Why did climate narratives get so fixated on the apocalypse?
And is it hindering our ability to make change?
If you’ve spent any time on the internet, then you’re probably familiar with the love affair the media has with apocalyptic climate change narratives. “Time Is Running Out to Avert a Harrowing Future, Climate Panel Warns.” “Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late.” “Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature.”
Every year, we read countless headlines claiming that we’re teetering on the edge of irreversible overshoot and collapse, nearly past the point of no return. The sense of urgency they are meant to evoke is purposeful: we are, in fact, on a trajectory that will cause a lot of suffering and destruction. The urgency is meant to raise awareness, to shock and motivate people into action.
The problem is that this approach hasn’t accomplished anything resembling swift action. With every new disaster, the news cycle explodes with shocking headlines for a couple of days followed by weeks of silence, leaving people with the feeling that taking action is futile amidst all of the evidence that we’re already doomed. As Rebecca Solnit recently put it in her Guardian column, “It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win.” Unless we change course, this dominant narrative could hinder our ability to make progress.
So how did we get here? Although it might seem like a modern phenomenon, the apocalyptic framing of climate change coverage is not a new one. It’s actually been around since the 1970s when the topic of climate change first entered the public consciousness.
This was the decade the world saw its first Earth Day; the UN Environment Programme was founded, as was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Time Magazine released covers referencing the warming climate. And an organization called the Club of Rome published an influential report called The Limits to Growth. The report presented the idea that, even with advanced technology, the earth simply could not sustain our present growth rates past about the year 2100.
It was an explosive claim. There was a growing sense, particularly among scientists, that the world was heading for disaster unless we drastically changed the course of endless growth and industrialization. This was the first time that any mainstream voice raised the issue of the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ or proposed that there were planetary limits that could not be surpassed. This time also came with a lot of concern over population growth, with books like The Population Bomb claiming that, unless (highly unethical) population control measures were taken, society would collapse after running out of the resources needed to support so many new people.
The prevailing message of these early narratives was that business as usual would lead to total collapse. Impending apocalypse was baked into these appeals, soon becoming the hallmark of climate change discourse during this era. Scientists truly believed that the missing piece was information – if people and policymakers only knew how dire the situation was, they would jump into action. (Spoiler: they didn’t.)
In the beginning, the apocalyptic framing served its place to stress the urgency of the problem to a public that truly wasn’t aware of the dangers. However, the sense of cataclysm they evoked also gave many climate deniers fodder to discredit their claims as being “hysterical” and not grounded in observable reality.
Even though the public consciousness has changed drastically since then, climate narratives have failed to evolve. One paper estimates that up to “98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature.” In popular media, “Climate change is most commonly constructed […] as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. […] It incorporates an urgent tone […] and uses a language of acceleration and irreversibility.” Films like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up or calls to formally declare a climate emergency still dominate the tactics to motivate change. In McKay’s film, the trope of the hysterical scientists warning of impending disaster to an apathetic audience seems so familiar it’s almost tired.
The problem with relying on these narratives is that, in real life, people are simply not driven to action by fear, concern, or even knowledge alone. Instead, we have the direction all wrong; often, action itself is what causes us to change our beliefs and inspires further action. It’s a feedback loop: when we act, “one action leads to another, [and] this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowing how to act.” In other words, act first, then the emotions and beliefs will follow. It’s not that we don’t know things are bad; we just don’t know what to do about it as individual people.
“We have the direction all wrong; often, action itself is what causes us to change our beliefs and inspires further action.”
So far, most of the coverage of climate change has been framed around “issues” – ice caps melting, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather events, and the like. It’s presented as an external threat, something to be concerned about, rather than simply the backdrop of our lives from which we must make all of our decisions. What is needed is not more communications aimed to raise our awareness, but instead “the opportunity and capability to engage in action which is experienced as meaningful.”
What we need, above all, is a shift to an “action” framing in our media around climate change. We must pose the question – regardless of how dire things are, what are people already doing to address it, and how can we learn from them? This would represent a huge shift in the stories we tell about climate change – a shift that has the chance to inspire real change.
Some push back on this framing as naive, as if we’d be putting on optimistic blinders and ignoring the danger we’re in. Critics might say that all we’d read would be feel-good stories about people building a community garden or doing a beach clean-up while ignoring systems of power that work to obstruct change. There is some truth to this worry; feel-good stories that reduce complex problems to tidy narratives about people “doing the right thing” can actually obscure the need for wider change.
This type of narrative is probably familiar to all of us. Consider the typical talk-show segment or article (and there have been many) about a young child noticing that other students couldn’t afford their school lunches and jumping into action with a lemonade stand or some effort to pay off the students’ lunch debt. Such stories celebrate heartwarming heroism without asking very crucial questions about why students aren’t given free lunches in the first place, why child poverty is so widespread in economically prosperous countries, or why an eight-year-old was the one most concerned and willing to do something about it. These kinds of stories are meant to “restore our faith in humanity” by arguing that things aren’t so bad after all. Although they might feel good, they lack any ability to change underlying systems.
There’s a fine line to tread when talking about solutions in a way that doesn’t obscure the systemic nature of the problem or lull us into complacency. Let’s look at an example of the kind of action-based story that has the potential to create change.
One of this year’s winners of the Right Livelihood Award, an “alternative Nobel Prize” showcasing social and environmental change efforts is a group called Mother Nature Cambodia. They’re a youth-led climate action organization that started in 2012 to oppose damaging and environmentally disastrous industrial projects. One of their first campaigns was opposing the Chhay Areng hydroelectric dam, a Chinese-led project that would have flooded 10,000 hectares of land. This land was home to 31 endangered animal species and the project would have forced over 1,600 Indigenous people from their land. Corruption was rampant in the project; it would have cost USD $400 million while producing only small amounts of electricity for people. Most of the money would have gone into government officials’ pockets. Although hydroelectric power can be a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels or coal, the implementation of specific projects matters a lot – not all projects are equal. And this one was shaping up to be a disaster for the environment and for the people. To protest it, Mother Nature used viral social media videos, direct action, and other nonviolent tactics to put pressure on the government. They have been incredibly successful; the government was forced to abandon the project, setting a rare precedent for Cambodia.
Unsurprisingly, the government has responded with intimidation, arrests, raids on offices, and financial penalties. Some members have had to flee the country. But the movement’s power, through wide-scale online and in-person activism, can’t be contained. They’ve successfully stopped several projects from moving ahead despite the hostile political environment, showing the immense influence that movements–especially youth-led ones–have to reshape their societies. Stories like these prompt us to ask more important questions: how were they able to be so successful despite the unfavourable political conditions? How did they leverage social media so effectively? Could something similar happen where I am?
The work that we’re going to look back on in 30 years and celebrate is the work that is being born right now. It doesn’t look very impressive yet because the outcomes have yet to be decided; the early actions take the form of a protest, an organizing meeting, or a campaign in isolation. But later on, we might look back and see the arc of this wider movement that reshaped the world for the better. If nobody joins them now, however, they might not come to fruition. Our media doesn’t privilege these stories either, so it’s hard to know where to look for them. This is a problem if we want to address the challenges ahead of us.
Mother Nature Cambodia–like most all social movements–undoubtedly started with a group of people looking around and realizing that something harmful was happening, then sitting around a table together thinking about what they could do. Then, they were courageous enough to put it into action, which is the hard part. If they had decided that the problems were too big, or they were too small to do anything about them, the projects would have gone ahead with no resistance. We are far more powerful than we think.
Back to the apocalyptic narratives for a minute. It makes sense that we engage with them; many of us, especially in the Western/industrialized world, feel a lot of guilt about our contribution or inaction on climate change, so being informed about how bad things are seems like a kind of necessary penance. Maybe we aren’t feeling the worst effects of climate change, but at least we’re unwilling to live in denial. If we understand that action begets more action, however, we begin looking around us for things we can actually do. The apocalypse stories don’t help us, so we need to take on different tactics. That’s why sharing action-based stories is so important. It helps us know where to begin.
All of this is also underscored by our cultural bias towards stories that resemble a typical “hero’s journey”. In this paradigm, every story must have a hero, a victim, and a villain or threat. The story is advanced by the heroic acts of exceptional people who save the victims from their fate at the hands of the villain. Climate change has not been an exception: we are the victims (to wildly varying degrees based on geography and privilege), climate change is the threat, and the heroes are either outstanding individuals who bear little resemblance to us, or technologies and innovation that will save us from our fate. All of this provides little agency to regular people, offering only to hope the threat will be mitigated by politicians, scientists, and technologists.
Rather than clinging to hero narratives, however, we can embrace a new kind of story: one that begins with a sober appraisal of how things are, and then highlights the short-term actions being taken all over the world that are changing things. Hopefully, all of these collective actions lead us to where we want to go. What we need to tell, ultimately, are positive stories that invoke all of us, and in which everyone has a role to play.
We have a tendency to privilege things that happen on a large scale and dismiss those that are more local in nature. But change almost always begins on the margins. It starts with student groups, neighbourhood coalitions, municipal governments, and grassroots campaigns. Projects often start around one local issue. Then, when there’s momentum, it grows. But if none of us are interested in engaging at this level, then it won’t come to fruition.
“Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.”
The bottom line is that the collapse scenarios might come true – and they might not. Dwelling on that question is not very interesting. What’s more interesting are the choices we make now. We cannot see into the future and we can’t simply can’t afford to assume that the ending of the story is predetermined. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.” It doesn’t actually matter whether we feel one way or another about our future. What matters is that we remain committed to acting in the search for something different – regardless of the outcome.
This resource from the Climate X-Change which talks about how to communicate effectively about the climate crisis across all kinds of contexts.
This article from Rebecca Solnit titled “‘If you win the popular imagination, you change the game’: why we need new stories on climate.” It’s a great read on how storytelling factors into movement-making, and is ever-relevant to the topics discussed here.
This article was written by Thea Walmsley and edited by Gareth Gransaull.