Events

Writing on climate change ranges from apocalyptic to hopeful, fact based to emotion driven. Leading environmental journalists and writers share how they balance these polarities to create compelling and urgent narratives about our planet’s most pressing issue.

– Susan Jakes, Editor, ChinaFile
– Aryn Baker, Time magazine
– Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
– Alexandra Kleeman, novelist

Aryn Baker is Time magazine’s Senior International Climate Correspondent, based in Rome, Italy. She covers science and innovation, the environment, health, migration, and international humanitarian affairs with a specific focus on the human impacts of climate change. Since joining Time in Hong Kong in 2001, she has worked as a reporter, editor, and correspondent. She was Time’s Pakistan and Afghanistan Bureau Chief from 2006 to 2010; Middle East Bureau Chief from 2011 to 2014, based in Beirut; and Africa Bureau Chief from 2014 to 2020, based in Cape Town. Baker has won numerous journalism awards for reporting and feature writing, as well as a World Press Photo award for digital storytelling in 2017, as part of a Time documentary project on migrants in Europe. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, Baker earned her M.A. in Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, following a brief stint as a pastry chef in Paris. She was born in Los Angeles.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novels Something New Under the Sun, one of The New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2021, and You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, as well as Intimations, a story collection. The winner of a Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, and the Bard Fiction Prize, her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and n+1, among others. Born in Berkeley, California, she is an Assistant Professor at the New School and lives in Staten Island.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a CNN contributor, and a Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury. His book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, based on eight years of living in Beijing, won the 2014 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2020, Osnos published Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now. Previously, Osnos worked as Beijing Bureau Chief for The Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Before his assignment to China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq.

Susan Jakes (moderator) is Editor of ChinaFile and a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. From 2000 to 2007, she reported on China for Time magazine, first as a reporter and editor based in Hong Kong and then as the magazine’s Beijing Correspondent. Jakes was awarded the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Young Journalist of the Year Award for her coverage of Chinese youth culture. In 2003, she broke the story of the Chinese government’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, for which she received a Henry Luce Public Service Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Jakes speaks Mandarin and holds a B.A. and M.A. from Yale in History. Her doctoral studies at Yale, which she suspended to join ChinaFile, focused on China’s environmental history and the global history of ecology.