Tracey Brown
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Dec 2011
Tracey Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
On the 11th of March this year, the Tohoku earthquake caused a tsunami on Honshu in Japan, killing thousands of people.
We were told at first that the estimate of the dead was 1,000 and rapidly rose to 5,000, 7,000, 8,000 until we were looking at a figure of around 20,000 dead or missing.
And yet another number dominated the discussions in those days following the tsunami.
The Fukushima 50.
50 workers at the Fukushima plant trying to cool the reactors so that there wasn't the release of nuclear waste into the atmosphere and the surrounding area.
And this was something that dominated, I read the Independent, six pages of disaster, page after page after page, where we lost sight completely of the 20,000 who were dead or missing and the hundreds of thousands who had been displaced from their homes.
Why was it that the Fukushima 50 became the stuff of headlines, the stuff of the disaster, and yet the 20,000 became something that we couldn't really relate to?
Was it because there was a search for heroes?
I mean, there weren't actually 50 working in the plant.
I think it might also be our fear of nuclear power that came to dominate our way of looking at what had happened on Honshu.
As a result of that fear, Germany cancelled its nuclear programme, and according to a London investment bank, that's going to lead to 300 million tonnes more of CO2 between now and 2020.
Perhaps our fear of nuclear power was so strong that we forgot to look at the human cost that was actually unfolding right in front of our eyes.
Another explanation is also that we just can't relate to numbers like 20,000.
We're immune to them.
Evolutionary psychologists say that it's because we have actually been programmed not to relate emotionally to numbers on that scale.
And it is probably all of those things that came together in March 2011 to mean that our focus was on the Fukushima 50 and not on 20,000 deaths.
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