Welcome to Locally Sourced, a biweekly Covering Climate Now newsletter for journalists working to localize the climate story. Share this newsletter with colleagues and journalism students interested in localizing the climate story.
Story Spark: Disappearing Traditions and Heritage
Just as climate change puts our future at risk, it also threatens our connections to the past. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather, and worsening heat are disrupting deeply rooted cultural traditions in communities across the world. In addition, many culturally significant areas and the history they hold may be lost forever — with a recent global assessment finding that nearly 80% of UNESCO World Heritage sites are already burdened by climate stress.
Given how vast and diverse our cultural heritage and traditions are, we want to provide you with a few general coverage topics to help you explore the loss of heritage and traditions in your area and give meaning to climate data by anchoring it to human experience.
Many of the tips included in this issue come straight from CCNow’s free training program for journalists. Sign up before January 16 to join our winter cohort!
Food Traditions
National dishes prepared for the holidays, a taste that transports you back home, a specific plant used for religious ceremonies. Food is deeply intertwined with people’s sense of identity. As temperature and precipitation patterns shift along with dramatic changes in animal populations, centuries-old food traditions become more unpredictable. Examine how access to specific foods, iconic to a specific culture or nationality, is becoming more difficult due to availability, cost, or even climate-forced migration.
Stories We Like
High Country News highlights how growers of New Mexico’s iconic Hatch green chiles must now wrestle with challenges stemming from climate change.
For many Southeast Asian countries, fish sauce is more than just a condiment, it’s an essential piece of the region’s heritage and history. However, climate change and overfishing are making it harder for families to keep this tradition alive, NPR reports.
In Italy, a 300-year-old culinary tradition of fried soft-shell green crabs is under threat as climate change forces chefs, locals, and fishermen to rethink what to put on the plate, Smithsonian Magazine reports.
Reporting Tip
Don’t expect to hear the words “climate change.” People sometimes struggle to identify the changes they’re seeing firsthand in their fields and nets as a symptom of a larger, sprawling topic like climate change. Phrase your questions thoughtfully, especially if you believe interview subjects may bristle at the term “climate change.”
Indigenous Traditions
Already impacted by centuries of injustice, Indigenous cultures are especially vulnerable to climate change’s threats. Explore not only how traditions tied to places may be lost, but also language; it’s estimated a language dies roughly every 40 days. Seek out people who are keeping traditional knowledge and practices alive; often Indigenous techniques are climate solutions.
Stories We Like
Noema Magazine examines “What is left when the things you have words for begin to disappear?”
As winters warm in Northern Alaska, animals that rely on snow and sea ice dwindle, worrying Iñupiat communities for their livelihoods and cultural traditions, TIME reports.
As drought grips portions of Brazil, an ancestral tradition of pottery built from river clay is threatened — impacting the Waurá people’s culture and income, AgenciaBrazil reports.
Reporting Tip
Lived experience is expertise. When reporting on climate change’s impacts on communities with strong ties to the land, recognize the value of interviews with locals who have deeply rooted relationships to an area, and thus, experience. Don’t dismiss them in favor of “real” evidence.
Erasing History
In the wake of more frequent devastating hurricanes and rising sea levels, more at-risk coastal communities are being forced to leave their homes and histories behind. Terms like “managed retreat” don’t begin to capture the psychological and cultural toll that physical displacement from home can take on people. Erosion, worsening floods, wildfires, and other “unnatural disasters” threaten to destroy cultural heritage and archaeological sites, including Easter Island’s Moai statues, prehistoric shell mounds in Florida, and monuments in Iraq dating back thousands of years.
Stories We Like
The Post and Courier highlights how climate change is displacing the Gullah Geechee people, who have lived in the barrier islands of the Carolinas since their enslaved ancestors were brought from West Africa 400 years ago.
As sea levels rise in Florida, archaeological sites are at risk of being swept away by the waves, WUSF reports.
The Guardian explores the quest to find Black cemeteries in Louisiana before they’re lost to climate-fueled hurricanes and floods.
Reporting Tip
Talk to local historians. While some cultural sites are public and widely known, many historically significant locations are kept under wraps for research and safety purposes. Historical societies, research centers, and museums are great resources to find out what heritage sites in your area are under threat from rising tides, erosion, and flooding.
Before We Go…
The next Locally Sourced will highlight faith and religious responses to climate change. Have you reported on how churches have become more climate-friendly, or how pilgrimages must adapt to changing weather patterns? Send them to us at local[at]coveringclimatenow[dot]org. We’d love to consider them for the next edition of Locally Sourced and our media trainings and social platforms.
The Climate Newsroom is a free-of-cost training program from CCNow that equips local US journalists to cover climate news more effectively. For inquiries, please email Elena González at elena[at]coveringclimatenow[dot]org. Or apply here.
Want more story ideas? Check out the Locally Sourced archive for more topics to explore, including resilient agriculture, emergency alerts, climate anxiety, and more.
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