Investigative journalism 📝 and climate migration, with Sarah Stillman

Today's guest, Sarah Stillman, is a Pulitzer and MacArthur genius award-winning journalist. She founded and leads the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, and she's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for about a decade. Sarah’s writing typically focuses on our immigration and justice systems, but increasingly (and in some part due to my nudges), she's also writing about climate change.

Sarah's first piece about climate was an essay, “Like the Monarch,” she wrote for my first book, All We Can Save, an anthology I co-edited with the wonderful Dr. Katherine Wilkinson. And, fun fact, Sarah is also a very dear friend. During the pandemic we would have long telephone conversations while we were going on walks in the woods on opposite coasts. We’d talk about work and writing and climate change, and also dating and family and heartache — the whole spectrum of comedy of errors that is life. 🫠

I am so excited to let you in to one of our meandering, deep dive conversations. Welcome to the inner circle, with the one and only Sarah Stillman.

Sarah's Calls to Action:

* Interview the people you love about what they love about nature that they want to defend

* Find something to investigate. Document the extreme weather events that are happening to you and the causes — and cite that climate attribution science

* Support local and national public media. Visit your local public library.

Mentioned in the episode:

* Sarah's articles: The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters; When Climate Change and Xenophobia Collide; 'The Missing White Girl Syndrome': Disappeared Women and Media Activism.

* Her full New Yorker archive and website

* International Refugee Assistance Project

* Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale

* ProPublica’s investigative series on Sacrifice Zones: Mapping Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution

CREDITS: This podcast was made possible in part with the support of Future Being, a grantmaking and special projects studio which supports the healing of our planet and the safeguarding of biological and cultural diversity. It’s produced and edited by Matthew Nelson/Stramash Media and me, with help from Jenisha Shrestha.