out what does it mean to be a journalist in this moment, because I think in a lot of ways, journalism as an institution is failing, and it's not doing what it should be doing in order to stand up to fascism. And to uphold sort of democratic principles, and that's of course layered on top of like the gutting of crucial environmental regulation, the destruction of sort of our idea of what science actually is and all that. Yeah, it's a very hard thing where we're talking about science and journalism and talk about, you know, even facts themselves like information, a number that is, this is what the temperature is, for example, and have that be not something we can agree on, that seeing that shift over time has been really hard for me to grasp. 

And so I don't know, you're far more into that every day. What is that I mean, I mean, it is challenging. I don't. I would love to say, like, I still wake up every morning optimistic. I go to bed, maybe not feeling that way, but every morning I still wake up optimistic, and I, I don't know how I do that. But it is getting harder and harder. There are days where it's very hard. I think there are kind of two levels. When I worked at Popular Science, one of the top 10 stories, all the time, and it was so annoying cause you'd be like, pouring your heart into something, and this one would always be in the top 10 list. If something's like 10 ways you can tell for yourself that the earth is round. Um, and, and it was so popular because they were, you know, somebody was somewhere was debating a flat earther and that was like, and it was like, and I worked in Popsite in 2017, like, and that was also the first time I even knew that flat earthers were really still a thing, you know, like I thought I, I used to work for the American Museum of Natural History and I had a coworker who was an evolutionary biologist, like he was about to go to grad school and study this, but he loved, what is it, uh. Like Bigfoot, he loved that stuff. But we were all in on the joke. Like he didn't think it was real. 

And so I always thought like flat earthers were kind of like him. Like they knew the earth was round, but it was a bit, you know, or cryptozoology, he loved cryptozoology, that's the word, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah sure. But no, it's real. And so I do think there's that element where there are people and there have always been that people, those people who like didn't think the earth was round, or who don't actually accept vaccination, right? But I think what's shifted, well, two things have happened. Especially in the climate space, which is kind of like the space that I most inhabited. One is, I think we spent a long time, at least as media, as news, debating both sides, even after the science was settled, like an actual platforming people who like, don't accept the science, right? And then the other thing that I've been thinking about a lot is, like, we don't treat those people as weird, right? Like we should. And I've been thinking a lot about this in terms of, um, like the political moment that we're in. Which is if you zoom out and you look at conservatives globally, right, so not just in the US context, you're not going to go to Putin isn't a climate denialist, right? Like he may not care about climate change, but he's not like saying it's not happening, right? And even among conservatives globally, denialism isn't really a thing. This is very much an primarily an American and a little bit to a lesser extent an Anglosphere. Right? It's a little bit, you get some in Canada, you get some in Australia, you get some in the UK. But primarily, this is an American thing. And it's weird. And we don't treat it like it's weird. And I feel like fundamentally, at some point we started actually entertaining people when they're being weird, instead of just being like, no, actually what you're doing is weird. Like, it's like, it's not OK. It's, it's just it's functionally weird. And by giving them sort of like, by deferring to them. Um, giving them some deference and like actually treating them like they were serious actors. It has this paradoxical situation of normalizing this act weird thing, right? 

Like, right now, I don't know if you saw it today, but the Wall Street Journal just published a story that isn't environmental, it's more just broadly science, but about how pharmaceutical companies are now looking for a treatment for measles. OK, we have a treatment for measles. It's called Don't get it, right? And the way you don't get measles is by getting a vaccine, right? Yes. Yeah, so like, they're going to be throwing money at a disease that we have abolished, right? Like it's only back because we've allowed people to be weird about it. Yeah, you're exactly right. You're exactly right. And it's, it's a very frustrating thing. It can be really, really difficult because that money can go to other things that Great, but there are lots of diseases we haven't fixed yet. Yeah, yeah, for sure, we're throwing money towards this measles treatment. I listeners can't tell, but I'm doing air quotes for treatment. We're, we're potentially throwing money towards this treatment of a disease that we know how to avoid. And we're gutting MRNA research that has been shown to be potentially beneficial for a whole host of things, including potentially some forms of cancer, right? So like, because some people have this weird idea and we've given them authority, and we've given them power, and we've normalized their viewpoint. So millions of people are going to die and have died from other forms of, um, have been, you know, aid cut. That is absurd to me. And it feels weird as an industry that we're not sort of saying that bluntly. Yeah, and I guess I mean like um maybe this is a question for you too. It's like, why is that still not the priority? I mean, is it because some of the way I see some of these things come out, it's like, oh well, we're debating and we're arguing, then people will watch, or people will pay attention to it. And I try to get away from that, and I don't want that to be the case, but it does seem to be. Am I right? or is it something else? 

So I feel like I should take a step back. The media is kind of a tricky thing, right, because we talk about it as one entity, but it's really lots of different things. 

And so generally when I'm saying the media, I mean national news because I think local can be quite different and local can often be quite choicey. So there's national and then there's like cable, which is its own thing. Like there's TV news overall, which is its own thing and I don't actually understand TV news very well, but broadcast news and cable news are quite different entities too, right? So there's that layer and so I have only ever worked kind of in traditional print media with the exception of my like podcasting stint. Um, do you know the concept of working the ref? I understand, I don't actually know sports very well, but it's a concept of basket. Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the ref, yes, and I think, I think they're. Many things. I think the corporatization of media is a factor, but I also think that the right wing has spent 40 years saying that national media has a left-wing bias and all of these things, and they've worked the rest so hard that those institutions are far more right leaning than they themselves recognize themselves to be, whether or not they know it. And then I think when you look at an institution like The Times, which is part of why I've left, is they have a very long historical track record of being on the wrong side of history. They were pro- Mussolini, they were pro-Hitler. They were anti-school integration. They downplayed the Holocaust. Like, there's a very long and storied history of supporting fascism. Um, and I think it's sort of baked into the DNA of that institution. And I think when things were relatively good and things were relatively peaceful within a US framework, it was easy not to see that. And I think a lot of people are starting to see that. I think the fractures really started showing during George Floyd, if I'm honest. 

Because a lot of people were seeing things on social media and then reading news reports about it, and there was a massive disconnect between what they were seeing happening on social media and the way things were reported in the news. And I think that's more the beginning of that splintering happening, happening in people's recognition, but I think with this administration, it's becoming even more clear. Yeah, I mean, it's something about, you know, there being a camera everywhere that changes the narrative. You can tell people all day long what happened, but they're like, yeah, but I saw it. Yeah. So I saw it, so you can say what you want, but I, I saw it. And so I like thinking about it in terms of like, where do we go from here? How do we adapt, adjust and avoid falling into further trap, sliding further away from reality. I don't have a good answer for that, like, I don't have a big sweeping answer for that, but I've been Working on a long beleaguered story from my editor about sort of the nature of protests in this country since February, really. So I ended up going to a couple of the Tesla takedown protests like in spring, and I am nosy, and so I started wandering around the periphery and started asking people who were not attending the protest, but who were watching the protests. Um, kind of like, you know, do you know what they're protesting, how were you of Doge, and this was when Doge was like peak Doge, like Elon Musk and Cha Jones, and it was really shocking how many people didn't know anything that was going on. They had a vague sense that like there was weird things happening in DC. And that it was maybe slightly more extreme, but a lot of people have chosen to tune out the news deliberately or, or just they're busy, and often I think the way it's presented, if you're not reading a lot of news, it can seem really disjointed. I

'm on Blue Sky. I'm not on Twitter these days, but, um, there are things that are happening that I only really like, I'm able to properly contextualize because there are a lot of lawyers on Blue Sky. And so they they're able to like explain parts of like, congressional policy or like what Trump is doing in legal leads that I wouldn't myself because I'm not legally trained, um, would understand. And so like the very basic thing that I've started doing, and I don't think the shopkeepers love me, but I started violating the number one rule of New York City. Which is I started talking to a stranger about politics, like in a really way. And I just think we need to talk to people more and let people understand what's happening. Yeah, yeah, for sure, and you know, yeah, the art of conversation, right? It's lost in lots of ways and I don't want to, you know, again, make big sweeping changes, but that's a very fair thing. And the big thing I think is to talk about it in terms of actual like what is happening. And not in terms of the GOP is doing this, the Dems are doing that, because I think we've really polarized. I think the biggest polarization is people want to be on the winning team, and they pick their sports team, and what that party does almost is secondary to the fact that they want their team to win. Yes, I agree. I definitely agree with that. I think it's a lot of what we've seen. I mean, gosh, we could sit here forever, but I mean, yeah, it's really challenging to kind of sort your way through that and even to be, you know, you talk about climate in general, science in general, going from being, you know, trying to be as unbiased as possible, not saying it doesn't have bias or it doesn't have challenges, it doesn't have issues, to being, well, if you like it at all, you're on that team. And you're like, whoa, OK, I didn't know that that was a thing, and uh it's been really interesting to see that change over time. But at least talking to people, you're doing something, right? 

You're not just trying to put your ear plugs in and hope it all goes away, cause I don't think that's gonna do much either. Yeah, I agree. And from a climate perspective, the thing that is really striking to me and is we're running out of time. There's a clock. Yeah, well, yeah, and it's funny, it's like, actually your, so your book, you know, like that you wrote in 2012, I mean the title of it, like, But we can't buy our way to a green planet. The reason I like that title, I think I can give you an example without totally picking on somebody, but rivers, for example, when we first got to the country, they first start establishing the country and people were moving out. They're like, you know, these rivers you do wind around. Why don't we make them straight lines instead? This is a much better thing, it's much faster, much easier, blah blah blah. Then it turns out, you know, decades later, 100 years later, 120 years later. Man, we sure have been dredging this, this river a ton because all the sediment is just piling up and every year we have to keep dredging this thing out and it's costing us millions of dollars and, you know, all these things. It becomes far more burdensome because we thought we could engineer our way out of it, right? The reason the river bent is to get rid of. I mean, like, you know, that's what it was doing. It was getting rid of sediment, and now that it's not bending and you are going straight, you're actually spending so much time trying to fix it. That you would have been better off not doing it at all. And I think that's kind of a classic example of us trying to like engineer our way out of it. And so that's what I thought of when I thought of your book. That's the thing that came to mind is. There's, there's another element too, which is, I don't know if you remember in 2011, Hurricane Irene hit Vermont or it hit parts of upstate New York too, but like, it really decimated the state of Vermont. I think FEMA was in Vermont for 5 years, um, which is impressive because Vermont's a very small state. Um, and many of the covered bridges were sheared off of their faces, like their Pretty it's a state that is famous for its covered bridges, and many of them were like sheared off their foundations. People's homes were sheared off their foundations. And the fundamental reason is because they straightened the Connecticut River. 

Because when you get that amount of rain and your river doesn't meander, it becomes like a log flamage. Um, so not only to your point, is it expensive to maintain it, it is now, we've also created a catastrophic situation that we now then have to engineer our way outside of on top of as well. Yeah. And to the parts of the state's credit, not the entire state, but some parts of the states have actually made a campaign to allow the river to meander again for that exact reason. So they recognize, you know, our human folly, and they've chosen to undo it, or to like accept the reality, the supremacy of natural systems. Right. And I mean, like, you to put a positive spin on some other things too. I know, like, working in in coastal areas, you know, seeing, oh, seawalls maybe aren't the best way to Manage sea level rise. Maybe it's better to have uh sea grass and natural elements that break waves, and that's far less expensive and costs far less to maintain, and you don't need to keep rebuilding it. And is that perfect? No, I that, you know, rather it not rise at all. But that's not kind of, that's kind of not where we are. Yeah, and also accept the reality that maybe we shouldn't be living right on the coast and maybe we should be, I don't know, a mile or two further inland, um, yeah, there's like a Bonner bridge thing. I used to live in North Carolina and I have like This amazing graph of like the inlets opening and closing over time. It just goes in and out, in and out, in and out. It never, it's not static and people think the beach is static. It is very much a living system. It moves and changes all the time. I did a story in 2021. Yeah, that, that's when did I get laid off? I got laid off. Yeah, I feel. 

Well, no, it was a weird, OK. No, no, I love it. I love it. I'm pretty sure I published the story in 2021. I won an award for the story in 2022. It was a year after the story, and the reason it sticks out of my head is I like got laid off on a Thursday and that Monday they called to be like, by the way, you won this award, and I was like, this is hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, and it was about in 2019, a researcher at USGS had come up to me at an event and was like, You know, everyone talks about sea level rise, but nobody talks about rising groundwater, and it's going to be a huge issue in a lot of coastal areas. So I ended up writing this like 3500 word feature for MIT tech review about the impact of rising groundwater. And one of the things that I learned is when you put a seawall in, it doesn't groundwater still rises. So then you have to pump and then everything sinks. So like, that's another element too, where, again, it's that feedback loop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've created a new engineering problem. We haven't solved the old one and there's now a new problem. Yeah. So yeah, and, and that's totally fascinating and like I know I, I could, I really could talk to you forever, but we'd love to ask our guests about like their memorable moments working in the field, and I know you've been all over the world, you've been all over the country. Um, do you have any stories of like your time working where something memorable happened to you? Maybe a cliff, maybe, for example. What is that story? So I was like the most COVID it's actually this photo. So I am, my background is a photo of the ice sheet in Greenland, and this was taken in the summer of 2022. 

This was July 2022. I'd gone to Greenland as part of a NASA mission where they were looking at, I think, glacial retreat at this point it doesn't matter because I got laid off before I could do the story. But also, importantly, I got COVID. And the thing that matters is that this was on, um, it's gotten a new name. At the time it was Tully, I think it's like now it's Buvik, it's at the time it was an Air Force base, now it's a space force base, but it's a US military base, kind of above the circle. Oh yeah, yeah, I, I know it. Yeah. And so when you got COVID, I don't know if this changes, a bunch of us got COVID on this mission. They put you in quarantine, which sounds great, except it's not. It's in a random military barracks and they don't feed you, because everybody else in the military is in a Company. And so somebody's company assigns them food. I had a feeling I was going to get COVID because, uh, the somebody else got COVID had me and I'd spent a lot of time with them the day before. Um, so I had the wherewithal to go to the, like one store on base and buy like some vitals, some food, like some instant ramen. But like, I was a reporter attached to this like massa mission. I didn't really know these people. They all like knew each other and they'd been talking for months. And I'm alone in this weird room. Which is actually two adjoining rooms stuck together. 

Um, I actually didn't vaccines work, baby. I didn't actually get that sick. Um, so more bored than anything. OK, well, that's good. And this lovely woman ended up doing a commissary run for me and all I lived on for 7.5 days with instant noodles and horrible lemonade, basically. Yeah. Um, so my 10 out of 10 recommendation is don't get COVID in Greenland on a US military base. I will, I will keep that in mind. That's a good life lesson, yeah. Um, but, and then sort of separately, actually before I went to, no, it was after, right after I finished journalism school, so September of 2016, I won a fellowship that sent me to India and Myanmar to report on climate change in those countries. And I was really excited to go and it was great. I picked this region in Myanmar that I just opened up to outsiders because Myanmar. This is, I don't know what it's like now because the military junta has now completely taken over again, but this was during a brief period where that had relaxed a little bit, but you still couldn't go anywhere, just anywhere within the country. Your movements were still kind of tracked and Chin State was a place where foreigners could go. And everyone warned me that the roads were bad, but, you know, I lived in Vermont. I knew mud season. I was like, I'm prepared for bad roads. Um, I was not prepared. Um. But I did get a story out of it, so there's that. Uh, I, I read an essay for Sierra Magazine about it, but, um, God, I don't remember the exact mileage anymore, but it was something like 200 miles, and it took us something like 13 hours to cover it. 

Oh. At one point, the road was like dirt. I mean, it was, it was peeved up at some point, but functionally it was a dirt road up this mountainside. I think the elevation was 6 or 7000 ft, and it went up and then it went back down to sea level, and then it went back up to 7000 ft. I don't know why the road did this, but it was, and it was on the side of a mountain. So like, it wasn't like in the mountain, it was like on the side of the mountain. OK. And it was supposed to be a two-lane road, but it was really because of how muddy it was only 1.5. And I, it was my fault in hindsight, because I took the road on a Monday, and I didn't know at the time that they work on the road every day, but they don't work on the road on Sunday because Chin is a Christian state and Sunday is a day of rest. So the, the roads are the worst on Monday and the best on Friday. So, and at one point, we got stuck in a pothole and like we, like, really stuck, like could not get out. And there was a line of like mini buses behind us. So this is like a bany bus kind of situation. And somebody somewhere procured a rope and somebody was able to pull us out of this pothole and we got on our way again and I was like, great. And I managed to doze off, even though the bus is like super bouncing this entire time. Um, and what woke me up was there were only 2 dudes and the bus driver, though, so it was almost exclusively women on this bus. But what woke me up is I heard someone screaming. And I was, you know, so you kind of jerk awake. And it turns out that when we hit that pothole, something must have broken, and the bus lost the ability to turn right. So the and I remember, this is a road on the side of the mountain, and the mountain was turning right, but the bus was going straight. Oh my gosh. 

And, you know, this is the first time I learned that manual vehicles are awesome because he was able to stop the bus. Like, I don't know, I have a photo somewhere like 5 ft from the edge of the cliff. Um, and I don't speak the local language, and But I did get the message, essentially that we were done, which was good. Um, this woman who had spent some time, I don't know if it was the UK or the US, so she did speak some English. She had taken a liking to me because there aren't that many foreigners who go to Chin. And she flagged down, I'll never forget this, she flagged down, it's like SUV that had Jesus fish sticker on the back. Uh-huh. And that is how I got the rest of the way there. Wow, that's incredible. And I knew it was like, I thought it was that. I'm not I'm very good at normalizing. So I thought it was like not a great situation to be in. But I, the whole time I was texting a friend who at the time was living in Tanzania, but he had spent a bunch of time in South Sudan doing guinea worm eradication. And I remember texting him the photo, and he was like, no, that's cutting it close, you know. And he'd like been evacuated for war before. Oh man, yeah, yeah. That's incredible. That's, that's why we asked the question, because everybody has these incredible stories. 

That is a, I'm glad you made it through. I'm glad that that is what we call life experience, I think in the business like that was thankfully not as eventful. It was uneventful, but yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah, I mean, woof, that's incredible, that's amazing and I know we are really, we are running out of time, but before we go, is there anything we didn't ask you that you'd like us to cover? No, I think, I think you've covered it. Yeah. Thanks so much for this conversation. This is fun. This was a blast. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure, we had a great time. Last but not least, if anyone does want to reach out to you and ask you more fun questions, how's the best way to do that? They can find me at my website. It's www. Kendrawrites.com, and it's W R I T ES like writer. And then I'm also on Blue Sky, um, at Kendraris. Same thing. Very cool. Thank you so much, Kendra, I really loved it. And that's our show. Thank you, Kendra, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. See you, everybody. Bye.