November 21, 2023

There’s a new voice in climate change coverage. It belongs to Jeva Lange ’15 and a digital publication she helped found: Heatmap. The site launched in March 2023 and is growing its reputation. Lange’s data-driven article about the effects of wildfire smoke from Canada on the East Coast was cited in a New York Times opinion by David Wallace-Wells, and the Washington Post called the new online news source “indispensable.” 

Q: To start, tell us about your time at Bennington. 

Lange: I went to Bennington to study languages. I thought I wanted to be a linguist and work for the Foreign Service. I remember my first plan meeting with Annabel Davis-Goff, my advisor. She was like, ‘you don't sound like you want to do this. It sounds like you want to be a writer.’ And I was like, ‘no, no. I wrote in high school. That was just for fun. You can't actually make a career as a writer.’ Annabel convinced me to take writing seriously, which shifted the course of my life. Now, I've been a professional writer for 10 years, which is just such a crazy thing to get to be. Bennington is just everywhere in my life, and it goes back to that.

Q: What was your first job out of college? 

Lange: For the first seven years of my career, I worked for The Week, a news and politics website and magazine. I actually got the job, literally, the day I graduated from Bennington. I was heading to graduation when I got the call that I got it, and so it was just the best day ever. After starting as a news writer, I became the outlet’s culture critic, and then I was promoted to editor. But I didn’t take to it very naturally; I mostly found myself daydreaming about rewriting the stories I was editing. I remember myself thinking, ‘I wish I was the one writing this.’ I eventually became the executive editor, which was a huge honor but also felt removed from what had drawn me to journalism in the first place; so much of my time was spent managing people and attending business meetings. I’d gotten so far from the creative work that I wanted to be doing with my writing and my creative life and my professional life.

Q: How did you come to work at Heatmap? 

Lange: My former boss, Nico Lauricella, mentioned in passing that he was starting to think about launching a reader-friendly climate news site called Heatmap. A lot of the existing media narrative was focused on climate as a serious issue, but it was also laced with all the doom and gloom that goes along with that: The oceans are really warm. The smoke is everywhere. It can feel like all bad news. Readers get overwhelmed and move on with their day. Climate news could also be alienating and highly technical and ‘jargony.’ It becomes impenetrable to normal people. Neither the ‘doom and gloom’ stories nor the jargon-laden ones draw readers in or hold their attention or expand on the news with fresh perspective and analysis. Nico wanted to create something that was like Wired was for tech in the 1990s, but for the climate space; and that was really exciting to me.

I left The Week to become a founding staff writer at Heatmap. So much of the confidence it took to make that leap came from having gone to a school like Bennington, where it's not about hitting predetermined steps on the career ladder. It's about the value of the work itself. The work we're doing is important. That’s what made it a secure transition for me.

Q: Describe Heatmap

Lange: We’re writing for an audience that already believes climate change is real and a serious issue but who want a deeper perspective than they might find in a general interest or general news publication. And no matter what angle we approach the story of climate from—politics, the economy, the green energy transition, tech and electric vehicles, or my niche, culture—we aim to represent what it’s like to live in this unusual time and to give people who are concerned about the planet something they would actually want to read on their lunch break. We are trying to find new ways to tell climate stories that don’t fall into the pre-existing narratives and that tackle the thorny challenges and the big successes with honesty, curiosity, and insight. And that's been really exciting for me. It's a creative challenge.

Q: How does creativity come in? 

Lange: I actually use techniques I learned at Bennington. I took a class with Doug Bauer on pastiche, where we practiced adopting the styles of different writers. I still do that when I'm writing now. I'll be like, ‘I want to write like this particular New Yorker columnist today.’ So I'll read a bunch of their columns and get really excited about trying to figure out how they’d approach a story or try to mimic what draws me to their style of writing. At other times, I experiment with telling a story in a nonlinear way or in ways that blend fiction and nonfiction, which was the focus of my senior work.

For example, I just finished a story about heat stroke. I wrote it as a narrative. ‘This is what it would feel like. Your air conditioning stops working. Your apartment starts getting hot. There's not anybody you can reach out to…’ It’s much more engaging than reading a bunch of bullet points about “how to avoid getting heat stroke” that you might find in a more traditional publication. I can explore telling the story in a different way or in a more compelling way or in a way that speaks more closely to the experience of those who would be reading it. That’s definitely something I got from Bennington.

Q: How do you cope with all the bad news? 

Lange: The job is not easy. The week of the Maui fires, I remember, was especially difficult. I published an emotional interview with a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian activist, who had just landed on the island to be with his community. He was so generous with his time. We published it as a Q & A, because it was important to take a step back and let him tell the story.

With the Canada wildfire smoke in New York City this summer, I was surprised to find almost no information on the dangers of wildfire smoke immediately available or any guidance on what people should do. The city failed to release any substantial advice for a number of days. We were breathing the smoke in and feeling terrible. So the writers at Heatmap just set out to answer all our own questions about what was happening. That led to a new section of the website called ‘Guides,’ which features stories that give advice about what to do in climate emergencies or how to protect your home from climate-related damage. For instance, the available information about how to prepare for wildfire season typically includes recommendations that people reroof their houses and wildfire-proof their gardens. Those things are important, but also nobody's going to read an article and then immediately go outside and reroof their house. I’m thinking about ways to reach real people and give them actionable steps, rather than bring them down or overwhelm them. I am interested in recommending things you can do on a weekend afternoon or in 30 minutes on your computer. 

Climate is the most important story of our time. It has incredible creative opportunities, and I just find all of that really invigorating.

Enjoy this video of Lange's return to Bennington.