THRESHOLD CONVERSATIONS

Kendra Pierre-Louis

AMY: Hey Threshold listeners, I'm Amy Martin, and this is the start of something new.

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It's called Threshold Conversations, and the idea is pretty simple: we're going to bring you conversations with environmental thought leaders from around the world. We're still doing our main thing -- our documentary work, where we take you on a journey deep into one pressing issue. But in between seasons, we're going to start sharing interviews with people who have interesting things to say about important environmental topics. This is something we had planned before the coronavirus hit, but since we can't travel right now, it's an especially good time to put some energy into this new spin-off show, so welcome to the very first episode of Threshold Conversations. My guest today is Kendra Pierre-Louis, a reporter with the New York Times. She writes about climate change -- both the science of it, and the social impacts. Before joining the Times, Kendra was a reporter with Popular Science. She's also the author of the book Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet. I've been reading and appreciating Kendra's reporting for a while, and for this first episode of Threshold Conversations, I wanted to talk with her about the way the coronavirus pandemic is intersecting with a number of the environmental stories that she's tracking every day. But I'll be honest, that's not the only reason I wanted to talk to her -- over a year ago I checked out her Twitter feed, and that's when I discovered that in addition to being a great writer, she has a delightfully quirky sense of humor, a quality that's sometimes in short supply when it comes to climate change reporting. Kendra Pierre-Louis, thank you so much for joining me on Threshold Conversations.

KENDRA: Thank you so much for having me. Amy.

AMY: My first question for you is about your Twitter handle, which is Kendra "Gloom Is My Beat" Pierre-Louis. What's the backstory there?

KENDRA: It started off as a joke. I still, and it still makes me laugh. Before I was at the Times I was at Popular Science. I was covering climate change and my coworker was also covering climate change but also a lot more, like, other natural like geological natural hazards. So earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, that sort of thing. And our, our editor jokingly said that she was doom and I was gloom and it just sort of stuck. But yeah, it just makes me laugh. Honestly. That's the entire back story.

AMY: Well, it makes me laugh too as someone who also does a lot of reporting on things that are pretty heavy. I was like, I appreciate this approach. Okay, well there's, there's so much to talk about here. I feel like the coronavirus pandemic intersects with environmental issues in all kinds of ways. Just to toss out a few examples, there's this temporary reduction in carbon emissions that's happening. Oil prices are plummeting. The virus is having an outsize impact on people living in places where air quality is bad and respiratory illnesses are more prevalent, many of whom are people of color. I mean, we could just go on and on, but just starting with that first item on the list. The temporary reduction of carbon emissions we're seeing because of the dramatic drop off in economic activity and travel and everything, what does that mean? If anything for our, our long term climate change prospects?

KENDRA: So...I'm trying to think of a really good analogy. Basically it buys us like an extra hour or an extra day or an extra month to do something about climate change, but it's not enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change and everyone that you talk to basically expects those numbers to go back up once the economy is back online. So it's a temporary reduction, not a permanent reduction. The biggest takeaway that I think people can make from it is you see people in like LA talking about how they can see forever now or you see people in New York saying it's smells like the countryside. This is what we're fighting, this is the product of what we're trying to get, right. We're trying to get air that is as clean. How we get air that is as clean is not through a global pandemic.This is a little bit different, but in the last couple of weeks before the city shut down, the city really stepped up cleaning of the subway system. So they were like steam cleaning the subway twice a day. Stations that had like, seemingly never been cleaned before, were being cleaned. And there were all of these photos on social media being like, they could have done this the whole time and we just accepted that they didn't. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KENDRA: And that's kind of, I think what the takeaway is, is not that we should shut down the economy, but that we can demand clean air.

AMY: Right. And now, maybe a kid growing up in Queens or in the heart of LA has never experienced that, had never experienced that. If they'd never had the chance to leave the city very much and then, and then they get a taste of it. And maybe do you think that that's going to have an impact on what people feel entitled to or what they can envision going forward?

KENDRA: I think both. They feel yes. And the other side of that is that we know that as air pollution decreases, that deaths decrease. So there are people, ironically now that are not dying because the air is cleaner.

AMY Right, right, 

KENDRA: And I’m not saying that’s a benefit, I’m not saying that’s worth the catastrophic losses because of covid. I absolutely do not say that. I’m just saying, it’s very, I’m just saying it’s, it’s true. I guess that’s all I’m saying. 

AMY: So do you think there are some things we can learn by comparing these two crises -- the climate crisis and the pandemic?

KENDRA: Yeah, and I think it's not just comparing them, it's also recognizing the overlap rate. So the reason community of color or the reason black and brown communities are disproportionately impacted by climate or by coven is twofold. First, it's because of economic reasons, right? So we're more likely to hold jobs that are essential. So we're more likely to work in retail. We're more likely to be drivers. We're more likely to be healthcare workers. So there's an exposure element in that regard. And then there's the flip side of that is we're more likely to live in communities that are heavily polluted, right? We're more likely to live downwind of a power plant. We're more likely to live in an industrial, near an industrial facility. And, you know, a study from Harvard recently came out and I think it's said, 15% more likely to die if you were exposed to small levels of consistent air pollution over time, well who is that? That's low income and that's communities of color. And all of the, not all, but many of the things that are precursors to not doing well from covid for example: Having diabetes is considered a preexisting condition for covid, right? Well, if you live in a polluted area and you're exposed to high levels of air pollution, you're more likely to develop type two diabetes. And so in that regard, you kind of see this interplay.

AMY: Mm. And what about in terms of our response to these, these two different crises and, and as you said, overlapping, intersecting mutually affecting crises. What do you think we have to learn about how we're responding to covid and how that may or may not impact how we will or should respond to the ongoing climate crisis?

KENDRA: One of the things that I find really heartening is that something like 80% of Americans, based on the most recent polling data say that we should continue to stay at home orders even if it harms the economy. And so what that tells me is people just want to be told what to do. Right? Like, like the thing that you can do to help stop this pandemic is stay at home. That is an actionable thing and often doesn't feel actionable, but it is like a, you know, I've been in communication with the healthcare worker and I, and I, you know, I keep complaining, but I feel like I'm doing nothing, even though intellectually I know that doing nothing is literally the best thing I could be doing right now. So I think one of the takeaways is clear information and clear guidance about what you can do. It's something that people want. 

AMY: Yeah. But something that's very different here is that people in, in this case can feel directly how, if they don't take those actionable steps or in this case inaction you know, it, it could affect, it could affect them, it could affect people they love and not five or 10 years down in the future and not in some nebulous combination of, of factor, but directly. And I wonder, you know, I don't mean to be the cynic here, but I wonder about that in terms of what, how this doesn't apply because you know, the reality is with climate change, so many of the ways in which people are going to suffer you know, they're going to play out incrementally. You know what I mean? Versus, I have to stay in or like my grandmother could die and it's so much more immediate, you know?

KENDRA: Yeah. I feel that. And I think there's some validity to that. But I would say on the other side of that is one of the things that covid is really making clear is the ways in which we're incredibly vulnerable, right? So we're all watching footage of farmers mastering out food, even as the lines around food bank stretch for miles, right? And so everyone is recognizing that there's clearly a supply chain issue, that the food isn't going to the places that it should be going and that that can be fixed. Right. And so what I'm, I think the opportunity there is, is that the ways in which you would fix that system to be responsive to a catastrophe like covid are ways in which you can also fix that system to be responsive to a changing climate

AMY: I don't think your Twitter handle should be gloom as my beat. I think it should be hope is my beat. (laughter) I'm feeling better talking to you. Can we do this every day?

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AMY: We’re going to take a short break and be back with more of my conversation with Kendra Pierre-Louis.

BREAK: Angela Swatek, Giving Tuesday Now Campaign 

AMY: Welcome back, you're listening to Threshold Conversations, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm speaking with Kendra Pierre-Louis, a climate reporter for the New York Times. I spoke with Kendra in late April 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, and we talked about the various ways that these two crises -- corona and climate -- intersect. Before the break, Kendra was saying that the pandemic is showing us the vulnerabilities in some of the systems that hold society together, like the food supply chain. And, she says, in the wake of the pandemic, we could choose to shore up those systems in ways that also make them more resilient as the climate changes. But she also wanted to make clear that does not mean she thinks the pandemic is a good thing.

KENDRA: You know on the one hand, I think some people are really sort of pointing out the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the reductions in air pollution and saying this is what environmentalists want. And I don't think I know any environmentalist who would say that this is what they wanted. I don't know any climate scientists who say this is what they wanted from a practical perspective, the missions that we've reduced so far are not enough to mitigate climate change. We need to reduce emissions way faster and nobody is asking to do it in a way that leads to mass hunger and mass starvation which is a situation we're currently in. People in, within the movement and the researchers that you talked to, you tend to look for win-win solutions. There are ways in which you can reduce climate emissions in ways that lead to greater equity and greater social mobility among people. And this is clearly not that, this is, this is opposite of that. And this is, if there's any lesson to really bring out of what's happening with Covid-19, especially in countries like the United States, especially in Western Europe, this is what happens when you ignore a disaster on your doorstep. If you look at what's happening in the US to what's happening in say, Taiwan or what's happening in Vietnam, countries that looked at China and saw what was coming and prepared adequately, we're living in very different worlds, right? Like the level of suffering that we're enduring is because we didn't take it seriously when we had a chance. I think there's a difference between hoping that now that we've lived through a tragedy, that we can find a way of using that to bring in positive change versus considering the tragedy itself. Positive.

AMY: Yeah, thank you for making that distinction. In more general terms, how much do you think climate change or climate concerns will be part of this recovery in terms of where we put the recovery dollars?

KENDRA: And yeah, I think that completely depends on the administration. Like I think it's one of the things that I think is really interesting about covering climate. And one of the things that I learned really kind of acutely at popular science is the degree to which one of the biggest feelings I think in the United States within climate change is the way in which we've coupled climate action with politics. So, like, if you support climate change, you're quote, unquote a leftist. If you don't, then you're right wing, like it becomes a value argument and that's not one that exists in the rest of the world for the most part. And so I try really hard to be thoughtful about recognizing the degree to which climate has been made political and not trying to feed into that framework.

AMY: Yeah, me too. Me too. And it's hard. It's hard. When it, when just the word climate change feels like a dog whistle.

KENDRA: That's one of the interesting things about Covid is the way in which how it's being reported on is very much along partisan lines. It becomes very easy I think to filter everything through the lens of red team, blue team.

AMY: Yeah.

KENDRA: And so I just really try hard not to do that.

AMY: Yeah. Me too. It's, it's, it feels so in addition to being dysfunctional and, and just not helpful. I'm just bored with it. I'm so bored with it. But yeah, you're right. I think the stories like that that, you know, right now, I think that the general story is if you're, if you're a governor who's reopening your state, you're, you're, you're Republican, you're maybe a right wing Republican. And, and so then it does feel important as reporters for us to like call forward the stories that maybe push against that, those prefab narratives. And do you have other examples of how you're trying to do that? Just, I mean, leaving covid aside for a minute, just some things that come to mind where you've been like, I'm going to, I'm going to pursue this because it runs counter to what people are going to expect out of a climate story or an environment story.

KENDRA: This is like pre- my time at the Times, when I was at pop site, around the time Pruitt became EPA administrator, there are a lot of stories that ran sort of really focusing in on his, his like, strong deregulatory focus. And the problem with the word “regulation” is that if you like regulations and you hear that he's rolling them back, then you automatically think he's doing something bad. But if you dislike regulations and you hear him rolling it back, then you automatically think he's good. And so whoever is reading your article has already kind of adopted a framework even before you've read the piece. So you've kind of created this barrier that now your writing has to jump over. And so what we did instead was we did, it ended up being a four part series but the piece that kind of took off and got a ton of attention was simply this is what America looked like before the EPA. And so it was a, a photo series that the EPA itself had commissioned chronicling, sort of, pollution across the United States shortly after they were created. I wanted to kind of pull that conversation out of the partisan divide because I talked to a lot of experts and they were essentially like, you know, some people will be like, Oh, I hate regulations. But then when you start actually walking them through your sort of the text of what the regulations say, like you find very few people who are against clean air and very few people who are against clean water. And so these words become very loaded and they become shorthand for values that people think they have but don't necessarily have on both sides. Right? So some regulations probably aren't great or like could be done better. But like once you've already put people into their, their zones on either side, they kind of, they've already chosen and there's nothing that they're writing. There's little information. Like, my goal isn't to try and convince anyone of anything. My goal is to try and get people the information. And the only way people don't learn is when they've already put up that wall. And so what I try to do is I try to bring that wall down before I give you the information.

AMY: Do you think are, are there things just in your own life, you know, pre-reporter or an ongoing that do you think have, have made you extra sensitive about the barriers people put up and, and, and what have you learned just as being Kendra to, to help people drop their, their narratives and get into the information with you?

KENDRA: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of things. I think I was a nerd as a child and I like lived in the library, so I was like a complete reader. You know, my family is first generation American. We grew up in a neighborhood that at the time when we moved in was heavily Republican. You know, the neighborhood is heavily Republican and Irish and Italian and Jewish and it's since switched over to pretty Korean and Chinese and Democratic. So it's been really fascinating, like periodically going back to the same like Catholic church that I went to as a kid and seeing the neighborhood change when I was really small, when you live somewhere else, like technically English wasn't even my first language. It was like my third, because my parent's vocation cradle at home, we had a babysitter who only spoke Spanish. So my entire life has basically been trying to navigate different cultures and literally speaking to people with whom I don't speak the same language. Yeah. And so, that's the thing like that I think more than anything else has, it's what informs my writing: is recognizing, is being able to sort of twist things over in my head and see how people can misconstrue it or take it differently than I meant it to be taken. So I'm not perfect. I'm human and I make mistakes and, but that is something that I'm constantly thinking about. It's like, what am I trying to say, and is this the best way of conveying it.

AMY: Bringing us back to covid, in March you wrote a piece for the New York times about how this virus could impact us, is impacting our ability to manage wildfires this year. Could you just kind of give us the cliff notes version of that? Explain what that piece was about. I thought it was great by the way.

KENDRA: Yeah, basically what the piece was looking at was essentially that the ways in which you fight wildfires are very team- based. So you, in March, April, basically they should have been starting to convene sort of the big regional meetings where people go through retraining and they weren't able to do that because you can't put 300 people in a room. Some of the most experienced fire managers are 60 plus, so they're at the age that is most likely to die from covid. In some parts of the country, people have not been doing the prescribed burns that are necessary, which means that as wildfire season kind of takes off, there might be more kindling on the ground, more, more plants on the ground that can burn. When you fight a fire, you know, you send people out in teams of 10 or 20, usually in a truck with 10 person per truck. Well, if one person has covid, you've now potentially infected, even exposed the entire fire crew and you've potentially infected the entire fire crew. So how do you send out a team and minimize the risk for infection? If it's a big fire, you build a fire camp and even under the best of circumstances and those fire camps, which can have a thousand, upwards of a thousand firefighters, infection runs rampant. So how do you have a big fire? Like how do you fight a big fire if you can't have a giant camp because the camp would be another vector of disease? And then there's the other element, which is that the people who were supposed to be working on this right now, a lot of the emergency and fire managers are kind of busy, because some of the same emergency services are, are dealing with covid-19.  So like, even under the best of circumstances, some of these people have it on their mind. But they don't, at least in March, they did not yet have the bandwidth to do anything about it because they were running flat out. You know, there are just so many elements of fighting a fire that is team-based. And the one thing we're not supposed to do right now during covid is get together. And then there's a question of like, what happened? What do you do with the people who evacuate? The good thing about fires is that oftentimes people evacuate to family members. They don't necessarily go to shelters, but some do and the Red Cross has done some guidelines around social distancing within shelters, but then that limits how many people you can put into a shelter. And many of these same things also overlap with what we're going to see happening with hurricane season. And hurricane season people do go to shelters more.  

AMY: And you know, also thinking about the fire season. You know, one of the things that is a huge impact on air quality in, in places like, you know, Montana, Wyoming, California are the fires and I hadn't really thought of that, but I wonder if there's a way that, you know, the places where the air suddenly becomes almost unbreathable. Again, it comes dangerous to go outside if you have any preexisting conditions, you know, possibly for a month in some of the places in the summer, then if that is going to increase people's susceptibility to covid as well. 

KENDRA: Yeah, it seems like it probably, well based on all available literature and in fact that's why they didn't do a lot of the prescribed burns in the spring. It's because they didn't want the smoke. It was because of covid.. So they were balancing out those two things. It was either they didn't want to expose populations that are susceptible to covid to additional wildfire or additional fire smoke. And that's why a lot of municipalities also held off on prescribed burns and also passing new burn ordinances.

AMY: Something to keep our eye on for sure, especially out west. Before we wrap, I want to also touch briefly on zoonosis. But first, do you prefer zoonosis or zoonosis?

KENDRA: I’m agnostic.

AMY: OK, I hear people say both and I, I had like the internet tell me, but the internet also told me both. So I'm, I'm going to go zoonosis cause it makes more sense to me. So a covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, which means that it, it originated in animals and, and moved into the human population. What is the relationship between zoonotic diseases and climate change? Is there one? Aand can you speak to that at all?

KENDRA: It's less about climate change and more about habitat destruction and  basically as we encroach on more forests and more ecosystems and we chop them down and we like hang out in their spaces, we lose buffer animals. So a virus or a pathogen that might've hung out in a field mice and now doesn't have the field mice anywhere because there's no field. But there are people may make the jump into people. And so that has a backend impact in climate change because you know, if you cut down a forest that has climate impacts, but really it's more about habitat encouragement and habitat destruction.

AMY: Hm. OK. Well, sadly, we’re almost out of time, so last question: What is up with you and mayonnaise?

KENDRA: It's the world's most disgusting condiment and it deserves to be banned.

AMY: Ooh. Fighting words. Not with me personally. I'm not a big meal fan, but I think people around the world are rising up right now. When did this, I only know about this from, from reading your website and a little bit your Twitter feed. It comes up, this mayo thing comes up. Why?

KENDRA: Oh yeah. It's literally, it is, it is literally my biggest form of activism is anti-Mayo activism. I think my Twitter profiles or something like working to get mayo put on the side.

AMY: And when did this start, and why do you have such a visceral low thing for this condiment?

KENDRA: I've never liked Mayo. I generally, as a rule of thumb, I don't like creamy savory food. So like no new England clam chatter, no hollandaise sauce, like that whole cat, no ranch dressing. That whole category of food is just like really not pleasant to me. But the reason I single out mayo in particular is because it just shows up on things like you order a sandwich unsuspectingly and they were like, yeah, of course it has mayo on it and you come out and it's just like covered in mayo. And you were like, this was not on the menu. And that is why I hate mandates because it shows up all of the time with no warning.

AMY: I see. It's the stealth nature in the ubiquity,

KENDRA: You don't have to put this everywhere. Like you just, you don't.

AMY: I am so appreciative of the passion in your voice right now. You got to speak truth, speak truth to mayo, and you know, carve a path for all the other anti-mayo activists out there. Well, Kendra, it's been a complete delight to speak with you. I've been following your work for a while and I always appreciate it, thank you for being our first guest on Threshold Conversations.

KENDRA: Thanks so much for taking the time and for reaching out to me and this has been fun. 

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AMY: And thank you for listening to our first episode of Threshold Conversations. We’ve got more interviews in the works for you -- to get a heads up when new episodes are ready, join our mailing list at thresholdpodcast.org.

This project is funded by the Park Foundation, Montana Public Radio, the High Stakes Foundation, and by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. And we’re also funded by you, our listeners. Your support is essential and deeply appreciated. If you want to help keep our independent, nonprofit journalism free for everyone, just go to thresholdpodcast.org and click donate.

The team behind Threshold Conversations includes Angela Swatek, Caysi Simpson, Eva Kalea, and Nick Mott, with help from Caroline Kurtz, Dan Carreno, Hana Carey, Kara Cromwell, Katie DeFusco, Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. Special thanks to Frank Allen. And our music is by Travis Yost.