“If you want to go somewhere, find a story that will take you there.”
Ysabelle Kempe got this tip from a reporter at The Boston Globe while working as a reporter for the paper this spring.
A few months later, Kempe bought an Amtrak ticket and packed her bags.
He had an idea: He would tell the stories of people in cities across the United States who say they have been affected by warming temperatures, natural disasters and other environmental impacts that scientists have linked to climate change.
“Climate change is becoming an increasingly heated issue,” says Kempe, who studies journalism at Northeastern. “There are so many different subcultures in the United States, and I wanted to explore the different impacts local climate change has and how they're responding.”
Kempe interviewed dozens of people in six states over 18 days in August, including a biology teacher in Alabama, a seafood market owner in Seattle and a seventh-grade science teacher in Texas. She recorded her conversations on Instagram @changingnationwhere he wrote vignettes about the people he met.
A retired artist in Chico, California, recalled how he had lived at six different addresses after his home was gutted in a deadly fire that burned 153,000 acres of land in Paradise, California, In November. He mourned the loss of his material possessions, including his grandfather's guitar, which was over 100 years old.
“When you talk to people about losses, you'll always hear, 'Oh, it's just material things.' There's no doubt about it, it's material things,” the retired artist told Kempe. “But in these material things they included little treasures.”
A man in New Orleans described how a freshwater swamp known as the The Bayou Bienvenue wetland triangle had been turned into a saltwater marsh. Most of the wildlife that inhabited the swamp has disappeared, he told Kempe.
“I had friends who used to go out here,” he said, “and they used to hunt animals.”
A biology professor in Birmingham, Alabama, gave Kempe a tip for talking about climate change: Don't talk down to people. “I don't lecture about the facts like I'm a scientist using jargon they don't understand,” he said.
Kempe says she didn't interview anyone who denied the existence of climate change, but she did meet a few people who were hesitant to link climate change to human activity.
“I used to go to places with a lot of farmers,” he says. “Climate change isn't just about asking them to switch to a reusable straw, it's about changing their entire lifestyle.”
Kempe returned to Northeastern in September after traveling 4,000 miles in just over two weeks. He says he wants to continue reporting on how climate change has affected people across the country and plans to visit cities in the Northeast and Midwest next.
“I think the best thing journalists can do in their reporting on climate change is to make it more humane,” says Kempe, whose trip was funded in part by a grant from the University Honors Program at Northeastern. “The more you put a human face on it, the more successful you'll be in getting people to care about it.”
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