Americans need to hear from the media about the climate
crisis even if there's a shortage of cheerful angles.
A new scientific
report predicts more dire and irreversible consequences of the
climate crisis than ever before.
“No one on this planet
will be untouched by climate change,” declared Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which the UN runs jointly with
the World Meteorological Organization.
Even though it wasn’t
news to me, I welled up with frustration when this news broke.
But I can’t make my
city have better infrastructure for biking and public transportation, or put
solar panels on my apartment, or influence the larger policy environment that
impacts our climate much more than my light bulbs.
However, my discouragement
runs deeper. I became a journalist to find and tell important stories. I didn’t
go to Bolivia looking for a story on the climate crisis, but I found one when
I got there.
In a million ways, the
changing climate is ruining lives there: changing rain patterns, floods,
mudslides, crop failures, and more. As if that wasn’t enough, reduced glacial
melt in the Andes means decreased hydroelectric power. All of this is happening
now.
My research later led
me to Kenya, where the effects of climate change were just as shocking.
Why should things that
happen half a world away matter to us? Our link to their misery is simple: The
United States has arguably benefited more from industrialization and greenhouse
gas emissions than any other nation on earth. People in these far-flung places
are suffering for it.
That won’t matter to
some people, so I’ll add this: Violence, instability, and disease don’t have
borders.
In Kenya, I met Andrew
Githeko, a scientist who has documented how malaria has already moved to new
areas as the climate warms up. The people in these places have no immunity to
the disease.
When an epidemic occurs, as Githeko put it, “the bodies pile up.”
Newer projections find
that the changing climate will jeopardize the world’s ability toproduce enough
food for everyone on Earth. And the problems already hitting
the tropical areas I’ve visited could be a harbinger of what’s to come here at
home in the coming years.
Trying to tell these
stories as a journalist makes me sometimes wonder why I even bother. I’ve been
told flat out by editors that their readers are burnt out on depressing climate
crisis stories. They don’t want to print a story that contains nothing but bad
news.
Since readers would
presumably prefer a hopeful story about the climate crisis, they suggest that I
find an inspiring angle. Like how someone is adapting to the changing climate.
Entertaining readers
is not my job. I became a journalist to tell people what they need to know. But
it seems most publications are more interested in what sells than what’s
important. Like that story about how a 10-foot Australian snake ate a
crocodile. The images were absolutely captivating, but it’s not
important news.
I wish there were more
happy and hopeful angles to the climate crisis. The climate story is, and
always has been, a huge bummer. Or, as Al Gore says, “an inconvenient truth.”
Journalists aren’t
entertainers, and the media has a duty to inform the public about what they
need to know. Perhaps if more reporters had done their job right from the
start, we would have made the changes we needed years ago. Had that happened,
maybe the latest reports on climate change would instead describe how we dodged
a bullet.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org