Climate Crisis Cartoon Roundup 1
There's Nothing Funny about Climate Change. That hasn't stopped cartoonists. | ISSUE 21, July 22, 2019
The end of the world as we know it is not funny. That’s why most climate change cartoonery leans toward mordant, gallows humor. Or outright editorializing.
But if a picture is worth a thousand words, a cartoon may be worth more nowadays. What better way to nab the attention of a species that spends hours each day of its life mesmerized by glowing screens as the planet boils?
Since launching Changing Climate Times in November 2018, I’ve promised a cartoon each issue. Not always easy! Finding a good one, I mean. After 20 issues, it’s time for a roundup of my favorites. Got others? Send to the links below. And please fan-follow the cartoonists. CTC is (so far) a non-income producing public service. But these hard-working cartoonists need more than love. PS: CTC could use love, too. Let me know if you are out there.
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ONE | Voted Off the Island
Let me say this and get it out of the way: Dan Piraro (Bizzaro.com) is brilliant. This may be my favorite climate cartoon of all. (So far.) Witty, but deeply, deeply —literally, deeply—true.
After the funniness wears off, I recall my October 2017 interview with Susie Crate, a globe-trotting anthropologist. Crate, her daughter Katie, and a documentary crew rounded the world for five years to produce the documentary “The Anthropologist” (2015). They visited indigenous communities threatened by climate change, including the island republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean:
“At one point in the documentary, we were actually standing out chest deep in the water. A local woman is talking about how where we were standing used to be the main meeting house of the biggest village on the island,” Crate says. READ ON.
Rising sea levels may sound like an abstract concept from the future — unless they’ve taken out where your village center used to be.
TWO | (Snow)Man Up
If you’ve followed the newsletter from the start, you’ve seen many cartoons. Not this one by Dave Coverly (speedbump.com) since I just discovered it on Twitter today. It’s that rare climate cartoon (like Dan Piraro’s above) that’s funny on its own. Then, you may start musing on its implications.
Or maybe the implications weasel their way into one of those oddly named brain parts (the basal ganglia? Help me out, neurology nerds). Especially, if you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people hiding out—or trying to—from the brutal heat wave cooking several hemispheres of the world as I type these words.
THREE | Snow Job
I define ‘climate cartoon’ broadly: Funny, but true, cartoons or images that cause a second-take. This image is just amusing. Then, I recall the suspiciously lousy snowfalls we’ve had for years now. And remember what it was like as an 8-year-old, zipped into a puffy snowsuit like a mini-Michelan Man. With frozen snot on my icy scarf, we’d build a snowfort from the monster snowfalls that used to bury the family Buick in New Jersey in the early 1960s. Then, crawl inside to prepare for the snowball fight to come.
Let’s save that world—of snowforts and snowpeople.
FOUR | ‘You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which the Way the Wind Blows’
Here’s an uplifting weather report by Matt Wuerker, staff cartoonist and illustrator for POLITICO. The climate report is not so good everywhere, as this June 2019 Bloomberg News article notes. Climate change “is creeping higher in surveys of voter concerns,” the report notes. In some countries it’s at or near the top. But it’s not regarded with the same urgency the world over:
“In many countries, climate and the environment has become a political battlefield on which elections are increasingly being fought. European Union elections in May saw an unexpected surge in support for green parties.
Yet Australia’s ballot the same month saw the pro-environment, coal industry-skeptic Labor Party lose rural votes—and the election—even as it picked up support in major cities. Canada’s fall vote is shaping up to be dominated by carbon taxes levied on fossil fuels. | READ ON
FIVE | ‘That All You Got?!’
Enough said. Another all-time fave, by cartoonist Joel Pett (gocomics/joelpett).
SIX | Save the Penguins
Not sure who the cartoonist is (’Gregory,’ call home!). But there are few sweet climate cartoons. This one is. Until the bittersweet aftertaste kicks in. Then, the acid reflux … And so, I doff my shiny, happy people shades. And don my serious-as-a-heart-attack, climate crisis newsletter-editor fedora.
Because, penguins, for one.
You likely know all about saving polar bears, long the poster species of climate change. But penguins need lobbyists, too. Try looking a bunch of penguins in the eye from this National Geographic report. And tell me ‘Save the Penguins’ is not a goal worth waddling together a coalition. And maybe a Million Penguin March.
I joke—rather acidly, but not really. Anchor species like penguins are just colder canaries in a pretty big coal mine. Antarctica sprawls 5.5 million square miles and is the world’s fifth biggest continent, bigger by far than Europe and Australia. As the Geographic story notes:
Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) have survived in Antarctica for nearly 45,000 years, adapting to glacial expansions and sea ice fluctuations driven by millennia of climatic changes. The penguins remained resilient through these changes, but new research from the University of Delaware suggests that unique 21st-century climates may pose an existential threat to many of the colonies on the Antarctic continent. | READ ON
Antarctica is Earth’s least humanly populated continent. It has 0.00008 people per square kilometre—mostly several thousand frosty scientists. So, you know, if we’re screwing up remote, people-free, ancient penguin-lands, we have some explaining to do to Mother Nature—who likes her some penguins, given how long they’ve been around.
PS | Meet Brenda, the Civil Disobedience Penguin
I would remiss if —while pontificating on penguins—I did not mention “Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin,” by the seriously pissed-off Australian cartoonist First Dog on the Moon. That’s her, above. Brenda is not a particularly funny penguin. Nor is she meant to ‘meet cute,’ as penguins usually are portrayed.
Brenda is a truth-telling, editorializing penguin. She says stuff you’ll likely not wish to hear. Like, how we humans have screwed the pooch, the penguins and the world. And these may be the end-times, ruled over by men stuffing wads of money into their underpants as Earth burns down. Yet I think Brenda and First Dog on the Moon still loves you and me. Why else would Brenda engage in civil penguin disobedience?
SEVEN | The Tail End of Things
Bulls-eye work by Jon Kudelka. He’s an award-winning cartoonist for The Australian and The Hobart Mercury. See more of his craft at kudelka.com.au.
EIGHT | Cashing in and Cashing Out
If you’ve been a magazine-reading adult for any length of time, you’ve encountered Bob Mankoff’s superb work and recognizable style. A legendary cartoonist, he served 20 years as cartoon editor at The NewYorker. He is now Esquire magazine’s Cartoon and Humor Editor (there’s a cool career goal).
Mankoff has remarked that “Being funny is being awake.” This cartoon illustrates those words. Come to think of it, ‘Be Awake!’ would be a good motto for climate change communicators, activists and average folks like you and me, just waking up to the breadth, depth and scope of the climate crisis.
That’s a different, unprecedented opportunity than the one that excites the guys in suits, stuffing scads of money in their underpants.
NINE | Numb Skulls
I first saw this cartoon tweeted out by climate/water scientist Peter Gleick, with the comment: “How every climate scientist on Twitter feels.”
The cartoon is the work of James Lachlan MacLeod, a historian and cartoonist in Evansville, Indiana. See more of his work at Facebook.com/macleodcartoons and on Twitter at twitter.com/MacLtoons
PS | Elephantiasis
I’ve deliberately avoided cartoons featuring the Occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, District of Columbia, USA. Just too much of a cartoon already (check out CCT Issue 19 for a good one, though). But elephants? Yes. Climate change has been the elephant in the room for a looooooooong time. More and more people are noticing.
Wait! There’s …. a, um, elephant. A really BIG elephant.
In …
The …
Room.
Help point out the elephant in your house, town, suburb, village, community, state and country. It’s right there.
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BE WELL. Change the world. Not the big one. The one in which you live. And love. | Changing Climate Times Concierge and Curator Douglas John Imbrogno
TEAM|WORK: Thanks to David Imbrogno for key editing feedback.