We hear a lot more news about environmental problems than solutions
Climate change is an urgent, global-scaled problem. In October 2018, the world’s leading climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—released their most dire report ever: the world is currently 1 degree Celsius (1.8°F) warmer than preindustrial levels, and every fraction of additional warming will worsen the devastating impact of climate instability.
Yet worrying about a problem that is way too big for you to tackle inevitably feels discouraging. It’s disempowering. It breeds apathy. The same phenomenon happens in politics. When someone says, “Why would I bother voting?” they may be finding it hard to see how their single ballot among thousands or millions makes a difference.
To counter this feeling, psychologists say it’s important to see how our individual actions make a collective positive impact.18 Indeed, research demonstrates that when the news focuses on success stories about entrepreneurial activism and actions ordinary people are taking in local contexts we can relate to, we feel more enthusiastic and optimistic about our capacity to tackle climate change.
But unfortunately, that’s not the way climate change is typically reported. Less than 19 percent of climate change coverage on major nightly news programs in the US in 2017 and 2018 mentioned climate change solutions.19 We might assume that negative news will shock people into action, but instead it’s been proven that it can cause them to disengage. Stories that emphasize the failures of climate politics intensify people’s feelings of despair and cynicism. Journalist Elizabeth Arnold, in her five-year study of national media coverage about climate change in the US Arctic, found that almost every story perpetuated a narrative of “fear, misery, and doom” that left the public feeling powerless.20 The effects of this on our personal health and well-being are profound. As David Bornstein (journalist and co-creator of the Solutions Journalism Network) put it: “If the news were a pill, and all the known effects of the news were given in pill form, the FDA probably wouldn’t approve it.”21
In a 2017 review of more than fifty thousand abstracts from articles published in ocean and coastal science journals between 2006 and 2015, Murray A. Rudd of Emory University determined that the vast majority of articles did not propose actual solutions to environmental-change challenges. Because environmental reporters often base their reports on journal findings, those reports are heavily weighted toward presenting problems without solutions.22
In many ways, the negative skew of climate change media stories is also a reflection of the general tendency for the media to focus on negative news. Plane crashes, for example, are always covered in the news, but car crashes hardly ever are, even though they kill more than 125 million people (and injure and maim 20–50 million more) every year.23 The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is extremely low. In 2019, the fatal accident rate was on average one death for every 5.58 million flights.24
Studies reveal that news all over the world has grown gloomier in the past two decades. Major US newspapers, studies show, are far more likely to report on unsuccessful climate actions than they are to cover climate action successes.25 The same is true internationally. Maxwell Boykoff directs the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Center operates a Media and Climate Change Observatory, which monitors how climate change is reported across 117 sources (newspapers, radio, and TV) in fifty-five countries. They’ve found that problems caused by climate change are deemed more newsworthy than solutions, and that this coverage drives a sense of hopelessness. “There’s still a pervasive doom and gloom,” Boykoff said in a 2018 interview. “When these stories just focus in on doom and gloom, they turn off those who are consuming them. Without being able to find their own place as a reader, viewer, or listener in those stories, people feel paralyzed and they don’t feel like they can engage and have an entry point into doing something about the problem.”26
These findings are worth paying attention to because the number one way most of us learn about the environment is through the media. Media shape the stories we hear, which, in turn, become the mindsets that we use to understand the world.
Catastrophe narratives in pop culture
Climate change fatalism is so ubiquitous it’s made its way into pop culture. In the HBO series Euphoria, for example, a teen addict defends her drug use, saying: “The world’s coming to an end, and I haven’t even graduated high school yet.” It’s just one of a seemingly endless stream of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and television series that emerged over the past decade. The surge of catastrophe narratives led New York Times film critic Anthony “Tony” Scott to quip, “Planetary destruction and human extinction happen a half-dozen times every summer” in his 2014 review of the movie Snowpiercer.27
Popular culture provides a lens through which we can see how, as a broader society, we are thinking and feeling. It both influences and reflects societal concerns and desires. Fears about climate change, and the profound ecological uncertainty and change it engenders, are so resonant they’ve given rise to a whole new genre of ecological-disaster-themed entertainment, commonly referred to as “eco-apocalypse,” “eco-catastrophe,” or “climate porn.”28
In 2019, Shauna Doll and Tarah Wright of the Education for Sustainability Research Group at Dalhousie University29 did a thematic analysis of two hundred artworks related to climate change from across Europe and North America. Only four artworks were coded as expressing “hope.” This is a problem, particularly given the findings of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They studied the impact of the art displayed in Paris in association with the 2015 United Nations climate change summit. They too found that the vast majority of the pieces were dystopian and gloomy, and that those works left people feeling uninspired to take action. Only three of the thirty-seven works on display left people feeling hopeful that they could do something about climate change—all three of those works focused on solutions.30
Any narrative that is so deeply embedded should raise alarm bells. There should never be just one dominant story. In a well-functioning, democratic world, there are multiple stories competing with one another for our attention. The idea that something as complex and extraordinary as all life on Earth could ever be encapsulated by a single grand narrative just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if “the Earth is dying” has become a sort of apocalyptic platitude. We repeat these things because we’ve heard each other say them, but it’s possible we say them without really thinking about what they actually mean. We have massive, terrifying, urgent environmental problems. But we also have powerful successes that we need to amplify above the din of hopelessness.
Whenever we straitjacket an idea or an issue into a single, monolithic story, whether it’s “environment” or “Africa” or “gay” or “terrorist,” we lose the nuance and specificity of context. We miss positive developments and shifts in perception. We are left with an oversimplification that is so generalized it becomes inherently inaccurate. Because we are told that the planet is doomed, we do not register the growing array of scientific studies demonstrating the resilience of other species. For instance, climate-driven disturbances are affecting the world’s coastal marine ecosystems more frequently and with greater intensity. This is a global problem that demands urgent action. Yet, as detailed in a 2017 paper in BioScience, there are also instances where marine ecosystems show remarkable resilience to acute climatic events. In a region in Western Australia, for instance, up to 90 percent of live coral was lost when ocean water temperatures rose, causing the corals to jettison the algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues—what scientists call coral bleaching. Yet in some sections of the reef surface, 44 percent of the corals recovered within twelve years. Similarly, kelp forests hammered by three years of intense El Niño water-temperature increases
