Have you ever slept through your alarm? Its distant chimes slowly penetrate their way through the layers of your unconciusness, to (hopefully) bring you into the waking world on time. Well – just FYI – that’s not how you wake up when a cockroach crawls into your ear canal and clings to your eardrum. That wake up call is a lot sharper, a lot quicker – and there is no snooze button.
Last week a story made international headlines when a cockroach crawled into my ear and wasn’t extracted for 3 days. But as much I’m sure that piques people’s interest, that’s not the real story here (and it never actually was). The real story is about a world sleeping through its climate alarm clock and a media that continually asks people to click the snooze button.
For the last week I have been fielding interviews from across the world about the ‘cockroach incident’. As I write this I am awaiting an interview with an Irish radio station, and this story has been reported by the Indian Express, the Guardian, Fox news, CNN and every media outlet in between. If you thought having a cockroach in your ear made you feel dizzy, try coming to grips with the fact a cockroach is more newsworthy than a 300-day occupation to save the trees at Canal Rd.
Similar frustration to mine was captured in the recent blockbuster Don’t Look Up, where news about celebrity breakups were prioritized over an incoming comet that was about to destroy the world. Right now on earth, our life-upholding systems are now breaking down with breathtaking speed, but governments are failing to act, influenced by the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture lobby fighting to hold onto their dirty profits. While the climate crisis causes newsworthy, ‘alarm-clock’ events such as extreme weather occurrences and climate-induced migrations and conflicts, the link between these events and climate change are often not included in these media stories.
The last week has felt just like another version of ‘Don’t Look Up’. The cockroach headlines reads the ‘stuff of nightmares’ – but they are not talking about the nightmare of nitrate pollution in drinking water causing bowel cancer in our communities. The story evoked disgust in readers – but it is not disgust at environmental criminals Ravensdown and Ballance who import 98% of the climate-killing synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
It doesn’t have to be this way – through people power we can change everything, allow our environment to heal and protect our collective futures. But to do that, we need to tune the alarm clock to the issues that really matter – and leave behind the cockroaches.
