Making a difference in a world full of bad news

We’re living in a time where information is easily accessible with a few clicks on our smartphone or laptop. This has also given rise to information disorder with its various shades of misinformation.

Instead of inspiring action, in most cases information incites fear. As the Poynter Institute has written, “in a fast-moving information landscape, fear can sell as well as sex. Fearful headlines draw people in by capitalizing on their concerns and anxieties.”

Psychologists say that fear can be your friend in just the right doses, but too much of it can harm you. Fear alerts us to the danger our community, and all of humanity, is facing. But oftentimes fear can become exaggerated and overwhelming.

Glaciers in New Zealand turning caramel brown and its skies turning bright orange by the smoke and ash drifting from the Australian wildfires remind us of the haze that enveloped Cebu last September from the forest fires of Indonesia. We talked about how to cope with the haze but as soon as it was gone, we went with our business as usual, unmindful of our own ways that could have contributed to the haze.

We air our concerns on social media by sharing articles and photos about the apocalyptic wildfires in Australia that has torched more than 14.8 million acres and killed over 500 million animals. Yet we often ignore the science behind unprecedented disasters like this.

Many people don’t know that bushfires are an annual and inevitable occurrence in Australia. It’s an intrinsic part of the ecosystem cycle of disturbance, cleansing and rebirth. The bushfire season which started late last year, however, has been supercharged with unusually dry and windy conditions and record heat waves. The burning moved fast and continued unabated for days, reaching places previously unaffected and enveloping cities like Sydney with thick, dangerous smoke.

Meanwhile, Australia remains the third largest exporter of fossil fuels behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. Despite previous warnings as early as 2007 about heat waves and fires that are certain to increase in intensity and frequency, Australia continued to “play an outsized role in the collapse of the COP 25 climate talks” in Madrid last December.

There’s a certain sense of helplessness when we are confronted with information like this. We think that we don’t have the power to change the bigger things happening around us. That is a classic mistaken notion. Had Time’s Person of the Year Greta Thunberg thought that sitting alone outside the Swedish parliament in “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for the climate) would be fruitless, people around the world would not have been inspired by the clarity of her message about global inaction on climate change.

Yet the global protest movement that Thunberg inspired is supposed to be just the starting point for individual and collective concrete and effective actions to address climate change. Thunberg herself made that point emphatically.

Take the Indonesian forest fires that brought its harmful smoke to Cebu in 2015 and 2019. The science behind it tells us that the palm oil industry is what’s driving the fires there. Forest lands in Indonesia are being burned to clear these for palm oil plantations which supply at least 73% of world demand for palm oil.

Before the next and more intense haze episode comes to Cebu, kindly check the list of ingredients in your grocery items like soap, shampoo, toothpaste, powdered milk, bread, margarine, and skincare products. Chances are there is palm oil in them. Then decide how you can make a difference this time.