Jonathan Vigliotti on Connecting the Climate Dots

BROKEN GROUND, SEASON 7: JONATHAN VIGLIOTTI Q&A

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Leanna First-Arai: This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I’m Leanna First-Arai, your host. Here at Broken Ground, we dig up environmental stories in the South, and introduce you to the people at the heart of them.

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In our last season, we explored how the closure of local newspapers, often in small towns, allows for, and even FUELS environmental injustice. Since then, we’ve been digging into a related question: in the nearly one-third of the South that’s classified as “rural,” what are some of these environmental burdens residents are shouldering – issues often unseen by those outside of their communities? And how might ALL OF US be contributing to the weight of that burden? To put it another way … what does environmental injustice look like in the rural South? 

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Dr. Treva Gear: Lots of times in little small rural towns, we can’t get assistance or nobody sees us. We tend to be targets because we always need some type of economic progress. It’s quite disturbing.

Leanna First-Arai:  That’s one of the folks you’ll be hearing from this season, when we bring you to small towns in Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama … where southerners are out in pine forests and on riverbanks … connecting with their neighbors … questioning industry promises … and challenging billion dollar businesses they’re not so sure they want showing up on their doorsteps.

Richie Harding: I’m not opposed to industry, not opposed to growth, development, but we want to make sure that what’s here is not harming us. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Although WE’LL be diving into environmental challenges specifically in the rural South, we know that perhaps the greatest threat facing these areas is one that we’re ALL facing: climate change. So while we’re furiously editing our upcoming episodes, we want to share a conversation we had recently with author and CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti. Jonathan covers climate stories so often, that he actually has a “go bag” packed for when he has to race out to cover a major flood, fire or heat emergency. 

And now, he has a new book out about his reporting. It’s titled, “Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America.” Many of the places he writes about – whether here in the South or further afield, like Hawaii – have something in common with the rural communities we’ll be visiting this season. They’re facing forces much larger than themselves, and fighting for a better environmental future. Here’s Jonathan, speaking about his recent reporting on a wildfire we can all learn from, in Hawaii.

Jonathan Vigliotti: I was woken up early in the morning and launched to what at the time was a wildfire burning in Lahaina.

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Jonathan Vigliotti: My team and I were one of the first network crews to arrive there, and we didn’t drive in because there was a roadblock set up on the run road. So we chartered a boat. And an hour and a half later, we arrived on a makeshift dock on the edge of town. A dozen or so people who had survived the fire were walking around surveying the damage, what was left of their neighborhoods in a state of shock. Some looked like ghosts with ash on their face. We didn’t see any first responders on that first day. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: And the images we saw spoke to how this community was caught off guard by this fire. Home after home. Business after business. Entire communities were decimated. 

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Leanna First-Arai: You have mentioned in your reporting and in the book that it was very clear that plenty of preparation that didn’t happen could have been done to prevent the tragedy from getting to what it grew into. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: That really seems like kind of a theme in, in many of the areas and the situations that you have reported. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yeah. There was nearly a decade-long fuse that could have been put out at any point because in 2014 scientists came together and put out a report that said the warming climate on Hawaii, and specifically in the Lahaina area on the island of Maui, had made it vulnerable to fire. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mmm. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: And they even put out suggestions, programs that could have been implemented to reduce the fire threat, including removing dry invasive grasses that had taken root, restoring wetlands that had been destroyed because of population growth, conserving water that had been depleted also because of population growth and a booming tourism industry. They also suggested using fire-resistant materials when building or updating, including metal roofs, things that qualified for tax credits and could have reduced insurance prices. But in the end, this report was just filed away and essentially ignored. And of course, those warnings unheeded became the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Leanna First-Arai: Mmm. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: What was so illuminating and tragic in all of this was as we walked through historic Front Street, we’re talking miles as far as you could see, 360 degrees, destruction. There was one home that was still standing, the home with the red roof, as I describe it in the book, as I tell it to anybody that will listen, the homeowners had recently updated it and they had implemented those scientific remedies. They removed dry invasive grasses. They removed trees and brush that were too close to their homes. They also put up a red metal roof. So when flames did reach or fall with ash on that roof, it didn’t ignite. Those homeowners listened to those scientific remedies, took action on their own when local leaders didn’t, and they survived. And this book describes other communities with other ‘homes with the red roof’ that have survived similar tragedies by storms by different names and what they did was they listened and they took action. Unfortunately this town was kind of a poster town for what other Main Streets could face if they don’t listen to the warnings and take action. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. As I’m sure many of our listeners will know, you have covered just about everything that one can imagine from kamikaze iguanas to extreme weather events, um, whether we want to call them “natural” or “unnatural.” 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm. 

You’ve reported on terrorist attacks and on romantic comedies and everything in between. What was it that drove you to focus on climate change and sort of building resilience at this moment in your book that we’re here to talk about today “Before It’s Gone.”

Jonathan Vigliotti: Kamikaze iguanas. That’s a great reference. I’ve always loved nature. And when I was writing this book, one of my friends was like, ‘Why do you love nature so much?’ And it was really the first time I, I kind of considered it. I always loved surrounding myself with the natural world. There was a woodland area near my home where I spent all of my free time, taking photos, writing in my journal, reading, daydreaming. And that was my safe space. And this was in the nineties in a town called Mount Kisco in New York state. And those woods were threatened by a housing development. My parents, along with so many other people in Mount Kisco came together, and wrote letters in protest of this development. They were concerned about the nearby wetlands and the impact that development would have on nesting birds. and ultimately that development was scrapped. I think that moment taught me an invaluable lesson about connecting the dots, how storytelling, when it is clear, can make people who maybe don’t understand to understand. And I’ve taken my love for nature, for wildlife, and as I’ve had more freedom to choose the stories that I get to tell through my career, I’ve always fallen to environmental crossroads. 

Leanna First-Arai: This season of Broken Ground is focused on environmental issues in the rural South, specifically …

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: And I know that you’ve been to all 50 states, some of those visits to North Carolina, to Kentucky, to Louisiana appear in your book, in “Before It’s Gone.” 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yeah.

Leanna First-Arai: Bring us to the rural South from your perspective as a reporter. What have you learned about how struggles across the country are connected to what’s happening in the rural South? 

Jonathan Vigliotti: I think all of these stories are all connected. I spent time in Virginia and North Carolina. My producer and I were covering trees. We were trying to film trees being chopped down, turned into wood pellets by an industry that sold itself – a biomass industry – that sold itself as a green alternative, even though all of the scientists that we spoke with at the time – as the Southern Environmental Law Center also knows very well – is anything but green. 

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Jonathan on TV: I’m walking in what used to be a more than 60 year old forest. Just a few months ago, it was chopped down to this in just a matter of weeks. When people think of green energy, do you think this is what they envision?

Danna Smith, Dogwood Alliance: Absolutely not. I mean, look, this looks like a bomb went off. 

Jonathan on TV: As Danna Smith with environmental group Dogwood Alliance explains …

Jonathan Vigliotti: It’s a perfect example of our changing habitat. And how habitat change is – hand in hand with climate change – working together to make our communities more vulnerable to environmental disaster. So you had entire swaths, thousands of acres of woodland being chopped down, and when you lose that woodland, you’re losing some resilience in that community. You’re impacting waterways in perhaps ways that most people don’t understand. And so I thought that was an important story to tell. First, because greenwashing is such a … it’s so pervasive and it’s being used in ways – and I think this was highlighted by what we were covering when we were on the ground in North Carolina – it’s being used in ways to enable the destruction of our habitats for what is being sold to so many people as a green alternative when it really isn’t. 

Leanna First-Arai: What struck me about getting to know your work a little more, was that you have gotten to know the most extreme of the most extreme situations intimately. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: You already brought us to Lahaina in Maui, um, in Hawaii. So there’s these big sort of just like unimaginable disasters that you document. But actually one of the places in the book that I think most stuck with me, was the little pieces on, on Fair Bluff, North Carolina. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: It’s just because rather than kind of these big, um – maybe flashy isn’t the right word – but these big sort of unimaginable bursts of coverage, it’s just kind of this story of a small town that’s fading away and, and just really struggling to stick around. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yes!

Leanna First-Arai: And so many towns across the U.S. are kind of quietly on the brink like this. And I wanted to ask you if you could just describe a little bit more of what brought you to Fair Bluff, North Carolina and what you found there. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yeah, Fair Bluff was never considered traditionally at risk of flooding. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew hit and caused severe flooding along the Lumber River, where downtown Fair Bluff was nestled nearby. And what ended up happening, most of the community was flooded out and destroyed. But it was a resilient community. And so many of the homeowners there, the property owners, the business owners, they stayed to rebuild. But then two years later, another storm – Hurricane Florence – hit in 2018 along the same path, creating the same destruction. And it was like the final nail. And overnight, half of the population disappeared. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mmmm. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: I focus on this town because there were no warnings for them to even follow at the time. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency here in the U.S., which creates flood maps for communities, and these flood maps help with insurance rates and also help prepare local leaders for the worst that could come in the event of a storm, those flood maps were outdated and did not include Fair Bluff. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: I spoke with the mayor of Fair Bluff who said, even without those maps, they should have known better because they noticed that there was flooding occasionally over the years, and he described it as being “asleep at the wheel.” 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: Being asleep at the wheel, I think that was very bold for him to take all of that onto his shoulders alone, and he was being gracious, but I think it’s not just the local communities that are asleep at the wheel, I think just talking about these outdated flood maps shows that it’s a bigger issue facing our larger federal government as well. But being asleep at the wheel led to the decimation of this town. So many people left. Without a tax base, the mayor, years later – I spoke with him a year and a half ago – they were struggling after all of those years to figure out how to rebuild. Of the 40 businesses, only one was still open, and that was the post office. That’s just how dire the situation was. And they’re now currently looking to move their downtown to a new location, higher elevation, which they will call Uptown, except it is a project that costs millions and millions of dollars, and while federal funding is available, it’s also very difficult, the mayor was telling to me, to convince the federal government to give them the kind of funding, especially when there isn’t the kind of population that existed before these storms. So this is an issue that they’re facing as they’re trying to rebuild to bring the community back, to bring those taxpayers back, to bring the traditions and the culture of this community back. 

Leanna First-Arai: There’s so many everyday marvelous characters in this book. Wanted to ask if you can help us get to know one of the people that you’ve learned from that sticks with you. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: The story’s all stick with me. Some of them haunt me. Most of them inspire me. Miss Becky James probably inspires me the most. 

Leanna First-Arai: If I remember correctly, that’s Miss Becky James from Kentucky?

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yeah. She lives in Dawson Springs, which is near Mayfield. Both towns were destroyed by “the beast,” that tornado that hit. And she has a very popular diner called Miss Becky’s Place. It was a landmark before the storm hit; it is even more so one today because so much of the town was destroyed. But Miss Becky’s place only sustained minor damage. And she inspires me because every community that is touched by disaster has someone who helps hold that history together, that serves as a cheerleader, a shoulder to cry on, a place to come to remember what was, to remember what was lost and to remind people and give hope to people of what can be. And she reopened her shop, I think it was three weeks after the storm, and it became ground zero for all of the first responders, all of the people that were helping rebuild, FEMA – all of them combined, along with survivors who had nowhere else to go, who counted on this place as a refuge. It was a refuge for everybody, for a new community. And to her, leaving Dawson Springs? Not an option. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: And so she is THAT person – and there’s one of them in every storm – that helps bring a community back together. And I love her and I love the entire staff there. I call her a steel magnolia in the book. And she is, and everybody that works there – all women, except for one male dishwasher – they made me feel at home even when their homes had been lost. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mmm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: And to be able to, to give that feeling to a stranger, that’s the kind of power that’s going to move us forward. Community after community, whether it is rebuilding, and hopefully if more people listen and take action, it’s not rebuilding, but just building up stronger to prevent disaster. I love Ms. Becky James.

Leanna First-Arai: Ohhh.

Jonathan Vigliotti: She’s great.

Leanna First-Arai: I love that answer because it can be hard, I imagine, when you’re, you know, when you’re reporting from the front lines so regularly, just to keep your head up and remember that it’s not all doom and gloom that we’re talking about. There’s like great opportunity for living better and being better to one another amidst all of this, right? 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm. I mean, how easy is it to give up, right?

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.

Jonathan Vigliotti: I mean, I haven’t been through a disaster like that where it’s impacted my home, my family. I’ve been through small dramas that have kept me in bed for a day or two. And this is a woman who – she said it this way: “I was down in the dumps” – but she got up immediately and just, she rose to the call to action that nobody was calling her to rise to. And she became a leader in that community, an unlikely leader. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. There are so many compelling stories like that in this book. But obviously, Jonathan, you’re primarily a television reporter. What prompted you to turn to, to print?

Jonathan Vigliotti: As I was being launched to disaster after disaster, and clearly able to – from these frontlines – uh, have access to scenes that most people never will have access to. I wanted to, through my writing, introduce readers to these frontlines as well, hoping that if me seeing these things firsthand helped me understand the impacts that climate change is having on our communities, maybe they would too. Early on covering these storms, you know, I failed at first as a journalist to identify climate change in my reporting as the fuel behind the storms that I was covering. Storms that were constantly being called historic and every storm seemed to be historic. And yet I wasn’t connecting those dots clearly. 

Leanna First-Arai: Interesting. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Over time, I realized these storms are not isolated individual occurrences, they’re all connected. They’re all connected to climate science, oftentimes scientists not being listened to. And I wanted to write this book to connect those dots. One of the themes throughout the book is this idea that before every disaster, there is usually a scientist that has been ignored. And so I kept that as my North star as I wrote this book and I expanded it to also include survivors who have been forgotten, uh, because survivors, what they have gone through, the survival guides that they offer from their experiences, they’re invaluable to others on the flip side of luck. 

Leanna First-Arai: That’s fascinating to me that retrospective realization that you failed at first to sort of frame the issue as, as what it was. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: Can you bring us a little bit back to when you began to connect those dots for yourself? 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Time and time again, story after story, wildfire after wildfire that caught firefighters off guard, hurricanes that decimated communities and knocked them offline. The more you’re seeing this happen, the more I was seeing this happen, I couldn’t just keep reporting on the same thing. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: I couldn’t just keep saying, ‘High winds, a lot of rain.’ ‘Look at those flames behind me.’ ‘Here’s the recovery effort.’ ‘Here’s FEMA coming in yet again to another billion dollar storm.’ I couldn’t just keep saying those things without looking and connecting the dots in a bigger way. Honestly, I think connecting those dots just naturally happened from being in the field so often, trying to figure out new ways of telling this story that would hopefully connect to viewers. And I think probably a few years ago is when I made an effort to link climate change in all of the reporting I did. I, I hope that the book is a shortcut to understanding what took me a longer time to understand through many years of being on those front lines and seeing these disasters and the people left behind to pick up the pieces. 

Leanna First-Arai:  Mmmm. Jonathan, can I ask: why did you choose to focus specifically on small towns? 

Jonathan Vigliotti: I love small towns. I grew up in one, so perhaps I’m biased. But I also find that small towns are the ones that are impacted the hardest by extreme weather because they don’t have the infrastructure in place, the engineering in place, the financing in place to build a resilient community and then to rebuild if they are hit. They also don’t get as much of the spotlight in the media’s eyes as a major city gets. If you look at Hurricane Sandy, we were talking weeks, months, years of reporting the aftermath of that storm. A lot of these small towns are forgotten after a week or two. I’ve made it a point in my television reporting, and I’ve been so fortunate to have the backing and support of CBS News, to go back to these places as much as possible to keep them in the spotlight. Because that spotlight does two things: it provides more federal funding for them, more help for them, so that they could rebuild faster. And it also keeps the messaging alive too, what these people have been through is something that other people could go through. I call these small towns ‘a canary in the coal mine’ because what is happening there is going to happen more and more to other small towns, and as Mother Nature outpaces our ability to hold her back, it’s going to happen more and more in bigger cities as well. 

Leanna First-Arai: You know, you’re in this unique position where you have your go-bag ready. And the rest of us, um, are perhaps less prepared for – less kind of limber in this moment – still, though we’re learning. But I’d wanted to ask you, you know, from your unique position with your go- bag prepped, can you share, um, what you’ve learned to the rest of us for the kind of quick-on-your-feet and empathetic way that you’re required to be for your job? 

Jonathan Vigliotti: Yeah, you know, me packing up and going into somebody else’s community that’s been destroyed is nothing compared to somebody packing up to leave their community that’s been destroyed. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Vigliotti: So I always need to remind myself to take a deep breath, to be calm, to listen so that I could truly understand, so that I can convey their message to others. And I think the broader message is for all of us, no matter what it is that we’re going through: listen to others. Don’t come in it with your own thoughts, with your own anxiety, whatever it may be. I’m obviously thinking specifically about reporting, but how important it is to listen to others, and how critical that is in our understanding. I think that’s a lesson that I, I can’t hit home hard enough. I hope it’s one that I hit home hard enough in the book. I think that there is obviously a lot to fear when it comes to extreme weather and fear is a powerful motivator, but I hope that the book ultimately provides hope. And a lot of that hope has come from listening to survivors. There is a more resilient way forward if we listen to the signals, if we listen to the scientists, if we listen to the survivors, and if we all work to make our homes the home with the red roof, more sustainable, more resilient to whatever could come our way. 

Leanna First-Arai: Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing sort of the inner thinking and process behind “Before It’s Gone.” Thank you so much. 

Jonathan Vigliotti: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Leanna, and thank you for the very thoughtful questions. 

Leanna First-Arai: Of course.

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Leanna First-Arai:  That does it for this special episode of Broken Ground. The book Jonathan Vigliotti spoke with us about is called “Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America.” In two weeks, we’ll be talking about small towns ourselves, when we launch the first of our episodes on environmental challenges in the rural South. If you haven’t already subscribed to the podcast, may I tempt you to do it now? That way, you’ll never miss an episode. I’m Leanna First-Arai. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment … rooted in the South. It’s produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noa Greenspan, Paige Polk, Jennie Dailey, and me, Leanna First-Arai, with special thanks to Ko Bragg, Sam Lenga, and Pria Mahadevan. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app. We seriously read them all! Thanks for listening.

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