November 4, 2025 • 39 mins
Zoë Schlanger is an author, journalist, and current staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers the newsletter “The Weekly Planet”. Schlanger has written for major outlets such as Newsweek, Quartz, Wired, The New York Times, The Nation, Time Magazine, and NPR. Schlanger is also the author of the 2024 book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Her work focuses on science and environment- in particular climate change, pollution, and environmental justice. In this episode, host Alec Baldwin and Zoë Schlanger discuss environmental policy, climate change, and the impact of the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires as Schlanger covered in her Atlantic article “What Happens When a Plastic City Burns”.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio My guest Today is a journalist
and staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers the
weekly Planet newsletter. Her work has previously appeared in major
outlets such as Newsweek, Courts, Wired, The New York Times,
(00:24):
The Nation, Time Magazine, and NPR. Zoe Schlanger is also
the author of the twenty twenty four book The Light Eaters,
How the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new
understanding of life on Earth. In twenty seventeen, Schlanger received
the National Association of Science Writer's Reporting Award. She's also
(00:48):
been recognized as a finalist for several other major journalism awards,
with a focus on climate change, pollution, and environmental justice
in her life writing, I was curious about win Schlanger's
environmental awareness and interest began.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I grew up in Connecticut, not very far away from
where we are now in Manhattan, and I grew up
with New Yorker parents, so I was coming into the
city all the time. And I think my earliest environmental
awareness came from driving in alongside the Hudson River and
learning at some point that the Hudson River was contaminated
with PCBs ge right exactly, and was declared a super
(01:30):
fund site, and that clicked something in my child brain thought,
I can't see that that's kind of a secret. Not
many people maybe know it, but maybe everyone should considering
the implications. So that's probably my earliest recollection of interest
in these things. But I also came of age professionally.
(01:51):
I got my first journalism job in the midst of
the BP oil spill and became entranced with this idea
that the very substance were using to clean up the
oil turned out to be a massive health hazard, corrects it,
which was being sprayed to disperse the oil in the goulsperson.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, I remember, though, So you had this enlightened kind
of advanced awareness of environmental those serious environmental issues when
you were very young. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I think I was always drawn to this idea of
there being kind of secrets out in the world, and
that's why journalism was interesting to me, that this was
the sort of horizontal transfer of information from these you know,
quote unquote secret sources like academics or people working in
the Ivory Tower to uncover these environmental disasters and the public.
So journalism is the conduit between those two things, and
(02:41):
it was very appealing to me to like ferret out those.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And you wanted to study journalism, I did you know?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I went to NYU for journalism, but I left the
journalism department within a semester because they started talking about
the internet after finals, and I thought, the world I'm
going into is the world of online journalism. And I
did a lot of internships. Instead of having a journalism.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Degree, where did you get your degree?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
In environmental studies and urban studies and a sort of
mishmash of things I thought were interesting. They let you
build your own major there if you want to, which
has varying degrees of efficacy, right exactly. I appreciated the flexibility.
And I just worked in newsrooms from undergrad.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
What's the first newsroom you worked in and what was
that like? How old were you?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I was eighteen years old. I was a freshman, and
I was working at Gothamist, which is the wonderful New
York metro area reporting outfit, and I was sent out
to cover things like the protest against the bike lanes
in around Prospect Park, and that was very fun to
me and then I interned at The Nation magazine, which
was a great political education, and they teach you to
(03:46):
fact check there, the interns fact check the entire magazine.
And so you're essentially re reporting these incredible journalists' stories.
You're calling their sources back, You're learning how they put
it together, you're learning the context that they decided to
place the stent. And it was an incredible crash course
and how to do rigorous journalism.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
So you worked for the Nation, how long were you there.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
For, oh, you know, summer?
Speaker 1 (04:09):
What did you take away from that? Like, just all
of it served to wet your appetite more and more
to keep going in that direction.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Of Absolutely, I think I was checking pieces and studying
at the time the issue of mind tailings in places
like West Virginia and the legacy of coal mining. And
they had a fantastic reporter there. Absolutely, just issue after issue.
Actually at during the time I was at the Nation,
around the time of the Kalamazoo oil spill in Michigan
(04:35):
where all of this tarcans diluted bitchmen from Canada was
being piped through Kalamazoo and pipe burst and this was
a type of heavy crude oil that we really hadn't
had to deal with in a cleanup context. It turned
out to be incredibly difficult to clean up and also
contained all these other compounds like benzene that were carcinogenic
in ways that.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Used in that Tarsans process. Exactly was it coming down
from Alberta? I believe? Oh yeah, yeah, for you, this
goes on to become your profession. Yeah, I mean you.
So when you finish college with your other degrees, your
non journalism degrees, where do you go.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I started out My first job was at Talking Points Memo,
and that job was basically rearranging the homepage and writing headlines,
which is a classic first job in journalism. But like
I said, it was right around the time of the
BP oil spill, and I sort of insisted and they
were very open to me writing some stories. So that
was the first time I got into actual environmental journalism.
From there, just got deeper and deeper. And there's this
(05:33):
funny thing in journalism in newsrooms, in generalist newsrooms, if
you know how to read a scientific paper, people act
like that's some magical power, and you become more and
more specialized and you're given more and more responsibility in
that era. So I'm grateful that I could.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
So every morning you wake up and have breakfast over
some scientific, dating exact environmental.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Journeys and still do. It's the best job in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, BP is twenty ten, and it's still at a
time for me when i'm you know, pretty it's fifteen
years ago, obviously, and so I'm still raging about these
kinds of things, even privately, and I become that guy
which I had been before that maybe laps where I
don't get gas at a BP ever again. Never I
don't go to Exxon Mobile anymore. Ever since Exxon Valdiez
(06:17):
and then BP, I never want to buy their gas again.
And what difference is mes you know, as one customer,
but you know, launching a broader campaign boycott Exxon, boycott BP.
That's tough to pull off because people view gas. They
view gas separately, do you agree from oil? Well, they
view gases like they've got me, what am I going
(06:38):
to do? They just yes, it's true.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And that's the product of decades of intentional directionings exact
why we don't have electric cars absolutely, And now the
situation the golf is everyone's pivoting to LNG to liquefy
natural gas, and it's a whole new, intensive, very extractive
energy project happening in the now. And I went down
(07:01):
there recently to do a story about this exporting natural
gas project in an area where it was all fishermen
who talked to me about being in their fishing boats
while they were spraying correct sit onto the you know,
being sprayed directly by the stuff back in twenty ten.
So these are cyclical Gulf environmental devastations and they're continuing now.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
The thing that ignited me to want to look into
your career and your writing was nine to eleven. Thirteen
million square feet of real estate at the World Trade
Center gets pulverized into ash, toxic ash within a matter
of hours. You divide that by four thousand, meaning let's
say a house, an average house or even a decent
(07:43):
sized US is four thousand square feet or more. Obviously
in the Palisades or we're pivoting to the Palisades here
via nine to eleven, So that's three thousand, two hundred
and fifty houses. The Trade Center represents three two hundred
and fifty homes at four thousand square feet per home.
That all gets pulverized and then it rains and all
(08:06):
that toxic sludge, which in California they're racing to get
the toxicity out of there and to remediate that. First
the idea being is what are they going to do?
Are they going to try to go back and rebuild it?
You can't rebuild the way it was because it was
like a Disneyland set. Well, when I think of southern California,
I think of an intricate webbing of natural plant life.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
And that's the wonder of it in many ways.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
And now that's all gone, that's all gone, and so
knowing that it's gone and you can never get that back,
you have to impress upon people from decades and decades
or centuries of growth of the wildlife there, knowing you
could never get it back, what do we do? Do
you have any ideas about that?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Well, you brought up this idea of managed retreat, this
idea that the state or whomever should pay folks not
to be there anymore and turn part of the acreage
into park, and that would of course remove some people
from the WUI area the wild land urban interface. But
that's a very controversial concept and it touches at the
heart of sort of all these emotional attachments to this area.
(09:12):
I mean, what's amazing about California is that there's no
place with a better firefighting service, that have the most
amazing technology for firefighting. They are the best prepared. They
have tried to pass a law to make sure people
don't put any foliage within five feet of their house
Paradise exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
You saw Lucy Walker's film Gate not but I've.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Heard a lot about it. So this five foot of
space marker is supposed to be scientifically proven to keep
your house from catching fire, or at least prevent these
conflagrations where like a thousand houses can catch on fire,
but no one wants to do it. There's whole towns
that have shot down ordinances like this.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
In the movie. In Lucy's film, they hire a consultant.
He comes and lays out the five steps. He thinks
you should take all of the very simple and they're like, no, no,
that's one of them. Keep the vegetation five feet from
the house. No wooden roofs. No, they say, no, yeah,
right back to what they had.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
I spoke to a former fire chief while the Palisades
were burning in northern California, near Berkeley, in a town
near Berkeley. He had retired two weeks before because his
town refused to pass the five foot ordinance and he
didn't want to be responsible for what would happen when
that town inheavit CA. Yeah, exactly. So it's a matter
of reassessing the way that like living in California looks
(10:32):
and feels, the aesthetic of it, and fully accepting that
there's a measure of danger to living these places, which
will be all heightened by the fact that no one
can get insurance, or if you're getting insurance, it's incredibly expensive,
which should start to kind of correct for these decades
of under valuing the risk to these areas.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
I mean, everybody wants ocean front, live by the water,
and you realize, you know what happens when there's a
three mile island and you tell people they got to
get aut or Chernobyl or whatever like that, there's something
like Beau Paul. There's a super level of toxicity and
people can't live there anymore. Well, this is not a
super level of toxicity, but it's a super level of
(11:15):
pazard for a community.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I think the thing that this teaches us, though, as well,
is that there is actually no place safe from the
ravages of climate change. This was a particularly extreme example,
and the fire risk to some of these communities is
higher than elsewhere, but the fire risk and large swaths
of California is similar. And if you're going to build
a new community, it's likely going to be in that
(11:38):
WUY zone, that wildland urban interface. So yes, certainly getting
people encouraging them to move elsewhere, but there is a
reality of these fires becoming less and less fightable all
over the place. I mean, talking to fire chiefs during
these fires, they were very clear that the physics of
this fire meant that no amount of fire response could
(11:59):
have prevented what happened. The only way to do anything
to mitigate these kinds of fires is this advanced preparation,
these hardening of homes, this changing of what the landscape
looks like.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Change.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, and you can have a beautiful garden that's made
of rocks and cacti and a gave, but you just
can't have rose bushes, you can't have palm trees. It
will take a mass cultural shift, and it's so unclear
to me what will cause that, like when will it
be bad enough that people would be willing to do that.
There's this kind of wiping of the cultural memory each
(12:33):
time this happens. And there was a time when, you know,
in the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco fire, there's
a time when we lived with urban fire in a
way that was more top of mind to people. But
it's been so long, take a big shift.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Now, you eventually you can describe this. For me, got
to the point where you were a bit overwhelmed by
all of your environmental reporting. Correct?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Correct?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Can you describe the period when that really hits you.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah. I was working at a different newsroom than I
work at now, and i'd been covering climate change for
about seven eight years at that point, and as you
know very well, it's an incredibly devastating thing to face
every day, and I had this experience of becoming quite
numb to it. I think I was covering the potential
for an ice sheet to fully collapse and thinking through
(13:19):
scientists projections of that and what it would mean, this
catastrophic sea level rise, and I registered this sense of
feeling nothing in regards to it, just sort of numbing,
and I didn't like that. I think the second way
detach the emotional quality of all this devastation from the
reality of it, there's nothing to hope for. So I
(13:39):
started combing through botany journals. Plants have always brought me
some measure of peace, and I stumbled upon what turned
out to be a massive controversy in the botanical space,
where botanists were fighting with each other about whether or
not we could consider plants intelligent or possibly conscious, based
(13:59):
on behaviors that scientists were uncovering around communication, around memory,
kin recognition, manipulation of plants, of insects on the part
of plants. All these very plastic, spontaneous, quite cunning responses
plants had to their world that very clearly showed them
as active agents rather than these kind of passive, immobile
(14:24):
items as we typically consider them. So I realized that
was an incredibly alluring story, back to this idea of
like secrets that exist within the confines. Absolutely, and this
I did feel like it was changing my conception of
plant life. So I spent four years talking to botanists
and it totally revolutionized my thinking about the natural.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
You never had any interest in that subject of botany
in a generalis sens before.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I was obsessed with ferns. Ferns are amazing. Between
two f there you go and I that kind of
spiraled out into a larger interest in But no, it's
the beauty of being a journalists. You get to fixate
on new topics all the time and call scientists up
and the greatest scientists in their field will give you
(15:09):
time and give you a personal masterclass on their field
and turning that attention towards botanists. They are some of
the most fascinating scientists and enthusiastic scientists in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Is there someone I'm sure there's many, but is there
someone you want to recognize?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yes, there's a botanist ecologist named Richard Carbon at UC Davis,
and he is a pioneer in the world of plant communication.
He studies sagebrush so California, of course, Northern California full
of sagebrush and it has that camphorus unctious smell And
what you're smelling is one small portion of the many,
many chemical compounds that sagebrush releases into the air. And
(15:46):
he was responsible for discovering the ways that those contain information,
the way that sagebrush signal to nearby plants about danger
in the area and how they will signal differently to
their biological kin than to strangers. Plants that they can
have even regional dialects of these chemical languages. Graphically isolated
sagebrush will have dialects much like human dialects of how
(16:10):
they create these compounds in their bodies. And his work
is absolutely fascinating. That's the other thing about this is
you spend so much time thinking about the devastation of
the natural world. What about the wonder and awe of
the natural world? I think this process of learning about plants. Yes,
this was about how we define intelligence, how we defined consciousness,
but it was more about for me the incredible perfusion
(16:34):
of biological creativity out there, this idea that we are
all products of wild evolutionary exuberance, and plants are some
of the most bizarre versions of that. But it really
situated me back into this kind of humble or more
humble space of recognizing how we are. Each each species
(16:55):
is like the end node of millions of years of
absolutely why evolution, and to sort of snuff out any
little node is becomes a much bigger ethical crime. So
it was really good for actually connecting me back to
the really tangible stakes of what we stand to lose
with climate change, particularly loss of plant species, but loss
(17:17):
of anything.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger. If you enjoy conversations about
the environment and the role big cities like New York
play and reducing waste, check out my episode with Pam Lardo,
the former Deputy Commissioner of New York City's Department of
Environmental Protection and New York City's first recyclings are Ron Gonan.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
This is the fascinating world of biology. We use a
community of bacteria that actually digests the suspended organic material
and clean the water via that method, and from there
it goes to another settling tank where we settle out
the biomass that just can assumed all this organic matter.
But the water that comes out of the final settling
tank gets disinfection, basically household bleached to take any particular
(18:07):
pathogens out, and that gets either discharged to receiving waters
or in some cases in some cities, they're able to
polish a little bit more easy for irrigation purposes.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
To hear more of my conversation with Pammy Lardo and
Ron Gonan, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After
the break, Zoe Schlanger talks about how a typical home
can be extremely flammable and the unseen dangers of synthetic furniture.
(18:46):
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Zoe Schlanger's recent article for The Atlantic, titled what Happens
When a Plastic City Burns examines the aftermath of the
disastrous two thousand twenty five wildfires in Los Angeles County.
The environmental impact of an urban fire on the city
(19:07):
of LA calls to mind the aftermath of nine to
eleven in New York City. I was curious why Schlanger
felt compelled to write about the Los Angeles fires as
a New Yorker.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
This was the story of our time. What happened in
LA is something that we are facing in our next
twenty years. There will be many more fires like this,
that's all but guaranteed. And this idea of urban fire
coming back to the US is incredibly important to focus
on because it's different firefighting and different hazards than wildland fires.
(19:39):
Wildland fires produce lots of toxic compounds, but urban fires
produce many, many more, and many more noxious ones. Ones
We don't fully understand. Even so as someone who thinks
about environmental contamination, I go through great pains, Like I
bought a couch a few months ago, and it took
(20:00):
incredible amounts of research to find a couch that was
free of perfluorinated chemicals p fast those forever chemicals, to
find a couch without polyurethane foam blocks as the upholstery.
And then I started thinking about this, and there's quotes
from fire chiefs going back years saying things like a
couch is basically a block of gasoline. Yeah, this retired
(20:23):
Maryland Fower chief exactly because what is polyurethane foam, which
is in all our furniture. It's a polymer, it's gas,
it's oil, it's petroleum. And that's the same with everything.
Thinking about what happens in a modern house fire different
from let's say the Great Chicago Fire, is you have
a house clad in vinyl siding. It's got vinyl plank flooring,
(20:44):
PBC pipes, the curtains are polyester, the mattress is just
a block of gasoline. Every component of that house is
flammable in a new way, and they light so much faster.
There was a wonderful. This nonprofit on fire safety did
this demonstration on videos on YouTube, very compelling watching, where
(21:05):
they built two home a living room sets exactly the
same size, with the same number of items, but one
was mostly natural materials and one was synthetic, which is
much a much more common setup. So they had this,
you know, synthetic couch, engineered wood furniture. You know, that's
like everything that you might get at a department store.
The glues holding the engineered bits of wood together is polymer.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
They had like a curtain made of polyester in the
other room, cotton curtain, cotton stuffed pillows on the couch,
wooden frame, couch, et cetera. What happened in when they
lit in an identical fire was that the room full
of natural materials lit very easily, but the flame sort
of stayed in place for a while. It took about
(21:50):
twenty six minutes for that room to reach flashover, which
is the point in which everything's ignited and escape is impossible.
So it's very important from a firefighting perspective and a
life saving perspective. In the synthetic room, the fire started
as a smolder produced much more noxious black smoke much faster,
and flashover happened in under five minutes. So if you're
(22:13):
in that home, if you're asleep, the chance of escape
goes down, which is also why we've seen the rate
of deaths and home fires go up. There's fewer home
fires now than there were in the eighties, but there's
something like thirty percent maybe little more thirty four percent
more deaths when it does occur. And that's you know,
you can really ask any fire chief that has everything
(22:33):
to do with these polymer materials, these plastics, and our
bucket of gasoline precisely. And I think people don't always
connect this fact that plastic plastic is an oil product.
It's a petroleum product, and when we think about the
flammability of petroleum, that applies to all of our plastic items.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Just this morning, I picked a sample to recover a
couch in my kid's playroom, which, of course, with all
my kids, that cover is ruined by grape juice and
everything's all over the place. But anyway, I'm getting the
couch cover, and she drops off the materials, the woman
who are going to do the work for us, and
I'm going through them, and I see one and it
(23:12):
says hemp, and in my haste a mistake that it's
made out of hemp, but you know, the pattern is
called hemp. It's a pattern made to look like hemp.
And then when she went and got the details from me,
it's aid forty percent poly So we had to throw that.
That was my first choice decoratively speaking.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
You know, it's interesting about things like picking couch covers.
We've just discussed how fast polyesters ignite. Fine, but if
you see a couch material or any material that says
it's performance, a performance fabric that's scuff resistant, stain resistant,
that's all then coded in clothing p fasts This forever chemical,
the teflon toxin that people may have heard about. So
(23:52):
you have a base of woven plastic covered in a
lacker of a compound that's associated with many cancers and
potentially neurotoxic, and the combination you light that on fire,
you create many many other compounds in the burning process,
some of which we don't fully understand, but none of
which are going to be good for us.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
My wife and have gotten better, and I think we're
pretty good actually in terms of avoiding clothes for our
children that are heavy heavy polyester and plastic based, you know,
petroleum based products. And the same with our home. We
have a house on Long Island and the kids are
in and out of the house all day long. You know,
they run out to the pool, they run here, they
do this. We have a big piece of property. And
(24:31):
then in the city they're inside and they're inside for months,
and they go to their play space, they go to
their soccer classes, they're inside buildings. And you're thinking, I mean,
I'm told that like certain fabrics you wear, the stuff
like little microscopic flexs of it are coming off of plastic.
When these couches you have deteriorates slowly flex of they're
sprayed with some kind of that little little pieces of
(24:54):
little microchar it's of plastic. Or with these in the
air just you sit down on it. Yeah, they go
into the air. So another thing for me to worry about.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
You know, it can be endless and overwhelming, and then
you have to think about plants for a few years.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Where are you working now? Can you say?
Speaker 2 (25:08):
I work at the Atlantic magazine?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
So you're on the staff of the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
I am, yes, I cover climate.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
There and they so that's your Bailey.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Wick I'm the only climate reporter at the Atlantic currently.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Really, and you never have any issues with them in
terms of me. And I'm not going to assume the
Atlantic is exempt from this, which is you don't ever
have any editorial blowback about things you want to do.
They don't care. You can do whatever you want to do.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
They are staunch defenders of fact based journalism. So as
long as I can back it up with fact and
our fact checkers don't think it's there's anything wrong with it,
it gets published.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Do you think that the Atlantic, because obviously the New
Yorker would fit into this category. And I think the Times,
which was in I was told almost twenty years ago
they were in grave danger. There was some rumor that
they were going to be sold. So The Times comes
out in the digital agents and they work it out.
They're in good shape now. They got a lot of
online subscribers. And I'm assuming the same as Sue for
The Atlantic. Correct like these magazines that have survived, I
(26:04):
viewed The Atlantic as a survivor. Oh, certainly, And then
what do they attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (26:08):
You know what? The subscriptions to our print magazine are
going up right now. It's a rare case of that,
I think happening. The Atlantic just became profitable just in
the last few months after you know, that's unusual from
a media company now, and we went from at one
point having to cut down to eleven print issues a
year to going back up to twelve just recently. So
print is not dead from our perspective, and I feel
(26:31):
very lucky to be at one of the rare places
where that's the case.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
May I ask, what are you working on next?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Right now, I'm working on covering the Trump transition from
an environmental perspective, thinking through all the various ways that
environmental work is being halted, and that applies to absolutely everything.
I mean, including the nine to eleven Fund or the
many people who developed cancers after nine to eleven. There
was the news just this week that the White House
(26:58):
was pulling back funding from that. They've now been so
sort of shamed into putting it back. But it's a
lot of moving parts, and we're losing the enforcement mechanisms
that keep our environmental laws working properly, and that will
surely have a lot of interesting impacts.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
It's interesting that you say that because first stumbling upon
your writing as a result of this plastics thing and
the toxicity from these fires, And the same thing I
noticed about your words now, is this idea of enforcement
the United States. In my work I've done environmentally and
the advocacy I've been involved with from a few decades now,
(27:35):
is that there are plenty of good laws on the
books in this country and there's no enforcement. Sure, they
don't make anybody do anything that they should be doing
a large industry.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Do you agree, I say, we go through phases of
it being better and worse. I think from an environmental perspective,
we have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,
and the EBA has always functioned on a shoe string
budget in terms of enforcing anything related to those two things.
But actually, what I'm really interested now is the fact
that environmental justice as a government concept is being erased
(28:06):
in this administration. And most people think, oh, environmental justice,
that's this kind of like a DEI thing ideologically, but
what is the actual impact. And the impact is the
fact that Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act
leave a ton of environmental hazards uncovered because they regulate
each point source of pollution. But let's say you're a
(28:28):
person living in a neighborhood where there's twenty five sources
of pollution. There's four refineries, there's a garbage incinerator, there's
several factories, nuclear power plan nuclear anything of that nature.
Trucking in the area, that's a combined effect that you're ingesting,
breathing in as a resident of that area that is
completely uncovered by either of those two main environmental acts
(28:51):
that we have on the books. And so environmental justice
exists to fill that space, to have some government oversight
mediating the way that people experience those many, many sources
of pollution at once. And without that, we like many
many people will fall through the cracks of that. So
you have diminished enforcement even of the two main laws
that we have in the books, But then you have
(29:12):
absolutely nothing at helping people where they're actually at and
how they actually experience environmental harm. These are neighborhoods where
the life expectancy could be twelve years less than the
neighborhood next door, just because they have so many sources
of pollution. So this eradicating of environmental justice is a
deeper issue, I think than most people realize.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger. If you're enjoying this conversation,
Tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. When we come back, Schlanger discusses how climate
denial often has better funding than climate education and why
(29:56):
she believes the narrative has been pushed in the wrong direction.
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Zoe
(30:17):
Schlanger's writing often focuses on climate change and environmental policy. Recently,
she took a break to explore the world of botany
during a period of perceived burnout. While writing about the
current state of the climate in the aftermath of the
recent Los Angeles fires, I wondered what more will it
(30:38):
take for people to truly pay attention to the changes
in our climate? And what gives Schlanger hope for environmental
advocacy these days.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I think there are a number of people in government
who really want to make a real difference. I most
recently felt hope when listening to a Senate hearing about
the role of insurance companies in the climate crisis and
the fact that they were dropping many people from home
insurance because they lived in such climate vulnerable areas, but
(31:11):
at the same time, we're still ensuring fossil fuel projects.
And also the insurance sector is a major investor in
the fossil fuel industry. And it was heartening to see
senators really take them to task and go how can
you have a hand in both of these things? And
that was Cenator Sheldon Whitehouse and Senator bor Elizabeth Warren
asking really tough questions of So whenever I see a
(31:33):
real accountability action take place where we're actually pointing the
finger at actors that are knowingly contributing to this, that's
very heartening to me, because I think too much focus
is on the sort of individual responsibility, this idea we
should all recycle, which I'm not saying anyone should stop doing,
but we are part of a system, and the system
(31:54):
is larger than any individual consumer. It's not right to
say that just because you consume fossil fuels that you
are implicated in the climate crisis. There's much bigger machinations
at work to keep us doing that, and it's always
heartening to see some government officials stepping up and recognizing that.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Well, when you hear the propaganda from quote unquote the
other side the business, I shall we say where they
mock recycling and say it's only making a little dent,
And I thought to myself, well, it's more the spirit
of it. The recycling thing, to me is just like
a credo. You're making a stand and saying I care
enough about the environment, and hopefully that again will expand
(32:31):
in other directions. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I think I covered the plastic industry for several years
and learning how little gets actually recycled and other watching
other people come to that realization as well, produces some
measure of rage. And I think rage is a very
important emotion when it comes to these things. It's very
like you said, you recycle, maybe not because you think
it's going to save the world, but because you are
(32:53):
putting your flag in the ground that you want to
do something, and you are at the same time expressing
a measure disappointment in the powers of it.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I don't like to use the word rage anymore. I
like to use the word indignation.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Indignation, productive indignation.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
We can't We got to be careful what we rage
against these days. For myself, I wonder environmentally what's going
to have to happen, And I'm not talking about some
horror movie or you know, some tsunami the size of
the Grand Canyon comes rolling in. But I wonder what's
going to have to happen before people really really start
to pay attention to this on a wholesale level. Do
(33:27):
you ever think about that?
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Well, yeah, this kind of also goes back to things
that give me hope. Much more direct form of hope
I have is the fact that to some degree, this
transition to electrification to renewable sources is going to happen,
whether or not we have government support of doing so.
The solar boom is in full effect. It's totally surpassing
(33:50):
everybody's ideas of what would happen. So I am somewhat
heartened by the fact that the market itself is driving
in the direction of this is the cheapest, best, most
efficient form of energy can make, and we're going to
do it because it makes market sense. So I'm hoping
that it's not even won't be about this mass wholesale
devastation that we have to endure to finally wake up.
(34:11):
It'll just be the sensible business choice for some energy companies.
That may be wishful thinking, but I think it's possible,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I realized that For me, I think do people only react?
I mean, I'm asking this is a question, but it's
more rhetorical, which is that do people in this country, especially,
do they react to things only when it touches them?
Like there's fires in California, but don't see any fire.
No fires on sixth Avenue. You know, we're good here,
(34:40):
But what's the we had sandy and the water came
up to fourteenth Street or whatever. Does it really always
have to be that it impacts you before you really
really care? Do you believe that?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I think that that's a pretty rational facet of being
a human, that things are really untangible until they're tangible.
And I don't necessarily blame people for not thinking about
it in their daily busy lives, but I feel like,
you know, even thinking about fires. We were all here
for the Canadian wildfire smoke that hit in New York
City so intensely. I was actually in Canada during that time,
(35:10):
but people felt touched by that. I don't think there's
very few places in the country that haven't already been
touched by some kind of climate disaster.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Even next Arizona one hundred degrees over these for one
hundred days. I'm like, that's not enough to drive you
towards some environmental.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah, well, you one can't discount the decades of misinformation,
willful disinformation that was perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry.
You know, I know you had Naomi or Rescu's on
your show, and of course she wrote Merchants of Doubt,
the incredible book about this. But I recently had to
review another recent book called The Parrot and the Igloo,
(35:47):
and that was just this recounting of the last fifty
sixty years of very well financed disinformation to keep us
from really engaging with the climate issues. It felt that
every time the country was at a precipice of genuine concern,
scientists had officially broken through. Congress was engaged the sort
of pr machine to avoid any real phase out of
(36:10):
fossil fuels or real recognition of this issue at a
federal level. Were dropped in, and this narrative was pushed
that climate change isn't real. And this is a classic pattern.
Climate denihalism is much more funded in many ways than
climate education, and so that is why people are in
this position. It's not for lack of self interest. It's
(36:31):
actually just education in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Well, I remember when on the south shore of Long Island,
near my home I grew up in as a child,
that were going to build these wind turbines, which all
people were screaming, you know, environmentalists having to deal with
the nimbi crowded was saying, these are to these I sores,
and these going to be so ugly, and you're to
look out on the ocean from the beaches, the fabled
(36:55):
beaches of Long Island and see all this crap. And
I thought, God, when I see wind turbines anywhere, it's
like the statue of liberty. To me, it's a symbol
of our freedom from something that's going to kill us eventually.
You know. My spirit animal teaches me that the Earth
is a self managing mechanism and we will all die
(37:16):
off because the planet needs to get rid of us
the planet for the planet to survive on some level,
a humankind must go unless they amended their ways and
lived more because some kind of a spiritual connection to
the land and the water. And the other thing I
think is that solar arrays all across Death Valley, and
we should have wind turbines on the Great Lakes. Someone
(37:37):
told me once that they put wind turbines to write
amount in the right places in the Great Lakes. You
have enough power for thirty percent of the country from
the winds during that time of year when it's very
very high winds there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I mean you think about the expansion of the fossil
fuel infrastructure. That was a massive infrastructure process that the
country went through at some point, and we can do
the same thing, could have a massive industrial proliferation of
clean energy. But back to your point about humans needing
to die off, I think that's actually that sort of
forecloses a certain measure of hope. I mean, humanity has
(38:12):
not always had this orientation towards the natural world. Actually,
for far longer than our current version of exploiting the
natural world. There has been the long history of humanity
that we're very much stewards of and organisms working in
concert with the natural world. And I do think humans
will be the ones to figure out how to return
(38:32):
to such a state. But I don't think that the
planet's going to spit us out, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I want to thank you so much for coming on
and doing this with me. I read your writing, and
I'm just such a great admirer of your thinking. For
someone who is covering this, you do it so well.
I mean, you're so articulate and about this subject in others.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
So appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
My thanks to writer and journalist Zoey Schlang. This episode
was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Danielle Gingrich by Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing, as brought
to you by iHeart Radio
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio My guest Today is a journalist
and staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers the
weekly Planet newsletter. Her work has previously appeared in major
outlets such as Newsweek, Courts, Wired, The New York Times,
(00:24):
The Nation, Time Magazine, and NPR. Zoe Schlanger is also
the author of the twenty twenty four book The Light Eaters,
How the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new
understanding of life on Earth. In twenty seventeen, Schlanger received
the National Association of Science Writer's Reporting Award. She's also
(00:48):
been recognized as a finalist for several other major journalism awards,
with a focus on climate change, pollution, and environmental justice
in her life writing, I was curious about win Schlanger's
environmental awareness and interest began.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I grew up in Connecticut, not very far away from
where we are now in Manhattan, and I grew up
with New Yorker parents, so I was coming into the
city all the time. And I think my earliest environmental
awareness came from driving in alongside the Hudson River and
learning at some point that the Hudson River was contaminated
with PCBs ge right exactly, and was declared a super
(01:30):
fund site, and that clicked something in my child brain thought,
I can't see that that's kind of a secret. Not
many people maybe know it, but maybe everyone should considering
the implications. So that's probably my earliest recollection of interest
in these things. But I also came of age professionally.
(01:51):
I got my first journalism job in the midst of
the BP oil spill and became entranced with this idea
that the very substance were using to clean up the
oil turned out to be a massive health hazard, corrects it,
which was being sprayed to disperse the oil in the goulsperson.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, I remember, though, So you had this enlightened kind
of advanced awareness of environmental those serious environmental issues when
you were very young. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I think I was always drawn to this idea of
there being kind of secrets out in the world, and
that's why journalism was interesting to me, that this was
the sort of horizontal transfer of information from these you know,
quote unquote secret sources like academics or people working in
the Ivory Tower to uncover these environmental disasters and the public.
So journalism is the conduit between those two things, and
(02:41):
it was very appealing to me to like ferret out those.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And you wanted to study journalism, I did you know?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I went to NYU for journalism, but I left the
journalism department within a semester because they started talking about
the internet after finals, and I thought, the world I'm
going into is the world of online journalism. And I
did a lot of internships. Instead of having a journalism.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Degree, where did you get your degree?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
In environmental studies and urban studies and a sort of
mishmash of things I thought were interesting. They let you
build your own major there if you want to, which
has varying degrees of efficacy, right exactly. I appreciated the flexibility.
And I just worked in newsrooms from undergrad.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
What's the first newsroom you worked in and what was
that like? How old were you?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I was eighteen years old. I was a freshman, and
I was working at Gothamist, which is the wonderful New
York metro area reporting outfit, and I was sent out
to cover things like the protest against the bike lanes
in around Prospect Park, and that was very fun to
me and then I interned at The Nation magazine, which
was a great political education, and they teach you to
(03:46):
fact check there, the interns fact check the entire magazine.
And so you're essentially re reporting these incredible journalists' stories.
You're calling their sources back, You're learning how they put
it together, you're learning the context that they decided to
place the stent. And it was an incredible crash course
and how to do rigorous journalism.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
So you worked for the Nation, how long were you there.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
For, oh, you know, summer?
Speaker 1 (04:09):
What did you take away from that? Like, just all
of it served to wet your appetite more and more
to keep going in that direction.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Of Absolutely, I think I was checking pieces and studying
at the time the issue of mind tailings in places
like West Virginia and the legacy of coal mining. And
they had a fantastic reporter there. Absolutely, just issue after issue.
Actually at during the time I was at the Nation,
around the time of the Kalamazoo oil spill in Michigan
(04:35):
where all of this tarcans diluted bitchmen from Canada was
being piped through Kalamazoo and pipe burst and this was
a type of heavy crude oil that we really hadn't
had to deal with in a cleanup context. It turned
out to be incredibly difficult to clean up and also
contained all these other compounds like benzene that were carcinogenic
in ways that.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Used in that Tarsans process. Exactly was it coming down
from Alberta? I believe? Oh yeah, yeah, for you, this
goes on to become your profession. Yeah, I mean you.
So when you finish college with your other degrees, your
non journalism degrees, where do you go.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I started out My first job was at Talking Points Memo,
and that job was basically rearranging the homepage and writing headlines,
which is a classic first job in journalism. But like
I said, it was right around the time of the
BP oil spill, and I sort of insisted and they
were very open to me writing some stories. So that
was the first time I got into actual environmental journalism.
From there, just got deeper and deeper. And there's this
(05:33):
funny thing in journalism in newsrooms, in generalist newsrooms, if
you know how to read a scientific paper, people act
like that's some magical power, and you become more and
more specialized and you're given more and more responsibility in
that era. So I'm grateful that I could.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
So every morning you wake up and have breakfast over
some scientific, dating exact environmental.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Journeys and still do. It's the best job in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, BP is twenty ten, and it's still at a
time for me when i'm you know, pretty it's fifteen
years ago, obviously, and so I'm still raging about these
kinds of things, even privately, and I become that guy
which I had been before that maybe laps where I
don't get gas at a BP ever again. Never I
don't go to Exxon Mobile anymore. Ever since Exxon Valdiez
(06:17):
and then BP, I never want to buy their gas again.
And what difference is mes you know, as one customer,
but you know, launching a broader campaign boycott Exxon, boycott BP.
That's tough to pull off because people view gas. They
view gas separately, do you agree from oil? Well, they
view gases like they've got me, what am I going
(06:38):
to do? They just yes, it's true.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And that's the product of decades of intentional directionings exact
why we don't have electric cars absolutely, And now the
situation the golf is everyone's pivoting to LNG to liquefy
natural gas, and it's a whole new, intensive, very extractive
energy project happening in the now. And I went down
(07:01):
there recently to do a story about this exporting natural
gas project in an area where it was all fishermen
who talked to me about being in their fishing boats
while they were spraying correct sit onto the you know,
being sprayed directly by the stuff back in twenty ten.
So these are cyclical Gulf environmental devastations and they're continuing now.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
The thing that ignited me to want to look into
your career and your writing was nine to eleven. Thirteen
million square feet of real estate at the World Trade
Center gets pulverized into ash, toxic ash within a matter
of hours. You divide that by four thousand, meaning let's
say a house, an average house or even a decent
(07:43):
sized US is four thousand square feet or more. Obviously
in the Palisades or we're pivoting to the Palisades here
via nine to eleven, So that's three thousand, two hundred
and fifty houses. The Trade Center represents three two hundred
and fifty homes at four thousand square feet per home.
That all gets pulverized and then it rains and all
(08:06):
that toxic sludge, which in California they're racing to get
the toxicity out of there and to remediate that. First
the idea being is what are they going to do?
Are they going to try to go back and rebuild it?
You can't rebuild the way it was because it was
like a Disneyland set. Well, when I think of southern California,
I think of an intricate webbing of natural plant life.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
And that's the wonder of it in many ways.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
And now that's all gone, that's all gone, and so
knowing that it's gone and you can never get that back,
you have to impress upon people from decades and decades
or centuries of growth of the wildlife there, knowing you
could never get it back, what do we do? Do
you have any ideas about that?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Well, you brought up this idea of managed retreat, this
idea that the state or whomever should pay folks not
to be there anymore and turn part of the acreage
into park, and that would of course remove some people
from the WUI area the wild land urban interface. But
that's a very controversial concept and it touches at the
heart of sort of all these emotional attachments to this area.
(09:12):
I mean, what's amazing about California is that there's no
place with a better firefighting service, that have the most
amazing technology for firefighting. They are the best prepared. They
have tried to pass a law to make sure people
don't put any foliage within five feet of their house
Paradise exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
You saw Lucy Walker's film Gate not but I've.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Heard a lot about it. So this five foot of
space marker is supposed to be scientifically proven to keep
your house from catching fire, or at least prevent these
conflagrations where like a thousand houses can catch on fire,
but no one wants to do it. There's whole towns
that have shot down ordinances like this.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
In the movie. In Lucy's film, they hire a consultant.
He comes and lays out the five steps. He thinks
you should take all of the very simple and they're like, no, no,
that's one of them. Keep the vegetation five feet from
the house. No wooden roofs. No, they say, no, yeah,
right back to what they had.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
I spoke to a former fire chief while the Palisades
were burning in northern California, near Berkeley, in a town
near Berkeley. He had retired two weeks before because his
town refused to pass the five foot ordinance and he
didn't want to be responsible for what would happen when
that town inheavit CA. Yeah, exactly. So it's a matter
of reassessing the way that like living in California looks
(10:32):
and feels, the aesthetic of it, and fully accepting that
there's a measure of danger to living these places, which
will be all heightened by the fact that no one
can get insurance, or if you're getting insurance, it's incredibly expensive,
which should start to kind of correct for these decades
of under valuing the risk to these areas.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
I mean, everybody wants ocean front, live by the water,
and you realize, you know what happens when there's a
three mile island and you tell people they got to
get aut or Chernobyl or whatever like that, there's something
like Beau Paul. There's a super level of toxicity and
people can't live there anymore. Well, this is not a
super level of toxicity, but it's a super level of
(11:15):
pazard for a community.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I think the thing that this teaches us, though, as well,
is that there is actually no place safe from the
ravages of climate change. This was a particularly extreme example,
and the fire risk to some of these communities is
higher than elsewhere, but the fire risk and large swaths
of California is similar. And if you're going to build
a new community, it's likely going to be in that
(11:38):
WUY zone, that wildland urban interface. So yes, certainly getting
people encouraging them to move elsewhere, but there is a
reality of these fires becoming less and less fightable all
over the place. I mean, talking to fire chiefs during
these fires, they were very clear that the physics of
this fire meant that no amount of fire response could
(11:59):
have prevented what happened. The only way to do anything
to mitigate these kinds of fires is this advanced preparation,
these hardening of homes, this changing of what the landscape
looks like.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Change.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, and you can have a beautiful garden that's made
of rocks and cacti and a gave, but you just
can't have rose bushes, you can't have palm trees. It
will take a mass cultural shift, and it's so unclear
to me what will cause that, like when will it
be bad enough that people would be willing to do that.
There's this kind of wiping of the cultural memory each
(12:33):
time this happens. And there was a time when, you know,
in the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco fire, there's
a time when we lived with urban fire in a
way that was more top of mind to people. But
it's been so long, take a big shift.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Now, you eventually you can describe this. For me, got
to the point where you were a bit overwhelmed by
all of your environmental reporting. Correct?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Correct?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Can you describe the period when that really hits you.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah. I was working at a different newsroom than I
work at now, and i'd been covering climate change for
about seven eight years at that point, and as you
know very well, it's an incredibly devastating thing to face
every day, and I had this experience of becoming quite
numb to it. I think I was covering the potential
for an ice sheet to fully collapse and thinking through
(13:19):
scientists projections of that and what it would mean, this
catastrophic sea level rise, and I registered this sense of
feeling nothing in regards to it, just sort of numbing,
and I didn't like that. I think the second way
detach the emotional quality of all this devastation from the
reality of it, there's nothing to hope for. So I
(13:39):
started combing through botany journals. Plants have always brought me
some measure of peace, and I stumbled upon what turned
out to be a massive controversy in the botanical space,
where botanists were fighting with each other about whether or
not we could consider plants intelligent or possibly conscious, based
(13:59):
on behaviors that scientists were uncovering around communication, around memory,
kin recognition, manipulation of plants, of insects on the part
of plants. All these very plastic, spontaneous, quite cunning responses
plants had to their world that very clearly showed them
as active agents rather than these kind of passive, immobile
(14:24):
items as we typically consider them. So I realized that
was an incredibly alluring story, back to this idea of
like secrets that exist within the confines. Absolutely, and this
I did feel like it was changing my conception of
plant life. So I spent four years talking to botanists
and it totally revolutionized my thinking about the natural.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
You never had any interest in that subject of botany
in a generalis sens before.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I was obsessed with ferns. Ferns are amazing. Between
two f there you go and I that kind of
spiraled out into a larger interest in But no, it's
the beauty of being a journalists. You get to fixate
on new topics all the time and call scientists up
and the greatest scientists in their field will give you
(15:09):
time and give you a personal masterclass on their field
and turning that attention towards botanists. They are some of
the most fascinating scientists and enthusiastic scientists in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Is there someone I'm sure there's many, but is there
someone you want to recognize?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yes, there's a botanist ecologist named Richard Carbon at UC Davis,
and he is a pioneer in the world of plant communication.
He studies sagebrush so California, of course, Northern California full
of sagebrush and it has that camphorus unctious smell And
what you're smelling is one small portion of the many,
many chemical compounds that sagebrush releases into the air. And
(15:46):
he was responsible for discovering the ways that those contain information,
the way that sagebrush signal to nearby plants about danger
in the area and how they will signal differently to
their biological kin than to strangers. Plants that they can
have even regional dialects of these chemical languages. Graphically isolated
sagebrush will have dialects much like human dialects of how
(16:10):
they create these compounds in their bodies. And his work
is absolutely fascinating. That's the other thing about this is
you spend so much time thinking about the devastation of
the natural world. What about the wonder and awe of
the natural world? I think this process of learning about plants. Yes,
this was about how we define intelligence, how we defined consciousness,
but it was more about for me the incredible perfusion
(16:34):
of biological creativity out there, this idea that we are
all products of wild evolutionary exuberance, and plants are some
of the most bizarre versions of that. But it really
situated me back into this kind of humble or more
humble space of recognizing how we are. Each each species
(16:55):
is like the end node of millions of years of
absolutely why evolution, and to sort of snuff out any
little node is becomes a much bigger ethical crime. So
it was really good for actually connecting me back to
the really tangible stakes of what we stand to lose
with climate change, particularly loss of plant species, but loss
(17:17):
of anything.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger. If you enjoy conversations about
the environment and the role big cities like New York
play and reducing waste, check out my episode with Pam Lardo,
the former Deputy Commissioner of New York City's Department of
Environmental Protection and New York City's first recyclings are Ron Gonan.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
This is the fascinating world of biology. We use a
community of bacteria that actually digests the suspended organic material
and clean the water via that method, and from there
it goes to another settling tank where we settle out
the biomass that just can assumed all this organic matter.
But the water that comes out of the final settling
tank gets disinfection, basically household bleached to take any particular
(18:07):
pathogens out, and that gets either discharged to receiving waters
or in some cases in some cities, they're able to
polish a little bit more easy for irrigation purposes.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
To hear more of my conversation with Pammy Lardo and
Ron Gonan, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After
the break, Zoe Schlanger talks about how a typical home
can be extremely flammable and the unseen dangers of synthetic furniture.
(18:46):
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Zoe Schlanger's recent article for The Atlantic, titled what Happens
When a Plastic City Burns examines the aftermath of the
disastrous two thousand twenty five wildfires in Los Angeles County.
The environmental impact of an urban fire on the city
(19:07):
of LA calls to mind the aftermath of nine to
eleven in New York City. I was curious why Schlanger
felt compelled to write about the Los Angeles fires as
a New Yorker.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
This was the story of our time. What happened in
LA is something that we are facing in our next
twenty years. There will be many more fires like this,
that's all but guaranteed. And this idea of urban fire
coming back to the US is incredibly important to focus
on because it's different firefighting and different hazards than wildland fires.
(19:39):
Wildland fires produce lots of toxic compounds, but urban fires
produce many, many more, and many more noxious ones. Ones
We don't fully understand. Even so as someone who thinks
about environmental contamination, I go through great pains, Like I
bought a couch a few months ago, and it took
(20:00):
incredible amounts of research to find a couch that was
free of perfluorinated chemicals p fast those forever chemicals, to
find a couch without polyurethane foam blocks as the upholstery.
And then I started thinking about this, and there's quotes
from fire chiefs going back years saying things like a
couch is basically a block of gasoline. Yeah, this retired
(20:23):
Maryland Fower chief exactly because what is polyurethane foam, which
is in all our furniture. It's a polymer, it's gas,
it's oil, it's petroleum. And that's the same with everything.
Thinking about what happens in a modern house fire different
from let's say the Great Chicago Fire, is you have
a house clad in vinyl siding. It's got vinyl plank flooring,
(20:44):
PBC pipes, the curtains are polyester, the mattress is just
a block of gasoline. Every component of that house is
flammable in a new way, and they light so much faster.
There was a wonderful. This nonprofit on fire safety did
this demonstration on videos on YouTube, very compelling watching, where
(21:05):
they built two home a living room sets exactly the
same size, with the same number of items, but one
was mostly natural materials and one was synthetic, which is
much a much more common setup. So they had this,
you know, synthetic couch, engineered wood furniture. You know, that's
like everything that you might get at a department store.
The glues holding the engineered bits of wood together is polymer.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
They had like a curtain made of polyester in the
other room, cotton curtain, cotton stuffed pillows on the couch,
wooden frame, couch, et cetera. What happened in when they
lit in an identical fire was that the room full
of natural materials lit very easily, but the flame sort
of stayed in place for a while. It took about
(21:50):
twenty six minutes for that room to reach flashover, which
is the point in which everything's ignited and escape is impossible.
So it's very important from a firefighting perspective and a
life saving perspective. In the synthetic room, the fire started
as a smolder produced much more noxious black smoke much faster,
and flashover happened in under five minutes. So if you're
(22:13):
in that home, if you're asleep, the chance of escape
goes down, which is also why we've seen the rate
of deaths and home fires go up. There's fewer home
fires now than there were in the eighties, but there's
something like thirty percent maybe little more thirty four percent
more deaths when it does occur. And that's you know,
you can really ask any fire chief that has everything
(22:33):
to do with these polymer materials, these plastics, and our
bucket of gasoline precisely. And I think people don't always
connect this fact that plastic plastic is an oil product.
It's a petroleum product, and when we think about the
flammability of petroleum, that applies to all of our plastic items.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Just this morning, I picked a sample to recover a
couch in my kid's playroom, which, of course, with all
my kids, that cover is ruined by grape juice and
everything's all over the place. But anyway, I'm getting the
couch cover, and she drops off the materials, the woman
who are going to do the work for us, and
I'm going through them, and I see one and it
(23:12):
says hemp, and in my haste a mistake that it's
made out of hemp, but you know, the pattern is
called hemp. It's a pattern made to look like hemp.
And then when she went and got the details from me,
it's aid forty percent poly So we had to throw that.
That was my first choice decoratively speaking.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
You know, it's interesting about things like picking couch covers.
We've just discussed how fast polyesters ignite. Fine, but if
you see a couch material or any material that says
it's performance, a performance fabric that's scuff resistant, stain resistant,
that's all then coded in clothing p fasts This forever chemical,
the teflon toxin that people may have heard about. So
(23:52):
you have a base of woven plastic covered in a
lacker of a compound that's associated with many cancers and
potentially neurotoxic, and the combination you light that on fire,
you create many many other compounds in the burning process,
some of which we don't fully understand, but none of
which are going to be good for us.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
My wife and have gotten better, and I think we're
pretty good actually in terms of avoiding clothes for our
children that are heavy heavy polyester and plastic based, you know,
petroleum based products. And the same with our home. We
have a house on Long Island and the kids are
in and out of the house all day long. You know,
they run out to the pool, they run here, they
do this. We have a big piece of property. And
(24:31):
then in the city they're inside and they're inside for months,
and they go to their play space, they go to
their soccer classes, they're inside buildings. And you're thinking, I mean,
I'm told that like certain fabrics you wear, the stuff
like little microscopic flexs of it are coming off of plastic.
When these couches you have deteriorates slowly flex of they're
sprayed with some kind of that little little pieces of
(24:54):
little microchar it's of plastic. Or with these in the
air just you sit down on it. Yeah, they go
into the air. So another thing for me to worry about.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
You know, it can be endless and overwhelming, and then
you have to think about plants for a few years.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Where are you working now? Can you say?
Speaker 2 (25:08):
I work at the Atlantic magazine?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
So you're on the staff of the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
I am, yes, I cover climate.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
There and they so that's your Bailey.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Wick I'm the only climate reporter at the Atlantic currently.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Really, and you never have any issues with them in
terms of me. And I'm not going to assume the
Atlantic is exempt from this, which is you don't ever
have any editorial blowback about things you want to do.
They don't care. You can do whatever you want to do.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
They are staunch defenders of fact based journalism. So as
long as I can back it up with fact and
our fact checkers don't think it's there's anything wrong with it,
it gets published.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Do you think that the Atlantic, because obviously the New
Yorker would fit into this category. And I think the Times,
which was in I was told almost twenty years ago
they were in grave danger. There was some rumor that
they were going to be sold. So The Times comes
out in the digital agents and they work it out.
They're in good shape now. They got a lot of
online subscribers. And I'm assuming the same as Sue for
The Atlantic. Correct like these magazines that have survived, I
(26:04):
viewed The Atlantic as a survivor. Oh, certainly, And then
what do they attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (26:08):
You know what? The subscriptions to our print magazine are
going up right now. It's a rare case of that,
I think happening. The Atlantic just became profitable just in
the last few months after you know, that's unusual from
a media company now, and we went from at one
point having to cut down to eleven print issues a
year to going back up to twelve just recently. So
print is not dead from our perspective, and I feel
(26:31):
very lucky to be at one of the rare places
where that's the case.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
May I ask, what are you working on next?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Right now, I'm working on covering the Trump transition from
an environmental perspective, thinking through all the various ways that
environmental work is being halted, and that applies to absolutely everything.
I mean, including the nine to eleven Fund or the
many people who developed cancers after nine to eleven. There
was the news just this week that the White House
(26:58):
was pulling back funding from that. They've now been so
sort of shamed into putting it back. But it's a
lot of moving parts, and we're losing the enforcement mechanisms
that keep our environmental laws working properly, and that will
surely have a lot of interesting impacts.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
It's interesting that you say that because first stumbling upon
your writing as a result of this plastics thing and
the toxicity from these fires, And the same thing I
noticed about your words now, is this idea of enforcement
the United States. In my work I've done environmentally and
the advocacy I've been involved with from a few decades now,
(27:35):
is that there are plenty of good laws on the
books in this country and there's no enforcement. Sure, they
don't make anybody do anything that they should be doing
a large industry.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Do you agree, I say, we go through phases of
it being better and worse. I think from an environmental perspective,
we have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,
and the EBA has always functioned on a shoe string
budget in terms of enforcing anything related to those two things.
But actually, what I'm really interested now is the fact
that environmental justice as a government concept is being erased
(28:06):
in this administration. And most people think, oh, environmental justice,
that's this kind of like a DEI thing ideologically, but
what is the actual impact. And the impact is the
fact that Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act
leave a ton of environmental hazards uncovered because they regulate
each point source of pollution. But let's say you're a
(28:28):
person living in a neighborhood where there's twenty five sources
of pollution. There's four refineries, there's a garbage incinerator, there's
several factories, nuclear power plan nuclear anything of that nature.
Trucking in the area, that's a combined effect that you're ingesting,
breathing in as a resident of that area that is
completely uncovered by either of those two main environmental acts
(28:51):
that we have on the books. And so environmental justice
exists to fill that space, to have some government oversight
mediating the way that people experience those many, many sources
of pollution at once. And without that, we like many
many people will fall through the cracks of that. So
you have diminished enforcement even of the two main laws
that we have in the books, But then you have
(29:12):
absolutely nothing at helping people where they're actually at and
how they actually experience environmental harm. These are neighborhoods where
the life expectancy could be twelve years less than the
neighborhood next door, just because they have so many sources
of pollution. So this eradicating of environmental justice is a
deeper issue, I think than most people realize.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Writer and journalist Zoe Schlanger. If you're enjoying this conversation,
Tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. When we come back, Schlanger discusses how climate
denial often has better funding than climate education and why
(29:56):
she believes the narrative has been pushed in the wrong direction.
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Zoe
(30:17):
Schlanger's writing often focuses on climate change and environmental policy. Recently,
she took a break to explore the world of botany
during a period of perceived burnout. While writing about the
current state of the climate in the aftermath of the
recent Los Angeles fires, I wondered what more will it
(30:38):
take for people to truly pay attention to the changes
in our climate? And what gives Schlanger hope for environmental
advocacy these days.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I think there are a number of people in government
who really want to make a real difference. I most
recently felt hope when listening to a Senate hearing about
the role of insurance companies in the climate crisis and
the fact that they were dropping many people from home
insurance because they lived in such climate vulnerable areas, but
(31:11):
at the same time, we're still ensuring fossil fuel projects.
And also the insurance sector is a major investor in
the fossil fuel industry. And it was heartening to see
senators really take them to task and go how can
you have a hand in both of these things? And
that was Cenator Sheldon Whitehouse and Senator bor Elizabeth Warren
asking really tough questions of So whenever I see a
(31:33):
real accountability action take place where we're actually pointing the
finger at actors that are knowingly contributing to this, that's
very heartening to me, because I think too much focus
is on the sort of individual responsibility, this idea we
should all recycle, which I'm not saying anyone should stop doing,
but we are part of a system, and the system
(31:54):
is larger than any individual consumer. It's not right to
say that just because you consume fossil fuels that you
are implicated in the climate crisis. There's much bigger machinations
at work to keep us doing that, and it's always
heartening to see some government officials stepping up and recognizing that.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Well, when you hear the propaganda from quote unquote the
other side the business, I shall we say where they
mock recycling and say it's only making a little dent,
And I thought to myself, well, it's more the spirit
of it. The recycling thing, to me is just like
a credo. You're making a stand and saying I care
enough about the environment, and hopefully that again will expand
(32:31):
in other directions. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I think I covered the plastic industry for several years
and learning how little gets actually recycled and other watching
other people come to that realization as well, produces some
measure of rage. And I think rage is a very
important emotion when it comes to these things. It's very
like you said, you recycle, maybe not because you think
it's going to save the world, but because you are
(32:53):
putting your flag in the ground that you want to
do something, and you are at the same time expressing
a measure disappointment in the powers of it.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I don't like to use the word rage anymore. I
like to use the word indignation.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Indignation, productive indignation.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
We can't We got to be careful what we rage
against these days. For myself, I wonder environmentally what's going
to have to happen, And I'm not talking about some
horror movie or you know, some tsunami the size of
the Grand Canyon comes rolling in. But I wonder what's
going to have to happen before people really really start
to pay attention to this on a wholesale level. Do
(33:27):
you ever think about that?
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Well, yeah, this kind of also goes back to things
that give me hope. Much more direct form of hope
I have is the fact that to some degree, this
transition to electrification to renewable sources is going to happen,
whether or not we have government support of doing so.
The solar boom is in full effect. It's totally surpassing
(33:50):
everybody's ideas of what would happen. So I am somewhat
heartened by the fact that the market itself is driving
in the direction of this is the cheapest, best, most
efficient form of energy can make, and we're going to
do it because it makes market sense. So I'm hoping
that it's not even won't be about this mass wholesale
devastation that we have to endure to finally wake up.
(34:11):
It'll just be the sensible business choice for some energy companies.
That may be wishful thinking, but I think it's possible,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I realized that For me, I think do people only react?
I mean, I'm asking this is a question, but it's
more rhetorical, which is that do people in this country, especially,
do they react to things only when it touches them?
Like there's fires in California, but don't see any fire.
No fires on sixth Avenue. You know, we're good here,
(34:40):
But what's the we had sandy and the water came
up to fourteenth Street or whatever. Does it really always
have to be that it impacts you before you really
really care? Do you believe that?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I think that that's a pretty rational facet of being
a human, that things are really untangible until they're tangible.
And I don't necessarily blame people for not thinking about
it in their daily busy lives, but I feel like,
you know, even thinking about fires. We were all here
for the Canadian wildfire smoke that hit in New York
City so intensely. I was actually in Canada during that time,
(35:10):
but people felt touched by that. I don't think there's
very few places in the country that haven't already been
touched by some kind of climate disaster.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Even next Arizona one hundred degrees over these for one
hundred days. I'm like, that's not enough to drive you
towards some environmental.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah, well, you one can't discount the decades of misinformation,
willful disinformation that was perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry.
You know, I know you had Naomi or Rescu's on
your show, and of course she wrote Merchants of Doubt,
the incredible book about this. But I recently had to
review another recent book called The Parrot and the Igloo,
(35:47):
and that was just this recounting of the last fifty
sixty years of very well financed disinformation to keep us
from really engaging with the climate issues. It felt that
every time the country was at a precipice of genuine concern,
scientists had officially broken through. Congress was engaged the sort
of pr machine to avoid any real phase out of
(36:10):
fossil fuels or real recognition of this issue at a
federal level. Were dropped in, and this narrative was pushed
that climate change isn't real. And this is a classic pattern.
Climate denihalism is much more funded in many ways than
climate education, and so that is why people are in
this position. It's not for lack of self interest. It's
(36:31):
actually just education in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Well, I remember when on the south shore of Long Island,
near my home I grew up in as a child,
that were going to build these wind turbines, which all
people were screaming, you know, environmentalists having to deal with
the nimbi crowded was saying, these are to these I sores,
and these going to be so ugly, and you're to
look out on the ocean from the beaches, the fabled
(36:55):
beaches of Long Island and see all this crap. And
I thought, God, when I see wind turbines anywhere, it's
like the statue of liberty. To me, it's a symbol
of our freedom from something that's going to kill us eventually.
You know. My spirit animal teaches me that the Earth
is a self managing mechanism and we will all die
(37:16):
off because the planet needs to get rid of us
the planet for the planet to survive on some level,
a humankind must go unless they amended their ways and
lived more because some kind of a spiritual connection to
the land and the water. And the other thing I
think is that solar arrays all across Death Valley, and
we should have wind turbines on the Great Lakes. Someone
(37:37):
told me once that they put wind turbines to write
amount in the right places in the Great Lakes. You
have enough power for thirty percent of the country from
the winds during that time of year when it's very
very high winds there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I mean you think about the expansion of the fossil
fuel infrastructure. That was a massive infrastructure process that the
country went through at some point, and we can do
the same thing, could have a massive industrial proliferation of
clean energy. But back to your point about humans needing
to die off, I think that's actually that sort of
forecloses a certain measure of hope. I mean, humanity has
(38:12):
not always had this orientation towards the natural world. Actually,
for far longer than our current version of exploiting the
natural world. There has been the long history of humanity
that we're very much stewards of and organisms working in
concert with the natural world. And I do think humans
will be the ones to figure out how to return
(38:32):
to such a state. But I don't think that the
planet's going to spit us out, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I want to thank you so much for coming on
and doing this with me. I read your writing, and
I'm just such a great admirer of your thinking. For
someone who is covering this, you do it so well.
I mean, you're so articulate and about this subject in others.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
So appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
My thanks to writer and journalist Zoey Schlang. This episode
was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Danielle Gingrich by Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing, as brought
to you by iHeart Radio
Host
Alec Baldwin
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