Dear SEJ Members,
I am honored to announce my candidacy for the open seats on the Board of Directors. SEJ has been an integral part of my career since I became a climate journalist for a few years now (after a short stint as an earth scientist during my undergraduate years).
Since my early years, I have had a strong passion for our planet and for words. I had my first (of many) existential crisis at the age of 5, when I first read about climate change in an encyclopedia. I was as terrified as you can imagine a five-year-old could be and decided to make saving our planet my mission.
Being an earth scientist taught me much about how the world worked, but something felt missing. I had a voice and I wanted to use it to bridge the gap between climate science and how the climate crisis was disseminated in the media.
I have had all kinds of jobs, internships and fellowships within the spectrum of journalism and communications since I got my master’s in journalism at USC Annenberg more than a year ago. I currently work as the Managing Editor of The Xylom, where I support and guide freelance science writers and help grow a newsroom in a burgeoning field. As an early-career journalist and Gen Zer, I came into environmental journalism right when it was questioning itself in an attempt to self-understand, and perhaps even self-correct.
Even though SEJ has a huge membership, we are by no means representative of the whole sphere of journalism who now have to incorporate climate and environment into their work because of how severe the climate crisis has become. My future vision for SEJ is to make environmental journalism less elusive and make more journalists — even those that don’t necessarily identify as environmental reporters — feel more confident reporting on this beat.
In journalism, we say everyone has an agenda. Well, as environmental journalists, we have an agenda too. I believe that our agenda, at its basest level, is to be a voice for the planet and its people. There is no one perfect way to do so, but I believe we can get closer to the right paths if we can get more diverse voices into the room and make them talk. I’d love to help make SEJ a safe space for people to have these conversations, to question the purpose and the future of environmental journalism, and together, create and refine frameworks that help us make our work balanced, fair and supportive of the communities that we all belong to.
Sincerely,
Shreya Agrawal
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