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To kick off this episode, your host, Mike Smith, explores the intersection of forest, fire, and climate, thinking about how natural disasters shape our opinions on climate. He discusses his personal experience with wildfires and the role of climate change in exacerbating fire risks. He also touches on the history of wildfire suppression and the need for forest management practices.
Next, he welcomes his guest, Dylan Jones of Highland Outdoors, and they discuss the importance of storytelling in raising awareness about the environment and the unique beauty of West Virginia. Overall, the conversation highlights the need for collective action and shared values to address the challenges of climate change. They cover various themes related to climate change and its impact on West Virginia, including the emotional connection to forests, the increased threats of flooding and drought, the need for consensus and engagement across political spectrums, the role of small businesses in addressing climate change, the resurgence of print media, and the importance of central Appalachia in the fight against climate change.
00:00 The Intersection of Forest, Fire, and Climate
17:51 The Power of Storytelling and Nature
23:58 Combining Love for the Outdoors and Storytelling
36:31 Offsetting Carbon Footprint with Aclymate
42:34 The Power of Print Advertising
45:53 West Virginia's Role in the Fight Against Climate Change
Mike Smith (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome again to The Climate Dad, the podcast where we talk about and explain the news and science of climate change and the things that you can do, both as an individual and as part of an organization. I'm your host, Mike Smith. I'm a father of two great kids and the founder of Aclymate where we help businesses measure, reduce, report, and offset their footprint for an affordable price and without having to become a climate expert. Today, we'll be talking about the intersection of forest, fire, and climate, thinking about how natural disasters shape our opinions on climate.
and how opinions on climate aren't what you think they really are. We'll also be joined by our friend Dylan Jones of Highland Outdoors to discuss his work in outdoor recreation journalism, the importance of stories and place, and how local communities can affect global climate change. Stick around, it's gonna be a great show.
Mike Smith (00:55)
summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, and as things warm up, Westerners in both the United States and Canada have long thought of this as wildfire season. Some of you may know, some of you may not, my own personal background getting into climate started with wildfire. As a kid, I lived in Idaho. My grandfather was a forester, and we used to go on these long walks in the morning before my dad and I would get to work in the summer. And one of the things that happened that was very memorable to me when I was nine years old was there was something called the Lowman Fire.
It put up a mushroom cloud. I came to find out later that was referred to as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, but for all intents and purposes, it was shaped like a mushroom. And as a child of the Cold War, that was really memorable and attention getting for me. My grandfather was well ahead of his generation and he understood that fire was an important part of the landscape when it came to Western forests. They were known as fire adapted ecologies. And he said that, don't worry, it'll grow back.
I said, what do I know? I'm nine. Okay, great. Went off, joined the Navy, saw the world and came back to it 22 years later. Shortly after I got married in 2011, I took my wife to Idaho to kind of show her where I'd grown up. And we went by the Scar of the Lowman fire and saw that it wasn't coming back. That was the impetus for me to leaving the Navy to go ahead and start my first company, RenewWest, and to get started on climate, wildfire, forests. It's all stuff that's very personal and important to me.
The thing about the Lowman fire was it felt like the whole state was burning at the time when I was a kid. And that was 44,000 acres. It was first of the mega fires. These pyrocumulonimbus clouds are actually where a fire burns so hot that it changes the weather. It punches through the lower part of the atmosphere up into the stratosphere. that's where you start seeing some really extreme fire behavior, things like fire tornadoes, et cetera. And as a result...
Fires in the western United States have gotten massively bigger. For example, here in Colorado, the largest wildfire in 1996, and it was about 14,000 acres. Everybody thought that was a big deal. Six years later, in 2002, the Hayman and it burned 140,000 acres, 10 times the size.
A couple of years ago here in Colorado, we had three fires that were over 400,000 acres. All these make the Lowman fire seem very small. One of the things that people don't really appreciate is that how much fires have been burning at higher volumes in the western United States and Alaska. And that's changed a lot of perceptions around fire. And so you'll see a lot of commentary about it.
But wildfires not just a Western thing anymore. It's also kind of a Northern thing and increasingly an Eastern thing in the United States. last summer I was back in New York City I was involved very tangentially on a movie project, a documentary called Against All Enemies about violent veteran extremism. And, uh, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend its premiere at Tribeca, which super cool life experience didn't know I was going to get that. And I kind of felt like the angel of death because as I came in, in New York,
It was just absolutely choked with wildfire smoke. And that was driven by the Canadian wildfires. Canada had an atrocious fire year last year. A lot of people don't really appreciate how big this scale was. 5% of its forested area was burned. That's somewhere in the ballpark of about 71.
thousand square miles of forest that burned. To give you the idea of what 71,000 square miles would be, that's larger than the state of Washington in the United States. were these wildfires in Canada all consolidated, it would be the 19th largest state in the United States. So big, big areas there. And as we all know here in the Eastern United States, it had caused a lot of respiratory problems. It caused a lot of...
decreased health. And then of course, there's like the loss of habitat, the ability of these forests to do some really important functions around climate. So you'll sometimes see in the conversation about like, why is this all happening? And sometimes people fall down into one of two camps, either, oh, it's bad land management practices or it's climate. And the reality is like most things, it's a lot more nuanced. It's not that something is blue or green, but that it's
blue-green or green-blue really, and that the categorical nature of human thinking causes you to try to fall into one camp. But increasingly climate is becoming a big part of that. So let's talk about fire adapted ecologies, fire was a natural part of the landscape to the point that
in certain parts of the Western United States, fire would come through maybe about once every 15 years. And that was a good thing. Sometimes it was lit by Native Americans or, First Nations folks in Canada, but a lot of times it was also natural, you know, wildfires start through lightning strikes. And so as those fires would sweep through, you could almost think of it as, like, how wolves are to elk,
which is wolves don't prey on full-sized elk. Wolves prey on, as we've all learned in kind of our ecology studies, wolves prey on the sick, the young, and the old. And wildfire kind of serves a similar purpose in fire adapted ecologies, where it comes through and it burns out in low intensity fires. It burns out.
small trees, old weak trees, and a lot of the underbrush that would cause that. But in 1910, 1911, there was a series of wildfires in the United States, one called the Big Burn, this was the first time that a large-scale fire had been experienced by of European ancestry that had settled the Western United States,
They saw that as a big problem. And so the U.S. Forest Service was. Given the, the to start putting out fires. And the forest service is any westerner that spends time in the outdoors knows, spent a lot of time putting in like fire watch stations and their goal was to put out a fire before noon. So if somebody left a campfire or there was lightning strike, they would work very hard to get the fire out as fast as possible. and that was.
super beneficial from a timber perspective, which was part of the mandate for a big part of the mandate for the Forest Service for a long time. But what they didn't know, or maybe they didn't fully appreciate, was that they were creating a fairly explosive situation. And so any discussion about wildfire, especially in the Western United States, needs to rely upon that history of wildfire suppression. Because what they ended up creating was essentially whole forests full of water-stressed trees. Because you didn't have this fire action to come through and clear out.
some of these smaller trees, we end up having way too many trees per acre for what would normally be the land would normally be able to support. And trees use water as their only defense. And so they become particularly susceptible to whenever there's a drought, you know, you'll see a lot of dead and dying trees. But even when there isn't a drought, there's just not enough water to go around. So that becomes susceptible to beetles that...
They don't have enough water to dump sap on the beetles to prevent the infestation. they become susceptible to wildfire, which is, is they're just not as naturally resistant to it when a low grade fire comes through. Add to that, that there's a lot of these ladder fuels, which is, brush that's unnaturally large and grown up. And so when wildfire comes through now, the landscape is, is stressed and unnaturally dry, even without a drought.
and it is prone for those fires to jump from the ground up into the into the crown. And that causes these really high intensity wildfires where you start to see a lot of catastrophic and scary stuff associated with that. But it's also worth pointing out that climate has a component to this too, which is the winters aren't getting as cold as they used to. Beetles have a life cycle where they die.
their larvae die over the winter, and particularly cold snaps. But if you don't get those cold snaps, they just come roaring back. It also creates a system where there's not enough water. So where you normally would have had like a low intensity fire, even with these high fuel states, because we have more drought
You just get these really high intensity wildfires. And so we're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here, which is we really can't safely light wildfires anymore because they just won't stay low grade. We don't have the public license, the social license for people to be breathing wildfire smoke. And so we're left with this practice of having to thin it. And you'll hear some proponents that talk about like, well, we should just log it. And
That's partially correct, which is, yes, there would be some activities. The thinning would be in that category. But it's more than logging, because logging looks for the largest, thickest trees. And those are the trees that we actually need to leave behind. What we need to take out are the small diameter, you know, trees that have very little commercial value and the stuff that's even smaller than that has no commercial value. And that's just expensive, hard work. And so...
Don't let people force you into the false choice of that. Like, oh, we need to go either log it or not log it and just leave it as is. We're now at the back end of those choices. We're at the consequence part of it. And we're gonna have to do things to reduce that wildfire risk. But even if we do those sorts of things, we're entering a new age. Part of the reason that the wildfires in Canada were so large and so explosive last year is that the
ecosystems that are currently in place are not going to be supported by the climate that has emerged there. Some of these places have gone from an average temperature of below freezing to an average temperature above freezing. And that's just a fundamentally different ecosystem.
And so that's going to introduce a whole host of other problems around assisted migration and about like the role of humans on the landscape. Because we have changed the climate faster than it can naturally adapt. And as a result, one of the things that we're going to have to do is to help the landscape to adapt to our new future.
There's a lot of deep emotional things. Like we're an arboreal species, essentially. Humans have evolved from apes And trees mean a lot to us And so we're going to have to think about that a little bit. And the answer is not no forests. Our world will be the poorer for it. And not only will we lose that emotional connection to our ancestry, but also.
we will lose our ability for the natural system to be able to adapt to our increasingly changing world from a climate perspective.
Mike Smith (11:53)
One of the interesting things about wildfires is how it changes our perceptions. As a species, we sometimes need to experience things. It's kind of part of what makes climate so different. There really isn't an immediate cause and effect to any of our actions. It's kind of like if you touch an electric fence and your neighbor got shocked next week. That can feel like a force of nature, an act of God, instead of the predictable outcome of dumping pollution into the atmosphere. But people are starting to understand that there actually is something new under the sun. That what we're seeing really isn't all that natural.
For me, a big and I really underappreciated turning point about climate came with the Santa Rosa fires in California in 2017. with dark and orange skies at noon. If you haven't looked at those pictures in a while, I'd encourage you to do so. Those fires that had burned in remote parts of America stopped being remote. They started affecting people kind of where they lived in bulk, and it was no longer an out of sight.
out of mind sort of problem. Climate's had a great public resurgence as things like this and other climate events have gained attention. An unfortunate bit about our climate changing, though, is that it doesn't always change evenly. As the Gulf Stream has weakened, one result of that is that the eastern half of the United States actually cooled slightly for a time and created a semi-permanent ridge of higher pressure that kept hurricanes offshore. A lot of the people that live in the United States just weren't experiencing climate change.
Unfortunately, that also caused more heat to be built up into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. And so now that we're seeing extreme hurricanes, you know, start to rapidly intensify at kind of record-breaking speed. As the eastern US is now catching up with the rest of the country when it comes to temperature, we're seeing more landfalling high-intensity hurricanes. It's just kind of a mess. But it also means that climate opinions are changing.
So if I asked you what percentage of Americans believe in climate change and think it's a serious threat to humanity, what would you say?
Well, according to a recent study, 2024, it's 77%. More than three in four Americans think that climate change is a serious threat to humanity.
You're probably not seeing that in the news. You're probably not seeing that very widely reported. A function of the kind of how our media ecosystem works is it tends to be, you know, interview somebody from column A and somebody from column B, even if there's not a whole lot of people in column B or those opinions are not bounded by reason or by scientific backing. So that's an issue. And so we can get mad about that. You can kind of look down your nose, but you should also not do that.
there's two things actually what you really should be doing, which is one, taking a little bit of pride in the fact that we've made a lot of progress here and that there's actually a fairly large consensus of people now ready to get to work and that we can do this. And two is we still need to win those other people over. And so it's just generally a bad to shame or to look down your nose at anybody as a species, we really need to work together. One.
thing that I really like. It comes from a professor at Bard College, a gal named Katie Boyle. And she talks about how there were six tips to help people talk about climate change. To get those people that are maybe a little on the fence or even pretty firm into the denial category to start thinking and to find common cause with you a little bit. So you know just briefly let's go over them. The first one is to frame climate change discussions in terms of shared values.
There's a lot of things that you and the people that you're talking with care about in common. And there are a lot of things that sometimes in our kind of polarized world can feel like, well, they're the people that do this and we're the people that do that. But we're really just shared values of decency and humanity. Even people that don't share your political beliefs care in a lot of the same things. And so if you can frame your discussion around things that are kind of common human characteristics.
I think people will find themselves on the same side of the argument sometimes. The next thing that Professor Bard talks about is connecting the dots, about how climate change can feel very remote and removed from kind of our daily lives. And you need to turn it back to these experiences that people have had. And if they haven't had it, that you have had and how that makes you feel. And even though like this is a discussion about science and reason,
as a species were connected to stories. And so telling those stories and helping them to emotionally connect the dots will help them to logically connect the dots. The third thing is to think about rallying behind a common goal. Even if it's not explicitly about climate change, reducing wildfires is something that everybody can get on board with. So don't let the perfect be the enemy of good.
get moving on a common goal and you'll find that as you build common cause, you'll be able to move them forward. Alternatively, you can, as Professor Bard says, number four is you can rally against a common enemy and that common enemy can be unifying. So think about, you know, who is opposing a kind of a shared outcome that you're looking for. Five, a big thing is to share tips about misinformation. There's a lot of bad information out there.
try not to identify with it as specifically in a political or an ideological sense, but just talk about like, yeah, there is misinformation out there. How can we avoid looking for that? Well, you frame it in the conversation such as like, well, you need to agree, right? That we have to like base it upon like people that have done research on this, right? And that's a pretty good way to start.
getting people to think critically about a piece and trying to identify if a piece is driving an intentional emotional response. And six, and the last part is convincing is not the goal, actually. Conversation is. You're not going to win anybody over in one conversation. It just is a very rare thing. And so, changing minds is more about softening
their opposition to it at first, and then ultimately helping them to build acceptance into the movement there. It's a conversation. It's going to take time. We're human beings, and that's just something we're going to have to accept.
Mike Smith (17:51)
Are you interested in being part of bending the curve of emissions but don't know where to start? About being part of the solution around wildfire? Well, we'd love to help you over here at Aclymate where we have the easiest, most affordable climate solution for your business. We'll show you ways to reduce your carbon footprint and get you on the path to net zero. It'll help you win new customers and keep you your most valuable ones already. And it'll attract and retain the talent you need from the climate generation. Also, our -
Green Business Certification Program will help you show your climate bona fides and win certifications at places like B Corp, EcoVadis, the Green Business Benchmark, and more. If you mention The Climate Dad, you'll get a 10 % discount. All right, it's time to meet with today's guest, Dylan Jones, which is Highland Outdoors publisher and editor -in -chief. I think you're really going to enjoy hearing his passion about stories, his passion around nature, and his just deep love for the state of West Virginia. Enjoy.
Mike Smith (18:44)
All right, today I'm joined by Dylan Jones. He's the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Highland Outdoors, which is West Virginia's outdoor magazine. You can go to their website, which is Highland-Outdoors.com
We have a couple of print copies of their magazine here in the office, really proud to be featured in one of Dylan's letters. We've been working with him for a long time, love the guy, love what they're doing. So Dylan, thanks for joining us today.
Dylan Jones (19:09)
Hey Mike, thanks a lot for having me man, appreciate it. Glad to be here.
Mike Smith (19:13)
so yeah, tell us who you are,
Dylan Jones (19:16)
Yeah, so like Mike said, I'm Dylan Jones. I'm the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Highland Outdoors We're a grassroots independent magazine that focuses on outdoor adventure. I was born in Morgantown in West Virginia. I grew up over the state line in Greene County, Pennsylvania. I grew up on a 15 acre farm in the woods.
So my friends and I had our childhood, we'd play outside. Parents would send us out with our BB guns and our sandwiches and we'd be out for eight hours building tree houses, swinging on vines, exploring creeks. So I think that lifestyle really helped me develop an appreciation for the natural world really early at a very early age. So I'm extremely grateful for that.
So I grew up there. In 1999, our house actually got undermined and was destroyed from long-wall coal mining. So my parents and I actually moved to West Virginia to escape coal mining, which is kind of the opposite narrative. Typically people leave the state to flee coal mining. We came here to escape it. That's kind of the opposite narrative of what you find in Appalachia.
Once we were here, we lived in Morgantown which is a great college town. I made my best friends there, and that gave me the opportunity to go to WVU. I went there and majored in journalism. So I've been kind of working in media on various forms for a long time.
Mike Smith (20:38)
So why'd you pick journalism? You know, that's a, a calling. You know, what about journalism called you to study it?
Dylan Jones (20:45)
Yeah, so that's a good question. I started college as an engineering major and quickly realized that I did not have the mathematics chops to do well. I was taking twice as long to study as my friends and getting half as good of grades. So after a very bad semester, I decided that I needed to change. I'd always been a good writer, and I talked to my counselors. And they suggested that I become an English major.
I talked to some people and they said, unless you want to be a poet, they didn't know what kind of future there was or, you know, go into academics. So someone suggested journalism. So I switched majors to that and really excelled in it. I loved it. I liked being out in the field. I did some internships working for the Dominion Post, which is a local newspaper in Morgantown. I loved it. I worked for sports, worked for hard news, features, did some lifestyle stuff.
And I really excelled in that. After school, I didn't know what to do. So I actually worked as an insurance salesman, worked with my friend at the local guy co-ops in Morgantown, and discovered the soul sucking nature of being an office worker in the insurance sales industry. I got into rock climbing at that point. And my friend and I worked for a little bit. And then we quit our jobs, bought a van, and went on a six month climbing trip out west.
So when we did that trip, a friend had told me to check out this new group called Adventures and Scientists for Conservation, which is now called Adventure Scientists. They're a group that links climate scientists up with outdoor adventurers to collect citizen science data. So I reached out to them, told them about this big trip we were doing, and we signed on to collect data for, they were doing a thing called the Pika Project where they were
trying to collect data on pikas, which are little animals in the mountains in the alpine zone that are kind of indicator species for climate change. So we climbed in the Rockies and the Tetons. We went all west Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and we looked for pikas as we were hiking and adventuring and climbing. And they had a blog, so I started writing for them. That blossomed into some of my first paid writings. So that's kind of how I got my foot in the door as an adventure writer.
Once I got back from that trip, I went to graduate school at WVU. I got a master in public administration where I did that program with kind of a nonprofit management focus. After that, I graduated. I went to Thailand for two months on a climbing trip and came back and became a climbing guide in the New River Gorge. Worked as a summer living in a tent, being a rock climbing and paddling guide.
And at that point, I met the owner of Highland Outdoors magazine, who was a guy named Eric Lee in Morgantown. He started the magazine, kind of as a garage operation. He had a full-time job, but he was passionate about covering this state and all its awesome outdoor opportunities. So I met him while on a climbing trip. I started writing for the magazine. I told him that I was going to become the managing editor, and he said, all right. So...
I was the managing editor of the magazine for a couple years, and then he gave me the opportunity to take the magazine over and buy it from him in 2018. So my wife, Nikki Forrester, and I, we started an LLC and became a small business and bought the magazine from him. And now here we are. So the rest is history.
Mike Smith (23:58)
What a cool path, I love those stories. And one of the things that's apparent for anybody that reads your magazine is about like, one, you are a good writer, I'm glad that you got steered that direction. And that two is that you are a storyteller. And how important that is to kind of the human experience. The other thing that I think about when I hear all that is about how there's this common thread amongst a lot of people that care about the climate and about a deep love for the outdoors.
Dylan Jones (24:09)
Thank you.
Mike Smith (24:25)
And so I think it's really interesting that you've combined that love of the outdoors with your, your natural skill set, which is, which is storytelling and writing in order to make what is has become, you know, a successful publication in Highland Outdoors. You know, you started with talking about how as a kid growing up and running around the woods. That's kind of where that appreciation started. All my earliest memories are like that as well. I, I
My first memories are all of being in Alaska. My dad used to take us a week, one week long jet boat trips up river in Southern Alaska. But how do you continue that throughout a life, right? It's not just about a childhood experience. And it's interesting that you've made this into a career. I wonder if you could kind of talk about like how your career has continued to lead you and how that, both for a love for the outdoors, but also how that interacts with your concern around.
Dylan Jones (24:55)
Yeah.
Mike Smith (25:14)
climate.
Dylan Jones (25:14)
Yeah, so I think what's really cool about the magazine is that it has it has allowed us to really expand upon the amazing outdoor community that exists in West Virginia. This is just a fantastic state and
A lot of people who are outsiders only see the negative press about West Virginia, the opioid crisis, coal mining, mountaintop removal, environmental destruction. The politics here are questionable at best. But even with all the struggles that come in living in a place like this, it's just such a vibrant landscape and such a vibrant community. There are just wonderful people here.
world-class resources, the Appalachian mountains are just a place that speak to me. That's where I feel home. I love to travel, but when I come back here, I think how lucky are we to live in a place that we love to come back to. So I think for me, it's this connection to the landscape in Appalachia. And I think that that's a common theme that a lot of people who grew up in the Appalachian region.
Whether it's from down in Georgia in the Grand Dome's there or all the way up in Maine, the swath of these ancient mountains, it cradles people in it, just really provides a love for the land. Everyone's a naturalist here. We go on our group mountain bike ride at five and not only do people love to rip up the trails and bike hard, but they also stop on the point out a mushroom species or a flowering spring ephemeral. They know what trees are, by their bark in the winter, they know.
when foraging foods are coming up every year. So there's just this deep seated love for the land and I've really carried that into my career. To have the opportunity to do something that you enjoy and to spend your days writing and photographing things that you love, it's just super special. So I'm really grateful for that. I think that having this magazine,
really allows us to expand our minds about what we want to cover here. And we feel a great responsibility and a great privilege to be able to decide what goes in our magazine. We print 15,000 copies per issue. We estimate an annual readership of about 180,000 people. So to be able to have an influence on that many sets of eyes about...
how we write about West Virginia and what we cover is a really important responsibility that we take dearly.
Mike Smith (27:39)
So I think that takes me into the idea of around climate and storytelling. And you talk about the story of how West Virginia has all these environmental problems, but it's also a land of great beauty. Full disclosure, actually, my bachelor party was in West Virginia, and we did a float down the New River. So yeah, love the state. And yeah, it's got its problems, but it's also got some really amazing stuff. And when you talk about kind of that
Dylan Jones (27:43)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Smith (28:02)
changing the narratives, talking about making people think about not necessarily West Virginia as this damaged by coal sort of scenario, but also about a place of beauty. There's also this question about other threats to it around climate. How have you talked about climate within the magazine and within some of the outdoor scenarios that you've encountered?
Dylan Jones (28:21)
Right, and I'm glad that you said that there's more threats than just coal mining with climate change. One of those is flooding. West Virginia is one of the most flood prone states in the country due to our topography. We're called the mountain state because 100% of our state terrain is completely encompassed by the Appalachian Range. In fact, we're the only state that's completely within the Appalachian Mountain Range. And with that come a lot of steep and deep terrain, a lot of water.
So when we have these storms that are, you know, a warmer atmosphere holds more water. And so when it unleashes it, we're having torrential rains where, you know, the 500 year flood is now a 50 year flood, 100 year flood is now happening every couple of years. We just had really intense flooding a couple of weeks ago, fortunately not at where we are, but in other parts of the state. And so, you know, you've got increased flooding and then you've also got increased drought. So.
when climate scientists really started to wrap their heads around what climate change would you know be like in which we're living in that era now it's not something in the future that will happen it is happening now. So they said that it would be wetter and drier here and that kind of dichotomy doesn't make sense but what that means is that we have prolonged periods of drought where we have increased fire danger like the eastern part of West Virginia to the east of the Allegheny front is actually one of the driest areas in the east.
It is a fire adapted landscape, but it's seeing more fires than we're normally used to seeing there. So we just had a fire there and then two weeks and then like a week later we had flooding. So you've got this increased drought and then you've got these increased rainfall events where these supercell storms come and dump several inches of rain in just a couple hours. You've got all these narrow troughs in the mountains and you've got flooding.
So we have these issues here and we do not shy away from writing about climate change in the magazine. We do pride ourselves on kind of being a neutral publication. We don't lean left or right. But...
So we don't shy away from talking about climate change, but I think we do it in a way that is accessible to everyone, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. we want to cover it in a way that, you know, a conservative coal miner from West Virginia can pick it up.
And if they read something about climate change in our magazine, we hope that it resonates with them in some way.
it's combining art, it's combining adventure, and it's telling the story of climate change through people doing these engaging things
Mike Smith (30:48)
I think that's a key point about like if we're trying to change hearts here and get commitment towards climate is to engage in some common themes of in some common loves, right? Politically conservatives and liberals can all appreciate the outdoors. And so, you know, sharing that kind of common framework of an appreciation for, wild spaces, especially. And being
Dylan Jones (31:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Smith (31:11)
Not shying away from the truth, but not necessarily being explicitly political, like avoiding, like rubbing anybody's nose in it and just talking about like, this is what worries me and I'm concerned about. And like, this is what the outcomes are. I've seen anecdotally, at least in my life, I've seen that we've moved a much further away from a kind of a point of climate denialism, where people just deny that the climate is changing to more of like a
Dylan Jones (31:22)
Right.
Mike Smith (31:35)
like a position where people are not necessarily sure about what the next steps should be. What's your experience been how political opinions around climate have changed.
Dylan Jones (31:43)
I think what's kind of fascinating about West Virginia and Appalachia as a whole, is you'll meet a guy on the ski lift here at the local resort who works in the pipeline industry, and you find out that they're a conservationist and they love fishing and they support nonprofits. And so my brain goes...
how can you be both those things? But the reality is that there's a large spectrum of people and a lot of people who are coal miners and work in the pipeline industry or like the natural gas industry, they do love the outdoors. They get off work and they have two weeks off before their next shift and they go hunting and fishing and camping and they take the children out. So I think that we have to realize that and...
We're not gonna solve the climate crisis by shaming people and making them feel bad. I live in a house that uses electricity that's made from coal. I don't really have the option here to decide where my electricity comes from. So, we burn coal and that's what's powering the lights in my computer right now. Do I like it? No, but that's the truth. And so I'm not anti-miner, I'm not anti-worker.
I would say that I'm anti-industry in the fashion that the industry itself has contributed to a lot of these problems and that the lobby of the industries fight bills that seek to solve this problem. With that said, we're not going to solve this crisis by shaming people. We have to build consensus. We just had a story in our magazine about one of the founding members of a group called Friends of the Cheat, which is a really successful river advocacy group here that has...
been at the hands of a massive turnaround on the Cheat River, which was a dead river following a coal mine blowout in 1994 that killed the river for upwards of 40 miles. And so FOC was formed and they were effective because they did it based on consensus. So they knew that this coal mine...
which didn't seal itself up properly. They were the root of the problem. But instead of pointing fingers and blaming them, they said, hey, we're all in this together. Let's reach across the aisle. Let's work with this coal company and let's get funding and let's fix this issue. And I think that's how we need to address the climate process at large is on consensus. Even if climate denialists had, they should have come over
to the side 15 years ago, if they're coming over now, the fact that they're coming over now is a good thing and a step in the right direction. So instead of making them feel bad and say, thank you for recognizing this, thank you for being willing to change with us, let's get this done together. So I think we need to work in a consensus attitude instead of shaming people. And one of the tough things about climate change is that a lot of the media coverage is dire. Every day it's scientists are finding that things are moving faster than thought.
It's the hottest day, it's the biggest storm, it's this and that, and the news is hard to swallow. It kind of makes you want to just turn off the TV, turn off the internet, and just go bury your head in the sand. Obviously, that's not gonna get things done, and one thing I appreciate about Aclymate is your newsletter, you guys send out the good and the bad news, because we do need to know the data and the truth, and the truth is that things are worse than we thought they'd be, and...
We need to know that, but we also need to hear that good news. Hope is the only thing that will get us through this. If we're all hopeless and it seems impossible, then we can say, hey, let's throw our hands up and go fly 50 times a year and just go out with a bang. So I think that we need to have positive coverage. We do need to see that progress is being made.
And I think the truth about all this is that we do have all the tools to solve the climate crisis. We know what to do, we have the tools, but we as a society need the strength to act upon it and make the tough choices to get it done. Is it going to be easy? No. Is it possible? Absolutely. And we need to pressure our leaders and also make change at whatever level you can as an individual or as a small business owner.
to send the message that we can all do this together.
For us as a small business, we're just a magazine made by two people. We work from home. We have a very small footprint. But with that said, we felt responsible. We felt that we had corporate responsibility.
social responsibility to show that as small business owners, we're doing what we can to not only reduce our carbon footprint, but also to offset it.
So doing both of those things together, I think if you show as a small business, no matter how big your...
your scale of business is if you're just a two-person outfit working from home or if you're a 50-person company that has employees who drive the flyer regularly, I think if you show to your customers and your supporters that you're making an impact and an effort, I think that it encourages people to also try and follow through and do their part too.
So I actually reached out to a local friend. He's an expert carbon auditor who works with The Nature Conservancy. And he said, hey man, I just came back from a meeting where I heard about this new tool called Aclymate. So I reached out to you folks.
I had kind of a discovery call with someone. We discussed how the program works, how we calculate the footprint, and then how to go about doing the offsets. So I said, yeah, that sounds awesome. Let's do it. So right from the start, I was just amazed at how easy it was. It was the obvious answer for me to achieve this carbon neutral goal to satisfy this promise I made to our readers and to ourselves.
So I was able to peruse and buy offsets in a way that fit our goals and values, and then was able to see that these are, in fact, certified programs.
And I'm able to see how to keep buying offsets to kind of maintain my position with you guys called Climate Leader where that shows that we continue to be carbon neutral as we move forward. So I absolutely love Aclymate. I think it's awesome. I think it's great that even as a small business of two people who work from home, you can go on your carbon neutrality journey and you can show people that you're making the effort.
I think it's great what you guys are doing.
Mike Smith (37:48)
That's really kind of you to say thank you and the feeling's mutual. We've really enjoyed working with you Dylan over the years now. You're one of our earliest customers and I appreciate not only your feedback on how to make the program better but also your willingness to kind of walk the journey with us. You know as interesting as you were talking about that it reminded me a little bit about like
Dylan Jones (38:04)
Sure.
Mike Smith (38:07)
how categorical people can be as humans, that it's either A or it's B. You're either a good guy or a bad guy. You're either a liberal or a conservative. You're either, you believe in climate change or you don't believe in climate change. We're doomed on climate or we're not. And all of these are really false categorizations, right? Which is like, there's a lot of dynamism to both the people and like our position on climate. And that...
Dylan Jones (38:12)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Smith (38:32)
to a certain extent, people that are like, are do-mers about climate are almost like the new denialists, which is that like, yeah, climate change is happening. It is here. You mentioned that yourself, but also like it can get a lot worse and we can do something about it now. And what I really appreciated about what you said there also was about how individuals, your individual footprint is small, but you know, it takes many soldiers to make an army.
Dylan Jones (38:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Smith (38:59)
and how you can both be the example to everybody around you and how you fit into larger systems and organizations is really the superpower that we all have when it comes to climate.
Dylan Jones (39:08)
Yeah.
Mike Smith (39:08)
Let's switch gears a little bit. So you're a publisher. Where do you think the industry is going and where do you feel like climate might fit into that?
Dylan Jones (39:17)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. It's a pretty fascinating time to be in the publishing industry. Excuse me. I think first off, one of the maxims that people have been saying for years is print is dead. Print is absolutely not dead. There's a resurgence of print media happening right now, especially among small niche publications just like ours. I think...
we're seeing a contraction of kind of the digital era. I don't think the digital age is coming to an end because it's just an easy and convenient and fast way to get information in real time, which is one of its benefits. But if you're like me, you spend all your time working on a screen, I don't want to read on a screen any more than I have to. So if I want to read for pleasure or for learning, I read books, I read magazines, I read newspapers, and I love...
the feel of a print publication in my hand, I can go sit in my reading nook in the light. And so I think a lot of people are realizing they've spent the last 20 years on screens and they're kind of sick of it. It's bad for your eyes, it's hard on the brain and the body to sit in a computer chair and stare at a screen. So I think a lot of people are realizing, you know what? I don't want to read.
my news or pleasure articles on a screen. I want to get a magazine or a newspaper and a book and I want to sit outside and I actually want to read on a page, hold a physical product and just kind of engage with, you know, the way that people read for a long time. There's actually a lot of fascinating neuroscience on the way in which we retain information. So if you're light...
light emitted from a screen. If you're reading something that's coming from light emitted from a screen, it's actually hitting different cells in your eyes. So that emitted light actually affects the way that you retain information in your brain differently than natural light that's reflected off of the physical page, the way that hits your eyes, that actually works kind of differently in your brain for how you read and retain information. And so I get that experience when I read on a screen,
I feel scattered, my eyes are kind of flitty. I try to skim and jump and just be done with it and scroll. Where when I interact with a print magazine, I can appreciate the design, I don't know, pop-up ads. And I just feel like the light coming off the page is less harsh and I engage line by line, reading in a slower manner. And I totally feel that, you know, science playing out when I actually read something.
A lot of our readership loves our magazine. They love the fact that we make a print magazine and we lean heavily into that. We do have a website, because you kind of have to, and that's how we sell subscriptions for our print magazines. So shameless plug, if you'd like to subscribe to our magazine, you can go to our website and hit the shop tab, sign up for a print subscription, and we'll mail you our quarterly magazine. So.
To come back on that, the print industry is really seeing a resurgence. So much so that I actually want to spend less time putting content on our website and really lean into making our print magazine a larger publication, adding pages, adding content, expanding our distribution, making sure that more people can enjoy our print magazine.
Mike Smith (42:35)
I love it. I think it also brings to mind, to remember that journalists are integral parts of our communities, and that they help to create that community by both telling the stories but also bringing people together. And so yeah, if you are in the West Virginia area, make sure if you find your local copy of Highland Outdoors, make sure to
frequent some of the people that are advertising in the magazine and tell them that you know Dylan and his wife sent you over from Highland Outdoors.
So in the last couple of minutes here, I want to ask a question more about you, like something that makes you tick here a little bit. And so specifically, if you were going to write a book and you are a professional writer, but if you were to write a longer form, like a book, what would it be about and why?
Dylan Jones (43:19)
Man, that's a great question. I've always been highly intimidated by the prospect of writing a book and have the utmost respect and kudos for anyone who actually goes through the process of not only deciding to do it, but finding a publisher or self-publishing and then actually doing it. Knowing what it takes to create a 52-page magazine, I just have the utmost respect for people who actually write a full book. With that said, I've actually given a lot of thought to this before.
And there is an endless stream of amazing topics in West Virginia to write about. I think that for the rest of my career, I will probably dedicate most of my passions and creative energy to telling stories specifically to West Virginia, simply because I think that it's a state that, given its
position in the national conversation is more than worthy of having its own stories. And that's why we say that we are West Virginia's outdoor magazine. People have said, oh, you could expand coverage to all these other states. And I say, you know what? I don't want to. We're here. This state is more than deserving of its own stories. So I think there's just so many fascinating stories. You could talk about the logging in the 1900s. That clear cut all.
all of the Appalachian Range, all of that industry, the stories of how it was done, like you go hiking here and you see some of the terrain that they logged and the fact that they built these rail lines. Most of our hiking trails in the wilderness here follow old rail grades and you'll find maybe an old rail wheel or a piece of a track or like a piece of a boiler cover at some point in the woods in places where there was once a town of a thousand people.
and now it's nothing but forest that has completely recovered it. So, you know, you'll hike through and you know the history of extraction in the state. You see the photos from the early 1900s and you, it's just amazing that people were industrious enough to clear cut this entire landscape and to mine it and also that the resiliency of the landscape, now we get to go recreate in.
wilderness where the forest has had 100 years to recover and a lot of these forest stands have reached maturity to where it doesn't look like it would have been in the old growth days but it looks pretty darn close. And you go up into these red spruce forests at 4,500 feet elevation, they're 80 feet tall, there's thick moss on the ground, it's just a you know it's just a spiritual place. So that's one topic that I would love to write about is the history of industry extraction in West Virginia.
I think another one that I would write about is the critical importance of central Appalachia and the global fight against climate change. So we just had a story in our spring magazine about so there's a valley right near where I live in the town of Davis it's called Canaan Valley it's the highest large elevation valley in the east it's 13 miles long by five miles wide
It's got an average valley floor elevation of 3,100 feet, and the mountains around it go to about 4,200 feet, which might not sound like much for you folks out in Colorado, but in the east here, it's a very amazing landscape. It's regularly one of the coldest places in the country in the morning. It'll be as low as 31 below zero sometimes in the winter on a cold clear night, because of the way that it collects cold air. And so for that reason, there are a lot of rare plants that you find up in Canada.
that lived here or moved down here in the last ice age. And then as the glaciers retreated, the plants also retreated, but Canaan Valley remained cold enough and kind of this high elevation ecology to support rare species that you don't find until you get back up into Canada. And so there's this whole region here, Canaan Valley, Central Appalachia, it's really a biodiversity hotspot.
not only for Appalachia, but for the world. And so in the story that we wrote about Canaan Valley, The Nature Conservancy recently was able to conserve the northern portion of the Canaan Valley in a kind of complete full conservation of the undeveloped portion of the valley. And they transferred that land recently over to the Fish and Wildlife Service to become a larger part of the existing Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. And so in writing this story,
I got to learn that not too long ago, The Nature Conservancy basically did a global assessment and they looked
at the four most critical areas for conservation in the global fight against climate change. And up there with like the grasslands in Kenya, the Amazon rainforest,
They also selected Central Appalachia as one of the four most critically important areas in the fight against climate change. it just blew my mind that I live in one of the most critical areas for conservation in the fight against climate change. And so writing about this conservation gain here and how critical of a win it was
just really ramped up my pride for the region and I would love to write a book about.
how important central Appalachia is in the fight against climate change. I think it's a really fascinating fact that not a lot of people are aware.
Mike Smith (48:25)
I love it. Well, Dylan, it's been a pleasure to spend some time talking with you. Your love for the outdoors, your love for central Appalachia, in particular West Virginia, like just shines through for all the listeners. Again, Dylan is the Editor-in-Chief and publisher of West Virginia's outdoor magazine called Highland Outdoors. You can get it at Highland-Outdoors.com If you're not in the state and if you are in the state, make sure you pick up a copy.
Dylan Jones (48:32)
Thanks, mate.
Mike Smith (48:52)
and support his advertisers as well so he can keep, you know, being a part of this community and telling the stories that West Virginia needs to hear about its landscapes. Dylan, great to have you. Thank you again for joining us and thank you for supporting Aclymate for so many years.
Dylan Jones (49:05)
Thanks a lot for having us, Mike. Cheers.
Mike Smith (49:10)
Dylan's a real one and I love how connected he is to his state, his community, and of course to nature. Make sure to pick up a copy of Highland Outdoors as soon as you can get your hands on one. To wrap up, I want to hear from you. Please go to Aclymate .com or send an email to TheClimateDad@Aclymate.com Again, that's TheClimateDad@Aclymate.com Just submit a question for me or the show. Again, Aclymate is spelled A -C -L -Y -M -A -T -E.
If your business needs help measuring, reducing, reporting, or offsetting your company's climate footprint, please reach out to my team at Aclymate We'll get you set up with the best, most affordable, and easiest climate solution out there. Thank you again to Dylan Jones for joining me, and thank you all for listening. I'll be back next time with a breakdown of all things climate and with another guest. Make sure to subscribe to The Climate Dad, where you get your podcasts, and to share, like, and comment on social media. My name is Mike Smith, and this was The Climate Dad.
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