We’re all Climate Journalists: A Conversation with Cascadia Daily News’s Julia Lerner
Julia Lerner, Cascadia Daily News’ environmental reporter, sat down with The Planet to discuss her experiences and vision for her beat.
Story by Katie McNabb
As the threat of climate change is growing more imminent, news publications are hiring environmental reporters, who cover the stories that impact the climate and those most closely tied to it.
“The Planet” sat down with Cascadia Daily News’ environmental reporter, Julia Lerner, to discuss her position at the paper and her views on environmental journalism.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you do at Cascadia Daily News?
JL: “I cover local environmental issues, as well as I have taken on the indigenous issues and affairs beat.
So I’ll cover local tribal issues; I’ve covered a couple of the tribal elections, ongoing political issues there as well as environmental and climate things. Climate change is not a local issue by any means; climate change is happening all around us.
So we look at pipelines that are being built across the country. Here in Bellingham, we had a pipeline spill a couple decades ago, and so there are ways to localize most of these stories. So that’s kind of my job. I look at what’s happening, not just around us here in Bellingham and Whatcom [County], but all over the world.”
What does the day-to-day of your job look like?
JL: “I come in the morning, and I look at what’s happened in the last 24 hours, and there’s constant news happening around the world related to the climate, and it’s kind of just a question of how can I relate this back to our community?
So I’ll spend the first couple of hours taking notes, reading, making phone calls to locals. There’s a couple of really really valuable environmental nonprofits in the community who really have a lot of great knowledge and understanding so they’re usually my first calls. They might get annoyed at how often I call, but they just have great information for people who may not have that information.
So I’ll spend time making calls, sending emails, drafting, chatting with editors about what we have, here’s why it’s local and why it might be relevant to people; here’s where I’m thinking to go with the piece, and then it usually takes a couple of hours to draft and write out like a 500 or 600 word piece. So I usually can knock out two of those a day.”
How did you get into environmental reporting, specifically?
JL: “I actually didn’t start in environmental reporting. My undergraduate degree is in multi-platform journalism and my master’s is in investigative reporting.
So I really started looking at investigative processes, and one of the projects that I worked on as a grad student was related to how climate change was impacting military bases in Alaska, which was a really interesting project.
My first job after grad school was actually up in Alaska as well. So I started working at the Nome Nugget, Alaska’s oldest newspaper, and every story there is environmental. You can’t look at the things happening around you in Nome, Alaska, without also talking about the environmental impacts.
You know, there’s the dog sledding and mushing races, but those are changing because the ocean is warming. There’s gas prices rising up there and that’s because of the way the shipment of oil happens, and it has to change every year because of how sea ice patterns form. You can’t build houses because of permafrost, and there’s an entire village up near Nome that’s literally sinking into the ocean. You can’t talk about all of these things like building houses and roads and driving cars without acknowledging the climate impact on every single thing that’s happening there.
So that really pushed me into this environmental lens in my reporting, and I ended up here in Bellingham at the Cascadia Daily as the environmental reporter because I think they liked that. I looked at regular stories as environmental stories, and I looked at what might just be a city council meeting through the lens of climate, environment and how this impacts the indigenous communities around us.”
So, you said your master’s was in investigative reporting. Do you think there are a lot of intersections between investigative journalism and environmental journalism?
JL: “I think, in terms of analysis and understanding, it takes a lot of work, even on an everyday story.
For instance, yesterday I sat in on a city council meeting where they were talking about a wastewater treatment facility here in Bellingham, and it’s really easy to write “wastewater treatment facility in Bellingham”, but you still have to explain what that is. Environmental reporting always takes a lot of understanding and knowledge, and I think the investigative role plays really well into that.
There are a lot of big questions out there to be investigated. Like I mentioned, one of the first projects I did relating to climate change in the environment was how climate change is impacting military bases up north, and that’s a question that’s really easily applicable everywhere.
You can look in Arizona and say the environment has gotten so dry and so hot that airplanes can’t fly anymore down here. You can look into Alaska and say they’re trying to build a port up north, but the sea is frozen half the year. So how are they going? I think there are a lot of big questions like that though. You know, take time to research, to understand and figure out exactly how to present this as an issue and how to make sure when people read about it, they care about it.”
How do you decide what stories need to be covered and are worth your time?
JL: “A lot of it is community engagement related. What are people in the community talking about and looking at, and where is there some lack of clarity on some of these issues?
I see my role as explaining the science and reasons behind some of the decisions that are made at local and city and state levels. A lot of the stories I decide to write are related to meetings going on, things I’ve seen people post about on the internet.
People will reach out to me and say ‘Hey, did you hear that this boat caught on fire and now it’s sinking and oil is leaking into the ocean?’ It’s a lot of figuring out what other people are interested in.”
How do you find the balance between advocacy and being objective as an environmental reporter?
JL: “I think in the early days, it was maybe a little bit like all opinions and all sides get equal weight. I have come around to the idea that one of the Society of Professional Journalist’s guiding rules is ‘Seek truth and report it.’ I’m not going to spend time giving equal weight when there isn’t equal knowledge.”
If someone comes to me and says, ‘Why don’t you report on the fact that climate change is fake?’ It’s like, well, my job is to report the facts.
Some people may think this is advocacy and advocating on behalf of the climate and the environment when I see it as, ‘Here’s the science and here are the facts to back it up; here’s what’s really happening.’ They can choose to believe it or not, but the thing about science and facts are, it’s real, even if they don’t think so.
I don’t believe that, necessarily, voices deserve equal weight if they don’t have the facts and the knowledge to back it up. It’s not our job to promote false ideas, so I’m not going to do that.”
Do you think you need a strong background in environmental science to be an environmental reporter?
JL: “I think there’s definitely a learning curve, and a background in environmental science would probably be really helpful. I don’t have a degree in environmental science.
That said, I make sure that all of the science that I write about comes from people who do have that background and experience in environmental and climate issues. I just make sure that, whenever I make a claim, it comes from someone who does have that knowledge.
I think reporting on climate is very much like reporting on other beats in the sense that someone who is reporting on the police probably may not have a degree in criminal justice, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn and understand the key players.
In your beat, you understand the people who have the knowledge and are willing to help you to understand, and it does take a little bit of work to kind of look at all of these stories through an environmental lens at first. You know, I can’t look at a story without saying, ‘What’s the environmental impact? How is this going to impact our carbon emissions?’ You start to learn what questions to ask.
I do think it’s important that a journalist has a good enough understanding in their subject to take these high-level ideas and the people with PhDs and master’s degrees in environmental science and distill them into stories that make sense to people without that background.”
What do you see as the future of environmental reporting, or what do you hope it will look like?
JL: “That’s a really good question. I think the direction we’re moving in, and I sort of hope we’re moving in, is that every reporter starts to look at themself as an environmental reporter.
With every story, there are always going to be questions about environmental or climate outcomes. It could have something to do with the cars we drive and carbon emissions, or it could have something to do with the city council meetings and deciding to continue meeting on Zoom versus in person; there are always environmental implications to every decision that’s made.
I would hope that all reporters moving forward start to ask those questions.
In fact, my Twitter cover photo says “Every journalist is a climate journalist. Every story is a climate story.” Because I genuinely believe that every story has environmental implications, and I’m hoping that, in the future, every journalist, be it a city hall reporter, education reporter, business reporter, they all will start to look at the beats and stories that they cover through an environmental lens.”
Katie McNabb is a third-year at Western. She’s majoring in journalism and English with a creative writing emphasis. Her reporting focuses on science and the environment.
