MUSIC

Change is coming, oh yeah

Ain’t no holding it back

Ain't no running 

Change is coming, oh yeah!

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

This is Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers from Environmental Defense Fund. I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk. For the better part of the last decade, it’s been my job and my honor to help students use their talent and passion to get experience and jobs that serve the planet.

On March 15, 2019, a bomb cyclone hit the midwest. As Helena would write for her employer, Politico, later that year, it was an explosive storm that brought high winds and severe blizzard conditions. The storm ravaged the heartland. It turned formerly productive fields into lakes. It killed livestock. And it destroyed grain stores.

That spring’s wet weather, Helena wrote, “left a record-shattering 20 million acres unable to be planted. It was an area almost as big as South Carolina.”

Helena spends much of her time on Capitol Hill, asking tough questions of lawmakers and lobbyists. Now, she grabbed her boots and traveled to Missouri to visit farmer Rick Oswald. 

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

So he's a Missouri River Valley farmer. His parents also farmed there. He's a multi-generational farmer. And he had just gotten massively flooded out, almost destroyed his childhood home. All of his grain storage on the property was ripped open. So there was corn just spilling out everywhere. It was a huge mess. The roads were washed out. So I went with one of my photographers at Politico, Scott Mahaski, and he drove us in this big truck, and we got stuck multiple times. I mean, it was just a disaster, right? It was major flooding. And the quote he gave me, which I'll never forget, is, he was standing in his house and the house is trashed. It's musty smelling. It had been flooded out, and it's just in complete disarray. And he's like, I'm standing here in the middle of climate change, right? I am seeing it.

And not every farmer around him agrees that this catastrophic flooding is tied to climate change. But he is very clear about this and there's this feeling of what does the future look like, right? How are we going to prepare for this? How are we gonna get to a place where we're not having disasters and disaster aid over and over again? I think that it's kind of a question of becoming more resilient. I went and talked to him at a time when the USDA really wouldn't talk about climate change.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Helena was in the midst of what would be a year-long investigation into the USDA. Under Trump she discovered, the massive agency was suppressing its own research - its own research - on climate change. 

Helena won a George Polk award for her Politico series. That award is rare. It’s given to a handful of journalists every year, those whose investigative and enterprising reporting, quote, “gains attention and achieves results,” according to Long Island University.

The premise of her investigation: climate change was affecting food production in ways that we can’t turn back. But given the proper tools, farms and ranches can become more resilient to extreme weather. But they weren’t being given those tools. In 2014, the Obama administration had created USDA climate hubs around the country – designed to help the ag industry prepare for and survive climate change. But Helena learned that those climate hubs were being stifled. Farmers, like Rick Oswald, didn’t even know they existed.

In addition, most farmers would never learn that in 2015 the Obama administration launched a climate-smart effort aimed at reducing agriculture’s net emissions. The plan would have sequestered 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2025.

Had it actually been allowed to happen, that plan would have been the equivalent of taking 25 million cars off the road per year. Because agricultural practices like planting cover crops can actually pull carbon out of the air and sequester it. Not only can farmers become more resilient to climate change, they can also combat it, using new practices and technology. 

But often, politics stands in the way. After she visited Rick Oswald, Helena went back to the capitol. 

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

And it was a very stark contrast to being in this disaster area and then going back into Washington and realizing we weren't gonna talk about climate change in agriculture. And the USDA's climate scientists and climate response really kind of went into almost hibernation mode, right? They were trying to survive, keep their heads down. And that meant folks like Rick weren't getting as much resources. So I think there's a lot of examples like that where the weather is getting more unpredictable and we all have to figure out like what to do about that, right? And making sure that our food supply is always getting stronger and more resilient and not more vulnerable. And I think that's the conversation we're increasingly having.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Helena’s been covering food policy for more than a decade. She understands the politics around food – in fact, around, red states and blue states – far better than most of us. And she knows that a lot of good solutions are coming from farmers themselves.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

I think one thing that's interesting about this space of whether you wanna call it climate smart agriculture or regenerative agriculture, a lot of this momentum from the grower side, from the farmer's side is being driven by oftentimes very conservative farmers who politically again may not even buy into the scientific consensus on climate change, but they really are driving a cultural shift in farming around kind of reducing the need for inputs and trying to improve profitability. It's sort of a rethinking of how you operate in what has long been seen as a quote more industrial system, right? And I just think if you can read at all about some of the people that are driving this, then the characters involved, I think it's a really interesting nuanced story that doesn't often get put out there. And there's a lot of visceral pushback in agriculture because they'll say we're the original conservationists. Why are consumers coming at us, right? And you walk around their 5,000 acre farm and it's beautiful out, right? The air is clean, I'm not polluting anything. There is a lot of like emotion that also gets into this that I think consumers don't understand. But I think looking at the people that are driving this if you know regenerative ag, if you go on like YouTube or you listen to podcasts, there's just some really interesting folks out there leading on this. And they might not be who the super climate concerned e-bike rider in New York City or DC would expect, but I think it's a really good part of the story to understand.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

So let’s zoom back to 2022. I asked Helena to tell us where the climate and ag conversation stands today, three years after she stood in that sodden field with Rick Oswald.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

During the Trump administration, we definitely saw climate being one of those issues that was sort of not to be discussed at USDA. That has definitely changed. The Biden administration is talking about climate and agriculture quite a bit in terms of how are we positioning the agricultural sector to help to not only adapt to climate change, but also in some cases help mitigate it. Can we increase our ability to sequester carbon? Are there practices we can encourage across millions of acres of farmland that would make a dent in our greenhouse gas emissions and sort of the overall footprint of agriculture? There's a lot of discussion and a lot of policy being pursued at USDA, but it's only sort of newly been back on the table over there if you will. One area where we are decidedly still not talking about climate and environmental impact is the dietary guidelines. Back during the Obama administration, there was a push to include environmental sustainability as part of that advice, and it caused an all out war in Washington. The worry among like livestock groups and different agricultural interests was that it would come down really hard against foods like beef or even just meat in general and maybe even dairy. So there's a lot of politics around that. And the Obama administration actually backed off and was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not gonna talk about sustainability as part of the dietary guidelines, but we'll talk about it sort of in other venues. So anytime you go anywhere near climate and food choices, nutrition and the environment, sort of that climate food nexus, it really quickly can become like a third rail issue.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

That sounds like a really tricky conversation to have and really tricky waters for all of these parties to be navigating right now. What would sustainability look like in nutrition? If it was all green lights go on addressing climate nutrition and agriculture, how does the consumer experience that in that sort of future world?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Well, I think it is really tricky. We don't all agree on what the most climate friendly diet would be. I think there's some points of consensus for some folks, clearly the carbon footprint or the environmental footprint of some foods is higher. Beef is often targeted. And so it's hard because beef is also a very nutritionally dense food and lots of Americans love it. There is a lot of emotion wrapped into it and culture and habit and just a lot, right? So I think we in the US don't have a good consensus around like exactly what it look like to have an American diet that is quote more sustainable without sort of putting foods into good or bad categories. Which in the US so far, we are, we are pretty unwilling to do.

So if you were to add an environmental layer, would it even make a difference in consumption? I don't know. I do think consumers have been pretty familiar with the carbon footprint of beef, for example, for a long time. I imagine if you polled people they would know that there is a bigger impact from red meat. And yet it doesn't seem to have made like a huge difference in meat consumption in the U.S.

One thing that's really interesting, we hear so much buzz around plant-based milks andplant-based protein and alternatives and all of these trends. Per capita meat and dairy consumption in the US has steadily risen. Data came out from USDA that we hit record high dairy consumption in the US per capita dairy consumption. Folks are moving away from fluid milk. But we're eating way more yogurt and butter and cheese.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

I mean, those are like my three favorite foods. So I get it, but it kind of surprises me.

Helena Bottemiller Evich

I think it does surprise a lot of people because the narrative has been against more of these products and yet the demand is increasing in the US. And I just say that because I think it's a really important sort of reality check on where people are, where consumers are. And it's interesting to think about if the dietary guidelines in the US, which by the way, Americans don't follow, right? If we followed it, we would all be eating fruits and vegetables. We don't even have enough fruits and vegetables to meet the dietary guidelines. 

I'm not convinced that is really the sole thing driving consumer behavior. I think what we're gonna see a lot more of is products trying to reduce their carbon footprint or change the way they're produced or adopt different practices to then market themselves as better for the environment. So carbon neutral, where we now have Neutral milk, which is a dairy brand that basically buys carbon offsets and offsets the footprint of the milk. And you can buy this, I think it's in Whole Foods so far. You can already get climate smart cereal. This is the next wave of marketing. And you know, some of it will be legit and some of it will be greenwashing. And it's gonna be really tricky to tell which is which.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Do you have any tips about how to decide? This is tricky across all of sustainability and the branding, the certifications that we get. Do you have a gut feeling or, or something that you do personally when you're in the grocery store aisle to decide if it's BS or not?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

I think it's too early to even successfully navigate it, to be honest with you. The direction we seem to be headed is that USDA is essentially looking at this question of can we have quote climate smart commodities? Right? It's almost thinking about how we have organic certification, right? So with organic certification, there are rules, there's audits, right? It comes with some structure and some oversight, although some things still get through, but there is a formality to it, which is very different than some of the random labels you see at the store that don't have that structure and sort of teeth behind them. So one of the things I'm watching is USDA moving in that direction in a way that actually creates some type of certification or some sort of backing that goes with the term climate smart? It is just too early to know, but I think that's the thing to watch. Because down the road, if we did have a USDA climate smart commodities program, that would be the thing that consumers would look for. But we are, to be clear, a long way away from that.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Disappointing. But it's nice to know what the goal is to look for. So what does climate smart mean? For people who are just starting to learn about the space and are interested in seeing how they can plug in. Not a lot of us are farmers by upbringing or childhood influence. So tell us what climate smart is in today's world.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

I don't think we have an ironclad definition. In general, practices that are considered climate smart would be things like cover cropping, basically keeping your farmland covered year round. So instead of having bare soil, you add a third crop, maybe it's cereal rye or some type of clover. And a lot of these cover crops can have soil health benefits. They improve filtration, so water can actually go into the ground more easily, which sounds like a weird thing to care about, but it actually can improve runoff, right? So you have less soil running off into water, you have less nutrients, overloading water supplies. And so there's a lot of benefits to adopting these soil health practices. And we now are considering them also climate smart, because some research suggests that some of these practices can help sink or sequester carbon. Now the big question is for how long, right? Because if you adopt these practices for a year or two years, or even five years, and then you tear up your farm or you sell it and it's developed, then that all kind of goes back up into the air, right? So it's not permanent and there's a lot of questions around what long term we can count on in terms of the quote, climate benefit. Other practices might include using bio digesters to capture the gas coming off of manure lagoons. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Manure lagoons

Helena Bottemiller Evich:

Yeah. Reducing nitrogen fertilizer. I mean, there's a lot of different pieces to this that can be considered, quote, climate smart. And I think folks will probably disagree to an extent about which ones should be included and which ones shouldn't be. And we are early days in terms of really defining these practices, but the general overarching theme is either sequestering more carbon or reducing your greenhouse gas emissions.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

I really appreciate that context because it's sort of exciting to think about all of the possibilities. But I don't know, a lot of farmers personally. And you, through your work have met a lot of farmers and ranchers, and not just politicians who are duking this out and making this really partisan.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

I think farmer attitudes around climate change are really shifting right now. So there are a lot of folks who maybe don't believe that greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, right? I've met farmers who do not believe that but they very much acknowledge that the climate is changing and that weather is getting more extreme. It's unpredictable, weird, heavier rains. They acknowledge that things are more precarious in many ways. 

And I think that's important because the conversation around adaptation and mitigation does require some buy-in on whether or not climate change is happening, right? Because it's very difficult to talk to a major landowner about changing how they do things, how they've done things for decades, if you don't kind of start with some sort of common understanding of why you would do that, right? And so if you look at something like cover crops, let's say you're kind of a traditional corn and soy grower, it does change how you manage your operation. And so it requires a mindset shift, a management shift. There's a lot that goes into it. And I think for these farmers, they need to see the benefit of it, right? They're not just gonna add costs and add headache to what they're doing.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

And change their practices.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Yes and if they don't see a benefit. So some of the benefits around cover cropping are now really being sold as you're spending less on fertilizer, right? Your input costs can go down. And next time you have a super crazy rain, you get nine inches of rain, your fields will do better, right? The water will infiltrate the field better. Instead of just saying, Oh, you're doing this to sequester more carbon. That's not necessarily the first, second or third reason why a farmer might be doing it. So a lot of the growers I've met are really excited to talk about the soil health benefits, the ways they're able to sort of feel like they're able to withstand more extreme weather. And then we have this other thing coming, which is carbon credits. If you can figure out how to measure carbon sequestration on these farms, could they sell essentially the offset? They're actually farmers being paid for sequestering carbon right now. It's fairly small scale considering the massive scale of agriculture right now, but there's potentially a lot of money in this. If you're a farmer in Nebraska, you don't wanna get left behind if there's gonna be money to be made in carbon markets.

We’ll be back in a moment to talk about what a future career fixing food could mean for you. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk here, back with award-winning food policy journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich…who also happens to be a mom. Like me. And as any parent knows, politics is hardly the only thing that affects what’s on our plate.

And when it comes to you and your family, does your dinner plate look any different because of what you know and what you're covering with this beat?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

That's a really good question. I actually don't talk about what I eat or don't eat. I mean, I eat a variety of foods. I'm not a particularly picky eater. I mean, I have a toddler, so you have to, you have to take what you can get in terms of what they will actually eat. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

A bagel and ketchup is my daughter's favorite right now.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Ketchup -- is a ketchup is a magical. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

It's magical.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

It’s a magical dip to get them to eat anything. That's my number one tip is they won't eat it, get the ketchup out, they will. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Exactly.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

So I'll share that. But I really, I don't talk a lot about my personal food choices because it is so political and because it is so fraught. And I have seen other reporters who cover this who get into trouble, right? Because if you don't eat certain foods or you cast like public judgment on certain foods, then when you cover that, you're sort of not seen as, I don't know if neutral's the right word, but sort of that you've made up your mind about it. And I just try to not do that publicly, One thing I will say, I do think about this a lot, the statistics on your environmental footprint, if you eat plant based for a whole year and then you fly to Europe and back. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Oh gosh, uh oh.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

You essentially wipe out your environmental savings or your carbon footprint or your overall emissions footprint. And so I do think about that a lot, that there's a lot of other things we do and just focusing on food, it is an important part, but it's a slice of it, right? And so even if you ate the most quote, climate friendly diet and you tried to cut out the things that have higher emissions, you would still take a hard look at all of your other habits, right? And flying is one I think about a lot. I think about that one almost more than I think about food because it is a real big one.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

But let's, let's talk about the money that's flowing in from the Biden administration today into fixing food. Just this fall, the USDA awarded three billion to companies for climate friendly ag. And you created a very cool heat map of 70 projects across the country. What kind of innovation is happening that is helping to advance some of these best practices, thinking, experimentation, that may influence how we get our food someday?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

For the climate smart pilots that the USDA just announced, there's a lot of partnership happening between grower groups and buyers, right? So food companies are involved and retailers and groups that represent like corn growers. It’s a really broad based effort. One of the things that's been criticized though is that the first round of grants that were announced are largely the bigger players. So you're seeing names like PepsiCo and ADM and there is some criticism from the left saying is this really the way to go in terms of rethinking the food supply? I think if you were to ask USDA or folks who sort of support this effort, they would say this is how you get to scale, right, is to work with the big players. The companies that are feeding us right now, the companies that are essentially making up the American food system. If we want them to be more climate friendly or regenerative or whatever the term is you wanna use, if we wanna reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, if we wanna encourage these practices over millions of acres, it makes sense to start with the folks who are operating at scale, who are buying food from thousands of growers and engaging those folks. I think most of them won't really get off the ground until next year. So I'm gonna be following this really closely. But overall, they are promoting a lot of the same practices. So cover cropping and trying to capture methane. There's questions around how fast can we move the science in terms of measurement and actually understanding the impact of these practices. How can we move the science forward and not sort of slow down the implementation? You need to be able to measure this stuff, right? And know that it's having that impact you're intending or it's all sort of just paying for practices without outcomes. And that's a real question with what they're pushing here.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Well, and I imagine, that just increases the tensions with the people who are actually doing the farming because they're being asked to do things differently, but the proven outcome is not there. So I wanna stick on this sort of trajectory we're on massive policy that has come through, lots of money coming down, companies are working on this, farmers are addressing this. Now, the idea of working in regenerative ag and climate smart ag in general is very hot. A lot of job seekers I talk to have this on their dream list of sectors to dive into. If I wanted to make a career out of making our dinner plates greener, what kinds of opportunities would I be looking at?

Helena Bottemiller Evich:

I think a lot of what's needed is science. So I think research, environmental science, soil science, the field is actually called ecosystem services, right? So one could be like creating pollinator habitat, right? Can you create a market around that? There's a lot of momentum around this idea of creating ecosystem services markets. So you are finding ways to incentivize different practices. And I think if you zoom out, one of the big things to understand here is that almost all of these big food companies and a lot of the agriculture companies have made pretty aggressive commitments to slash their emissions or be carbon neutral by a certain point, or they have, all of these pledges, right? And the way you get to the way you meet those pledges is to reduce the footprint of your whole supply chain. And that means going on the farm. And that's where a lot of this tension comes from because you can't meet these PR goals, right? They got a lot of positive PR for making them without changing practices. And yet a lot of these companies are not the ones growing the food. They're buying the food. So it creates a lot of like supply chain pressure.

The other thing is all of the managing of these projects, the managing of sustainability, partnerships, the managing of different pilot projects that different food companies are doing. I think there's a lot of jobs that are gonna be created in this space of sort of measuring impact and also accounting for it, right? And I just imagine there's a lot of jobs in those worlds, trying to figure out who gets credit for cutting emissions from trucking food, right? Is it the retailer? Is it the food company? Is it the trucking company? I mean, not triple counting those. I think anything in that space is probably gonna have a lot of growth. So jobs that are actually in the sustainability offices. Or JBS, the massive, global leading meat company, they just hired their first global chief sustainability officer. I'm seeing a lot more positions like that where at a very high level, I think companies are trying to coordinate what it is they're doing so they have a coherent strategy, right? Because eventually this stuff is probably gonna be a competitive advantage. I think that's the thinking around it. You don't wanna be behind the curve. There's also of course the desire to get in front of any type of regulation, right? We are not in a place where there's any political appetite for regulating the environmental impact of agriculture. For example, the Biden administration likes to talk about climate change. They talk about leveraging agriculture and in the next breath they say voluntary incentive based.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Ah.

Helena Bottemiller Evich:

I mean. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

It's not there.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

It's not gonna be the hammer. But a lot of these leaders in agriculture understand that the way you prevent a hammer is to meaningfully make progress and become more efficient, cut fertilizer where you can cut down on the emissions used, where you can and inputs and so, and water, right? There's a lot of efficiency that can be found in a lot of these practices. So I think there's a lot of growth to be had in, in any job that is working on those questions. Right? And I think some of those are technical hard science questions. And then there's also this whole emerging space of how you account for this stuff. There's a lot of startups right now that are in the field of trying to come up with technology that like can measure carbon sequestration remotely. Can you put sensors on fields? Because it's really expensive to send someone out to take a soil sample and measure how much more carbon did we put in this field? And then how do you extrapolate that out? Is it sinking the same amount in this little square as it is over here? And so you can quickly imagine how this all becomes very complicated. So there's a lot of momentum too in the agricultural tech space. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

So we're a career show and I have to ask you, how did you get interested in this beat as a journalist?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

I get asked this a lot because I am from right outside of Seattle. My husband's always like, how did a girl from King County randomly end up in agriculture? I get this question a lot. I was growing up, my grandpa had a produce market in southwest PA. So I never really thought about being interested in food, but I think at a young age I just was. My grandpa would take me to different farms when he'd go pick up food. He took me into Pittsburgh to go to what's called the Strip, which used to be where they would bring in all the produce on the rail cars. Not how they do it really anymore. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

That's such a romantic image.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

It is. And they would eat these sandwiches that had french fries in them. It's Primanti brothers. It's a famous thing there because if you were on the go, it was a better way to eat your sandwich. Because you could have the

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

It's very efficient.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Yeah.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Delicious.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

So they are really good. I went to college in Southern California and I studied government. And I really liked following how congress works. And so when I did my undergraduate thesis, I ended up doing it on food policy because I'm gonna do something a little bit different. It was kind of hard to find the thesis advisor because food policy wasn't a thing. So I ended up having a healthcare policy advisor. Anyway, that's all to say no one was into food policy. I did my thesis on it and it was actually my thesis that led me to reporting on these issues. And I kind of feel like I just never stopped, right? It just kept going. And six months after I moved to DC for my first reporting job, Michelle Obama launched Let's Move. Congress was debating like the biggest update to food safety law in a century. So there was just a lot going on in the food world. So it ended up being good timing. And here I am more than a decade later and I'm still covering these issues. And the thing that I love about food and agriculture is it's so vast. Like I think when you initially hear it, people are like, Oh, that's a weird niche to be in. But actually.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Except that everybody eats food. So.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Yeah, it totally. I argue it's not really niche, right? It's not at all.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Right, yeah.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Because we all eat multiple times a day and have thoughts and feelings about it. And it's a trillion dollar industry. It touches on everything. It touches on education, healthcare, the economy, rural development. Right now we have this whole push into food and agriculture tech, right? And trying to figure out what are the foods of the future? How can you produce more with less? And there's all sorts of technology coming now that there's ways for them to essentially brew identical dairy proteins using biotech fermentation. I mean, there's just so much happening that I never got bored with it. And I hope more people go into it. I think there will be more opportunities as the whole sector tries to move forward and really respond to the demands now from consumers. And also the global, environmental goals and the push to actually tackle climate change is increasingly seeping into the food and agriculture space. So this is just a topic that is going to become even more top of mind and I think even more mainstream going forward.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

So what about this conversation riled you up? Was it that the USDA was suppressing its research about climate change? Was it that farmers aren’t resourced with the available tools they need to survive? Was it thinking about the very real risks we are facing in our food system that will affect every meal you have in the future?

So how are you going to use your career to sew the seeds of food resiliency? Write to me on Twitter at Yesh Says and tell me your plan!

Now it’s time for Ask Yesh, where I help you with your biggest green career challenges. If you have a question, write to me on Twitter, at Yesh Says with the hashtag Ask Yesh. 

Q: How do I figure out where my place is in the climate movement?

For the answer to this question, I’m going to turn you on to one of my personal climate heros, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. In a recent TedTalk, she asks listeners to draw their own personal climate venn diagram. Close your eyes and draw this in your mind. In one circle, the question is: What are you good at? 

In a second, overlapping circle, the question is: What is the work that needs to be done? 

And finally, in a third overlapping one: What brings your joy?

Whatever is at the center of that diagram, where all three circles overlap, is THE critical answer to this question.

I did this exercise for myself – let me show you my answers. 

Let's start with the first question: What are you good at? For me, I am good at connecting people. And it just so happens that doing that brings me immense joy! Just this week a job seeker came to me looking for help. He is looking for a job where he can use his passion for sustainable ag as a matter of national security. Josh is a vet. He saw first hand, overseas, that food insecurity, related to climate change, was a root cause of conflict. I know a Climate Corps alum who had the same light bulb moment when he worked in Afghanistan. He has since gotten a job working at a VC that funds alternative proteins. John and Eric have the same mission. When I can make that kind of connection, my heart bursts!

Second, what is the work that needs to be done? We need a LOT of people to use their talent to work on climate. Like hundreds of thousands of you. We need people to work on climate for my daughters, for the millions of people in Nigeria and Pakistan who have been displaced by flooding, for the farmers in Missouri who are dedicated to bringing food to your plate. MY work that needs to be done is communicating the need to you and helping YOU work on climate. Working on Degrees and Climate Corps is at the center of my venn diagram. And that's also MY answer to the third question: What brings you joy? 

What is at the center of your Venn diagram? I’ll put Dr. Johnson’s TedTalk in the show notes so you can take it all in and do this exercise yourself. I’d love to catch up and hear about your diagram, what you’re aiming at and how I can help you on your journey. Hit me up on Twitter at YeshSays or LinkedIn at Yesh Pavlik Slenk.  Stay fired up y'all! 

And that's it for this episode! Make sure to listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. Share this podcast with a friend so you can both tune in each week and hear how you can help fight climate change. And learn where the jobs are and how you can make a difference. 

On the next episode of Degrees, the dynamic environmental justice trailblazer Heather McTeer Toney. Once one of the nation’s youngest mayors, today she’s blowing the doors wide open – to everyone – to get in on the wave of green jobs coming our way. EDF’s vice president of community engagement and author of the forthcoming book “Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America's Urgent Call for Climate Solutions” next week, right here on Degrees. It’s the final episode of Season 4! You DON’T want to miss it. 

Until then, check out our Green Jobs Hub to find all the resources to jumpstart your green job career search.

Degrees is presented by Environmental Defense Fund. Amy Morse is our producer. Podcast Allies is our production company. Tressa Versteeg, Elaine Grant, and Matthew Simonson worked on this episode, with help from Rye Taylor and Elizabeth Miller. 

Our music is Shame, Shame, Shame from my favorite band, Lake Street Dive. And I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk. But the foundation of the show, dear listener, is you. Stay fired up y’all.

MUSIC

Change is coming, oh yeah

Ain’t no holding it back

Ain't no running 

Change is coming, oh yeah!

------------

Helena Bottemiller Evich: 

Because the last time I did a podcast in my closet, I was wearing toddler headphones. So moving on up.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Oh gosh. We're making it happen. Millennial moms. Here we go. 

Degrees is produced with Podcast Allies. The artwork is by illustrator Bee Johnson. Degrees theme music is by the amazing band Lake Street Dive. We love their powerful video and song Making Do, all about climate change.