- Coming up on "IGI," we welcome producers for a new film, "Hot Times in the Heartland."

A discussion on the impact of climate change in our region is coming up.

Stay with us.

(electricity buzzing) (gentle music) (upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "IGI."

I'm your host, LeTiffany Obozele.

Climate Change is impacting the world in multiple ways.

We have all heard about the increase in temperatures, the impact on severe weather, increased drought, warming ocean temperatures, loss of species, but how is it specifically impacting communities in our region?

A new documentary film, "Hot Times in the Heartland," addressing the local impact and the community response to climate change in Kansas and the region.

I am excited to welcome from Prairie Hollow Productions, we feature co-founders Dave Kendall and Laura Mead and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey, Rex Buchanan, all of whom produced "Hot Times in the Heartland."

Thank you all for joining me on "IGI"" today.

So tell me, Dave, I'm gonna start with you, about "Hot Times in the Heartland."

What prompted the idea to begin creating a documentary that focused on climate change in our region?

- Well, it came up a couple years ago, what I was gonna do my next project on.

And it's something that I've been following for a number of years, what's happening with the climate.

And it just seemed that now is the time to get more focused on that.

And so I tried to figure out how I would address it.

You know, it's a global phenomenon.

You know, it's affecting the whole planet, so how do you kind of get something you can get your arms around?

And so I just decided the thing that we could do is to focus on our local region.

So I just started doing some research, trying to find out who was working with the subject in this part of the country, and focus specifically on the Kansas River Valley into the Kansas City metro area.

So from about Manhattan into Kansas City.

Although what we talk about in a lot of ways applies to the Great Plains in general.

So it's just something I thought it was time to get involved with this.

And I asked my friend Rex Buchanan, who had worked with me on a previous production, if he'd be interested in this one.

And my wife Laura Mead.

I asked if she'd be interested.

So we just started identifying people to interview and got the show on the road, so to speak.

- Okay.

Well, I think people are gonna really enjoy getting to learn about the different aspects of this film today.

And so, Rex, I wanna talk with you about what are the differences on how climate change is impacting us here in the heartland versus what we're hearing about it being reported in the nation and the world?

- Well, certainly it's a topic that doesn't suffer for lack of information out there, but a lot of that information is national or international.

And I think, again, Dave, that's one of the things I appreciate what you've done here.

And just to be clear, Dave is really the driving force behind this.

But one of the things I appreciate about it is that it is, almost feels a niche that was sitting there waiting to be filled in the sense of talking about Great Plains and then bring it more into Kansas.

You hear an awful lot about climate change related to sea level rise, and that affects folks on the coast.

You hear an awful lot about climate change and hurricanes.

And again, that's not an issue in our part of the world.

It's pretty easy to understand how, if you use the term, global warming might affect us here.

But beyond that, you might sort of scratch your head and say, "Well, what's that got to do with us?"

And I think one of the clear answers and a number of the conversations was it affects us in a lot of ways.

We deal with not just warmer temperatures, but also more extreme weather events than we've had in this part of the world.

Also deal with things like wildfires, which we're right back in that season here in April.

And when you get high winds combined with low humidity and higher temperatures, this part of the world struggles with those issues.

So it might be easy to think of this, or you might wanna think of this, as a coastal issue.

It's not.

And I think Dave makes that point pretty well in the documentary.

- Yes.

What's that got to do with us?

I think folks will learn it's got a lot to do with us, right?

And so what are our communities doing in our region to promote change and educate others about how climate change is impacting us and our future generations?

- Well, some communities are more engaged with the topic than others.

We focused on the Kansas City Climate Action Plan and the story behind that, how it got started.

And Laura did the interview with Lindsey Constance, who was someone that, basically, she was a mom who was concerned about it and thinking about the future of her children and got together with another person.

She was also on the Shawnee City Commission at the time, I think.

And anyhow, she got concerned about it, got the ball rolling, and it came together in Kansas City as a climate action plan that spanned the whole metro area.

- I think that, as Dave said, I did that interview, and before I go on, I wanna echo what Rex said, which is I helped Dave, but this was really his vision, and he put this together.

You know, I was a helper, and a happy one.

One of the things that I felt was really important when Dave brought this project up as a possibility is I think that there's so often people just kind of glaze over when they hear the idea of climate change.

It just feels so overwhelming, so depressing, so just outside of our grasp that it's really easy for folks to just shut down.

And I said, you know, I don't really wanna add to the climate anxiety that's out there.

We do need to educate people, but let's also look at the solutions, which he had already had on his radar, of course.

And one of the things that was really interesting to me when we interviewed Lindsey and we were talking about that particular action plan in Kansas City is the interest that people had.

People really wanted to know about this topic.

And she said, you know, when she opened up the first information gathering session, they were overwhelmed with people.

And I will tell you, the mirror, in one of our very first live event, we had the same experience.

You know, lots of people showed up.

They maxed out our space, and we had to grab more chairs, which tells me people really are interested in what they can do about this topic that can often feel so vast.

Luckily, our program really shows, in a lot of different facets, there's a lot we can do.

- Yes.

I would also say, Dave, you touched on that topic in a number of these interviews.

One was with the piece you did about the students over in Lawrence and the project they had going on.

Steve Werner's project where he brought folks together in communities throughout the state, and they talked about it.

And in some respects, the work of the religious community, faith-based community as well.

I mean, I hadn't really thought about it this way, but in a lot of respects, all of those sort of tie into what folks are doing education-wise as opposed to simply just talking about how can we respond.

Education is sort of one of the themes that runs throughout this, it seems like.

- Right.

Right.

- Yeah.

And speaking of education, Rex, so how do we communicate and how do we educate those people that are not believing in climate change, that don't believe in global warming?

You were talking to us about that earlier.

- Yeah, that's a tough one.

I would say, by and large, if you look at the polling, I think that it's pretty clear that there is widespread acceptance, certainly, of climate change.

You don't run into much disagreement about that.

You might run into some disagreement about how much of it is natural versus how much of it is anthropogenic or made by humans.

And occasionally there's some disagreement about that.

But for the most part, I think you can have those kinds of conversations as long as they're fact-based.

If folks want to sort of claim their own facts, and that spills over into not just climate change, but throughout society, it's pretty hard to have that conversation.

And there are times, I think, if somebody wants to approach it that way, it's pretty difficult to have that conversation.

But by and large, I think our experience, and you guys can chime in on this, I think people are, it's not a question of do they believe or don't believe.

It's a question of what do we do?

And those conversations are the really important ones, and they're reflected in what you did in the documentary, I think.

- One other thing that I think of when you asked that question is the response that we got from Doug Kluck, who was with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He's the regional climate science services provider for this region.

And he said, "People ask me."

Well, Rex asked him about, you know, do people ask him about that?

And he says, "Yeah, I'll be traveling someplace.

I'm on a jet.

People say, 'Do you believe in climate change?'"

And he says, "It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of what the science tells us."

So it's not a matter of belief.

It's a matter of looking at the factual data that we have and interpreting that.

And so it's laid out for us, and it's just a matter of understanding what it means.

- Yes.

And so you actually brought up another interesting aspect when you and Laura were talking about education.

You talked about getting to talk to some religious folks.

And so one of the interesting things that you guys talked about in the documentary that I really enjoyed was the Episcopal Church participation in climate change.

Can you talk to the viewers a little bit more about the embrace creation's core and the Great Middle and what Cathleen Bascom, who's in this region, is doing regarding climate change in the church?

- Right.

And Reverend Cathleen- - Yes, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

- Chittenden Bascom is her full title.

Although she is the bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, which is like the eastern 40% of Kansas from like Wichita to the east.

All the Episcopal churches are under her purview.

But she's been engaged with this for many years, and she talked in the program about she and other people like her being engaged in this ongoing discussion about it, calling it the Great Middle, 'cause this is the region they're in.

And she talked about going to the UN climate conferences in the past, kind of virtually, not going in person.

But this year she actually went in person.

So she's somebody, one of the rare people, I don't know of anybody else who personally has attended those, but she's gone and brought back information and inspiration from that.

And so she's working within her church to encourage congregations to become more engaged with the subject and to, you know, just talk about it to begin with.

And so that's part of it.

I know you had quite an interview with her and were struck by her dedication to it.

- Her dedication was just so multifaceted.

And I would have to say, that was my experience with most of the, virtually everyone that we spoke to.

You know, both Rex and Dave and all three of us, people were just so passionate on these wide varieties of ways of grappling with this issue of climate change.

And one of the things that Bishop Bascom mentioned that I thought just made so much sense is if we look at the practicality of issues, what's happening, not in these philosophic ideas, but we're lacking water here.

The water tables are going down.

What do we do?

You know, we've got some issues with the economy of certain kinds of resources.

What do we do?

And, you know, what Bishop Bascom said is, "If you address things with people in that way, they're much more likely to engage with you, rather than making some grand statement."

You know, you are having issues with this.

How do we work together with fixing it?

That seems to be a really workable way to approach this rather big problem.

- And I would also say, in a lot of respects, this is really a moral question, which it then makes sense for the faith-based community to weigh in.

In the past, Dave, I've heard you talk about motivation for doing this, and part of your motivation was what kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren and our descendants.

And really, that's a moral question.

You know, are we gonna just live for the moment and let them live with the mess that we leave behind?

Or are we gonna try to do what is sort of the morally right thing for future generations?

So if you look at it as a moral issue, it only makes sense that people like her would be right at the forefront.

And she has been.

- And it's not only her.

She's also affiliated with an organization called KIFA, the Kansas Interfaith Action Group, with Rabbi Moti Rieber as the director.

And they know each other pretty well.

But KIFA is also encouraging congregations to become more actively engaged in addressing the issue.

It is a moral question in how we treat the earth and each other, and how we can alleviate suffering that is already hitting a lot of people on a global basis.

And so it's not something that we're gonna be able to stop in its tracks.

I mean, the process is underway, and there is gonna be an ongoing implication for how it impacts us.

But we can minimize the suffering if we get more engaged in addressing the issue.

- Okay.

And so in addressing the issue, you also talked earlier just about facts, right?

It's about the facts and not whether it exists.

What do you say to people who say climate change is too controversial, it's too political?

We've got here faith communities getting into it.

We have education.

We have just listen to the facts.

So what do you say to that?

- Well, as Rex pointed out earlier, you know, polls show that people in general overwhelmingly believe that this is something that we need to be paying attention to and doing something about.

And the politics comes in when particularly people with vested interests or those representing people with vested interests try to put the brakes on any new developments or any way of addressing it.

And so it becomes a political issue.

It isn't inherently a political issue.

It's something that is a community issue on a global community.

The politics come into play when there is, you know, money involved, I think, and, as I say, vested interest.

And that's one of the things, one of the challenges we have.

And how do we overcome that and get into the meat of the issue?

And just talk about now, this is what we're facing.

What can we do about it?

And so.

- I would also say, though, one of the things that became abundantly clear is that individual action is not gonna solve this issue.

You can't recycle your way out of this.

You can't put solar panels on your house out of this.

It's gotta be a collective effort by a lot of people are coming together and agreeing on how do you respond.

And a lot of times the only way that manifests itself is through the political process.

So in a lot of respects, whether you want it to be or not, the politics is going to determine how this plays itself out.

And in a time when we're kind of divided politically, I think it's even more important to talk about the role of politics here, because we're not gonna solve this one, you know, one off.

It's gonna have to be a community or larger effort.

- And I think when we look at that idea that, you know, this is not a topic that we can no longer address, because it is being addressed.

It's being addressed when there are entire insurance companies who are no longer inuring people in California because of the wildfires.

And the wildfire smoke comes over Kansas.

And, you know, Kansas weather patterns and food patterns impact how much we can supply the rest of the world.

This is an interconnected problem that is already being dealt with.

And really the idea here, I think the pandemic that we all just lived through is a good model, in a sense, in that learning about the impact allowed us to be conscious about making actionable change.

And in a similar way, learning about climate change, we can begin to make actionable decisions with our politics, with our community to make changes that affect all of us in hopefully a more positive and informed way, using facts.

- Okay.

So we've talked about education.

We've talked about what climate change is.

We've talked about your documentary.

Another way I wanna talk about is how we're getting information to people.

So I wanna turn your attention to social media and how we use local news and platforms we use to get information out, messaging to our communities.

And so I guess I'll start with you, Rex.

And how have those been helpful in getting information out about this documentary?

- Well, I would say just as, again, just watching how Dave has, once the documentary was complete, how Dave sort of got the word out, and has done it real successfully.

The number of screenings and people, and it's gonna be shown in a lot of places and engender a lot of conversations.

And you did that, through some extent, through traditional media.

Newspapers, public radio, that sort of thing.

But from my perspective, sort of the outside looking in, you also, up to a point, were real successful on social media, and I would say particularly Facebook.

Then there arrived a point when you were less successful.

And you might want to talk about that a little bit.

- Yes, let's talk about it.

- Well, that's something that we were a little bit frustrated because we, you know, we tried to cultivate people, a group.

We set up a Facebook group for people that were particularly interested in this so we could keep them informed with the developments as time went on.

And the idea was that this is, you know, just a way of getting the information out.

But we noticed that our posts on Facebook weren't getting very broadly shared and people weren't seeing them.

And after a while, I became a little bit suspicious about that.

And at one point, as we were getting close to our premiere, I tried to boost a post on Facebook, you know, to advertise it, and it was rejected by Facebook, saying it was a violation of community standards, which I thought was very curious.

And so, you know, I ended up writing a piece about this, an opinion piece for the Kansas Reflector publication.

And they published it, (laughs) and it ended up being quite a kerfuffle, as it turned out, because as soon as they tried to publish it, all of the articles that they had online over a period of six years, it was like 6,000 articles, just all the links disappeared.

- Oh, wow.

- And so then it's kind of like, now, wait a second, was my opinion piece that was somewhat critical of Facebook for not allowing discussion of climate change responsible for these things disappearing?

I mean, that was the question.

And it's still a little bit ambiguous, uncertain what happened, but it's not ambiguous that they were offline for seven hours on that platform, the Kansas Reflector was.

And so it became kind of an issue of almost First Amendment rights.

So that's still kind of reverberating.

But again, that's where the point of my opinion piece was.

Even though we couldn't be as effective in using social media because of their constraints on who would be able to see our posts, we could, you know, approach the local public radio station and get things on the air.

We could approach the local newspaper or the local news outlets.

And so we were able to get the word out, but not like I thought we should be able to on social media.

- I think the concerning thing to me about that is that, you know, you could just say, well, maybe Dave and I don't have very many people, or maybe people aren't interested in this topic.

Well, the people that have approached us, the people that have showed up to public screenings tell us there are a lot of people interested in this topic.

When Dave would post a video of the birds in our backyard, we had one that got like 10,000 views.

So it's not a matter of people not being able to see our page.

Facebook was effectively throttling things that they didn't want people to see that we are posting and emphasizing more benign posts, which they have explicitly said is their new policy.

I think that is a bid for more and more people to watch things like this program, local programming, local news like the Kansas Reflector and The Topeka Capital-Journal, in places that are really looking at topics that affect us every day.

Because social media, we think that's the town square, they say.

It's not, really.

It's being regulated very tightly by people that have no obligation to allow us any free speech.

Ironically, I don't think most people are aware that the free speech that is protected in social media sites are the owners of the social media sites, not the people that use the social media site.

Their free speech is protected.

We, the users, ours is not protected in any way.

I think Congress and our government need to address that, but more importantly, when we're looking for information, come to your local sources to really see what's going on in your community and support them in every way you can.

- Okay.

We've talked about a lot of things, and so I also wanna give you guys the opportunity to tell people about your experiences with taping this documentary.

Maybe your favorite moment, experience, or person that you had that had the greatest impact on you when you were taping this documentary.

And we'll start with you, Dave.

- Well, I was just pleasantly surprised to find as many people engaged with this as there are.

And, you know, who comes to mind now is just Cathleen Bascom, the Episcopal bishop, being right here in Topeka.

I was just really impressed to see what she was doing and how actively engaged she personally is in the subject.

And then seeing what other people are working on across the board here.

You know, there was a young, well, the young people that we talked with.

You know, we talk about this as being something that's in the future.

And it is, 'cause it certainly has implications for future generations, but it's hitting us right now.

And so we need to be saying, you know, what can we do right now to start slowing things down?

And that's where we're interviewing or talking with middle school students in Lawrence.

And they were, you know, pretty straightforward in their concerns and sharing their concerns about, you know, something needs to be done about this, because, you know, this is directing their future.

This is directly impacting them.

- Laura.

- I would say, you know, it's a hard question to answer my favorite, you know, or most impactful.

I think the takeaway that I had, and thankfully, I think other people have given us that feedback as well, is I felt really hopeful about two things.

One, something that Rex pointed out, which is completely true, which is the extraordinary people in our area that are working in a worldwide way to approach this problem from so many different facets.

That to me is very hopeful.

And the individual's level of passion and interface, and then the response from the community.

I come away feeling like we do have a big problem here.

It really has to be addressed.

And if we just focus ourselves on it, there'll be a piece that we can do that's very meaningful.

And that, to me, is a broader takeaway that I'm really happy about.

- Yes.

And Rex?

- Yeah.

- You know, I sort of come at this from the science side.

But one of the things, and I'm not gonna pick out any single person that we talked to.

I was, you're right, consistently impressed at the quality of folks we interviewed.

But one of the themes that I was struck about is the language we used to talk about this.

In the interview we did with Nancy Jackson, with Governor Sebelius, with Evan McHenry, the student who wrote the magazine article, the way we talk about this really affects the way we view it and then what we're gonna wind up doing.

And I would also say one of the things I've been struck by since the documentary, as I watched this, Dave, and, to a certain extent, Laura and I, talked about how do you talk about a topic like this and have folks come out anything but horribly depressed, which is covered somewhat in documentary?

And yet when you've done screenings, people walk away hopeful and energized and relatively optimistic, which tells me you must have done something right in this process, Dave.

If people wind up at the end of the day that way, that's probably kind of what you wanted, isn't it?

- Well, we certainly didn't want to add to the depression.

(participants laugh) - We were hopeful that that would be the takeaway.

We were hopeful.

And again, we weren't sure what was gonna happen when we talked to all these people.

But the truth is, is these people are passionate, dedicated, educated.

We know a lot of the solutions, not all of them.

But we know a lot.

And so there's real hope there.

- Thank you guys so much.

That's all the time we have for this episode of "IGI."

If you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, send us an email at issues@ktwu.org.

If you would like to view this program again or any previous episodes of IGI, visit us online at watch.ktwu.org.

For "IGI," I'm LeTiffany Obozele, and thank you for watching.

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