Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins
Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, and an independent journalist who covers science and the environment from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. Her work appears in The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, and The Economist, bioGraphic, National Geographic and other outlets.
DJP: My first question is, do you use environmental terms spontaneously, or do you have the process of selecting environmental terms for your articles?
Erica Gies: I interview a lot of scientists, and they often are using terms that are scientific, which you could call environmental. That could be things like biodiversity or geochemistry or socio-hydrology, etc.
In general, I write for a lay audience, even when it is for magazines like Nature or Scientific American. In fact, they are trying to appeal to educated laypeople. It's important to try to identify terms that might be reader losing. That means that a reader might not know what they mean and stop reading.
If it feels like a bit of a wonky or a jargon word, then I try to define it. If it's important to use it, if I feel like there is no better word to describe it, then I'm educating the reader about the use of the word.
In some cases, it might make sense to change it into something more generic. For example, I wrote in my book, and in a series of articles, about a geologic feature in California called Incised Valley Fill. And to my ear, that was just way too wonky for lay readers.
I pushed in my conversation with a scientist for more public-friendly terms that we could use. Ultimately, we settled on Paleo Valleys, which are a specific thing and are used in the literature and can grab the public's imagination more.
So, kind of through my partnership with this researcher, we have sort of popularized this term “paleo-valleys” for this particular feature that can be used to recharge groundwater in a fast way.
I am a freelancer, so I write for a lot of different publications. And some of the publications, such as The Guardian, have decided to call it a climate emergency instead of climate change.
I understand the thinking behind that, and as a freelancer, I'm not in a position to control how an editor at a publication will edit my words to conform with their official style.
I have been covering climate change for more than 20 years. And a long time ago we called it global warming. Then it was decided that climate change was better because it's not just warming—there are a lot of other impacts.
For a while, that was also a political thing. Republicans in the U.S. were using climate change because it sounded more neutral than global warming. There was resistance from environmentalists to call it climate change.
Now, some people are talking about climate chaos to try to indicate the severity. I would say I generally use climate change these days, but I sometimes use climate chaos.
I tend not to use climate emergency. But as I said, if I'm writing for a publication that has made editorial or style decisions about that type of language, then I must go along with that.
Also, it is my preference to refer to animals as gendered—typically “he” or “she,” as opposed to “it,” which was kind of the general preference in English for a long time.
The reason I do that is because I believe that other species have a right to exist. They are independent beings with agency. They are not things that are here for us to use, exploit, or control. I think that using that kind of language is a way of conveying that.
When I started doing that, almost every publication I wrote for would resist and would change it to “it.”
Now I'm finding that some publications will accept and retain that language when I use it.
Another thing is “kill.” I recently wrote an article about beavers. Settlers in North America and people in Europe have a long history of killing beavers to the point of extirpation from some places (extirpation meaning localized extinction), which I would probably define in an article for the public.
Or I would just say, “went extinct in that area.”
I think terms like “depredation” or “trapping” are euphemisms for killing that try to sanitize what is happening.
It is a way of distancing us from the actual impacts that we are having on another species in the landscape.
In this particular article, I decided to use “kill,” and the editor had a really, really hard time with it and was coming at me with it, as if I were an activist.
I told them that I did this because I felt like it was more accurate than obscuring words like “depredation.”
But of course, it's their publication, and I'm willing to go along with their style choices. They changed it all, and I accepted that. But I believe that word choice matters.
DJP: Thank you. These were excellent examples. It is obviously incredibly challenging to convey complex environmental issues and choose how you're going to describe them. How do you approach those issues knowing that you have diverse readership? And you said already that you are writing for an educated layman, but do you have a strategy when you are thinking of how the average person would conceptualize this in the most objective manner? What's your process there?
EG: I think oftentimes I am looking for stories that I believe challenge conventional assumptions about a subject.
The reason I want to tell those stories is because I have learned something from talking with scientists, and I feel like the general discussion about that topic is missing a key point or the key point.
When I'm writing, I'm generally starting from that perspective, like “Hey, you might be thinking about it this way, because that seems to be the mainstream way that people think about it, but there is this other element that maybe you don't know about, or maybe you don't understand. Here's what I have learned about it from these experts.”
DJP: In which way do you feel that specific words and phrases used in environmental reporting play a role in how readers perceive it?
EG: You know, I've been covering climate change for the better part of two decades and primarily in the U.S., but I have written for international publications in Europe, Canada, and occasionally Australia and generally English-speaking places.
For a long time, there was this strong argument that climate change wasn't happening, particularly in the U.S., funded by fossil fuel and other vested interests. Journalism kind of fell into this “he said-she said” approach: “Here's what the climate scientists say,” and “Here's what the people who say it's not happening say,” rather than trying to find out the truth and write the truth.
There was this kind of both-sides-ism. Eventually, people largely accepted that climate change was happening, but then the narrative that humans aren't causing it emerged—that it is just natural variation.
Now, people are mostly accepting that humans are causing climate change.
One thing I have been noticing recently in the dominant culture—by which I mean Judeo-Christian-Euro-North-American culture that's been exported around the world via colonialism and capitalism—that troubles me is that we tend to have a very single-focus, problem-solving approach.
We don't think in systems; we're not using systems theory. If we're worried about flooding, we want to build a wall, build a levee, build a seawall. If we are worried about water scarcity, let's build a pipeline and bring it in from somewhere else.
We are not looking at how these complex natural systems work when they are healthy. And we're not looking at how our single-focused solutions are undermining their functionality and their efficacy.
I see this now in the climate sphere, in the effort to get people to understand the crisis and the need to take action.
The message has been boiled down into “We need to keep warming to 1.5 degrees or two degrees by X year, we need to get off fossil fuels, we need to move to renewable energy…”
Of course, those things are true and very important, but they are only part of the picture.
Twenty percent of emissions come from land-use change. And in my work, deeply diving into water, I have found that 75% of the land area is severely degraded and that we have really, really dramatically altered the water cycle by filling or draining 87% of the world's wetlands and putting dams on two-thirds of the world's large rivers.
Those are just a few examples. What I have been focusing on recently are cross-disciplinary scientists who are working on ecology and climate, or biology and climate, or hydrology and climate, and in particular the relationship among plants, the water cycle, and climate.
Because, of course, evapotranspiration has a significant cooling effect.
So, if you're talking about building renewable energy at all costs, as if it doesn't matter if we put up a solar panel in this grassland and destroy it, that is not taking into account those 20 percent of emissions that come from land-use change.
It is also ignoring the significant climate impact from the water cycle and the role of plants and intact ecosystems and all the critters, large and small, that also are helping the water cycle and the ecosystem to continue to function in the way that we need it to.
I think humans in the past maybe had the luxury of ignoring this because there have been a lot of buffers.
But in our lifetime, the global population has more than doubled. And we have also seen a really rapid increase in the disparity between the very, very rich and the poor.
Both of those things are driving this really dramatic degradation of these natural systems that have kind of buffered our single-focus approaches.
Getting back to climate, that single narrow focus on reducing emissions, on getting off fossil fuels, I think is really missing the fact that the biodiversity crisis and the water crisis are inextricably linked to the climate crisis.
It is complex.
And in an attempt to get people to understand that it is urgent, we have oversimplified it.
That is tracing back to policymakers, who are coming up with these really over simplistic solutions like “Let’s plant a trillion trees.”
I mean, we have deforested a lot, but oftentimes they are talking about a plantation of pine trees because they grow so quickly, so they are going to store carbon quickly.
Then the scientists show that, in fact, old-growth trees store a lot more carbon, and there is a lot of carbon in the soil as well, and the relevance of the water cycle to the matter, etc., just wanting to point out the complexity behind each item.
DJP: It's what you're saying is basically that this Tragedy of the Commons narrative is still very prevailing—that the only way for humanity is a rat race to obtain and exploit resources as long as possible, preventing others from using them. While Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work proving that shared management of common goods makes them last longer and benefits more people, we still behave as though resources are inevitably limited, so why wouldn’t it be us to exploit them? So, my question is, how do you feel about this underlying but mainstream narrative constantly opposing the efforts to inform the public objectively?
EG: The important thing to realize about the capitalist narrative is it's not about creating a better quality of life for everyone. It's about making the very rich even richer, as rich as absolutely possible. That is fundamentally at odds with managing resources sustainably because you are then driven to extract that resource to a point of economic extinction, to the point where it's no longer economic. And then you move on to some alternative.
There is something fundamentally in the Judeo-Christian culture that is really at the root of this—the separation of humans from nature. That goes back to the Bible, but it also has roots during the Enlightenment, like the Great Chain of Being, in which humans are more important than other species.
That is such a prevailing thing in all of our narratives. In the dominant culture, it’s okay to fell that old-growth forest because there are 50 people whose jobs are cutting down those big trees, and we don't want to take those jobs away from them.
I think that is why you see biodiversity is higher in lands managed by Indigenous cultures, because they have a very different worldview that sees other beings as relatives and sees not only rights to resources but also a responsibility for care. If you don't perform those responsibilities, then you're not entitled to that resource. And that is a check on overexploitation that we just don't have in our dominant culture.
I do think that under the current system, it is impossible to get to a point of sustainability.
I think the growing inequity is pushing that political conversation and making it much more acceptable, particularly to younger people, to reevaluate how we are dividing resources. There have been various shareholder activist actions.
But one thing I would like to see, that I don't see yet in the language, is—even though there is increasing talk about environmental justice and ecojustice—that other species have a fundamental right to exist.
We should be expanding the environmental justice conversation to include other species.
At the moment, we talk about how a lot of these decisions are unfair to poor communities, which is absolutely true. The old story is that rich people typically get rich by exploiting the environment and poor people, dumping the waste and the problem onto them while just taking the profits.
But I think we're starting to see the Rights for Nature movement, which is a way to bring a different worldview into our dominant systems, like the legal system.
I think it is possible that in 100 years we might be in a place where we can't believe that 100 years ago, nature didn't have rights—just like we say now, “We can't believe 100 years ago women didn't have rights,” or “Black people didn’t have rights,” or “Indigenous people didn’t have rights.”
I do see movement in that direction, but most of the environmental justice narratives are still focused on people first.
I think that is very much our default in the culture.
And the thing is that it is not just morally wrong—it is against our best interests.
These complex ecosystems, all these other species, are doing so much to support a comfortable life on Earth.
We don't really understand that because it's an externality in our economic system.
But again, there are changes happening. At Stanford, there is the Natural Capital Project run by Gretchen Daly. Then the University College London has an environmental economics program in the Institute for Global Prosperity, and the UN developed a program to measure ecosystem services and take that into accounting, which some tens of countries have signed on to.
The Biden administration has put forth some framework about that. I'm not sure—I haven't looked at it closely.
So, we are beginning to see those kinds of changes, but they're still really, really on the periphery.
And I think until those things become mainstream ideas, we are not going to make the kind of progress that we need given the current state of the Earth.
DJP: Do you think that it is sort of your job to help make those ideas more mainstream by educating the public?
EG: I do believe that my job is to educate. The reason I do this work is because I feel there is a scientific and emerging scientific understanding that is not yet understood by the public or by decision-makers.
I want them to understand that because they are not going to solve the problems we’re facing if they don't understand that.
And I don't think that's unjournalistic.
As journalists, we are always choosing the stories we want to tell because we think they are important for some reason or another.
I think environmental issues are the most important issues we face because they affect everything else we do, and they are in such a state of crisis.
In choosing to tell those stories, I'm using my voice and my experience and expertise to elevate that information to the extent possible.
I am one person; I am freelance. But I feel like it's important to spend my life doing that.
Whether or not it actually shifts things is out of my control, but I feel like I need to do what I can, and what I can do is to be accurate above all else.
In that respect, I feel like that is classic journalism because it undermines my credibility if I am overstating in some way.
I also have seen journalists make mistakes, like the false equivalency of climate denialism that was allowed to go on for so long.
Part of the reason why action was delayed in the U.S. and why political actors were able to exploit that desire to retain the status quo is because journalists wanted to cover their butts or were confused by the science and didn't have the time and money to really dig in and understand it, and, you know, take a stand: “This is the actual truth, and these are deniers.”
Journalism did a poor job for a decade or more, and we are globally paying a price for that.
So, I am okay reporting on the leading edge of science.
For example, this article I just wrote for Nature Water about the interconnections of plants, water, and climate is about cutting-edge science.
There are mainstream scientists who aren't yet on board with it. It is possible these scientists will ultimately be proven wrong in some way or another, but there is enough of that work, and it is moving in the same direction, that I think it has a lot of merit.
And I want to do my part in bringing that into the conversation and making people aware of important complexity that isn't receiving any attention.
So, policymakers should at least try to educate themselves about it and then see how that impacts the decisions they are making.
DJP: How do you ensure the accuracy and consistency of environmental terminology across different stories, and do you align with the style guide on climate reporting, which proposes more precise terms over neutral ones—for example, from climate change, the climate crisis, biodiversity to wildlife, global warming to global heating?
EG: I have my own internal style guide. I was a copy editor for seven years, so I wrote several style guides, and I like style guides. In my book, Water Always Wins, I was free to use my own style, but because I'm a freelancer writing for a number of different publications, all of my writing for those outlets goes through their own copy editing and style choices, and as a freelancer, I have to accept that.
As far as terms for climate—climate change, global heating, etc.—I think words matter. But I am not at all sure which of those is best. It may be different for different audiences.
I think there are people who see climate chaos or climate emergency as alarmism, and that might instantly turn them off from the story. They will think of it as propaganda and maybe they won't read it.
But I also understand the instinct behind wanting to use that kind of terminology.
DJP: How do you attribute agency to different stakeholders in environmental narratives—from those who have a lot of agency, like governments and industry, to those who often lack agency, like the general public, citizen minorities, and other species?
EG: You mean, do I give people with less agency more say, or something like that?
DJP: What I'm asking is, what are the language choices you make to attribute agency or emphasize the lack of it?
EG: I think a lot of my stories are what might be called solutions journalism.
I have scientific pieces where I am just relaying the work of scientists and trying to explain that.
But then I have more feature-based stories that might be centered around a project that is a solution to some problem.
I have always been interested in what people do as communities to face some problems. Typically, those local stories have national or international implications.
So, I want to show an approach they are having that might work somewhere else.
I would say, because those are the types of stories I like to write, I am often talking to community groups or local governments who have figured out some lever for agency and are trying to implement it.
There might still be someone else with more agency—a group above them that has power over what's happening that they're still fighting against—and that might be part of the story.
But I do prefer to tell stories that are elevating the voices of the voiceless, like an ecosystem or a river or an animal, or disadvantaged people.
I have written a lot of stories about Indigenous groups because I find they often have a tradition of living close to the land and having a different perspective on how they want to manage the land.
That conflict between their approach and the dominant culture, and where they are at with that and trying to realize their vision, is the kind of story that often attracts me to tell it.
DJP: While environmental justice stories are more and more present, it kind of gets confused with Indigenous rights and their powers to save the planet. It somehow comes off as if we right the wrong, just their mere presence and culture will fix it, while in reality, powerful political and economic structures are true decision-makers. What do you think about this growing faith in the healing powers of Indigenous land management?
EG: There's a growing land-back movement where various entities, like a conservation NGO, for example, might buy a chunk of land and return its management to the local Indigenous group. That is happening in the Bay Area; it's happening in Northern California. Although Indigenous groups in North America were subject to genocide and cultural erasure—where they were pressured not to speak their language, not to practice their culture, etc.—many of them have retained some of their knowledge and stories passed down through elders. And when given the opportunity, there are people who are restoring the land when they get it back.
There are examples where people are getting the power to do that. Here in Canada, there have been a series of court cases over 20 or 25 years that are starting to recognize Indigenous land rights and title, particularly in British Columbia, where many of the Nations never signed treaties because the settlers arrived kind of after the treaty era was over. Instead, the government just took the land and started leasing it to timber companies and clear-cutting it, etc.
With the advent of these court cases, different groups are starting to make claims like, "Hey, this was our traditional territory." The government is actually obligated to give them some money for their lawyers to help get that established, etc.
More recently, there's this movement called Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. Science shows that the 25% of land area managed by Indigenous people contains 80% of the world's biodiversity. Looking at their historical lands and how decimated they have become within 100 years, some of these groups are saying, "This is ours now, and we're going to manage it."
Canada is such a vast landscape that there aren't really enough government officials to be patrolling everything. It is early days, and we will see how that plays out. But First Nations here are building big houses again. They're having dances and potlatches; they are teaching their languages to their kids again. All of this has happened just in the last 10 or 15 years.
They are definitely still marginalized people in the U.S. and Canada. But I am seeing stories where they are deploying actual agency to manage landscapes as they prefer.
DJP: That is wonderful, but in a big picture—for example, the administration now is still going with the pipeline project. The power of the corporations and the government in these issues remains unchallenged. It seems more like they are giving back something they can’t manage anyway, and it makes them look good. I am just wondering if a bottom-line question in the media and news discourse on environmentalism is: How important is it to call out the truly responsible people for what's happening, in its entire complexity?
EG: I think it's really important. When I try to introduce capitalism as the root of the problem into stories, I get a lot of pushback from editors, and most are not comfortable with that being part of the story.
It is true that we are operating in an environment where we have all sort of accepted rules that we live by.
I have written a number of stories that talk about environmental economics, natural resource capital, and these kinds of alternative economic ideas—things that focus on research that has valued the cost of protecting a community. For example, I wrote a story about a study looking at protecting a wetland and how quickly that cost is offset by avoiding flooding damages because the water has space to go.
I write stories specifically about things like that, and I think that's important.
It is also important to write stories that show examples of communities overcoming these limitations because those can be a blueprint for other communities. I mean, every community is different, and all governments are different. You can't do the same thing in every place. But the more stories you have of people who are choosing a different way and succeeding at it—and often reaping unexpected benefits—the more we learn.
The whole idea of nature-based solutions was considered incredibly fringe just five years ago. It was seen as a nice idea, but it can't be a significant part of the solution. Some of that attitude is still out there, but now there are 30 x 30 commitments from a lot of countries (protecting 30% of the planet's oceans, lands, and freshwaters by 2030).
California has a 30x30 commitment. In the infrastructure bill, there was money for nature-based solutions. It was a little marginalized and could potentially go to other things as well. But the fact that it was called out as a thing is important.
I think that these stories of people going another route, of showing a different way, do have an impact and ultimately change the conversation. It starts around the fringe.
Before I wrote a lot about water, I wrote about renewable energy for 10 to 15 years. And at that time, people said to me again and again, "Solar will never be more than maybe half a percent of our energy production." Like, it's just too fringe.
Then economies of scale happened. More and more people did it. More people showed how you could run your meter backwards. People started understanding how you could put solar and wind on the grid together and create a more generalized amount of power, looking at various storage devices, etc.
That's something that has significantly changed. In some countries, they are at 100% renewable energy.
DJP: It's definitely possible; we can see it in northern Europe. But in many other places, we are just ignoring the socioeconomic complexity behind these decisions and are not educating ourselves on how to change it. It is all very vague. When we add that to the natural complexity of the issues, it gets almost unattainable.
EG: It is true that we default to the dominant economic story. But that is why I think community-based activism is critical because you can get grants from the federal government or the state government, but so much of the decision-making about what actually happens on the ground occurs at the community level.
You see this play out in different ways, like Kenya actually has community watershed management. That means that every community makes its own decisions about its own water. Now, it's not well-funded. And, you know, the devil's in the details, but the fact that it is in their constitution—that water management should be local—I think is really interesting.
DJP: That is something to think about.
EG: I have seen a lot of examples of people working things out within their own community on different levels, whether it is the town or the county making a decision about daylighting part of a creek or like Washington state that has something called floodplain integrated management planning.
They recognize that too much land has been taken away from the water in the floodplain, and they're having a lot of floodplain flooding.
So, they are getting the farmers together and the Indigenous people and the floodplain managers. They have a series of meetings for years to figure out where they are going to give space to water.
Another example of this is in the Russian River watershed in Northern California, where they had massive water scarcity. There were people who had the oldest water rights and were having plenty of water at a time when other people in the community didn’t have any. They voluntarily gave back some of their rights to support the community in having enough water.
Every community has different politics and functions differently. But knowing your neighbors and coming face to face with them and negotiating with them is the thing that I see again and again that works.
I also think it is harder to do that today. When I was a kid, we took civics in junior high school or high school and learned how the government works and how to participate in it.
My grandparents' generation had a huge tradition of volunteering and participating in the community. That has definitely faded away with our current culture, which I would say is more independent; it is more about me than about my community.
I do think there is some kind of pendulum that is coming back as people are realizing the power of unions, the power of community organizing, and the power of a marginalized community coming together—or people from NGOs partnering with people in marginalized communities.
So, I hear what you're saying. Maybe it is a local news desert thing, and there is no accountability. There is not that kind of understanding. Like my stories—I write about a particular community usually, but it is for a national or international publication. So, I am trying to make the perspective broad, and I don’t have the same understanding of how that local government works as I would have if that was my daily beat and I covered it all the time.
DJP: What is the most important environmental issue the media should address today?
EG: The connection among climate, life, and water. We can't fix climate change if we ignore biodiversity and the water cycle. That’s something I’ve come to understand based on the research I've done talking to various scientists.
DJP: Is this issue given enough space in the news, in your opinion?
EG: Definitely not.
DJP: So what is the general tone of reporting on this issue, and what are the biggest obstacles you see from it being reported enough or adequately?
EG: As I said, the kind of climate narrative today in journalism and in the dominant culture has gotten to a point where we acknowledge climate change is real. We acknowledge it's already happening. We acknowledge that humans are causing it. But the solution has been oversimplified to, “We need to get off fossil fuels.” That is very important, and I don't want to undermine that in any way.
But that's become pretty much the sole narrative when it comes to climate. There are people who are covering other aspects, but that is definitely the loudest and most prevalent focus. And then, because that's what you hear in journalism, that is also what you hear in policy circles and in tech solution circles.
When you talk to climate scientists who are interdisciplinary, they are very upfront about what they don't know, relating to the water cycle and the role of biodiversity and life. They're very clear about what is missing from climate models and what's been oversimplified because it was too complex to really come up with a number for, and they're working really hard to try to get better answers and to try to improve these climate models.
But because the answer hasn't been quantified down to some kind of simple target, it tends to just be ignored by journalists and policymakers.
I've seen some articles about how cloud cover is really complicated and not well represented in the climate models, and that's part of the water cycle impacts. But the plants and their evapotranspiration are a really important part.
There are stories on how deforestation reduces rain because the plants are not there to evaporate and transpire. But then there is nothing on how that is also affecting climate. It is making that area much, much hotter because there is no shade, there is no evapotranspiration cooling.
Also, the way in which that interacts with the jet stream and other big atmospheric cycles. So, yes, deforestation can reduce rain on the other side of the planet, and that's something that I think some people know. But the way that plays into flood and drought and the way that plays into climate is not usually talked about.
DJP: I would like it if you could name the most important environmental terms currently that you find significant and why. As many as you like.
EG:
- Hydroclimatology: That's just what I was talking about—the interactions between water and climate and often plants, because they're important in water as well.
- Eco-climate teleconnections: This is the work of a scientist named Abigail Swann out of the University of Washington. It is about how plants or lack of plants can impact water cycles on the other side of the world.
- Moisture hopping or precipitation recycling, or the small water cycle: This is the way that plants’ evapotranspiration creates water and cooling in their area and in close regional areas, sort of like a hopping mechanism across the continent. Deforestation can disrupt that.
- Socio-hydrology: For a long time, hydrologists were just measuring water flows, for example, without recognizing that humans were having a really, really significant impact on those water flows. Socio-hydrology looks to understand the human component in it.
A couple of key findings are things like the levee effect. When you build the levee, everybody's like, "Oh, great, it's safe behind this levee, so why don't we build a bunch more development behind it?" But it is putting more people at risk.
Similarly to that is the reservoir effect that brings in a lot of water from somewhere else, sitting in a big reservoir. So, people think that they don't need to conserve water. They have this false sense of how much water is available and tend to overuse it and don't conserve it until it is too late.
It is very similar to the way in which more lanes on the freeway attract more traffic. Bringing water from elsewhere attracts more development and more overexploitation of that water, putting more people at risk in an area that doesn't have enough water. Southern Arizona is a very good example of this.
DJP: Or giving the land and said water to Saudi Arabia to grow alfalfa.
EG: That's called water grabbing or land grabbing. It happens all over the world, where countries or companies are going into places with fewer regulations on water and land and taking the things that they've already overexploited in their own areas.
A lot of U.S. states have very laissez-faire approaches to environmental management. In Texas, where there is almost no regulation on development because it is thought to help the economy, there is no political will to have laws that protect the environment. That was true in Arizona with water until this most recent governor. And we'll see if she's able to change things.
DJP: How do you see your role in shaping the public discourse on environmental topics?
EG: I hope to make ideas that are not well-known better known. That's why I wrote my book, which is about nature-based solutions for water management, trying to look at problems from water’s perspective, not just humans’ perspective. Because I felt like these solutions weren't getting enough attention.
DJP: So how do you structure the boundary between that kind of work and activism? Or is it possible to draw a clear boundary?
EG: It was an interesting exercise writing a book because it gave me the opportunity to take more of a point of view than I do in a lot of journalism articles.
Water is a huge subject, and I needed to decide what I wanted to cover, which aspect of it. I wanted to cover the nature-based solutions because I felt they were not getting much funding or policy attention.
I had watched it grow over 10-plus years, and it was getting to the point where some countries were taking it to a national scale, some states were taking it to a statewide scale, or aspects of it. Not that they were solving all the problems, but some aspects of policy had gone nationwide or statewide, and it still wasn't really being recognized as a movement, as the Slow Water movement, as I dubbed it.
I guess I will try to continue to put forward the most prevalent work of scientists that shows the efficacy of the kinds of projects that I am talking about.
It is not me saying, "You should do this." It's scientists saying, "Hey, we went to this community and we saw them doing this, and we measured it. And it's working."
Since publishing the book, I have been invited to speak in a lot of places—podcasts, radio, television, and also a lot of keynotes at conferences for water utilities, with floodplain managers and engineers and restoration scientists.
They seem really open to learning more about these projects and incorporating them more into their work.
I feel like the book hit at kind of a turning point where these people working in water are starting to see more and more examples of how it can work.
It is weird to speak in that way because they are experts, and I guess now I'm an expert in that as well.
I've talked to many, many, many people working on it, so I have kind of a big-picture perspective. But being an expert feels like something I am not supposed to be as a journalist.
So that has been a little bit weird to navigate. But I just try to stick to the science that I've learned while reporting this and the things that certain communities have demonstrated.
It's a little tricky, but I guess I would just go back to the fact that everything a journalist or publication decides to cover is a choice that is underlined by a bias or a preference, or thinking that a particular subject is important and worthy of that space and focus.
I think what I'm doing is in line with that.
DJP: Do you find that the ownership in the media and the advertisers’ influence affect environmental reporting? Because even if they hire people like you to report in-depth on something, they can still frame it. It's their decision what kind of title they’re going to put, how they are going to copy edit it. Do you have anything to say about that?
EG: As a freelancer, I'm basically an outsider. I almost never visit the newsrooms. Sometimes, if I'm in a particular city, I'll try to have a meeting with an editor. But I really don't know what goes on in internal discussions in terms of funding.
All the publications I write claim to have a very strict wall between funding and what they choose to cover. I would not want to write for a publication that did not claim that.
I think my sense is that the shaping of the coverage comes more from the editors themselves and their, perhaps, own knowledge or biases.
So, for example, talking about environmental economics, I was writing for the editor of a big-name publication recently, and the story was focused on capitalism versus environmental economics. The editor was very, very uncomfortable with that and thought it was incredibly fringe.
When I pointed out to them that, you know, Stanford has had the Natural Capital Project for 25 years, and the University College London has had a program for a similar length of time, and there have been various orgs like Redefining Progress. For several decades, these have been part of an academic effort that was backed up by a lot of intelligent people who had published a lot on it.
Once I showed them that, they accepted it, but it is something that they had been completely unaware of before, and therefore their instinct was that I was getting way too fringy and that it shouldn't have a place in the publication. And they came around.
DJP: It seems as if reporting on the facts but tackling these issues such as capitalism, a reporter gets perceived as an activist?
EG: I think that's true because it's something that's outside of the mainstream. And different editors are more prone to a kind of herd mentality.
If you're the first person to pitch something and they have never heard of it, therefore it is not a story. If you're the second person to pitch it, then it is like, well, I've heard something about that, but I don't know, I don't think it's that important.
And if you're like the third person to pitch, it is like, oh, it's a trend, we have got to do it, you know?
I find that access to publication, especially access to really big-name publications where that kind of idea might get a lot of play or attention, can be limited by a herd mentality attitude.
I think big-name publications are under a lot more scrutiny, and they are a lot more worried about having a defensible position if someone comes after them for, you know, being too fringe or seeming like they're too "activisty."
I kind of get it, but it is frustrating.
DJP: I understand. This is the last question. We are going to do a little experiment. I'm going to say a word, and you're going to tell the first association you have. No right or wrong answers.
DJP: Resource.
EG: Management.
DJP: Landscape.
EG: Protection.
DJP: Nature.
EG: Solution.
DJP: Complexity.
EG: Misunderstood.
DJP: Socioeconomic systems.
EG: Unfair.
DJP: Pipeline.
EG: Bad.
DJP: Carbon footprint.
EG: Oversimplified.
DJP: Environmental justice.
EG: Other than human.
DJP: Pollution.
EG: Corporate responsibility.
DJP: Fish stock.
EG: Overexploited.
DJP: Climate deniers.
EG: Vested interests.