From Eko Anhovo activists fighting against pollution from a cement plant in the Alpine Soča Valley, to fishermen trying to understand how climate change impacts their livelihood in the Adriatic, the case of environmental justice and climate activism is as vast as it goes. They are the personifications of decades of fighting against environmental injustice that we see around the world, yet each of them are real cases with a consequence of real human lives, not numbers, not examples, but people. 

So, what’s going on?

We are faced with a conflict. A case of industry vs. people in times when trust in news and institutions of media is fragile, and we live in misleading times. On one side private or state-owned investors – people with money, and on the other local communities, people that have to live with these investments whose livelihood depends on those very environments and lands. A conflict with a disproportionate power between these two actors. On one side we have an industry with money, with resources to buy propaganda, own media and lawyers, and on the other side, people, journalists and NGOs, actors that don’t have these resources.

Science on its own is not enough. Even if 99% of scientists agree, they are not successful in carrying on the message. Consequently, scientists are not willing to talk to journalists, because it creates conflict for them personally because of the history of mistrust in science. Scientists, even in the way they talk, try to protect themselves, from their own science community, and that makes their message incomprehensible and unrelatable to the real people. And that creates mistrust. 

Similarly, the intellectual, political and media thought in Slovenia is completely centralised and highly intellectual. The intellectual, political and journalist discourse is too high to reach the people in the periphery. We are again in a power struggle, this time between the elite and the periphery.

And social media thrives on these divides. It is the biggest disinformation platform conglomerate, an ad company, so what we are consuming.Their role is not “the truth”, but content that will sell you things. To be able to produce high quality media, investigative and factual news, you need to build and develop trust from local communities whose stories you are trying to tell. Disinformation is successful when it takes a part that’s truthful and turns it into something else, and investigative journalists have to take that doubt, that little piece of truth, even if it’s only people’s experience, and turn it into fact, to report factual truth.

The way we tell our stories is important because people thrive on stories. Today, disinformation is not only about false claims. It might have started as climate denial, but climate denialism has evolved into a different frame and it creates another divide. It transforms the climate question into one for the elites, an EU enforced elitist idea, even calling solar power a scam, that is being pushed to the regular people. 

The production of news is fast, and so is the production of disinformation. On all fronts, the goal is to inform people on what is going on, to build trust, to create alliances and shed light on facts and people, so next time, maybe, it won’t take 40 years to be heard.

#EUfunded #PROTEUS #EUValues

Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.