Kate Yoder

Confused by recycling? Wondering why the symbol doesn't seem to make sense anymore?

I spent half a year researching what happened. I found that corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its meaning.

We've become so focused on making everything recyclable that we forget to question whether recycling everything was the best goal in the first place. And that's exactly how companies wanted it.

https://grist.org/culture/recycling-symbol-logo-plastic-design/

I'm writing a piece for Grist on 2023's "words of the year" related to #climatechange. Any ideas? I'm looking for words and phrases that are new OR newly relevant to what happened in climate spaces this year

@Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it I came across references to this! I know some of the new "truth in labeling" laws are around composting. Washington state just passed one

Grist's top 10 climate words of 2023 (from my 7th annual installment)

• AQI
• Carbon insetting
• Climate quitters
• Deinfluencers
• El Niño
• Global boiling
• Greenhushing
• Noctalgia
• RICO
• White hydrogen

@Hawaii@mastodon.world Now we have "carbon insetting" too https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/02/21/you-ve-heard-of-offsetting-but-what-in-the-world-is-carbon-insetting

@Deus@charcha.cc fascinating, I like this one. thanks for flagging

@praxeology@post.lurk.org oh cool, I hadn't heard of this

@AndyMiller@fediscience.org I was thinking about this one!

What once sounded outlandish, like material for a dystopian novel, is looking more and more like reality. So what is a writer of climate fiction supposed to do?

My latest for Grist:

https://grist.org/culture/summer-reality-caught-climate-fiction-heatwave/

Have you taken a trip this summer and been foiled by heat, fire, smoke, or floods at every turn? I'm looking to talk to someone about navigating this experience for an article I'm writing for Grist. Let me know if you're interested!

A year ago, the climate scientist Patrick criticized his own wildfire study in Nature, causing an uproar in the climate world. I kept wondering why he did it. I spent a chunk of the summer talking to Patrick and people who know him, trying to figure out why the reaction was so polarized, and why nuance can be so hard to for people to accept.

https://grist.org/science/patrick-brown-profile-climate-scientist-criticized-study/

Does giving a hurricane a name change how we talk about it, or even prepare for it? I looked at the history of naming storms and how it's always been tied up with cultural biases

https://grist.org/language/hurricane-name-culture-response-bias/

@JetlagJen@geekdom.social Global boiling is on my list!

@ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social good call!

@Deus@charcha.cc 👀

@Ed_Carley@urbanists.social That sounds awful, I'm so sorry to hear that! :( I would be interested in hearing more about this if you're up for chatting about it. I'm at kyoder [at] grist [dot] org

For the first (and last?) time in 8 years of climate reporting, I wrote about polar bears — and how they turned into a climate cliche. As the visible effects of warming moved from the North Pole to your backyard, the movement's symbols changed too

https://grist.org/culture/climate-change-polar-bears-symbol-history/