A conference of twin crises

Tempe, Ariz. — The first sign of trouble was breakfast, or more specifically the lack of it.

It was Friday, April 25 — the first full day of panels at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference, hosted by Arizona State University in Tempe. The opening plenary had started fifteen minutes earlier, and I was waiting in line to buy a yogurt parfait at the hotel snack bar. The woman in front of me, catching sight of the parfait, shook her head.

“It’s because all the usual sponsors dropped out,” she said. Gone were the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which had sponsored the conference in 2022 and 2023; in the time since, its cofounder, Mark Zuckerberg, has cozied up to Donald Trump. Gone were the likes of Deloitte and the Ocean Conservancy. Gone, too, was the federal government, which hadn’t been a sponsor but under the Biden administration was friendly to the conference; two years earlier, it had sent then-Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to speak to SEJ’s members in Boise, Idaho. And so, while the conference continued its tradition of providing copious amounts of tea and coffee throughout the day, the breakfasts that repeat attendees had grown used to had disappeared with the sponsors.

Two themes — of silence and belt-tightening — came up again and again in Tempe. A lunch plenary on Friday was supposed to be a conversation with Arizona State University president Michael Crow, but Arizona Republic climate reporter Joan Meiners, moderator of the plenary, announced that Crow had dropped out the day before the conference began. “Panelists have been dropping like flies,” Meiners said.

People are scared, she explained: several of the Thursday tours that SEJ is known for had to be replanned at the last minute after speakers backed away, and politicians across the state who might otherwise have enjoyed the free publicity had declined invites to the conference. The plenary would instead be a conversation with investigative journalists Amy Westervelt and Helina Selemon about speaking with sensitive sources and reporting without access.

SEJ has historically focused on teaching journalists how to better cover the existential threat of climate change, and it often does so through immersion. We were in Tempe because, among other things, the area is known for its extreme heat; the neighboring city of Phoenix (Tempe is part of the Phoenix metropolitan area) is one of the hottest cities in America. This year, however, a second existential threat dominated conversations at the conference: The Trump administration, which has been gutting climate policy and research (just this week, Trump fired hundreds of scientists experts who had been working on the next version of the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment) and attacking the free press alike.

The administration’s actions have had a chilling effect on climate journalism. Many reporters, especially those based in red states, said they have been avoiding the words “climate change” in their coverage and agreeing to grant anonymity to sources who are afraid of losing grant funding. “How do you deal with dread about journalism?” an attendee asked panelists in a session about literary approaches to climate change. “How do you keep the faith that writing matters?”

In the climate world, solutions broadly fit into one of two buckets: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is the prevention phase, when steps are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by doing things like electrifying vehicles or switching to renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines. Adaptation is when steps are taken to prepare for or respond to the new realities of climate change; this often takes the form of building things like seawalls and levees, or in the case of Phoenix creating a network of cooling centers to help residents get respite from the heat.

At SEJ, climate journalism was clearly in the adaptation phase. At the first conference 34 years ago, the majority of attendees were staff reporters at local and national publications around the country, while about a quarter of the attendees were freelancers. In Tempe, that balance had flipped. “So many of the people whose badges had a publication under their name now have ‘freelance’ or ‘independent,’” one attendee remarked to me. SEJ is taking steps to acknowledge that shift; it’s working on a bylaws update to make it easier for freelancers, especially those who might do communications or PR work to pay the bills, to qualify for membership.

But adaptation doesn’t mean resigning yourself to fate; if anything, it’s the opposite. Hundreds of journalists attended the conference, and panels about how to respond to the current moment — like one about covering climate change in an age of distraction — were packed. The Uproot Project, a network of environmental journalists of color (disclosure: I’m a member), announced that its membership had grown to over 900 members around the world since it launched publicly just four years ago.

When I report on climate change, I am drawn to adaptation stories for exactly this reason: in the face of daunting odds we build seawalls and raise houses on stilts and plant drought-resistant crops and join mutual-aid groups that provide strength and hope through community. At SEJ it became clear that there is still an appetite for climate coverage from both reporters and readers alike, and for finding ways to continue doing it even as much of the world turns more hostile.

Adaptation without mitigation is a fruitless endeavor, however: no barrier we build can stand against the forces of the world forever (and don’t get me started on how overused the word “resilience” is). Attacks on free speech are mitigated by a free press, and by people refusing to bend even if it might break them; I think here of Wired’s reporting on DOGE and of 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley taking CBS parent company Paramount to task for trying to interfere in its coverage. Reducing and reversing the impacts of a destructive force of change is slow work, and many people will feel unnecessary and cruel pain along the way. But it can be done, and often it happens because journalists do the hard work of lifting the wool from readers’ eyes.

“I think journalists should party more,” said Ezra Romero, a climate reporter at KQED in San Francisco, when asked about how to stay hopeful. On the day of the presidential inauguration this year, he said, he went out into San Francisco instead of watching the news and found himself at a drag show, which he left feeling inspired. “If you’re starting to get not hopeful,” Romero continued, “leave your house.”