Dear Reader,

Hope you’ve had a great Juneteenth, Dragon Boat Festival, Father’s Day, and Summer Solstice!

Last week, The Xylom and Inside Climate News co-published a feature story on the Gulf Coast women challenging Asia’s largest petrochemical company on its home turf. I asked my counterpart, mentor, and new-ish dad Dylan Baddour, who followed environmental leaders 8,000 miles from Texas to Taiwan, what stood out to him in this reporting project. You can read his full account below.

Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

At one point in May, my wife and I looked into each other’s eyes and paused for a moment to accept what we planned to do: take a baby on a 12-hour flight.

I’d spent too much time away from home lately chasing stories in Texas, so when the opportunity suddenly arose to chase a story in Taiwan, I knew I couldn’t leave my family again. The only way to take this trip in good conscience would be if they came with me.

My wife, a fellow adventurer named Pu who I met 12 years ago in journalism school, agreed. We thought it would be fun. Actually, it wasn’t.

Our 20-month-old daughter Amara came down sick the day of our departure. Flying with a baby is like holding onto a cat for 12 hours overnight. It’s a sick cat, which also screams loudly, and all around are people trying to sleep.

Before we arrived in Taiwan, we suspected that we’d made a mistake. After we arrived, we realized that babies don’t really adjust to jet lag. Instead, Amara tumbled around the hotel room all night long while my wife stayed up so I could sleep before work in the morning. And, we both caught her virus.

I felt a creeping sense of despair as I went to work that morning, anxious, as always, about somehow getting a good story out of this. Fortunately, this reporting trip had lots to teach me about the same challenges it presented.

My objective was to write about three senior environmental leaders from Texas and Louisiana —Diane Wilson, Sharon Lavigne, and Nancy Bui — who had traveled to Taiwan to speak at the annual shareholders meeting of Formosa Plastics, Asia’s largest petrochemical company.

The women gave me a sympathetic smile when I shared my story about the baby on a plane. They’d all seen much worse.

As I would learn that week, Lavigne, 74, raised six kids while teaching special education in public schools. Wilson, 78, raised five kids as a single mother, working at a fish house and living in an un-airconditioned trailer. Bui, 72, brought her two kids when she fled Vietnam as a refugee on a crowded boat that bobbed in the ocean for 21 days. Then they spent eight months in a refugee camp.

Maybe my baby on the plane wasn’t so impressive.

Learning the stories of people like those women is the greatest part of a journalism career. A reporter has the privilege of asking questions, even personal questions, and more often than not, people are happy to answer. Everyone’s story has insight and wisdom that adds context to the world.

As I learned those women’s stories, it helped me cope with the difficult week.

I had imagined my wife and daughter relaxing and enjoying themselves while I was gone. Pu’s parents, immigrants from China, had also accompanied us to help with childcare. In the evenings, I figured, we’d all spend time together.

In reality, my wife stayed up all night with a sick baby, then kept a distance from her parents to avoid getting them sick. It happened to be the week of a record-breaking heatwave in Taipei, so going outside just felt unpleasant. All week long felt like we were barely holding things together.

As the party responsible for this plan, I ended up torn between the story, for which my small non-profit news company had paid thousands of dollars in travel expenses, and my family, which seemed to be suffering in a hotel as a result. I did the best I could for both and felt totally exhausted.

Again, I found consolation in my reporting. In an interview with Wilson, I asked if she wasn’t tired out by all this travel and business and commotion. She was extremely tired, she said. She held sleep, in particular, to be sacred. But long ago, she decided not to let it stop her. That was her secret.

She’d realized, she said, that getting tired is what stopped most people from taking a passion and turning it into their life’s work. So, she said, she’d made a rule: go until tired then go past tired.

I found comfort in that perspective. If Wilson approached tasks and challenges with an intention to exhaust herself, then how could she ever despair from exhaustion? How would the threat of weariness ever dissuade her from taking up great ambitions?

So for that week, I adopted her mantra. Go until tired then go past tired.

As we departed Taiwan, my wife and I both agreed that we’d never do that again. But we’d been together too long through too many places to believe ourselves. That was the heat of the moment talking.

After we got home and got some sleep, we looked back fondly, laughed, and accepted that we’re definitely going to do that again.

🔥 HOT OFF THE PRESSES

In Parliaments, TikTok and COP Summits, This Atlanta-Based Doomsday ‘Cult’ Spreads Climate Disinformation

Meet AllatRa, an Atlanta-headquartered, pro-Russia “religious cult” that believes humanity will go extinct by 2036. By associating itself with the European far-right, the “spiritual advisor to President Donald J. Trump”, and unsuspecting scientists, AllatRa operatives have been spreading climate disinformation in the EU Parliament, UN conferences, and TikTok.

This story is produced by openDemocracy and co-published by The Xylom. Read more here.

The Generational Health Toll of Excluding Black Americans in Healthcare

“Roughly 5 percent of doctors in the United States are Black today, compared to the 14 percent of African Americans living in the nation. It’s a ratio that has barely budged in more than a century.”

Read an exclusive excerpt from award-winning journalist Nicole Carr's new book, "The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation".

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✨ NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

• 🇲🇽 Read about our contributor Myriam Vidal Valero’s day in the life in The Open Notebook! Myriam shares her daily routine, work-from-home habits, and favorite coffee mug from the Mexican Network of Science Journalists. She says drinking out of it “makes me feel like I’m invoking the spirits of my other journalist colleagues to help me find the motivation I’m struggling to find.”

• 🟫 Our contributor Siddhant Pusdekar made his debut, “The Dirt That Refused To Die”, on Quanta Magazine!
  

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• MIAMI — Biscayne Bay Is Slowly Becoming the Ocean (Kate Waxman, Inside Climate News)

  Joseph Serafy, a NOAA research fishery biologist who has tracked Biscayne Bay fish communities for two decades, has watched the catch change as the water grows saltier. Snook, seatrout and mullet—species that thrive where fresh and salt water mix—have declined, he said, while fish that tolerate a wide range of salinity, like gray snapper and grunts, hold on. It is the signature of a bay tilting away from its estuarine past: As the brackish conditions vanish, so do the creatures built for them.

• NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee Pharmacies Sell Potent Ivermectin, Led by Anti-Vaccine Doctor Who’s Taken ‘Bucketloads’ (Brett Kelman and Rachana Pradhan, KFF Health News)

  “People are taking this because they just feel unwell. It’s almost like a panacea now,” said Rebecca Bruccoleri, the [Tennessee Poison Center]’s medical director. “I’ve heard rumblings on the internet of using ivermectin for an alternative cancer treatment, and we’re seeing it definitely in here.”

• NEW ORLEANS — A shrinking strip of New Orleans marsh helps protect 1.5 million people. Louisiana wants to save it (Tristan Baurick, Verite News)

  “This land bridge is one of the most critical natural barriers protecting the city of New Orleans,” said April Newman, a project manager for the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. “Without it, the New Orleans levee system would be much more vulnerable to overtopping or breaching.”

🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• Software Update Automatically Turns off Amazon Delivery Drivers’ AC During Dangerous Summer Heat (Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media)

  “Thing is we are up and about waaaay longer than we are driving so the ac turns off and when it turns on again we are already getting up before im the air is even cold,” one driver said. “It effectively made the ac not work and those vans get hot as fuuuck.”

• VJOSA-NARTA, Albania — ‘Flamingo Revolution’ aims to stop Kushner- backed resort on protected Albanian delta (Stefan Lovgren, Mongabay)

  “Here we are not just fighting for Albania’s natural heritage, we are fighting for the natural heritage” everywhere, Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, told Mongabay. “Italy and Spain have destroyed miles and miles of coastline and now they’re trying to restore what they lost. Albania doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”

• When science is under siege, history offers a playbook (paywalled) (Deborah Blum, Scientific American)

  “I actually think of the 1950s and 1960s as an aberrant time in economics,” says Katherine Pandora, a historian of science at the University of Oklahoma. “A lot of people today say that should be the norm. But it was not normal; there was an unnatural amount of money going into universities.” She adds, “Even the humanities were in clover.” The coffers of science were overflowing. Realistically, it couldn’t last.

  And it didn’t.

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