Madeline Ostrander is the keynote speaker at this Saturday’s Bainbridge Island Environmental Conference. We spoke with Ostrander about her book, At Home on an Unruly Planet, which chronicles communities taking action against climate change; how her book’s message can help people find hope among other troubling current events; and how her time at YES! Magazine, which was started on Bainbridge Island, helped shape her book.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you talk about this environmental conference, your background, and what you’re going to be talking about?

The Bainbridge Environmental Conference is, as I understand it, an annual conference hosted by a bunch of community groups on the island. This year they wanted to make the theme related to having conversations in the community about how to respond to the impacts of climate change and also how Bainbridge Island can be part of solutions to climate change. And that’s really the theme of my book, which tells a series of stories about communities that are responding to climate change and its impacts in different ways across the country. And so they asked me to come and give a talk about, what can Bainbridge learn from some of these stories that I’ve written about, and then how can they apply them to things that are happening locally? So I’ll be giving a talk and then we’ll have a discussion, and then there’ll be a series of breakout groups where people can talk about different things related to local impacts.

I know one of the discussions around climate change is how much of an impact one person can make, versus how much you need collective action through, say, legislation. Can you talk about that, and some of the actions people take in your book? Is the idea that smaller scale projects add up to have a greater effect?

I think my book really occupies a middle scale between acting as just one lone person or acting on some big legislative scale. I write about communities in the book and how communities are searching for solutions related to climate change. And I think there’s a lot of potential for people to make a big difference at that scale. I think there’s also a lot of interest from climate experts, and climate organizers, and people who work on policy on what can be done by cities, what can be done by communities. And since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the summer, there’s a huge push to organize communities all over the country to be involved in different kinds of transitions to renewable energy and to electrification and electric vehicles and different kinds of transportation.

So there’s a lot happening at the community scale, and I think communities also learn from each other and adopt solutions that they see working in another place. And I also think that what happens at the level of the community can become an example that then can influence state policy and then, eventually, federal policy. But there’s a lot you can do kind of quickly and simply and in a really empowering way at the local level. I also think it’s a place where it’s just more tangible for people to see what they’re doing and to get together and organize something. It feels more immediate. And so I think there’s something really inspiring about when people get together and do something locally.

Are there illustrative examples in the book of something that’s really effective at making a change?

I think all four stories are about different examples of that. There’s four main stories that I focused on and they’re kind of braided through the narrative arc of the book in terms of taking action and rethinking what our economy looks like. The story that reflects the most on that in my book is from Richmond, Calif., which is actually an oil refinery town — it was built around this rather large oil refinery, one of the largest on the West coast. And it’s also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the West coast. And over time the community has both been confronting that industry about pollution, but also then developing a lot of grassroots projects to do with urban farming, to do with developing little green businesses around the community, and recruiting solar companies to come to town and starting solar jobs training programs.

It’s allowed people there to start to imagine what it might look like if there weren’t a refinery there or if the community were something else besides an oil town. And over time they’ve been having a more and more assertive conversation about, what say do we have over the energy choices that are made here, and what can we do to influence whether this refinery stays here forever or not? And can we actually shape what happens with oil policy in California? And so I find it to be a really inspiring example.

And it’s also happened across the northwest as well. For instance there was a lot of local resistance to the idea of putting a lot of coal export terminals across the region. People really got together and said, we care about this place and we don’t want these here. And those export terminals didn’t get built. And a lot of that has to do with the way people care about their communities and the way they care about the northwest.

Beyond climate change, it sounds like the point of your book is that these huge problems may seem hopeless, but people can gain a sense of purpose by taking action. There’s a lot of things like that nowadays: We had this global pandemic, and you have political division and inflation and all this stuff; I think there’s an undercurrent of hopelessness on a lot of different fronts. Does your book have a broader message about how even though it might feel hopeless sometimes in the face of these issues, there are things you can do to make an impact?

One of the things I reflect on in my book is about the emotions that we feel about the climate crisis, which I think you can think about more broadly is the emotions we feel about the state of the world right now. We’re living through a lot of overlapping changes that are scary, overlapping crises. We’ve lived through the pandemic, there’s been a lot of economic uncertainty. There’s been a lot of political turmoil and divisiveness over the last few years. And so I think we all feel uneasy. I think that title, about living on an “unruly planet,” could play to a lot of things. But one of the things that I reflect on in the book is that this anxiety that we feel, when researchers and scholars have studied what it is that makes us able to cope with that anxiety, or able to cope with this level of change and disruption, is to be able to find community and to be able to come together and come up with shared things that inspire us, shared actions that are creating something positive.

That’s hugely helpful for people’s ability to cope with whatever it happens to be, whether they’ve lived through a wildfire that’s burned down a lot of their community, or whether they’re really just coping with a sense of unease about how troubling things are right now.

A separate crisis, so to speak, is this loneliness epidemic we’ve heard about, and deaths of despair. You mentioned coming together to work toward a common goal, and it seems like maybe that is also something that can address that, where you’re building community and staving off that loneliness a lot of people are dealing with nowadays.

Someone asked me recently on social media, what’s one surprising solution to climate change that you’ve come across? And I said: getting to know your neighbors. Because even though that seems small, there’s a lot that can come out of a conversation with your neighbors. And also we’re all more resilient against certain kinds of threats and impacts and crises when we get to know our neighbors. For instance, there was a famous study done by a sociologist in Chicago after a heat wave where he shared that in communities where people knew their neighbors, where there was more social cohesion and people were friends with each other, they were better able to withstand the heat wave and have fewer health impacts, even if there are all sorts of other things that made them vulnerable, like a lot of elderly people, or having lower incomes, or not having that much access to buildings that had proper heating and cooling. The effect of people knowing their neighbors was as powerful as if you had given everybody an air conditioner. Because people checked on each other. So I think there’s a lot that comes from getting together in community and talking together about, how do we deal with the challenges we’re facing?

That’s interesting, because preppers — you know, like “doomsday preppers” — that’s one of the pieces of advice that they give, too: One of the first things you should do is make connections with your neighbors and look out for each other. I think that’s a universal thing we’ve kind of lost sight of, and getting back to that is a good thing in general.

Yeah, I mean there’s so many other implications about being together in community. There’s so much research about how much healthier it makes us, how much happier it makes us. We live longer. I just think we as humans, we’re wired to want community and we do much better when we reconnect with one another. And I think that’s a solution to a lot of different things. But in particular, my book is about how it’s a solution to things related to climate change and how there’s a lot of power and a lot of inspiration people can find from community.

Switching gears a bit, I know you’re based out of Seattle, but you were the editor of YES! Magazine, which was founded in Bainbridge Island. Can you talk about your experience working there?

I think, really, the book came out of my experience working as editor there particularly. We did an issue — I think it was in 2010 — on resilience. And that was the first time I actually reported on Richmond, but I also went down to the Bay area of California and I talked to a lot of environmental justice groups who were working on climate change. And one of the things I noticed when I talked to those community organizers was that they spoke about climate change in a very tangible, local way because they were used to thinking about, how would an issue affect their communities that they worked with, how would it affect vulnerable people? How would it affect communities of color, people living in poverty, people who are at risk in a lot of other ways? Because decisions that are made on a local level can either make better or make worse the kinds of disparities that we already have in our society. But what was inspiring about all of that was that they had such a tangible, real way of talking about climate change — what does this mean for us here in our home? And I think that was one of the first threads that got me thinking about this book. How do we talk about this in a way that people understand it in places that are familiar to them, in contexts that are meaningful to them?

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I didn’t talk at all about the fact that the first story in the book is all about the Methow Valley [in northern Washington] and about its experiences going through multiple mega wildfires. It also talks about my experience living in Seattle and how all of us have dealt with these seasons of wildfire smoke year after year now. I think for all of us, our perception of what it means to live in the northwest has changed because we’re going through these heatwaves and wildfire smoke, almost every summer it feels like. So those stories are both about recovery. They’re talking about how, especially Pateros [a small city in north central Washington] and the community recovery efforts out in Okanogan County played out because those are the kinds of examples for communities all over the nation.

Carlene Anders, who was a former mayor [of Pateros], who led those efforts, now goes and consults around the country about how to recover from disasters. And they’re also about, how do we take care of our forest ecosystems in a time when there’s more wildfire risk? And then it’s about our connection across the northwest between the east and and west and places that are more prone to wildfire. And here in the west we’re living in places that are increasingly getting their own wildfires. How do we navigate living in this time of fire and heat?

A couple years before COVID, I bought some N95 masks to deal with the wildfire smoke because I have asthma. And those came in handy when COVID hit. But it is crazy how frequent it’s getting.

I reflect on the same thing in the book actually. I think it was in 2018, I bought an N95 mask because the air quality in Seattle was so bad. And then I still had it when the pandemic came around. For a while you couldn’t get that kind of mask. And so I kept using the same mask that I bought for wildfires during the pandemic.

Any last thoughts?

I realized when I was talking about these stories, I haven’t reflected that much on the people in them and they’re very much driven by the people in particular communities who have come to these realizations about how climate change is affecting the place they love and care about community — they care about and are taking it upon themselves to organize responses and to organize inspiring solutions. I mentioned Carlene Anders as one. She’s the former mayor of Pateros. She was I think one of the two first female smokejumpers in Washington state. She has been a firefighter for a couple of decades and also has run a fire recovery organization in Okanogan County.

And then in Richmond, the person there is named Doria Robinson and she’s an urban farmer and also now a city councilor. She was just elected in the fall and she’s been leading efforts to get kids, especially young people, teenagers and youth, involved in urban farming. It has evolved into this big community conversation about what else could we be in Richmond — could we actually be a healthy community that doesn’t have all this pollution from an oil refinery and have a different kind of economy that can be a different kind of place?

I think people might think at first glance that it’s a pretty dry journalistic account, but it sounds like it’s more of a character-driven narrative nonfiction book.

It is a narrative journalism book, yeah. It also has a lot of essays as well where I’m reflecting on some big ideas about home and about, what does it mean to live with uncertainty in this time that we’re living in? It’s very much focused on storytelling. I’ve had a couple people tell me it reads like a novel, which is what every narrative journalist wants to hear.

I definitely respect the craft of narrative nonfiction journalism, because I’ve tried to do that a couple times and it’s definitely harder than it seems. It’s not like a novel where you can just make stuff up; you have to find the narrative elements within things that actually happened and make sure you’re still maintaining your journalistic ethics. I definitely appreciate the skill that goes into that.

Thank you. It’s a huge amount of documentation, like photographs and audio and checking back with people. I had three fact checkers work on the book. It was quite a labor, um, to have all the details be part of the story. And yet I think they’re really important because too often we think about climate change as this abstraction or as this kind of wonky policy question. And I really wanted to write something where people would feel it — they would feel it in their heart and in their gut and not just think about it as an abstraction or as a scientific issue, but as a personal question. And so the story is very personal and the writing is really personal and all of the essays are also very personal.