Introduction
According to the WWF’s latest Living Planet Report, there has been a 73% average decline in the number of animals alive by species in the last 50 years.
YES, that’s as cataclysmic as it sounds. But I’m not writing this blog to talk about the Living Planet Report, I’m writing this because it angers me to live in a society where the mainstream media, national governments and public aren’t talking about three quarters of all living animals dying in the last 50 years. Our society has managed to become incredibly technologically advanced, but also pathologically disconnected from nature, it’s intrinsic value and it’s utterly essential role in our own survival. So how did we become so cumulatively stupid?
Table of Contents
1984 or 2024 – Dystopia is Here
Modern society is far closer to George Orwell’s 1984 than most people realize. The political and media discourse around climate change and biodiversity loss creates an illusion that we are in a war we intend to win, even though we have made no significant policy or cultural changes to do so. The reality is that every year the number of wild animals and remaining ecosystems rapidly shrink, while our CO2 equivalent emissions relentlessly increase – driven by the far more pressing issues of the economy and consumerism. Recognition of the severity and tragedy of the situation is not something that can be allowed into the mainstream media, political discourse or the wider cultural viewpoint. A positive, solution orientated outlook is mandated by western culture, and negative viewpoints are considered as a sign of defeatism, preventing conversations grounded in facts and reality.
73% of Animals Drop Dead – Not Newsworthy
Suppression by omission is the foundation for making sure that the public stay largely unaware and therefore uninterested in the severity of the information contained in something like the Living Planet Report. This report didn’t go unnoticed, but rather it received about 1 short news article, usually online only, from a handful of major media outlets. A quick Google search of videos for ‘Living Planet Report 2024’ shows that no major news outlet took the time and effort to give this topic actual airtime, a pre-requisite for an issue to be taken seriously. Our news cycle has endless airtime for murder and accident reports, but virtually no time for the destruction of the entire natural world in a single human lifetime.
Only Humans Matter – Western Culture
Does mainstream media choose not to discuss the biodiversity crisis because the public simply aren’t interested? While this is far from the entire reason, Western culture, which has increasingly become the hegemonic global culture, has little regard for nature in its own right. Most environmental organizations do not plea for us to save beavers and wetlands because they are unique, amazing and fascinating creatures and habitats – but instead appeal to their ‘value’ as an ‘ecological service’ to mankind. Our cultural view is entirely human centric, and largely sees nature as a resource we need to manage for future generations of humans. Factory farming is another illustration of our human centric culture. Only an ideology with no value for non-human lives could allow us to breed, torture and kill billions of animals every year in the most brutal and inhumane ways, so that most of us can eat a diet that is largely a culinary preference, not an essential part of survival.
But culture is a circular logic. If you never hear about 73% of all animals dying in 50 years, then ecological conservation isn’t about to gain a toehold in your understanding of the world. And the key point is not that such information is silenced, but rather it is drowned out by a cascade of other news, which no rational person could consider to be ‘more’ important to society
Bad Environmental Journalism the Norm, Not the Exception
But it’s not just the lack of airtime that kills the impact and power of news like the living Planet Report. The presentation can have a huge impact, with common techniques such as manufactured uncertainty, objective language and the obligatory ‘positive solution’ used to make alarming environmental news sound more benign.
As much of the online reporting on the Living Planet Report was by smaller media outlets and environmental charities (thanks to it being given minimal attention by larger media companies), the reporting was generally free from most of these techniques. However, the positive ‘solutions’ were universally offered at the end, and it’s worth giving them a cursory review to examine their absurdity.
Boiler Plate Misinformation
Positive solutions are presented at the end of every piece of environmental news, like some sort of boiler blate wording that’s legally required. It has a few variations, but it usually states that we need to rapidly transition to renewable energy solutions, that there is still time to save the environment, avoid 1.5 degrees of warming and get everyone better jobs. I don’t have space in this blog to address how ludicrous all these claims usually are, but I’ll give one example from the Living Planet Report.
The Report repeatedly references our need to avoid a scenario where the planet warms by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as a warming planet will eventually become a key driver for biodiversity loss (it’s not currently one of the major factors). This would give one the impression that this is still a serios target, despite the fact that the earth was recorded as being 1.5 degrees warmer for a continuous 12-month period in early 2024, well before this report was published. Scientists won’t declare the 1.5-degree target breached until it’s been seen over a much longer multi-year average, but unless humanity is entirely wiped out in a nuclear war in the next few years, this target is a dead duck. You will still see this target referenced in almost all reporting on the environment, as though the Ministry of truth hasn’t got around to updating the wording and pretending that the real target was always 2.0 degrees of warming.
Why Doesn’t the Media Care
Mainstream media is not in the business of providing meaningful and essential information to the public. It’s also not in the business of holding government and officials to account. It’s in the business of making money. The best analysis you’ll find of this is the book ‘Manufacturing Consent’ by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. Their model for analysing what and how news is selected and reported, called the Propaganda Model, does an excellent job of predicting whether or not an event will be considered newsworthy.
Newspapers are dependent on advertising money simply to exist, and massive overconsumption of non-essential products and experiences is both the engine of our capitalist society, and one of the main drivers of environmental destruction. There is an obvious conflict of interest between corporate advertising and accurately reporting the scope and scale of environmental destruction currently going on.
Newspapers and media outlets are a low margin and low profit business, meaning they are shockingly cheap to purchase ownership of. Take the Washington Post, which Jeff Bezos (the CEO of Amazon) purchased for just $250 million USD in 2013. That sounds like a lot, but for the third largest Newspaper in the US it’s staggeringly cheap. So it should come as no surprise that 90% of US media is controlled by just six companies, and not governments, NGOs or Co-ops. Do we really believe that a Newspaper owned by the CEO of Amazon is going to espouse anti-consumerist arguments in the name of saving the environment?
But even for media that is independent or partly funded by readership subscriptions, the majority of their revenue still comes from advertising. An independent newspaper is limited in how critical it can be of big business, rampant consumerism and environmental destruction, because these topics do not create a buying mood amongst readers, and if readers don’t purchase products advertised in your paper, then your advertising slots will become less valuable. When you read media that is supported by advertising, then it’s essential to remember that from the newspapers’ perspective news isn’t the product, you are the product.
Why Doesn’t the Government Care
Surely our democratically elected governments care? The Living Planet Report must have flown up the bureaucratic chain of command, eliciting gasps and shocked responses from senior cabinet members upon being received.
Unfortunately our governments are just composed of people, who reflect their societies cultural values and understanding, which are themselves strongly influenced by the narrative (or lack of) that we’ve heard in the media about environmental destruction and biodiversity loss. It’s a circular feedback loop, which is why the failure of media to adequately discuss our big societal issues is so important.
Media outlets dictate and heavily police what is allowable debate. Solar Panels and Wind Turbines are part of the allowable debate, because they produce new industries and provide more energy for us to consume. The fact that they produce very low amounts of intermittent electricity, have very short operating lives and drive massive environmental destruction are not part of the allowable debate. Discussing the actual root causes of why we’re destroying the environment are seemingly unmentionable. The world has seen a huge population increase, with the population rising from 1 billion people in 1804 to approximately 8 billion in 2022. We manage to feed this enormous population only thanks to the incredible amount of energy we’ve been able to harness from fossil fuels, which are functionally irreplaceable to our modern society.
The reality is that our governments do not have any short-term solutions that they could implement which would be acceptable to western culture. Banning or massively limiting meat consumption and rewilding the incredible 80% of farmland this represents would be the only significant short-term policy that we could enact, but such a ‘dictatorial’ style of government would be unimaginable to Western culture.
Long-term societal planning needs to include population control as a central discussion and policy point. Our planet simply cannot sustain this number of people, and we have been steadily exhausting our global resources of arable land, fresh water and robust ecosystems. Discussions around population control fly in the face of individual freedoms and rights, but such rights are not laws of nature, just societal constructs that came into being in an era where resource constraints seemed to have been overcome by the power of modern technology.
Our governments represent a society that can’t imagine a limitation to the power of modern technology. A culture that has psychologically disconnected food and fresh water from the ecosystems that produce them. Ecological constraints are just an infringement on our human rights, so no democratic government can discuss 73% of all animals dying in 50 years, because the real solutions mean impinging on our rights to consume, our rights to reproduce and our unquestioned right to destroy nature.
Conclusion – I’m Pissed Off
I’m writing this blog because I’m angry. The Living Planer Report was a trigger, but it’s just an example of how new information, which should unquestionably be the centre of our news cycle and political debates, goes largely unnoticed. Mainstream media influences enormous control over our societal values, but it is almost entirely captured by corporate interests. Democracies only reflect the societies that they come from, and modern societies are extremely intellectually repressive. Accurately highlighting the extent and scale of our biodiversity crisis is not a topic that is part of the allowable debate in the media, and so it is also not an allowable topic for political discourse. Information like the Living Planer Report is suppressed.