Episode 9: Disinformation and climate change, with Zanagee Artis

SYNOPSIS

Zanagee Artis, a climate advocate and educator with Natural Resources Defense Council, joins Rachel and Dan to talk about disinformation in arctic and coastal drilling. Zanagee describes the challenges of addressing disinformation when the time horizons of climate research spans decades. Inspired by this discussion, Rachel coins the lens of Time Feel. Dan, impressed by efforts to close the physical distance between policymakers and drilling in the arctic, suggests the lens of Distance.

STORIES OF DISINFORMATION

White House destruction photo

• Katie Harbath’s Substack

Black Death poem

• Centuries of Black Death misinformation started with a poem

INTERVIEW WITH ZANAGEE ARTIS

• Zanagee Artis
• A Kids Book About Climate Change
• Kimberly Miner’s study on alaskan arctic impacts
• Gwich’in people of Alaska
• Iñupiat people of Alaska
• Coastal Plain Caribou Alaska
• Taylor Oil Spill
• Radioactive waste water from fracking
• Oil and gas sponsoring community and social programs

LENSES

Distance

The gap between a personal context and the context of the information creates an opportunity for misinformation. (e.g. global warming isn't real when it's snowing in my town).

• How does the system help users bridge the gap between their personal context and other contexts?
• How is the information contained in the system distanced from the person consuming it? How does the system close the gap?
• How much does the system expect users to close the gap between themselves and the information?

Time Feel

In music, time feel is how the musician interprets time while playing. More than rhythm or beat, it’s how the music creates a feeling of time passing. 

• How does the system treat the passage of time?
• How does the system handle time horizons and the differing perceptions of speed?
• How does this thing support or not support the potential variations in time?
• What role does urgency play in the system?

_____________________________________________________

Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

We are way closer to each other than we are an oil and gas executive.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Dan 0:19

Rachel, we're back.

Rachel 0:21

We are back. I keep coming back. I can't quit.

Dan 0:25

I am so grateful because I I genuinely enjoy these conversations. It also gives me a bit of a sense of purpose as I observe so much disinformation.

Rachel 0:34

And wander aimlessly on this earth.

Dan 0:36

And wander aimlessly on this earth. Observing disinformation. Now I have an outlet. Now I have a way of sort of talking about when I see things in the news, like, oh, I'll get to talk to Rachel about that.

Rachel 0:48

Speaking of observing, we observe disinformation so much. So much. This podcast is a good outlet for that. It also, though, on the downside, is like I'm so much more aware of how much disinformation I'm observing all the time. It can be a little hard. So I'm pretty excited about this story because this was a real-time observation of the disinformation vacuum being avoided for once. In late October of this year, this was like last week, I think, Katie Harbath took a photo of construction at the White House from her vantage point on a domestic flight. So she's up in the air and she posted it to the internet. It went viral because until then the extent of the construction at the White House was actually unclear. And her photo was illuminating. It was the first time we had seen the full extent of the construction, destruction, whatever you want to call it. So the reason I brought this isn't because I need to talk about what's going on at the White House, but because this really hopeful thing happened where her photo brought information to the internet that ended up illuminating the truth of a situation. And Dan, you know, you and I have discussed how during a breaking news event there's this vacuum of information. Yeah. And that's a really ripe environment for disinformation to thrive. In this case, we have this moment where Katie's photo went viral while she was in the air with limited Wi-Fi. And she writes about her experience where it all could have gone sideways. Like that is set up to fail. But instead, the truth persevered. So I'm going to read a bit from her Substack newsletter where she wrote about this experience. She wrote, I clarified where I could, but I mostly watched in real time as the internet both scrambled and self-corrected, something it rarely gets credit for doing. It was thrilling, honestly, a little surreal, a lot of dopamine, and deeply satisfying to have done something so simple yet so impactful to help millions of people see and understand something happening in the world that few had actually witnessed. For all the attempts to manage perception, an unplanned moment of transparency slipped through. One photo, taken from seat 1D, opened a conversation about visibility, control, and the accelerating speed at which truth and attention travel. Wow. So there's this little nugget of hope. Sometimes the information void is filled with truth, not just misinformation.

Dan 3:16

That's great. I mean, the destruction of the White House, not great. Yeah. But someone capturing it and not feeling like they need to hide it or conceal it in any way, and just letting the picture speak for itself.

Rachel 3:29

Aaron Powell We'll post the link to this Substack article she wrote. There's a very kind of sweet part of this where her friends were the ones who actually convinced her to post the picture in the first place because she sent it to them first, like on text or whatever. Amazing. And then you know these news outlets start asking all these questions, blah, blah, blah. And her her friends and like support network were like fielding this stuff while she was in the plane.

Dan 3:50

We're Katie's staff and we'll be handling. Yes, exactly. So that's my little glimmer of hope. My story is about the Black Death. We're gonna talk about this later. The Black Death? We're not gonna talk about the Black Death later. What we will talk about is time horizons and distance and how information, truth, is often a slow burn. So this was literally released this week. I saw it first in popular science. Our understanding of how the Black Death progressed through Asia and Europe is largely driven by a poem that someone wrote at the time.

Rachel 4:33

This is like the equivalent of Taylor Swift writing history for us.

Dan 4:38

I guess so. So basically, there was a poem, and it was written in Arabic, it looks like. And the translation of the title is An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence. And it was I'm reading now from Popular Science, a story penned by the poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi in Aleppo, Syria, around 1348. It's the most famous example of this kind of narrative that features the misdeeds of a roving trickster. Well, for many years, for literally centuries, we thought the roving trickster was just sort of a stand-in for the plague. And so the idea that this character in the story sort of explained how the plague moved through from China all the way through uh Asia to Europe. The story is this 15-year journey, and so there was this assumption of like how quickly the plague moved and all of that. And a historian from the University of Exeter says all roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text. So this one text was sort of the source of misinformation about how the plague moved. He referred to it as the center of a spider's web of the myths about how the Black Death moved across the region.

Rachel 5:59

Wow.

Dan 6:00

So although the story is interesting and important cultural artifact, it does not in fact describe the Black Death. But it just goes to show you a couple things. One, that, you know, the misinformation can come from anywhere. Sort of one random interpretation of this text suddenly leads us to continue to think to this day that this is how the Black Death moved. And that sometimes it takes literally centuries for us to uncover what the truth is, or in this case, is not.

Rachel 6:31

I felt like a very veiled X-Files reference. Because the truth is out there. The truth is, I just we finally made it, Dan. We've made it.

Dan 6:41

I think we should ask our listeners which one of us is Mulder and which one of us is Scully.

Rachel 6:46

Because I feel like it's not quite as obvious as one might think.

Dan 6:49

It's not obvious. Rachel and I have the pleasure today of talking to Zanaji Artis, who advocates for policies to end oil and gas leasing and development on public lands and waters at the Natural Resources Defense Council. His advocacy focuses on ending offshore drilling and conserving the Alaskan Arctic for future generations. He co-authored a kids' book about climate change and is the host of the associated podcast 1.5, a kids' podcast about climate justice. Artis is also a founder of Zero Hour, a global youth-led climate justice organization based in the United States. Sanaji, thanks so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat.

Dan 7:36

It seems like you've been involved with a lot of different climate action stuff, and it's almost hard to choose where to start. What information space kind of looms large for you? What's the main information space that you're paying attention to these days?

SPEAKER_03 7:49

So I'm a climate advocate, and climate and environmental work intersects with a lot of different issues. It intersects with climate science, environmental science, conservation science, but it also intersects with policy, people and communities, the places we live and we work and we play. And in my work, information is constantly evolving. We're learning new science, we're honing methodologies for research, we're learning more about ecosystems and ecosystem management practices, and we're discovering new species every year. And we're also understanding harm from pollutants more deeply, and we're understanding the impacts that industry has on our communities. And all of this information also is tied to disinformation. And there's there's other people on the other side who are fighting the information and research that we do have out there that is evolving and weaponizing it for their own purposes.

Dan 8:46

Is your aim in educating really to help policy people, or is it to help the general public? Like when you do your work, who do you see as your main target audience?

SPEAKER_03 8:56

I think there's a few different audiences. So I work on public lands and waters and trying to phase out fossil fuels there. And public lands and waters are for all of us. They're for the public. And so while we are advocating that the government do more conservation in these places and steward our environments for future generations, we also are engaging the public to be engaged citizens and be a part of the governing of these places. And that looks like submitting public comments. It looks like writing in your local paper, showing up to the city council meetings, wherever there is a role for influence in actually supporting nature in people's own communities.

Dan 9:35

You said that, you know, you're sort of learning new stuff all the time. And all that new information on the one hand needs to get out. You know, you need to educate people, but is also sort of confronted with misinformation. Before we get to the misinformation, maybe you can share something with us of something that you've learned maybe in the last month, something new and cool and interesting about climate that you've started to think about how to integrate that.

SPEAKER_03 9:59

Yeah. So I think new is relative in climate, actually. And that's really interesting because climate science is often lagging behind what's happening in real time, because it takes so long to do this research and come up with these methodologies. But one interesting study from last year by Dr. Kimberly Minor and others found that ecosystem impacts of oil exploration in the Alaskan Arctic, the impacts persist today. And that's from exploration that happened in 1986. That's a long time. That's that's 40 years ago. They went back, they did some studies, there was only one exploratory well ever drilled in the Arctic refuge, and that well was remediated to the standards of our regulations and the government the same year. And what they found over 40 years later is that permafrost thaw, which is permafrost is frozen ground, there's there's water trapped in the ground, it's frozen for all time. That ground that was drilled has observed permafrost thaw and water pooling because there's melting and the water comes to the surface from the original drill site from 40 years ago. And I think that's just really fascinating because we can see, even though there's so many people out there who will say that we can do this responsibly, that we can produce energy from the Arctic in a way that coexists with nature, we're seeing lasting impacts from so long ago, and we don't even know how long that'll last.

Rachel 11:29

Do you sense a tension in time horizons? Like you said, climate science is often lagging behind. And then this example where we are now observing the continued impact of a thing that happened 40 years ago, let alone I'm sure there are many other examples where we're observing impact from things that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, right? Do you sense this dissonance in time? And do you feel like that has any effect on accuracy of information versus like the blooming of disinformation?

SPEAKER_03 11:58

I think it does. Part of that is also that scientists don't say things have 100% certainty. You know, they're they're usually using numbers like 99%, or generally speaking, the scientific community agrees on this thing. And that's because our models actually can't say with certainty, they're models into the future on climate. And we're learning how to put different inputs in, different things like the AMOC collapse, Atlantic meridianic overturning cycle. It's an ocean current, and it it brings water different ways, complicated operations. But people are learning how to model that better. People are learning how to model impacts on the Arctic better, and there's all kinds of inputs to try and build a model that's based on natural systems. And so we have some degree of certainty, for example, of what might happen when we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. And then the uncertainty increases every fraction of a degree more than that. And so when we're thinking about how we communicate risk for climate change, that gets a bit tricky. And then there's a window for misinformation to fill in that gap. We don't know for certain, and they're gonna cling onto that and say, actually, we'll be okay. And we don't need to take action in the way that advocates are calling for.

Dan 13:19

This finding is fascinating because I think part of misinformation is also just going with some assumptions, and the assumption has always been, as you said, we can do this responsibly, we can do this without affecting the space around it. And what this finding is saying is now we know better. Now we know that any action we take, even an exploratory drilling that purposefully attempted to restore things the way they were, we don't have the ability yet to leave things completely untouched. What's the next step here? What role are you playing in now sort of taking this and trying to now help educate people about the reality and correct this assumption that people have that we can restore things to the way they were?

SPEAKER_03 14:04

I mean, a lot of it comes down to communicating this information out to the public. But the whole time that there's been debate about whether or not there should be drilling on the North Slope of Alaska, we have said that it will have reparable damage on a landscape that is unique in the world. This evidence just adds backing to that. But we've been saying the same thing the whole time. And we also know that there's there's in-person accounts of change. People are experiencing climate change, people were experiencing it before it even had a name. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. Another example that we're campaigning on right now to prevent exploration in the refuge, there's a lease sale we just heard that the Trump administration will host this winter. And we've been talking a lot about how they actually do exploration because oil and gas exploration sounds pretty tame, but essentially, onshore they take these huge bumper trucks and they do seismic blasting. They've got these big discs on the bottom and they're vibrating the ground as they move along. And for miles and miles, they're crisscrossing across the landscape. And these trucks weigh 90,000 pounds, so it's huge. And during that same period, when Chevron and BP developed that first oil well for exploration in the refuge in the 1980s, they were using thumper trucks to survey the land, and we can see the tracks still many years later. And this is a place that's very dark for a huge part of the year, it's very cold, there's like low nutrition, and plant life grows very slowly there. And so we can actually see the scars of the tracks on the tundra are still out there. And so it's one thing to have these studies, but it's a whole nother thing to just say, like, here it is, here's the evidence. We have photographic proof that like this is really happening and it's a change to the landscape.

Dan 15:57

There are footprints still on the moon, but that's the moon, and you don't think of that happening here on Earth, like things are constantly moving and changing. But no, it turns out there are places that are almost moonlike, and we have to live with that. Help me understand how that distance, that moon-like distance of these things makes it complicated or introduces challenges into communicating or educating people. It can seem very far away to think about the north slope of Alaska.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Yeah, it's it's really hard to imagine. I mean, people associate polar bears with the Arctic, right? The polar bears are up there on the north slope. There's caribou up there. These are species that people will see on National Geographic, right? Or the Discovery Channel. And they think about these places as just so remote, they won't they'll never see it. And so our job is really to convince people to care about a place and advocate for policies for a place that they'll never set foot in and then they may never see, other than on their screens. And that's a huge challenge. On the one hand, I'm a young person, I care about student loans, and I care about like my opportunity to have healthcare and be able to buy a home. And there's all these issues that are immediately in front of us. And we try to connect our work on land conservation to people's everyday lives to say that actually the preservation of nature does have an impact for you personally because we're protecting nature, which has feedback loops for climate, and that connects to your utilities. And at the same time, we should protect nature for nature's sake because it is so incredible that we have such diversity of life on our planet. So we do tons of things related to that in our work. And for Congress, uh, we have a similar issue where these members of Congress they're representing districts and states that are very far from the places where these issues are happening, and frankly, like they have no obligation to really care or stand up to representatives in Alaska who are advocating for more drilling for their state. For that, we like to bring in the human stories. So we work with the Gwichin peoples and the Inupia on the North Slope who who live there in Alaska, they're Alaska native peoples, and have been stewarding that land, living off that land since time immemorial. And so some of them will come down to Washington to bring that story thousands of miles to Washington because it's that important to actually hear that human story too.

Rachel 18:30

So I'm hearing this theme of how urgency plays a role or not in messaging and how much people care about things or how we frame information. The things you you're trying to educate people on are these like very long time horizon things, things for keeping the planet safe beyond, you know, the 4,000 weeks we each have on this earth. I am going to assume that some of the information that's being weaponized, like you mentioned earlier by opponents of some of the policies you're pushing, are framing things in a much more short-term time horizon, like in your lifetime, in your year, in your district, in the amount of money in your bank account, instead of worrying about a village with inhabitants you've never met. So then you mentioned bringing someone down from the Arctic to actually stand in front of legislators and tell their story of the impact, which seems like it really ratchets up the urgency.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Yeah.

Rachel 19:27

Is this an intentional tactic?

SPEAKER_03 19:29

It is, yeah. And this varies by the place and by the issue that we're fighting. But for the Gwichin, the caribou herds are their lifeline. They rely on the caribou for subsistence that is central to their culture. The coastal plain where the caribou herds have their primary calving grounds is sacred to the Guichin. They call it the sacred place where life begins. And for them, if if drilling happens on the coastal plain, which is the only sliver of the refuge that is actually open to oil and gas drilling on the coast at the very top of Alaska, that could disrupt the calving. And then that disrupts migration along the entire route of the caribou. And the caribou, after they are in their calving grounds, they migrate in a big loop through parts of Canada, even, and then back up to the coastal plain every season, like clockwork. And they've been doing that for as long as we have any human recollection of. So for them, this is an immediate problem. That's why we're we're fighting alongside them to stop drilling. And at the same time, drilling has an impact for climate longer term too. And so we use different frames when we're talking to different people, but the immediacy of that issue is definitely because of the Guichin peoples.

Dan 20:46

Can you talk to us about some of the other misinformation that you have encountered from the fossil fuel industry or maybe other industries that are fighting for this? What are some of the other misinformation messages that you have heard that you feel like loom large or sort of part of every conversation that you have about this?

SPEAKER_03 21:04

So I work on offshore drilling also, and there's a lot of conversation about just production in the United States in general, that we hear all the time from Republicans in Congress that the US produces energy more sustainably in a cleaner way than any other country in the world. And so we have to produce oil and gas here because if it happens here, it's going to be cleaner than anywhere else. And we know that this is simply not the case. We like to say when you drill, you spill. And that is always the case in the case of offshore drilling. And we have documentation of oil spills that have happened for decades. The Taylor oil spill that was only just decided in court that there actually had to be accountability on that in the last couple of years. That was the longest standing oil spill that we know about. And it was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Go for over a decade. And so the industry wants to talk about this idea that we produce clean energy in the form of oil and gas here in the US. And we know that there's negative impacts throughout their entire supply chain. Whether it's oil spills in the Gulf, whether it's pipeline getting dragged across the sea floor because of superstorms and hurricanes in the Gulf intensified by climate change that their products are causing. Or it's health impacts in refineries. We know that there's carcinogens, there's things like benzene, other chemicals that I couldn't even pronounce, I don't even know about, that are polluting people's air. They often downplay the impacts of this industry on wildlife, on communities, on the environment.

Rachel 22:44

Or I'm guessing try very hard not to define what anyone means by clean. Oh, absolutely. Like stay away from a strict definition of what clean energy actually is.

SPEAKER_03 22:55

Yeah. So when drilling happens, there's a solution that they drill into the ground. This happens a lot with fracking. And the solutions that they're pumping into the ground to assist with drilling are patented. And so no one actually knows the chemical makeup of these solutions. It's just classified as oil and gas wastewater. And there's different rules in different states on where that wastewater can go. But in in some states, they're allowed to actually spread the wastewater on roads. And it's often radioactive.

Rachel 23:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 23:29

And who knew that oil and gas waste was radioactive, right? And this is like new information. We now know this is a risk to communities, but never once would the industry say that this is maybe something we shouldn't do.

Dan 23:42

What I find frustrating and confusing is we do have clean ways of producing energy using renewables, right?

SPEAKER_03 23:51

We do.

Dan 23:51

And so they're arguing this is cleaner and the US does it a cleaner way, but ignore the windmill over there. Do not see the windmill behind the curtain.

SPEAKER_03 24:02

Actually, on that, that goes to this theme about energy security, too. And people in Congress talk a lot about this idea of energy security to be this urgency around we need to drill more. And in fact, renewable energy is energy independence. Yes. People can get off the grid if they get enough solar. We are producing it abundantly. The sun's shining, it's not going to explode anytime soon. And if it did, we'd all be gone anyway. We're not going to really need to worry about energy.

Rachel 24:32

Right. Can you explain this concept of energy security for folks who may not be familiar?

SPEAKER_03 24:37

Yeah, there's this talking point that the US wants to achieve energy security and energy independence. And it's this idea that if we produce enough oil and gas domestically, we will be energy secure. We'll be self-reliant for our own energy. And that also indicates some disinformation campaigning because the United States imports a ton of oil and gas. Yeah. And it's because our refineries, they're so old that they have not kept up with development of new technologies for oil and gas. And so the oil and gas that we produce here in the US is most often exported. And we import other oil and gas because our refineries cannot process our own.

Rachel 25:21

I knew that, but hearing you say it so succinctly, it just I had to laugh.

Dan 25:25

What are some of the techniques that you have seen or felt or experienced from fossil fuel industry on how they manipulate information, right? They're putting out misinformation, but are there are there other things that they are doing that you feel like are less about the information itself and more about how they're putting it out there?

SPEAKER_03 25:45

So I actually think advertisements are a huge, huge piece of their disinformation work. Not only advertisements in the traditional sense of like you're watching TV and you see an ad that's talking about the human energy company, which I think is Chevron, but it's sponsorship of activities in communities. So if you go down to the Gulf, you go down to Louisiana, you'll see jazz festivals sponsored by an oil and gas company, you'll see school sports teams in Alaska sponsored by oil and gas, all sorts of after-school programs, social programs with a shell logo or a BP logo or some other company. And that really gives the industry social license to operate. Because here we are as advocates campaigning against an industry we know is polluting communities, it's causing climate change. And then on the other hand, they'll say, look at all this good we're doing in this community. We're helping kids play basketball. We are funding a library, we're funding cultural festivals. That's pretty wild. So they've really infiltrated our daily lives and our culture and made so many social programs, especially in some of these remote places, dependent on their industry.

Rachel 27:03

We see the same kind of dependence on jobs, right? Like we can't shut down this refinery because this region's biggest employers. And this advertising, like community sponsorship, feels almost like even reaching past that then to create more arguments for dependence. Yeah. And the idea of social license to operate, I am just gonna muse on this phrase for days. That's really powerful.

Dan 27:30

I mean, in our space, this is sort of the big tech firms, too. One of the things that they're talking a lot about these days is how the tech firms frame AI and large language models and generative AI as kind of inevitable, right? Well, it's here, you gotta deal with it. And I feel like that's not too far from an argument that's made on the fossil fuel side, right? Well, it's here, we've got all this infrastructure, we should kind of stick with it. It's inevitable that we're going to continue using fossil fuels, that there's this kind of framing of inevitability that's coming from the people who benefit most from that inevitability.

SPEAKER_03 28:08

Yeah, definitely. And that's what they talk about in relation to wind and solar, too. They'll say it's intermittent and we'll always need a base load energy, and that energy is oil and gas, even though we know we can build battery storage technology. There is an opportunity to have energy with renewables when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing. And so that's just another way that they're manipulating information.

Dan 28:39

And I saw some numbers recently of even the small investment that's been made in renewables over the last five, ten years has had just a tremendous impact. And again, it makes me think like, hey, if we put a lot more effort behind this, this could turn around pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_03 28:56

Totally.

Dan 28:57

You used a phrase when we spoke earlier that the industry drives wedges. What did you mean by that? And what is a good example of the industry trying to drive a wedge in culture in in our society?

SPEAKER_03 29:11

I think jobs is a big one. This idea that a phase-out of oil and gas is anti-worker and is anti-economy, even anti-American, to say that we shouldn't drill for oil and gas, a resource that is homegrown and that we have abundantly in the US. That drives a wedge between labor and environmental organizations. But there has been work on that and in recent times, actually supporting oil and gas workers. And that's a huge part of a lot of organizations' work, is to think about what a just transition looks like? And a just transition is this idea that we transition out of a fossil fuel economy in a way that actually allows for oil and gas workers, communities impacted by oil and gas industry, to come along and thrive economically while we transition, to say that we're not just going to leave them in the dust, like what's happened with other industrial operations that have been in existence in the US in the past. And the oil and gas industry doesn't talk about just transition at all, even though it's up to them actually to say we could transition your job to renewable energy, and they have the capital to start that on their own. But because they are being forced to do it slowly through policy, their resistance is actually what is causing this issue, which they're using as a wedge to split union workers and your everyday person who thinks that we need more drilling for cheap energy.

Dan 30:45

So to say that back to you, just to make sure I got it, consumers may be demanding renewables, right? They may be demanding kind of more responsible energy. And the energy companies will say things like, see, these consumers want to put you out of a job to labor. There's the wedge there. There's a perfectly good, it seems like a perfectly reasonable approach, which is to retrain these workers to work on uh renewable, but instead they're using it as a wedge to kind of get their workers fired up over this.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Yeah, definitely. And we we've been able to find some synergies with oil and gas workers, actually, which is sometimes surprising. I believe that. But like, yeah, they they are regular people too. We are way closer to each other than we are oil and gas executive. And so uh one of my friends actually was working with some workers at the Marathon oil refinery to get more safety standards in place for workers who were working just insanely long shifts and were also being exposed to leaks and other sorts of hazards that they shouldn't have. And so that was just a really cool example of environmental groups and environmental advocates actually setting up for workers because we need the workers to be on board with transition too.

Dan 32:00

That's a great story. Just to shift gears a little bit, your bio said you wrote a kid's book. I did. You co-authored a kid's book. First of all, awesome. Second of all, I'm just genuinely curious how did that come about?

SPEAKER_03 32:13

So that was my COVID project. So a friend of mine, Olivia Greenspan, I co-authored it with her. She's also from Connecticut. And we wrote that while I was at home for a semester from Brown. And it came about because we didn't have a resource when we were kids to get into this work and to learn about climate change. I took my first class that actually focused on climate when I was a freshman in college. I became an activist of the year before that. And we thought, well, why not introduce this to kids too?

Dan 32:47

That's amazing. Was there specific climate misinformation that you were trying to unpack or disarm at this early formative stage of a person's life?

SPEAKER_03 32:57

Yeah, I think that at its core, we talk about climate change as a political decision and that there were affirmative decisions that led us to this point, and we have an opportunity to effect a change on that. And that climate change is not a trajectory that was always bound to happen, but we actually can raise our voices and we can think about cool solutions like high-speed rail and solar power to actually fix the issues that we have. We also made clear that people are impacted very differently by climate change, depending on where they are, if they have disabilities, if they are lower income. And so we try to introduce diversity as well, and in understanding that climate impacts people differently too.

Rachel 33:47

As the mother of a four-year-old, I get a lot of practice trying to distill things to kind of their core nugget so I can explain it to a kid with a 10-second attention span who does really want to know, who's very, very curious. Last night it was, you know, why do we die? Over dinner. I'm thinking that also my experience uh dealing with a toddler has helped me deal with many adults, maybe a little bit better. Did the experience of trying to distill some of this information down for a kid's book affect how you think about communicating this information in your everyday life, even when you're not talking to kids?

SPEAKER_03 34:24

Yes, which was a really interesting outcome because I'm not a parent and I would not have thought that. I went into this, and we talked about this a lot with our publisher that like talking to kids is not dumbing things down. No, it's actually more complicated to talk to kids about something like this, because they do understand. And you try to make them understand in a way that is not like totally demoralizing for someone. But what we took away from it was actually like our book is better read in partnership with a parent because we know that the parents are maybe on the same level of understanding on climate as their five-year-old. That was interesting to think about. Because I think as advocates, we often think about other people just out there living their lives as peers who can join us in our advocacy because when you know better, you do better. But at the same time, I think we overlook how expert we've sometimes become on the topics that we work on. And so it was really interesting to distill all that information about climate justice and climate change into this book that was intended to be for kids five plus that can now be a resource for really anybody.

Rachel 35:39

I love that. I'm not gonna lie, I've had this experience. I have a organic chemistry book for very young children that uh not gonna lie, I learned quite a bit.

unknown 35:54

Yeah.

Rachel 35:54

I studied music, I kind of skipped that part, and I was like, oh, actually, this is breaking it down for uh a four-year-old is very helpful for me, the adult in the room, also.

Dan 36:03

Oh my gosh. This is really cool. So I feel like one of the things that you would have had to overcome is this idea that kids are not ready to hear about climate change or big scary things like climate change. How did you kind of get past that or how did you deal with that?

SPEAKER_03 36:24

I mean, I'll admit when Olivia pitched this idea, I even in the back of my head was wondering if this was like a good topic for kids because we talk about this idea of a livable future, and if if we don't achieve certain things, we won't have a livable future. And I thought, like, how are we gonna tell this kid that if we don't stop oil and gas drilling, if we like donatue climate justice, we won't have a livable future. And I was like, well, like hands up, I don't know what we're gonna do about that. And then um we met our publisher, a kids co and the founder of A Kids Co. wrote the first book. Uh it's a kids' book about racism. And I thought, wow, if you can talk about racism, which has been such a a scourge on the world and has impacted so many people horrifically, then I thought we can tackle climate change. And we can do it in a way that actually shows people there is reason to hope still, that even though we are fighting for a livable planet, we're fighting for biodiversity and nature, that there is actually still something worth fighting for.

Dan 37:37

I am looking at the titles of some of these a kid's book about books. And in some ways, climate change is a relatively easy topic compared to some of these titles.

Rachel 37:48

You know, I think that we found our next set of guests. We just gotta go through all the authors of all these books. I'm serious. Thinking about like how you translate these concepts for a child, like you said, it's not about dumbing it down, it's about really getting to the core of it, explaining the context around it, assuming no prior knowledge. There's so much there about how you teach and share information and try to level set. And we talk about that a lot in the domain of misinformation as like an antidote.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

Yeah. Well, it's also interesting because I so I got to talk to a class in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was at school, and I read the book, and kids had so many questions. We actually, I don't think, got to the end because there were lots of questions. What a good sign.

Dan 38:32

Yeah, that is so real. That is so real.

SPEAKER_03 38:35

It's really fun. And we got to the section on climate solutions, and there was just a question about like, oh, like, could we do electric airplanes? And I was like, I don't know. Like I haven't thought about it. Yeah, they have ideas that I haven't thought about. They have so much to offer too. So I I think we learn a lot from engaging children too.

Rachel 38:56

Norway is like the kingdom of electric planes, in case you didn't know. I just learned about that in the New York Times not that long ago.

Dan 39:04

Zanaji, this has been so great. We try and end on a slightly optimistic, positive. As an educator and researcher, what is your best tool for dealing with misinformation?

SPEAKER_03 39:14

I mean, I guess this is the case for all misinformation, but I think that the best tool available is the truth, but it's individual people's truths too, and and storytelling and lived experiences. And that's why we talk to so many communities that are in the places that are impacted by the work that we're doing. I've been most impacted by people I've met who live in the Arctic in Alaska or on the coast of Louisiana and Texas, getting to hear from them, even though I will probably never live in the shadow of the oil and gas industry. And I grew up in a wooded area of Connecticut. I find that I can continue this work knowing that this is their reality every day, and we have an opportunity to help out with that. And so there's all this misinformation out there about climate and public health issues associated with oil and gas. I hearken back to the stories I've heard for people who live there and this vision that they have a better future for their own communities and what that could look like after oil and gas. Because there will be an after. There will be. Eventually. Yeah.

Dan 40:33

So, first of all, and I probably say this after every interview, but thank you. Just thank you to Rachel and to the people who agree to appear on this podcast. Because when I started this, I really thought I want to do something about disinformation. And I believe we are making headway. But what I also realize is how much I love talking to smart people about the things that they are passionate about. And this is allowing us to explore lots of domains that I don't think you and I would really get to explore otherwise. No. And what's cool is Zanaji is a young man. He's clearly very passionate and very accomplished, very knowledgeable about this stuff. And I feel like I learned so much.

Rachel 41:21

Well, and there's a couple layers of learning here. Like I do learn new facts, I learn tidbits I didn't know before. But then it's always so heartening when there's this moment where I learn that someone in a completely different space, working on different things, with different background, working with different people. Yes. We can kind of join each other in this shared construct for 45 minutes and talk about the world with this frame or this lens that Dan and I bring. And it's such a cool light bulb moment for lack of another term.

Dan 41:58

I think my big takeaway from that conversation with him, and this will lead right into my lens, is that the best tool that we have is to decrease the distance between a person's lived experience and some need that's out there in the world. So what I found really fascinating was this acknowledgement that the people that Zanaji has to deal with, the people that his organization needs to deal with, aren't living on the north slope of Alaska. They don't live there. They live as far away as you can possibly live from such a place. And that until they feel some kind of connection with the place, it is difficult for them to make the threat real, make the findings real for them. And so my lens, I just called it distance. I wrote that the gap between a personal context and the context of the information creates an opportunity for misinformation. So how can you look at your information space and ask yourself, where is the distance here? How is what we're trying to present in this space? How is what the information contained in this space going to be distant from the person consuming it? And is there anything that we can be doing to close that gap? And part of that may just be simply like inviting the person creating the information to acknowledge that their readers, their consumers of the information, are not connected to it in any way and that they need to provide more. And there may be other things that we can do, but it's not something that I've ever thought about before talking to him.

Rachel 43:41

For some reason, as you were talking about this, too, there seems like there's a connection between this and the term that Brandon taught us. Was it hyper object?

Dan 43:50

Yeah.

Rachel 43:51

As being like too big to grasp. Yes. This is almost like too far away to grasp, like how you can't really grasp how deep. The Grand Canyon is when you stare at it.

Dan 44:02

I think it's a really good point. And I feel like that time is another one of these things that creates gaps, right? Creates these vacuums of information, whether it's time or distance or scale, any of these things create these opportunities for a bad actor to fill in information that then allows someone to say, okay, I don't need to think about this or I don't need to worry about this.

Rachel 44:23

That was a perfect setup for my lens, which I named time feel. So in music, we talk about time feel as like your sense of time and how you interpret time while playing music. It's different than the tempo. It's not like how fast or slow you're playing. It's not explicitly about like what rhythms you're playing. It's like a vibe, man, you know? Uh you dig. I named the lens list because it's really asking us, you know, how does the system treat the passage of time? How does the system communicate time lags? For example, I think this is what you're talking about, like that gap. Or I'm thinking about how does the system communicate or handle time horizons, things that are changing quickly versus things that change very slowly. This lens leads you to ask how much of a vacuum does the system create for other information to fill in, maybe between time horizons. And what got me thinking about this was when we were talking with Zunaji about, you know, how they instill a sense of urgency via bringing in local constituents who are impacted by climate change immediately. So you were talking about that distance of like, yeah, the North Slope is very far away. And then we're also talking about this sense of timing and urgency and how this isn't just a thing that's gonna, like, yeah, make the earth different somehow in a thousand years. This is a thing that is going to screw up the caribou population and thus the human population this season, this winter. This lens is really thinking about like how does the system handle time? How does the system handle timelessness or not? It's a little abstract, but I liked it that way. There's a lot of maybe more specific lenses that could come out of this, but this idea of time feel and just wondering and looking at how does this thing I'm designing support or explicitly not support time feel?

Dan 46:18

One of the things that I've observed about a lot of the perspectives that we're introducing here is that they can cut both ways. On the one hand, we want the system to make explicit the time feel, as you're calling it. On the other hand, bad actors, purveyors of misinformation, can create a sense of urgency which would shut down a curiosity or a desire for seeking the truth. I think the difference is an information system in conveying the information should try and be as realistic as possible about what is the actual time frame that we're talking about here.

Rachel 46:56

This is a non-creative but very literal example of how there's a pattern now. I've seen many news outlets use the New York Times, does this. When there is a breaking story and you are reading about it, there's literally red text and like a tag or something that often says like breaking or happening now, um, in the same way that television media might have a ticker at the bottom, right? Like telling you this thing is happening right now. I think sometimes we exploit that for a false sense of urgency. Right. But in some cases, just something as simple as acknowledging what time horizon we're operating on. Is this a thing that's bound to change in the next 10 minutes, in the next hour? Is this research that took years to complete and we feel really solid about what this tells us for the next several years? Right. Thinking in terms of you know how Zanaji was talking about how climate research takes a long time and misinformation moves much quicker than that. And I think it puts information speeds in competition with each other only because I think part of the reason that competition exists and like quick information wins is not solely, but partially because we don't understand the other information is just on a longer time horizon.

Dan 48:15

Right. As you're talking, I'm remembering that study that he mentioned where they're only just now realizing that something that happened, I think it was forty, fifty years ago. Yes, forty years continues to have an impact. And I think the system has a responsibility to convey time feel, as you're putting it, to help us understand that certainty may only come with time. And that by conveying that time feel, we can sort of feel a little bit more confident with the not knowing that that happens. I know I'm being naively optimistic here, but I think the the thing to try and achieve is that certainly with climate science, we're still learning and that we might not have certainty for some time, and that any attempts to fill a thing with breaking news about climate science should be taken with a grain of salt.

Rachel 49:10

I mean, there are other lenses we've talked about previously that kind of play off of what you're talking about, where we've talked about this lens of confidence or this lens of certainty, a precision. How can the system communicate how certain this is, how much it's likely to change, what time horizon it's on, how big of a gap are we dealing with here?

Dan 49:29

Time and distance, two pretty good lenses, I think.

Rachel 49:33

Two pretty basic aspects, I guess. Took us a while to get there, but we're here now.

Dan 49:43

And that was Unchecked. Thanks so much for listening. We really want to hear from you. If you've got ideas for topics or guests or stories, drop us a line at unchecked at curious-squid.com. If you made use of the lenses that we described today in your practice, we want to hear about that too. Hey, check the show notes for any of the links that we talked about today, and it would really mean a lot to us if you shared this episode with a friend and rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.