Twenty years a journalist, then a detour she wasn’t sure about. Maria Sköld of the Stockholm Environment Institute on where good research gets stuck, and what actually helps it travel.

I asked my boss: we're going to put this probe on the International Space Station to measure CO2 in the atmosphere, but don't we already know CO2 is causing global warming? Why do we need more measurements? And he said to me, well, maybe Congress will do something with more data. That was the moment. No. We have enough data. They won't do anything else. It's not about the data. It's about the communications.

My mom and dad are trying to clear out things from their home. They still live in the house that I grew up in. And so I just got in the mail a poster that I had made as a school project, I think in second grade, where I was painting the storm drains in our neighborhood. "Chesapeake Bay drainage, don't dump." And I was like, oh, I got started as a clean water advocate in the second grade.