A staple of dystopian science fictions is an inner sanctum of privilege and an outer world – chemical desert/airless waste/District 12 – peopled by the desperate poor. The insiders, living off the exploited labour of the outlands, are indifferent to the horrors beyond their walls. Well, here we are.
Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.
After all, why should they care? Though temperatures hit a Florida record on the day DeSantis excised references to climate breakdown from state law, he had no fear of the consequences, as the inner sanctum is always air-conditioned. Air conditioning is the only answer such politicians have to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. That the homes and offices through which they glide and the food they eat are built and grown and harvested by people working in the outlands, who face escalating temperatures, is no concern of theirs: however many die, there will always be more.
What those dystopian stories reflect is the core-periphery model of colonialism. The core extracts wealth from the periphery, often with horrendous cruelty, while the insiders turn their eyes from the human and environmental costs. The periphery becomes a sacrifice zone. As environmental breakdown accelerates, the planet itself is treated as periphery. Those in the core shrink to their air-conditioned offices.
Extreme heat events are killing people in their thousands, but we hear remarkably little about them in the wider media. Why? Because almost all the victims are underprivileged. In Africa, heat deaths go almost entirely undocumented. Only very rarely do more prosperous people, like the series of tourists who died or went missing during the early summer heatwave in Greece, become victims of these events. It happens to other people, not us.
At the Guardian, we seek to break out of the core and the mindset it cultivates. Guardian journalists tell the stories the rest of the media scarcely touch: stories from the periphery, of the outlanders exposed to the impacts of the insider economy, such as David Azevedo, who died as a result of working on a construction site during an extreme heatwave in France. Or the people living in forgotten, “redlined” parts of US cities that, without the trees and green spaces of more prosperous suburbs, suffer worst from the urban heat island effect. Or the prisoners left to cook in sweltering facilities.
Among the duties of journalism is to break down the perceptual walls between core and periphery, inside and outside, to confront power with its impacts, however remote they may seem. This is what we strive to do.
Exposing the threat of the climate emergency – and the greed of those who enable it – is central to the Guardian’s mission. But this is a collective effort – and we need your help. If you can afford to support the Guardian’s reporting, it will help us to share the truth about the influence of the fossil fuel giants and those that do their bidding.
