Me, How to Save the Planet Reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis, and This Is How I Work

Given the pandemic, you will be forgiven if you briefly forget about another apocalyptic disaster that dominated our worries. But climate change remains an ongoing threat, and Kendra Pierre-Louis covers the implications of it on the hit podcast How to Save the Planet , where she is Producer and Senior Climate Correspondent.

What interests me most about Kendra’s approach to this huge topic is how she explores the systems that affect us all, starting from the idea that traditional ideals of personal responsibility and tough individualism can be applied to climate change. I spoke to Kendra about the impact that each of us can have on the climate, where we should focus our energy and how it gets results.

I often wonder how much we can do at home to combat climate change. How useful are small decisions like recycling and switching to high efficiency light bulbs?

So the idea is that humans cannot make a difference with climate change. At the heart of this belief is the idea that we can single-handedly reduce our carbon footprint to zero. First, this is impossible without death or complete flight from American society.

This is also the answer to the wrong question. Why do we base our understanding of personal responsibility as consumption? Our consumption is built into systems. Most people living in New York do not drive or rarely drive, not because they are exemplars of climatic virtue, but because driving in New York is hell and public transportation is cheap and affordable. It is a system that helps them reduce their carbon footprint. So how do you change the system?

We talk about this a lot in How to Save the Planet . Personal responsibility is not something you consume because that choice is so important to wealth, access, and wider systems. Take the bulbs. We all use more efficient light bulbs to comply with federal laws than we did ten years ago. Compact fluorescent lamps or LEDs have become the norm. But even if you buy an incandescent lamp, it is true that it is not as energy efficient as other lamps. But they are still 30-40% more effective than ten years ago. And this is because of politics.

Your dishwasher, washing machine, refrigerator – they all use less water and energy than they did a generation ago. And this is because of politics. And when you average that across the country, it has a much bigger impact than, for example, wearing underwear twice or doing something light in the name of Mother Earth.

So my personal responsibility is not to focus on changing bulbs. Yes do it; but how do you use your talents? It’s great to compost and set a low thermostat when you’re not at home, but if your day-to-day job helps fossil fuel companies find more oil, you’re still helping humanity get into a dangerous place. This overrides everything you do with your personal consumption. If you are a journalist but spread misinformation about the climate in the name of “objectivity,” first of all, please stop. But also start with this, not the toilet.

Real personal responsibility is community connection. At least we should have learned this from COVID. Remember the Maine wedding that killed seven people, none of whom attended? It’s all connected. So ask yourself: what is your community doing to reduce its carbon footprint? How can you hold your legislators accountable? Should you run for office yourself? What leverage can you use to bring about broader changes in order to live within planetary limits? This is what we are trying to highlight in How to Save the Planet .

I don’t mean to say that the idea that many of us really need to live differently is wrong. The average home size in the United States has grown even as family size has decreased, so we spend a huge amount of resources heating and cooling unoccupied spaces. Before the pandemic, we threw away a third of the food we brought home. All of this has detrimental effects on the climate. But decarbonizing your life will take all of your time and attention [which] could be better used elsewhere.

So what should we do as individuals?

Pick a couple of goals that you can automate and then focus on other things. As for me, I try to reduce the amount of food waste. It’s about the climate, but it’s also about paying tribute to my privilege. So many people suffer from food insecurity, and we use so much water, fertilizer and labor to produce food. At least I can respect that and that’s what I buy. But mourning the head lettuce frozen in the back of the refrigerator all day is not the best use of my time and energy. Climate change reporting is more important.

How does your job work?

I live in chaos. I moved in the fall after the clarifying moment of the pandemic this summer, when I realized that nothing would change anytime soon, and the only way to survive [is] I can be closer to nature and those around me. as few people as possible. So I did this and my COVID setup is a one bedroom apartment in New England where I carved out a corner of my living room with a table that has an external monitor, a bookshelf, really cute plants, an inkjet printer without a balloon. a printer and CD-ROM drive which is very old and which I have just because it didn’t die.

And yet I spend 80% of my time working lying on the couch under a blanket that I was persuaded to buy due to Instagram ads. I mostly use the desktop setting when cutting audio or in external video chat where I need to look “professional”.

In terms of hardware, my work computer is a MacBook Pro, which I use under duress because I’m a PC for life. We use ProTools to cut audio; for automatic transcription we use Descript, which I like better than Trint, but not like Temi.

For my to-do list, I have a kind of ridiculous daily planner that I ignore, and I use Sunsama, which I like because I like to keep my personal and professional calendar in one place. It connects to Trello, which I use as a complete data dump for ideas that I’m not willing to share with other people.

For the interview, if it’s a background call, I use my own cell phone – Android two years ago; I record with a monitor connected to an eight-year-old TASCAM recorder. When it comes to recording shows, we do very little field reporting right now due to COVID, so we usually use [Google Meet] or Zoom with a source that records itself, usually using the recording app on our mobile phone. If I’m actually in an interview and not just reporting, I’m recording my side with a shotgun mic connected to the Zoom H5.

When I cut the sound, I use my work headphones – the Sony MDR-7506 headphones. They’re plugged in, and to be honest, they hurt my head, so most of the time I wear a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s, which were not a buy when I was working in an open office and wanted big headphones to give a signal. that I was busy with work and should be left alone. Three days later, we were told to work from home, which made the whole purchase pointless, but I had no intention of going back to the store and returning them in the midst of the pandemic.

You traveled a ton before the pandemic and I’m curious what you might have learned earlier from working outside the home.

I sincerely think my favorite style of work is lying on the couch, but I can work anywhere and when my mood improves, I can record large portions of entire stories on my phone. This is partly how I wrote this essay for Sierra on near-death in Myanmar. I started using the phone as soon as I realized that I was okay, because he needed to get out. The rest I wrote by hand because I find [it] more intimate and easy when I try to write about difficult things.

I think your ability to get things done mostly comes from within, and that environment can support or hinder it, but you can be in an “ideal” work environment and do nothing because you don’t have free space to do something. … , and vice versa.

I think the pandemic has highlighted this. For me, the most important lesson in working with others is the transition from textual reports to audio. In text, this is a fairly linear relationship: you write something, your editor edits; rinse and repeat. In audio, at least Gimlet style, it’s more collaborative all the time. I could write a draft script myself, but after that everything will be ready, and there will be many people at each stage – this is more iterative. It taught me a lot about communication because you also juggle a lot more charts.

When it comes to communication, there are so many ways to do it now, but they all have drawbacks – lately, this has meant everything from “zoom fatigue” to books on how to stop relying on email . What kind of communication do you prefer?

When I try to get work done, it means either recording or cutting the audio, and the only way to do this is to remove all the distractions, so I hardly use all communication devices.

So, you don’t need a perfect work environment, but you need motivation (or discipline, whatever the motivation) to get things done – what do you do to create motivation to work when you’re not particularly inspired?

I think that people who do “cognitive” work may be somewhat pretentious about what they do, instead of admitting that at some level we are all just creating widgets.

I was fortunate enough to work from home during the pandemic, which is a privilege, but it also means that I mostly brought things home. And I guess the UPS woman has days when she doesn’t feel very motivated to bring me a box from the farm or whatever. But she does it. Maybe she spends more time arranging boxes to make the day enjoyable, or maybe I spend more time sending emails to avoid scripting or cutting audio on the day I prefer to watch movies, but I do. because this is my job. And I find the fear of being fired because of not doing the basic tasks that make up my job and being in complete need is a great motivator.

What good job advice did you get?

Protect your author. Don’t put your name on something that you would be ashamed of if it were. And stop working with editors who force this choice on you.

Who else would you like to know how they work?

Would love to see someone like Clint Smith, Elizabeth Colbert, Jasmine Ward, or Johnny Sun structure their time.

This article has been edited for clarity.