Last Friday, I attended “Voices from the Amazon: Our Stories, Our Solutions” – an event that brought together Indigenous creatives and activists to share their perspectives on media representation, environmental justice, and decolonisation. The conversations were powerful, challenging, and – for those of us working in UK-based, and more specifically English, media organisations and who care about the climate crisis – deeply instructive about the work we need to do.

As Environmental Editor Iniquilipi Chiari Lombardo from TV Indigena spoke about his experiences with foreign media visits to Panama, including the BBC, a familiar pattern emerged. He told us that when journalists visited to cover a village’s forced relocation due to climate change, they used only “15%-20” of what he said and “changed the story” to make it more sellable. The resulting coverage reinforced tired stereotypes about Indigenous people living “in the wild,” with one journalist expressing surprise that Indigenous advocates engage with modern technology. Filmmaker Sophia Brasil, who has worked with the BBC and other international media companies, described being told her documentaries weren’t “Amazonian enough” – that they didn’t match the exotic Amazon that commissioners wanted to sell to audiences.

This disconnect – between the complex realities of Indigenous communities and the simplified narratives that reach global audiences – reflects a deeper problem that we began to set out in our 2024 report on the social psychology of human values and Indigenous perspectives on social and environmental justice from conversations with participants by way of Yupik and Siberian Yupik and tribal member of Manley Hot Springs; of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation; of Inupiaq & Yup’ik; and of Te Ātiawa, Ngāruahine, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whakaue ki Airangi. The issue isn’t just poor journalistic practice; it’s a symptom of our collective failure to engage with the most pressing questions about our colonial legacy.

The question we’re not asking

At the event, Sophia Brasil described how indigenous knowledges were once considered ‘bullshit’ and that there have been many attempts to erase them, but that now that the Western world is, to some extent, beginning to be faced with the realities of climate destruction, these knowledges are being extracted (a continuation of a long history of extraction from indigenous peoples and territories). This echoes a critique we heard repeatedly in our conversations with indigenous researchers: that environmental activists of white European descent often ask Indigenous people, “What can you teach us that could help us avert ecological collapse?” while overlooking a more fundamental question.

As one of our participants suggested: What can white Europeans, learn about them/ourselves from our historical commitment to the genocide of Indigenous people, and how might such reflection inform an understanding of their/our own role in driving continued and intensifying crises?

This is the question that UK journalists – particularly those with white European heritage – have a responsibility to help their audiences engage with. Yet it’s precisely the question our media continues to avoid.

The media’s role in perpetuating denial

The activists at Friday’s event weren’t just critiquing poor representation; they were highlighting how media coverage actively perpetuates what our discussants called the “ongoing actions of genocide, displacement and erasure.” When the media reduces complex stories of climate displacement to simplified narratives about “traditional” people, it reinforces the same colonial mindset that treats Indigenous communities as objects of study rather than as humans and political actors with sophisticated analyses of the crises we all face. It also distorts the significant role that countries like England have played, and continue to play, in environmental destruction, and thus, the displacement and suffering of indigenous peoples.

As one participant in our conversations observed about a British Jamaican friend’s education in England: “They only ever talk to us about kings and queens: they didn’t tell us what England was doing. There was this complete removal of any responsibility.”

This “complete removal of responsibility” continues in how UK media covers environmental issues today. Climate change is often presented as a technical problem requiring technological solutions, while the colonial extractivism that created both the climate crisis and ongoing Indigenous displacement remains largely unexamined.

Beyond romantic reconnection

The event also highlighted another pattern we identified in our conversations: the tendency for people of white European descent to seek “romantic connection with nature” while denying their own ancestry. As Ecuadorian climate activist and Indigenous defender Leo Cerda spoke at the Voices from the Amazon event about the need to “indigenise people” and learn from Indigenous knowledge systems, there was an implicit warning about the difference between genuine learning and extractive appropriation.

One of our discussants captured this distinction perfectly: “In striving for a romantic connection with nature she denies her own ancestry, which is to deny herself… it is also to deny the relationship with the forest, which her ancestors likely helped to destroy. The forest is hurting – you can’t simply say you’re going to reconnect with it.”

This points to journalism’s crucial role in supporting what our discussants called “truth-telling” – helping audiences understand not just what Indigenous communities can teach us, but how our own cultural inheritance, and present, continues to shape the crises we face.

The spiritual battleground

Perhaps most significantly, the Amazonian Voices event reinforced the understanding expressed in our work with indigenous participants that these are fundamentally spiritual and cultural battles, not only material resource conflicts. As one activist put it to us, addressing environmental crises requires “having to dive deep to find the whale bone which is the root cause of the problem.”

For journalists in the UK, this means moving beyond coverage that treats environmental issues as discrete policy challenges. Instead, journalism must help audiences understand how “multiple forms of social and environmental injustice are intimately interconnected through shared origins in the drive to dominate”, a trend that emerged in our conversations with indigenous participants.

This might look like:

• Creating space for complex Indigenous voices rather than reducing them to simple environmental messaging or exotic otherness.
• Interrogating colonial continuities in everything from trade policies to climate finance, helping audiences understand how historical patterns of extraction continue today.
• Supporting audience reflection on how ‘English’ mainstream cultural values and assumptions might need to change, rather than simply asking what Indigenous people can teach “us.”
• Centering decolonisation as a practical necessity for environmental justice, not a theoretical framework.

This isn’t about abandoning ‘English’ heritage, in fact it’s the opposite – facing up to the complex, messy parts of it honestly – including its shadow side – so we can transform our relationship to the rest of the world.

As our discussants made clear, this isn’t just about historical justice. Understanding the roots of colonial domination is essential for addressing current environmental and social crises (including, but not limited to, the global impoverishment of peoples, inequality, genocide, white supremacy, etc). Until we’re willing to “dive deep to find the whale bone” of our own cultural patterns of domination, our responses to these crises will remain superficial.

The UK media has the power to support this deeper reflection – or to continue perpetuating the denial that keeps us all stuck.

Common Cause Foundation works to understand how values shape responses to social and environmental challenges. Our 2024 report “The social psychology of human values and Indigenous perspectives on social and environmental justice” explores these themes in depth and is available on our website here.