Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones... (cont.)

We’ve all seen graphs and charts detailing the magnitude of the climate crisis, but it is difficult to grasp the true significance of a “2-degree Fahrenheit increase in average global surface temperature since the pre-industrial era” (NOAA, 2024). It becomes slightly more tangible when you read that, “the 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade,” or that 2023 was the “warmest year on record” (NOAA, 2024). However, for those of us residing in places where the effects of climate change are less overt, it seems as though the destruction effectuated by hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, etc. only happens to *other people.* This piece was inspired by a 2022 Tweet by @/PerthshireMags that reads, “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” I saved it in September, when Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern US, causing unprecedented levels of destruction that reached far beyond the “typical” path of ruin.
A passage from Joy G. Bertling’s 2023 text “Art Education for a Sustainable Planet: Embracing Ecopedagogy in K-12 Classrooms,” pushed me to complete this piece. It describes our distanced perception of environmental devastation as being “...distant geographically, happening far afield; historically, transpiring in the distant future; and socially, only impacting "less than human" others” (Bertling, 2023, p. 85).
In person, one must confront the grotesquely detailed rendering of my countenance while rotating through each depiction of cataclysm. The medium through which the news is delivered grows increasingly proximal: a news channel, TikTok’s “For You Page,” a groupchat, and finally, the camera app. Though “de-distancing” from the ramifications of climate collapse is the primary intent of the piece, conversely, the familiarity of experiencing these effects through mass media grows increasingly distant with each push, serving as a corollary to the distancing detailed by Bertling.