Climate stories: what about a tragic photograph?
The faces of people in newspapers sometimes disturb me. Let me explain. I have talked to people that want their stories told or don’t really care whether their likeness is available to the world, but I also know from my own experience that I do not want my family's fresh wounds aired out for the world to see. When we use people’s faces to humanize a climate disaster, at what point are we dehumanizing those whose stories are being told? As a family stands on the rubble of their life-long home, destroyed by a hurricane, flood, tornado, fire, you get to look into their eyes from the other side of your screen and scroll through. I don’t have an answer for this. Climate stories need to be told, but why? For readers to understand the impacts of climate change, as climate disasters worsen all over the world but especially for vulnerable populations. For outside observers of these disasters to understand their role, and the role of the powerful and wealthy, in exacerbating climate change. Maybe these stories and these faces can reach someone out there that can make a statistically significant difference in the effects of our human actions. These stories are told to a curious or bored or skeptical audience, and then what? What am I or you or anyone reading going to do about it? Why is their pain and suffering available to me, why is it for sale and on exhibit? Whose pockets do the profits from the exposure of this suffering reach?
Let people tell their own stories. Most importantly, listen to those communities that have already been facing the impacts of climate change before it’s too late. Listen to them before disaster occurs, so communities can have more resources available earlier on as they search for and work towards solutions.
Heather McTeer Toney speaks specifically to the experiences of black women in the South (the southern USA), highlighting how community efforts and ancestral knowledge have been a powerful tool for collective action, and how these efforts are starting to overcome the tokenized use of black voices in climate tragedy media.
An excerpt from McTeer Toney’s exposé Collards Are Just as Good as Kale featured in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis below expands, touches on, and adds dimension to the key points discussed above:
“Despite hearing the Republican rhetoric of “climate change ain’t real,” people knew that something more than a rising river was changing and amiss. The river waters were coming faster and stronger from the increased snow up north. (Heavier wintertime precipitation is yet another outcome of rising global temperatures.) Each time Chicago, Minneapolis, and other midwestern cities got strong winter storms, the snow melted into streams that eventually made their way to the Mississippi Delta. Deer and duck seasons weren’t the same as in years past. Cotton and soybean crop yields were different. Increased heat, droughts, and floods meant more pests. Meanwhile, it felt like no one was listening to the voices of the poor, of rural folks, of southerners.
[...]We live in pollution, play around it, work for it, and pray against it. Hell, we even sing about it. Black women are everyday environmentalists; we are climate leaders. We just don’t get the headlines too often. Rarely do we see or hear Black voices as part of national conversation about climate policy, the green economy, or clean energy - even though 57 percent of Black Americans are concerned or alarmed about climate change, compared to 49 percent of White folks. We’re relegated to providing an official comment on environmental justice issues like the water crisis in Flint, or we’re the faces in the photos when candidates need to show they’re inclusive. Fortunately, this is slowly changing as more and more women of color step loudly up to the table and make their expertise known in climate justice and culturally competent, solution-based thinking.”
What are your thoughts? Let's continue the conversation.