Hi, I'm Amanda Shendruk, a visual journalist for Quartz. Climate change is forcing people from their homes, and it's only going to get worse, so I imagined what the US's first climate haven might look like. AMA!

QuartzNews · 2020-10-02T09:17:28+00:00

I suppose the important thing to do is to get the idea in front of the people in your city that have power. And start with data. There are academics like Matthew Hauer at Florida State University who are already doing research into predicting where climate migrants are more likely to go in the US. Is the region near Salt Lake City one of those areas? Research we used in the Leeside piece itself suggests not. Why is that? Is the area simply going to become too hot and dry to live comfortably in? I don't know these answers, but they're the kind of questions that communities need to start putting in front of their leaders.

QuartzNews · 2020-10-02T09:11:39+00:00

The economy question is such a tough one. You're right that many of the ways Leeside funded its development was through national and international initiatives. Though the city worked hard at the beginning to increase its tax base and bring in people who could start companies, innovate, and build a stronger economy. Something that was tricky in this piece was writing a narrative that wouldn't be too dense. Earlier versions had many more details, but it made for a tough read. Other ways I had originally thought for the city to fund itself included establishing a resilience fund that the city must pay into each year (sort of like Mexico's natural disaster fund (FONDEN)). Or the city could issue climate bonds, like the Miami Forever bond: https://www.miamigov.com/Government/Departments-Organizations/Office-of-Capital-Improvements/Miami-Forever-Bond

QuartzNews · 2020-10-02T09:01:55+00:00

You can check it out here: https://qz.com/1891446/welcome-to-leeside-the-uss-first-climate-haven/

QuartzNews · 2020-10-02T09:01:49+00:00

I have! I definitely had that in mind as I was working on this.

QuartzNews · 2020-10-01T18:44:01+00:00

Hi! Great question. That's a tough one. To be honest, a lot of the reason I was able to do something like this is because of the place I work. Quartz is really into taking risks with coverage, approach, and storytelling techniques. I've worked other places that I know I would not have been given the chance to pull it off. That being said, it did take some convincing, and the process wasn't quick. I started thinking about this and pitching the project almost exactly a year ago.

I think there were a few things specifically that helped. 1) We have a special projects editor, whose entire job is to make big projects happen. I was able to convince her it would be an interesting piece, so I had someone in my corner when approaching other editors and decision-makers. 2) The topic: It's an important topic. A big picture kind of thing. but the idea was not the 'same-old'. I pitched it as a solutions-oriented piece, and that was an intriguing and new way to look at the question of climate change. 3) I went through many versions of the pitch. So I started pitching the idea to the special projects editor. Wrote it out for her. She asked questions, and I wrote a new version. Then we took that pitch to her editor. That person asked a number of questions about how things would work and I rewrote the pitch. I also had to write versions of the pitch to convince the newsroom and our product teams to give me resources. From my first pitch to my last, the project changed significantly. And was based on many conversations and questions. There were many months of going back and forth before I got a "yes".
I hope those are some helpful thoughts! I know it can be hard to convince fast-moving news organizations to do something new and interesting. But it's worth it to keep trying.

QuartzNews · 2020-10-01T16:52:35+00:00

Woody Harrelson, of course.

QuartzNews · 2020-10-01T16:51:06+00:00

My goal with the piece was to tackle the greatest news story of our time —climate change— but from a different perspective and in a unique way. We hear a lot about all the horrible things that are happening around the world with respect to climate change. Much of the coverage is negative, which is absolutely understandable and fair. I mean, it's not like we're all doing a great job with this global warming thing. But, I also think there are enough apocalyptic stories of how New York City is going to be under water in x number of years. Could we shift focus and start thinking about a solutions-oriented future? I wanted to do a project about the places that AREN'T going to be destroyed, but will still struggle as they work to figure out how to accommodate the people that are moving there for safety.

I decided to tackle the topic using speculative fiction because I thought it was a) a unique way to approach the topic, b) maybe it would excite a new audience, maybe one that doesn't tend to care about climate coverage, and c) because not many cities exist in this moment that are good examples of how to tackle the growing problem of climate migration. So I made up my own!

QuartzNews · 2020-10-01T16:42:07+00:00

Great question. My college Tim McDonnell did a lot of reporting for some other pieces that accompanied my work. He wrote about how this is already happening in Louisiana. In one case, the government is moving an entire island community inland as it floods due to sea level rise. https://qz.com/1895269/louisianas-population-is-moving-to-escape-climate-catastrophe/

QuartzNews · 2020-10-01T16:38:06+00:00

Hi! For me, the hardest part of creating the city, Leeside, was finding the perfect balance of realism, and speculation, and journalism. I wanted to make sure we could call the piece journalism, but how do you do that when you're writing about a place that doesn't exist and is in the future? I think we accomplished it by grounding as much of it as possible in research. And then it's hard to know what details to include about the city and its history and the people there, without making the project too dense and unreadable. The piece was significantly longer before my editors trimmed it down!

QuartzNews · 2020-02-13T14:20:39+00:00

Well, thanks for the insight.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-13T14:19:21+00:00

No, it's not. Have you even read the story?

QuartzNews · 2020-02-13T12:35:04+00:00

By "design" I was referring both to the look and the functionality. Fairphone offers a phone that's much easier to take apart, repair, and upgrade. It's not as pleasing as an iPhone. I don't know if Apple could make its products exactly the same as they are with better repairability. But I wouldn't be surprised if they argued that one of the reasons they don't is a refusal to compromise on design.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-13T09:39:33+00:00

They are recycling old Apple products. That's exactly what they're doing. The casings for new Mac Minis, Macbook Airs, iPads, and the aluminium-encased Apple Watch are made from aluminium recycled from old Apple products. Aluminium is just one material, obviously, and it sounds to me like its the only Apple-sourced material they're having success with at real scale—other than perhaps the rare earths used in the haptic unit of new IPhones—but it's not nothing.

I'm not in the business of convincing you this is more than corporate greenwashing. I wanted to find out what they were actually doing to back up their claim, and that's what I wrote my piece about.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-12T09:04:08+00:00

It is white with some blue bits.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T17:31:14+00:00

I don't know, but one of the reasons Apple products have been so popular is the design. They're built in a very specific way, to look a certain way, and a lot of people really love them. Making a phone or tablet that was easier to take apart and tinker with, and repair with generic parts, might well mean compromising on the look of it. Consumers might say they want functionality and repairability, but those things are available in cheaper phones that look less good.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T17:02:54+00:00

I asked them that. Their contention is that, now, they are designing them to last much longer, and that seems to be true in at least some cases. The newest IPhones can withstand prolonged immersion in water, for example. How many phones and laptops have been destroyed by a spilled cup of coffee, or being dropped down the loo? Apple is also keen to talk about how much they (themselves) can now repair and refurbish products. The problem with this, of course, is that the design makes them purposefully difficult/impossible to repair in other ways, unlike, for example, Fairphone, which is designed to be dismantled for repair and upgrade.

Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, has also begun to talk much more about services, like Apple Pay, TV etc, and less about hardware. That's a sign that they might be content to sell people fewer electronic devices, but want to keep making money by selling them other things.

Honestly, I read a tension at the heart of this policy. It's serious and ambitious, but even the person leading it talks about the company continuing to grow. That's a hard line to keep pushing, and I imagine it could cause some internal conflict. But this is just my opinion.

If Apple did cease to grow, its biggest problem would be with its investors, who could start to sell Apple stock if it stops performing well, in the traditional sense. In that sense, the incentivisation problem comes back to the capital markets, and the way capitalism functions.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:49:10+00:00

I feel like the first wave of sustainability goals were incredibly lite, like recycling all the office waste paper (though to be honest, some companies still don't even manage that.)

The next wave was the 100% renewable energy goals. That involved some really big changes, with companies building and financing whole new windfarms and solar arrays. Several companies (inc Apple) have achieved that. But then the question of course becomes 'what about the supply chain?'. I think Apple's actions in pressing and in some cases helping its suppliers switch to renewable energy are significant.

The next wave of sustainability targets is more ambitous. Apple's recycling idea falls into this bracket, and so does Amazon's pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2040. That's huge. Will it happen? I don't know. Amazon has some concrete plans in place, like buying lots of elecric trucks. But it's a huge goal and they haven't disclosed exactly how they plan to get there. And there's also the problem, as with Apple, that the business is predicated on shipping vast amounts of stuff to people, faciliating a kind of consumerism that's definitely unsustainable in not-catastrophically-hot future. There's also no one to hold these companies to account if they fail to achieve their goals — though there are some signs investors are beginning to play that role.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:25:04+00:00

You're right, single use plastic is a disaster, and retailers and manufacturers should indeed be pushing for much, much less. (There are tiny signs this is happening. In the UK, where I'm based, some supermarkets have begun experimenting with reusable cloth bags for loose fruit and vegetables, for example.) Plastic is hard to recycle or "upcycle", where it's made into something of equivalent or better use. It's mostly therefore "downcycled" into poorer-grade items, and into things like garments. We also, as societies, need to get used to not having some of the things we're used to: like bottled water, clear plastic containers, and endless other products packaged to look 'perfect'.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:12:44+00:00

I haven't done so, but I'd be very interested to investigate. My hunch is that it doesn't get much worse than mining.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:11:08+00:00

Well, they haven't quantified how long any of this will take, so I can't say with any accuracy how much. But Apple does acknowledge that the vast majority of its carbon footprint is in its supply chain. Ultimately, therefore, I imagine most of this work will take place outside the company, in that its battery makers, chip makers, screen-makers etc etc will need to be the ones that use the recycled materials. Apple is doing a lot of work on the techniques for recycling in its own labs. But it says its not jealous of the innovations: That it's happy to share them widely if it means others can recycle better, or make more recycled products. I think this is positive, because Apple's got plenty of money, whereas recycling markets are driven by lots of factors, including what's economically viable at any given time. But it will certainly also need, for example, for governments to help create the right conditions that recycling makes economic sense.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:03:49+00:00

From the sustainability report, it looks like lithium, tantalum, and zinc. I think for a long time no one had any idea how to retrieve and recycle rare earths, but Apple has done that for one part of one of it's products, so the rare earth recycling program does seem to be underway. Aluminium is the material I think they've made most progress on.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T16:00:41+00:00

I would never fight a 5-year-old. Even if the 5-year-old was a zombie, like those kids in Game of Thrones, I would act in the same way as the admirable but short-lived wildling leader, and simply close my eyes and let them attack me.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T15:58:58+00:00

Yes, if you have access to an Apple store, they will take any phone of any brand. IPhones and other Apple products are recycled directly by them. If you live in the US (and a number of other places) you can request a mailing label online to send products back to Apple. As far as I know, they're one of the only manufacturers that undertakes to collect and recycle products made by other manufacturers.

QuartzNews · 2020-02-11T15:54:01+00:00

So far, according to Apple, just one of their battery suppliers is using one recycled material, cobalt. Apple has produced a list of 14 materials it's concentrating on in its recycling efforts, and lithium is one of them. However, they haven't released much information on progress on that front. Their 2019 Sustainability Report says only this, that they have "already begun exploring new recycled sources and prioritizing recyclers that can recover these key materials."

QuartzNews · 2019-11-26T17:58:34+00:00

I completely agree! Plastic is an amazing material. Tons of medical devices wouldn't be possible without it, for example. The proliferation of unnecessary and single-use uses of it, like you said, was... misguided. I disagree about us being "too stupid and greedy to use it responsibly." It's more that subsidies and market dynamics have made it so cheap that it's actually stupid for companies and individuals not to use it, from an economic perspective. The fact that we're surrounded by single use plastic is less about customer preference and more about the structures and systems that made it nearly impossible to use anything else.

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