Download the transcript as PDF

Finding Your Communication Medium: A Climate Chat with Dr. M Jackson

[Climate Decoded theme music starts, sparse and slightly reverberant, anticipatory]

KIM KENNY
Welcome to Climate Decoded. On this podcast, we decipher climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice and welcome to a series we're calling Climate Chats, where I have casual conversations with people doing pretty dang cool climate work, and we discuss that work through a communication lens.

Today I talk with Dr. M. Jackson. She's a glaciologist, geographer, and National Geographic explorer, and also just one of the most badass women I've ever met.

She's the author of four books, While Glaciers Slept, The Secret Lives of Glaciers, The Ice Sings Back, and Ice to Water, the last of which is her very first novel. In this chat, we talk about the importance of mentorship and the interconnectedness of both environmental and personal grief. Without further ado, Dr. M. Jackson.

[Theme music plays for 15 seconds and then fades out]

Dr. M. Jackson, thank you so much for your time today. Could you please introduce yourself and say a little bit about how you came into climate change work?

DR. M JACKSON
Kim, thanks so much for having me on your podcast today. So my name is Dr. M. Jackson, and I very broadly am a geographer and a glaciologist.

So I'm really interested in large ice systems, the people that live with them, and what has happened with that relationship in our past and our present and our future. I do a lot of climate change work, writing books, doing film and television. I do a lot of public speaking.

I try to think a lot about climate change in different ways we can tell the stories of climate change. I got into this work in a really kind of odd backwards way. I worked for a really long time and lived for a really long time in Alaska.

And I did a lot of backcountry guiding, especially on large glacier systems. And I was fascinated by this landscape, and I was fascinated by the questions that people would ask me about this landscape. But when I went to answer these questions, I couldn't actually find any real data on what was happening with these ice and how it impacted the people of the small town I lived in in southeast Alaska, and then how it might impact all these tourists who were coming.

I couldn't find any of that data anywhere. And that should be the end of the story, but it's not. I never considered myself a scientist. I never thought I could go find my own answers. I did not have the most thorough education growing up. I come from a pretty socioeconomically limited background and while my parents were always very much encouraging of me reading and doing these things, the money to do higher education, the money to go out in the world was just simply not there. So I kind of viewed my world in the context of what job would I do to pay my bills and then to do that well. And so the idea of climate change, the idea of participating in a conversation, wasn't really what younger me thought about and so I kept getting all these glacier questions, and I didn't know how and who would answer them. But I had a conversation with somebody that changed the outcome of my life.

I happened to meet a guy from the National Geographic Society named Ford Cochran in Alaska.

And because I didn't really have an understanding of how science worked, this was a guy that was actually a volcanologist by training. And he was just one of those people who had been at the Geographic since the 80s and knew everybody anywhere. And I remember talking to him about all of these things that were happening on this really specific glacier and asking him if he had the answers to these questions.

And what should have happened was him saying, I have no idea what you're talking about. I live in Washington, D.C. I couldn't answer this for you, because that's usually how the story goes. But instead, this incredible human being turned to me and said, those are really important questions you're asking and I think that you have the ability to answer them.

And then he took that one step further. He said, here are some places you can eat. Here are some people that you can talk to and he started to give me options. And every time I hit a brick wall, every time I didn't have funding, every time I didn't know where to apply for school, didn't have a letter of recommendation, I never took my GREs and I needed to get into a graduate school program. There you go.

This is a person who enacted incredible mentorship for me and showed me every way that if the door was blocked, I could go in through a window. And I remember telling him over and over, I'm learning this about glaciers and how they're tied to climate change. I want to be part of that conversation.

And he told me, go to graduate school, get your doctorate. I said, I want to do all of that. I was really, really terrified about going to graduate school and he supported me every step of the way. He was even on my doctoral committee as an outside member from the university. I think about that a lot when I think about ‘what is my climate change work?’ Because for a lot of people, climate change work is particularly the science that they're working on.

And for me, working in glaciology, that's a huge part of it. But another huge wing of my climate change work today is reenacting what happened for me, is mentorship, is reaching out and finding people who are working in rivers, in trees, in public art, in equity, and saying, how can I amplify? How can I open windows? How can I build? Because that's the only way we are going to be able to address climate change. 

KIM KENNY

Incredible how one person can have such an influence on the trajectory of our lives, and it can be totally unexpected. Was he someone that you were guiding in Alaska? Was on one of your tours?

DR. M JACKSON
The funny thing is, on this story, is that, I was guiding and doing logistics work for The National Geographic and he came out. And so he just happened to be out there. It was one of one of the most random things.

KIM KENNY

Yeah. And beautiful. Thank you for telling me that story.

And this kind of goes with your answer, and I'm guessing there's something with glaciers in there, but what would you say is your environmental ID or how you came as a person to relate to your natural world? I mean, different people could grow up on a farm or a stream in the backyard, or you're in a city and it's just the public garden. What was it for you that made you first identify with your natural world?

DR. M JACKSON

What made me first identify with my natural world has a lot to do with the education I received. And kind of building on the story I just told you for Cochran, I still remember I decided, OK, I would go to graduate school and I decided to enroll in a Masters of Environmental Science at the University of Montana in their EVST program, which is an extraordinary program. I wanted to think about and understand the science of climate change.

That was really important to me at that time period. I didn't have a background. I did not have an undergraduate in science. I'd never taken a chemistry course in my life. I didn't have any of the fundamental underpinnings that would help me in science. So I was very much nervous about science and then not feeling like I was adequate to be able to do this.

And so I decided I would go to graduate school and I would be all in and learn the science and I wanted to be a scientist with a capital S. I wanted to have that as part of my identity. And so I started.

But the first couple of days of graduate school, my mother died. And my father was also sick. And he ended up later dying as well during graduate school.

And so I had this immense personal loss right when I was gaining a new identity. And so you're asking me, what is my environmental ID and how did I come to relate to my natural world? I started to study climate change science and understand how our landscapes were changing. Our worlds were changing. Our rivers, our glaciers, our parks, our cities, everything was changing but my life had dramatically changed at the same time. And what I started to notice is that the language we use for environmental change is the same damn language that we use when our life changes, when the landscape of our family changes.

And for me, those two things became embedded in one another as we started, as I started to understand what accelerated change meant. All of us live a life where we're going to probably lose our parents. But what happens when that happens really young, when that's accelerated, when it's unexpected? How do you engage with that? What do you do when the glacier you've grown your entire life with is suddenly gone? Our language is deeply overlapping in these areas. And so, as I became a scientist I started to realize that I am a scientist and a humanist. I’m a scientist, a writer, and a communicator. I’m a scientist and all of these things and that complexity is okay. So, that’s the idea that I carry myself with, that is how I came into thinking of science in this natural world. 

KIM KENNY

You go into this in your first book, While the Glacier Slept, which I encourage all listeners to read to you and you have two other books after that. I love this interweaving of personal grief and environmental grief. I don't know if I can use that terminology, but you do it in a beautiful way in your book. So thank you. 

DR. M JACKSON

It's a fun thing. So I have a new book coming out this fall from Torrey House Press and it's fiction. And I love this book and part of prepping for when a new book comes out, the book is called Ice to Water. And I'll be doing all of these readings. And that happens when you have a new book coming out, do all these readings. I did it for the Secret Lives of Glaciers.

When the Icing’s Back and now Ice to Water. I did not do any readings of my first book While Glacier slept. I can't. It is too, I go back very rarely and look at that book. And I wrote that book as I was in it. As I was experiencing the loss of my family, I was experiencing the loss of the ice that I was working with and trying to understand. And I wrote that out and I turned it into my publisher. And I can't go back there today.

KIM KENNY

Fascinating. Yeah, I don't wanna go too much into my own personal journey, but I relate to that a lot of writing right now and going through loss and being in it. I'm super curious to see how time changes as I look back on that.

DR. M JACKSON

I'm incredibly grateful for the record. I'm incredibly grateful for the story that is out there. But sometimes we walk right on up to the edge of dark. And that's one of the empowering things about writing is you can do that. You can walk right on up to the edge of something that is incredibly dark and you can make sense of it and process it through writing. But for me, a really healthy place is then to step back. And that's what I've had to do with that book.

KIM KENNY

Wisdom. Moving on to the next questions of what kind of climate change work do you do and how do you communicate about climate change in your work? You've already touched on this a lot, but maybe an opportunity to delve into other facets that you haven't even mentioned about being on Netflix and doing Crash Course and so many options to go into here. I leave it to you. 

DR. M JACKSON

I am an inch past 40 years old, which means when I'm looking back at my life, I've had this opportunity to see the phases of importance in how we work. And for a long time, there was an emphasis on being someone who generalizes on things. And then there's an emphasis on being a specialist, knowing this one thing. And now we did generalist and we might be switching back. It's kind of hard to say right where we are right now. 

When I went through school and got my PhD, there was a strong emphasis that you must learn a thing and then do that thing really damn well. And so I probably could kill at a party, telling you all of my glacier facts. I know a shit ton about glaciers. Actually, I didn't even ask. I swear a great deal. I apologize on the front end for your listeners. 

KIM KENNY

Totally fine. Let's do the damn thing. 

DR. M JACKSON

There you go. But as much as I find glaciers fascinating, Kim, I have some really big doubts about how great my readership is for my academic articles. I think all of the four people that care about the same things I do are gonna go looking I'm Google Scholar for those articles. So that is for me the motivation for a lot of the work I do. I love science communication. I love communicating about climate change. And I love talking about it. But I can never presume an audience is gonna be just as nerd excited as I am about one way of communicating, which has kind of led me into continuously trying different ways.

Gosh, whether I'm doing a Netflix show and trying to reach an entirely different audience and get them excited about landscapes and environment, whether I did a YouTube series on Crash Course about climate change and energy. There's a really specific set of folks, my husband included, that sit there forever and watch YouTube channels. I, and it's not my go-to thing, I'm a person that wants to sit outside and read. And so I like to read nonfiction and fiction. And so I still remember I wrote my first two books were nonfiction. And then I was the visiting writer at the University of Montana. And I remember having a conversation with this, if you have not read anything by Deborah Erling, your life is not complete. She's one of my favorite writers ever. And she and I were having a conversation about how we communicate science. And she was like, why have you not talked, pardon, why have you not tried to write fiction? And I said, challenge accepted.

And so I wrote these two fiction books, one that's already out, The Ice Sings Back, and then this new one that's coming out, Ice to Water. These are stories of women. These are stories of Alaska and Oregon. These are stories of place, but it is climate change that is helixed through these stories. It's another way to talk. It's another way to think. It's another way to share. And I love it. I do a great deal of public speaking. I do a great deal of mentorship. I do a great deal of stuff that comes under this umbrella of climate change work. And then I spend a lot of time boots on the ground, just trying to look at ice and figure out what's happened into it and how it impacts you and me. So I think that's the answer to your question of what do I do, which is at changes. I love to do new things. 

KIM KENNY

I'm so inspired by how you've created your own career and it's a collection of What seems like a lot of different career, one person could pick one career path, but you've done so many different things. It's super impressive. Envisioning a positive collective future. When we think about climate change, it can often be very doomsday and we know as a communication technique that doesn't often work. It does work for some segments of audiences, but not for everyone. It's been said you can't live, I'm not sure where this quote comes from, I need to find the source. But I like the idea of it that you can't live the future that you can't envision. What is your positive vision for our collective climate future?

DR. M JACKSON

I think that I think that there's a lot of ways to think about futures. And I, I think that there's a lot of ways to think about them that don't have to be dressed with a value. Whether we're thinking about a future that is negative or positive. I think that we need to be thinking about futures, especially in the context of increasing climatic changes. We need to be thinking about futures. We need to be thinking about the different futures that we have ahead of us that we can choose to move towards. And these futures are going to have negative aspects to them. They're going to have positive aspects to them. And because of space and place and time, value associations for futures are going to shift radically by person, by time, by place, by all of these different variables. So trying to define just a positive future, just a negative future, I don't think that helps us much. 

What I can say is that I am 100% over having conversations about our future, where people talk about different ways forward and then the rest of the room talks about why such an idea won't work. I am 100% over that easy way of thinking where you just take a paradigm idea because X doesn't work, so therefore the entire idea is wrong. We of late have this culture of futurism that demands perfection, and any form of perfection is simply rooted in white supremacy. It's rooted in paternalism. It's rooted in this very harmful missionary zeal of there is one way. And that one way is supposedly perfect and I now must convert everybody to my one way of thinking. And I'm just over it. I do not have time for it. 

When someone starts taking apart an idea of a new way to think about a just future, a new way to think about regenerative futures, sustainable futures, new tech, new ways to make certain laws, regulations equitable, new ways to think with our environment about ways forward, new science, all these new ways forward. And someone says, ah, we'll never confront, we'll never be able to confront say guns in the United States because there's too many, so why don't we just give up? We can never think about climatic changes because it's too big, so we should just give up or because this particular thing won't work. I literally am just done with it and leave the room because it is not helpful. I'm thinking about futures in terms of excellence, in terms of possibility, in terms of an expectation that any of our ideas are only gonna be half-assed and barely work, but we're going to learn and we're going to adjust and we're going to pivot. We're gonna think about, here's one way to approach, here's one way to approach a coastal city and rising sea levels. And as we enact that idea and build better infrastructure that is built with an environment, that is built to allow water to seep and move and flow, which is built with the communities that are already there and the people that are coming. When we look at whatever it is that we have built and we reassess and we say, damn it, we forgot everyone passed Fifth Street. That doesn't mean the idea shuts down, the project shuts down. That means we pivot and we move forward. If we demand from the beginning, this absolutely impossible idea of perfection, we're never gonna move into the future. We're gonna be stuck as we are now. It is the easiest thing to say why a future will not work or why something will not work. And frankly, anyone who's on their soapbox going in that direction, I don't have time for you. 

KIM KENNY

Thank you for that reframing. And I'm going to think more about how to frame that in the future of not just positive and negative, but all of it, and moving forward with. 

DR. M JACKSON

Do you know the idea of post-traumatic growth syndrome? It is the idea that we go through something that can be valued as negative and then we grow. And for a lot of, think about books, think about some of the most incredible music that's ever been made is built off of a shitty breakup. Totally. Right? I'm trying to be very light here. But when something is not perfect, when something is not great, when something doesn't work, we don't need to move away from it because the entirety of something is bad. We can say, okay, what are we learning and how do we build? How do we grow? 

Having a strong eye of our future, we have sea level rise. We have increased forest fires. We have all the very long list of things. Those are all sources of growth. Those are all sources of how do we do better? How do we ameliorate? How do we regenerate? How do we pivot and grow with those things that we're going to be experiencing? Yeah. How do we stop them in some cases? How do we think differently? I don't want to live in a future that is simply positive because I don't generate well with positivity. I really like it in small doses. I also really like negativity in small doses. I like that whole spectrum of living and I expect my future to have that. Yeah. I want all of that together because I grow as a human being. 

KIM KENNY

Yeah, yeah. I think in our society we can have this positive, toxic positivity. Everything has to have a good outcome and we need to be happy all the time and really that's not authentic living, as you say. 

DR. M JACKSON

No, and that's a really strong American trait. If you, and it is, you can also go back and say like this has also got some in white supremacy, right? I expect you Kim, as a woman, to constantly be smiling and happy and you should combine with this state of being. And if you're not, the issue is simply you, something is wrong with you versus what about the larger circumstances of what's going on here? Again, we can grow from these things. I want a really complicated future that has the whole range of possible experiences that all of us can live in where we can just say, fuck yeah, look at the diversity of possible solutions, look at the diversity of humanity versus there should be one way. 

KIM KENNY

Yeah, yeah, thank you. Okay, wrapping up, pivoting to a final question of a chance to plug your channels, your future book, which I'd love to hear more about or anything else that you'd like to get out there into the world. 

DR. M JACKSON

I appreciate the ‘ask’ on plugging all of my stuff. I think it would be more useful for your listeners if they just thought about a single idea and it is a back to our futures. I spent a lot of time working with glaciers and I've had a lot of people ask me like, how do you know you're done? How do you know you've succeeded? And I think a dream of mine is that I walk into a room and I say, hey, I'm a glaciologist and nobody makes the remark, oh, so one day you're gonna be a historian or some variant of this.

I would love for your listeners to think about the fact that our future is not static. We have a truth right now, which is our glaciers are melting and they're melting at rates never before experienced. And we can take the word glacier out of that sentence and we can start looking at what is happening environmentally to our forests and our oceans and our rivers and so many different environmental features. What is happening to our world is not static. It's not like we all are going to arrive at a specific future and then it's over. 

Our glaciers are melting, yes, but that does not have to be the last chapter. Our glaciers are melting and they have the capacity to grow back under the right conditions. Those conditions determined by us, get our emissions down, get our planet cooled down, our glaciers can return. We have the ability to live in a series of futures that have healthy thriving glaciers, oceans, rivers, forests, all of the environment, our deserts, all of our immense landscapes. Anybody who's telling us that our future is fucked. Again, we don't have time for that. Our future is not static. Nobody has written it. I would love for your listeners to think about a range of possible futures and then how we get there. And the fact that whatever there is, you and I, we're not gonna see it in our lifetime. We might not see it in my son's lifetime. That doesn't make our work any less important. Instead, it helps guide our work. And we continue forward fighting for a future we might not see.

KIM KENNY

Dr. M. Jackson, thank you so much for that final message and for this whole conversation. I really appreciate your time and all of the work that you do.

DR. M JACKSON

Thanks, Kim.

[Theme plays to signal end of episode] 

OUTRO:

You've been listening to Climate Decoded. Climate Decoded is produced by Chantal Kaufschultz, Lara Haleth Davis-Jones, Isabelle Bordish, Greg Davis-Jones, Jens Wendel Hansson, Jamie Stark, Gracie Neer, Alex Teske, and me, Kim Kenny. To read the transcript, learn more about today's guest, and find other resources, check out the show notes. To keep up with the podcast, follow us on all the socials. We're @climate_decoded on Instagram and Twitter and Climate Decoded podcast on LinkedIn. 

To support the show, hit that follow button on your podcast platform of choice and drop us a rating or review. You can also donate to the podcast. Every little bit helps us bring you more climate content. You can find the link to donate in the show notes. Thanks for helping us get more people thinking about, talking about and acting on climate change. Until next time. 

Take care of yourselves and keep up the good work.

[Theme music plays for 25 seconds and then fades out]