BOOK OF THE DAY: Reporting Live from the End of the World By David Shukman Profile Books, 307pp, £12.99 MANY OF us will remember when environmental awareness mostly meant easy-to-remember slogans and cartoon recycling representatives, visible campaigns highlighting issues that were happening in the now, like saving the whales and rainforests.
And then it changed – really fast – and the environment became a massive issue; it was an existential threat that wasn’t a bomb, but rather our habits and lifestyles, threatening to drown us or incinerate us or suffocate us – depending on which computer model you liked best.
All that happened shortly after BBC News correspondent David Shukman traded in the bullet- proof vests of frontline news reporting for the parkas of the science and environment beat.
Following Shukman on assignment to the latest environmental stories, issues and outrages, we meet the scientists on the frontlines of climate research.
His adventures include getting stuck on a glacier (several times), being rained on by insects, catching a man illegally logging to pay off his previous illegal logging fines, and filming a heartbreaking botched harpoon job on a whale in Norway.
Shukman peppers the book with human interest pieces, which allow him to depict climate change where it’s actually happening. The first-person present-tense narration renders the book as current and relevant as the issue remains and, with Shukman adopting a visual and episodic style, the result is quite compelling.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable account of Shukman’s globetrotting as he chases news that is rarely good. Fast and entertaining, the sober and panic-free tone is a refreshing remedy to both the political mud-slinging and some of the more catastrophic predictions out there.
Shukman does what a science correspondent ought to: he gets us to understand what the issues are, making them interesting without being too reductive.
As he watches the increasing public vitriol climate change generates – and here is where he stands out among some of his peers – Shukman determinedly refuses to politicise the issue, which nicely dispenses with the habit of certain media to address solely the argument, not the issue itself.
Shukman is genuinely impressed by the diligence and sheer toughness of the researchers he meets, praising their “search for hard numbers not abstract slogans” – and he goes to some lengths to try to demonstrate a rational, agenda- less approach and to defend science’s credible authority.
Although he can at times be overly dismissive of environmental campaigns, Shukman rightly asks if the more shrill declarations and antics of some activists don’t harm the issue by casting the science into question. Dressing up as a polar bear and shouting at men in suits rarely gets any results.
Equally, he might have pointed out that much of the sceptics – fixated on ideas of grant-hungry and corrupt scientists – and some of their unquestioning supporters in the media base their arguments on conspiracy theories masquerading as evidence-based dissent.
Daniel Bolger is a book editor and freelance journalist