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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: THE WORLD IS OURS TO CHERISH
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WEBSITE: https://www.maryannaiseheglar.com
CITY: New Orleans
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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PERSONAL EDUCATION:
Graduated from Oberlin College, 2006.
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CAREER
Climate justice advocate and writer. Hot Take podcast and newsletter, cocreator; Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY, writer in residence, 2020. Has also lectured at Columbia University and Tulane University .
AWARDS:SEAL Environmental Journalism award, 2020.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and essays to periodicals, including Boston Globe, New York, Vox, Rolling Stone, and the Nation; contributor to short story and essay collections.
SIDELIGHTS
Mary Annaïse Heglar is a climate justice advocate and writer. She has contributed articles and essays to a range of periodicals, including Boston Globe, New York, Vox, Rolling Stone, and the Nation, as well as stories to other journals. She was the cocreator of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter with Amy Westervelt. Heglar served as the Columbia University Earth Institute’s first writer in residence in 2020, the same year that she was awarded the SEAL Environmental Journalism award.
In an interview in the Oberlin Review, Heglar discussed how she came to write regularly about climate change. She recalled: “I’ve always worked in nonprofit communications, and that led me through the arts and higher education, and eventually I was doing work with a social science research foundation. I decided I wanted to work on something that was more immediate, and I wanted to be part of telling the most important story. At the time, I decided that [story] was climate. So that was how I came to climate communications in particular.” In her line of work, Heglar noted that she frequently reads reports of just how daunting the task of tackling climate-related problems really are and how “terrifying” it can be. In the same interview, Heglar shared: “I ultimately came to a place where I was like, ‘Well, I need a place to process my feelings about this stuff.’ That was what drew me back to writing because it’s the best way I know how to process anything.”
The World Is Ours to Cherish is Heglar’s way of reassuring young readers that, even though there are a lot of bad things in the world, there is still lots of magic and good things as well. She notes that things like trees, cool breezes on hot days, fireflies at night, and the songs of birds in the morning are proof of that. The picture book stresses the importance of working together to address the world’s climate crisis through both urgency and compassion.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor opined that “the themes of the magic of hope and beauty will tug at readers’ heartstrings.” The same reviewer called The World Is Ours to Cherish “an honest and hopeful call for climate caretaking.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that “it’s a gentle introduction to climate advocacy that emphasizes learning and care.” Writing in the Youth Services Book Review blog, Rose Metayer found it to be “a beautiful call to action to the children of this generation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2023, review of The World Is Ours to Cherish.
Publishers Weekly, December 7, 2023, review of The World Is Ours to Cherish.
ONLINE
Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/ (December 15, 2022), author interview.
Mary Annaïse Heglar website, https://www.maryannaiseheglar.com (June 1, 2024).
Natural Resources Defense Council website, https://www.nrdc.org/ (June 1, 2024), Karen L. Smith-Janssen, “A Translator for the Climate Crisis, Grief Included.”
Oberlin Review, https://oberlinreview.org/ (April 22, 2020), Nathan Carpenter, author interview.
Vanderbilt University website, https://news.vanderbilt.edu/ (February 15, 2024), “Climate Storytelling at Vanderbilt.”
Youth Services Book Review, https://ysbookreviews.wordpress.com/ (February 25, 2024), Rose Metayer, review of The World Is Ours to Cherish.
Mary Annaïse Heglar is known for her essays that dissect and interrogate the climate crisis, drawing heavily on her personal experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the South. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. Her work has also been featured in collections like All We Can Save, The World As We Knew It, The Black Agenda, Letters to the Earth, and Not Too Late. With investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, she is also the co-creator of the now-retired Hot Take podcast and newsletter. In 2020, she was selected as the inaugural writer in residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and has gone on to teach at Columbia University in New York and Tulane University in New Orleans. In 2020, she received a SEAL Environmental Journalism award. She is based in New Orleans, but her heart is in Mississippi and her soul is in Birmingham.
Mary has been obsessed with the art of storytelling as long as she can remember. She began writing about the climate crisis in 2018 as a way to process her own climate grief. From there, she expanded into other modes of storytelling, including podcasting, teaching, and public speaking.
Mary Annaïse Heglar is known for her essays that dissect and interrogate the climate crisis, drawing heavily on her personal experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the South. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. Her work has also been featured in collections like All We Can Save, The World As We Knew It, The Black Agenda, Letters to the Earth, and Not Too Late. With investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, she is also the co-creator of the now-retired Hot Take podcast and newsletter. In 2020, she was selected as the inaugural writer in residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and has gone on to teach at Columbia University in New York and Tulane University in New Orleans. In 2020, she received a SEAL Environmental Journalism award. She is based in New Orleans, but her heart is in Mississippi and her soul is in Birmingham.
Mary has been obsessed with the art of storytelling as long as she can remember. She began writing about the climate crisis in 2018 as a way to process her own climate grief. From there, she expanded into other modes of storytelling, including podcasting, teaching, and public speaking.
Q&A: Mary Annaïse Heglar, OC ’06, Climate Writer
Nathan Carpenter, Editor-in-Chief|April 22, 2020
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Photo courtesy of Mary Annaïse Heglar
Mary Annaïse Heglar.
Mary Annaïse Heglar, OC ’06, is a writer who focuses primarily on personal essays about the intersections of climate and justice. She also serves as director of publications for the National Resources Defense Council, and is currently a writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where she is working on both short- and long-form pieces about climate change and its human impacts. Recently, Heglar has published on the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways that grief over its spread mirrors her own journey through climate grief. Heglar claims the Gulf Coast as home and has written extensively about climate within that geographic context, including her reflections on Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall right before her senior year at Oberlin. Heglar is a speaker and panelist in several virtual events taking place this week as part of Oberlin’s Earth Day 50 celebration.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was hoping you could start by talking about what initially drew you to write about climate change and climate justice.
I’ve always worked in nonprofit communications, and that led me through the arts and higher education, and eventually I was doing work with a social science research foundation. I decided I wanted to work on something that was more immediate, and I wanted to be part of telling the most important story. At the time, I decided that [story] was climate. So that was how I came to climate communications in particular. So my job at NRDC, I’m now the publications director, but I started as a policy publications editor. That means that you’re working with these really wonky, really dense and technical reports about environmental damage, mostly, and how to solve it. And it’s terrifying. It was really, really terrifying. I ultimately came to a place where I was like, “Well, I need a place to process my feelings about this stuff.” That was what drew me back to writing because it’s the best way I know how to process anything.
Were you thinking about this stuff while you were at Oberlin or does your current work in any way have roots in what you were doing while you were a student here?
It definitely related to a lot of stuff I did at Oberlin, which I didn’t recognize until much later. I don’t know if y’all still do The Word ’n’ The Beat festival. Does that still happen?
I don’t think so. Maybe it has a different name.
Maybe. It was still active up until like two years ago or something, with [Professor of Theater and Africana Studies] Caroline Jackson-Smith. I bring that up because, immediately when I got back to Oberlin after [Hurricane] Katrina — that was right before my senior year — I wrote a poem about Katrina, and Katrina as Emmett Till. And that was how The Word ’n’ The Beat started. At the time I wasn’t thinking of Katrina as climate , but I’ve got a whole-ass essay out here about Katrina now, so I guess so. So I’ve been writing about Katrina ever since Katrina happened. … Also, when I graduated, I thought I was going to be a journalist and I did a summer at Oberlin with [John C. Reid Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and English] Jan Cooper. Is she still there?
Yeah, Jan’s still here.
Jan kept me on as her student assistant over the summer and she was really interested in how environmental journalism was shaping up. She had me do all this research on it, so that she could use it to teach her class next semester. So yeah, [I] didn’t know that that was going to become super pertinent.
What do you think makes an essay about climate change particularly compelling?
To me, what’s compelling is the truth, and the whole truth. I think we’ve been not so good at telling it. I say that in terms of naming the villain; we’ve really been bad at connecting the dots to the fossil fuel industry. We sort of, as a community, have made it seem like climate change is just this thing that happens, and that to fight climate change you gotta go fight the air. No, we should fight the fossil fuel industry, and then it’s tactile, something you can do. So I’m drawn to communications that name the villain. I’m drawn to communications that allow space for emotional messiness, and that have a good bedside manner. I do think the reports that I was editing at NRDC, they’re important, and they should be technical and they should be wonky, but that’s when an expert is talking to a decision maker. That makes sense. But when we’re talking person to person, that sort of cold, clinical language doesn’t work. You try to fact people to death and that doesn’t work either. And actually, we’ve talked about climate change like it’s just this really, really complicated thing. It’s not. It’s really simple. It’s an injustice: bad guys versus everybody else. It’s like a classic story.
Similarly, what have you found — maybe in your own writing or reading other people’s work — are the biggest challenges in writing about climate?
The biggest challenges are gatekeepers. At these big publications, there [are] a lot of editors who are really stuck in their ways and kind of feel like, “We know how to do this.” What I think is, “You don’t; if you did, it would’ve been done already.” … So I think that’s a big barrier. And I think, up until recently, there were a lot more and I think 2019 saw a lot of really important conversations in climate really get litigated. For example, individual versus collective action. For a long time, [climate action was seen] as the one thing you can do, which is like recycle your plastic bags or something. And that got interrogated last year and I think that narrative is out. There was also the narrative that people of color don’t care about climate change; that myth got busted. So if you had asked me a year ago, I would’ve been able to name a lot more problems, but I feel like now, a lot of those barriers have come down.
To shift gears a little bit: You cite James Baldwin as your personal hero, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why.
I love James Baldwin for so many reasons. One, he was a fantastic writer. He had a really strong gift for naming beyond names, and describing things that you had felt before but never really had the language to articulate. That is basically giving you the weapons, the tools to dismantle your oppression — when you can finally articulate it, then you can change it. I think that’s a quote of [his], it’s like, “You write in order to change the world.” If you alter the way people see reality, then you can change it. I thought he just was amazing at that. Another reason I admire him so much is because he really loved children and youth and he took them very seriously. … There are lots of video interviews that he does, [and] whenever he’s talking to a teenager or a young person, he’s always very interested in what they have to say, and takes them seriously. … Stokely Carmichael, who was a teenager when James Baldwin was in his thirties or something, they had a great mentorship relationship because James Baldwin always showed up for them, took them under his wing.
Obviously, during the time in which James Baldwin was writing, people weren’t necessarily talking about climate change in the terms that we do today.
No, not at all. I don’t think it had been discovered.
I’m wondering if there are still lessons that younger writers can take from how James Baldwin approached his own writing that you think are applicable to writing about climate and the environment, even though that wasn’t what he directly focused on.
Well, yeah. I take a lot of my cues for writing about climate from him. I try to find something that I don’t think has been articulated well and really grapple with it, so not being afraid of messy ideas. The point of writing, I think, is to come to a conclusion. I think a lot of people feel like you have to know where you’re going before you start, and you don’t. That’s not the point of writing a personal essay, at least — it might be the point of writing a term paper. He was never afraid of foggy ideas, or at least didn’t seem that way. And I think that the climate crisis is the outgrowth of not really healing the wounds of Jim Crow or slavery or etc., and that way his writing [makes] a very seamless connection.
If you were to be speaking to a room of students who are interested in writing about climate and the environment after they graduate, what’s some advice or words of wisdom that you would give them?
Maybe don’t expect it to be a full-time-paying gig at first. Not if you want to be good. Because if you make it your source of income, you’re kind of beholden to editors. You might wind up having to write something that you don’t fully believe in, and if you don’t believe in it, I don’t think you should write it.
Q&A: Mary Annaïse Heglar talks Hot Take podcast and how climate journalism can shape up in 2023
DECEMBER 15, 2022
By COVERING CLIMATE NOW
Photo courtesy of subject
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EACH MONTH, Covering Climate Now speaks with different journalists about their experiences on the climate beat and their ideas for pushing our craft forward. This week, we spoke with Mary Annaïse Heglar, who cohosts the climate podcast Hot Take with Amy Westervelt. Heglar’s writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Wired, the Boston Globe, and more. After a three-year run, Hot Take will air its final episodes at the end of 2022. Heglar shared reflections from her work on the podcast, her critiques of how the media approaches climate change, and what journalists can do better in the coming year. The conversation, between Heglar and CCNow deputy director Andrew McCormick, has been edited for length and clarity. Follow Heglar on Twitter.
There’s been a lot of climate news this year, including the passage of significant climate legislation in Washington. Tell us about where you see the climate story at the end of 2022.
I feel like we’ve gone backwards. It might be true that we’ve come closer to climate action, but in a lot of ways I think we’ve gotten further away from climate justice.
We can say the Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest climate deal ever, and that’s true, but I see that as an indictment of all the climate legislation that’s come before. When I see so many environmental justice and frontline groups in sorrow over this legislation, when I see the Gulf Coast seemingly being sold off for parts, that’s hard for me to celebrate.
In 2019 and 2020, it seemed like we were in these glory days when a Green New Deal felt possible—it’s still the only political framework that comes close to answering the scientific demands of climate change—and when the climate movement wanted not only to hire Black people but to listen to them. Now, though, it seems that a lot of that listening was just performative. It feels like the same old experts have been ushered back to the front of the line and everyone else has been either silenced or sold out. I hate that for us. So, all the tone policing in climate spaces around the IRA, including by some pundits and opinion writers—the idea that we have to call the bill a win and shouldn’t dunk on it—was really disappointing.
Where does journalism fit in here as a corrective?
I mean, it’s going to sound overly simplistic, but tell the truth. Broaden your scope on the issues you consider when you form your assessment of “the truth.” Way too often, I think journalists just go along with conventional wisdom. But the only thing conventional wisdom does is reinforce the status quo.
Tell us about how Hot Take got started. What did you and Amy want to bring to the climate conversation?
Well, Amy and I first met on Twitter. I slid into her DMs, because I was such a big fan of her podcast Drilled. We met in person soon after and pretty quickly started talking about doing a podcast together. We considered different approaches and eventually landed on the subject that she and I already spent all our time talking and texting about: media criticism.
This was in 2019, when journalism was really just starting to take climate change seriously. Before then, if you saw a climate story, well, bully for you, because there weren’t a lot of them. That’s not to say there weren’t intrepid climate journalists out there, but for a long time the industry as a whole, the machinery of it—the editors, the executives—just didn’t seem interested in climate. What stories there were often focused in a very limited way on consumer actions—reduce, reuse, and recycle, stuff like that—or else they were packed full of scientific jargon that was barely translatable into English. Occasionally, you’d see a story that broke from this mold, but those were almost always written by white men.
So, suddenly, toward the end of 2019, there’s this explosion of more nuanced climate coverage. That was great, but it also meant some coverage that was not so great—I’m thinking in particular about articles that took this attitude of “It’s all over, we should give up.” Climate Twitter, meanwhile, was becoming this place where everyone was railing on stories like this; but that wasn’t necessarily helpful either, because Twitter is absolutely where nuance goes to die. So Amy and I thought, “Hey, we should have these media-focused conversations in one of the few places left where you can have messy conversations in public: a podcast.”
As you say, a lot of climate coverage pre-2019 was dense and probably impenetrable for audiences who weren’t already climate-smart. How did you think about making the show accessible to the uninitiated and climate-curious?
From the jump, we wanted the show to be fun. As a writer, I’m so often in this deeply emotional place where I’m thinking about the intersections of climate change and subjects like race and justice. That’s a big part of who I am, but I’m also a goofball. So when we were getting started, I thought: If I’m going to be having these hour-plus-long conversations, I need to be able to crack a joke.
Another thing that we did very deliberately is keep in the episodes the times when Amy or I corrected each other, or when a guest corrected us. We wanted to show people that you don’t need to be a perfect expert on all of these climate-related subjects. No one is a perfect expert on all of those things. Yet this idea that you should be an expert to weigh in on climate change has been a real barrier to people getting interested and involved. In fact, the right wing and the fossil fuel industry have weaponized that idea, calling out climate activists whenever they get something wrong. They act like, “Oh, if you don’t know this or that one thing, then you should shut up forever.” Or, “If you have any personal contradictions—say, you care about the climate but you also eat meat—then you should shut up, too.”
Since starting Hot Take, what have been some of your and Amy’s key criticisms of journalists’ climate coverage?
This might be criticism of the state of journalism overall, but one thing we kept noticing was that big outlets would make these huge announcements about boosting their climate coverage. And then they’d go silent. You wouldn’t hear another word. They’d launch a big new vertical on their website, for example, but then you go to it and it’s just articles by one person. Worse, they’d publish other climate-related stories elsewhere on their site that would undermine stories in the climate vertical. So the reality of these flashy climate commitments, unfortunately, often isn’t much different than what outlets were doing before. They’re out there going on about “Hey, we’re really gonna cover climate change now!” And then it’s like, “Oops, guess not.” I don’t understand this. Do they think nobody’s going to notice?
Another criticism that’s remained constant for us is that more accountability work needs to be done about the fossil fuel industry. There’s this assumption still that climate change is difficult to cover because it’s a slow-moving story—how do you cover melting permafrost?—but that doesn’t hold up anymore. Climate disasters are coming fast, and if journalists would do more to connect cause with effect, they’d find there’s always a story to tell about fossil fuels. Every time the industry builds a new oil rig, that’s a climate story. Every time a new pipeline opens up, that’s a climate story. Profit margins, hiring decisions, every time a fossil fuel worker dies on the job—those are all climate stories. But they’re not treated like it.
Could you recommend a couple of Hot Take episodes that might surprise listeners or help them think differently about the climate emergency?
Some of my favorite episodes were about prison abolition. We did two episodes—one with Drew Costley, an environmental reporter for the Associated Press, and one with Alleen Brown, an investigative reporter—exploring how intricately woven together the mass-incarceration crisis is with climate change. I didn’t realize that many prisons are built very shoddily, making them more susceptible to flooding and other natural disasters. A lot of prisons don’t have air-conditioning, too, so as heat waves get worse and more common, more and more prisoners are dealing with heat illness. Many prisoners are also on antidepressants or other mental health medications, which in extreme heat can have terrible side effects. Prisons also contribute to climate change, because they’re built from concrete, which is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. And a lot of prisoners work in factories, meaning that somehow, through no fault of their own, a prisoner can have a higher carbon footprint than someone on the outside who drives an SUV and hangs out on the internet all day buying Bitcoin.
More recently, we did an episode with Abrahm Lustgarten, from ProPublica, to talk about the intersection of climate change and debt in countries that were formerly colonized. Debt has severely limited how some of these countries are able to prepare for climate change, but in the lead-up to cop27, Barbados was pushing forward this interesting idea of debt relief as a form of climate reparations.
In a recent piece for NBCU Academy, you wrote about journalism’s culpability in the climate crisis, arguing that although much has changed for the better in recent years, journalism still has a long way to go on climate. Where would you like to see news organizations do better in 2023?
I’d like to see more coverage of climate change as an intersectional issue. You wouldn’t cover covid-19 without reporting on its economic impacts. But a lot of outlets still treat climate change as this special thing that sits over there by itself. It’s treated as another problem among many, and I think that’s part of why people feel so immobilized around climate.
Personally, I got interested in climate action when I learned how climate change connected to other issues I already cared about—when I realized that I didn’t have to abandon caring about racial justice or police violence or right-wing extremism to care deeply about climate. After all, these other issues are no less emergencies because of climate change. It’s exhausting. But at the end of the day, this is all about creating a livable future—and, in fact, scientists say that the fastest path to a livable future, when it comes to climate change, is the path that prioritizes justice and equity. So if journalists help connect these dots, I think it will make climate change less overwhelming, not more.
Another thing the media can do is help educate people on how disaster patterns have changed. People in different regions have known for years what to do during different types of storms—but the old rules often don’t apply anymore. I live on the Gulf Coast, for instance, in New Orleans, and it used to be that if you heard “Category 1 hurricane,” you would probably say, “All right, I’m gonna stay put. I’ve got my supplies, and I’ll be fine.” But now, because of climate change, we live in a world of rapid intensification, where you can hear “Category 1” in the evening and wake up facing a Category 4 or 5 storm.
I grew up in Mississippi and Alabama, and the deal was always: “New Orleans gets the hurricanes, and we in Mississippi and Alabama get the tornadoes.” But earlier this year, I was sitting in New Orleans and got an alert on my phone about a tornado watch. I thought, “Yeah right, ain’t gonna be no tornado in New Orleans,” and went on about my business. Then, suddenly, I get the alert that there’s now a tornado warning. I go on Twitter and, sure enough, there’s pictures of a tornado downtown. Lucky me, I grew up having tornado drills all the time. I knew what to do—get to the lower floors of buildings and all that—but a lot of people in New Orleans had no idea.
Another point you made in the NBCU Academy piece was about solutions reporting. You took issue with journalists who say we should give audiences hope—and you said that “hyperfocus” on solutions might inadvertently serve the fossil fuel industry, in that it could distract from enduring, fundamental problems, like fossil fuel use, that underlie climate change. Can you unpack that a bit?
I worry that an overemphasis on solutions framing will create the appearance that there’s not much work left to do. Of course, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t cover climate solutions. But I think a lot of climate journalism these days actually does a pretty good job on solutions. And solutions are only half the story; we’re not done needing to cover the problem. I think the media continues to drop the ball in coverage of the causes of climate change—which gets back to the need for accountability reporting about the fossil fuel industry.
I also think it’s not journalists’ job to control how audiences feel at the end of a story. I’m not sure it’s on us, either, to give people a blueprint of what to do about climate change. Ultimately, it will be up to each individual to figure out how they’re going to incorporate an understanding of the climate problem into their lives, based on their skills and their strengths. As a journalist, you can’t know all of your readers or listeners; you can’t know the creativity that lives in them. So I really disagree with this idea that we need to give audiences hope. That’s not how hope works.
What’s next for you with Hot Take coming to an end?
The end of the show is both a sad thing and not. It’s sad because I’ve been really proud of Hot Take. At the same time, I’m excited and a bit relieved to have a little less to do.
I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like over the past couple years. I felt burnt out. But I feel like I’ve got my legs back underneath me, and now I’m working on some new stuff—including a piece about climate change and burnout. I’m excited to have more time to think. And I’m excited to find out if one of these days I’ll be able to support myself full-time as a writer. That would be beautiful.
A Translator for the Climate Crisis, Grief Included
Writer, editor, teacher, and podcast host Mary Annaïse Heglar uses the art of storytelling to help people feel less alone in facing the climate crisis—and to build the movement for climate justice.
May 4, 2020
NRDC publications director and climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse HeglarCredit:Maxwell Swift
Karen L. Smith-Janssen
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All is lost in the climate fight, say the nihilists. People must have hope in the climate fight, say the optimists.
Climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar says neither. “We, quite literally, have no time for nihilism,” she wrote in a blog post last September. And to the other point: “In our context now, rosy hopefulness feels downright sociopathic.”
Heglar, who is NRDC’s publications director as well as the inaugural writer in residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, notes that for a long time, the focus on hope was the main message about climate change. She finds it naive. “I don’t think we have to be full of hope to feel agency,” Heglar says. “I’m not, but I also don’t feel helpless.” She holds up the civil rights movement as an example of activism fueled mostly by dogged determination and survivalism and the feeling that there was no other choice but to take action.
Heglar is upending the climate conversation—and who has historically been included in it—with a goal to make people feel less alone in the fight. On a sabbatical from her work at NRDC, she is now teaching a new seminar at Columbia while continuing to cohost a climate media podcast and publish urgent personal essays that confront our planet’s existential crisis head-on.
Heglar found her calling in part by trying to process her own feelings. Her clear-cut essays in The Boston Globe, Wired, The New Republic, Vox, and other publications talk plainly about the roots of our climate crisis in conquests, genocides, slavery, and colonialism. “Climate change itself is not racist, but it is the product of racism,” she writes. “The fossil fuel industry was literally built on the backs and over the graves of Indigenous people around the globe, as they were forced off their land and either slaughtered or subjugated—from the Arab world to Africa, from Asia to the Americas.” And yet, she continues, among many who consider themselves environmentalists, “my insistence on connecting race and racism to the conversation is seen as ‘divisive’ and a ‘distraction’ or ‘identity politics.’ ”
Many of Heglar’s essays directly address the feelings of isolation and alienation that the climate crisis can rouse, including for her, “a Black person in green spaces.” These feelings can consequently be a barrier to deeper involvement in the movement, she says, recalling her first encounters with “enviro-bros” at Oberlin College.
Heglar arrived at the Ohio college in 2002, after a childhood spent in Birmingham, Alabama, and throughout the Mississippi River region, surrounded by nature. As a student with little disposable income (she worked in kitchens washing pots and pans throughout college to help pay her tuition), she was affronted as a freshman by both Greenpeace campaigners’ aggressive appeals for money and the enviro-blame they rained down on her when she had to refuse them. It was a turnoff. “I can go back and look at a couple of places where I almost stepped into it and didn’t,” she recalls, “both because it scared me, and because the people who were trying to bring me through the door, I decidedly did not want to hang out with.” Even volunteering at an independent newspaper, after she moved to New York City in 2007, brought her up against climate fatalists whom she nicknamed “doomer dudes.” So for years, she didn’t get involved in the environmental world. Then she eventually landed in policy communications.
Heglar speaking at the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, July 2019Credit:Doug Ellis
Heglar, who worked at a social science research foundation before joining NRDC, can “speak fluent wonkese,” as she puts it, and leans on her English-major background to edit reports written by her colleagues with science and policy backgrounds, on topics ranging from Hurricane Sandy’s lessons for coastal cities to preparing for extreme heat waves in India. “I was drawn to things like editing policy publications because someone has to translate that really important scientific work into language that is digestible. I’ve always been drawn to playing that role of translation,” she says. Simultaneously, her personal writing delves into the mental toll of the climate crisis, exploring the emotional trauma behind the hard data.
Heglar started writing those essays in part because they placed talk of climate-stirred emotion beyond dispute. “You can argue with me about data, but you can’t tell me that this didn’t happen to me,” she says. “There’s no room in a policy report for a personal or emotional argument. There shouldn’t be. Those should be focused on solutions and be more detached. But there’s room elsewhere for personal stories and emotional storytelling. It felt like that was where the gap was and where my writing went.”
In “Climate and the Personal Essay,” the graduate seminar she’s now teaching at Columbia (albeit through a vastly rejiggered, Zoom-oriented semester), climate science and literature collide. Heglar surprised herself by how much she has taken to teaching, even though she was raised by a college professor and is from a family of teachers.
And for her students, “it’s liberating,” she says of the ungraded departure from the rigid parameters that previously defined their climate education. “I encourage them to feel and to talk about what they feel, and they’ve never really had that license before.” Cynthia Thomson, the associate director of Columbia’s one-year master’s program in Climate and Society, echoes this sentiment and notes that Heglar’s class allows for a rare, raw vulnerability that can be crucial to people who spend their time otherwise immersed in the study of climate science’s brutal effects and the barrage of related bad news.
Katharine Poole is among those seminar students to be moved by Heglar’s approach. She notes that reading about people’s experiences has made the data she’s studied in other classes more real and personal. “She’s a trailblazer,” Poole says of Heglar, whose work she had gotten to know before signing up for the class, through following the writer on Twitter. “Her essays were some of the first I’ve read that validated my own concerns. Her bearing witness and documenting these emotions is very important work because it shows people that they aren’t alone.” In turn, this helps build the movement, Poole adds, “by creating a community that will endure. If we can’t articulate and process these things, the ideas will never be implemented.”
Heglar’s class syllabus doesn’t only include essays on climate change but seminal civil rights pieces too. Classics like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time help her students trace the climate crisis back to racism, and explore issues of environmental injustice. “You don’t get to say that climate change is man-made and not look at the systems that man made,” she says. “You don’t get to wonder why people of color are not involved in the climate fight and then also not allow them to create their own reflections and make their own connections.”
In the class, the students discuss the importance of ensuring that more lower-income Black and brown communities are central to climate conversations and that their stories are told—a theme that goes hand in hand with the lessons from the students’ climate justice courses, which unpack the reasons why the effects of the crisis are disproportionately felt by people of color.
That theme of “checking your privilege” is one Heglar also tackles on Hot Take, the podcast she’s cohosted with climate journalist Amy Westervelt since November 2019. Her relationship with Westervelt originated over Twitter. Months later, they began to discuss doing a news podcast but eventually decided they’d prefer to focus on how climate issues were being covered in the media. “We felt that conversation about what is good and bad climate coverage was happening but in the worst possible place: on Twitter. Other than that, it wasn’t happening,” she says. “Twitter is a place where there’s not a lot of room for nuance, but there’s so much room for everybody to just get really, really mad and never understand each other.” Arguments ensue, people block each other, and the dialogue comes to a full stop. This was a gap the two felt they could fill.
Heglar speaking on an Earth Day Live panel, April 2020
Media coverage, too, has increased dramatically in recent years, which benefits the podcast. Once Heglar and Westervelt created an episode that covered all of 2016 and 2017. Now there’s as much to talk about in a two-week time span as there was in those two years combined. “The taping that we did for 2019 in review was initially nearly four hours long,” Heglar says—so long that it left them with sore throats. As they neared 2020, they were drowning in coverage. But despite the weighty content of the podcast, laughter is one of the defining sounds of Hot Take. To Heglar, that laughter is a sanity-preserving, life-giving defense mechanism for grappling with the enormous scale of the crisis we face.
Heglar and Westervelt agree on the primacy of emotion, including anger and despair, to any honest conversation about climate change. Others in the movement have criticized this tack. In one November episode, Westervelt noted a common response to their openness about emotion was the idea that “it is unseemly and certainly unintellectual to react this way.” But Heglar dismisses talk of rebutting critics; she’s got enough to do already. “I don’t have time to walk on those eggshells. We’re at zero hour,” she says.
Climate storytelling at Vanderbilt: Mary Annaïse Heglar highlights “The Highs and Lows of Climate Grief”
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Most conversations about the climate crisis revolve around the science and policy considerations about how to mitigate them. But what if the stories we tell about our changing climate are just as important to those plans as science and its policy ramifications?
Writers, artists and scholars of the environmental humanities have opened a parallel discussion about climate change—one that examines not just what the climate crisis is, but how it feels—that has grown steadily louder.
A leading voice in this discourse is Mary Annaïse Heglar, whose work uses storytelling in fiction and nonfiction to depict the emotional landscape of the climate crisis as a necessary step toward action and justice. Heglar will offer a public lecture at Vanderbilt at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 20, to kick off the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong interdisciplinary project that will use art to illustrate the emotions evoked by living through climate change.
The Eco-Grief Initiative emerges from a recognition that contemplating the climate crisis brings up challenging emotions: anxiety, fear, denial, depression and anger, among others. Often, the undercurrent of these emotions is grief—a profound sadness for what we have lost and a mourning for a future that no longer seems available to us in a warming world.
Heglar’s novel Troubled Waters (Harper Muse) is scheduled for release on May 7, 2024.
Through her essays, podcasts and forthcoming books, Heglar argues that storytelling is key to naming and healing the trauma of living through the climate crisis. She posits that grief is not a weakness to be overcome but a necessary step toward understanding and action. As she puts it, “We can’t create a new world unless we mourn the old one.” Her lecture, “The Highs and Lows of Climate Grief,” will offer reflections on the language we use to describe the emotional impact of climate change and what it means to grieve what we have lost.
After the lecture, Heglar will engage in conversation with Teresa Goddu, professor of English, whose research and teaching focus on contemporary climate fiction of the United States. “Heglar’s writing is a salve for our climate grief,
Goddu said, “a guide for how to tend to ourselves and each other as we work together to create planetary change.”
Before the lecture, Heglar’s writing workshop, “Processing Eco-Grief,” will guide students through articulating their own stories as a way to engage with climate grief.
Heglar’s visit accompanies a campuswide inquiry into storytelling as a tool for examining the climate crisis already happening at Vanderbilt.
The Environmental Humanities Seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities considers interdisciplinary approaches to the research and communication of the climate crisis. The seminar provides a forum for the Vanderbilt community to consider the history and culture of ecological sensibility, climate change and environmental justice through talks, films, reading groups and invited speakers.
Bringing climate storytelling from the Vanderbilt campus to a global audience is the Art of Interference podcast, which explores creative responses to climate change through interviews with contemporary artists, climate scientists and philosophers. Professor Lutz Koepnick leads a team of faculty and graduate students in producing this podcast, which investigates a different thematic element each season: the first season, Water, launched in fall 2023, and subsequent seasons will focus on Air, Earth and Fire.
In addition to research initiatives, many faculty are featuring climate storytelling in their teaching as part of Vanderbilt’s new Climate Studies major. Postdoctoral fellow Anna Hill is teaching a first-year writing seminar, Imagining the Climate Crisis, which investigates how literature and the arts might aid in critically thinking about environmental crises and envisioning futures beyond them. Environmental journalist Amanda Little, writer-in-residence in English and CSET, teaches several advanced writing courses, including Investigative Environmental Journalism: Stories of Environmental Crisis and Innovative Breakthrough.
Across disciplines—from history to religious studies to literature—students at Vanderbilt have an array of curricular opportunities to consider storytelling as an integral element of how to live and learn through climate change.
As the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative continues this year, the Department of Theatre will produce short plays written by Gina Femia, Kristin Idaszak, Reynaldo Piniella and Jaymes Sanchez for the Eco-Grief Performance Project and Commission. This project examines how telling stories through performance might provide insight into the complex emotions accompanying climate change. The plays will be produced using sustainable materials and methods, demonstrating that artistic engagement with the climate crisis can occur through medium as well as message.
“As the climate crisis becomes an observable and present reality, artists are exploring its many facets, including its disparate impacts on different communities, feelings of despair and glimmers of hope,” said Leah Lowe, director of the Curb Center and professor of theatre. “I am thrilled that these four talented playwrights are working with the Vanderbilt community to navigate the human dimensions of the environment we are living in.”
Storytelling—about the past, present and possible futures of our changing climate—helps acknowledge that the climate crisis is not only a scientific issue, but also an affective and deeply personal one.
Such storytelling provides a container for the range of our earth-related emotions, including the grief that has become increasingly familiar in recent years. “Climate grief is not an illness to cure, it is a condition we all have to live with,” Heglar writes. “But then again,” she adds, “isn’t all grief?”
Heglar, Mary Annaïse THE WORLD IS OURS TO CHERISH Random House (Children's None) $18.99 2, 27 ISBN: 9780593568019
A tale that imparts important messages about the beauty and magic of the world--and encourages readers to treasure it.
"There is magic all around you," an unseen narrator notes. "You are part of this magic." Directly addressing young readers, Heglar gently observes that so much of the world has changed for the worse, yet there's still so much to cherish: fireflies, morning birds singing, a cool breeze on a hot day, trees that shield us from the wind. Despite the drastic effects of climate change, Heglar makes it clear that as long as we have hope and continue to work together, we can change the world for the better. The text reads like a lovely, delicate poem threaded with urgency, compassion, honesty, and optimism. Heglar discusses the dangers of a changing world in ways that are appropriate and approachable for children but that never ignore the dire realities facing the planet. The themes of the magic of hope and beauty will tug at readers' heartstrings. Those who feel moved should look to the author's note, which briefly discusses climate change, and the appended First Steps for Changing the World, a list of five specific actions readers can take. Mineker's soft, inviting illustrations complement the text and depict people diverse in terms of age and skin tone.
An honest and hopeful call for climate caretaking. (Picture book. 4-6)
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"Heglar, Mary Annaise: THE WORLD IS OURS TO CHERISH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776005295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7dd3027a. Accessed 27 Mar. 2024.