BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Barrie resident Kelly Gingrich.
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This is the climate’s final warning to society – we must talk like it. Yet another dire warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has the UN officially telling us to essentially ‘prepare for the worst’.
People are figuring it out, processing the moment in history we’re living through. But people are figuring it out at the 11th hour. Another IPCC report underscoring the scores of scientific studies, Indigenous calls to action and lived experiences around the world – frankly, we are cutting the apocalypse very close.
The climate emergency, and actions to mitigate and adapt to its impacts, need to be embedded into all other news: housing, the economy, mental health, education, jobs, and so on.
News outlets understand things are interconnected; we’ve been hearing about the impacts of the pandemic on every possible aspect of our lives. We need this for climate, too. We need daily coverage of the widespread consequences and the interconnections between causes and actions to address it.
Journalists and news outlets must develop climate literacy to avoid propping up false solutions, techno-optimism, climate delay, as well as racist, colonial myths and reactions. Again, we have seen that they are very capable of this, by doing their due diligence to catch misinformation about the pandemic and public safety.
For those who have lived through major world events, and all of us who have know been living through this pandemic, know that the climate emergency is bigger than all of those. Why doesn’t it feel like it when we read or watch the news? This is the biggest deal in human history – and possibly the most decisive decade in human history. We simply have to rise to the occasion and show the best of humanity, or our story will have a very sad ending.
The media, from national news to our local newspaper, have a uniquely powerful role to play in this story – because media shapes the public narrative. The media has a heavy responsibility of ensuring that climate breakdown is treated and talked about like the emergency it is.
But this responsibility to inform the public of the state of the world comes with the incredible opportunity to also shape a hopeful narrative – because there is still hope. We know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and we already have the knowledge and technology to do it. We just need everybody on board and all hands on deck.
From the open letter (2021) to the world’s media, written by young activists Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg: “You are among our last hopes. No one else has the possibility and the opportunity to reach as many people in the extremely short timeframe we have. We cannot do this without you. The climate crisis is only going to become more urgent. We can still avoid the worst consequences, we can still turn this around. But not if we continue like today. You have the resources and possibilities to change the story overnight.”
I hope you take this suggestion, or plea, on board, because we really need your hands on deck if we’re going to write a better ending to this story.
Kelly Gingrich
Barrie
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