ZEKE Magazine: Spring 2022

PROFILE
Antonia Juhasz
Author of "Sustainable Solutions to
the Climate Crisis
By Daniela Cohen
New Orleans-based author and investigative
journalist Antonia Juhasz aims
to “move readers to see themselves as
active participants in the events that
shape their own and other people’s lives,”
hold bad actors to account, and present
solutions to pressing problems.
With a focus on energy and climate, for
her, reporting has been a tangible way to
immediately be of service.
Juhasz’s passion for this work is obvious,
with early roots including time in
her 20’s as a legislative assistant in the U.S.
Congress, where she experienced firsthand
the harmful and undue influence of certain
corporations over the country’s policy
process. Her determination to confront
this evolved into a focus on oil companies,
particularly during the Bush administration
and the Iraq war. Later, she noticed how
most of the reporting on the oil industry
was done by finance journalists, many of
whose coverage was limited by interdependent
relationships with the companies they
reported on and did not include investigating
broader impacts on human health,
environment, politics, human rights, war
and peace, and climate.
“I wanted to apply a holistic approach
to look at fossil fuels through all of these
lenses,” says Juhasz. “And in particular, the
impacts on people on the ground and what
their experiences were, what their stories
were, what their struggles were, and to
report from this full 360-degree lens.”
As the climate crisis worsened, the scope
of Juhasz’s reporting widened to focus on
climate and energy more broadly to address
the scope of both the problem and the
various environmental justice movements
working towards solutions.
Writing “Sustainable Solutions to the
Climate Crisis” provided her with a refreshing
opportunity to focus fully on solutions.
Although Juhasz includes the perspectives
of people on the frontlines who are pushing
back, in her writing there is often limited
opportunity to include their solutions.
“I so often feel it is important to
explain and hold to account things that
have gone wrong and bad actors and
bad outcomes,” says Juhasz. “But it really
behooves us to spend the same amount of
time and attention, if not more, on all of
the incredible work that people are doing,
Antonia Juhasz reporting for Newsweek on local
Indigenous resistance to Shell's offshore oil plans.
On the tip of the Alaskan Arctic in Wainwright.
Photo© 2015 Gary Braasch
to put forward the solutions and actively
living the solutions.”
The interviewees in “Sustainable
Solutions to the Climate Crisis,” women of
color on the frontlines of the energy and
climate crisis, were keen to focus on that.
Each reiterated that they have solutions
to the climate crisis, but far too often their
voices are not heard, or when they are, they
are not supported with funding or policy to
make these changes or to keep bad actors from
interfering with what they are already doing.
Juhasz hopes to leave readers knowing that
we have the solutions to confront the climate
crisis, as well as the inspiration and resources to
get involved in implementing them.
ZEKE
SUBSCRIBE
WWW.ZEKEMAGAZINE.COM