Kenneth Weiss, From Climate Change Reporting to Saving Avocados

Sydney Peerman interviews Pulitzer prize winning reporter Kenneth Weiss about his experiences traveling to other countries to report on the climate crisis and public health.

Kenneth R. Weiss stands with children from a rural school in Uganda, while reporting on how the school was providing menstruation pads to teenage girls for his Beyond 7 Billion series in 2013.

Kenneth R. Weiss is a former Los Angeles Times journalist who has covered education, politics, environment, science and public health throughout his career. He has traveled extensively, reporting from countries such as Kiribati, Bangladesh, Australia, Afghanistan and many others. He won a Pulitzer prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 for his five-part series, Altered Oceans, which was published in the Los Angeles Times. He currently writes freelance on science, environment and public health for various publications including National Geographic, and is associated with the Pulitzer Center.

Q: How did your career in journalism begin?

So I actually started in college, believe it or not. It’s a long story, but I ended up working for the student newspaper, The Daily Californian, when I went to UC Berkeley and at first I was a reporter and then an editor and then the editor-in-chief there, and pretty soon that was sort of all I knew how to do. When I graduated, I set off to Washington DC as a cub reporter and spent nine years there and had an internship and then three different reporting jobs while I lived there. I then wanted to come home and ended up working for the LA Times for the next 24 years.

Q: What led you to begin reporting internationally?

I did a variety of work with the LA Times over the years and that’s how I actually ended up doing foreign reporting. I did two major series’ of articles for the Los Angeles Times over the years. The one was the “Altered Oceans” that won all of those awards back in 2006. I really wanted to go and look at different places that would illustrate the kinds of trends and problems that we were seeing in the oceans and that meant going beyond the waters of the United States. So I started to travel to other places and that kind of started it.

Later on, I did this series called “Beyond 7 billion” and it was looking at human population growth and with the initial premise, whether that was an environmental story. The answer was yes, but it was really complicated. The population growth of the planet is really not in the United States. We are growing because of immigration, but really, the population growth is in the developing world. So I ended up going to a lot of those places as well. And it was, you know, pretty extensive. So I had two really wonderful, huge opportunities at the Los Angeles Times to go places, and this was at a time before the whole business model of newspapers really broke and lost funding to send journalists abroad.

Q: What was one of the first countries you traveled to with the Los Angeles Times and how did that alter the rest of your journalism career?

Well, I remember Australia was one of the early ones because it was part of the Altered Oceans series. I went to Queensland and dove on the barrier reef and went to Moreton Bay, which is outside of Brisbane. But I went to South Africa to cover a meeting once and that was maybe one of the earliest ones with the LA Times because that would have been in 2001. I went to Canada and South Africa in 2001 and this is when I really started to get more in depth with environmental reporting. Before that, I was covering higher education as a “beat” and that was focused mostly on the United States. I was always focused on doing different subject matters, whether it was the Pentagon or when I was in DC I covered Congress, and then later the environment in 2001 and that’s what I’ve been doing since.

While reporting on Albatross parents mistakenly feeding plastic to their chicks, Kenneth R Weiss catches up on his notes while surrounded by curious Laysan Albatross on Midway Atoll in the NW Hawaiian Islands.

Q: Can you tell me more about the process that led to your Pulitzer prize winning series, Altered Oceans?

I was, as I mentioned earlier, a beat reporter, and I was very interested in covering the oceans as a subject matter beat. I had been lobbying my editor for years to do this and I was a scuba diver and a fisherman as a boy so I had this great passion for it, but he basically kept blowing me off which is what editors do. But then, the newspaper was sold and they brought in a whole suite of editors from the top rung and they said they wanted to do something different. So my editor said, ‘I’ve got just the guy to do it.” Next thing I knew, I had switched subject matter beats from covering higher education to covering the coast and oceans.

A lot of the story had to do with the California coast but then it went beyond as well because the oceans just flow everywhere. I really wanted to package this together as a series and take a deeper look, instead of just one little story or another, so I was given several months to go travel and I did four or five major trips with photographer Rick Loomis. We went to Florida, Australia which I mentioned earlier, and we went to the Pacific Northwest atolls above Hawaii to do the trash story. So I spent five years covering this and learning a lot about fishing and going to scientific conferences and seeing certain patterns and trends. What I realized was, we always had this concept that the oceans are so vast that there was no way that human industrial society could ever change something so grandiose, but as it turns out, our impact is huge. We had been changing everything from the composition to the chemistry of the oceans. So the story was looking at how there’s been an utter transformation at the hands of human industrial society.

So that was really important because a lot of these things hadn’t really been written about or certainly weren’t in the mainstream press at the time. There had been a few science articles but we were sort of the first to put this together and try to illustrate how we as people were changing something as vast and seemingly unbreakable as the oceans. This was also a time in the climate world, despite it being recognized since the 70s, that there was a lot more outright denialism that we as humans were changing our climate.

[embed]Special Report: Altered Oceans This five-part series on the crisis in the world's oceans was published in July and August of 2006. The series -- by…www.latimes.com

Q: What are some of the other countries you’ve traveled to and other reporting you have done?

The Pulitzer center has been really key in helping me get money together to go to places like Kiribati and New Zealand more recently. But I went throughout Africa and Asia for that population series in 2013, and that was more focused overseas because that’s where the population growth is. I was trying to find out: What are the kinds of strains that are complicating society and what’s it like in those societies when the population is growing faster than the economy and how do they deal with it? I also took a more recent trip in 2020 to Palmyra Atoll in the Central Pacific. For that, I was doing a couple of stories on the remarkable wildlife refuge and invasive palm species.

[embed]Beyond 7 Billion The statistics outline the story. More than 7 billion people crowd the planet, and by mid-century there will probably…pulitzercenter.org

Cruising the inside lagoon looking for wildlife, Kenneth R Weiss poses for a photo while writing a story on the wildlife refuge in the Palmyra Atoll in the Central Pacific.

Q: What are some of the struggles with international reporting that you have seen or experienced?

It can be tricky to work overseas in many ways. Sometimes, just getting there is really exhausting and then you have to get to work. And with a lot of countries, journalists increasingly have problems getting journalism visas so the dirty secret is sometimes you don’t ask, you just get a tourist visa and go in. This is easier to do if you’re an old fashioned paper and pencil reporter but much more difficult if you have a bunch of cameras and things on you like doing multimedia work or video work. You become much more conspicuous and more subject to government sensors.

Some countries like Iran and China are particularly tough because they have a massive surveillance apparatus in place that tracks you. That’s how I got in trouble in Morocco, but fortunately Morocco takes a lot of US aid money so I wasn’t imprisoned but I could’ve been and it was really scary. We went straight from there to Afghanistan and that actually felt safer because we didn’t have the secret police chasing us everywhere. In Morocco, everytime we interviewed someone they would beat them up and it was just terrible. So it can be very tricky reporting in other countries.

Also, in many ways it’s easier to report and ask people questions if you share a common language. I spent a lot of time interviewing people on the island of Bohol in the Philippines, and they don’t speak English much less Tagalog, they speak Boholano. It’s a sub-dialect and one of hundreds that they speak there. So I got pretty good at finding interpreters, but it took a lot of time and so finding a nongovernmental organization that was working in the field that had contacts and new people and could help broker a relationship was really helpful. I felt proud about being able to actually communicate with these folks and connect with them or try to at least because it’s not easy to bridge those gaps.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

I took a buyout at the LA Times and since then, I’ve been writing for science publications like Science, National Geographic, Foreign Policy and doing a lot more overseas work.

More recently, my wife and I have bought land in the hills above Carpinteria, California and I’ve been growing avocados in a small organic orchard, and I’ve become interested in writing about them. I just got back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand where I went to a scientific conference and something called the World Avocado Congress and am now writing something for Science Magazine about efforts to preserve the diversity of avocado genetics. What’s happening is, the avocados you get in the store are a Hass variety, and all the native trees are being cut down for this one variety. Through the propensity for this one cash crop, the Hass Avocado to dominate, we’re losing all genetic diversity which is not a smart thing to do when also facing disease, a changing climate, and changing salinity in the soils. So I’m focusing on the scientific efforts to save that diversity.

Reporting by Sydney Peerman shared with the Reynolds Sandbox.

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