MAVERICK EARTHOur own flavour of climate avoidance — why science journalism can’t save us [Part 2]

Science journalists are humans, before we’re society’s watchdogs. The talking points at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists show we’re so busy surviving the immediate threat to our careers that there may be little headspace to confront the enormity of climate collapse. If something goesBANG,our nervous system fire-hoses our bodies with red-hot stress hormones before our brain’s senior management has a chance to think through which of the first responders it should send out to deal with the emergency.

The reason our species is still here after a few million years of evolutionary tweaking is because our ancestors handed us a good get-out-of-danger startle response. BANG = fight, flight or freezehas worked well so far. Another handy evolutionary tweak is that we tend to focus on immediate threats to our survival, before we stare down the more remote ones, be they distant by time or geography.

This explains why so many people – even smart, well-read people – are in a dream state regarding how bad the climate crisis is. Science journalists are not immune to the same survival responses. This might explain why climatechangewas on the agenda at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ), held for the first time on the Africa continent, right here in Pretoria, in early December.

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Journalists are humans before we’re societal watchdogs, and we’re subject to the same ailment that’s gripping the rest of society as we confront the climate situation: we either lurch towards a state of fight [active, gloves-on denial: “it’s not that bad’], flight [head-in-the-sand denial: “oh, look, pretty sparkly, distracting things”], or freeze [wide-eyed paralysis: “… !!!”]. It’s hard to fret about the distant threat of a heatwave or hurricane or wildfire to other people, when we don’t know how to pay the bills this month. That’s how grave the situation is for many of us.

The talking points throughout the conference were of shrinking newsroom budgets, where science reporting is often the first to get the chop. The non-salaried, no-benefits freelancers once again surfaced as those living the more precarious existence. Because we’re such niche content specialists, many science journalists are freelancers. We were also all confounded by what AI means now, as our craft suddenly looks like it might be on the brink of redundancy.

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