Six young journalists imagine reporting for a world in permanent crisis

Six journalists on three continents recently sat down to write letters to the future instead of to editors. All were part of the 2025 cohort of the Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellowship, and what emerged from their screens reads less like optimism and more like field notes from a generation thinking hard about what journalism even means when crisis stops being exceptional.

Their letters don't agree on much. But they circle the same question: What kind of storytelling survives when environmental collapse becomes the baseline condition, not the breaking news?

Storytelling has to change, or journalism won't survive it

Shradha Triveni writes from India, where air pollution isn't a seasonal concern—it's the texture of daily life in the cities where she reports. She's watching audiences abandon traditional news for video platforms and social feeds, and she's clear about what that means: journalism has to reinvent how it tells stories, or it loses its audience entirely.

Lee Kwai Han, reporting from Malaysia, arrived at a similar conclusion from a different angle. She traces her own journey from frustration with sensational coverage to respect for rigorous editing and verification—the unglamorous work that actually distinguishes journalism from everything else flooding the feed. Ethics, she argues, isn't a nice-to-have. It's the discipline that keeps reporting coherent when everything else is noise.

Both are writing about survival, not idealism.

The stories that statistics can't tell

But the letters also reveal what conventional environmental coverage routinely misses. Manuel Fonseca, reporting from Colombia, keeps running into the same problem: environmental defenders get killed, and newsrooms reduce them to body counts. The number rises. The story moves on. What vanishes is the question that actually matters—why someone stays in a dangerous place to protect land and water when leaving would be easier.

Blaise Kasereka Makuta, writing from the Democratic Republic of Congo, points to another gap. Traditional medicine systems contain knowledge about land and plants accumulated over generations, and that knowledge is disappearing as displacement, climate change, and institutional neglect hollow out the communities that hold it. Journalism, he suggests, treats these systems as interesting sidebars—cultural color to accompany the "real" environmental story. But they're central. Understanding what's at stake requires understanding what's being lost, not just what's being damaged.

What strikes across all six letters is less a sense of hope and more a kind of clarity. These journalists came of age in a media landscape already fractured, already flooded. They've never known a world where environmental crisis felt distant or theoretical. For them, the question isn't whether to care about these stories. It's how to tell them in a way that actually reaches people, that honors complexity, that resists both despair and denial.

They're not waiting for permission to figure it out.