When a wildfire swept across Fermanagh, the story that caught our attention was not the hectares of land burned, the conditions that allowed the fire to spread or the wider ecological consequences. It was the rescue of a handful of tiny Curlew chicks caught in its path.
Of course it was. There is something almost irresistible about the image: vulnerable chicks, a wall of fire, people scrambling to save them. It has all the ingredients of a good news story; jeopardy, emotion, a local connection and, crucially, a beginning, a middle and an end.
Climate change is much harder to photograph.
The environmental writer Rob Nixon calls this “slow violence”: harm that is dispersed across time and space, gradual rather than spectacular, and often invisible until its consequences become impossible to ignore. It does not arrive with sirens. It accumulates.
A warmer night here. A drier summer there. Rain falling harder when it does come. Soils losing moisture. Habitats becoming less resilient. Species declining. Each change, taken alone, can seem unremarkable. Together they are altering the conditions on which people and ecosystems depend.
But these are difficult things for a fast-moving news culture to tell. News needs novelty. It needs to capture a moment. It needs something to point a phone at.
So when wildfires rage across Europe, the climate story often becomes the local family fleeing a holiday campsite in the middle of the night. If they strike local-paper gold, there will be an audio clip: a pic of a small family silhouetted against a distant wall of flames, a next day shot of an abandoned beach with buckets and spades and beach towels abandoned.
It is a compelling story. But it is only the visible edge of the story.