tv to blame for climate change Why are so many Australians having so much difficulty coming to terms with climate change? One academic from regional New South Wales thinks he might have the answer.

Dr Bruce Fell from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst has developed a compelling theory that the reason Western culture has difficulty accepting climate change is because we're disconnected from nature, we're not ecologically aware and what's caused us to disconnect from nature is the contemporary television screen.

"We see and understand what's happening … but we're having difficulty coming to terms with it"

Dr Fell argues that the content that appears on the TV screen contributes more to the perpetuation of climate change than does any number of motor vehicle exhaust pipes, industrial chimneys and unfiltered drains!

Difficulty coming to terms

"We see and understand what's happening… the literature on global ecological degradation is substantial, but the reasons Western societies and cultures are having difficulty coming to terms with the issue is less understood."

Dr Fell, who specialises in the study of all things visual communications out in Bathurst and has even directed and produced television at various stages in his career, says with all our modern TV, computer and mobile phone screen devices, we need to know more about how 'the screen' affects us. Because a screen is more than just something you look at… it gives you another worldview.

"The screen needs to be understood across the sweep of humanity for what it truly is," the Doctor says. "It's what cogitative archaeology calls the surrogate cortex. Any artefact that functions as a surrogate cortex is a screen. For humans, the screen is central to our personal and community well-being, and the dominant screen is television."

Dr Fell says the reality is that as one more TV ratings season of their favourite show ends and a new season starts, the ice caps keep melting, and the soil, wind and oceans continue their climate changing narrative.

A separate worldview

The TV gives us a separate worldview to the real, natural world we have to live in everyday. It stops us from seeing our world from an environmental perspective. "There is a link between the more-than-human world and the well-being of our species. That link, or lack of, has always been rendered on that most human of technologies, the screen, be it a Palaeolithic or contemporary screen."

For about 99.9 per cent of human history, Dr Fell says the screen has been an external influence, like a relative whose influence and persuasion was distant. "In the latter half of the twentieth century television became the screen by which most people got to know about nature, society and publicly important events and issues… it has become the 'third parent'."

Dr Fell argues that in the twenty-first century, as billions of people the world over regularly view television, the planet's ice caps, rainforests, soil and oceans continue to be depleted. The digital revolution, he says, has taken us further away from both community and ecological awareness, and climate change is a symptom of living in an environmentally unaware civilization.

"The tragedy is that the domestic TV screen has the potential to contribute more to the restoration of global environmental equilibrium than any amount of worthwhile placard waving, petitioning or emission trading schemes," he said. "On a planet with approximately 39,000 television stations, why aren't television networks programming for a sustainable Earth?"

When scientists told us cigarettes would kill us, the media screened that message and we believed it and many of us stopped smoking cigarettes as a result. Hopefully one day we'll believe what they say about human-induced global warming and cut back on doing that too.

To find out more about this former musician/rice farmer/market gardener's theories linking climate change to TV, check out his new book Television and Climate Change – The Season Finale.

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Written by Philippa swifft