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Research Center, an innovative Fairbanks nonprofit, none of the celebratory reports mentioned that the research center’s funding had just been zeroed out by Dunleavy’s vetoes. Rick Thoman, an oft-quoted meteorologist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy in Fairbanks, spends much of his time trying to steer reporters away from tired tropes. He emphasizes human impacts, he said, but it can be hard conveying how drastic these can be. Last year, at a big-market television conference, Thoman said, he drew a lot of blank stares when he urged weathercasters to concentrate on people stories and not the charts of Arctic temperatures. “It’s so outside the realm of people’s experience, to be living somewhere not connected by road,” he said. “They ask, ‘Why can’t they just move to another town?’ ” Old habits of race and class, of exoticizing and orientalizing Alaska’s Native people, also affect the choices of visiting journalists, in the opinion of Shady Grove Oliver, the only reporter for the only Arctic newspaper in the United States. Oliver, thirty-two, has worked for more than four years for the Arctic Sounder, a weekly covering Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and the smaller northern villages. Her newsroom consists of a backpack and laptop, sometimes on a couch in Kiana, sometimes in a coffeehouse in California, where she grew up. Her editor works from a farm south of Anchorage, and ads are sold by the Anchorage Daily News, which recently took over the Sounder. “People in the villages have been seeing these changes for a long time, and have not been heard,” Oliver said. “A lot of local journalists have been trying for a very long time to cover the story in a way that’s meaningful to people on the front lines.”
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ast summer, returning in his truck from the Chukchi Sea bike trip, Olson drove into a wildfire in the Kenai Mountains. The Swan Lake Fire, as it was named, was about to become the nation’s largest of the season. Flames had just jumped the highway, which state officials were getting ready to close, and were approaching the town of Cooper Landing. Holding his camera, Olson walked into the
CJR
embers. He did not have to go to the Arctic to see what climate change was doing. The photos he posted on Facebook were shared sixteen hundred times. Olson was not the only person documenting the scene. The Swan Lake Fire, closer to settled areas than any in memory, brought about a noticeable shift in how local media covered climate. In the midst of what would be the hottest year in Alaskan history, during the state’s hottest month ever, with Anchorage choking on smoke, reporters started connecting the dots. Record warming and extreme drought were presented as part of the story. “The scenario playing out this week is likely to repeat itself in a warming climate of Alaska’s future,” Michelle Theriault Boots, an Anchorage Daily News reporter, wrote, citing the opinion of climate scientists. Still, the coverage wasn’t explaining what could be done to fight back against climate change. Arnold, the former NPR reporter, believes that to fully engage jaded readers, journalists need to focus more on hope. “Such reporting would also include responses and innovations, and increase pressure on policymakers to act, rather than offering excuses for inaction,” she wrote in a 2018 paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Her research burrowed in on Alaska, where her own early work treating coastal villagers as victims of the environmental crisis now struck her as somewhat exploitative. She noted that the residents of Newtok, for example, think of themselves not as losers but as “pioneers,” and argued that the story of how they cling to their region, rather than disperse, provides a compelling frame. Arnold told me that her argument has met with some resistance from national climate activists, who worry that a focus on resilience could undermine the important message that we’re in a planetary crisis. But her prescription for writing stories about community ties to a natural world worth saving was seconded by Tim Bradner, a veteran oil industry reporter who spent part of his career as a BP lobbyist, and who has also fretted over the toughto-penetrate scrim of despair in some readers. Bradner told me that despondency of this kind has now been clinically identified