When I spoke to Erik Ness several months ago about his idea for a cover story, I remember feeling a sense of relief that he wanted to write about potential answers to our climate crisis and not solely detail the threat at our doorstep. It’s not that we don’t need to take the planet’s precarious health seriously, but the world is a heavy place right now and I know I’m not the only one overwhelmed by the endless stream of bad news and natural disasters.
Ness’ piece falls under the umbrella of a relatively new category of reporting called solutions journalism. At its essence, this is reporting that examines responses to problems, be they social, environmental or economic.
As might be obvious from its name, the Solutions Journalism Network is a New York-based nonprofit devoted to this approach; it trains journalists to do solutions-based reporting and supports reporting projects around the world. In April, its co-founder, David Bornstein, gave the keynote speech for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s “Force for Positive Change” event, held on Zoom.
Bornstein talked about the power of stories and storytelling and how the choice of story told can significantly impact how people think about the world and whether they see the possibility for change.
Bornstein referenced the reporting on the Ebola crisis in 2014. “For a few months it looked like civilization around the planet was going to collapse,” he said. It led to people almost losing hope, he added. But “what ensued was pretty much an extraordinary containment effort in many African countries,” and, up until that point, the “fastest development of a vaccine ever.”
That success story, he noted, got much less attention than the original doomsday reports. Readers “heard the fear but they didn’t hear the story of the hope and the possibility.”
There are dangerous implications of feeding this kind of news to people every day, Bornstein said. “When people have a low sense of control, anxiety-inducing news leads to fear, helplessness, and a desire to tune out. We know it’s really bad for democracy and we know it’s one of the primary motivations for people seeking misinformation and disinformation. Believing in conspiracy theories comes from a sense of powerlessness, a lack of control.”
Ness, who has covered environmental and science issues for some 30 years, says he found himself getting depressed from years of reading about such things as the degradation of the Amazon rainforest and loss of species through extinction. “These are just gut punches,” he says. But, he adds, “In the last couple of years, digging into the calculus of nature-based solutions really gave me my first dose of hope. Climate change is inevitable. But we have the capacity to steer the ship. And the only way we can do that is by including nature in the equation.”
More specifically, as Ness writes in his cover story (page 16), scientists have come to believe we could pump the brakes on further climate change destruction if we put aside more land and mend what we have already damaged. And that, says Ness, should be a more relatable goal to most people than, say, a cut in carbon emissions by the year 2030.
“I really believe that everybody understands the power of nature on one level or another. Even the most cynical urbanite still appreciates their backyard, their trees. If you can just scale that up in your head and think about what it can do for the entire planet, I think we can make progress.”
The need for hope when dealing with seemingly intractable problems came up again, in a recent conversation I had with Lisa Peyton-Caire, founder and president of The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness. The organization grew out of Black Women’s Wellness Day, which Peyton-Caire launched in 2009, a few years after her mother died at 64 from heart disease. In January the 10-year-old organization moved into its own quarters on Grand Teton Plaza on Madison’s west side.
The group works to address health disparities for women of color in Wisconsin. Black mothers in Dane County, for instance, are more than twice as likely as white mothers to give birth to low-birth weight infants. The Foundation’s mission is to “energize, mobilize and support Black Women to transform their health and their lives through education, advocacy, support, and powerful partnerships.”
One of the many programs and events the Foundation sponsors is a weekly midday walk downtown. I tagged along on one recently and wrote about the experience for this month’s Snapshot (page 6). In a call to Peyton-Caire for some background on the walks, we ended up covering a lot of ground, including how it is important in advocacy work to keep hope alive by tracking progress as well as problems.
Peyton-Caire says institutional data accurately reflects the disproportionately poor health outcomes experienced by Black women in Wisconsin in such areas as chronic illness and morbidity. But there are also numerous stories of health transformations she has seen through the work of the Foundation that are not reflected in existing data. And that is why her organization is working to create new data around its work, much of which is done in collaboration with community and health system partners. “We want to dig down with a fine-tooth comb” to find the areas where progress is being made, she says.
“For example, Black women may be getting more access to doulas, which is a critical step to better birth outcomes. Or maybe more Black women are getting introduced to breastfeeding? Or more Black women are gaining access to health care than they were 10 years ago. Maybe fewer Black women are uninsured. But we can’t tell because the data isn’t there.
“We want to be able to say there’s a looming crisis that needs to be treated with urgency, but here are some tiny glimmers of hope that we see.”
It has to be both, adds Peyton-Caire, or the work becomes a depressing slog. “We try to focus on the solutions. We also try to focus on the joy, which is what the walks represent.
“We like the balance. We’re always going to be truth tellers and we’re never going to let up on talking about the disparities until they measurably change. But we also want to say, ‘Here’s what’s beginning to show signs of being promising.’”
Quick follow-up: Hopes for a promising payroll rebate for local news outlets, folded into President Biden’s social spending bill, have dimmed as the president’s $1.75 trillion package has run into a brick wall, otherwise known as U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of Virginia. On the upside: Proposed state legislation to create a tax credit for local businesses that advertise in local news outlets was introduced to the state Assembly on Dec. 9 and referred to the Committee on Ways and Means. It is co-authored by Republicans so its future in the GOP-controlled Legislature could be bright.