This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio My guest Today is a journalist and staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers the weekly Planet newsletter.

Her work has previously appeared in major outlets such as Newsweek, Courts, Wired, The New York Times, The Nation, Time Magazine, and NPR.

Zoe Schlanger is also the author of the twenty twenty four book The Light Eaters, How the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth.

In twenty seventeen, Schlanger received the National Association of Science Writer's Reporting Award.

She's also been recognized as a finalist for several other major journalism awards, with a focus on climate change, pollution, and environmental justice in her life writing, I was curious about win Schlanger's environmental awareness and interest began.

I grew up in Connecticut, not very far away from where we are now in Manhattan, and I grew up with New Yorker parents, so I was coming into the city all the time.

And I think my earliest environmental awareness came from driving in alongside the Hudson River and learning at some point that the Hudson River was contaminated with PCBs ge right exactly, and was declared a super fund site, and that clicked something in my child brain thought, I can't see that that's kind of a secret.

Not many people maybe know it, but maybe everyone should considering the implications.

So that's probably my earliest recollection of interest in these things.

But I also came of age professionally.

I got my first journalism job in the midst of the BP oil spill and became entranced with this idea that the very substance were using to clean up the oil turned out to be a massive health hazard, corrects it, which was being sprayed to disperse the oil in the goulsperson.

Yeah, I remember, though, So you had this enlightened kind of advanced awareness of environmental those serious environmental issues when you were very young.

Yeah.

I think I was always drawn to this idea of there being kind of secrets out in the world, and that's why journalism was interesting to me, that this was the sort of horizontal transfer of information from these you know, quote unquote secret sources like academics or people working in the Ivory Tower to uncover these environmental disasters and the public.

So journalism is the conduit between those two things, and it was very appealing to me to like ferret out those.

And you wanted to study journalism, I did you know?

I went to NYU for journalism, but I left the journalism department within a semester because they started talking about the internet after finals, and I thought, the world I'm going into is the world of online journalism.

And I did a lot of internships.

Instead of having a journalism.

Degree, where did you get your degree?

In environmental studies and urban studies and a sort of mishmash of things I thought were interesting.

They let you build your own major there if you want to, which has varying degrees of efficacy, right exactly.

I appreciated the flexibility.

And I just worked in newsrooms from undergrad.

What's the first newsroom you worked in and what was that like?

How old were you?

I was eighteen years old.

I was a freshman, and I was working at Gothamist, which is the wonderful New York metro area reporting outfit, and I was sent out to cover things like the protest against the bike lanes in around Prospect Park, and that was very fun to me and then I interned at The Nation magazine, which was a great political education, and they teach you to fact check there, the interns fact check the entire magazine.

And so you're essentially re reporting these incredible journalists' stories.

You're calling their sources back, You're learning how they put it together, you're learning the context that they decided to place the stent.

And it was an incredible crash course and how to do rigorous journalism.

So you worked for the Nation, how long were you there.

For, oh, you know, summer?

What did you take away from that?

Like, just all of it served to wet your appetite more and more to keep going in that direction.

Of Absolutely, I think I was checking pieces and studying at the time the issue of mind tailings in places like West Virginia and the legacy of coal mining.

And they had a fantastic reporter there.

Absolutely, just issue after issue.

Actually at during the time I was at the Nation, around the time of the Kalamazoo oil spill in Michigan where all of this tarcans diluted bitchmen from Canada was being piped through Kalamazoo and pipe burst and this was a type of heavy crude oil that we really hadn't had to deal with in a cleanup context.

It turned out to be incredibly difficult to clean up and also contained all these other compounds like benzene that were carcinogenic in ways that.

Used in that Tarsans process.

Exactly was it coming down from Alberta?

I believe?

Oh yeah, yeah, for you, this goes on to become your profession.

Yeah, I mean you.

So when you finish college with your other degrees, your non journalism degrees, where do you go.

I started out My first job was at Talking Points Memo, and that job was basically rearranging the homepage and writing headlines, which is a classic first job in journalism.

But like I said, it was right around the time of the BP oil spill, and I sort of insisted and they were very open to me writing some stories.

So that was the first time I got into actual environmental journalism.

From there, just got deeper and deeper.

And there's this funny thing in journalism in newsrooms, in generalist newsrooms, if you know how to read a scientific paper, people act like that's some magical power, and you become more and more specialized and you're given more and more responsibility in that era.

So I'm grateful that I could.

So every morning you wake up and have breakfast over some scientific, dating exact environmental.

Journeys and still do.

It's the best job in the world.

Well, BP is twenty ten, and it's still at a time for me when i'm you know, pretty it's fifteen years ago, obviously, and so I'm still raging about these kinds of things, even privately, and I become that guy which I had been before that maybe laps where I don't get gas at a BP ever again.

Never I don't go to Exxon Mobile anymore.

Ever since Exxon Valdiez and then BP, I never want to buy their gas again.

And what difference is mes you know, as one customer, but you know, launching a broader campaign boycott Exxon, boycott BP.

That's tough to pull off because people view gas.

They view gas separately, do you agree from oil?

Well, they view gases like they've got me, what am I going to do?

They just yes, it's true.

And that's the product of decades of intentional directionings exact why we don't have electric cars absolutely, And now the situation the golf is everyone's pivoting to LNG to liquefy natural gas, and it's a whole new, intensive, very extractive energy project happening in the now.

And I went down there recently to do a story about this exporting natural gas project in an area where it was all fishermen who talked to me about being in their fishing boats while they were spraying correct sit onto the you know, being sprayed directly by the stuff back in twenty ten.

So these are cyclical Gulf environmental devastations and they're continuing now.

The thing that ignited me to want to look into your career and your writing was nine to eleven.

Thirteen million square feet of real estate at the World Trade Center gets pulverized into ash, toxic ash within a matter of hours.

You divide that by four thousand, meaning let's say a house, an average house or even a decent sized US is four thousand square feet or more.

Obviously in the Palisades or we're pivoting to the Palisades here via nine to eleven, So that's three thousand, two hundred and fifty houses.

The Trade Center represents three two hundred and fifty homes at four thousand square feet per home.

That all gets pulverized and then it rains and all that toxic sludge, which in California they're racing to get the toxicity out of there and to remediate that.

First the idea being is what are they going to do?

Are they going to try to go back and rebuild it?

You can't rebuild the way it was because it was like a Disneyland set.

Well, when I think of southern California, I think of an intricate webbing of natural plant life.

And that's the wonder of it in many ways.

And now that's all gone, that's all gone, and so knowing that it's gone and you can never get that back, you have to impress upon people from decades and decades or centuries of growth of the wildlife there, knowing you could never get it back, what do we do?

Do you have any ideas about that?

Well, you brought up this idea of managed retreat, this idea that the state or whomever should pay folks not to be there anymore and turn part of the acreage into park, and that would of course remove some people from the WUI area the wild land urban interface.

But that's a very controversial concept and it touches at the heart of sort of all these emotional attachments to this area.

I mean, what's amazing about California is that there's no place with a better firefighting service, that have the most amazing technology for firefighting.

They are the best prepared.

They have tried to pass a law to make sure people don't put any foliage within five feet of their house Paradise exactly.

You saw Lucy Walker's film Gate not but I've.

Heard a lot about it.

So this five foot of space marker is supposed to be scientifically proven to keep your house from catching fire, or at least prevent these conflagrations where like a thousand houses can catch on fire, but no one wants to do it.

There's whole towns that have shot down ordinances like this.

In the movie.

In Lucy's film, they hire a consultant.

He comes and lays out the five steps.

He thinks you should take all of the very simple and they're like, no, no, that's one of them.

Keep the vegetation five feet from the house.

No wooden roofs.

No, they say, no, yeah, right back to what they had.

I spoke to a former fire chief while the Palisades were burning in northern California, near Berkeley, in a town near Berkeley.

He had retired two weeks before because his town refused to pass the five foot ordinance and he didn't want to be responsible for what would happen when that town inheavit CA.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's a matter of reassessing the way that like living in California looks and feels, the aesthetic of it, and fully accepting that there's a measure of danger to living these places, which will be all heightened by the fact that no one can get insurance, or if you're getting insurance, it's incredibly expensive, which should start to kind of correct for these decades of under valuing the risk to these areas.

I mean, everybody wants ocean front, live by the water, and you realize, you know what happens when there's a three mile island and you tell people they got to get aut or Chernobyl or whatever like that, there's something like Beau Paul.

There's a super level of toxicity and people can't live there anymore.

Well, this is not a super level of toxicity, but it's a super level of pazard for a community.

I think the thing that this teaches us, though, as well, is that there is actually no place safe from the ravages of climate change.

This was a particularly extreme example, and the fire risk to some of these communities is higher than elsewhere, but the fire risk and large swaths of California is similar.

And if you're going to build a new community, it's likely going to be in that WUY zone, that wildland urban interface.

So yes, certainly getting people encouraging them to move elsewhere, but there is a reality of these fires becoming less and less fightable all over the place.

I mean, talking to fire chiefs during these fires, they were very clear that the physics of this fire meant that no amount of fire response could have prevented what happened.

The only way to do anything to mitigate these kinds of fires is this advanced preparation, these hardening of homes, this changing of what the landscape looks like.

Change.

Yeah, and you can have a beautiful garden that's made of rocks and cacti and a gave, but you just can't have rose bushes, you can't have palm trees.

It will take a mass cultural shift, and it's so unclear to me what will cause that, like when will it be bad enough that people would be willing to do that.

There's this kind of wiping of the cultural memory each time this happens.

And there was a time when, you know, in the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco fire, there's a time when we lived with urban fire in a way that was more top of mind to people.

But it's been so long, take a big shift.

Now, you eventually you can describe this.

For me, got to the point where you were a bit overwhelmed by all of your environmental reporting.

Correct?

Correct?

Can you describe the period when that really hits you.

Yeah.

I was working at a different newsroom than I work at now, and i'd been covering climate change for about seven eight years at that point, and as you know very well, it's an incredibly devastating thing to face every day, and I had this experience of becoming quite numb to it.

I think I was covering the potential for an ice sheet to fully collapse and thinking through scientists projections of that and what it would mean, this catastrophic sea level rise, and I registered this sense of feeling nothing in regards to it, just sort of numbing, and I didn't like that.

I think the second way detach the emotional quality of all this devastation from the reality of it, there's nothing to hope for.

So I started combing through botany journals.

Plants have always brought me some measure of peace, and I stumbled upon what turned out to be a massive controversy in the botanical space, where botanists were fighting with each other about whether or not we could consider plants intelligent or possibly conscious, based on behaviors that scientists were uncovering around communication, around memory, kin recognition, manipulation of plants, of insects on the part of plants.

All these very plastic, spontaneous, quite cunning responses plants had to their world that very clearly showed them as active agents rather than these kind of passive, immobile items as we typically consider them.

So I realized that was an incredibly alluring story, back to this idea of like secrets that exist within the confines.

Absolutely, and this I did feel like it was changing my conception of plant life.

So I spent four years talking to botanists and it totally revolutionized my thinking about the natural.

You never had any interest in that subject of botany in a generalis sens before.

Well, I was obsessed with ferns.

Ferns are amazing.

Between two f there you go and I that kind of spiraled out into a larger interest in But no, it's the beauty of being a journalists.

You get to fixate on new topics all the time and call scientists up and the greatest scientists in their field will give you time and give you a personal masterclass on their field and turning that attention towards botanists.

They are some of the most fascinating scientists and enthusiastic scientists in the world.

Is there someone I'm sure there's many, but is there someone you want to recognize?

Yes, there's a botanist ecologist named Richard Carbon at UC Davis, and he is a pioneer in the world of plant communication.

He studies sagebrush so California, of course, Northern California full of sagebrush and it has that camphorus unctious smell And what you're smelling is one small portion of the many, many chemical compounds that sagebrush releases into the air.

And he was responsible for discovering the ways that those contain information, the way that sagebrush signal to nearby plants about danger in the area and how they will signal differently to their biological kin than to strangers.

Plants that they can have even regional dialects of these chemical languages.

Graphically isolated sagebrush will have dialects much like human dialects of how they create these compounds in their bodies.

And his work is absolutely fascinating.

That's the other thing about this is you spend so much time thinking about the devastation of the natural world.

What about the wonder and awe of the natural world?

I think this process of learning about plants.

Yes, this was about how we define intelligence, how we defined consciousness, but it was more about for me the incredible perfusion of biological creativity out there, this idea that we are all products of wild evolutionary exuberance, and plants are some of the most bizarre versions of that.

But it really situated me back into this kind of humble or more humble space of recognizing how we are.

Each each species is like the end node of millions of years of absolutely why evolution, and to sort of snuff out any little node is becomes a much bigger ethical crime.

So it was really good for actually connecting me back to the really tangible stakes of what we stand to lose with climate change, particularly loss of plant species, but loss of anything.

Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger.

If you enjoy conversations about the environment and the role big cities like New York play and reducing waste, check out my episode with Pam Lardo, the former Deputy Commissioner of New York City's Department of Environmental Protection and New York City's first recyclings are Ron Gonan.

This is the fascinating world of biology.

We use a community of bacteria that actually digests the suspended organic material and clean the water via that method, and from there it goes to another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that just can assumed all this organic matter.

But the water that comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection, basically household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that gets either discharged to receiving waters or in some cases in some cities, they're able to polish a little bit more easy for irrigation purposes.

To hear more of my conversation with Pammy Lardo and Ron Gonan, go to Here's the Thing dot org.

After the break, Zoe Schlanger talks about how a typical home can be extremely flammable and the unseen dangers of synthetic furniture.

I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.

Zoe Schlanger's recent article for The Atlantic, titled what Happens When a Plastic City Burns examines the aftermath of the disastrous two thousand twenty five wildfires in Los Angeles County.

The environmental impact of an urban fire on the city of LA calls to mind the aftermath of nine to eleven in New York City.

I was curious why Schlanger felt compelled to write about the Los Angeles fires as a New Yorker.

This was the story of our time.

What happened in LA is something that we are facing in our next twenty years.

There will be many more fires like this, that's all but guaranteed.

And this idea of urban fire coming back to the US is incredibly important to focus on because it's different firefighting and different hazards than wildland fires.

Wildland fires produce lots of toxic compounds, but urban fires produce many, many more, and many more noxious ones.

Ones We don't fully understand.

Even so as someone who thinks about environmental contamination, I go through great pains, Like I bought a couch a few months ago, and it took incredible amounts of research to find a couch that was free of perfluorinated chemicals p fast those forever chemicals, to find a couch without polyurethane foam blocks as the upholstery.

And then I started thinking about this, and there's quotes from fire chiefs going back years saying things like a couch is basically a block of gasoline.

Yeah, this retired Maryland Fower chief exactly because what is polyurethane foam, which is in all our furniture.

It's a polymer, it's gas, it's oil, it's petroleum.

And that's the same with everything.

Thinking about what happens in a modern house fire different from let's say the Great Chicago Fire, is you have a house clad in vinyl siding.

It's got vinyl plank flooring, PBC pipes, the curtains are polyester, the mattress is just a block of gasoline.

Every component of that house is flammable in a new way, and they light so much faster.

There was a wonderful.

This nonprofit on fire safety did this demonstration on videos on YouTube, very compelling watching, where they built two home a living room sets exactly the same size, with the same number of items, but one was mostly natural materials and one was synthetic, which is much a much more common setup.

So they had this, you know, synthetic couch, engineered wood furniture.

You know, that's like everything that you might get at a department store.

The glues holding the engineered bits of wood together is polymer.

You know.

They had like a curtain made of polyester in the other room, cotton curtain, cotton stuffed pillows on the couch, wooden frame, couch, et cetera.

What happened in when they lit in an identical fire was that the room full of natural materials lit very easily, but the flame sort of stayed in place for a while.

It took about twenty six minutes for that room to reach flashover, which is the point in which everything's ignited and escape is impossible.

So it's very important from a firefighting perspective and a life saving perspective.

In the synthetic room, the fire started as a smolder produced much more noxious black smoke much faster, and flashover happened in under five minutes.

So if you're in that home, if you're asleep, the chance of escape goes down, which is also why we've seen the rate of deaths and home fires go up.

There's fewer home fires now than there were in the eighties, but there's something like thirty percent maybe little more thirty four percent more deaths when it does occur.

And that's you know, you can really ask any fire chief that has everything to do with these polymer materials, these plastics, and our bucket of gasoline precisely.

And I think people don't always connect this fact that plastic plastic is an oil product.

It's a petroleum product, and when we think about the flammability of petroleum, that applies to all of our plastic items.

Just this morning, I picked a sample to recover a couch in my kid's playroom, which, of course, with all my kids, that cover is ruined by grape juice and everything's all over the place.

But anyway, I'm getting the couch cover, and she drops off the materials, the woman who are going to do the work for us, and I'm going through them, and I see one and it says hemp, and in my haste a mistake that it's made out of hemp, but you know, the pattern is called hemp.

It's a pattern made to look like hemp.

And then when she went and got the details from me, it's aid forty percent poly So we had to throw that.

That was my first choice decoratively speaking.

You know, it's interesting about things like picking couch covers.

We've just discussed how fast polyesters ignite.

Fine, but if you see a couch material or any material that says it's performance, a performance fabric that's scuff resistant, stain resistant, that's all then coded in clothing p fasts This forever chemical, the teflon toxin that people may have heard about.

So you have a base of woven plastic covered in a lacker of a compound that's associated with many cancers and potentially neurotoxic, and the combination you light that on fire, you create many many other compounds in the burning process, some of which we don't fully understand, but none of which are going to be good for us.

My wife and have gotten better, and I think we're pretty good actually in terms of avoiding clothes for our children that are heavy heavy polyester and plastic based, you know, petroleum based products.

And the same with our home.

We have a house on Long Island and the kids are in and out of the house all day long.

You know, they run out to the pool, they run here, they do this.

We have a big piece of property.

And then in the city they're inside and they're inside for months, and they go to their play space, they go to their soccer classes, they're inside buildings.

And you're thinking, I mean, I'm told that like certain fabrics you wear, the stuff like little microscopic flexs of it are coming off of plastic.

When these couches you have deteriorates slowly flex of they're sprayed with some kind of that little little pieces of little microchar it's of plastic.

Or with these in the air just you sit down on it.

Yeah, they go into the air.

So another thing for me to worry about.

You know, it can be endless and overwhelming, and then you have to think about plants for a few years.

Where are you working now?

Can you say?

I work at the Atlantic magazine?

So you're on the staff of the Atlantic.

I am, yes, I cover climate.

There and they so that's your Bailey.

Wick I'm the only climate reporter at the Atlantic currently.

Really, and you never have any issues with them in terms of me.

And I'm not going to assume the Atlantic is exempt from this, which is you don't ever have any editorial blowback about things you want to do.

They don't care.

You can do whatever you want to do.

They are staunch defenders of fact based journalism.

So as long as I can back it up with fact and our fact checkers don't think it's there's anything wrong with it, it gets published.

Do you think that the Atlantic, because obviously the New Yorker would fit into this category.

And I think the Times, which was in I was told almost twenty years ago they were in grave danger.

There was some rumor that they were going to be sold.

So The Times comes out in the digital agents and they work it out.

They're in good shape now.

They got a lot of online subscribers.

And I'm assuming the same as Sue for The Atlantic.

Correct like these magazines that have survived, I viewed The Atlantic as a survivor.

Oh, certainly, And then what do they attribute that to?

You know what?

The subscriptions to our print magazine are going up right now.

It's a rare case of that, I think happening.

The Atlantic just became profitable just in the last few months after you know, that's unusual from a media company now, and we went from at one point having to cut down to eleven print issues a year to going back up to twelve just recently.

So print is not dead from our perspective, and I feel very lucky to be at one of the rare places where that's the case.

May I ask, what are you working on next?

Right now, I'm working on covering the Trump transition from an environmental perspective, thinking through all the various ways that environmental work is being halted, and that applies to absolutely everything.

I mean, including the nine to eleven Fund or the many people who developed cancers after nine to eleven.

There was the news just this week that the White House was pulling back funding from that.

They've now been so sort of shamed into putting it back.

But it's a lot of moving parts, and we're losing the enforcement mechanisms that keep our environmental laws working properly, and that will surely have a lot of interesting impacts.

It's interesting that you say that because first stumbling upon your writing as a result of this plastics thing and the toxicity from these fires, And the same thing I noticed about your words now, is this idea of enforcement the United States.

In my work I've done environmentally and the advocacy I've been involved with from a few decades now, is that there are plenty of good laws on the books in this country and there's no enforcement.

Sure, they don't make anybody do anything that they should be doing a large industry.

Do you agree, I say, we go through phases of it being better and worse.

I think from an environmental perspective, we have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and the EBA has always functioned on a shoe string budget in terms of enforcing anything related to those two things.

But actually, what I'm really interested now is the fact that environmental justice as a government concept is being erased in this administration.

And most people think, oh, environmental justice, that's this kind of like a DEI thing ideologically, but what is the actual impact.

And the impact is the fact that Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act leave a ton of environmental hazards uncovered because they regulate each point source of pollution.

But let's say you're a person living in a neighborhood where there's twenty five sources of pollution.

There's four refineries, there's a garbage incinerator, there's several factories, nuclear power plan nuclear anything of that nature.

Trucking in the area, that's a combined effect that you're ingesting, breathing in as a resident of that area that is completely uncovered by either of those two main environmental acts that we have on the books.

And so environmental justice exists to fill that space, to have some government oversight mediating the way that people experience those many, many sources of pollution at once.

And without that, we like many many people will fall through the cracks of that.

So you have diminished enforcement even of the two main laws that we have in the books, But then you have absolutely nothing at helping people where they're actually at and how they actually experience environmental harm.

These are neighborhoods where the life expectancy could be twelve years less than the neighborhood next door, just because they have so many sources of pollution.

So this eradicating of environmental justice is a deeper issue, I think than most people realize.

Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger.

If you're enjoying this conversation, Tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

When we come back, Schlanger discusses how climate denial often has better funding than climate education and why she believes the narrative has been pushed in the wrong direction.

I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing.

Zoe Schlanger's writing often focuses on climate change and environmental policy.

Recently, she took a break to explore the world of botany during a period of perceived burnout.

While writing about the current state of the climate in the aftermath of the recent Los Angeles fires, I wondered what more will it take for people to truly pay attention to the changes in our climate?

And what gives Schlanger hope for environmental advocacy these days.

I think there are a number of people in government who really want to make a real difference.

I most recently felt hope when listening to a Senate hearing about the role of insurance companies in the climate crisis and the fact that they were dropping many people from home insurance because they lived in such climate vulnerable areas, but at the same time, we're still ensuring fossil fuel projects.

And also the insurance sector is a major investor in the fossil fuel industry.

And it was heartening to see senators really take them to task and go how can you have a hand in both of these things?

And that was Cenator Sheldon Whitehouse and Senator bor Elizabeth Warren asking really tough questions of So whenever I see a real accountability action take place where we're actually pointing the finger at actors that are knowingly contributing to this, that's very heartening to me, because I think too much focus is on the sort of individual responsibility, this idea we should all recycle, which I'm not saying anyone should stop doing, but we are part of a system, and the system is larger than any individual consumer.

It's not right to say that just because you consume fossil fuels that you are implicated in the climate crisis.

There's much bigger machinations at work to keep us doing that, and it's always heartening to see some government officials stepping up and recognizing that.

Well, when you hear the propaganda from quote unquote the other side the business, I shall we say where they mock recycling and say it's only making a little dent, And I thought to myself, well, it's more the spirit of it.

The recycling thing, to me is just like a credo.

You're making a stand and saying I care enough about the environment, and hopefully that again will expand in other directions.

Yeah.

I think I covered the plastic industry for several years and learning how little gets actually recycled and other watching other people come to that realization as well, produces some measure of rage.

And I think rage is a very important emotion when it comes to these things.

It's very like you said, you recycle, maybe not because you think it's going to save the world, but because you are putting your flag in the ground that you want to do something, and you are at the same time expressing a measure disappointment in the powers of it.

I don't like to use the word rage anymore.

I like to use the word indignation.

Indignation, productive indignation.

We can't We got to be careful what we rage against these days.

For myself, I wonder environmentally what's going to have to happen, And I'm not talking about some horror movie or you know, some tsunami the size of the Grand Canyon comes rolling in.

But I wonder what's going to have to happen before people really really start to pay attention to this on a wholesale level.

Do you ever think about that?

Well, yeah, this kind of also goes back to things that give me hope.

Much more direct form of hope I have is the fact that to some degree, this transition to electrification to renewable sources is going to happen, whether or not we have government support of doing so.

The solar boom is in full effect.

It's totally surpassing everybody's ideas of what would happen.

So I am somewhat heartened by the fact that the market itself is driving in the direction of this is the cheapest, best, most efficient form of energy can make, and we're going to do it because it makes market sense.

So I'm hoping that it's not even won't be about this mass wholesale devastation that we have to endure to finally wake up.

It'll just be the sensible business choice for some energy companies.

That may be wishful thinking, but I think it's possible, you know.

I realized that For me, I think do people only react?

I mean, I'm asking this is a question, but it's more rhetorical, which is that do people in this country, especially, do they react to things only when it touches them?

Like there's fires in California, but don't see any fire.

No fires on sixth Avenue.

You know, we're good here, But what's the we had sandy and the water came up to fourteenth Street or whatever.

Does it really always have to be that it impacts you before you really really care?

Do you believe that?

I think that that's a pretty rational facet of being a human, that things are really untangible until they're tangible.

And I don't necessarily blame people for not thinking about it in their daily busy lives, but I feel like, you know, even thinking about fires.

We were all here for the Canadian wildfire smoke that hit in New York City so intensely.

I was actually in Canada during that time, but people felt touched by that.

I don't think there's very few places in the country that haven't already been touched by some kind of climate disaster.

Even next Arizona one hundred degrees over these for one hundred days.

I'm like, that's not enough to drive you towards some environmental.

Yeah, well, you one can't discount the decades of misinformation, willful disinformation that was perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry.

You know, I know you had Naomi or Rescu's on your show, and of course she wrote Merchants of Doubt, the incredible book about this.

But I recently had to review another recent book called The Parrot and the Igloo, and that was just this recounting of the last fifty sixty years of very well financed disinformation to keep us from really engaging with the climate issues.

It felt that every time the country was at a precipice of genuine concern, scientists had officially broken through.

Congress was engaged the sort of pr machine to avoid any real phase out of fossil fuels or real recognition of this issue at a federal level.

Were dropped in, and this narrative was pushed that climate change isn't real.

And this is a classic pattern.

Climate denihalism is much more funded in many ways than climate education, and so that is why people are in this position.

It's not for lack of self interest.

It's actually just education in the wrong direction.

Well, I remember when on the south shore of Long Island, near my home I grew up in as a child, that were going to build these wind turbines, which all people were screaming, you know, environmentalists having to deal with the nimbi crowded was saying, these are to these I sores, and these going to be so ugly, and you're to look out on the ocean from the beaches, the fabled beaches of Long Island and see all this crap.

And I thought, God, when I see wind turbines anywhere, it's like the statue of liberty.

To me, it's a symbol of our freedom from something that's going to kill us eventually.

You know.

My spirit animal teaches me that the Earth is a self managing mechanism and we will all die off because the planet needs to get rid of us the planet for the planet to survive on some level, a humankind must go unless they amended their ways and lived more because some kind of a spiritual connection to the land and the water.

And the other thing I think is that solar arrays all across Death Valley, and we should have wind turbines on the Great Lakes.

Someone told me once that they put wind turbines to write amount in the right places in the Great Lakes.

You have enough power for thirty percent of the country from the winds during that time of year when it's very very high winds there.

Yeah.

I mean you think about the expansion of the fossil fuel infrastructure.

That was a massive infrastructure process that the country went through at some point, and we can do the same thing, could have a massive industrial proliferation of clean energy.

But back to your point about humans needing to die off, I think that's actually that sort of forecloses a certain measure of hope.

I mean, humanity has not always had this orientation towards the natural world.

Actually, for far longer than our current version of exploiting the natural world.

There has been the long history of humanity that we're very much stewards of and organisms working in concert with the natural world.

And I do think humans will be the ones to figure out how to return to such a state.

But I don't think that the planet's going to spit us out, so to speak.

I want to thank you so much for coming on and doing this with me.

I read your writing, and I'm just such a great admirer of your thinking.

For someone who is covering this, you do it so well.

I mean, you're so articulate and about this subject in others.

So appreciate that.

My thanks to writer and journalist Zoey Schlang.

This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.

Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.

Our engineer is Frank Imperial.

Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich by Alec Baldwin.

Here's the Thing, as brought to you by iHeart Radio