Love of nature shaped a story. Can it reshape climate debate?

Episode transcript

Clay Collins: Many of the issues that are talkers in the U.S. – think guns or abortion – end up setting up as being starkly binary, pick-a-side debates, even if they’re nuanced. Climate change is certainly in that set.

Can there be any movement toward something more like a solutions-interested middle?

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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. 

Joining me are two Monitor staffers. Stephanie Hanes is our environment and climate change writer. She has been a correspondent from southern Africa. From the U.S. she’s written on subjects that branch into education, families, food, and farming. 

Also here, Christa Case Bryant, our senior congressional correspondent. Besides being a political reporter, she has served as, among other roles, Jerusalem bureau chief. Christa’s an accomplished cross-country ski racer who covered the Winter Olympics in 2010 and 2018. Both are return podcast guests, you can find links to their past appearances in our show notes. 

And recently, they were collaborators on a story about how the love of nature can be a unifier – in the mountains, on the plains, and even in the halls of political power. Welcome, Christa and Stephanie.

Christa Case Bryant: Great to be here.

Stephanie Hanes: Good to be here, thanks!

Collins: So, Christa, this piece, a Monitor Weekly cover story, has a pretty interesting origin story. Can you talk us through that?

Case Bryant: Sure. Well, just about a year ago, I saw something on the Instagram account of the most decorated American cross-country skier ever, Jessie Diggins. She has now won an Olympic medal of every color. And that has given her a real platform to speak out about other things, one of which is climate change. So I saw something on her Instagram account in April 2022. She was speaking with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and comparing her experience in the Olympics to their experience trying to make bipartisan climate legislation. At the Olympics in Beijing, she had come down with a very bad case of food poisoning just before the 30 kilometer race, and that’s just a grueling race anyway. She had to persist for 30 kilometers, not feeling well, and did so to win the silver medal, and it was just an absolutely incredible race. And her point was: Even if the conditions aren’t great, you gotta give it everything you have, until you get across the finish line. And I thought that was a really great analogy for sort of the sausage-making process of legislation. 

So I reached out to her to find out what the context of those comments were. It turned out the group she was speaking with was a new group that I hadn’t been familiar with, called the Conservative Climate Caucus. It was started by a Utah Republican who felt like Republicans had just said, “No, no, no, no, no” to their Democratic colleagues every time climate change came up, and hadn’t really engaged about: “Well, what do we have to contribute here? Lots of us love the outdoors too.” So, through a group called Protect Our Winters, which Jessie represents, I was able to learn more about what they were doing, reaching across the partisan divide to try to build a bigger coalition, including in Washington, so that there could be progress on the legislative front. Very slowly this evolved into a larger story than what I thought it would be. And I decided it’d be great to bring in Stephanie because of her expertise on environment and climate issues. She sort of took the lead for the reporting for a while, and then I was able to fill in with some reporting from Washington. So it was just a really interesting evolution and a great learning experience for me.

Collins: Some of the visuals around Jessie Diggins really are illustrative of the climate change situation. She was basically skiing on, I think you called it “a ribbon of slush,” and in cutoff Lycra.

Case Bryant: Right. There was literally green grass in the background. And this was in January in Central Europe. When I was racing there, you’d occasionally have something like that, but now it’s almost become normal. 

Collins: Right. Stephanie, as a climate writer, you’ve been tracking these radically contrasting views on climate change for a long time. And it sounds as though you’re seeing a little bit of a shift. 

Hanes: Yeah, there’s definitely a shift. I think for people who did this job, my job, five, 10 years ago. You were constantly writing this story where one side was talking about the dangers of climate change, and [those on] the other side were basically saying that it didn’t exist. And recently that has really shifted. We’re no longer seeing these debates about “does it exist or doesn’t it exist?” It’s increasing more about what do we do about it. And so when Christa came with this story, I was pretty excited because it was giving some insight into the mindset of the people who were concerned about this from different parts of the political spectrum.

Collins: Hmm. You too, in your reporting, have seen the evidence in person. You wrote recently about looking for winter ice, and having to go further north in New England than you’ve had to before.

Hanes: Yeah. At least in the northeastern part of the U.S., winters are where we’re seeing the impact of climate change most definitively. There are fewer days of snow, more days where the temperature hovers above freezing, so you get rain instead of snow storms. The temperature increase in winter has gone up in a number of different regions more than in other seasons. And the group that Christa came across, Protect our Winters, is one that I had talked to a couple years back when I was reporting on “ice out” in New Hampshire. When I talked to them, I was interested in their advocacy about winter, and winter athletes were coming together and saying, Hey, let’s get apolitical action, cross-political action to help save this season, because it matters to us and it should matter to everybody. And one of the things we found reporting this piece was that that group had really expanded. They’d started looking at all people who were interested in playing and being and recreating outdoors. Because climate change is affecting all of the people who wanna be outside.

Collins: And that emerging middle zone is really interesting. Christa, I wanted to ask, back on the politics…. As you point out in the story, in the United States there’s a long, perhaps latent Republican tradition of valuing conservation. But that’s a party that’s come to be thought of as being pro-business, and that tends to mean reducing regulations, and that tends to come into conflict with preserving natural resources. But, you know, you did see action on the right, didn’t you?

Case Bryant: Yes. So I reached out to the Utah Republican who had founded this group called The Conservative Climate Caucus. His name was Representative Curtis. He was the mayor of Provo, Utah, and was pursuing some more climate-friendly policies when he was in that job. After this Utah Congressman got into office, he decided to organize a “town hall hike.” And some of the people who came to that were some local climate activists from a nonpartisan group called Citizens’ Climate Lobby. And as Tom Moyer, who’s a volunteer state coordinator with that group, later told me, the conversation’s just so different when you’re on a six-hour hike. Because you’re not just talking about whatever lobbying or legislative issues you have in your 15-minute slot in some representative’s office. You know, you can talk about kids and family and the homes that you’re building or have built and how energy efficient they are, and all sorts of things. And that was one way for him to connect and to hear more ideas in the background that’s literally celebrating their shared love for the outdoors. 

So after a few of these hikes, he proposed to some of his staffers: “What if I invite some Republican members of Congress out to Utah for a summit about how we can engage on this important topic.’ And they were like: “Yeah, you might get five or six people.” Well, it turned out he got something like two dozen. And quite a few of them were what they call ranking members of their committee. So when the other party is in power, they’re the top member of the minority party on that committee. They were influential Republicans, in other words, and that was really encouraging to him. And out of that summit came this group, and they’ve been mainly focused on educating and engaging at this point, and, I think, with the idea of shaping some legislation this congress.

Collins: I love how it went from theoretical to very real in the setting of the natural cathedral. Politically at the other end of that spectrum we talked about at the very top, liberalism is more closely aligned with responsible behaviors and government protections of nature. But of course, the reality is, EVs require rare earth elements like lithium, and our iPhones need Congolese cobalt. So we’re kind of really all part of the problem. And it becomes harder to caricature two sides in that way. So I’m wondering, as a team of writers working with your editor, how do you handle the old hardened perceptions of those two extremes?

Hanes: I’ll actually go back to the last point that we were talking about, because I think it’s illustrative. This idea that Republicans have traditionally encouraged conservation but have more recently been seen to be more in line with business interests – I think even that dichotomy is shifting. A lot of the people that I spoke to would say that focusing on the climate doesn’t have to be anti-business. And in fact, there are some really important shifts in the energy system, in technology, in innovation, that are bringing climate action and business more in alignment. 

In terms of that other question, yeah, I think that we work pretty hard to try to double check ourselves to make sure that we weren’t falling into any of those stereotypical, “the Democrats like nature and the Republicans don’t,” any of those stereotypes. We were really checking each other a lot.

Case Bryant: I think the reporting and editing of the story really demonstrated both the point and the potential of what we were writing about. One example was, we were talking about how to refer to, the solutions that conservatives favor. I had been to North Dakota last year for a story about oil, and one thing I kept hearing Republicans out there talk about was energy security. And we need to be developing American oil because that’s important for energy security. And then that was something I heard again from the interviews I did for this story. So I had put a line in there about conservatives favoring solutions that will support energy security. And there was a question of: How do we frame that in a way that makes clear what the concerns are, without coming across as condescending toward that position. So it was so helpful to have Stephanie’s understanding of the larger landscape here, and the alternative idea about energy security that, actually you’re gonna have better energy security if you can get away sooner from oil and gas and coal, because that will be more sustainable going forward. Whereas Republicans had been telling me: “If you make that transition too quickly, then that’s gonna hurt energy security, because you’ll be stuck with windmills and Russian gas. And if you don’t wanna use Russian gas anymore, then you’re out of luck.” It was just a really helpful back and forth between Stephanie and myself.

Hanes: Yeah, I think it was just really interesting how in both the climate realm and the political realm, there are all of these words that actually mean other words, and phrases that might sound really straightforward, but then once you understand all of the layers that are under that particular phrase, it could mean something entirely different to the particular reader or listener. And it was so valuable to have Christa’s political knowledge and expertise to really talk through how little phrases could unintentionally sound derogatory to a particular group. There’s just an awful lot of care taken in what we’re writing and how. It’s something I’m proud of.

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Jingnan Peng: Hi, I’m Jingnan Peng, a producer on this podcast. We hope you’re enjoying this episode. Keep listening for more of Clay’s interview with Christa and Stephanie. 

First, a quick note from our friends over at the Common Ground Committee, a nonprofit that’s part of a national movement to bridge divides.

Much of the media focuses on polarization, division, and anger. But on the podcast “Let’s Find Common Ground” you’ll hear from guests who look at the world from different sides. Some stories are political. Others are personal. And don’t be surprised to occasionally hear a voice or two from Monitor writers.

Journalists Ashley Milne-Tyte and Richard Davies interview politicians, including members of Congress from both parties, as well as social activists, authors, teachers, and members of the public. Find all episodes on your favorite podcast app, and at CommonGroundCommittee.org/podcasts.

On “Let’s Find Common Ground,” you’ll find common ground, one episode at a time. 

Now, back to our episode. 

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Collins: Both of you have written about and talked about and demonstrated your own love for nature. Stephanie, you recently wrote about your tween daughter nerding out about the UN climate report over dinner. I kind of associate both of you with places like Vermont. So I just… Can you each talk about how your personal experience informs your reporting on this issue, not just for this story?

Hanes: Christa, you wanna take that one first?

Case Bryant: OK. Well, I did grow up in New England and loving a winter landscape at the right time of year, and of course noticed when that started going away. Also when I was training for skiing, I had this wonderful Russian coach, Nikolai Anikin, who was from Siberia originally. He had won a number of Olympic medals and coached many people who had gone on to great international success. I remember after he passed on, I was interviewing people who knew him about who he was as a man and a coach and somebody talked about how, just in the middle of a training practice, he would see some tracks in the snow and say: “Look, a deer goes there!” And we would always see him, like, in the middle of the woods wandering around, looking for berries, admiring beauty and always remembering to do that, even if you’re in the pursuit of big accomplishments or whatever. And so I love that. 

Hanes: I also have New England background. I didn’t grow up here, but my first job was in rural New Hampshire. And so driving around and doing stories there gave me both a love of place and these outdoor areas. But also this recognition of the different ways that people interact with it. It was a great experience to report about people from all different political backgrounds, and recognizing that people can have a deep love of place coming from a lot of different perspectives. I ended up being a foreign correspondent based in Southern Africa and wrote a lot of conservation stories, and found a similar experience there, where people from very different backgrounds could come together because of the love of place. And that has definitely influenced the way that I experience both the stories that I report, and also just life in general.

Collins: Thank you both for being here, for writing about this story – and I hope you can finish work and get outside.

Hanes: Thanks so much.

Case Bryant: That sounds great.

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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes, with links to the story discussed and more work by both Christa and Stephanie, at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton were our engineers, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.