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 recovered within five years. By studying these “bright spots,” situations where ecosystems persist even in the face of major climatic impacts, we can learn what management strategies help to buffer destructive forces and nurture resilience.31 Rarely do the media return to profile the astonishing return of life after a catastrophic event.
Beware fatalistic mindsets
When the student I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter said, “I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless,” she believed that to be true, and I felt sad for her suffering. But I also saw her statement as an example of just how taken-for-granted and powerful the mindset of doom and gloom is. She described both her hopelessness and the hopeless state of the planet as non-negotiable, fixed, facts—as reality. She wasn’t saying, “I feel hopeless.” She was saying, “I am hopeless.” Just as she wasn’t saying, “I am worried that the state of the planet is hopeless,” she was saying, “It is hopeless.”
The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real. Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality. It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one. It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen. Record-high numbers of Americans worry about climate change, but only 5 percent of them believe that humans can and will successfully reduce it, according to a 2017 study by researchers at Yale University and George Mason University.32
We need to decouple the enormity of the crises we face from the ongoing construction of hopelessness. Doom and gloom is so synonymous with the environment, we fail to recognize it as a frame, as a way of seeing things, as a mindset. The mindsets we hold influence the outcomes that will result. Whether we are consciously aware of them or not, our mindsets affect what we pay attention to. Mindsets change what we are motivated to do and even what we believe is possible. We need to remind ourselves of this over and over and over again because, as we’ll see in the next chapter, our blindness to hope is extracting far too heavy a toll.
2
THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF DOOM AND GLOOM
Everything is shifting. Gone,