on fear.

Tiny Ecology Entry #3

The rain fell not as drops, but in sheets. It splashed and flowed down the concrete pathway toward my house, which sits on a slight downward slope from the road. I sat at the front window, looking down at my sit spot saturated and flooded with water. The force and volume of rainfall eroded the soil in the garden beds surrounding it, cutting little muddy streams through the slope. Heavy rain is common here. Atmospheric river events, colloquially termed “Pineapple Expresses”, are also common here. The meteorologists said one was going to be different, though. And it was. 

That night, with my bedroom window open and the sound of rain relentlessly thundering down outside, I couldn’t sleep. Having a background in the science of geomorphic processes and hazards, (e.g. debris flows, etc.), I knew this event posed risks beyond rivers topping their banks. Bleary-eyed, I took to Twitter to see what was happening elsewhere during this event, and there it was: the first reports were coming in about hundreds of people trapped on a highway between a pair of debris flows on Highway 7 near Agassiz, BC. Highways and roads were getting washed out. Bridges/overpasses were failing. The force of intense rainfall on a huge scale, playing out in steep mountain terrain, steep valleys, massive river systems, all with a ribbon of asphalt cutting through them. And that was the first of many failures.

Five days later, the full extent of impacts from that weather event is still being felt, uncovered, and understood. 

Fear is a normal, human response. It is an appropriate emotion in times like these. Earth’s physical processes are vigorous and powerful, and they carry uncertainty with them in exactly how they play out, where and to what extent, even when we know something is coming. There is nothing inherently bad or terrible about atmospheric rivers, flooding, debris flows, or any other physical hazards. It is when they interact with, adversely affect, and expose the vulnerability of our human-made infrastructure on the land and waters upon which we depend; when they impact something or somewhere that we have an attachment to, or when these processes and hazards pose a risk to our lives, or livelihoods, or our ability to function in the world. 

So there is a place for fear in communication, particularly during a crisis, but it must be used judiciously. It could be used effectively for encouraging safe behaviour and helping others by staying out of harm’s way. Stay off the roads. Evacuate. Don’t make things worse by putting yourself in more danger, which could in turn put more people at risk. In many cases, people’s emotional fear would already be heightened, so amping up doomsday scenario messaging would likely exacerbate existing distress, potentially causing overwhelm, which could lead to numbing out and emotionally shutting down.

Post-crisis, I would argue there is also a place for using fear to communicate the scale of the climate risk we face into the future, using recent crises to ignite people to action, using real events and imagery to connect the dots on what climate change impacts look like in their own backyards. Fear-based communication can leverage recent, lived-experience and tap into emotional states that energize people to act. But once the crisis is perceived as “over”, then some people may want to (try to) just “get back to normal life”, not hear about more scary things coming down the pipe in the future. 

The role of fear in communication about climate change is narrow and limited in both temporal, spatial, and depth of scale; meaning, it can likely only be used effectively over short periods of time, at the right time and place, and is more limited to the issues playing out on the landscape in that time and space.

Fear, in my opinion, is not the fuel for the marathon required for climate action – it’s the fuel for a sprint, a short-term, short-acting accelerant, and its use needs to be considered as such.

Addendum:

For this Tiny Ecology entry, I drew upon my own reflections of the Wallace-Wells (2017) and Solnit (2016) articles and my own experience of the Nov. 14-15 event on the west coast of BC. Even though I didn’t get to the hope discussed in Solnit (2016), it informed my thinking about the limits of fear framing in communication.

References

Soinit, R. (2016). Hope is an embrace of the unknown: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown

Wallace-Wells, D. (2017). The uninhabitable earth, annotated edition. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.htm