It takes a certain daring—or just plain audacity—to propose a cure for global warming. But that’s what Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker advocate in their book Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat—and How to Counter It. They argue that the climate crisis can be solved in part by dotting the planet with an array of carbon-scrubbing towers. To come up with this bold plan, the two combined their considerable talents: Kunzig is a prizewinning science journalist, and Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia University, has spent more than five decades studying climate change. One of the first scientists to sound the alarm on global warming, Broecker is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.
Now senior environment editor at National Geographic, Kunzig has spent more than two and a half decades writing about science, archaeology, and the environment, honing his skills first at Scientific American and then at Discover magazine, where he spent fifteen years as a staff editor and then the next seven as a freelance contributing editor. He is the author of Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science, which won the 2001 Aventis Prize for Science Books, and has written about topics from the theory of relativity and the physics of black holes to the development of the fetal brain and the origins of agriculture, as well as the science of ice cream, airplanes, spiderwebs, ballet, Scotch tape, cheese, photographic film, perfume, and truffles.
The logic of the pair’s proposal in Fixing Climate is simple. Carbon dioxide is a waste product of human activity, industrial and domestic. In this way it is no different from human sewage, a pollutant that was once dumped out of windows and into waterways, contaminating drinking supplies and leading to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. City planners in nineteenth-century London, Paris, and Chicago built sewer systems to safely dispose of the waste, and in the same way, we can rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide contamination by sucking it out and socking it away in rocks. In Fixing Climate, Broecker and Kunzig describe the technology necessary to do this and explain why solar energy and wind power alone cannot solve the problem. In July, Kunzig sat down with journalist Josie Glausiusz and discussed the rigors of battling climate change and the joys of science journalism.
Josie Glausiusz: Many of us are increasingly filled with a sense that global warming is an intractable problem and that we should all just learn to live with the consequences. But in your book Fixing Climate, you and Wallace Broecker seem optimistic that the problem can be put right. Where do you get your optimism?
Robert Kunzig: I think people are born optimistic or not. Some days maybe I’m not so optimistic, but I have a gut feeling that we are a tremendously adaptable species and are not so stupid that we’re just going to let this all go to hell. When I read accounts by other writers insinuating that our civilization is doomed, I have a visceral disbelief.
A civilization confronted with climate change is not a unique problem, but a civilization that is confronted with global climate change and is attempting to do something about it is unique. It’s a problem that will take a long time to solve. But I am optimistic, because I think these problems look huger when you’re standing on the edge of the slope, but once you start to head down a path things start to happen fast. Look at the change in mood in this country created by one election. I’ve always felt that the right leadership in the United States at the top could make an enormous difference, and I think we’re getting a chance now to see if that’s true. I could be wrong—maybe I’m a sap. I just think that it is a solvable problem and we’re capable of solving it.
JG: Do you worry about global warming on a day-to-day basis?
RK: On a day-to-day basis I don’t. I’m not necessarily proud of that. Part of the problem is that we have trouble worrying about things that aren’t immediate. I have become intellectually convinced that it is a really serious problem. Spending several years immersed in the subject got me more concerned. Concerned is the word, not worried. I don’t lie awake at night thinking about climate change.
JG: You said that this is not the first time that civilization is being confronted by climate change. When else has that happened?
RK: There have been local civilizations confronted by long-term droughts that might have been responsible for their demise. In National Geographic our current cover story is on Angkor Wat, in present-day Cambodia, and how the reason for its preeminence, from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, was its tremendous water-engineering system. The Khmer created vast reservoirs and canals that helped them store the monsoon rains and then weather the dry season, but they were hit by two severe, prolonged droughts at the tail end of the Middle Ages, around about the time the same thing was happening to the Anasazi, in what is now the southwestern United States. But while they were confronted with a climate-driven change, it wasn’t the same as today, obviously. Theirs was a completely natural change, whereas our problem is much vaster—a whole civilization is based upon the fact that we’re changing climate, and now we’ve got to find a way to stop doing that.
JG: I have to admit that I’ve read and written so much about climate change that I begin to feel supersaturated and just zone out. And if I, the journalist, am zoning out, how can we continue to make this topic of urgent interest to the public?
RK: Boy, that’s the question I’m struggling with in my current job all the time, and I, too, zone out. I, too, get bored with the climate problem. I never knew I was going to be doing it all the time. As a science writer, I zealously avoided specialization back in the old days. I would write about archaeology and astronomy and physics and, on occasion, medicine. But then I got into this stuff, and it does seem like it’s about the most important scientific problem we face. How do you make it interesting?
The time for pieces of prose outlining how bad the problem is has passed. If you just write about how horrible this is and how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket and how ancient civilizations were wiped out by it, too, then people will start to turn off. But I think once a solution is going, people will follow. Industry types, for example, are getting on board now. If you ask them “Do you really think climate change is a big problem?,” they’ll say, “No, not really, but hey, that’s what’s happening now. That’s the only game in town, and I want my business to succeed.” We don’t need to make sure everybody gets religion on global warming; we just need to get everybody interested in solving the problem. You still have to keep saying, “Look what’s going to happen—the whole ecosystem is changing, the earth is melting.” But you’ve got to find different angles on it.
For instance, right now I’m working on an article for National Geographic about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). It’s a period fifty-five million years ago at the end of the Paleocene and the beginning of the Eocene Period that was marked by a sudden spike of global warming that was almost certainly caused by a large burp of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which may have come from big deposits of frozen methane under the sea. It’s the best past analogue to what we’re going through now. It’s not a perfect analogue, because the Paleocene was very warm already—this was the famous alligators-of-the-North-Pole time. It started out maybe ten degrees warmer than it is now, and then in the PETM it got another five to eight degrees Celsius warmer still—a real spike—and then it settled back down.
Paleontologists are really interested in this period, as it was tremendously fruitful in evolutionary terms. Several of the major mammal groups that we know today—cows, horses, and primates (our group)—originated at that event. I think this article is going to have a message: we are doing something to the earth that is comparable to what happened fifty-five million years ago. In fact, the estimated amount of carbon that was released then is roughly the quantity that would be released if we burned through all the fossil fuels on the planet. Who knows what life on earth is going to be like in fifty-five million years because of what we’re doing now? That’s daunting.
JG: What will happen if we don’t fix the problem of climate change?
RK: If we just burn through all the fossil fuels, then the question of what happens to human civilization does present itself. We’re not going to do that; I just don’t think we’re that stupid. But the results of supercomputer models show that if you put that much carbon into the atmosphere, possibly half the planet’s surface could become uninhabitable to humans, unless we’re all living in air-conditioning. It would be so hot that we would die of heat—we wouldn’t be able to get rid of our heat waste because it would be hotter and more humid outside our bodies than inside, so we wouldn’t be able to cool off, and we’d die.
I think now we’ve already set a process in motion that will stop us from going that far. That’s centuries down the road. But what’s going to happen in the next few decades? By the time you and I die there will be no ice in the Arctic, probably. We grew up with the North Pole as an image of a frozen waste, a thing to be explored. So the idea that there will be ships crisscrossing the ocean and drilling for oil there is pretty impressive. Animals and plants are going to keep migrating toward the poles. The ones that live on mountainsides are going to migrate up to the top and discover there’s no room and go extinct. Humans, I imagine, are going to adapt, although a bunch of them in low-lying places are going to have to move. I don’t see cataclysm happening, but maybe I lack the imagination to see it coming.
JG: In Fixing Climate, you propose that we stock the planet with tens of millions of carbon-scrubbing machines. Why?
RK: We already scrub sulfur dioxide out of flue gases in coal-fired power plants. One of the great triumphs of the environmental movement was the Clean Air Act of 1990, which made that happen. Broecker and I don’t propose, necessarily, that we build millions of these carbon scrubbers. We just threw out that number to show the scale of the problem. I do think it’s a good idea to develop the technology to take carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. There’s all sorts of talk about how we can switch to energy-generating technologies that don’t emit carbon dioxide, and ultimately that’s the solution to the problem—solar energy, wind energy. But in the meantime we have this problem of climate change happening faster and faster—faster than it seems we are going to be able to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Some respected scientists say we’ve already gone too far, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, being the most famous one. He thinks the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already been passed and that we need to get it back to 350 parts per million or maybe even less (we’re now at 385 parts per million). If he’s right, we may want to actually clean some of the mess. That’s one reason for these carbon scrubbers.
The other reason is just to help us get through this transition of limiting emissions. The tens of millions of scrubbers Broecker and I propose—that’s if you wanted to keep emitting as much carbon dioxide as we do now and then just suck it all back out of the atmosphere, which is not the most reasonable approach. To accomplish anything substantial would take a huge number, but it takes a huge number of anything to solve the climate problem. If you want to do it with windmills, it will take a really big number of windmills; if you want to do it with solar panels, you’re talking about covering large swaths of the Mojave Desert and rooftops everywhere. The rooftops, especially, strike me as a fine idea, but it’s very expensive right now.
JG: James Hansen was quoted in the New Yorker last week saying that the only way to halt carbon emissions is to cut off the coal source, either by leaving the coal in the ground or by burning it only in power plants that capture the carbon dioxide. What do you think of that?
RK: I think that’s a great idea. It will be wonderful if no new coal power plants that cannot capture the carbon dioxide are built. Whether it’s going to happen that way, I don’t know. China is the main place they’re being built now. In the United States there has been a definite slowdown in construction of new coal plants. But we’re going to be burning coal for some time. We’re not going to stop overnight, or even in decades. No amount of people chaining themselves to fences outside of carbon coal plants is going to stop that. We need coal too much. We need the energy—we’re all hooked on it; it’s in everything.
JG: You argue that other sources of energy, such as wind power, are insufficient to solve the problem of global warming. Why?
RK: Wind power is inherently limited in terms of how much energy it can get, and people have mixed feelings about windmills. I was just on the coast of Normandy for a few days vacationing with my family and there were windmills all over the place. They’re kind of eerie-looking things. Some people think they’re ugly; I thought they were strangely beautiful. We arrived really late, and as we were driving in, approaching the coast, we saw these strange lights in the sky, a series of them. I thought they were cell phone towers, and my wife, Karen, thought they looked like lighthouses. As we got closer we saw that they were wind turbines, with lights to keep small planes from flying into them. They were blinking, but the reason they looked so strange was that the blinking resembled little flashes of lightning, because the light was illuminating the turbines as they spun. These linear flashes in the night were not like any light I had ever seen.
But there has been quite a bit of contention about these turbines. I also read about a big plan in the Lake District, in England. There’s this beautiful ridgeline—are you going to put ten wind turbines on it? That will destroy it forever.
JG: How are you going to convince governments, or the not-in-my-backyard neighbors, that these carbon-sequestering devices should be built all over the place?
RK: One of the great things about these carbon scrubbers is that they can be put anywhere. Carbon dioxide comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes, and a lot more of it comes out in the United States than it does in, say, central Africa, but it mixes through the atmosphere into a homogeneous level very rapidly. So the carbon dioxide concentration is pretty close to the same everywhere on the planet. What that means is, if you take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere anywhere, everybody benefits the same amount. So you don’t have to put the scrubber next to the smokestack, and you don’t have to put it on the beautiful windswept ridgeline. You can put it anywhere. The rational place to put it would be above whatever place you’ve decided to store the carbon dioxide underground.
The other big idea that people have been talking about, for much longer, is capturing carbon from the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant and then sequestering it underground. The drawback to that scheme is that coal-fired power plants are not necessarily sited above the best places to dispose of carbon dioxide. They’re sited near the demand for electricity, near cities, so you’ll have to build a big network of pipelines for the CO2 to be taken to good dump sites. The air scrubbers, on the other hand, would use the atmosphere as a conduit. You can take the CO2 out wherever you want to dump it.
JG: Where is the best place to dump it?
RK: Probably the best place of all would be somewhere like Oman, which has big formations of volcanic rock. Although it is not proven, there is good reason to believe that if you pump CO2 into basalt formations or other igneous rock, which contains either calcium silicates or magnesium silicates, you’ll get a chemical reaction that converts the CO2 to an inert carbonate that just sits there. If you can get that reaction to happen, that’s how the earth can clean up CO2.
The earth has had periods when there has been more CO2 and less. Over time CO2 gets taken out of the atmosphere by being dissolved in raindrops. These slightly acidic raindrops eat at igneous rocks and allow this reaction to take place. It’s called geochemical weathering, and it’s a natural process; this would just make it happen faster.
JG: Could you explain briefly what these carbon scrubbers would consist of?
RK: There are several approaches. The one we focus on in the book was developed by a guy named Klaus Lackner, who was a professor at Columbia University. He and his partners have found a kind of plastic that reacts spontaneously with CO2 in the ambient air. It’s the kind of plastic found in water softeners, nothing terribly novel. You could have sheets of this plastic that you’ve impregnated with a chemical like sodium hydroxide, which is what actually grabs the CO2 and reacts with it. The great thing about this plastic is that if you simply expose it to water vapor, the CO2 leaves the plastic and goes into the water.
JG: In reading about the ideas of Broecker and Lackner, I became increasingly convinced that there’s a strong overlap between their vision and a certain kind of madness or a mad abandon of caution. Do you think you have to be a little bit mad to think we can fix this problem?
RK: Neither of those guys is the sort of person you would think of as mad or even incautious. Wally has always been known for his bold ideas, but he’s really a rationalist. The carbon-scrubber idea is based on a very conservative calculation. Carbon dioxide keeps rising. None of the solutions we’ve been talking about has so far happened, for whatever reason. Yes, it’s all the government’s fault—they haven’t passed the laws they should have. But at the same time, the trend in science is showing that this climate problem is far more severe than we thought when we first started talking about it. We’ve got to find some way to solve it. Is it mad to think that we can solve it at all? No, I don’t
think so.
At the beginning of Fixing Climate, we compared this to solving a sewage problem. Some of my primary sources come from the nineteenth century, back when most cities didn’t have sewage systems, and some of the language is very similar. There was a debate going on then—do we really need a sewage system? Well, cities are getting too crowded, and we need something more hygienic, people said. That’s quite a huge job, building a sewage system to transport all the bodily waste of millions of people. But over the next century or so, we solved most of that problem, although admittedly there is still untreated sewage going into rivers in some places. But if someone had said in 1850, or even in 1880, “We need right now to build a system for handling sewage for three hundred million Americans,” people would have said it was impossible. Yet once an idea becomes accepted, it happens faster than you think. It’s going to be that way with climate. We need to get over the psychological hurdle that has allowed us to pretend we don’t have to do anything about it. Once we get over that, things will start happening fast. That’s not madness; it’s optimism.
JG: What it was like to write a book together with Wallace Broecker?
RK: Wally is a brilliant, warm seventy-seven-year-old kid. He’s also a very distinguished climate scientist. He’s won every award that is possible for an earth scientist to win, and is continuing to rack them up. (He just got an honorary degree at Cambridge, along with Prince Charles.) So I decided it really was worthwhile for his ideas to come out, and he didn’t want to write the book—he doesn’t consider himself a popular-science writer. He came to me looking for someone to help. In terms of the writing, he was a dream. I think he may have been a little surprised at first at how it was turning out, but he decided right away that he loved it. He would make a dozen minor wording changes per chapter, and that was it. There was never a single argument of any kind. For all that, it’s not like I just went ahead and did what I wanted. I talked to him for days and I read his papers and his PhD thesis, from 1957, and I tried to imbibe his ideas.
JG: Back in 1957, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess first suggested that man-made gas emissions could create a greenhouse effect. And Charles David Keeling measured a nearly 20 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 between 1958 and 2004. Given the now-abundant evidence for global warming, why do you think skeptics keep questioning?
RK: Skepticism comes in various stages. The stages are, one, it’s not happening, two, it’s happening but it doesn’t matter, and, three, it matters but there’s nothing we can do about it, or it matters but the cure would be worse than the disease because anything we do about it would cost so much. I think we’re mostly at this last stage of skepticism now, but there are certainly still people who say it is not happening. They are unfamiliar either with the science or with the great mass of evidence that shows it’s happening. “Environmentalists are pains in the ass,” the skeptics say. “They’re moralistic, smug, self-righteous bastards.” Sometimes people have a visceral response to the way the message is presented—to the notion that they’re sinners. The presentation clouds their reasoning. That’s one reason it’s useful to avoid too moralistic a tone. In Fixing Climate we went out of our way to say that fossil fuels are tremendously useful.
Climate change is also just a hard thing for people to recognize. We’re only now beginning to see the effects. The ice caps are melting, but back in the seventies and eighties they weren’t, really. Even in the nineties. People tend to deny that which they can’t see, that which isn’t really affecting their lives. They get very hung up on the notion that the planet has naturally warmed before. Yes, the earth’s climate varies naturally a great deal. But people then commit the error of assuming that because the earth’s climate varies naturally, this must mean the variation is benign. Well, no, it’s not benign. The ice age wasn’t benign, and even though the medieval warm period was benign in places like Britain or France, creating bumper crops and greater wealth, it wasn’t benign in the southwestern United States, where it led to prolonged drought. It’s possible we could change the climate and it wouldn’t be bad—for everyone, anyway. There might be some winners. Canadians might be happier. But it seems like there will be more losers than winners.
JG: As I read Fixing Climate, it occurred to me that you were telling the history of climate change through its characters: Milutin Milanković, who was “a closeted scholar who thought he could fathom the universe without leaving his dusty, book-strewn office”; or Svante Arrhenius, whose “ravishing young wife, Sofia, deserted him, after a year of marriage, and started writing him letters about how blissfully happy she was without him.” Did you seek to liven up the story of climate change by talking about the idiosyncrasies of its discoverers?
RK: I just write. I just keep myself amused. I have the most fun in a library, finding little historical anecdotes like that. It’s not with any great sense of strategy, like how can I make this bitter pill of climate science pass. I find these neat stories, and so I want to find a way to work them in. I thought it was admirable, and completely unlike myself, for Arrhenius to be able to make his calculations and to do this hard labor—the first global warming calculations—at a time that must have been one of complete emotional turmoil. Milanković, too. He did some of his groundbreaking calculations in jail, when the Austrians had imprisoned him, right at the outbreak of the First World War. I’m fascinated by people who have that ability.
JG: Why is it important for us to know and understand the history of climate change and those who studied and discovered it?
RK: I don’t write it because it’s important. I write because I get interested. Having that impulse is necessary for being a good science writer. You can just throw off some boilerplate about Milanković, because he has been written about many times, or you can try to satisfy yourself and rationally understand. I may have a tendency to tell too much sometimes, especially in physics articles. It’s such hard work to understand that when you do, you think, I’ve been struggling for days or weeks to understand what these guys are talking about. And now I must find just the way to say it that will make these previously elusive concepts plain to every man or woman of goodwill and intelligence. Still, when I’m writing I’m not consciously thinking of the reader. I’m definitely thinking of being clear, but there’s really a big component of writing for oneself.
JG: Do you enjoy writing?
RK: I enjoy certain aspects of writing. I find it mostly excruciating, and my great problem is that my mind constantly searches for anything at all else to do instead of trying to think of the next sentence. What I enjoy is the beginning of a project, before you really get bogged down in making all the sentences work. I enjoy the process of seeing connections in the piece and putting little connecting beams in. I am going to introduce this guy into the story here, and then later on when I come back to him, that’s going to sound really cool. I delude myself at certain moments that the piece is going to be more beautiful than it really ends up being, that it will be the best thing I ever write—deep and effortless and yet not ostentatious, brimming with quiet, powerful beauty. Then you get down to writing and it turns out to be much harder.
JG: You mentioned that you enjoy research at the beginning of a project.
RK: Yes, I like meeting the scientists and talking to them. I like the intellectual process. I’m really focused on the ideas. I’m not so good at perceiving the world around me. I’m not bad at sounds, but I have to force myself to notice what a place looks like. I have to start describing it in my head or take notes or else I won’t even notice it in the first place. Later on if I try to call up the scene from memory, I won’t be able to do it. For instance, if I don’t say right now that you’re wearing a color that is between blue and purple, and your shirt has little buckles on it, and you’re wearing black shoes, lace-up, with pale slate pants, and you’ve got a silver watch and stylish glasses—if I didn’t just do that, after you had gone and someone said, “So, you met Josie Glausiusz, what was she like, what was she wearing?,” I would say, “I didn’t notice. I sat looking at her for two hours—it went through my eyes and it hit my brain, but it didn’t register.” I do notice some salient auditory details of landscape or nature. That’s how my memory works; it’s very
word- and sound-oriented.
JG: How do you go about breaking down complex scientific ideas for the lay reader?
RK: I immerse myself in the material. I call people up and ask them a lot of questions and get them to explain the stuff until I feel like I really understand it. Then the trick is to weave the exposition into the narrative, and to find some narrative that feels organic to the material—that grows out of the ideas and not necessarily out of the idiosyncrasies of the people you happen to be with. There is a whole different school of science journalism that doesn’t muck around with all this narrative stuff which has become fashionable in journalism circles in the past few decades. Old-fashioned science journalism is really just explaining stuff: “The sun is a big ball of gas, and inside, under the tremendous pressure of all the overlying gas, protons and neutrons fuse to form blah, blah, blah,” instead of saying, “In such and such a year, when so-and-so was a young man, he first thought . . .”—which is what I do.
JG: That’s a typical New Yorker style. So many stories start with, “On a cloudy Thursday in March of 2004 . . .”
RK: I’ve just been wrestling with that in this PETM article. On the last Fourth of July, I was out in Wyoming, in the Bighorn Basin, where a lot of the fossils from the PETM are found, and I went to a picnic at a farm with all of the paleontologists. Outside this old farmhouse, entirely surrounded by cottonwood trees, was an old forties-era trailer. That trailer had belonged to one of the first paleontologists to come into the Bighorn Basin, a guy named Glenn Jepsen, who arrived with a group in 1929, in a couple of Model A’s, and became friends with these farmers. He ended up camping there and bringing his trailer. Now his trailer has been there for fifty years and he is long since dead and you couldn’t move the trailer anymore because trees have grown up around it. But if you open the door and go in, as I did—with paleontologists who had been his graduate students—you can find his raccoon coat hanging in the closet.
I started to write the story with that scene, which I was completely taken with. But I couldn’t get it to work, so I read it to Karen, who said, “Why did you start there?” We’d both been with a paleontologist out in the dig, searching for plant fossils, and had gotten a fifty-five-million-year-old leaf. That was much more germane to the subject. I decided my first beginning was roundabout, and that the elegiac mood I was establishing by evoking this trailer surrounded by cottonwoods wasn’t really right for the rest of the story. So I went with this second lede, about the leaf fossil, and then got stuck on that.
Finally, I left for vacation. I’d decided beforehand not to take my computer with me, to take just my pad of paper and my fountain pen, because sometimes that works for me. But I forgot the draft for my lede. I even forgot to print out all the work I had been doing for weeks on this article. So I didn’t have anything. I wrote a completely different lede, which was much more straightforward, something like, “The earth has been through before what it is going through now.” That’s what the story is about and now I’m convinced that this was the best way to go. I think I can come back to the trailer at the end. I am so wedded to that image of the trailer surrounded by cottonwoods, but maybe I have to let go of it. Sometimes I end up shifting everything around, thinking I have to get the prose to lead to a gorgeous passage. Then it’s like everything is teetering, perched on some passage I don’t want to part with, and I realize I should just lop it off so that everything will flow more naturally. We’ll see how it turns out this time.
JG: You’ve just given people a very keen insight on what it’s like to write a story. Can you describe your experience as a freelance science journalist, before you came to National Geographic?
RK: You have to be very productive as a freelance; you have to have lots of ideas, not get too wedded to one thing. You have to figure out what works and cultivate relations, and I don’t think I ever quite figured it out. I had been on staff with Discover magazine for fifteen years, so when I started as a freelance I had a very stable relationship with the magazine and I was doing almost all my work for them. The problem of spending your life pitching stories, many of which get rejected, I didn’t have. Because I had a long relationship with Discover, the magazine would tolerate my idiosyncrasies and be patient when I was late. I’m a slow writer, and I am dependent on people deciding that in the end my work is worth it. I loved being master of what I occupied my mind with, but I’ve always been pretty open. I loved it when editors would call me up and ask if I wanted to write about a subject that had never occurred to me. I was happy to go off and explore something that somebody else thought was a good idea for a story. I’m not that great at coming up with huge quantities of ideas for stories. Unfortunately this is part of my job now at National Geographic.
JG: What is your goal as the environment editor there?
RK: At National Geographic the goal is to inspire people to care about the planet. That’s the official mission, as I learned when I watched the orientation video from the human resources department on my first day. If you’re going to have a mission, that’s a pretty good one. But I go about my part in a pretty selfish way. I’m trying to instruct myself and make pieces of prose that I think are beautiful and that I hope other people will be interested in and nourished by as well.
JG: How has science journalism changed in the last fifteen or so years?
RK: Some science magazines have gone out of business and others are struggling. Discover, where we both used to work, has a much smaller staff. Scientific American has been under similar stress. So the business is hurting. I guess that’s because people are reading less and less long-form journalism, although I don’t have any statistics on that. I’m just parroting the wisdom one reads in the media pages—that all of the younger generation is getting its information off the Internet. At the same time, my impression is that there’s been a tremendous boom in the number of science journalists over the past couple of decades.
JG: I keep reading these depressing predictions that print journalism is heading toward its demise. Do you really think that print journalism, or indeed professional journalism itself, is nosediving toward its death in this age of obsessive blogging and tweeting?
RK: No, I don’t. Maybe this is just congenital optimism. People still seem to be buying and reading challenging things. The bookstores are still full of demanding books. A tremendous number of magazines are still being bought and read. I think we’re at a transitional time that no one really understands. No one’s figured out how to make the economics of journalism work. Newspapers made a fatal error, apparently, in deciding early on in the Internet age to give away their work on the Internet. It’s created an astonishing and unfounded expectation that information which takes a lot of sweat to compile and put in a palatable form should be given away for free. Where does someone get that notion? You don’t give away bread for free, why should you give away a long article on a complex scientific subject for free? It’s just insane, but I think people understand that now.
I imagine that print as ink on paper will die at some point. It seems like electronic books are really catching on this time. Maybe that’s the future for us, but that’s okay. If the next generation doesn’t have our same instinctive feel for the pleasure of turning pages of paper, maybe they will feel quite sentimental about their Kindles. And if the Kindle or its successor becomes a device that can reproduce National Geographic–quality pictures on e-ink, then nothing crucial will have been lost that anyone will miss except people who are already dead. The people who really love paper, like you and me, will die, and no one will be unhappy. It’s not as though humans will have gotten stupider or some great aesthetic decline will have occurred. People will still be reading demanding prose on a different support.
Photo: Karen Fitzpatrick
