From Marine Scientist to Engagement Journalist: Reflections, Successes and the Future of Climate Journalism
It’s a conclusive fact: climate change is the crisis of our lifetime. Everyone’s on board with that, right?
Unfortunately, from America’s social networking platforms to the White House, that is not the case. While two-thirds of Americans think the government is not doing enough to address the impacts of climate change, according to Pew Research, there is a wide, partisan gap of Americans who have doubts about the cause of rising sea levels, longer droughts and stronger storms.
I hoped to understand and address this quandary by leveraging the methodology and approach of the social journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York when I enrolled in August 2018.
Why Climate?
When I joined the social journalism program, I initially focused on how I could connect climate scientists with climate skeptics.
Before I started my graduate program, I was a marine and environmental scientist. I researched the effectiveness of anesthetics for various fish species at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. I also used innovative education techniques to communicate oceanography, conservation biology and estuary science at aquariums along the eastern seaboard.
One of the most important takeaways from my time as a science educator was the genuine interest people had. They wanted to know more about the natural world and their roles and responsibilities to it.
I understood how important it was to communicate science in a way people could take home and share with others. As a graduate journalism student, I wanted to understand why people second-guessed science.
This goal took me on a multi-borough journey from my neighborhood of Washington Heights in Manhattan to the southernmost region of Queens, learning all the way about the efforts of activists, community organizers, public health advocates, scientists and even science skeptics in the fight to address the real-life impacts of a changing climate.
Dueling Efforts
I learned in the first semester courses of Community Engagement and Social Media Tools that not all communities are physically present or have uniform online social behaviors.
My engagement work began online with climate skeptics and offline with New York City’s environmental activist community. I leaned into my curiosity around climate science doubt using platforms like Reddit, YouTube and Twitter to locate the most prominent online voices.
I also attended rallies, protests and lobbying events to build my relationship with citizens and activists in New York. I wanted to know more about the sources of information both groups used, and what motivated them to post online and act offline, respectively.
After joining an active, 21,000 member-deep climate change skeptic Facebook group, I worked on developing an observational, ethnographic understanding of the digital community. I asked both closed and open-ended qualitative questions. I participated in polls and commented on posts. I learned that members got their information from YouTube and Reddit rather than from ‘biased’ mainstream sources or government sites.
Simultaneously, I built in-person relationships with dozens in New York City’s climate activist, public health, legal and scientific communities. I met climate organizer Patrick Houston of New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit advocacy group that focuses on social issues from criminal justice to food insecurity.
Later I connected with WEACT for Environmental Justice, a 30-year-old environmental advocacy group based in Harlem. WEACT’s community organizers, communications director and co-founder all shared with me the big picture issues of climate and environmental injustice, and how they used city, federal and institutional data and research to inform their actions.
The skeptic community, on the other hand, believed scientists made thousands if not millions of dollars by publishing reports and presenting their ‘falsified findings’ at conferences. It’s a fringe belief that many members saw as credible. Grant-writing and other methods of compensation in science aren’t well-known to the public. It wasn’t an impossible jump to see how a few individuals could manipulate facts into fiction and spread rumors about ‘biased research.’
As a scientist, it was unnerving to hear that thousands of Americans think climate scientists change data to align with corporate or political motives. The budding journalist in me wanted to hear from scientists and how they approached the issue.
I spoke with Allegra LeGrande, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and I emailed with Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist, climate communicator and NASA GISS’s Director.
I learned from these scientists, community organizers like Houston, and others in the movement that they don’t speak with skeptics and deniers (with the exception of Dr. Schmidt). They’d rather focus their time and effort on climate solutions rather than roadblocks.
A Necessary Pivot
By November, I asked the Facebook climate skeptic group what they thought about the flat earth theory following a documentary I watched earlier that month.
When some members responded with reasonable answers, I followed up with a statement along the lines of: “why is it okay to believe in the science that supports a round earth but not the science that supports climate change?”
In minutes I was banned from the group by the admins for violating the rules. I was accused of calling those members climate science deniers. While I didn’t think I broke a rule, it was clear I tripped up.
I weighed finding another online group or an offline skeptic community to meet up with to continue my research and relationship-building. But I also took a minute to consider what it was I was trying to do:
If scientists didn’t want to connect with skeptics, and skeptics were busily blocking the facts, ignoring the truth and even doxxing climate scientists, what could I do to effectively bridge that gap?
I was also grappling with the issue of media manipulation of fringe beliefs as defined at the 2018 Online News Association conference session by danah boyd. I didn’t want to promote information or conversations that have negative impacts on the public and on truth.
I acknowledged that perhaps this community would need more time and more robust impact assessment than what I could offer. After considering these concerns, I decided that the best option was to move on.
A Second Wind
By the beginning of the second semester, I double-downed on my connections with climate activists to better understand what their needs were and how social journalism could help address them.
I interviewed local representatives and attended events by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the New York City Panel on Climate Change, New York Academy of Sciences and the New York Academy of Medicine.
I joined WEACT, attended their monthly membership meetings and participated in their events. I started researching issues regarding public health, extreme heat, air pollution and water quality.
As part of my Advanced Reporting class, I produced an audio project covering public health and community activism in Washington Heights and the Bronx. During that same time, I was in the Gifs, Memes and Animation class. I leveraged some of the techniques from our Data Skills course and published a Medium piece on asthma rates and heat across New York City, and created a short social video covering asthma in the South Bronx. I shared all of this content on my Instagram and on my newly created Facebook group, The NYC Environmental Concerns Discussion Group.
Even as the semester came to a close and my summer internship with CNN’s Headline News — Specials team began, I still didn’t have my community nailed down. I knew I wanted to focus on climate and health, but the community was difficult to pinpoint. I soon made another important pivot.
The community was difficult to pinpoint because New Yorkers who suffer from high asthma rates and don’t have air-conditioning at home or access to a nearby cooling center, for example, were not uniform in age, race, culture, language or income, nor were they specific to any area of the city. I wasn’t sure how I could properly assess the information needs of a community in Mott Haven without addressing the needs of those in Flushing Meadows.
I soon made another important pivot.
With Our Powers Combined
While covering the rallies and protests by the climate activist community during the second semester, I would occasionally see other Newmark J-school students reporting there, too, including my social-J classmate Lakshmi Sivadas. We both reported on the Williams fracked gas pipeline protest and the youth climate movement as they started up their actions in March.
We met with Terry Parris Jr., one of our program’s professors. He saw the overlap of our community engagement and reporting work, and suggested that we connect. By June, we decided to combine our efforts.
Our original plan was to have two projects. One was on the Rockaways whose residents were protesting the Williams Pipeline. I learned from Lakshmi that they were still dealing with long-term recovery issues from Hurricane Sandy.
The other community was the youth climate movement. Six months after Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate action in August of 2018, tens of thousands of kids protested across the city on Friday, March 15. The speed of their climb was astounding, something WEACT and New York Communities for Change recognized, too.
By August 2019, New York’s youth climate community held almost a dozen actions, with Lakshmi and myself reporting on many of them, either on Medium or via social. I joined their planning committee, and supported their press and communications teams. This was my way of connecting, listening and engaging with the teenagers leading this movement. It led to interviews with core members and in-depth insight into youth-powered community organizing.
Our initial practicum proposal was hosting a design-thinking workshop so the students could build connections with established environmental groups like WEACT. The youth organizers were concerned about losing media coverage, momentum and focus as the summer ended. However, our efforts quickly proved unnecessary.
Greta Thunberg sailed across the ocean and joined their actions leading up to the September 20th Global Climate Strike in downtown Manhattan. The teens saw their numbers and media coverage skyrocket. Vogue, Vice, CNN, PBS, NHK and dozens of other media outlets swarmed the movement.
Some of the core members had their images on billboards, in national commercials, and on million-follower Instagrams. They’d spoken at City Hall, at the United Nations and even on the concert stage for the Global Citizen Festival alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
Local environmental orgs soon reached out to the youth organizers themselves, effectively neutralizing our workshop goals. By early October, we elected to take a step back from the youth climate movement. While I was reluctant to do so, I felt that we had served the students to the best of our ability in the six months we had invested in building relationships and addressing their challenges.
My Chosen Community
“All these waves kept coming, kept coming, kept coming and the water just kept rising.” — Sonia Moise, Far Rockaway Resident
With President Donald Trump actively drawing back environmental regulations meant to protect Americans, and pulling the nation out of the Paris Accords, the need to adjust to a shifting climate is falling on cities. How governments prepare their citizens for a radically different climate is critically important, as the approaching deadlines for actions outlined by the United Nations and highly reputable scientific and academic institutions have determined.
When Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City on October 29, 2012, hundreds of thousands of residents who live in the Rockaways were left in isolation for weeks. The Atlantic Ocean experienced a storm surge of over 12 feet, breaching the peninsula, just as the Jamaica Bay surged from the north, effectively flooding whole neighborhoods.
“I heard this gush of water. I looked out the window — all these waves kept coming, kept coming, kept coming and the water just kept rising,” said Sonia Moise. “I have a six foot fence around my house, and I couldn’t see the fences.”
The basement and first floor of Moise’s home was lost when ‘the ocean met the bay,’ a phrase Lakshmi Sivadas and I heard often when we began our engagement work for our practicum earlier this summer.
Rock the Boat
On July 5, Lakshmi and I traveled to the Rockaways for the first time together, where I met Moise and Wanda Warren, community board members, and Lisa George a manager for State Senator James Sanders office.
They shared some of their biggest concerns, seven years later, such as the financial costs to rebuild with the city’s faulty recovery programs of Rapid Repair and Build it Back.
This was news to me, considering the official message from city officials was how great and fast the recovery was, and how quickly areas like Manhattan returned to normalcy weeks after Sandy.
Armed with these personal experiences, Lakshmi and I dug in. We pulled recovery and resiliency reports from the city, the state and the federal government. We learned of the racial disparity of the 120,000 people who lived on the peninsula during Hurricane Sandy. We made it a goal to connect with community members as well as organizers, officials and academics to build out our landscape analysis.
We went back often to forge new and further deepen community connections. Lakshmi met Jeremy Jones, the current president of the Rockaway Beach Civic Association (RBCA) during the spring semester. We attended their monthly meeting in early October where we presented our idea of a centralized website that could help address the recovery and resiliency issues for the peninsula.
The feedback and insight we received from this meeting was both plentiful and enlightening. Over two dozen residents and members of the RBCA confirmed our findings, expressing interest in a centralized platform that would host information about their experiences right after the storm, the long-term projects promised by the city, and why it was taking so long to get them finished.
Powerful Prototypes
We developed our prototype communication tool for Jeremy Caplan’s Startup Sprint course with the dual goals of collecting data and building relationships with residents.
We asked volunteers during a dune re-planting event with the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance one October Saturday morning to fill out our survey and take a flyer home. Many shared with us that they knew people who were either still dealing or had some experience with the city’s Build it Back program.
We met Dekendra Dazzell, the Constituent Liaison for State Senator James Sanders’ office, at the RBCA meeting. We stayed in contact with her, and later attended another event for Rockaway landlords. We brought the flyers and surveys we created for attendees to fill out there, too.
We met up with Lisa George who invited us to share our flyers, surveys, and our website proposal with her association, The Heart of Rockaway Civic (THoR).
By the time we presented our practicum on December 10, we’d visited the Rockaways about four times a month. The data, as shown below, is a result of the direct community engagement we had during October and November.
Following our presentation at THoR meeting in mid-October, George connected us with Yvaine Gibbs of the advocacy group Rockaway Call to Action, Inc. During the last week of October, Lakshmi and I interviewed her and Pastor David Cockfield of Battalion Pentecostal Assembly Church.
Together, Gibbs and the Pastor are empowering the congregation to get their homes properly repaired by the city, and we, in coordination with them, will interview a half dozen of their members to highlight that need.
We were also invited by the Pastor to present this idea and website at the group’s November 6 meeting. Given the vocal and emotionally-charged response we received, it’s clear that the trauma is fresh for this black, immigrant, community.
During this same time, I interviewed the NYC Department of Emergency Management Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Preparedness Meg Pribram. The city’s directive for the Rockaways when a hurricane is approaching is evacuation, an expensive and rarely feasible action for the thousands of residents who live in lower-income areas, or for those who live in shelters or nursing homes.
When I asked the Assistant Commissioner what residents with these concerns should do, she said the city offers assistance for those who can’t evacuate on their own on the city’s website. She was unable to comment on what happens to residents when they return to damaged homes or need resources long-term, other than relying on partner organizations like The Red Cross, which experienced its own accountability and transparency issues following Sandy.
We wanted to created an additional resource guide for the community so we plugged all of this into an automated bot communication platform called Dexter, a tool from our Design and Development class.
The Rockaway Project
By introducing ourselves, explaining what we learned through our extensive research, and confirming directly with over 50 residents to ensure our proposal reflected their needs, we were able to create TheRockawayProject.org.
It’s a website that centralizes storm recovery and resiliency information from the city, state and federal government. It has our fully operational Dexter Storm Prep Bot, a few of the audio stories from community interviews, and our Sandy survey.
It will soon track the dozens of resiliency projects across the peninsula, including how much money was allocated and how far along they are to completion. We hope to incorporate a map that displays where these projects are as well. As requested by the community, the site will host a forum where people can post their concerns about recovery issues in their neighborhood and share the status of their own home repairs.
With The Rockaway Project site, we hope that residents and researchers will have the visibility they want into the government’s response efforts. Additionally, we hope that newsrooms will leverage this community data, especially important when reporters aren’t able to be present as often as they’d like to uncover these issues.
If We Build It
During our final semester at the Newmark J-School our program director Carrie Brown and adjunct co-professor Rachel Glickhouse had students track their progress towards their practicum with journals. This weekly assignment really helped me understand what progress and growth looks like in social journalism. It also helped me, Lakshmi and the rest of the program’s graduating class recognize that our practicum isn’t based on deadlines and bylines but on relationships and impact.
The climate concerns of this community, from west to east, haven’t been fully addressed. There are still questions they want and deserve answers to. The racial and resource disparity that was present prior to Sandy is simply more apparent now.
We are working to build a partnership or collaborative effort between the local publication The Wave, The CITY and a few of the civic groups to continue this work on recovery accountability and resiliency transparency. We are still pursuing the FOIL data and will continue to build out The Rockaway Project.
A website that centralizes recovery and resiliency project information is a solution for the Rockaways. The solution for Miami, Houston, Boston, Virginia Beach, and other American cities could be different. Engagement journalism can help outline that solution.
Climate change will create stronger storms, stronger than Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, Maria, and Dorian. More cities will be affected, if not devastated by droughts, wildfires, floods and more. Climate injustice and climate gentrification will become the norm, and not the anomaly. How journalists report and track recovery and resiliency efforts will be crucial as societies adjust to a warming planet.
Looking Forward
My social journalism work over the last year with climate skeptics, climate activists and the climate-affected granted me an opportunity to speak on a panel discussing climate justice with leaders in solutions-based efforts. Scientists, communicators and climate organizers are reaching out via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, wanting to learn more about my journey and how social journalism works in addressing climate change and injustice.
Now that I have a practical understanding of social engagement journalism and how effective it can be in uncovering issues and finding solutions, I may try to approach the climate skeptic community once again. As I begin a new chapter of my life as a Junior Research Reporter with First Draft News in January, helping to track and report on misinformation, it may be a prime opportunity to study the information ecosystem around climate change skeptics and what role journalists can and should play in reporting on them.
I’m excited to see the impact I now know I can have on the conversation and education around climate change.
