What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters
When catastrophe becomes celebrity, we stop witnessing and start scrolling, turning suffering into spectacle. But we can break that cycle.
The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.
Another environmental catastrophe season brought destruction and death to North America this summer. Amid extreme heatwaves and weather, fires raged in northern and western Canada. In Manitoba alone more than 28,000 people, largely rural or Indigenous, were evacuated from their homes. At the same time, floods washed out Hill Country in Texas when the Guadalupe River rapidly overflowed its banks, killing at least 135 people. Similar events could go on indefinitely.
Chances are you’ve seen news reports about these disasters, or others like them, but this isn’t just the stuff of headlines. Fires and floods make news because they grab attention, unlike the daily realities of the economically depressed rural and Indigenous communities they often hit so hard.
This is the strange logic of catastrophe in the digital age: Some crises become “celebrity” catastrophes while others remain “commonplace,” meaning they’re normalized and invisible on an ongoing basis.
Who gets our attention — and who doesn’t — isn’t random. It reveals the value systems we’ve internalized and the limits of the stories we tell ourselves about suffering and survival, and in turn those that invite responsibility. The real currency of the 21st century is attention. And most people, if they’re going to pay attention, want something spectacular: an event worth watching.
When Tragedy Turns to Spectacle
Our engagement with this reality came from a course we taught at the University of British Columbia on the role of language in shaping environmental behaviors. What started as classroom conversations over a few years eventually evolved into our forthcoming book, Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future, as a way to continue this conversation in public.
In characterizing different discourses we’ve been exposed to (and been a part of), we noticed trends in global reporting of catastrophic events. That reporting tends to emphasize spectacular events over those that are just as detrimental, if not more, but occur over longer periods of time without affecting highly visible populations — particularly visible in terms of people who attract mainstream media notice.
Our aim is not so much to critique the ways certain types of media function, from traditional broadcasters to social news like TikTok, but to look at how meaning is made and conveyed as catastrophe stories.
The ways in which meanings are socially constructed shape what people believe, how they act and interact, and create possibilities to nurture more broadly relational understandings of our roles and responsibilities on and for Earth. They can also hinder or inhibit other possibilities. The systems of language and environment are intricately interconnected.
We find it useful to speak of catastrophe by using the term polycrisis — the overlaying of multiple crises where a breakdown in one system leads to cascading effects, causing reverberations through climatic, biological, social, economic, political, scientific, temporal (and so on) systems.
The problem with catastrophe in contemporary environmental discourse is that the original meaning, the gravity of this word in ancient Greek — katastrophē, or sudden end — is completely lost. Catastrophe now is characterized as being visually spectacular, rooted in the notion of spectacle, making it newsworthy. To put it crudely, tragedy comes with a photo op or not at all.
Yet catastrophe originally implied the point at which fate and destiny are sealed. All hope is lost. No Hollywood ending. Greek tragic theatre made the pain of such a loss accessible safely; it had the effect of making audiences appreciate their existence and work to prevent such events from happening.
Today we’re saturated with an unending stream of high-profile catastrophes. They’ve gone from occasional newsworthy stories to a regular feature. But the truth is environmental catastrophe discourse at present has very little in common with ancient Greek theatre. Catastrophe isn’t witnessed as a universal condition. It’s more like getting voted out of a reality TV competition, with winners and losers. It signifies a form of virtual entertainment. It’s a money genre in the economy of attention.
What Makes a Catastrophe ‘Go Viral’?
Celebrity catastrophes, as we’ve come to call them, are disasters that strike at the right time, in the right place, and often to the “right” people — like the Los Angeles wildfires, which literally affected celebrities, among others, or the floods in Spain. They tend to be sudden and extreme, making them photogenic and emotionally gripping. There’s often an implicit narrative arc involving villains, victims, and often a final resolution or judgment; celebrity catastrophes provide an overabundance of social platforms to spread the story.
But what about commonplace catastrophes? These are the slow, grinding emergencies — some might even say boring, meaning people won’t pay attention. In other words, they won’t pay for the attention. Such emergencies might include boil water advisories for rural communities off the grid that stretch into decades, the rising tide of the urban unhoused, lack of accessible healthcare for generations, or the multigenerational trauma of environmental injustice in poorer communities.
These quotidian catastrophes don’t trend on social media. They rarely get press briefings in broadcast media. They certainly don’t receive attention from political figures. And yet they shape the lives of millions every day.
Beyond being a digital communication problem, it’s also a societal pattern. As environmental educators, we see it in our classrooms often, where students feel despair over ecological collapse but struggle to connect that grief to local issues like energy poverty, food shortages, or environmental racism. It’s as though they understand tragedy, but catastrophe means its hopeless.
But if they give up hope, then there’s no motivation other than individualistic ones, a competitive endgame everyone winds up losing. Without hope for the next generation, another turn of civilization’s wheel. There’s nothing they can do but watch catastrophes happen, transfixed by impending fate. That’s what’s selling.
The problem isn’t apathy or lack of education. It’s attention. There’s simply too much on the celebrity catastrophes and not enough on the commonplace world they inhabit every day.
The Ecology of Attention
We often talk about ecosystems in scientific terms of carbon, water, species, and so forth. But attention is an ecosystem too. And like all ecosystems, it can be thrown out of balance.
In a healthy attention economy, we would recognize and respond to both sudden shocks and slow harms. We could hold space for grief, not just in the wake of a celebrity wildfire in Maui but in response to ongoing loss — such as land, language, or life — in communities displaced by extractive industries.
But right now our attention is hyper-curated. We’re all being filtered by algorithms in our social media feeds, Spotify playlists, or Google searches, among many other aspects of our daily lives, and this influences our political and societal conversations.
That warped attention is like water on drought-stricken ground, particularly in how it rushes off quickly, collects in rivers, and overflows. This means that some people must fight for a cup of visibility, while others are flooded with it.
It also creates dissonance. Why do we cry over burning vineyards in California but ignore scorched farmlands in Sudan? Why are floodwaters in Germany more moving than footage from Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season? Our attention has been hyper-curated to look for the extremes and pay (for) attention to the sensationalized events.
Disaster as Event
There’s a reason why celebrity catastrophes dominate headlines and grab our attention, whether we want it or not. They fit within a monetized logic that values spectacle and saviorism. Disasters become “events” with start and end dates, with heroes and villains, victims and saviors. They can be marked in time, which makes them easier to be marketed.
More specifically, they can be monetized, as author Naomi Klein and others have shown. They can sell headlines, influence policy agendas, or affect branded charity campaigns.
But commonplace catastrophes resist this framing. There’s no clear starting point to systemic racism or global warming and the cascading effect of “events” reverberates throughout the world. These slow emergencies demand long-term commitment, not quick PR campaigns. They’re part of larger complex of socioecological systems that are often uncontainable, like weather patterns or world hunger.
In contrast, becoming more ecologically focused requires that we understand crises as entangled and complex. The flood is not separate from the housing crisis. The wildfire is not separate from extractive economies. Witnessing through this lens challenges us to see the whole picture and act from that place.
We’re not suggesting we turn away from the immediate or the dramatic. But keeping up with the latest catastrophic event, and being affected by it, is not enough. It catches us in a loop of mental doomism or constant anxiety, especially when it becomes expected, like a performance — amplified one moment and forgotten the next.
The truth is that our attention reveals what we value and what we make time for. And right now, too many people live and die in the fallout of commonplace catastrophes.
But there are ways to make the commonplace more important.
Witnessing as a Radical Act
So how do we begin to rebalance our attention? Something that affects our responses to climate breakdown?
One way is through the practice of witnessing. Not just seeing, but being present with, and responding to, what we encounter. Witnessing insists that we don’t turn away from the slow, uncomfortable, or inconvenient. Witnessing brings with it an ongoing responsibility. To bear witness means a duty to speak to what one has witnessed, requiring a different kind of attention.
Calls for critical digital literacy are the typical way of addressing this social need to nurture a healthy information intake. But another way is to consider the language we use and how it gets used when we talk about the environment. What stories are being prioritized?
Not every catastrophe fits neatly into a sound-bite narrative or a one-liner headline enticing people to click. There’s no easy resolution to poisoned water in Grassy Narrows, how much roadkill happened last night, or positive spins on colonial displacement. But those stories matter, and they need our attention.
Language, the fuel of attention, is a powerful site of witnessing. It’s not just a medium of communication. Language is an adaptive, living system. Communication and dialogue are catalysts for ecological transformation.
Words evolve, meanings shift, and sometimes, even a single word can carry the weight of an entire worldview. Consider words like “nature” or “climate.” The latter has become a euphemism for a justice movement as much as a science, on the one hand, and a political weapon of division on the other.
When we witness deeply, we begin to understand that these so-called “commonplace” events aren’t background noise. And that insight can spark empathy, as well as awareness and action in more profound ways.
A Call to Witness
The choice isn’t simply between caring about celebrity catastrophes and caring about commonplace ones. It’s about learning to see how they’re connected and how the imbalance of attention itself causes harm. This is a polycrisis in which all the social, linguistic, and ecological systems we rely on are interconnected.
Stories must be told even when they’re revealing what Al Gore famously termed an “inconvenient truth” — through them, we begin to see how all facets of our daily lives are interconnected with the sustainability of the planet. And this gives ground to hopefulness, to the sense that what you do and say does matter in the bigger picture. It is the bigger picture, even if there are no film crews and helicopters there to broadcast it, no smart phones to capture and post it within seconds.
These actions and the language that promotes them form a periphery around the visible mainstream news. If we look at what’s just outside the camera frame or press release or keynote speech, we see a surrounding discourse, a complex ecosystem of discussion across languages and initiatives that are hidden from regular sight, the actual “movements” of environmentalism.
Let’s take an example not from a celebrity catastrophe but from a celebrity event: the COP30 climate summit.
Such events, where people tell stories from all over and come together to mobilize global effort toward planetary care, are invaluable for our hope for the future of the species. And yet, some profound ironies exist: To make this happen, we need to facilitate more harmful disruption of natural systems. We also need such events to have celebrity status in order to compete with attention. Ideally, they are exotic and photogenic.
COP30 took place this year in Belém, a history-laden freeport town tucked away in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. To make it easy for attention-grabbing, celebrity global leaders and digital communication to reach the city, government contractors plowed a 13-kilometer road called Avenida Liberdade through protected rainforest. This is land where people and plants and animals coexist and co-depend.
The devastation was all in aid of an environmental event that lasted for 11 days (Nov. 10-21). But those jungle-dwelling lives will be affected forever — a prime example of where celebrity meets commonplace.
When we’re called to witness the impact on local environments of the attention economy, we start to become aware of how the celebrity and the commonplace are interwoven. We are no longer just spectators of hopeless collapse.
As educators we’ve seen what happens when students begin to witness. Not just from a distance, but with proximity and purpose. They stop asking, “Why don’t people care?” and start asking, “What stories do we need to tell?” They begin to name the socioecological systems that make some lives visible and others disposable.
In a time of overlapping catastrophes, witnessing isn’t passive. It’s an act of awareness and engagement. And perhaps more importantly, it’s an act of hope, one that integrates the celebrity and commonplace catastrophe in an increasingly unstable world.
And sustained witnessing might just be the most radical act we have left.
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Previously in The Revelator
The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse?
The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.
