This column by Simon Gear first appeared on the Don’t Be a Passenger blog (www.dontbeapassenger.com) in May of 2010

Until District 9, every UFO movie worth its salt had the aliens landing in the US.  I personally think that this is an entirely accurate reflection of our interaction with extra terrestrial civilisations.  Across the world, really, really big things can happen, but if a CNN camera crew isn’t there, we only learn about them weeks, months, maybe even decades later.  Take Iceland.  The island is made of volcanoes.  They are spewing out of the chilly rock year in and year out.  But no one would have ever mentioned Eyjafjallajökull in polite company had the jetstream not blown the ash over Heathrow, and so onto Sky News.

This goes on all the time.  A meteor flattens huge swathes of Siberian forest.  A doomsday cult appears to detonate a nuclear device in the Australian outback.  A million Rwandans massacre each other.  Transplant any of these events into Europe or the US and they would all have the ‘before and after’ social power of 9/11.  But they don’t because they happened “over there” and more crucially, to “other people”.  Nothing really wrong with that.  As a species we are genetically programmed to pay close attention to our own tribe and less to those foreign to us.  It’s just how we are wired.  I’ll be more appalled by my neighbour breaking his arm than by 50 Waziristani school children being classed as ‘collateral damage’. 

This effect makes environmental stories particularly difficult to tell.  Take climate change.  Generally, the cause has been the first world’s energy hungry habits while the people most affected have been the poorest of the poor.  And the affect has been astonishing.  The World Health Organisation asked a research question in 2007: “If the world was half a degree cooler than it is, how many fewer deaths would there have been from environmentally related causes?”  The answer they came up with was about 50 000 a year.  A thousand people a week dying from climate change.  Kofi Anan recently put the number as closer to a thousand a day.  Obviously this stat has inherent problems.  It’s nigh impossible to prove empirically because it relies on too many ‘what ifs’.  And no one is ever going to do an Oprah special on it because almost all those deaths are to sub-Saharan Africans.  But even if those numbers are overstated by a factor of ten or more, it is still an awful lot of people.

Easier to count are barrels of oil.  BP’s Deepwater Horizon has spilled about 11 million litres of oil at last count.  The media world is going ape.  Barack Obama has given sound bites on the Louisiana coast, we’ve had underwater footage of the leak and I for one have thoroughly enjoyed watching senior BP execs being slow roasted on television.  This reaction is completely in keeping with the scale of the destruction that this spill will cause.  But it’s worth remembering that by far the greatest proportion of American oil comes from countries far away from the TV glare.  Countries with either no environmental law or law makers who are easily bought and sold.  Chad and Angola come immediately to mind.  But first place has to go to the Niger delta.  Nigeria’s own Department of Petroleum Resources (vastly under-)estimates the average annual oil spilled in the Delta at around 40 million litres . Four times the Deepwater Horizon spill or an Exxon Valdez every single year.  Gosh.