Storytelling and Climate Change

Climate Storytelling

MICHELLE APPELROS

As Haraway writes: It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories (2016:35).

With this in mind I position myself with those claiming the more correct wording instead of climate change is climate crisis, or even emergencies, in plural that is.

If they only knew…

My academic journey engaging with storytelling emerged when I learned about the information deficit model, and how it subsequently also has been disproved.

The information deficit model explains what it phrases: that information is lacking, i.e., “-if they only knew, then they wouldn’t have…”. This locution is often turned to, especially regarding climate change, in order to explain why people for some illogical reason are not changing behavior although it apparently would be the most reasonable thing to do.

The acclaimed researcher Kari Mari Norgaard writes extensively on alternative explanations, such as socially organized denial and tools to avoid cultural trauma (2011;2013; 2017;2018). Partly Norwegian, she initiates her research on Denial in Norway.

Norgaard claims: people have the information, they know, they are aware of the crisis, so the question of why lands on how “People want to protect themselves a little bit”(pp 63-95). Norgaard links denial to privilege, away from information and instead towards emotions, political economy and social context (2011). As a sociologist, Norgaard looks into social structures, but she visualizes how this information materializes and is found in all layers of society; the individual, the family, the neighborhood as well as in the national identity.

What I learn from Norgaard is that we have patterns of rationalization in all different levels of our society and personal life that function to prevent change. She describes them as tools, sometimes as tools of innocence, because underneath lies reflections on privilege which are linked to racism, extractivism and other legacies of imperial colonialism.

Norgaard coined the term ‘double reality’,  -the process through which climate change is kept out of the sphere of everyday life (2011:123). Simply put; double reality refers to how to know and not know at the same time. The sensation of discomfort that this state creates is often referred to as ‘cognitive dissonance’ as opposed to harmony.

Cognitive dissonance (a term Norgaard but also many climate psychologists uses) is a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s, in which he reversed the relationship between information, or knowledge, and behavior. Festinger's research shows that when unpleasant tensions arise between what we know and how we act or behave, remarkably, we often don’t change our behavior, but instead our knowledge beliefs.

So where does this leave us regarding climate storytelling? And the questions of how we convey science?

Storytelling, fiction and perceptions on reality

Amitav Ghosh wrote in his The Great Derangement, (2016) that: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and thus of imagination” (p 9). Ghosh claims that  our ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ development of the novel has changed the way we tell stories from traditionally having the narrative driven by extraordinary events to in the modern novel being focused on small, ordinary, everyday life stories hiding the narrative. Our cultural change of ‘how’ stories are told has rendered us unable to respond to the very real but enormous and global crisis of climate change. The lack of this reality reflected in literature and culture will in the future lead to this era becoming labeled as the great derangement, hence the title of the book. Ghosh’s book discusses the importance of how we tell stories, mostly in fiction but also regarding the cultural change of how we ‘tell stories’ in western society and modernity are causing impacts beyond fiction (Ibid).

In 2018, Jem Bendell wrote the paper ‘Deep adaptation’ (revised in 2020) which stirred all sorts of reactions, one being kick starting the movement Extinction Rebellion but has since turned into a concept, an agenda and a movement in itself. Bendell, a sustainability management scholar became extremely discouraged and desperate when to him it was evident that  “inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change” was close and already unfolding, but that nothing around him seemed to deal with this properly. The paper was addressed to industry, academia and institutions/ governments and announced  “the end of the idea that we can either solve or cope with climate change”, and reviews why denial, especially among his professional peers, has left all debates without perspectives on climate induced societal collapse. He fronts arguments of realism and adaptation, that all of us need to face the truth and start preparing in order to be able to cope better with this forthcoming dystopian reality.

Vehicles of transformation?

Bendell has been criticized for fearmongering and being alarmist, but nevertheless he invokes questions of how we frame truth, science or reality and how that in turn affects how we respond. Something I myself have reflected upon studying climate science. Within the sector of society concerned with climate change, we have a long tradition of using predictions, forecasts, expectations, and probabilities, which is not fiction per say but definitely connecting to the hypothetical and therefore non-reality. (See for example ‘Limits to growth’ by Club of Rome 1972, World meteorological organization or IPCC reports from UN). For me these questions are not about being relativist (a-political) or denying climate science but rather about reflecting on how strategies of ‘now’ based on perceptions of the future deem framings and mindsets as fundamental in their either limited or expansive capacities.

Apparently, both despair and hope can be used as vehicles of transformation. Acclaimed utopian scholar Ruth Levitas claims that utopian visioning should be conceptualized as a method for facilitating social change. Both utopian and dystopia function as mentally contrasting current society which both can invoke the will to change. As with utopias and dystopias, storytelling is a focal point.

Storytelling contains notions of framings and narratives, and there can be important tension around storytelling in relation to reality and the climate crisis; climate science is mostly based in an empiricist ontology claiming an objective reality, i.e., reality is demarcated and can be measured. Simultaneously, many arguments for needing societal change in relation to climate change are based on interpretative ontology claiming a complex plural (non-measurable) reality. This isn’t always the case regarding marxist critique, but often when concerning feminist and decolonial based critique as they contain some degree of awareness of constructivism and subjectivity.

Storytelling is, therefore, not just about strategies but about worldview, ideology, and perhaps about just being human. Because we also base our interpretations of reality, or our ontology really, on the stories, framings, or narratives that we have access to or are told by our ‘settings’. The stories that we are emotionally and personally attached to, embedded and invested in are sometimes hard to change, which is why, apart from more diverse and different stories, we also need other things. To be able to shift the value system and transform our existence, we need to expand our openness, willingness, empathy and care. In order for us to reconnect, we need to practice deep listening and unlearning as well as relearning. We need gatherings and re-generativity. We need new spaces for the uncomfortable, frustrating and messy.

If the social context we are sitting in is structured in such a way that we, although we hold the crucial information that we need, are constantly inhibited, counteracted and prevented to change. Then we need strategies and frameworks of care to foster and forge new paths based on new values and other kinds of thoughts. Borrowing from the Degrowth movement, we need to ‘decolonize our imaginations’.

I will round up this essay by sharing two poetic quotes: firstly poet and climate activist Emily Johnston’s idea that “to feel hope—is optional. Our job is to be hope, and to make space for the chance of a different future”.

Secondly, a sentence from the Swedish protest singer Michael Wiehe: “The future is possible everyday, but someone needs to make sure it happens. When, if not now? Where if not here? Who, if not us?”

References

Bendell, J., 2020. Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy. Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Papers Volume 2. University of Cumbria, Ambleside, UK.

Ghosh, A., 2016. The great derangement : climate change and the unthinkable. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, J. D., 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press

Norgaard, K. M., 2011. Living in Denial. Climate change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. London: MIT Press.

Norgaard, K. M., 2012. Climate Denial and the Construction of Innocence: Reproducing Transnational Environmental Privilege in the Face of Climate Change. Race, Gender & Class , 2012, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (2012), pp. 80-103.

Norgaard, K. M., 2018. The sociological imagination in a time of climate change. Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 163, April 2018, pp 171-176.

Norgaard, K. M., 2019. Making sense of the spectrum of climate denial. Critical Policy Studies, 13:4, 437-441.