Maria Streshinsky is the Executive Editor of Wired, a science and technology magazine devoted to exploring technology’s potential to shape the world for the better. On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, Maria joins Ross to discuss the forthcoming issue of Wired, walking us through its sections on carbon capture, food and land, transportation and renewable energy.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Maria Straczynski, executive editor of Wired. I’ve been reading Wired for a very long time, so I am so happy to have you here, Maria. Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks, Ross. It’s my pleasure. And this month you have an issue entirely devoted to climate at Wired. That is very good. It’s a shame about coronavirus getting in the middle of it. I know. But it is amazing that there’s a tech magazine that has an entire climate issue.
Why would you do such a thing? What is the intersection between technology and climate? What’s happening in your mind that conceived of this?
Maria Streshinsky: Well, it’s a great question. Many, many, many months ago, you know, Wired has a long tradition of being a tech, but also a science publication. And we have long championed smart climate stories, of course, for a very long time, ignored the ridiculous argument that No such thing exists and just marched forward. Our science team has done a lot of great writing about climate, and it’s been clear to us for a long time that climate is, well, coronavirus aside, really the Earth’s existential problem. And the technology part of it, you know, it makes a lot of sense for us because Wired has a really fabulous and interesting history and tradition.
We can get into some interesting back and forth on this, but the origins of Wired are really that technology can do us a lot of good and a real curiosity about how tech was going to shape the world. And I think you can’t ignore that technology is a huge part of what we are going to need to use to deploy to help solve this problem of climate change. And so those things as a really clear intersection for us, science and technology as a way to shape the future, and in this case, shape the future in a healthier way, felt really natural to us when Again, before coronavirus, it was very clear that climate was the big existential problem we were facing.
So, you know, a group of us sat down and just, well, actually, the way that this issue started is that the editor in chief, Nick Thompson, we were talking one day in a story ideas meeting, and he said, you know, my kids asked me the other day. What’s the one thing I should do? What should I learn to do to save the planet? Because he has young kids and this is really, you know, at the fore of their mind. And so he kind of turned to us and said, what should I tell them?
And we just thought, well, let’s build a whole magazine around that. And then we took that idea and ran with it. Nick writes about that in the opening of the magazine. This kind of sets up this whole publication. But I hope that answers your question. I mean, it felt really natural to us at that point in Wired’s history to take those things that we believed and put it all down in this very 90s thing we do, which is still publish a print magazine. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: There’s something that’s still nice about the tactile experience of having a real book or a real magazine in your hands. Some of us still remember. The experience of that. That’s great. Yeah, I like Nick’s little introductory piece framing it. And I think that’s a good way to think about it too, because Wired I associate with, I mean, this is a bit pejorative, but people say techno optimist and it’s usually an insult. But when I think of Wired, I do think of it as a magazine chronicling exciting things that are going to change the world in terms of technology and the social repercussions of that.
And I think more often than not, it tends to focus or highlight things Things that would enhance human flourishing rather than be a gigantic threat. Am I misreading Wired’s tone or is that sort of how you see it?
Maria Streshinsky: I think that’s right. I mean, especially in the last number of years. I mean, well, maybe in all through Wired’s history, I think the editors have always believed, the editors and writers who are very core to Wired have always believed technology had a way to shape the future that was very positive. Now, there’s a long discussion about what Wired maybe got wrong and right over the years and maybe didn’t forecast. But I think that the way you sum that up fits really squarely into this, which is...
You know, you can even, we think of so much of science as technology, right, too. And so, yes, I mean, these two things have to intersect. I guess I’m repeating myself a little bit, but they need to intersect. And we need to have some optimism about what technology can do for us, because it’s evident, it’s there, it’s in front of us. And we need it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Change is already locked in at this point. We’re only making it worse. And we need to develop the technology to address it because it is too late to walk away. So I don’t know if there’s a lot of other choices except to look towards the advancement of technology to deal with our problems faster than we create them. Of course, people will always counter this with the Einstein, the same mentality that created a problem cannot be used to solve it. That was my bad paraphrasing of it.
But this is a longstanding fight. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.
Maria Streshinsky: Well, it’s interesting. I think of the wonderful book, The Prophet and the Wizard, or The Wizard and the Prophet. Charles Mann’s wonderful book that kind of grapples with the both sides of this, right? But I think you can just cut through it in a way. I could point to one of the stories that is... I adore all the stories in this issue, but one of my favorites is Brooke Jarvis is actually writing about how the technology of nature is such a powerful force for us to use if we would help it.
So that could maybe assuage some of the wizards. Does that make sense?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, maybe. So I’m familiar with this book. And I read 1491. And Charles Mann’s interesting thinker would love to have him on the show to at some point here. I imagine many of our listeners might be familiar with this dichotomy between wizards and prophets. Maybe maybe we should spell it out a little bit.
Maria Streshinsky: Well, I won’t do it justice. I mean, I think there’s a couple of organizations and Charles does it the most brilliantly, right? But it’s the idea you’re getting at here, which is the people who feel like, in its most simple terms, that you should just go back to nature. It’s not a stopping of progress, right? But it’s really a go back to nature. Try to be as natural as we can. And then the wizards who believe that you can technology our way out of this, to use a word wrongly.
You made it into a verb. Yeah, I just made it. You’re the executive editor of Wired. You can do that. I’m an editor. And I think there’s a couple of organizations. The Breakthrough Institute is one of them I think of. There’s a bunch of others that try to bring those two voices together. And I really think in the last year or so, or maybe two or so years... We’ve turned some corner where it’s pretty clear that those voices just have to come together.
Does that make sense? I believe so. We’ve had Ted Nordhaus and Breakthrough on before. Yeah, I sort of think of the Norman Borlaug was the beginning of the Wizards and the Prophets. I cannot remember. That’s what Mann’s book writes about is those two men who kind of they intersected a few times early on in the 60s, but they were really the fathers of both of those schools of thought.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Norman Borlaug of the Green Revolution and the Dwarf Rice and very polarizing in the climate space. A lot of people do not. So, I mean, I like this dialectic between these two types of thinkers, wizards and profit, and they clearly exist. And Nori, in that we tend to be optimistic about technology more so than we look down and panic about how high the stakes are. Yeah, we tend to fall into that wizard category. But we also we also get pushback on that on that, too.
I’m sure I’m sure you do at Wired as well.
Maria Streshinsky: Yeah, yeah. I think anybody who has anything to say out in public, which means in social media will get pushback from all from all sides.
Ross Kenyon: Anything worth saying you hope will have someone who cares. But then again, I’ve said this on the podcast so many times. I think all we have left in society is to work your job and then you come home and then you yell at people on the internet. That’s just sort of like all we’ve got left for some reason. Right, right. That’s all good to know then. Why don’t we dive into the issue as a whole? Okay. What kinds of topics did you choose to include or not to include?
Was there stuff left on the cutting room floor that just didn’t make it in? How did the issue come together?
Maria Streshinsky: Yeah. So, I mean, all of the above, right? So what we decided to do was tear apart the whole structure of the print magazine as we usually do it. We know there’s this format where we have this opening section and these columns, and we just took it all apart and made the whole thing into five sections. Because we felt like with climate, there’s various ways that people understand it. Let me back up a step. Actually, one of the greatest things we did early on was figure out what our guiding principle was for this issue.
And what we decided as sort of our internal language in the office was that we were going to keep saying to ourselves that we want the stories to be To fall into the category of what can we do with the technology we have today that will make the biggest impact in the next 10 years? Because in our minds, as we were building this magazine, that is essentially the time we have to move fast. And we really wanted the entire magazine to feel like it was about the only thing we can do today is move forward, right?
We didn’t want, we didn’t feel that there was any room or need or Even breath to be wasted on having a discussion about the politics around climate change or just the despair of climate change. What we really wanted to do was get at this idea that all we can do at this point is move, is act, is set things in motion. And that happens in so many different ways. So with that broad thinking in mind, we then decided to break the magazine up, as I said, into these five sections where the first part is like the big overview, establishing Nick’s piece that establishes why we’re doing the magazine.
And then we had Lisa Marginelli write this really interesting to me piece about how we actually have all of these systems in place that could that are basically shovel ready. And it’s not. The idea of a moonshot, what she did was said, look, we have infrastructure that was built during the Cold War, and we could turn it and use it to fight climate change, to make a huge difference. We have the DOD, we have DARPA, we have all the labs. I mean, it is all there for us to start using.
I’m starting to go down a narrow path here instead of talk broadly about the magazine.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think it’s a great part of the story too. And I think science as an entire thing is very opaque and people don’t know about any of those organizations typically unless they’re super nerds. You can go deep if you want to single out some certain articles or...
Maria Streshinsky: Well, I wanted to just talk about those, like Lisa’s, which we could talk a little bit more about. But the other one that comes right after Lisa’s is by the climate person, Mary Annis Heglar. And she writes about that age old question of what can I do as an individual? And she really writes about the place of an individual. And so what we wanted to do was counter, like we wanted Lisa to go big and Mary to really talk about our personal responsibility here, because those feel like The things we’re constantly grappling with, like, what are the big systems that governments have to do?
What should I do as a person? And, you know, those are very, very, very different things. And both wrote just pieces that I’m kind of blown away by. Mary writes this lovely line that I just found the other day that I wanted to... She writes, she writes, And so that counters sort of Lisa go, not counters, but just worked to me hand in hand with Lisa kind of going big. So that’s the beginning of the magazine is Nick setting up the magazine, Lisa going big, Mary talking about the individual.
And then we took the rest of the magazine and broke it up into what we thought of as kind of the four pillars of what we’re dealing with. The first one we call Capture, which is about capturing carbon. The second section is called Nourish, and that’s about food and land. Obviously, capturing carbon and food and land have a lot of crossover. The third section is called Move, and that’s really about how we move as individuals, which is really about transportation, right? Cars, public transportation, planes, trains, a huge contributor to climate.
Then the last one is called Renew, and that’s about renewable energy. We didn’t put them in an order of importance. They are all equally important. But so what we did is we set all that up. We set up this big thinking about what can we do now with the technology we have to make the biggest impact. And then we sent out calls to our favorite writers and writers who know this stuff so much more deeply than we know it. And we got a lot of great ideas.
And so now this whole issue is full of If we could do everything we write about in the magazine, we would make a big dent. I mean, of course, there’s so much more, right? There’s only 100 pages to the magazine and so many words we can ask people to get through. But that’s my slightly rambly presentation of how we did it and what’s in it.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think that’s a great way to sum it up. And yeah, Mary Annise Hagler has been following her on Twitter for a very long time. And yeah, that’s a great piece to single out too. It’s a nice framing one. Also one I struggle with personally. So yeah. I think it’s good. Yeah, it’s a good issue here. There’s a lot to cover. There’s about concrete. There’s a piece on urban design, a piece on fish and rice. Yeah. It’s diverse.
And that’s part of the opportunity, but also the peril of climate change is that there isn’t just a single silver bullet. Right. People love to lament. It’s sort of this like gigantic bucket of We kind of need it all to make progress.
Maria Streshinsky: Right. And actually, that’s one of the other things that Heglar writes is, as far as the individual, what you need to do is be your best you. You need to take your skills, not try to become a climate scientist if you’re an artist. Be an artist, you know, be a podcaster, be a writer, be an editor, and yet know this topic. And I think that’s a, it’s a simple idea when you hear it said out loud, but pretty beautiful. And that sort of Feels like a bit of a theme of this issue, right?
Like there’s farmers trying to do their best. There’s the guys who are building the company Rivian to make electric trucks and electric SUVs that appeal to the sporty.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I wasn’t familiar with them. That was a good one. Also, I’m amazed that you let a writer of yours use, you know, crib the Walt Whitman body electric for that title.
Maria Streshinsky: Yeah. Well, that was us. Our poor writers never get a say in our headlines, much to their chagrin many times. Cool. You know, there’s a lot of diversity here and that’s a great thing. You had mentioned sort of what made it in and what didn’t make it in. And, you know, I think that the thing that didn’t make it in is all the many other things that people are doing, right? You yourself are doing work that we didn’t write about. I also realize at a really sort of dire moment, we didn’t really write about the oceans.
There’s so much that could have been in here, so many more stories that we could have done. I think that’s kind of that and the fact that, you know, it’s a strange beast, this magazine, because it has a really optimistic feel to a very, very scary problem. But that’s what we wanted to do. Yeah. I mean, I think we came away, other than the fact that we landed in the coronavirus crisis, we came away with this really kind of excited feeling of maybe this will help, you know, many more people start thinking in these terms and in this direction.
And Lisa Marginelli said to me at one point, you know, we don’t have time for despair. If you’re in despair, you’re not doing something. So that feels like a good summation of like, what’s in the magazine is some careful optimism.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s one of the pieces of feedback we get on our show a lot, too, where it’s important to stress the severity of this problem or set of problems, you could say. But if it’s just doom, then why not go out in one giant bacchanal? Why bother utilizing your agency in some sort of productive way if it’s all wasted anyhow? That’s right. So yeah, I think that tone is really important. And also, don’t feel bad. You covered a lot of ground. And even for this podcast, I think we try to be very broad-minded and very wide in the types of things that we are willing to talk about.
Even still, there are huge gaps in the coverage that we try to bring here. It touches everything, Maria.
Maria Streshinsky: Yeah, it really does. And we even tried, we tried our best, although it got, there’s really quite a small staff that puts this whole thing together. And we thought we would have all these sidebars and what we call sauce and all sorts of added details throughout. And it just got, it got pretty hairy at the end to try to pull all that off. So there’s a lot of little bits of information scattered throughout, but not nearly as many as we wanted to get into here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, fair enough. Well, Maria, if someone wanted to read these articles that we’re discussing here by the magazine, if they want to experience that beautiful, glossy, tactile experience, you can tell my voice turned in that nice NPR voice. Because that’s what you should experience when you’re holding a fantastic piece of literature in your hands. When and where can they do that?
Maria Streshinsky: And to experience our fabulous psychedelic cover that I just love. So the magazine is on sale in newsstands and it’ll be in subscribers' mailboxes by March 24th. So end of next week. And we are rolling out the content online either next week or the week after. We really feel this is such important content. We didn’t want it to get lost in coronavirus coverage. We also have all of our reporters focused on coronavirus, which is the most important and biggest story facing us at the moment.
So all through the month of April, this content will be available at Wired.com, also at Apple News. And then we’ll push it out again on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which is April 22nd.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Maria. Thank you for having Wired, which is gigantic, a standard of the publishing industry, thinking about climate change, writing about it, letting people know that there’s a lot of diversity in what’s happening about climate change in a very interesting and unique kind of way. So thank you so much.
Maria Streshinsky: Well, thank you. It’s been great. And I really, I really appreciate you having me on and your podcast.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my pleasure. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
