🌱 Fireside Chat with Project Galileo participant: Ambiental Media

All right, good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone everywhere. My name is Francisco, I'm based in London and I work in the customer services team of Cloudflare and as part of our celebrations for Earth Day, which is today, our employee resource group of our ERG called Greencloud has been doing multiple events.

This interview is one of our highlights and that's why we have invited a very special guest, Thiago Medaglia, who is the founder of Ambiental Media.

So thank you for joining us today.

Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience? Thank you very much, Francisco.

It's a pleasure to be here, especially today. And I'm an environmental and science journalist from Brazil.

Right now, I'm living in the US doing a master's degree program in history of science.

And as you said, I'm the founder of Ambiental Media.

I'm also a former editor at National Graphic Brazil. So yeah, I think these are important things to share about myself and my work.

Yeah, for sure.

I will definitely touch base on those things, for sure. So thanks again for the introduction.

And to give some more context, I wanted to share that I got in touch with Thiago because Ambiental Media is Cloudflare's Project Galileo participants.

Cloudflare has the mission to help build a better Internet, and that includes protecting free expression online for vulnerable groups.

So this is one of the topics that we'll be covering today.

And as such, in 2014, Cloudflare launched this service free of cost to protect important and vulnerable targets like artistic groups, humanitarian organizations, among others that want to make a positive impact worldwide.

So that said, what does Ambiental Media do? How did you come up with it?

How was the funding process? What can you share about that?

Thank you so much for the question. Well, what we do is, Ambiental Media is an environmental journalism initiative.

We definitely want to expand our coverage to science topics other than environmental ones in the near future.

Basically, what we do is we work with data, and we use scientific data in order to do journalistic investigation or create journalistic projects, or even we try to help scientists communicate their results in the best possible way, but not only the communication of science, but also and especially journalism, because those things are not the same as you know.

Ambiental today works as a project-based initiative.

So we go from one project to the other. We are not able yet to produce content on a regular basis, especially because the type of content that we produce is special in a way.

We try to go deep, and for now, for instance, the Ambiental Media team has been developing an index about the level of degradation in water ecosystems in the Amazon.

So we've been crossing dozens of scientific results and assessing lots of databases in order to do that.

So those are not projects that you do from one day to the other.

I'm sorry, you also, how was the founding process?

Sorry, I made too many questions at once. No, not at all, not at all. It's just that I'm tired from my master's degree program, which is in the final part of the program.

So I'm a bit tired. I hope you don't mind. But it's a very good question, the founding process, because it's not easy, as you know.

Creating an initiative in journalism is very hard, especially in countries like Brazil.

So it takes a lot of effort.

What I did is, my long story short is that I was an editor at National Geographic Brazil magazine, and working for Abril publishing house in Brazil, which was the biggest magazine publishing house in Latin America for many decades.

And with lots of other journalists, because Abril publishing house went down very deeply.

So I was fired, and I saw all those talented journalists looking for jobs.

And I was really upset about the level, the state of environmental journalism in Brazil at that point.

I think we are in a much better place now today.

And I decided to, I was immediately hired by another publishing house, a smaller one, and was really upset with the level of journalism they were doing.

I'm not going to mention their names, because I don't want to expose anyone that wouldn't be nice.

But they were not doing a good job. So I was really upset about that, and I decided to create something.

I had ideas before, you know, that came from my work as a reporter traveling throughout Brazil, and now Latin America, covering environmental stories.

And so I went, you know, I decided to look for knowledge.

So I came to New York City, to the City University of New York. They have a very interesting and special, you know, center for the development of new business model and new strategies for journalism.

And that at CUNY is where I developed the idea of environmental media.

I also went to work with Gustavo Falleira, my friend from Amazonia, and I learned a lot from him as well.

And, you know, and I decided to create ambiental, and it's been a fantastic experience, but sacrificing in a way, it's very hard.

And we, I mean, ambiental media, we didn't have any support, any funding support in a way.

So we really created everything from the effort of this group of journalists, and especially I should mention Leticia Klein and Laura Kurzbach, who are great partners in this journey, and also Flavia Forner, who is, we are now doing projects together in daily basis like we used to do, but he's a very important person in this development as well.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.

That's really impressive. So what I'm gathering is that you noticed that there was a gap somewhere.

I'm not sure if that was, like, based on a data-driven approach that was missing somewhere, based on what you were saying earlier of all the data, all the databases that you check and cross check.

And I'm curious to know, how does that work today?

Like, do you, do your colleagues do some groundwork as well?

Do they get in touch with other publishing powerhouses and get data from there and then they are able to publish it?

Or how does that work?

Because it must be really challenging as Brazil is a huge country, the Amazon is quite big as well, so getting data from there must have a lot of different challenges.

So yeah, I'm very curious to know the nature of that as well.

That's very interesting. I think you are touching to, you can tell me if I understood correctly, I think you are touching in two topics.

One is access to data and other is strategy for publication.

Is that correct? Yes. Okay, good.

So access to data, I mean, we have, and just to highlight something, I do think that we have amazing journalists in Brazil.

So when I say that I wasn't happy with the state of environmental journalism in Brazil, I'm not, that's not a reference to my colleagues, but to, you know, to the media system, you know, as a whole.

But today we are definitely in a much better place with Info Amazônia, Amazônia Real, MetaMedia, which is still a tiny organization compared to these other ones, but we are growing, Repórter Brasil, Agência Pública, Oeco and others who have been doing an amazing job, amazing work.

So we do partner with the mainstream media who has also been doing important and fantastic work in the environmental area in Brazil.

So we have been, the content that we produce, the first maybe couple of years of ambiental media, we established partnerships with, especially with scientists.

So it wasn't a hundred percent independent journalism as I would like to be, as we do now, because now we do have funding sources that are more independent in that sense.

Like we've been working with the Pulitzer Center, we've been working with Serra Pileira Institute in Brazil, and those are fantastic partners.

And other reporting grants that we won, like from EJN in the beginning, in partnership with Info Amazônia.

So those are like the a hundred percent independent journalist projects, which what we are meant to be and meant to do.

But in the beginning, we've done partnerships with networks of scientists, including, especially including Brazilian scientists and international scientists as well, because you know like Brazil is in a very difficult moment, politically speaking, and Bolsonaro is cutting the funding for science and research, and that's terrible for the country's future, and has an impact in science communication as well.

So we established this partnership, accessing data, developing the work, and sharing the work with the media, the mainstream media in Brazil.

So in this way, we were able to see the content that we created being shared by, you know, Folha de São Paulo, which is Brazil's per se New York Times, Estadão, which is also a major newspaper in Brazil, O Globo, which is also like those three are the major newspapers in Brazil, but also BBC Brazil, Deconversation published our content in English, fragments of our content per se.

The Guardian also published or replicated content that we generated.

So I think this is very successful as a model for, you know, sharing the content and spreading the word and sending the message, which is key because our messages are relevant.

We are arguing for the conservation of the Amazon and against the climate emergency.

Yeah, regarding access to data, not to go, you know, not to make this comment too long, but there are issues in Brazil, like for instance, this project that we are about to launch, call it Aquazonia.

Like I said, we developed an index to evaluate the state of health of ecosystems, aquatic ecosystems in the Amazon.

And we had, I think this is a very special project done in partnership with Serra Pileira Institute, because we've been working side by side with a scientist and we interviewed like, you know, more than a dozen researchers that work with water in the Amazon.

So we are doing science journalism in, you know, very grounded in science.

And that's what I want to do. That's my view for ambiental media. That's what I want to do.

I want to take a step further in environmental journalism and science journalism in Brazil in regarding, you know, regarding feeding from science or working with scientific data.

You know, I think this is key. I think this is very important.

So we've been working on this project and there are gaps geographically, geographically speaking, sorry about that.

And also thematically speaking, you know, there are topics and regions of the Amazon where you do not have data about water.

And that's extremely, you know, disturbing.

But we also, we do, and I don't blame the scientists for this.

There are other reasons, especially funding. It's hard to do science in Brazil, but we do have a fantastic group of scientists in Brazil.

I mean, environmental scientists in Brazil are very hardworking and very talented.

And I think they do fantastic job with the conditions that they have. So we do have a lot of data, a lot of information, but we also have gaps that are something that make us very worried because we don't know without it, without data, we don't know exactly what's going on.

The last thing I'm going to say is that we try to combine the use of scientific data with journalistic work, going to the field and talking to the people, interviewing the people and spending time in the region.

And that's the sort of model that we have in mind, which is not a cheap model.

And you can imagine how challenging it has been. Yeah. No, thank you for sharing so much about that.

I'm curious to know, with that set of data and these different models, how important is the online presence for ambiental media?

I think it's key, but I do also think that it's a gap for ambiental media.

I do think that that's a step that the project has to take. We have struggled in finding the right people to conduct our voice on social media.

That's also on me because I'm sort of introverted person.

So my presence on social media is there.

I think people listen to me, but I'm not the social media journalist, the type that spends hours and hours there.

I'm more in the background. So we do have an online presence and we do have followers.

But my sense, being very honest and transparent, because I feel like this is important, is that ambiental has a very strong reputation, especially among other journalists and scientists.

We do have a public audience that is very interesting.

I do feel like people see us as a reliable source, but we do need to grow our audience and our presence online.

And I think that this is definitely a next step for us.

That's something good. And also probably that strong partnership ecosystem that you have built also definitely helps as well to attract readers.

So I'm really curious about this. How was your online presence before you...

I mean, today you're using Koffler, so there must have been a reason in between when you decided, hey, I actually would like to be protected.

So I'm curious to know, how was it before you used Koffler? How are things today?

What was the main trigger for that as well? Well, since we are a tiny organization and we've been growing consistently but slowly, we were not the main targets for haters and stuff like that.

But it happened and it changed very quickly once we launched it.

And things escalated in Brazil very strongly over the past years with Bolsonaro and his followers.

So you have this hateful environment in Brazil now in social media and in Brazil overall.

And that's definitely on him because he wants to create this chaos and he's definitely inspiring violence and violent reactions.

So with the support of the Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Pulitzer Center, we worked on an investigation, like I said, using scientific data because Bolsonaro and his supporters or his former Ministry of Environment, they did a very strong work over the past years trying to dissociate fire and deforestation in the Amazon.

So they started to spread publicly information that are not true, that are false.

Stuff like, the Amazon, there's no fire in the Amazon.

That never happens. And then contradicting themselves saying, you know, like fire happens because the traditional populations, they set the rainforest on fire to do their agriculture.

And so sometimes saying that there's no fire, other times saying, blaming the, you know, the small agriculture people that, you know, plant for a living.

That's what they do. They need food on their table.

So, you know, we were just like watching that and saying we should do something.

So we started to investigate data regarding deforestation and regarding fire in the Amazon.

And we combined those data in maps. We created a narrative based on maps.

It's a project called Smoke Screen. And we can share the link later.

And so we checked those data over the course of two years and we showed, so we used scientific data to break the false narrative and show that actually those two things were happening in the same place.

And scientists have been pointing that out for many years.

You know, that's known. The one thing people do when, like, it's a criminal act.

So they do the deforestation process. And once the trees are on the ground, they are drying under the sun.

The next step is to set fire on the dry wood.

You know, that's what they do. And that very often escapes to the forest and it starts like wildfires.

So the Amazon, there shouldn't be fire in the Amazon because it's a humid forest.

But it happens because of human action.

And it is a relative truth. It is true that people from traditional populations, indigenous populations, might set fire, a controlled fire, to renew the soil because they don't have tractors and other resources to, you know, to prepare the soil and do their plantations and, you know, gather the food that they need.

And that fire, that type of fire might escape, might escape to the rainforest.

But that's not like the main reason.

Definitely not. That doesn't create, usually doesn't create huge fires in the Amazon, you know.

So we just used the data to show that that was a false narrative.

And after we released that project, we released that project one day after Bolsonaro told those very same lines that I was explaining in the United Nations.

And we released it in partnership with Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's major newspaper.

And Global TV, also major in Brazil, also replicated our data analysis and our journalistic investigation.

And so we contradicted him. We actually showed that he was lying.

After that, we started to receive attacks. We are not saying that the government attacked us, that there's no way to say that, to say who did that.

But we did receive hacker's attacks to our website and personal attack on social media.

People like saying, you know, all sorts of things.

And that's where we, you know, we heard about Project Galileo. We spoke with friends in Brazil and we looked for help.

And it was definitely made a huge difference because the hackers were about to have success in invading our website and doing damage, because this is a project that is useful.

It was useful back then and it is useful now.

And it's going to be useful for many years because it shows that there is a connection between fire and deforestation in a very clear way.

There's no way to, you know, you cannot, there's no way to contradict that. It's visual, you know, and it's scientific.

So yeah, so I think this is an important project.

And we received like every fire season, hackers try to attack our website again, but now we feel secure.

Definitely. Cool. Thank you for sharing all of the context.

It's really interesting how you got there. And I'm glad to hear that Cloudflare is protecting ambient media and that you're able to continue sharing your findings and all of these more data-based information.

And speaking of which, I noticed in your website that there are many different projects that you're tackling today.

You already mentioned a couple with this one, between the fires and the deforestation and also the water levels.

Can you share a bit more about whatever projects, maybe from a past project that you're currently using with the new one and the water?

What is one of your favorite success stories of all the hard work that you have been doing?

Like, is there anything in particular that you say, yes, this is exactly why I wanted to create Ambiental Media?

Yeah. I mean, we had that feeling of, you know, that good feeling of achieving something relevant a few times, quite a few times.

And I think this is fantastic.

It's really like why I decided to create it, to create Ambiental and why this fantastic team joined me and dream with me.

And I think those projects, like the one we are about to release about water in the Amazon, this is, I'm really excited about it because there are topics.

So what I do here studying history of science is actually studying ignorance.

And ignorance can be produced in many forms.

It's not only the absence of knowledge regarding a given topic, but it can be produced intentionally.

We have seen that in the tobacco industry, have seen that with the oil industry.

And we see that in Brazil when the government uses, for instance, when the government very often lie, and that's easy to, you know, to identify and fight.

But there are like relative truths that are, you know, sold as absolute truths, and that's dangerous.

And so the water project, I know, I think it's very important because, for instance, in Brazil, the construction of new river dams is being discussed in the Amazon region.

And that's one part of the planet where you have like the last free-flowing rivers in, you know, existing free-flowing rivers.

That's a tough combination of words for a Brazilian to say in English.

But you do have those free rivers there, and river dams are about to be built.

And the damage that is going to be made, and usually, very often, you know, hydroelectric power is portrayed as renewed, clean energy, which is a relative truth.

I mean, the science knows that some river dams, some dams do emit as much methane, mostly methane, but also CO2, just as much as fossil fuels, just as much as all your sources of energy production, you know.

That is known. Of course, there are river dams that are, in reality, are clean regarding emissions, but you need a strategy to build river dams in a place like the Amazon.

And that strategy is not being applied, you know.

There are specific places where river dams should be built and other places where it shouldn't.

Then you have combined effects because you have illegal mining growing in the Amazon.

And then, and no one, I mean, it's hard to measure effects in water.

Usually, we speak about deforestation, we look at vegetation, we look at a number of species that are being lost, but it's hard to talk about water in the public debate or in journalism.

And it's hard to measure, you know.

And so that's what we did. And we are about to launch that project. You will be sharing very relevant results.

And so I think this is one that brings me a lot of, you know, excitement and realization in the sense that it's going to add something to the public debate.

That's what we want to do with ambiental media. We, like in 2017, we launched a project in partnership with the Sustainable Amazon Network, a network of scientists, where we show the effects of degradation, which is a different phenomenon than deforestation.

And after that, other journalists started to cover the topic more often.

So that's what I want to do to add value to the public debate using science and environmental journalism.

That sounds really cool, especially the fact that more journalists are getting involved there.

We are about to run out of time.

But before that, in maybe one or two sentences, if that's possible, is there anything that people can do to get involved at a personal level to make things better from a perspective?

Or is that too long of an answer to give right now, maybe?

Uh, you mean to support our work? Is that what you mean?

Uh, yeah. Or in general, the cost and sustainability. Good. Yeah. Well, great.

Well, Maybe it's a tough question for the amount of time that we have left. Oh, yeah.

I mean, to support our work, I mean, ambiental media is an international network.

We have people from everywhere. And everyone is invited. If you are a journalist, and you are a scientist and work with data, you are invited to join us, you know?

Usually people say, can I send you my resume? And I say, don't send me resumes.

We are, you know, we are project-based. Just, you know, send me stuff that you have done and what you would like to do.

And ambiental media is under construction.

So if you want to join us, come with that in mind. To join our cause, I mean, we have to be, like, if people who are watching us now and are in the northern hemisphere, we have to be aware of what we consume.

I think consumption is the key, you know, looking for accountability from, you know, the part of the world that is buying commodities from the Amazon.

Just make sure that you do not contribute to deforestation and other predatory attacks to the rainforest.

Absolutely. Thank you for that. And hopefully more people will continue joining the cause as well.

And now, yeah, we are almost at the end of the session.

So I wanted to thank you again for your presence here and for sharing a bit more of what you do.

And with that in mind, I would like to invite the audience to visit ambiental.media to see all the cool stuff that they're working on and achieving.

To close up the session, if anyone listening to this belongs to or is connected to non-for-profit organizations that may need help against cyber attacks, I would encourage you to browse Project Galileo and fill in the form, as we will be more than happy to help out.