Texas native Emily Foxhall is no stranger to hurricanes. She can remember getting days off from school as a kid, when powerful storms threatened. It was when she later became a climate journalist for the Houston Chronicle, however, that she came to fully understand the devastation that the natural disasters leave on the communities in their paths. In 2017, Foxhall was part of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist team that covered Hurricane Harvey, a storm that unleashed historic flooding and left thousands of Houstonians displaced.
In 2022, Foxhall joined the Texas Tribune, where she has reported on energy, climate, and an array of environmental justice issues, including the disproportionate harms that chemical contamination and certain types of electricity generation impose on vulnerable communities. She is constantly moved by the people whose lives she witnesses, she says, and she is driven to share those stories with the world.
Foxhall is currently on leave from the Tribune and spending the year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. I spoke with her about her journey in climate journalism, what it’s like to report on natural disasters, and how young climate reporters can navigate today’s challenging journalism environment. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nanticha Ocharoenchai: You entered Yale University as a pre-med student. What inspired you to pivot from medicine to journalism?
Emily Foxhall: I always loved journalism. My grandmother was a journalist, and my aunt and uncle were both journalists, so it was kind of part of the family. When I was really young, I made a newspaper for my family for the holidays. It would be like, The Foxhall Update, or something like that. And then I joined the paper in middle school and in high school.
So when I was really young, it was something I wanted to do. And I always thought it was really fun, just this idea that you could be curious about anything and ask anyone you wanted a question. It always delighted me, but for some reason I didn’t think about it as a career until I got to college.
I was facing this question of should I go to medical school, or should I pursue this job in journalism,and I had loved journalism so much I just didn’t want to let it go. I wasn’t ready to stop doing this thing that I loved and that I had so many friends in. A professor helped me to see that there are these parallels between medicine and journalism. You are using these very specific tools in each to try to answer questions and make sense of a problem. So I think as I saw the overlap, I felt a little less like I was choosing between two starkly different things. It was like my interest in both were aligned.
NO: What do you think the two fields have in common?
EF: I think with both it’s an interest in helping people. I’m attracted to journalism in this sort of idealistic way of wanting to make my community better or wanting to make the world around me better, and I also see in medicine that you’re helping people. You’re healing people. So journalism may not be as direct of a healing, but I do think it has a social good.
Also, my favorite days in journalism are days when I’m out meeting people or seeing something new. And I think with medicine it was that interaction you have with your patients or with other people that was appealing to me.
NO: What reporting experience has been the most memorable from your time in the field so far? How did it change you?
EF: Hurricane Harvey definitely altered the way I think about where I’m from. I grew up in Houston and we had hurricanes when I was younger, some pretty bad ones. But there was something about being a kid growing up in a pretty privileged way that, hurricanes, when I was young, they were just a chance not to go to school. I got to read books at home and play with my friends in the street when the power was out. So when I covered Hurricane Harvey, I think I saw for the first time how vulnerable my community was and how much harm it had faced in that storm — and that it could potentially face in the future.
NO: Of the stories you’ve written, which touched you the most?
EF: There have been so many. I think whatever story I’m working on in the moment tends to be the one that I care most about. I’m just thinking back through this past year and what amazes me is all the different slices of Texas that I’ve had the opportunity to see.
I was in rural Texas on a solar farm where there were a bunch of sheep that eat the grass under the solar panels. We rode around with the shepherd who takes care of these sheep, and just seeing this man in his element grappling with what used to be — there is kind of a concern that farmland will disappear to become solar farms, but in this case, he was seeing how both uses could occupy the same land. He did this holler out to the sheep that I just loved. I love seeing people in their element and in this place that you wouldn’t otherwise be.
I’ve been in a coral lab watching people take care of rescued coral from the Gulf of Mexico and feed them out of these turkey basters. I was on a boat going to look at habitat for whooping cranes. It’s hard for me to pinpoint one moment necessarily because I feel like all of them are adding up to this broader understanding of the state that I cover. They all just give me this opportunity to meet these incredible people.
NO: What advice would you give to young climate journalists who are starting out?
EF: One of the hardest things about climate reporting is just how much there is to write. I always encourage people to just pick two or three areas they really want to learn about — maybe it’s water or air pollution or heat — and just try to become an expert in this particular subject. It’s really helped me in my career to try to focus in my reporting.
I think on the mental health aspect, it’s important to be honest with yourself about how this work can affect you, especially when it comes to disaster coverage. I think newsrooms, at least that I’ve been a part of, have gotten a lot better about having an open dialogue between what boundaries are for reporters and really highlighting that no story is ever worth blindly risking your life for. You can prepare to cover disasters and make smart decisions while you work, so you can do the needed reporting while also keeping yourself as safe as possible.
Nanticha Ocharoenchai is an environmental journalist from Thailand and a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Herbert N Loveless says
This snow storm in the South is the result of a new weather pattern called warm artic/cold continent. She should know about it so she can incorporate it into her understanding of the multiple effects climate change can have.