Deez Interviews: Tristan Ahtone on taking cues from sci-fi to cover climate change + thoughts on journalism as a form
This week’s interview is with Tristan Ahtone, the editor-in-chief of The Texas Observer and writer of the fictional short story Climate Criminals, which was part of High Country News’ speculative journalism issue from August 2019.
I reached out to Tristan to chat last month when I saw his short story recirculating on Twitter in the wake of the West Coast wildfires. We chatted about the origin story behind both the piece and that whole issue, as well as the ethics of experimenting with journalism and more. Enjoy!
First, I’d love to hear about your career path — what originally got you into journalism?
When I was still a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico, I had a teacher named Evelina Lucero, who was really supportive of me wanting to get into this career. So I spent most of my degree finding ways to get more journalism classes there and really just diving into it. From there, I went to grad school and into the actual profession, which has taken me everywhere from television to print to all over the place.
What was the original inspiration behind why High Country News devoted a whole issue last year to “speculative journalism”?
We had been tasked by our editor at the time to write about National Climate Assessment and do a full magazine devoted to reporting on it. But frankly, none of us wanted to do that. Climate change reporting is incredibly taxing, and none of us really felt like we could do much to take that any further. So we talked about it and landed on the idea that we should take a speculative approach by projecting a lot of the findings in the report into the future.
So we started joking around. We were like, we should write a whole magazine where the president gets sent to the future and has to see what happens as a result of his policies. That was partly inspired by the film Jubilee. Once we arrived at that idea, we set the theme — all of the stories would take place in the same time period, so it would feel like the magazine came from that month and the year 2068.
We worked closely with climate scientists and other scientists to make sure that what we were writing about were things that could happen. It was a lot of back and forth with our writers and the scientists they were paired with; there was a lot of research and work we did in making those projections as scientifically sound as they could be for a projection that far into the future. So that’s how it came about, from not wanting to cover the Climate Assessment Report in any traditional way.
Your short story, “Climate Criminals,” imagines a sort of Inglourious Basterds-esque narrative where climate change deniers are tracked down and brought to justice for “crimes against the environment.” Tell me more about the inspiration behind that.
It was an idea I'd been kicking around for a while. One source of inspiration came from when I took a trip to Germany at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. I visited The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism while I was there, and it got me thinking about how the laid out that history and how we might think about this time if it were in a similar setting 50 or 100 years from now. The second source of inspiration came from the X-Men movies. In X-Men: First Class, I liked that they cast Magneto as this Nazi hunter at the beginning of the movie.
So those two threads converged. I was looking at all these parallels and thinking about what would be comparable nowadays — something that could be criminalized, studied, and documented in the future.
Was there anything about the reception to either the issue or your story that surprised you?
There was a lot of pushback from journalists who were sort of like, I don’t think this is a good idea. Technically, I agree on some level. It is more science fiction than speculative journalism; I think we just didn’t have a better word to use. Anecdotally, it looked like the stuffier side of reporting seemed to be really upset about it, while younger reporters seemed to look at it as an interesting possibility for work.
On the journalism side, it’s definitely a tricky area. I’m not sure I would necessarily do that again without labeling it something different. I do get a lot of requests to talk about it a lot, because I think it’s reopened some windows in rethinking how we can do our work and how we can engage readers in different ways. Journalism is always having a rough time, and applying some creativity can often open up new possibilities.
Has the experience of working on this piece and this issue influenced your work at all now at The Texas Observer?
It’s definitely left a lot of room for experimentation. That’s what we’re all talking about at the Observer now. What is the form bringing to the content? When is it right to experiment? Are you just doing it to do it? Because there is value there, but I’m not sure if it’s often worth the heavy investment of time and risk that you take with it without being really deliberate.
I’m really excited because I think journalism sorely needs the kind of thinking that our staff is doing as they’re pushing the boundaries of what we can do as journalists. I think of journalism as a form. That form has rules, obviously — like, don’t plagiarize, be transparent, be accurate and accountable. But it is still at heart a creative and literary form, so if we’re thinking about this as a form that has to conform to a few bedrock rules, what else can we do with it?
Don’t forget to follow @Tahtone on Twitter, and have a good weekend!