What a Zen master, a grieving elder, and a carbon bomb taught me about climate journalism

National Observer

19-05-2025

Have you ever stood on the edge of a tailings pond by an oil refinery? If you have, you've heard the boom of propane cannons as they explode to scare off wildlife. You've seen the more adventurous wildlife coated in toxins as they die.
The first time I witnessed this was at something called "The Healing Walk," organized to bring people to the oil sands to experience them viscerally. This is when my consciousness about climate as a journalist truly awakened.
I was trying to make sense of so many things at once. A white-haired Indigenous elder was breaking away from our group of 400, walking toward the edge of the tailings ponds. The scenery under a blue sky might have been beautiful – spacious, brushy pines, boreal forest cut to the ground. It's what Edward Burtynsky calls "A terrible beauty" – massive industrial complex rising out of glorious lands.
The air smelled acrid. The back of my throat hurt. Between the cannon explosions, I heard a deep cry. I looked over and saw the elder raise her hands to the sky, sobbing. Her white hair caught the light as she wept. There was no comfort here. For me, something that had only been theoretical became visceral – her voice, the injured wildlife, the nearby Suncor plant belching fumes. I stood there stricken, listening and watching, and feeling my own heart break.
Later at the Healing Walk, Bill McKibben told me as we stood by the Suncor Plant, "The oil sands are ground zero of climate change. A carbon bomb." I didn't quote Bill McKibben in my story. But that interview would become central to a powerful film I made with Bill Weaver for a crowdfunding campaign, "The Tar Sands Reporting Project," that raised $50,000 for us to do more reporting from Ft. McMurray. Myself, I had only just started thinking seriously about climate change. Bill's words have stayed with me through the years.
That night, I wrote up the story in my hotel room and published it. My story never mentioned climate change. It showed the impacts of tar mining on people and animals. The story went viral.
In a few weeks, I would drive to the Tsleil-Waututh lands in North Vancouver to speak with her — Amy George, the woman who had broken away from our group and wept at the edge of the tailings pond. We sat under the trees and talked for hours. She told me about her experience at residential school, the pain of that memory still raw beneath the surface of what we had witnessed together. She spoke about how learning about the Holocaust helped her begin to heal — how she saw parallels between her own suffering and what Jewish people had endured, and how that recognition gave her strength.
It was a wonderful afternoon. I wrote a follow-up story about her life — her strength, her grief, her spiritual leadership as a residential school survivor, her pride as a mother, and grandmother.
Two years later, I returned to Fort McMurray to cover Archbishop Desmond Tutu's visit to the region. I interviewed him as he stepped off a helicopter after doing a flyover of the oil sands hosted by Suncor. With the aerial perspective of the vast industrial landscape still fresh in his mind, Tutu declared with characteristic moral clarity, "The oil sands are emblematic of an era that must end." Yet even as he named them the product of "negligence and greed," he balanced his critique with compassion, emphasizing that "No one wants to see an end to industry. If you have industry that is responsible, they have to be commended and encouraged."
This approach—holding both critique and invitation simultaneously—reflected the same complex conversations I'd heard about happening around family dinner tables across Canada. From Tutu, who passed away in 2021, I witnessed another powerful model of how to speak difficult truths while still creating space for dialogue.
When I went home after these Fort McMurray trips, what stayed with me was the taste of chemicals, oil, and tar at the back of my throat. These visceral experiences taught me something profound about climate journalism – sometimes the most powerful stories don't need to say "climate" at all.
Don't say "climate"
Fast-forward to now when I have come to understand that my story's power without mentioning 'climate change' wasn't coincidental, but reflected a broader pattern in how people engage with this crisis. After witnessing how people responded to discussions about extreme weather, researchers working in Calgary told me very recently that they reached a striking conclusion: despite the fact that people they were interviewing had just suffered the impacts of extreme weather caused by global warming, victims shut down at the mention of climate. This reflects a growing trend. We've heard so many shocking things about climate change that the words "climate change" have become mundane and many people may want to shut them out. Not only many people. The U.S. government itself is leading in erasing all mention of "climate change" in official conversations. This has a chilling effect on the entire information system and will have many ripple effects.
As I wrote in a recent note to readers, the U.S. government has been ordering agencies to completely erase all mention of the word "climate" from websites and communications and remove climate studies. But the climate story doesn't listen to political edicts. It continues to unfold, mercilessly, cruelly, in spite of politics. While political forces attempt to erase climate language from our discourse, the physical reality continues unabated, manifesting in increasingly devastating events.
Just last week, Richard and Sue Nowell died tragically when wildfires tore through their home near Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba. The fire was described by police as having moved with "unprecedented speed" through the region. This news is wrenching, heartbreaking, but in an era where megafires devour thousands of acres, no longer shocking. And even though we now have a new group of climate deniers espousing that even the phrase "climate change" is "radical", weather doesn't care and will go on disrupting our lives until we get a handle on it.
Call Me By My True Names
This conflict — needing to communicate about a crisis while navigating resistance to its very name, needing to name something that powerful forces demand to remain unnamed — evokes a great deal of reflection in me. How do we navigate this in 2025?
I'm reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh's insight into identity and naming in his poem Call Me By My True Names. In that powerful work, he offers a profound truth about interconnection: that we must recognize ourselves in all people and situations — even the uncomfortable ones. He was writing about his experiences during the Vietnam War, urging us to see that we are not separate from the suffering of others — even those we might view as adversaries. His words were born from a specific conflict, but in my opinion, they apply to all of them.
That spirit — of seeing beyond sides, of listening deeply — stayed with me when I went to the oil sands region after the Healing Walk several more times to report on one of the most polarizing issues in Canada.
As a journalist, I've always tried to understand as many perspectives as possible. I've made a practice of putting myself in other people's shoes. In the climate story, that's meant being just as interested in the perspective of an oil company executive as in that of an activist. Unfortunately, the oil executives have never been willing to speak with me. I still wish they would.
When I was interviewing people in the oil sands region around 2013, many were eager to talk — and what they most often talked about was family. They told me about dinner tables where siblings faced each other across a divide — one working in the oil sands to support aging parents, the other an environmental activist fighting to stop fossil fuel expansion. And yet, the conversations didn't devolve into shouting or slogans. There was a deep recognition of each other's humanity, motivations, and the validity of their concerns. The oil worker understood the activist's fears for the future. The activist understood the worker's need for economic security. In some cases, they both wished the industry could rapidly shift to renewables — that clean energy like wind and sun could replace the paycheques that held families together. They faced each other across a divide — and then asked one another to pass the ketchup, laughed, and felt close again.
I met a man who worked in the oil sands to make enough money to build his home in B.C. and fit it out with solar energy. His story embodied the very contradiction we face - using today's carbon economy to finance tomorrow's clean energy future.
I was always moved by these stories of home - to me they told the story of Canada's challenge and its potential. I would have loved to have been at those tables myself and to have documented those conversations. As it was, I heard about them second-hand, but even then, I was struck by their warmth and depth and the sense of connection to people and place. These families were having the conversations our nation needed to have - holding space for complexity, for multiple truths, for the difficult tensions between present needs and future consequences.
Let's return to where we began – that tailings pond in Fort McMurray.
When I stood watching that elder weep, I didn't yet understand what would make my story resonate with hundreds of thousands of readers. I didn't understand how deep what I experienced that day would go, how it would become the catalytic story that led me to found CNO. Looking back, I can see all that. I also understand why it landed with so many people. It wasn't technical language about carbon emissions or climate models. It was the raw, human truth of what's happening to people on the ground – the sound of those cannons, the acrid smell that lingered in my throat for days afterward, the grief of that white-haired elder raising her hands to the sky.
Dene Suline hereditary chief Francois Paulette captured this sentiment by saying at the Tutu conference, "The greatest sin that a man can do is to destroy Mother Earth." Perhaps our challenge is similar: to call this crisis by its true names – not just the scientific terminology, but the human experiences, the economic impacts, the community stories that make it real. The elder's tears, the taste of chemicals in my throat, the shattered roofs in Calgary – these too are the true names of climate change.
Thich Nhat Hanh's advice to a journalist
In my thirties, I lived in Paris and received an assignment from an American magazine to travel to Plum Village, the Zen retreat, to write a profile of Thich Nhat Hanh, the meditation centre's senior monk. I was privileged to spend two weeks at Plum Village and at the end to have tea with the Zen Buddhist teacher on the porch of his humble dwelling near Bordeaux. As he poured me tea, he spoke to me as a journalist about the power of stories. "Stories are like seeds," he said with his gentle smile. "When you tell a story, you plant a seed that can grow in another's heart. Plant a few good seeds."
Though Thich Nhat Hanh passed away in 2022, his wisdom continues to guide my approach to storytelling. He understood that change doesn't happen all at once – it begins with a single story, a single seed, carefully tended. Perhaps that's our work today: planting seeds of understanding that can grow even in resistant soil. Finding stories and human experiences that can take root where abstract concepts cannot. By taking on the small task of planting a few good seeds, the larger task of solving massive global problems can be made manageable. Those seeds grow from experiences like that day at the tailings pond—visceral moments that connect us to the reality of our changing world into deeper reflections and concrete actions.
The taste of chemicals in my throat from that day at the tailings pond has long since faded. But the lesson remains: Our most powerful stories aren't the ones that insist on their own importance, but those that allow others to truly see and feel our shared reality – stories that plant seeds that can grow into understanding.
That's the work I'm committed to. Not because it is easy or because I've figured it all out, but because the people I've had the privilege to meet along the way in the years since I started my journey as a climate journalist and publisher have shown me it's possible. And in times like these, possibility is what we need to cultivate. That's going to mean planting a billion good seeds. That's going to mean saying "climate", even when the most powerful and scary forces in the world order us not to. That's going to mean remembering that the story we're working to tell is the story of ourselves, our home, our miraculous planet Earth. It's the story of our dangerous, remarkable species. Will we be dangerous or remarkable?
How will our story end?
It's always in the balance — we human beings, with our capacity for both brutality and brilliance, cowardice and courage. The story continues with each seed we choose to plant.
We carry within us both destruction and possibility. The future depends on which we feed.