I’ve been sitting with a question this week: why aren’t we all panicking?
We know the climate crisis is urgent. We know disasters are worsening. And yet, most of us just… carry on. I had a long conversation about this recently (a sneak peek of something I’ll share more about soon), and a few ideas came up that I haven’t been able to shake:
- Climate impacts are local, but the crisis is global. That dissonance makes it hard to emotionally connect the floods in Texas, the fires in Australia, and the droughts in East Africa to the same underlying cause. It feels scattered — distant, even.
- Disaster memory is seasonal. When bushfires or hurricanes strike, the urgency spikes — but then fades. By the time the next fire season comes, the media has moved on, and so have we. It’s hard to build momentum when visibility resets every year.
- Are we uninformed… or just overwhelmed? Would we act faster if climate impacts were front and centre in the news every day? Or would we switch off even more? In a world of doomscrolling, maybe we’re already too numb to absorb the signal through the noise.
None of these are answers — just questions I’m asking myself. I’m curious what others think.
Image by Золтан Сирчак from Pixabay
(This post was written with the help of AI, based on my own work and ideas. Here’s why I do it this way: Link.)
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