Cassandra Chapman, The University of Queensland

In late 2019 and early 2020, a series of devastating wildfires, known as the “black summer” bushfire disaster, left Australia reeling: More than 20% of the country’s forests burned.

As a scholar of the psychology of charitable giving, I have long been interested in the unique emotional response that disasters evoke – often generating an urgent and visceral wish to help.

I wanted to understand how and why people respond to a crisis of this magnitude. For the project, I teamed up with three Australian environmental psychology and collective action experts: Matthew Hornsey, Kelly Fielding and Robyn Gulliver.

We found that international media coverage of disasters can help increase donations. Our findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Disasters in 2022, are relevant to the situation in Los Angeles, where severe fires destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in January 2025, devastating many communities.

That recovery could take years.

5 key factors affect generosity

All told, Australian donors gave more than US$397 million, or $640 million in Australian dollars, to support the recovery from the black summer bushfire disaster. The international community also rallied: U.S. and U.K. donors contributed an additional US$2.6 million. These donations were used to fund evacuation centers, support groups for victims, and cash grants for repairs and rebuilding, among other things.

When we surveyed 949 Australians about what influenced their donations and analyzed news articles about the disaster, we found that coverage of disasters significantly increased generosity and influenced which charities drew donations. This may be because news articles communicated directly the need for charitable support.

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Using this survey data, we identified key factors that influenced how much money, if any, people donated in response to the bushfire disaster appeals. These five were linked with the amounts Australians donated:

• Scale: The sheer scale of the fires.

• Personal impact: Having been personally affected, knowing people who have been affected, or being worried that they will be affected in the future.

• Climate change beliefs: Believing that climate change is impacting the environment.

• News footage: The dramatic footage of the fires they have seen.

• Stories: The stories of those who have been affected.

Three of these factors – scale, news footage and stories – relate to information people were exposed to in media coverage of the disaster. Further, when we asked people how they chose which charities to support, they said that media coverage was more influential than either their friends and family or direct communication from those same charities.

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These findings collectively show how media coverage can powerfully influence both how much people give to disaster relief and which nonprofits they choose to support.

Setting the agenda

In the next phase of our research, we tried to learn how media coverage affects the public’s generosity.

We downloaded every news article we could find about the disaster over the three-month period that fires raged and analyzed the text of 30,239 news articles using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software.

We looked at which kinds of language and concepts were being used in media coverage, and how frequently they were used compared with their use in everyday written language.

In addition to concepts we expected to see, like emergency, heroes and human loss, we found that the concepts of support and money frequently showed up in coverage. Words like “donations,” “help” and “support” occurred in 74% of news articles. Words having to do with money were even more common: They appeared almost twice as often as they do in ordinary written language.

Our findings suggest that news coverage may have helped to set the agenda for the huge charitable response to Australia’s wildfire disaster because the media told people what they should be thinking about in terms of that disaster. In Australia’s case, it was how they could help.

A consideration for the media

We also believe that it’s likely that news coverage of disasters like this one can serve an agenda-setting function by teaching the public how to think about the crisis.

To the extent that news coverage highlights concepts like support, possibly communicating that donating is a normal response to a crisis, it’s reasonable to expect people to donate more money.

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Given that news coverage can influence how much someone donates, as well as which charities they choose to support, nonprofits responding to the Los Angeles fires may wish to encourage media outlets to mention their work in news coverage.

It is likely that being featured in news coverage – especially when calls to action or opportunities to donate are incorporated in an article – would result in more funds being raised for the charity’s response to the disaster.

Cassandra Chapman, Associate Professor, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Robert A. Kopack, University of South Carolina

If there is a leader in the aerospace industry, SpaceX is it. The company’s Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon spacecrafts are the current go-to vehicles to deliver astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.

NASA contracts awarded to SpaceX through 2030 alone are worth nearly US$5 billion and include research and development for the Artemis mission to return astronauts to the Moon.

Over the past decade, SpaceX has also emerged as a key vendor to the U.S. Department of Defense, seen most recently with a $733.5 million contract for projects such as launching defense satellite networks and contributing to other national security space objectives.

As a human geographer, I’m interested in how commercial space and defense companies affect the local communities where they conduct launches and tests.

For instance, I spent over two years in Kazakhstan researching the privatization of the Soviet space program and the beginning of a global commercial space industry.

Elon Musk and SpaceX’s influence

Politically, SpaceX is an enormous boon to the United States.

As a U.S.-based defense supplier and contractor, the company’s technology has helped to nearly end an almost two-decade dependency on the Russian Federation for access to the International Space Station. Its billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, has even expressed plans to colonize Mars.

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Musk’s decision to spend $250 million helping Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election is expected to lead to more support for SpaceX.

In the new administration, Musk is poised to lead a newly created advisory agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, which could lead to benefits for his business and widen his space ambitions.

Boca Chica, Texas, is home to SpaceX’s flagship assembly and test installation, Starbase. Since 2021, I have been conducting research with environmental groups and multigenerational community members of Latino and Indigenous descent in south Texas who see space exploration as a landscape-altering industry that affects their well-being.

After watching Starbase’s development proceed since 2014, locals there told me that there is much unseen and unsaid about what happens on the ground while an aerospace giant shoots for the stars.

Breaking eggs to make an omelet

Starbase is an industrial installation built by SpaceX to fabricate and test a number of the company’s rocket types.

The area around it is a unique and delicate ecosystem that includes estuaries and coastal grasslands, mud flats and more, where falcons, hawks, ravens, gulls and songbirds live.

Since construction began, SpaceX engineers have had to drain water-logged soils, level them and pour concrete to support ground tracking stations, assembly buildings, engine test stands, a nearly 500-foot (152-meter) launch tower and onsite fuel mixing and storage.

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In a lengthy response to local environmental groups’ claims of environmental abuses, the company maintains that it is dedicated to environmental stewardship.

But developing rockets is a dangerous and messy business. Sites chosen for this kind of work are often, though not always, remote and highly secured installations.

Fiery explosions on the ground or in the air aren’t unheard of over the past several years. Rocket tests in Scotland, China and Japan have all ended in accidents.

In April 2023, one of SpaceX’s prototype Starship rockets exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after liftoff.

This is not the only time that a rocket has exploded at places where SpaceX operates.

SpaceX runs a compact though growing operation at Boca Chica that has transformed the area. The hamlet was previously known as Kopernik Shores, and SpaceX purchased nearly all of the approximately 35 ranch homes in the area. Some residents have reported pressure to sell their property for suboptimal prices following rumors that the county would use eminent domain to seize their residences.

I spoke to Rebekah Hinojosa, a local activist and member of the Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, while researching in the area. To many locals, including Hinojosa, it seems like Musk is so well connected that SpaceX is insulated from public criticism.

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In a 2018 press conference, Musk said, “We’ve got a lot of land with no one around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool,” referring to a rocket he planned to test at Starbase.

Changes to the landscape

An installation the size of Starbase cannot avoid disturbing the wildlife in the four distinct state and federal wildlife protection areas that surround it.

If you walk through the protected areas you may see shrapnel, segments of rocket chassis and other random debris from any number of explosions – that is, if someone else hasn’t picked them up first.

In December 2022, I visited a luxury campground near Starbase. It displayed various fragments of rocket debris, which they called memorabilia to the new space age, throughout the site.

Within SpaceX, as well as NASA, the explosion of 2023 was celebrated as a crucial step in developing the Starship rocket. The event did produce valuable data on the rocket’s performance – it has done little to tarnish the company’s reputation.

There is tremendous support for SpaceX in Texas. The company has promised to drive high-tech industry jobs into a region ranked among the country’s poorest.

SpaceX has created about 2,100 jobs. However, reporting shows that local and state politicians have seen more personal gains in their real estate holdings and campaign budgets than the region’s economy has overall.

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A laboratory near the community

At the end of the day, to develop a rocket, you need a place to test your design.

“Our local beach is the laboratory,” local activist Hinojosa told me.

Resident coalitions of Indigenous, Latino and Chicano people as well as conservation groups are suing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Federal Aviation Administration and others to combat SpaceX.

These groups argue that SpaceX misled state and federal regulators about Starbase’s operations. They claim SpaceX changed how frequently it planned to launch tests and built new facilities for several rocket types, which rendered the company’s original environmental impact statement for the area inaccurate.

Some key issues these groups are fighting against include a bid to expand Starbase into more protected areas. Another point of contention is the deluge system, which creates thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater to cool launch pads and rocket engines after testing.

While the EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have notified SpaceX about violations of the Clean Water Act, claimants in a recent lawsuit contend that these agencies have not held the company accountable for breaking the law. The company has denied any wrongdoing and refutes claims of environmental harms.

“As we have built up capacity to launch and developed new sites across the country, we have always been committed to public safety and mitigating impacts to the environment,” a SpaceX statement reads. “The list of measures we take just for operations in Texas is over two hundred items long, including constant monitoring and sampling of the short and long-term health of local flora and fauna. The narrative that we operate free of, or in defiance of, environmental regulation is demonstrably false.”

So, what does the future hold? Many people from conservation agencies, activist groups and Indigenous communities in Texas want the company out. Given the high public support for space exploration in the U.S. and the burgeoning friendship between Musk and Trump, a SpaceX evacuation from the area seems unlikely.

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While it may take difficult negotiations that require concessions from each party, I hope that somewhere there is a middle ground on which space exploration and environmental protections can coexist.

This article was updated on Jan. 17, 2024 to reflect the amount of money Musk spent helping Trump win the 2024 election as $250 million and the correct speed of light.

Robert A. Kopack, Faculty Instructor of Human Geographies, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Rachel Gordan, University of Florida

Eighty years ago, the Jewish American novelist Laura Z. Hobson was contemplating her next writerly move and was seeking a little help from her friends.

“Gentleman’s Agreement,” the story she was drafting, felt like a bold idea. Maybe too bold. In her vision for the novel, reporter Phil Green is assigned to write an article about antisemitism. He pretends to be Jewish so he can experience bigotry firsthand. Readers follow the character as he encounters the prejudice of supposedly good people and learns how to respond to the slights and jabs casually meted out even by Americans who consider themselves liberal.

It was 1944, three years after the United States joined World War II. What prompted Americans to finally fight, however, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, not Nazi persecution of Jews and other marginalized groups. Antisemitism in the U.S. remained rampant throughout the early and mid-1940s.

With so many fraught feelings about Jews, and about the war in which American soldiers were risking their lives, Hobson was unsure how a novel about domestic antisemitism would be received. She might have wondered if readers would dismiss the story as a Jewish writer’s “special pleading” on behalf of her own.

Should she move forward with the novel that was bubbling up inside of her? To find her way out of her writing quandary, Hobson did something she had never done before and would never do again in her four decades of writing more than a dozen books: She consulted several friends and colleagues, mailing them her proposal for the novel and a cover letter explaining her quandary.

She did not know it at the time, but Hobson was about to write her most important book – one that would help broaden conversation about prejudice by reaching many more readers than would ever hear a rabbi’s sermon or read a committee’s report on antisemitism.

The right words

When the responses started to come in, it became clear that not all the feedback was of the helpful variety.

Lee Wright, Hobson’s editor at Simon & Schuster, seemed not to have fully grasped that writing fiction was a matter of placing oneself in the shoes of someone else. The editor advised Hobson that she was ill-suited to write from a gentile’s perspective because Hobson herself was Jewish. Further, Wright cautioned, Hobson should not attempt to write from a man’s perspective.

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Hobson’s publisher and friend, Richard Simon of Simon & Schuster, was also skeptical. He did not believe that novels were the way to fight antisemitism or bigotry. And then Simon did that worst thing an editor could do: He reminded Hobson that her last novel, “The Trespassers,” had been a commercial disappointment.

Hobson stewed over these replies, as evident from her autobiography and letters archived at Columbia University, which I found while researching my first book, “Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.” As Hobson later noted in her autobiography, her publisher’s less-than-enthusiastic reply sapped some of her confidence. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to continue with her writing.

It was one of Hobson’s closest female friends, Louise Carroll Whedon, whose letter offered just the right words of encouragement. Known as Carroll to her friends, she was married to TV writer John Whedon – and the family’s writing success would continue with their grandson Joss Whedon, of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Avengers” fame.

Familiar with the ups and downs of the writing life, as well as Hobson’s insecurities, Carroll replied with the enthusiasm that Hobson needed. “Let me say right away that I think the book ought to be written,” Whedon assured her, “and the sooner the better – not to highlight the plight of the Jew, but to examine the even more appalling plight of the non-Jew, and what the seeping poison of prejudice can mean to America.”

The Americans who really needed “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Whedon argued, weren’t the extreme antisemites, but the people hoping that “if you just pretend it isn’t there, maybe it will go away.” Otherwise, she warned, that willful ignorance and passivity could destroy the country – “at least the America that most people want to believe exists.”

Whedon did not deny the risks. But she wasn’t willing to watch her friend doubt her abilities – or her insights as a Jewish woman who had experienced antisemitism firsthand, and observed casual antisemitism from her non-Jewish friends. That Whedon was one of Hobson’s non-Jewish friends made her enthusiasm for a novel about antisemitism especially valuable to Hobson.

“It’s a controversial subject, Babe, and there’ll be arguments who should do it and when and how it should be done no matter what comes of it,” Whedon concluded. “For me, I think you’re in a singularly good spot to write it – in hot anger, sure – but in cold truth as well.”

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Whedon had brought Hobson back to herself. Now, it was time to write.

Instant success

In a few years, the book stuck in Hobson’s mind would become a sensation. First published as a series in Cosmopolitan magazine, “Gentleman’s Agreement” was then printed by Simon & Schuster in 1947. It became a bestseller and later an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

“Required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this parlous century” was how The New York Times described the novel. Because of Hobson’s readable style and romance, the novel received attention from a wide range of publications, from the Saturday Review of Literature to Seventeen magazine. From books like Hobson’s, Americans were learning “how we could be humane, as well as human, beings,” Times reviewer Charles Poore wrote in a December 1947 roundup of the year’s top books.

“Gentleman’s Agreement” was never perceived as “just” a Jewish novel – mostly because readers mistakenly assumed an author named Hobson was not Jewish. Even for critics, the book broadcast a new openness toward discussing antisemitism. It was a story full of teachable moments.

Hobson’s novel was part of a wave of 1940s fiction against antisemitism. Some of these novels were written by Jewish authors who were beginning to form the nucleus of postwar American literature, such as Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller. Others were by writers who made their mark during the 1940s, but whose names have faded over the decades, such as Gwethalyn Graham and Jo Sinclair. But Hobson’s was the most popular of its time.

If it weren’t for Whedon’s encouragement, though, “Gentleman’s Agreement” might never have been finished. If every friend of a writer said just the right thing – offering the needed encouragement or tough love – it would not feel like such profound treasure to spy a pearl of encouragement. But nobody gets all the encouragement they need, and writers are no exception.

Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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