(Climate) Change in the Magazine Industry

Photo: Rishabh Malik/courtesy Atmos

“We want everyone to be collaborating on this and speaking about it.”

The “it” is climate change, and the speaker is Jake Sargent, fashion brand head turned publisher of Atmos magazine. As Adele Peters explains in Fast Company writes, “Sargent cofounded a venture fund that invests in sustainable consumer product companies, but wanted to also invest in media as a way to shift culture.” 

The result is Atmos, a book-sized title that uses its presence in the media as a way to create cultural awareness and change. According to Peters, the magazine “looks at current challenges through photography, interviews with artists such as Anonhi and Yoko Ono, and trips to rural India and the island of Kiribati to see how communities are adapting to climate change. It explores a range of solutions of the kind that Fast Company also covers, including ‘clean’ lab-grown meat, mushroom-grown leather, vertical farms, and robots that pollinate crops or plant trees.”

“We really wanted to create a platform where we could tell stories about the environment through an art and design lens, and actually take the space to tell them in depth,” says editor-in-chief William Defebaugh.”

Their goal is to inspire leaders in the art and design space to look at climate change as it impacts their work, in a way they may not have considered yet. By leading this exploration at the intersection of climate and culture, they hope to create a growing “ecosystem” of people who are designing a more sustainable future.

In a rapidly changing world, it’s great to see magazines taking an active role in directing us toward real solutions.