Philll
New member
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2026
- Messages
- 29
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?
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?
