Hive - Sustainability Communications & Ideas

Crisis? What Environmental Crisis?

Over recent months the media cliché of choice seems to be ‘the elephant in the room’ - a term used to describe the improbably large issue that no one seems willing or able to acknowledge. So abundant has been its use that it leaves you wondering if there are so many elephants in the room how is there any space left for the people who aren’t talking about them?

Alas, like the loyal hack I pretend not to be, I too am forced to wheel out the ‘elephant’ analogy for the subject of the environment; concerned by just how accurate a description of the current media climate it appears to be. Over recent weeks a litany of other topics has dominated the news, most recently Barack Obama’s historic (and frequently hysterical) election to President of the United States. And of course looming large over everything is the economy; that giant dinosaur that appears to not merely be just in the room but to have eaten the entire house.

But even non-stories such as the stormiest tea cup ever churned out by the Daily Mail’s worryingly potent moral panic factory (Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross murdering Manuel from Fawlty Towers and using his bones for voodoo evil, or something like that) seems to have obscured the persistent problem of global climate change. It seems that while the media are happy to peddle hyperbole about climate change during ‘slow news’ weeks, the arrival of ‘faster’ news soon sees the big green elephant relegated to its uncomfortably familiar role of sitting quietly and increasingly impatiently in the corner of the room.

For those of us who have been convinced that climate change is a matter of the utmost seriousness then it’s increasingly frustrating to see it so quickly forgotten when other events capable of generating more enticing (and profitable) headlines emerge. Yes the economy is inevitably a subject that demands immediacy in thought and action; and yes Obama’s Presidency is a monumental moment in world history; but impending environmental disaster is unlikely to pause to give us chance to revel in our misery and hope respectively.

To take that dreadful cliché to its logical conclusion, if the environmental elephant remains in the corner of the room for too long, it’s going to make an awful mess on the carpet.