Wildfire Stories Enact Erasure of Human Caused Climate Change

Today's front page story has dramatic graphics and narrative about the impacts of wildfires on this generation of children.

Front page today

But the story is silent on the human causes of the intensification of our wildfire season. It treats it as a variation on the "natural cycle."

 “This condition of climate change, of creating a drier landscape earlier in the summer, we expect to actually increase,” [State Climatologist Larry] O’Neill said. “We expect that the wildfire season will be happening earlier, lasting longer, and be more intense in the middle.”

Today

Without including a discussion of the human causes of climate change, it's just some mysterious natural "condition" and variation. This is basically the same frame attentive Salemites might have read in 1931! "A warm age is normal for the earth," they said. (But also, that story is way more explicit about the role of fossil fuel, the "discharge of carbon dioxide...from burning coal.")

June 28th, 1931

Today's story ends on a harmonizing, reassuring, and unearned note. "Not all is lost."

But we are certain to lose more.

• Previously on a similarly shaped story see "Genre and Outdoor Writing: Story on Decline of Alpine Meadows has Unearned Happy Ending?" (2013)

A few days earlier in an AP story the paper picked up, there was a clear statement of the role of "burning coal, oil and natural gas" in the "ever warming human-caused climate change."

Thursday

The story included a request for "global leaders to start telling the truth." This should include journalists! The scientist says "It's all hands on deck now."

The paper is struggling with this truth. Yesterday the front page story was on a poll that didn't ever ask or state what was true, but merely reported on what people believed in a basic he-said, she-said frame. It might as well have been about a flat earth. "But is climate change to blame?" Some people say yes, others say no. Who knows. It's a mystery!

Yesterday

It ended on a note of private, individual actions, and not on any larger policy change at scale.

Focus on individualism is also a discourse of delay

Similarly, the follow-up today on the Liberty Jory area fire was silent on fossil fuel and emissions, not bringing home that our transportation is half the greenhouse gas emissions here or anything about fossil fuel generally.

Today

It is remarkable how siloed climate coverage remains. Stories from the AP climate desk might be picked up, but any insight from them is carefully separated from local stories about climate impacts.

• See "Story on South Salem Wildfires omits Discussion of Emissions" (just last week)
  

As it pursues an ostensibly "neutral" stance, the paper is instead minimizing the truth and offering a biased frame for passiveness, accommodation, and delay.

A Call for More Assertive Policy

Governor Kotek at the State Library
(Oregon Capital Chronicle)

As it happens, our 350.org chapter is hosting a rally for climate on Friday the 15th, focused in large part on that "wildfire generation."

Friday September 15 kicks off a week of climate action ahead of a big march in New York City and UN Climate Summit.

Friday 9/15 is a global youth-led climate strike day. In Oregon rallies will be held in Salem, Portland, Eugene and Bend, coordinated by Portland Youth Climate Strike in coalition with several other organizations. The statewide focus is a demand that Governor Kotek declare a Climate Emergency with the authority and urgency that entails.

The Salem event starts at 4 pm on the Capitol Mall across Court St. from the Capitol. There will be speakers and street theater. We will deliver our demand for a Climate Emergency Declaration to the Governor's office which is in the State Library - right next to the rally site - while the Capitol is under construction.

Addendum, September 13th

The front page story yesterday on our hot summer again enacts a kind of erasure of the human causes of climate change.

Front page yesterday

The whole tenor of the coverage is odd. The "wildfire generation" story was published on the SJ satellite Register Guard page, and that underscores how odd was the omission of Juliana vs. United States, whose lead named plaintiff and several others also are from Eugene. 

Those members of the "wildfire generation" are responding in a way the newspaper ignores!

Part of the RG site yesterday

Starting with the trope of water play in the lead image, the piece today (at top) is a little too conversational and casual about the "heat wave."

It’s no secret to Oregonians that this summer was a hot one. But as it turns out, it was one of the hottest ever for those in the Willamette Valley.

When it quotes a climate scientist, it says only that "this last decade [including this summer] was quite anomalous." It does not mention "climate change," increasing emissions, the near certainty of even hotter summers in the future, or the human source of emissions. And by focusing on the pattern of anomaly in the last decade, there is an implied return to "normal" in the future. But of course things are going to get worse, any rolling average is moving and increasing, and a kind of implied homeostatic frame with a "return to normal" is very misleading.

An odd tone is continued on a USA Today story a few pages in on the cost of extreme weather disasters. It says that the costly disasters "bear the undeniable fingerprints of climate change," but goes on to discuss the disaster highlights rather than any discussion of emissions. Its focus is more on the spectacle of disaster than on any contributing cause and solution for the pattern of those disasters.

USA Today in the paper

The same basic story, this time in an AP version, is published online only in the digital supplement.

AP version only in online supplement

Even though it does not stress fossil fuel use in our climate emergency, it devotes more space to scientists and the contributing cause of climate.

The increase in weather disasters is consistent with what climate scientists have long been saying...

"Adding more energy to the atmosphere and the oceans will increase intensity and frequency of extreme events"...

"But there are things we can do to reverse the trend...If we want to reduce the damages from severe weather, we need to accelerate progress on both stopping climate change and building resilience."

The climate coverage is just so very disappointing.