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On a warm, sunny day last July, Cara Buckley traipsed through a former hog farm in Iowa. Ms. Buckley, a reporter on the Climate desk of The New York Times, was there to meet the farm’s owners, who, in 2022, sold off their hogs and began growing mushrooms in an effort to restore the land and get out of factory farming.
It was at that farm that an idea came to her: Why not highlight local climate solutions in every state?
“I just thought, What other stories are we missing?” said Ms. Buckley, who this year began working with Catrin Einhorn, another reporter on the Climate desk, to see the project through.
The first installment, titled “50 States, 50 Fixes,” was published last month. It highlights climate and environmental solutions in five states, including a 100-acre nature preserve in Hawaii, a car-free neighborhood in Arizona and geothermal energy that is helping to power Idaho’s capital.
In an interview, Ms. Buckley discussed the importance of positive climate change stories in the current news cycle and what she finds rewarding about investigating solutions to our warming planet. These are edited excerpts.
Fifty states is ambitious. How do you decide which programs and projects are worth highlighting?
We want to find to projects that benefit people and the environment. We also want to be a little surprising. We loved the element of surprise in the car-free neighborhood in Arizona. How do people exist in Arizona in the summer without a car? I found that many people really liked living there because transportation is a huge part of the emissions problem. People are finding a real sense of community there.
You began reporting this project in January, when President Trump took office. Has the Trump administration changed the nature of the project or your reporting process?
It makes the project more relevant, because the places we’re looking at are really the heart of climate action in the U.S. now. Of course, there have been all sorts of rollbacks of environmental protections. In Catrin’s story about wildlife crossings, she mentioned how federal funding was thrown into question, which could affect how much these efforts are expanded. It hasn’t changed our reporting process, but it has cast a shadow over some of the projects that we will be writing about — about how they might expand or exist in some cases, and whether they can.
Do you have a favorite on-the-ground reporting moment so far?
I’ve been a reporter for over 25 years, but in Hawaii I had a very visceral feeling for the place. During preliminary interviews with the program director and executive director of the health clinic, they said, “You really need to come here.”
They were right. You could feel all the hard, wonderful work and joy that had gone into restoring this patch of land. I had thought I’d probably be finished after four or five hours. But I ended up spending 12 hours — the whole day, and into the night — and left reluctantly, only because I was so jet-lagged. It was truly memorable.
What have been your greatest reporting challenges?
Not getting to spend as much time on the ground as we’d like. If we had five years to do this, we could go to every state, but we’re often reporting from New York. There are also so many interesting efforts happening, and they often overlap. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle, and we want to be sure the stories don’t feel repetitive.
What do you hope readers take away from this project?
It’s difficult to witness what’s happening with the climate and the environment. But everybody can do something to help.
Climate change is daunting. There’s a sense of helplessness. But people aren’t powerless to do something that will help them and their communities.
You were formerly a reporter on the Culture desk. Why did you decide to transition to climate coverage?
In 2019, I reported a piece about climate grief for the Opinion section, which ran under the headline “Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help.” During the course of my reporting, I connected with an eco-psychologist who had gone through his own dark night of the soul about what is happening with climate change. He was a former environmental lawyer and had fought to save various stretches of wild lands that had been decimated and built over.
He basically said to me: You see all this stuff about emissions, parts per million of carbon in the air, but it’s missing this other story — which is that a lot of people are doing a lot of good work. We just don’t see enough of that news.
