Climate Blueprint: The Movement Is the Story

Transcript

Anna Hiatt: Hello, and welcome to today’s webinar. Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Anna Hiatt, and I’m Covering Climate Now’s executive editor. CCNow is honored to have partnered with Solutions Journalism Network on the Climate Blueprint Project, which was born out of the Climate Changes Everything conference that our two organizations co-sponsored in September of 2023.

We’re thrilled now to co-host this conversation and kick off a webinar series about the Climate Blueprint with our SJN colleagues and the project’s editor, Breanna Draxler. Throughout the hour, please share any questions you may have using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, and later today we’ll post a recording of the webinar on our respective Youtube channels.

Now, I want to throw this over to Angela Evans, my colleague at SJN before we get the conversation started. Over to you, Angela.

Angela K. Evans: Hi, everyone! It’s so good to see all of you here today for this conversation. I’m Angela. I’m the director of communities of practice here at Solutions Journalism Network. This entire endeavor of the Climate Blueprint and the preceding Climate Changes Everything conference has been participatory and iterative from the very start. The topics, including the one we are speaking about today, The Movement Is the Story, were identified as priorities through conversations with hundreds of climate journalists in 2023, and into 2024.

We are so glad to continue this conversation and add to the growing resource of the Climate Blueprint with these webinars. A special thank you, of course, to our partners, Covering Climate Now, for co-hosting these events, and to Breanna Draxler, the Climate Blueprint editor.

Breanna has been editing, reporting and writing for national magazines and online outlets for more than a decade. Her coverage centers on climate and environmental justice. Most recently she was the deputy editor at Yes! Magazine. Welcome, Breanna, and all the panelists! I’ll pass it to you.

Breanna Draxler: Hello! Hello! Thank you so much for that warm welcome, Angela and Anna. I’m so happy to be here today to talk with all of you about why climate activism is newsworthy and how best to cover it.

I want to thank everybody for taking the time to share this hour with us. We hope it will be a fruitful discussion, and I’m going to start by laying some groundwork for our conversation before I introduce you to our panel of esteemed journalists here with us today.

So, considering the state of our climate, I think we can all agree that solutions are needed, and in addition to renewable energy and government action, I would argue that social movements are also an incredibly powerful climate solution. They are how people get policymakers’ attention, pressure them to make change. Activism is critical to a functioning democracy, and we, as journalists, need to cover it that way. So just as historical movements have made huge strides in advancing civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, climate activists are making change.

Fossil fuel projects are getting stopped. Some, not all, obviously. And despite the federal government’s best efforts, some climate policies are getting traction, especially at the state and local levels. In Colorado, for example, grassroots neighborhood groups are holding regulators accountable for enforcing laws designed to curb air and water pollution.

So why wouldn’t we cover these important and impactful actions? One reason is that climate movements tend to be underreported because of the fear of blurring the line between journalism and advocacy. But here’s how I see it. Covering a climate movement doesn’t make you an advocate any more than covering a school board meeting makes you an advocate. You’re there to observe and ask questions when you report on a protest. You’re covering the demands that people are making the responses they’re getting and the outcomes. That’s just good reporting.

So as journalists, we know that caring about a topic doesn’t mean we’re not able to cover that topic with integrity. It actually makes us better journalists because our reporting is more informed and we can catch important nuances. And covering climate activism is really necessary reporting. We’re in a climate crisis. We do a disservice to our readers if we don’t tell the stories of the accountability that’s being demanded and the progress that’s being made, or how these actions are being silenced. I think one of the most compelling arguments in favor of covering climate action is the fact that corporations and governments are working really hard to silence these messages.

We saw the 667-million-dollar verdict that came out this spring in a pipeline company’s case against Greenpeace for protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and we see the way that SLAP, which stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” are being used to try and chill free speech around the country, and that’s not to mention the use of RICO charges against protesters.

This Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was supposed to target organized crime. But instead, it’s being used to charge participants in protests like the Stop Cop City actions in Atlanta. So exercising free speech to address life-threatening climate impacts in frontline communities is not the domestic terrorism that these SLAP cases and RICO charges try to portray. Free speech and the ability to speak out when, for example, governments are not acting on something as important as climate is central to a functioning democracy, and journalistic coverage of these actions is likewise essential.

Efforts to squash protests and scare tactics send a clear message. Movements are powerful, movements grow and spread, and movements are an effective means of making change. And that’s why it’s so important that we cover them today. We have the privilege of speaking with three very talented journalists who specialize in climate activism. So we can learn from their experience and their expertise. So without further ado, let’s get started.

Our first panelist is Amal Ahmed, a freelance journalist who covers climate and the environment with a focus on justice and equity. Previously she worked as a reporter for Floodlight News, the Texas Observer, and, as a fact checker at Texas Monthly. Her work has been published in Grist, Southerly, the Atlantic City Lab, the Texas Tribune, The Guardian, The Nation, Popular Science, and I’ve had the pleasure of editing her stories for Yes! Magazine.

Next, we have Keerti Gopal, who covers climate intersections between climate change, public health, and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. Previously she covered climate activism and movement repression. She’s a National Geographic Explorer and received fellowships from Fulbright, the Solutions Journalism Network, The Lever, and the National Press Foundation.

And finally, we have Jennifer Oldham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent decades covering grassroots, climate actions to limit fossil fuel production, environmental justice movements aimed at holding polluters accountable and environmental activism. Her work has been published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, National, Geographic, Politico, and other outlets. And Jennifer is the contributor who wrote this section of the Climate Blueprint, which we titled, “Consider the Messages of Movements.”

Thanks to all three of you for being here. And let’s get started. We’re going to begin by talking about why covering movements is important. So my first question is to sort of establish what it is we’re talking about when we say movements. So I’d like each of you to share maybe a couple examples of climate activism you’ve covered so we can see the range of what this coverage can include. I’ll throw it to you, Keerti, to start.

Keerti Gopal: Sure, thanks so much, thanks for setting this up and for having us here. And I’m really glad that we’re starting with this question, because I think that something that I’ve found while covering the climate movement is that this is not actually something that people necessarily know, like, what is a movement. And even people within the climate space or within the journalism space, we’re not necessarily always clear on this. So to start with a kind of zoomed out perspective, when we’re talking about the climate movement, we’re talking about a social movement and social movements are sustained efforts. So they’re long term and they’re about collective action in pursuit of some kind of social change, political change.

So that’s not a single protest, although protests can be part of these movements, and that’s not a single nonprofit or like a single organization, although again, these movements are ecosystems, and there can be lots of groups that are part of them. But when we’re talking about the climate movement, we’re talking about local movements, national movements and this bigger global climate movement. That is kind of, again, this ecosystem of all these different sub movements coming together. So I mean, there’s so many examples of this, and in the US, which is where I mostly cover, we can look at the resistance to the LNG buildout in the Gulf South, which has been a really strong movement. We can look at opposition to pipelines, like the Dakota Access Pipeline or the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

And these are all part of a broader US climate movement, which is part of a broader global movement, and something really cool that comes up when we’re doing some of this coverage is that a lot of these movements are really connected. And you’ll see, you know, activists in the Gulf South cooperating with activists in Uganda who are protesting the East African crude oil pipeline. And we’re just seeing these really fascinating global connections.

So yeah, I think the key takeaways, I would say, are long-term sustained efforts for collective action, for some kind of big big social change.

Breanna Draxler: That’s really helpful. Thank you, Keerti. Amal, do you want to share a couple examples of parts of these movements that you have covered in your work?

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, I think, kind of seconding everything that Keerti said. You know, I think she really summed it up, really. Well, I think I would just add that, you know, a lot of my work has sort of focused on kind of really local issues, right? Just folks who are tired of the conditions that they live in, and want more from the folks in charge, right, their elected officials. I think a really good example of that is just all the organizing like in Houston around like disaster, recovery and flood infrastructure, right, and kind of asking, “You know, we’ve been promised funding to improve drainage in our neighborhoods. And this is not happening, right?”

So you have folks who spent years organizing around that. And it doesn’t always look like, you know, protests and kind of flashy things. Although, this past weekend there was a pretty big kind of viral action at Houston City Hall because of some budget politics, right? That zeroed-out funding for this infrastructure, right? But that was sort of years long, like this kind of folks just showing up at city hall, of folks writing letters, folks, you know, just showing up for each other and clearing out drainage ditches in their neighborhoods, right? So there’s a lot of ways in which this is kind of small and local also, and maybe looks apolitical, right?

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, thank you so much. And lastly, Jennifer, I know you’ve been working on this for decades. Can you share a little bit about some of what you’ve covered?

Jennifer Oldham: Thank you and thanks everyone for being here. It’s good to see you and to talk to you about this very important subject. I would say, I agree wholeheartedly with what Keerti and Amal just said about the global nature of these movements, as well as you have the very visible efforts they make when they protest at a city hall building or at a state capitol building. But what I’ve tried to do in my experience is sort of start on the ground.

So a lot of times I’ll work backwards. I’ll look at industrial projects or oil and gas projects that are being proposed at the municipal or state level. And then I’ll go to communities that they might impact and start there to sort of get in on the ground level of what I would consider a movement. Often these folks are the most impacted and have the most to lose and the most at risk. So they really deserve to have a spotlight shown on what they’re doing at their kitchen tables, which is really where I’ve focused on in my many years of covering activism.

Breanna Draxler: Thank you. And I wonder, this is sort of a follow up for each of you. How did you come to cover movements in your journalism? Is there a particular story or experience that shifted your thinking or cemented your commitment to this work?

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I’m happy to start if no one else wants to. I guess for me it’s sort of interesting. So I went to journalism school and had the opportunity to cover student protests a lot. So the years that I was actually kind of, sophomore, junior, working at the school or newspaper, three different divestment movements started, right, Palestine, prisons, and fossil fuels. And I actually consider that really foundational to the, you know, to my approach because it’s so interesting covering things on a campus, right? Because you’re part of this community. A lot of the people that are doing things that might get them in trouble or like people you’re in class with, right? And there’s sort of like a sensitive way that you have to handle this.

And also with these topics and thinking about, you know, most of these students were actually from lower-income backgrounds. There were students of color [for] whom the disciplinary actions were going to be a lot more, right. And we’re definitely seeing that happen now with a lot of the student protests. So it’s been kind of interesting for me, like thinking about, you know, eight, nine years ago, what happened on our campus, and how much bigger that is now, and sort of the dynamics.

But I would also say that, for me, it was sort of working at places where I realized I don’t want to do work like that, you know this? I worked at a legacy magazine right out of college, and I sort of realized this is not the approach that I wanted to take, and when I came back to Texas — so I was in DC — and I came back to Texas, where I grew up, and I worked at the Texas Observer, and I I was kind of given free reign to really figure out my cell of reporting and, you know, just the ability to focus on things like highway expansion projects, you know, the flood control infrastructure I mentioned, and just doing a lot of field reporting and hearing firsthand from people what this is why it matters. I think, that really cemented for me like that’s the approach I want to take, like being really rooted in a community and getting to know people and understanding these sort of big systemic issues, right? Especially in environmental justice communities.

Breanna Draxler: Absolutely, thanks for that. Jennifer?

Jennifer Oldham: I would echo what she just said. I sort of really got my grounding and covering movements when I covered Los Angeles International Airport at the Los Angeles Times, and there were many communities around this tiny airport — I mean, LAX is so small — that were overly impacted by noise, and it really impeded their quality of life.

So I spent a lot of time literally in these folks’ homes, experiencing what they experienced with noise pollution, and that really taught me how to really meet people where they are and how to really follow, how polluting industrial activities are impacting their daily lives. And I think it’s so important to count their lived experience as something that matters, and we all care about where we live. And if there’s pollution there. So that’s particularly important for these EJ communities. And I’m watching now, communities get built out around Denver International Airport and thinking, “Oh, my goodness! Here we go again, you know.” With noise, noise, pollution, so.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks, Jennifer. Do you have any stories you want to add, Keerti?

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I kind of came into movement reporting through an academic lens a little bit in that I studied social movements in school, and I was doing research on climate activism as a student. And so when I then ended up in climate reporting, climate journalism, it kind of was a no-brainer to me to start with looking at movements and looking at what the climate movement was doing. Because I think, just looking at global history, like, every time we’ve seen significant social change, movements have been at the helm of that. So we’re looking at this huge problem, huge global problem that is climate change. I think looking to the movements that are responding to that is just kind of an obvious place to start in some ways.

Breanna Draxler: Absolutely, thank you for sharing. I, like Amal, started my journalism career in legacy media, and had a certain idea of how things were to be done, and also had some qualms with that. But I will say that when I first took a job with Yes! Magazine five years ago, I had my defenses up. I was a little concerned that the publication’s emphasis on activism might jeopardize my credibility as a journalist, which, you know, I felt like I’d work hard to hold a line there.

And what I came to realize over time was that I was holding the wrong line, that this sort of old-school journalism I’d been taught that was supposedly objective, in reality, was just upholding inequitable power structures, and I think that objectivity was in service of, sort of, the status quo. And there’s a lot of injustice that comes with that. So I really came to realize that covering movements made me a better journalist. I was questioning these long held narratives that I feel like can really undermine journalism if we’re not questioning them. And I think it brings up this question of whether you as journalists are ever called activists or accused of being advocates. And is it a concern for you in the work that you’re doing? Let’s start with, Keerti.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, it’s something that I never really thought of before. I started covering activism. I didn’t think people were gonna think I was an activist because I was covering activism because that’s not, you wouldn’t really think about that with any other beat. Like covering something is not the same as participating in it, and covering an elected official doesn’t mean you’re endorsing everything that they say. And it’s the same thing with movements, like you’re covering this movement as a journalist.

And so you are, you know, you’re doing your own fact checking. You’re doing your own, you’re getting your own evidence. You’re not just taking what they say at face value, just the way you wouldn’t do that with anything else you’re covering. But it’s definitely pushback I’ve gotten and actually, I got some of this pushback after the last Covering Climate Now webinar I did about this, and it is, it’s kind of, there’s not too much to say to that except that, you know, you can continue to affirm that you are an independent journalist, and that you’re doing your job, and that this is a important part of your job.

And yeah, I think that your point about questioning these power structures that have been ingrained in our society. That’s really important. And movements right now, the climate movement and all the movements that it’s intersecting with are grappling with these really, really big questions right now about global capitalism and colonialism and resource extraction. And how do we live as a society? And those are really important questions for us as journalists to be grappling with, too, because our job is to hold power to account. And if we’re not interrogating power structures, we’re not doing that. So I think that doesn’t make us activists, that makes us good journalists.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks. Jennifer, do you want to add yours next?

Jennifer Oldham: Sure. I think that this is a question that has become more and more visible. I know I get asked this question, you know, about sort of what the dividing line is between journalism and activism. And I think for myself, I’m constantly asking myself, you know, sort of how I’m practicing my journalism. I mean, journalism at its root is about observation, right?

So what I try to do is sort of hold myself outside of a movement and make sure that I’m observing it. And I’m telling every, every part of the story. I mean, you’re telling the story from the folks that are heading up the movement. And then you’re telling the story from the people who are on the receiving end of the movement. Whoever that is, the policymakers or the companies, whoever they’re advocating for change with, right?

I find this is particularly difficult when you’re covering something in your community, which I do a lot in Colorado, I mean, I cover industrial projects that are imperiling neighborhoods in the region I grew up in, the region I live in now, so it takes a lot of mindful effort on my part to think about how I’m intentionally going about this and how I’m sort of holding myself a few degrees away from these movements, sort of observing them. And I think that’s really what we need to do now.

Breanna Draxler: Amal, do you have any thoughts you’d like to add?

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I would just add really briefly, like, I’ve just found myself caring less, you know, like, if people think that. I just don’t care as much, you know, and I think to Jennifer’s point, I think perhaps I have a little bit of a different approach, which is like, especially with environmental justice and climate change, like we live in the world that, you know, climate change is creating, and I just don’t see that separation as much. Like this stuff affects me and my family as much as it affects, you know the folks fighting for this stuff. And I think, yeah, I’ve just come to care less. If people think I’m an activist, like, yeah, I don’t want to live in a world that’s constantly on fire, you know. Like, yeah.

Keerti Gopal: Can I just add one more thing?

Breanna Draxler: Please do.

Keerti Gopal: I’m sure many of the people on this call are climate journalists, and like we get hate mail for writing that climate change is happening. So like, at a certain point, you need to just stick to your journalistic ethics and what you know you need to do to get a good evidence-based story, and like kind of drown out the comments.

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, I think that’s good advice for all of us. I wanted to follow up on one thing that you mentioned, Keerti, earlier, and it’s this idea that I think, you know, movements tend to only get media coverage when there’s something big that happens that’s too, you know, too egregious to ignore. And I’m wondering if you can speak to this idea that, you know, what do we miss if we’re not covering the failures and the daily slog of organizing and the things other than those big, flashy, flashy events? And maybe we’ll start with Amal this time.

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I think what we miss when we, you know, discover these big events, the whole context of like, how we got here, right? Like, I think for me, a lot of the work that I find most interesting in doing and sort of most impactful is tracing back an environmental history of how we got here, right, or explaining, you know, I’ve done some stories that, like I was surprised, or so popular where I sort of explained, this is how the state agency does this thing. And it’s kind of like, really, you know, inequitable. And it has its roots here, like why they place air monitors here, not there, right?

Like, so, things that really explain the context of how we got here. I think that’s what you miss, right, like none of this happened yesterday. And I think, you know, when you posed this question earlier in our planning, what came to mind for me was Ta-nehisi Coates’, you know, book from last year, where he sort of spoke about his sort of understanding of Gaza and Palestine, and just like how this whole narrative that this started yesterday, right, like this started with the latest, like, whatever attack right? That’s not true. Like, this started decades ago, and it’s a very long systemic thing that has led to what we’re seeing now.

And I think that book and sort of his narrative there, and sort of all the speaking engagements he’s done about this, like, I think that really speaks to this question, when you don’t understand the history of a place and a people and what has gone on there, like that’s, you know, that’s the story, right? And I think a lot of people come into these things when these bigger events happen, and they need that context to really be more educated citizens. Right.

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, thank you. Keerti?

Keerti Gopal: Yes, I would absolutely second all of that. That context is so crucial. And in the context of, like, protest movements, we’ll often see a ton of coverage around like a big protest, or big-break moment, and that mass mobilization is just the tip of the iceberg, where, like the rest of the iceberg is the movement, and the organizing that went into making that happen.

So I think about something like the March to End Fossil Fuels in 2023, which is this huge march in New York that got a lot of media coverage, that was the result of organizing by groups that have been working on this for years and are continuing to work on this. And it’s really interesting to talk to some of the people who were behind that march about, what are they thinking about now in terms of like, what are, what kinds of mobilizations are they trying to create? Are they trying to create a mass moment like that again, or are they focused on something else, or something like the Fridays for Future strikes?

Student strikes like those got a bunch of coverage, because they kind of, and rightly so, like those were very impactful and globally impactful, but also looking at, like, what went into that. And what is the kind of lasting result of that on the kids who were striking every Friday from their schools? I think that’s the stuff that we kind of miss sometimes, and then to your point earlier, that’s also when we can sometimes miss the repression that’s going on and the repression of movements, which is another piece of this story that I think as journalists, we really, really need to be focusing on because the times when movements are silenced or when activists or environmental defenders are silenced, that’s also not necessarily always going to show up in these kind of like big, loud ways. And that’s what we need to be doing watchdog reporting on as well.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks. Jennifer?

Jennifer Oldham: I so agree with that and I think for me, this idea of the daily slog is where the richness lies in these stories. I covered the Keystone Pipeline protest pretty closely, and I would go to Nebraska and just sit in greenhouses and in fields and in barns with farmers who were protesting having the rights of way on their land taken from them to build this pipeline, and really talking to them about how they went about this activism and what it looked like from their point of view.

And where did they fail? I mean, failures often are as instructive as successes, right? And who did they bring in to help them? What did their strategizing look like? And I think this act of strategizing, and how these protesters are raising money and the movements gain legitimacy, documenting that is so important, not only for those movements themselves, but also for other folks to find inspiration or to understand how these things involve, like, TikToks, you know, journalism. Journalists love to do that, and I think TikToks can benefit a lot in sort of embedding yourself in this daily slog.

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, thank you for that. And I think that kind of gets into the next section of questions about how we cover these movements effectively. So I think, you know, as so many stories do, let’s start with sourcing, Jennifer, in the Climate Blueprint. You write that covering movements effectively, quote, “requires a deliberate mindshift from viewing activists as mere gadflies who provide an occasional sound bite to advocates whose demands should be taken seriously over time.”

So the question for the three of you is, when you’re covering a movement or a collective action, how do you go about finding and sort of evaluating your sources? You guys can choose who wants to go first, or I can. I can pass the baton around if that’s easier.

Jennifer Oldham: I’ll start. I think, you know, in writing this, what I was envisioning is, there are a couple of ways this happens for me. I mean, there’s the more macro way when you’re out covering a protest or an activism movement as it’s unfolding at a state capitol or at a city hall.

In that case I look for the folks that seem to be leading others, and sort of try to request individual interviews with them and find out sort of where they come from, what their background is. Why are they seen as leaders by others, and who is falling behind them? And also, I sort of do this approach that I mentioned earlier, where I work in backwards in terms of looking at neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by pollution, you know, and often there are nursing homes there, or schools there, or other places where people gather, and you go there, and you just listen, and you’ll find sources and folks where, you know, there’s sort of this community collective taking up to oppose either a project that’s coming or a project that’s already there.

Amal Ahmed: I don’t have too much to add. I would just say that I found social media pretty, you know, reliable. Because I think there are a lot of like grassroots groups that sort of document their own work and sort of share and post to raise awareness. So I think, finding those you know, the kind of traditional, like, press releases, knowing what organizations are on the ground. You know, I found a lot of, like, legal aid clinics are really great because they kind of know what’s happening in certain areas, and different, I would say, sometimes, you know, sometimes you get lucky, and you’re like listening to like a city gall meeting or county commissioners meeting, and you just hear something. And you’re like, that’s crazy, and I want to know more about it. So kind of finding the folks that, like, have issues, and they’re trying to bring that to light, I guess, you know.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I agree with all of that. And I think it’s not too different from other beats. And how you’re sourcing, you know, like, showing up in person is always great. Social media, I echo, is also helpful, and just like spending time getting to know who’s involved in these movements. And who’s kind of a longer term leader who’s been involved for a long time, or particularly in some of these fights that have to do with local environmental justice issues, like, who’s impacted? Who are the people who came to this because their kids are getting sick? And that’s what motivated them to get into this movement, like, they’re going to really know what’s going on.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks. Those are all really, really good and helpful ways to think about sourcing. And I think building on that, journalism often teaches us to use titles, credentials, and affiliations with institutions to determine who is an expert on a subject. And in the case of activism we need to broaden that, right? And so do you consider sort of lived experience or other criteria to determine expertise when it comes to these really important issues? Let’s start with Amal this time.

Amal Ahmed: Sure. Yeah, I would say, like, absolutely right, like, I don’t think you can write about environmental justice if you’re not talking to people that live in a community, right, like that just doesn’t make sense to me at all, right. And the folks that live there, you know, they’ve often worked in the industry. So they actually have a lot of knowledge.

I think about Port Arthur, which is an industrial town in Texas, right, on the Gulf Coast. Like a lot of the people that are kind of advocating now, they used to work at Exxon, or Chevron, or whatever, right like, they used to be part of the union, like they know the ins and outs of this better than me. I’m from Dallas, like, never saw an oil plant, right? So I was, like, in my twenties, but you know, and they know everyone in their community who’s got cancer, got asthma, like whatever, right? And so you can’t do that kind of reporting if you don’t know the people that live there and, like, what are they fighting for, right? Because it’s not a story about numbers and permits, right, like this is a story about the people living next to these kinds of facilities.

Breanna Draxler: Let’s go to Keerti next.

Keerti Gopal: Absolutely. And again, I argue that that’s true in any beat. Lived experience is expertise, and especially when we’re covering climate change and trying to articulate for people how climate change is impacting people right now, talking to people who are experiencing those most acute impacts are… that is an expertise that we all can benefit from hearing from. So I absolutely agree with that. And I think an interesting piece of it in the context of movements is that people are also building expertise in different ways around the type of action that they’re trying to get.

So like, for example, I’ve done some coverage of the movements that are trying to pressure insurance companies to stop underwriting fossil fuel infrastructure, and those movements are made up of a really interesting intersection of kind of, like, ex-insurance industry or financial experts or watchdog groups that are looking at these institutions specifically, and then also community members who live near the infrastructure projects that they’re trying to get these companies to stop insuring, who have also made themselves experts in the intricacies of insurance and these documents and FOIA processes and all this stuff, and are also experts in the sense that they understand what pollution does to their community.

And so I think those are like very, very rich sources, both for human stories and understanding. What motivates people to take up a cause, and also for, like helping you as a reporter navigate the kinds of information that you will need to get to kinda independently report on some of these issues.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks. Jennifer?

Jennifer Oldham: I agree with Amal, and care, too, that it is the lived experience that really is at the root of covering these movements, because we all care about the air we breathe and the water we drink, and how loud it is around our houses, and if the land’s getting destroyed by industrial activities.

So I think that what I’ve noticed in covering movements over the decades is how in most cases, now, they’re becoming more sophisticated. So these movements start from kits and tables, right? But these folks quickly learn that, you know, to gain sophistication and legitimacy, they reach out to others for their expertise. They start to collaborate with groups similar to theirs in other cities, in other states, and they share techniques with one another, and they share lawyers, and they share water experts and air experts and land experts.

And so I’ve started to ask these neighborhood groups, you know, sort of, where’s your expertise coming from? Can you let me know who your experts are? I call these experts. I sort of try to get in with them on what their agenda is. Are they being paid? Are they not being paid? Who have they helped in other places? And I think in this way it’s a really good way to sort of look at the spider web of these movements, and how they build on each other, and how they gain momentum. And I’m watching that happen right now with fracking, and I think it’s just so important to pay attention to how these neighborhood movements sort of push back against fracking across states.

Breanna Draxler: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s, you know, it’s so important for us to keep that in mind. And to make sure we’re centering that lived experience in particular, because so many industry corporations, they’re trying to downplay and undermine what people are saying. Right? They don’t know they’re not experts.

And so I think it’s, it’s all the more important for us to lift up those forms of expertise. And I think it goes for other sources, not just people. Right? Do we look at official police reports and the sort of biased way that the police have covered a protest? Or do we also, you know, look at the unofficial sources coming out of communities, the data they have to collect for themselves because no government institutions are measuring the pollution in their community, right? So it’s like both the people and the information benefit from sort of having that expanded ecosystem.

One thing I find that comes up a lot is sort of the tension between protesters, methods, vandalism, blocking traffic, that type of thing, versus the message the protesters are trying to send by taking those actions, ending police violence, preventing pipeline construction. How do you make sure that your stories don’t miss that message while also recognizing the methods? Let’s start with Jennifer this time.

Jennifer Oldham: Yeah, I would think that this really goes to balanced coverage of movements. And as you were reading that question, I was thinking about, you know, the George Floyd movements around the country, and I spent a lot of time sort of covering those in Denver as they were unfolding, and of course you have what you can observe, which is the police lines confronting protesters, and, you know, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them. That’s what you can visually observe, right? So of course, you have to write about that.

But what I tried to do, too, was sort of to talk to the people in the back, right, talk to the people that made homemade vests that said, you know, medical aid, and they brought like medical supplies and water with them. And why were they there? What was motivating them? You know, there were kids holding signs, sort of standing back away from the violence itself. Why were they there? Why did their parents bring them there? I mean, these are the people sort of that are brought out by the violence. I think that those are the folks you really want to get at their motivation and where they’re coming from, because then you can get a sense of sort of what’s really behind some of this violence in terms of the emotions and the passion behind this.

Breanna Draxler: Thank you. Keerti?

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with what Jennifer is saying, and I think that those, the motivation and the messaging behind these actions is a much… that’s a really interesting part of the story, that it’s like many times more interesting than just saying protesters blocked a road. That’s not that interesting. And there’s only so many times you can write that story. But if you really are getting into the message, and why, what is motivating people to come out and

and take these actions, that’s where much media reporting is.

And we also do have to report on methods as well, and particularly when, like Jennifer saying, when there is a law enforcement reaction, I mean even looking at what’s going on in LA this week and the way that US military forces are responding to protests, and that’s extremely important for us to be covering. And we can’t also separate that in our mind from climate, because all of these movements are intersecting, and all of these tactics of repression are intersecting as well.

So I think that’s really important. But yeah, I do think with climate specifically, it can sometimes, the media frenzy can get really fixated on these, like, tactics, like the protesters throwing soup on the paintings, and then no one knows why they did that, or like what they were. And they do know, and they have really, like, I’ve talked to those people, like they have really interesting analysis of why they’re deciding to take these actions and sometimes go to jail for them. So that’s just a way more interesting story, just from a reporting perspective and from a reader’s perspective as well. And then it’s also just a more useful one.

Breanna Draxler: Thanks so much for that, Amal.

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, I think this goes a little bit back to kind of what I was saying about understanding the context of something. I think it’s important to understand, like, what drives people to do something so drastic, right? As Keerti mentioned. Like, they’re taking a risk to themselves and their families, right? And there’s a reason for that.

I think I would definitely recommend, like a book that really changed my kind of perception of this was Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If you’ve read that, it’s a really excellent book, and it sort of talks about essentially the way that kind of targeted violence has always been used by social movements, right? Because the threat of that and the destruction of capital and sort of hurting people where, you know, their wallets are, like that actually is really effective and has been used for centuries, right? And it is actually this kind of rewriting of that history that has made that really you know, like delegitimize that and sort of de-emphasize how effective that is. Which really just works in defense of the status quo.

And I think what we’re seeing now is sort of, you know, people on the ground trying to shift that Overton window back and saying, “If you’re going to take extreme action, and you know, put people in jail, and like deport people and like, keep burning our planet, like, why can’t we throw a lot of rocks at a window?” Right? You know, obviously oversimplifying that a lot. But I think that book does a really good job of actually kind of explaining that. And I think if you’re covering protests that might get violent, I think that’s kind of essential reading to really understand, like, what’s happening.

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, I think those are really good points. And I think so often people react to these, you know, if there is violence or destruction of property without also looking at the flip side, that like, if we maintain the status quo, people are getting hurt. People are dying, right? Like it’s, that is violence. And so yeah, staying on the track we’re going is not going to avoid violence. It’s just impacting other communities, disadvantaged communities.

We’re going to open it up to audience questions pretty soon here. So I’m going to ask the panelists one last question. But while I do that, I’d love for participants to add your questions to the Q&A. We’ll be getting to those shortly. So bring us your best and trickiest questions, so we can really bring this home. So my final question is looking at what journalists stand to gain from doing this kind of coverage.

And I wonder if you could each speak to sort of the opportunity here to create a niche and differentiate yourself as a journalist by speaking to how your coverage of movements has set you apart in the field of journalism or has opened doors that are useful to you in your journalism career? Does somebody want to start this first?

Jennifer Oldham: I’ll start. I would say that sort of as I get on in my journalism career, I shy away sort of from the herd journalism and jumping on whatever story of the day that everyone else is covering. And I really sort of try to go to ground and find the stories people aren’t writing, and the stories we can add to the record to sort of show how things evolve in a community over time.

And I think about a story I did a few years ago in a town called Pueblo, in Colorado. That is one of the most polluted places in the state of Colorado, and those folks have been pushing back against the industrialization of their community for generations, and they have steel plants and power plants and car facilities and airports ringing their communities. And there was only one state air monitor in the whole region down there. And so the community got fed up, and public health folks and the community members themselves just started setting up these purple air monitors and measuring pollution themselves.

And so I went in and looked at these monitors with them. I talked to folks at the companies that make these monitors. How do they work? How do they measure the air? You know? What are they showing, the state’s one air monitor, and showing…

And you know, in this way you can sort of set your reporting apart because you’re actually sort of trying to break new ground here. Right? I mean there, there’s science, and there’s science that citizen scientists are coming up with here. But citizen science is increasingly more important in pushing back against climate change. And to me that is just a very intriguing thing, and something that I really have been trying to focus in more on.

Breanna Draxler: Thank you.

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I can go next. I don’t know. I think this is an interesting question, because I just think that like for me, it’s like, I just want to do interesting work, and I want to feel like the work that I’ve done has mattered to folks right like I think it. It’s really cool when you’re reporting and someone’s like, “Oh, I’ve read your work.” And that actually helped us, like, put together this thing that we did, you know, like, I think stuff like that is really rewarding and just being able to, especially with environmental justice stories, yeah, like Jennifer said, put some of this on the record, right?

For me, a story that I did in Freeport, Texas, where a historically Black neighborhood was sort of being dismantled and bought out by the port right in the course of reporting that it really hit me how rare it was for someone to come to a community like this and kind of take an oral history of this and make sure that that history doesn’t disappear. Because the neighborhood’s being industrialized and I think leaving behind that record to me has been a really kind of rewarding way, especially when we think of, like, the way that history of people of color in this country is not really well recorded. Right? So yeah, I think those are the kinds of things that kind of keep me doing this work.

Breanna Draxler: Thank you. Keerti?

Keerti Gopal: I would definitely echo all of that. And I think the probably the biggest thing that I’ve taken away is just how much it’s expanded my source base and just allowed me to find really interesting sources and be reached out to by really interesting sources and just kind of covering something that maybe not a lot of people are covering. You can quickly become someone that people are like, “Oh, I want to reach out to this person about this story,” which is always really great.

And so that’s something that definitely has come out of covering movements and also just getting to grapple with some of these bigger questions in an interesting way about, how does society respond to climate change? Yeah, when you’re talking to some of these people who are thinking about this on a global movement level, like, those can be really, really interesting conversations. And then, yeah, on a hyperlocal level as well. Getting to see kind of the impact of your work of covering local movements or local actions is also just really rewarding. So yeah, on either level, it’s been really helpful.

Breanna Draxler: Excellent. Thank you all for those reactions and responses. We’re going to go to some audience questions. The first is from Jay Shaw, who asks, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve listened and learned that we need to be intentional with our platforms and amplify voices that weren’t previously. So two-part question: One, whenever I’ve tried to take this approach, I’ve been critiqued that my pitch showed advocacy or activism bias. So how do you report from a solutions focused perspective with this intentional approach without that perception of bias? That’s part one and part two is, what is your understanding of decolonized reporting and how do you apply it to your work?” Does anyone want to tackle one of those questions?

Amal Ahmed: I can speak a little bit to the pitching process. I mean, I work as a freelancer, and I think that it is interesting. You know, I would say, so the story that I worked with for Breanna on the boycott of Chevron, like I kind of had to shop that around right, and I think in some cases like I had to do quite a bit of pre-reporting, and it was pretty clear to me that, you know, the place I’d wanted to write it for originally kind of was nervous about having it look like they were saying that people should boycott Chevron, right? Because of its role in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. So yeah, that was interesting.

And I think again, like for me, it’s kind of like… then they’re not the right place to write that story, and that’s fine, and I’m going to move on. And you know, eventually I found Yes! Magazine, and I pitched it there and got to write it, right? So I think sometimes, it’s a little bit of, do I want to tell the story? And would I kind of reframe this because it’s really important that it goes in this publication? Or do I want to tell the story the way that needs to be told? So do I need to find somewhere else to do that, right? And I think that’s sort of a case by case decision you have to make sometimes, right? Yeah.

Breanna Draxler: Absolutely. R.I.P. Yes! Magazine, I’m sad. We have lost yet another place where this work can really be highlighted. Jennifer, Keerti, anything to add to that? Or should we jump to the next one?

Keerti Gopal: I’ll just shout out, if you’re looking for somewhere to pitch, you can pitch ICN. I know my editors are interested in activism coverage, and if anyone is interested in pitching, I’m happy to talk to you. If you’re thinking through something, please feel free to reach out. I would love to talk to you about it.

Breanna Draxler: Wonderful. That’s a really valuable resource. Thank you, Keerti.

Victoria Bogatz asks, “If you are already a climate activist, can you still be a climate journalist not reporting on your own work?” Obviously. And if so, how do you separate your activism from your journalism?

Jennifer Oldham: Gosh! I think that is such an important question, right? Because we all really care about the land that’s being destroyed, and clean air and clean water. And I think ultimately this is a question we all have to answer for ourselves, right? Although I know that folks have straight out asked me this question, and it seems to be more and more often, and I have to say, my answer is, my activism is my journalism. Because for me, that’s a way that I can, you know, sort of in a balanced way, I can push back while not being involved personally.

Amal Ahmed: I think I would just add that this is something that I think newsrooms need to really grapple with, because I think they’re sort of limiting the scope of people who can write for them and provide that expertise that we’ve been talking about, right? Like, I personally don’t see a need for us to kind of gatekeep, like, who can and can’t be published, and sort of these reputable journalism things, right, and not just as op-eds right, although that certainly has a place like essays and op-eds. Right?

I think that’s a broader kind of industry question that I think unfortunately, a lot of folks kind of take the very kind of like old school, like, no, you do that, you can’t write for us, right? Which I think is unfortunate.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, it’s such a tough question. And I would definitely agree that it’s something that everyone needs to answer for themselves, and that different publications and different journalists are going to have a different approach to, and I think, like, in reporting on movements I have found times when I think it would have been hard to do what I was doing if I was also engaged in activism. Because, like, you’re trying to go to these companies and get real information from them and trying… you need to like, be able to get like — Jennifer spoke about earlier — the sides of different stakeholders and the kind of perspectives of different stakeholders in whatever the fight is that you’re covering. So that’s a real challenge. But also, of course, we all deeply care about the issues we’re covering. And yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question and something that we really need to be grappling with in journalism right now.

And I think transparency about where we are getting our funding, where we’re getting our resources, who we are — that’s really, really important, and our methods and kind of giving people more of an understanding of, like, what are journalistic methods, because people who are reading the news don’t necessarily always know, like the kind of fact checking that we have to go through, or the kind of standards that we have for our reporting, and I think that can all help mitigate some of these, like, questions or feelings of distrust. So yeah, I would say transparency. And let’s keep talking about it. And I don’t know…

Breanna Draxler: Yeah, transparency and funding, and also more funding. Please fund this journalism.

All right, we’ve got a question from Leonie Joubert, who’s based in South Africa, and is curious about how to define the climate movement and how to identify intersections between social and climate movements. Could you talk about how you think about these intersections and how to help audiences understand climate change’s systemic impacts?

Keerti Gopal: I can start here, and this also kind of goes to the question around decolonial reporting, which I think had also come up. But I do think that the climate movement is increasingly aware of its intersection with many other movements, and something that I’ve been speaking with some of my sources about recently, particularly in the US.

And looking at the US climate movement, some of my sources have been saying it’s been really hard for groups to recruit for climate actions or specifically for climate campaigns right now because people are so preoccupied in very reasonable ways with everything else that’s going on. And so a lot of these climate groups are thinking more deeply about showing up for migrant rights and showing up for protests around democracy and things like that.

I mean this coming weekend, the No Kings protests which are going to be happening across the country. That’s a really great opportunity if you’re looking for something to kind of cut your teeth in reporting on movements. It’s like, go to the local protest on that. There’s going to be climate groups involved in those protests. They’ve been involved in organizing them. But they’re not just specifically only climate protests. So I think increasingly, a lot of these groups and activists and actors are seeing the connections between climate change and global capitalism and some of these extractive structures that we’ve been operating on. And I mean, these people have been talking about these connections for decades, but I do think it’s more mainstream in recent years. And so it’s definitely an interesting thing to keep articulating.

Breanna Draxler: Amal or Jennifer, want to add any thoughts to the intersectionality question?

Amal Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, I think here, Keerti summed it up, really. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, like, everything is a climate story, right? Like, I think that’s just, every policy story has some way that it impacts climate change at this point.

Jennifer Oldham: I would agree. And I would also add that, in my solutions reporting and my sort of instructional failures reporting, I really look at… you can relate climate back to anything. Public health, the economy, immigration, things people really care about, it all is interwoven with climate. Now, I mean these more intense extreme weather, events, impact, everything.

Breanna Draxler: Absolutely. There is no shortage of story opportunities in this. And hopefully, today’s conversation gave folks some inspiration and some ideas for how to do more in their own work related to this, and I’d love to end on one sort of open-ended question from Amanda Magnani, who says, with a facepalm emoji, I mean, how is having social responsibility and advocating for a livable planet something journalists shouldn’t do?

I think that that’s a good way to sum up these takeaways. Thank you to all of our panelists Keerti Gopal, Jennifer Oldham, and Amal Ahmed, so grateful to have your insights and experience on this topic. I hope it’s something that will continue to spark conversations after this webinar.

And stay tuned, because Covering Climate Now and Solutions Journalism Network will be hosting four more webinars on other chapters from our Climate Blueprint. So there will be more rich conversations to come. So thank you so much for being here, and thank you to all of our audience members for your great questions and participation. We couldn’t have these conversations without you, so thanks for being part of it.