An Earth Week Unlike Another
We just released our 2024 Impact Report, but our work doesn't stop here.
Dear Reader,
Hello from toasty Tempe, Arizona, where our entire editorial team is gathering for the Society for Environmental Journalists’ annual conference!
This is the first time our staff have met in person: Rhysea will moderate the Just Transition in the Global South: Opportunities, Risks and Lessons From the North workshop, and I will be on the panel of the Charting Our True North: Building Community With/For Journalists of Color mini-workshop. It’s amazing how our team of twenty-somethings is making a real impact in the environmental journalist space; I’m still getting used to being a sought-after speaker!
Speaking of impact, you should check out our recently released 2024 Impact Report. In the past year, thanks to your support, The Xylom:
🗞️ Doubled our newsroom size
📖 Increased our readership by 32%
🟦 Grew our social media following by 75%
We’re not content with merely maintaining the same level of impact: so far this year, we’ve already had more media mentions, newsroom partnerships, and news social media followers than we’ve had all of 2024. Just this past week, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority improved its weekend rail service for the first time in 20 (!) years following my reporting on their ridership crisis.
Conferences such as #SEJ2025 allow us to touch base and strategize with colleagues across the world, gain access to potential funders, as well as gain story ideas (I promise you that #SEJ2022-inspired Texas story I’ve been talking about for three years will be released in May!)
We will be taking advantage of this week to rest, recharge, and reach higher, so we can keep doing the work y’all have depended on.
Yours sincerely,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor
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THINGS YOU SHOULD READ
✨ NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS
🌏 We joined the Climate News Task Force along with 11 other newsrooms to increase and improve climate journalism collaborations and innovate new solutions to current challenges. Alex will be speaking more about this during an INN Days panel in Minneapolis in June.
🟠 We also joined the 89 Percent Project Joint Coverage Week focused on the silent but overwhelming majority of the world’s people — between 80 and 89%, according to recent science — who want governments to take stronger action. Check out a story about urban farming in Jakarta here, and stay tuned for a story by our Editor-at-Large Kang-Chun Cheng!
💰 Thank you to Siri Carpenter and Tejas Kotak, our new sustainers and donors!
📱 ICYMI: We’re piloting a WhatsApp channel, which would help reach users who stay off social media, and curb misinformation at the source (share it with your immigrant parents, aunties, or uncles!)
🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR
ATLANTA — A Key Fight Over the Most Infamous Police Project in the Country Is Coming to a Head (Hannah Riley, Slate)
In other words, the highest-paid police foundation executive in the country essentially argued that journalism is a form of terrorism.
[…]
This case echoes a troubling national trend: private actors increasingly exercising public power while avoiding public accountability.LETCHER COUNTY, Kentucky — Indigenous Leaders Thwart Prison Plans with a Sacred Bison Revival (Yessenia Funes, Atmos)
“Yes, this is a very visionary and spiritual thing for us, but it’s also very economic,” DeVaughan said. “This is something that could essentially be an economic reviver for the area that does not include pollution. That does not include slave labor.”
Western North Carolina — Pursuing Higher Ground: Six Months After the Hurricane That Changed Appalachia (Christian Monterrosa and Trey Walk, The Margin)
We stood a few feet away from the river that devastated the family’s life. “I’m terrified of water,” Gaelen said. “There’s no obstacle it cannot move.”
Texas — All Eyes Are On Texas as Anti-Renewables Bills Advance (Jael Holzman, Heatmap Plus)
“He’s actively working against the interests of his district,” Lewin said of [state Senator Kevin] Sparks. “It’s algorithms. I don’t know what folks think is going on. People are just getting a lot of bad information.”
🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING
The scale of the Vietnam War (Kevin Nguyen and Nguyen Tran, The Verge)
But it’s a bit hard to imagine how big a Titanic is, let alone 15 of them. It’s easier to conjure a modern Ford F-150 pickup truck, the country’s most popular automobile, which weighs around 5,000 pounds on average. So imagine the bombs dropped during Rolling Thunder as nearly 344,000 pickup trucks — the kind you’re most likely to see on the road, but hundreds of thousands of them. For context, your average Ikea parking lot has the space for 1,700 automobiles. So envision about 202 Ikea parking lots, completely filled with pickup trucks.
Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. (Kate Yoder and Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist)
Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.”
(SOME OF) THE XYLOM’S RECENT STORIES
🌱 Jakarta's Urban Farms Come To The Rescue Of Food-Insecure Residents
Community-led urban farming is not only a solution for citizens to reclaim food sovereignty, but it also increases the Indonesian megacity's climate resiliency.
🌱 Perspective: Grief Grows, Like Ugu
As Roseline Mgbodichinma Anya Okorie mourns the death of her aunt, she is drawn to the properties of the ugu plant, a vine creeping from death to life.
🍠 River Nile Blues: Famished Sudanese Turn to the Humble Sweet Potato
Most families in the Sudanese Blue Nile have been subsisting on sweet potatoes over the past eight months, rather than on the preferred wheat, due to the effects of the Sudanese Civil War. For the first time, we looked at the public health impacts of this abrupt diet switch.