Complete Story
12/04/2017
Clearing the air on climate education, a NYTimes reporter returns to the scene of her story in SE Ohio
As a national correspondent, you learn to do stories and move on, no matter how much you might like to stay. It’s the nature of the job: There is always another story waiting to be told.
But recently, my editor asked me and several other correspondents to return, for public forums, to the areas of the country from where we had reported on the nation’s political divide. The idea was that it would be to the benefit of our journalism, and our readers, for us to continue in person the sometimes fraught conversations our articles had helped to stoke.
I cannot say that I embarked on this assignment without some trepidation.
My article focused on a clash between a high school science teacher and his students, in a town in southeastern Ohio coal country, over the broad scientific consensus that human activities are causing dangerous warming to the planet. Readers had voiced strong, and diverging, opinions on both the subject and my treatment of it.
