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An Unscientific Look at Nature: Media Coverage of the Southern California Wildfires
by Jaclyn Sakow, posted November 14, 2007.
image taken from Current.com (photographer unknown)
In late October 2007, a network of fires spread across Southern California engulfing both the forests and nearby suburbs in flames. The press swarmed to capture images and write blurbs about the affluent suburbanites who were thrown out of their McMansions and herded into Qualcomm Stadium, a strange parallel on a scene that unfolded two years earlier in New Orleans.
While race was the topic on everyone’s lips in Fall 2005 due to Katrina, you would think global warming would at least get whispered in coverage of the wildfires. After all, it is 2007: Al Gore’s celebrity has skyrocketed as a result of “An Inconvenient Truth” and the Live Earth concerts, bottled water is out, and green is the new black. Never in my lifetime has environmentalism been in the American consciousness to as great an extent as it is at this very moment.
And yet, after examining 27 articles of 2007 SoCal fire coverage on The New York Times and Time Magazine websites, only 3 articles mentioned global warming at all. Of these, one was an Op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman, another was a 817 word article which used the term “global warming” once, and the other was a large Time story giving an in depth look at the historical (and probable future) relationship between Southern California and wildfires.
Interestingly enough, on October 21, just days before the wildfires started to blaze, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story called “The Future is Drying Up”. The focus of the story, eerily, is how global warming and overpopulation is taking its toll on the West through drought. The author, Jon Gertner outlines:
As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, ‘an Armageddon’.
It is logical to assume that The New York Times would have made some connection between climate change in the Southwest and fires in Southern California, considering the close time stamp between the weekend piece and the fires. Alas, it seems that the Times threw Gertner’s feature out the window as old news within a few days.
Charles Seife, a New York University Journalism professor who specializes in science reporting, gave some insight into these omissions during a recent phone interview. He noted that while manmade climate change is something that most scientists would agree with, “most scientists would not say with certainty that the fires are a result of global warming”. While the fires may very well be related to global warming, there is not enough proof that it caused them. Seife said that many locations around the globe receive climate change differently, for example “England is supposed to become cooler, not warmer, due to climate change”. Thereby making the point that heated situations like wildfire are not necessarily caused by global warming.
It is understandable why reporters may not want to link causation to global warming, but it’s worth asking why most would neglect to even mention it as a possible factor. When sifting through these articles, loss of material possessions seemed to come up very frequently. As pure speculation, I thought that this could be a look into America’s fascination with materialism, especially the toys of the wealthy. Yet, they may have been mentioned often just because many more structures were destroyed in this blaze than human beings.
I mentioned to Seife that some journalists may be afraid of delving too deep into scientific territory, worried that their failing grades in high school biology could only take them so far. Seife seemed to be hesitant about the probability of this point, but did say that there’s “definitely room for more types of reporting” on stories of this nature. And added that “this and other environmental stories were not necessarily covered as well as they could have been”.
Sixteen of the 27 selected stories focused on a variety of explanations for the fires. Of these, 10 articles used arson as a possible or official cause of the fires. Fallen power lines and general hot/dry conditions (with no causal explanation) were other popular reasons, each with 5 story mentions. Note that there is an overlap in these statistics because many stories cited multiple explanations for fires started in different Southern California locations.
Seven of the 27 articles examined legislation or community action that may have had a role in mitigating the wildfires’ eventual effects. Yet, these proposed actions tend to run the gamut: improved city infrastructure, more firefighting equipment, conservation of water, the stoppage of fire suppression policies, and then finally to pass legislature that would prevent building in these dangerous fringe areas.
Again, social aspects were emphasized over scientific ones in the coverage. One article discussed immigrants who were pulled out of the shadows and sometimes deported because of the fires. Narratives about immigrants and a 10-year-old child accidentally setting the fires, tend to hold sway over factual scientific information in the stories presented. Left-wing urbanist, Mike Davis, expressed his doubt in the arson narratives in a recent airing of “On the Media”:
But this is one of the great hoary myths of the American West. During the First World War, of course, you know, there were German arsonists everywhere. During the Second World War, the Japanese. And my fear today, because there’s an FBI arson investigation going on, is we’re going to find some convenient link to the war on terrorism or to the immigration issue…what fire scientists will tell you is that the biggest single cause of big fires like this is probably power lines blowing down.
From Davis’ viewpoint, these social aspects are being inserted somewhat untruthfully into the media – making scapegoats out of 10-year-old boys and immigrants.
One semi-scientific (semi because the articles rarely gave substantial scientific information, although this is more science driven information) aspect of the wildfire articles that did receive a notable amount of coverage was the history of fires in Southern California. Thirteen of the 27 New York Times and Time Magazine web articles on the subject allude to a past that included fires. Of 13, about 8 of them raised questions or criticism about why residents would willingly choose to live in an area that is known for going up in flames. The other 5 articles use history in a more neutral way or as a vehicle for mentioning the SoCal wildfires of 2003.
If anything, the roots of this area point out another reason why global warming was not mentioned much in the articles - wildfires are old hat in Southern California. Mike Davis outlined the history of California wildfires in his 1996 essay “Let Malibu Burn: A Political History of the Fire Coast”. In it, Davis points a finger at residents:
If Southern Californians seemed unprepared for the inferno of 1993, they had no one to blame but themselves. Unlike the earthquakes that followed a few months later, the flames came down grimly familiar paths. There was no shortage of omens.
This essay was written over 10 year ago and many people know through personal experience how commonplace these fires are, so it seems fair that a notable amount of examined articles criticized or questioned these residents. Can a “natural disaster” really be called such when all of its victims realize its nearly annual autumn presence?
Latest page update: made by JaclynSakow
, Nov 14 2007, 9:48 AM EST
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