‘My son knows that I am a writer and I write about our planet,’ Tatiana Schlossberg tackled climate change in her own words

Schlossberg, who died Tuesday at the age of 35, was the scion of the Kennedy family, granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, daughter of diplomat Caroline Kennedy, and mother to two young children of her own. She was also a dedicated journalist work covering climate change and the environment earning awards and praise.

Her work was featured in half a dozen publications, including several years as a staff writer for the New York Times and an essay in The Boston Globe. She also wrote a book, “Inconspicuous Consumption”; detailing how everyday decisions can impact on the environment, the book was awarded the prestigious Rachel Carson Award in 2020.

“I try to write with humility, which translates to some as a lack of expertise,” she wrote on her Substack. “I think humility is important, especially with science: I don’t know everything, and things change all the time. I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble as a species and a culture by not embracing uncertainty and the blurriness of ideas.”

According to one account, Schlossberg’s writing career was nearly over before it began. While studying at Yale University, she was nearly recruited by an unnamed consulting group. But upon arriving at a job fair, she told the student paper that she knew it wasn’t her calling: “I looked around and felt that I not only didn’t belong with the group of people but that I didn’t believe in what the organization stands for or does.”

Instead, she turned to writing; first at the Yale Herald, where she served as editor-in-chief, and then as an intern at the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. Over the summer of 2011, Schlossberg chronicled the island’s local artists and farmers market, as well as a piece on hospice care on the island. She wrote that hospice workers, in their unique approach to life and to death, “show an immense respect for nature, for the natural cycles of life.”

After graduation, she worked at the The Record, a small newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey. In an article published after Schlossberg’s death Tuesday, Daniel Sforza, a former editor at the paper, said the Kennedy heir was — perhaps like her grandfather — eager to earn her credentials as a serious journalist.

“Early on, I let Ms. Schlossberg know that I didn’t care all that much about her family history and that I would treat her like any other reporter under my watch,” wrote Sforza, now an editor at The New York Times. “That suited her just fine.”

At The Record, Schlossberg covered municipal politics, public works, and the impact of Hurricane Sandy. Less than a year after her graduation, the paper sent her to Newtown, Conn., days after a school shooting claimed the lives of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Dec. 2012.

Sforza, writing for the Times, said the first few lines of her article showed that, for Schlossberg, “going to Newtown was something more than just reporting.”

“On his way to school last Friday morning, 6-year-old James Mattioli wanted to know if adults were allowed to go to Disneyland by themselves,” she wrote. “His baby sitter and driver, Jess DiVanno, 23, told him ‘Of course.’”

“James’ reply: ‘I can’t wait until I’m an adult so I can go to Disneyland by myself.’”

James Mattioli, a first-grader at Sandy Hook, was one of the 20 young students killed during the shooting.

Schlossberg eventually got a job at the New York Times, where her work veered into all sorts of unexpected places. She wrote about prison abuses on Riker’s Island, New York’s bodega scene, and a series of overdoses at Wesleyan University that the 24-year-old, in one essay, said turned her into “a bundle of anxiety and panic” when I got the assignment. In one case, she wrote about the strange mystery of a dead bear cub found dead in Central Park.

From the tone of her writing, it sounds like a frustrating story to crack: “Apart from the bear’s age and weight — six months, 44 pounds — the cause of death was almost all anyone seemed to know, and almost all anyone was willing to say.”

She couldn’t have known at the time that the bizarre story was much closer to home than anyone imagined. A decade later, it emerged that the culprit was none other than then-presidential candidate — and Schlossberg’s cousin — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By 2016, Schlossberg had found her calling as an environmental journalist; climate change, she later wrote on her Substack, “is the biggest story in the world, and it’s a story about everything.”

“Climate change and environmental degradation defy simple answers and solutions,” she wrote. “One of the reasons I started this newsletter is because I think that a lot of the existing journalism doesn’t offer the nuance that this moment in time and this particular issue require.”

Her work at the Times covered everything from sea level rise to the mass die-off of humpback whales. In one article, she reported that “ice from the Canadian Arctic has completely melted, leaving puddles of water in its place and scientists devastated” — the ice, of course, being core samples taken from glaciers lost in a laboratory freezer malfunction.

Despite the levity, Schlossberg maintained no illusions about the severity of the climate issue — and she strove to communicate that to her readers.

“Before I started writing about climate change, I didn’t like reading about it,” she wrote in a 2019 essay published in the Globe. “Stories about climate change filled me with dread and made me feel powerless. The problems seemed too big and too inevitable for me to do anything about, so it felt like it was probably best to look away.”

After leaving the Times, Schlossberg continued to write guest pieces for publications such as Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, as well as regular posts to her climate-themed Substack newsletter. The last regular newsletter was published just over a week before giving birth to her second child — the same day doctors first noticed the symptoms that led to her leukemia diagnosis.

“Things aren’t happening fast enough and big enough,” she concluded the post. But, she added, “I try to remain hopeful that there are enough people taking enough different approaches with enough care and due diligence to make things happen.”

Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.