[NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Emily Coren and Jenny Dusheck have science communication degrees, with Emily's in science illustration and Jenny's in science writing.]
Telling Better Climate Stories
by Emily Coren and Jenny Dusheck
The right story for the job
Someday, when historians recall how humans overcame climate
change to build a livable new world, writers might shine as some of
the biggest heroes.
Surprisingly, some of the best tools we have to solve the climate
problem are stories. Solutions like energy conservation and shutting
off the flow of fossil fuels are critical, of course. But stories can help
us envision a brighter future and then empower us to build it.
Unfortunately, we’re not telling those stories as well as we could.
Storytelling about climate change leans hard toward the apocalyptic,
with slim hope of rescue. In the 2004 film ''The Day After Tomorrow,''
for example, a massive storm floods and then freezes New York City,
stranding a teenage boy and his friends in the New York Public
Library.
His desperate dad (a climate scientist) struggles across a
frozen New Jersey icescape to rescue them.
Dad beats the odds and miraculously saves his son, but he’s
powerless to save the rest of the United States and Canada, now
covered by a massive ice sheet. The main characters survive, but
millions of others perish.
In our hearts, we all know dad, or some other rescuer, isn’t likely
to save us. Yet, many of us hope that government will ultimately force
change or that a miracle technology will appear, like a magician’s
dove fluttering from a hat. And that’s partly because of the kinds of
stories we consume.
Stories of apocalypse may wow us, but they neither bolster our
courage nor inspire us to engineer our own rescue.
Instead, they can leave us with a sense of misplaced impotence. But if we change the
stories we tell, we can change the way our own real-life story unfolds.
And that’s where the makers of games, films, television, and other
fiction come in.
This month, for example, Firaxis Games released a climate change
version of the game Civilization, called ''Gathering Storm,'' that tells
players, “Our survival necessitates new solutions to old problems.”
Flooding, sea level rise, and carbon emissions are all part of game
play. As Mary Beth Griggs reported in The Verge:
''Randomized future technologies let players develop advanced batteries,
or AI, or other ways to cope with a rapidly changing world. There are
diplomatic paths to action, infrastructure projects that can protect cities,
as well as incentives for conservation. It’s a low-stakes place to wrap your
head around climate change without some of the existential dread that
hovers on the outskirts of any modern discussion of the environment.''
''Gathering Storm'' is one of several climate change related games.
But entertainment that helps us cope with global change needn’t be
explicitly about climate change or energy. In the board game
Pandemic, players collaborate to prevent outbreaks of diseases
threatening the world. The game play is all about cooperation,
exchanging information and planning ahead, even in the face of
serious peril.
Everyone wins or everyone loses. In real life, we need
the same mindset and skills to tackle sea level rise, heat waves,
superstorms, and, of course, real pandemics.
Entertainment can also model civic engagement.
Imagine an episode of virtually any television show in which the right to vote is a
subplot. Maybe one character is registered to vote but is upset when
he learns he can’t vote without a driver’s license. Another character
shows him that that’s not true and the two go to the polls together.
Entertainment can casually address real barriers to voting and other
forms of civic engagement. And engaged voters are an essential
component of tackling climate change.
We can change our stories from disempowering stories that tell
us,“Disasters are scary and inevitable and only a hero can save us”
to empowering ones that show us, “We can solve problems and here
are skills and actions that will help us do that.”
Don’t get us wrong; we know that real apocalypse remains a
possibility.
But that’s no reason to sit passively, hoping it won’t
happen. Both individually and collectively, we already have a hundred
things we could be doing to slow climate change and prepare to adapt
to it. What many of us lack is the confidence, fortitude and
commitment to start, and the humor and hope that could keep us
working.
Social psychology can guide us toward success.
Research shows that we succeed best when we combine a realistic evaluation of tough
odds; an optimism that we can beat those odds; and, finally, dogged
perseverance. To promote that perseverance, psychologists
recommend setting goals in stages, with separate long-term and short-
term goals and periodic reevaluation.
Beyond stories that bolster our sense of community and the
confidence that we can succeed, we also need to articulate what we
want our future to look like.
Whether we put individual climate solutions into effect this weekend or in 50 years, we need stories that help us envision a future that’s fun to imagine and satisfying to build.
Stories make culture. And stories that offer enticing futures, as
well as those that uplift and make us laugh, can guide us to survive
and flourish in the next century and beyond.
=======================================
FOR A LIST OF ACADEMIC CITATIONS, REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES in this article, please contact the two authors via this blogsite using this email address for forwarding to them:
danbloom@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment