Tatiana Schlossberg essay connects climate journalism to cancer research and it's brilliant

I'm an environmental studies major and I've spent the last three years reading about climate change, ecological collapse, and the various ways humans are destroying the planet. It's honestly exhausting and depressing most days. So when I picked up Tatiana Schlossberg's essay in The New Yorker, I expected something completely different. I didn't expect it to connect so deeply to my field.

Schlossberg was an environmental journalist before she got sick. She worked for The New York Times Science section covering climate change, wrote a book called "Inconspicuous Consumption" about the hidden environmental impacts of everyday stuff, and won the Society of Environmental Journalists' Rachel Carson Environment Book Award in 2020 . In her acceptance speech, she talked about how environmental reporting helps her "feel informed and connected, even when it feels like the world's attention has moved elsewhere" .

In her essay about terminal cancer, she doesn't abandon that lens. She writes about how one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, comes from an ocean sponge . She had hoped to write her next book about Earth's oceans and "about what we choose to protect, or fail to protect, in the living systems that sustain us" .

There's also a 2019 talk she gave at Harvard where she said: "This isn't an issue that can be separated from other issues. This involves everything. A question about health care—that's a question about climate change. A question about justice is a question about climate change. A question about agriculture or, you know, any of these things is a question about climate change" .

That's exactly what her essay does—it connects everything. Health care, family, politics, science, the ocean, motherhood. She's showing us that these aren't separate silos. They're all connected.

The SEJ wrote after her death that her work gave readers "a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change, rather than drained by an accumulation of bad news" . That's the kind of journalism I want to do. The kind that connects dots and offers hope, even in the darkest circumstances.

Anyone else in environmental fields feel like her work speaks to you?

The thing that gets me is how she was planning her next book about oceans when she got diagnosed. She had this whole project in her head about "what we choose to protect, or fail to protect, in the living systems that sustain us." And then she ends up being sustained, literally, by one of those systems.

I keep thinking about that. She was asking big questions about what we protect. And the ocean, in some small way, protected her back. Gave her more time. Not enough, but more.

For environmental folks: This essay is a reminder that the work we do isn't abstract. The oceans we study, the climate we track, the species we worry about—they're not separate from human life. They're intertwined with it. A sponge in the ocean saved a woman who wrote about saving oceans. That's not coincidence. That's connection.

Her SEJ award citation said her work gave readers "a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change." She did that even while dying. That's a legacy.