We need environmental reporters who will widen the scope of a narrow media lens.

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Woman reporter looking at a smartphone. Pixabay License.
Woman reporter looking at a smartphone. Pixabay License.

By Yasmin Dahnoun, The Ecologist  (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Our media landscape is changing drastically – an ultrafast information age is pushing commercialisation and the concentration of ownership to a new level.

Rupert Murdoch’s influential media empire casts a shadow over upon local, organic, and investigative reporting. We hope that the Ecologist Writers’ Fund is a way of creating a fairer publishing model that works in the public interest, and not against it.

The climate crisis is shamefully underreported. At the same time, the conversation around climate breakdown that is taking place in the media is dominated by a few voices, marginalising those feeling the brunt of climate breakdown. 

Displaced

Just three companies dominate 83 percent of the UK national newspaper market, according to the Media Reform Coalition. A devastating lack of diversity in journalism is bred from low-paid, insecure, and exploitative working conditions.

And while the mainstream media is failing us, there is a generation of independent reporters emerging from around the world – who are well placed to tell stories that aren’t represented within the Murdoch agenda. 

I studied the role of community radio in Colombia’s long history of the violent struggle for my journalism degree. I found community-run radio stations had a vital role to play for those people who were in the firing line during the conflict.

These radio stations would play music, and discuss trivial village issues. And they would also alert other villages when para-military men or rebels were close to attacking. 

In various other projects, displaced children in Colombia would use community media projects to take pictures of their surroundings.

Grief

Such projects enabled them to interact with and understand unfamiliar territory, grounding their understanding of a new place through photography and voice recordings. 

And while social media is responsible for the saturation of information, false news, and tunnel-visioned views funneled through algorithms – it is also an opportunity for new and fresh perspectives to get heard.

For example, the story of three Amazonian Munduruku women who wield drones and cameras as weapons against miners in their territory. 

Telling our stories is a way to knit together the frayed seams of breakdown, whether social or environmental or both. Our words are a way of processing and expressing grief, exposing injustice, and most importantly – demanding change. 

Exploited 

My own journey into journalism hasn’t been an easy one. Even when I began my studies at the University of Westminster I was acutely aware that 60 percent of us students would end up in marketing and PR – and not journalism.

Our words hold power, they are vehicles of hope, a remedy for the heavy turmoil – a way out of the climate crisis. If only they are listened to.

I stubbornly resisted this grim statistical fate. Instead, I drifted in and out of low-paid care, warehouse, and bar work before finally landing on a career path that would accommodate my interest and skills. But for some time, it felt as if the minimum wage grind was killing my energy, drive – and dream. 

For most writers in the journalism industry, we’d do anything to get a piece published. Our naivety is exploited, we are tripped up and ripped off. What most writers don’t understand is that their words hold more meaning and value than they could ever comprehend.

Reporters carve history with their pens. They bring forward the realities of war, for example, the failing pursuit of Vietnam. Movements from the Montgomery bus boycott to Black Lives Matter have been captured, reported, told, and retold throughout history.

If we don’t have representative voices now, future generations will see the past through the skewed lens of the mass media. 

Ecocide 

We are currently witnessing the death of journalism – as an art, profession, and a viable career. Disillusioned, most reporters churn out press releases, also known as ‘churnalism’, or succumb to the pressure of writing clickbait articles – with their only purpose being to gain attention for advertisers.

And at the same time, we’re faced with issues that need our attention more than ever, in an age of attention deficit. As climatic conditions worsen, and corporations commit ecocide after ecocide and get it away with, we’re slowly losing the only chance we’ve got to survive as a species.

Having witnessed loggers chopping down vast areas of supposedly protected National Parks across South America first-hand, I knew that my heart and mind needed to be in environmental journalism.

As protectors of the planet – journalists stand with indigenous peoples, exploited minors, and families that have been poisoned by mercury in their water systems.

Power 

Our words hold power, they are vehicles of hope, a remedy for the heavy turmoil – a way out of the climate crisis. If only they are listened to.

The Ecologist Writers Fund aims to provide a scope for writers from marginalised communities, and countries that are most affected by the climate crisis. 

All donations will go directly towards supporting our writers. So far we’ve reported on stories from around the world, including: The fight to safeguard nature in rural Turkey, Fear over India’s dangerous dams, and Minds left behind in the global south. 

Do you have a story to tell? The Ecologist Writers Fund is currently accepting applications here.

Hot planet made deadly South African floods twice as likely: climate scientists

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Flash flood in Palapye, Central District, Botswana. Heavy rain caused a small dam to burst on the Lotsane River, which flows through the village. The mud walls of traditionally built houses dissolved like icing sugar, leaving just the roofs: the breeze-block buildings in the background survived intact. A young goat has become entangled in a wire fence and drowned, but it's believed no human lives were lost. Taken 1995 on film. Author: JackyR, CC BY-SA 3.0
Flash flood in Palapye, Central District, Botswana. Heavy rain caused a small dam to burst on the Lotsane River, which flows through the village. The mud walls of traditionally built houses dissolved like icing sugar, leaving just the roofs: the breeze-block buildings in the background survived intact. A young goat has become entangled in a wire fence and drowned, but it’s believed no human lives were lost. Taken 1995 on film. Author: JackyR, CC BY-SA 3.0.

“We need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a new reality where floods and heatwaves are more intense and damaging,” said a co-author of the study.

“If we do not reduce emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5°C, many extreme weather events will become increasingly destructive.”

By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Intense rainfall that led to deadly flooding and landslides in South Africa last month was made twice as likely by the human-caused climate crisis, a team of scientists revealed Friday, pointing to the findings as proof of the need to swiftly and significantly curb planet-heating emissions.

Experts at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative found that heavy rainfall episodes like the one in April that left at least 435 people dead can be expected about once every 20 years versus the once every 40 years it would be without humanity warming the planet.

WWA climatologists warn that without successful efforts to dramatically reduce emissions, the frequency and intensity of such extreme events will increase as the global temperature does.

“If we do not reduce emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5°C, many extreme weather events will become increasingly destructive,” said study co-author Izidine Pinto of the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town. “We need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a new reality where floods and heatwaves are more intense and damaging.”

During an April speech announcing a disaster declaration, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that communities in the eastern part of the country were “devastated by catastrophic flooding,” noting that it “caused extensive damage to houses, businesses, roads, bridges and water, electricity, rail, and telecommunications infrastructure.”

Ramaphosa also highlighted the death toll, sharing that when he and other officials visited affected families, “they told us heart-breaking stories about children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and neighbors being swept away as their homes crumbled under the pressure of the flood waters.”

The city of Durban was hit particularly hard and its port—the largest in Africa—had to suspend operations because of the extreme weather.

Friederike Otto from Imperial College London, who leads WWA and co-authored the new study, pointed out that “most people who died in the floods lived in informal settlements, so again we are seeing how climate change disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable people.”

“However, the flooding of the Port of Durban, where African minerals and crops are shipped worldwide, is also a reminder that there are no borders for climate impacts,” she added. “What happens in one place can have substantial consequences elsewhere.

In addition to the chances of an event such as the mid-April rain disaster doubling due to human-induced climate change, the WWA team found that “the intensity of the current event has increased by 4-8%.”

The New York Times noted that “the work has yet to be peer-reviewed or published, but it uses methods that have been reviewed previously” and “the finding that the likelihood of such an extreme rain event has increased with global warming is consistent with many other studies of individual events and broader trends.”

WWA’s previous work includes a review of last year’s fatal heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, which the scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without the climate emergency.

“Our results provide a strong warning,” that WWA analysis said. “Our rapidly warming climate is bringing us into uncharted territory that has significant consequences for health, well-being, and livelihoods.”

A switch to clean energy rapidly improves community health

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Reducing air pollution from fossil fuels could save more than a million U.S. lives over the next 20 years.

Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash
Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash

A transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy is essential for reducing global warming. And it rapidly improves public health.

“Within the moment, essentially, we act, within that same year, we start to see cleaner air,” says Drew Shindell, a distinguished professor of Earth sciences at Duke University.

He says that burning fossil fuels produces both climate-warming gases and tiny particles that are harmful to breathe.

“They can get down into the tiny little blood vessels that line the lung wall, and therefore get deep into the body and cause respiratory and cardiovascular illness,” Shindell says.

So he says reducing the use of fossil fuels is not only important to the long-term health of the planet. It can also save people’s lives in the near-term.

In a recent study, his team found that by cutting carbon pollution in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. alone could avoid more than a million premature deaths over the next 20 years.

Shindell says he hopes the research will help people understand that switching to clean, renewable energy is not only an investment in the long-term future of the planet but in people’s health today.