‘Everything I could’

Dahr Jamail witnessed climate change firsthand in the Alaskan wilderness in the ’90s, where the mountaineer explored, offered guided tours and performed rescues. As the years passed, he noticed less and less snowfall. “It was slapping you in the face regularly,” he said. “You couldn’t miss it.”

Climate change is what Jamail calls the “biggest existential crisis humanity has ever faced,” and it’s not of the “future tense.” For about seven years, the award-winning journalist has focused on the environment, reporting extensively on how humanity has irreversibly disrupted the climate. He’ll spend the first half of his keynote presentation at Chico State’s This Way to Sustainability Conference (3:30-5 p.m. today, March 15), with “a whole lot of bad news” about what’s going on with the planet, followed by sharing what he has been doing to lessen his own impact on the Earth.

Jamail’s concerned about all aspects of global warming, of course, but told the CN&R about the worries he has for the Arctic in particular, along with the world’s rain forests. Last year, the Amazon (the world’s largest rain forest), became a net producer of carbon. For the last two years, the Arctic has experienced its warmest average temperatures since 1900, and, in March 2017, reported the lowest maximum sea ice coverage ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Program. The North Pole recently experienced several days of above freezing temperatures.

“Just imagine: the North Pole in the dead of winter in complete blackness, melting,” Jamail said. “If that’s not a wake-up call, I don’t know what is.”

Jamail added that just because the Trump administration is “hellbent on destroying life on Earth,” that isn’t going to stop him “from doing the opposite.” While the bulk of what he reports is quite bleak, taking action in his daily life and career is his contribution to the world; his attempt to make things a little bit better. His home is solar-powered, he grows most of his own food and rides a bicycle, with the intent of eventually eliminating other modes of travel, such as flight, and being fossil-fuel free.

“I personally feel 100 percent morally obligated to do absolutely everything I can do to reduce my carbon footprint down to zero, to where I am actually managing to sequester more carbon than I emit … and do my job—inform people, educate people and hopefully encourage people to do the same thing.”

Though Jamail has always enjoyed the outdoors and been attuned to nature, his career in journalism actually began in 2003 with the Iraq War. He became outraged at propaganda attempting to sell the war to the American public, he said, and “took what the government was doing personally.”

Driven by an intense desire to provide the public with accurate information—the essence of democracy—he traveled to Iraq and wrote about how the war was impacting the Iraqi people, choosing not to embed with the military.

“Any story, especially in today’s world, you’re either writing from the perspective of the state and people who have power and money or from the perspective of people who are being impacted by that policy,” Jamail said. “With my journalism, I constantly choose to take the sides of the people. And now, with the climate, I consciously choose to take the side of the planet.”

That fresh, raw hunger for justice he felt in his early 30s in Iraq hasn’t gone anywhere. The BP oil spill grabbed Jamail by the collar and pulled him toward environmental journalism in 2010. Some of his fondest memories as a boy were spent in Galveston, Texas, his home state, catching fish, shrimp and crabs in the Gulf of Mexico with his parents. That memory now includes visions of the body of water completely contaminated with toxic material, Jamail said.

With the Trump administration’s “willful, active denial” of climate change today, it’s still personal, he added. Former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was secretary of state (ousted by Trump as of Tuesday), and Scott Pruitt, who Jamail calls the “fossil fuel industry’s wet dream,” is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency—recently, Pruitt questioned whether global warming “necessarily is a bad thing,” and has disagreed that humans are a primary contributor.

“When I see what they’re doing to the EPA, when I see Trump pull out of the climate accords … that makes me angry, and I want to write about it,” he said. “If [people] ask, ‘What did you do?’ I want to be able to say that I did everything I could, both personally and with my work.”

The choices made by the world’s policy makers affect all of us, Jamail said, and they are affecting the planet. “People need to understand what’s happening,” he said. “That continues to be a part of my motivation.”

Jamail can see a trajectory of where the world could be headed, and the picture is pretty depressing: a future with no land-terminating glaciers, ice only in Greenland and Antarctica, and parts of the planet so hot they’re like wastelands, with no water or food. He sees governments falling apart and wars over valuable resources, like water, becoming rampant.

Though Jamail is gravely concerned, he sees hope in younger generations, which, for the most part, just “get it”: “There’s no explanation necessary about the climate crisis,” he said, “and they are fired up.”