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Knight Science Journalism Fellow Aaron Scott says he suffers from “existential indecision coupled with omnivorous curiosity.” In other words: he’s a multimedia journalist. Throughout a decade-long career in radio, television, podcasting, and writing, Scott has resisted pigeonholing. His beat, he says, is wonder.
Scott’s award-winning podcast series for Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Timber Wars,” immersed listeners in a precarious chapter in American environmental history: the battle over old growth trees in the Northwest. Scott spent more than nine months reporting on the U.S. environmental movement, the decline of the logging industry, and how together they forever changed our understanding of the forest. “Timber Wars” was the first audio work to receive the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program’s Victor K. McElheny Award.
Most recently a host of NPR’s “Short Wave” podcast, Scott has transported listeners to deadly caves, dinosaur graveyards, and the bottom of the ocean. Now at MIT as a 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Scott continues to pursue stories about the wondrous, often messy, overlap of the natural world and the human experience. As we navigate the climate crisis, he believes there is a lot to learn from looking back at the science that’s shaped us.
I sat down with Scott to talk about what history like the Timber Wars can teach us and the power of narrative journalism to change our relationships to each other and to life everywhere. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Anika Jane Beamer: “Timber Wars” goes behind the scenes of the environmental conflict that exploded the northwest logging industry in the 1990s. When did you first learn about the Timber Wars?
Aaron Scott: I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Timber Wars were going on while I was in middle school in Colorado. So it wasn’t until I was reporting on the environment for Oregon Field Guide and spending time in the woods in the Pacific Northwest with biologists and ecologists that I started really learning about the way that we as humans had reshaped the landscape through decades of logging. And how, ever since legal fights over the spotted owl and the Northwest Forest Plan and the resulting changes in logging practices in the 1990s, how much the landscape had changed again — that most the forests around us weren’t “natural,” they were replanted second or third growth.
AJB: It’s easy to look back on the logging protests as an environmental win. But in “Timber Wars,” it becomes very clear that the stakes on both sides of the conflict were extremely high. At one point, you say “For the loggers, it was like their very existence was under attack.” As a journalist, how do you approach covering environmental problems that threaten people’s ways of life?
AS: To me, that’s where narrative story telling is so powerful, because you can spend time listening to people. It’s not like a news feature where you parachute in, and you ask a couple questions, and then you have to try to make meaning out of it. “Timber Wars” is a decades long story that played out over multiple states and dozens, if not hundreds, of communities. Being able to do a long form narrative story about it meant that I could go and spend weeks talking to people, listening to their stories, and going back to them when I had more questions. The beauty of narrative journalism is that you then can really let those stories breathe and try to share them with your audience in as rich and nuanced ways as possible.
AJB: Environmental issues can feel so pressing, so urgent, that it’s hard to look anywhere other than the here and now. What do you think is the role of history and looking back when it comes to understanding current crises?
AS: In order to get past the deep division we have on the environment today, I feel like it’s incredibly important to understand how we got here — to understand how we went from the environment being a thing that the majority of people wanted to protect to a thing that tears people apart, often along political lines. I think these historical narratives give people a greater understanding of both their position, but also that of the “other side.”
Our desire with “Timber Wars” was very much to try to get people to empathize with folks that they would normally disagree with. And we can do that through history. We can do that by telling the stories of what the environment means to people, how that’s changed, and how they came to these foundational ideas that are now so deeply stitched into our cultural fabric.
AJB: Are there other chapters in environmental history that you think are due for reexamination?
AS: In some way, all of them. Building off “Timber Wars,” I did a piece for the Outside Magazine podcast looking back at the Endangered Species Act, which has become one of the most consequential pieces of environmental legislation in the world. To me, it’s a fascinating story. It’s something everybody agreed on at the time because we thought it was just going to be protecting big, beautiful things like blue whales and cool animals like grizzly bears. Nobody thought that this law would also be used to protect tiny little fish that nobody has heard of, or things like snails, or lichen, or small flowers that grow in the desert.
But now, the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws are also being used to stop renewable energy and grid infrastructure projects that most experts say are necessary to save us from the existential threat of climate change. So, I’m interested in looking at how some of these laws that were the best that policymakers could conceive at the time, to protect the earth as we understood it at the time, have become challenges as we move forward to dealing with big global issues like climate change.
AJB: Much of your work has examined how, as humans, we walk the line between seeing other living things as a resource and also as our kin. Right now, how do you define your relationship to the things around us?
AS: That’s a great question, because three of the courses I’m taking at MIT and Harvard right now are very much about considering how our fellow species on this earth perceive the world, and trying to branch out from our human centric narratives into thinking about how other creatures experience, utilize, participate, and inhabit this planet.
There’s so much more to the world than what we’ve presumed. I’m really just scratching that surface of understanding that science, and I think scientists are just scratching that surface of understanding the world. And I’m delighted and enthusiastic about what we’re learning and what we still have to learn.
The thing that I find so exciting and intoxicating about science journalism is that it’s kind of like our beat is wonder. It’s our job to go out and encounter the world and try to find the most interesting, wondrous secrets about how it works and then to share them with people.
Anika Jane Beamer is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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