🌱Fieldnotes in Environmental Writing & Communication
Environmental storytelling + Robin Wall Kimmerer on the 'serviceberry' + Barry Lopez on 'stories that help' + environmental framing + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental writing & communication. If you’re new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
📚 What I’m reading
Orion & The New Yorker on Environmental Storytelling: An Interview with David Remnick and Henry Finder. Here’s an interesting excerpt:
Remnick: Storytelling is essential. You have to reach people in a way that gets into the mind and into the heart as only storytelling can. So, the demands are incredibly high. What’s not going to flip the switch, probably, is a barrage of op-eds with words like should and must and hence and therefore.
Finder: Then, there’s always difficulties with science writing. How do you establish a kind of rhythm of exposition and scene that’s compelling? One way of doing it journalistically, and Elizabeth Kolbert has discussed this, is you have somebody in a scene talking about these things: “Here we are, walking on a glacier in Greenland, and we’re having a conversation about albedo, about ice, about the complexities of thermal absorption, and so on.” These are part of the storytellers’ armamentarium, and all of these things have to be used in inventive ways in order to get a piece that people will actually start and finish and ideally be a little bit changed by. It has to be an experience not simply of illumination but also of something effective, something emotional where we experience a sense of the costs and the perils.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Some interesting podcasts I listened to this week:
An interview with Dr. BJ Fogg, founder and director of Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. He also runs a free training course for climate communication professionals called Behavior Design for Climate Action. He also wrote the book Tiny Habits.
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer and narrated by her. Here’s an excerpt:
“Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil. Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle, genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren. Regenerative economies which cherish and reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.”
On a side note, I recommend complimenting Kimmerer’s essay with this fascinating piece by environmental philosopher Val Plumwood: Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling.
👀 What I’m watching
An interview with Barry Lopez on storytelling. I saw Lopez speak in 2017 when he came to the University of Hawai‘i where I was a grad student. He spoke about his most well-known book Arctic Dreams, and its connections to a documentary film that was being screened at the university at the time called Standing on Sacred Ground, a four-part documentary series about Indigenous activism around the world, including Hawai‘i.
I recently found out that Barry Lopez is unfortunately struggling with some severe health issues right now, so I’ve been taking the past week to read some of his work, much of it available on his website. If you're a fan of his work, you can also send him a message here:
🔍 Eco-Communication Tool I’m exploring
Some advice on framing for more effective storytelling. From the FrameWorks Institute. The FrameWorks Institute also offers some helpful toolkits for journalists and writers on their website too. Here is their four-point plan to consider the role of effective framing in your environmental storytelling:
“As you think about the story you want to tell, consider:
— Values: What are the principles or ideals we should uphold as a society?
— Explanation: What is preventing us from living up to those principles?
— Vision: What does an aspirational future look like?
— Action: How are we going to get there?For a more in-depth perspective on framing informed by research in ecolinguistics, I highly recommend checking out this unit on framing (or all of the units!) from this excellent online course in ecolinguistics. The free course is developed by Arran Stibbe, Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
This is an excerpt from the 2017 interview I mentioned above with Barry Lopez on ‘telling stories that help’:
“So, if you’re going to tell a story, and you want it to be an authentic story, it seems to me it’s got to do two things: First of all, it’s got to help, the story has to help. And the second thing is, it’s got to be about us [not just about me].
The listener or the reader does not want to be in the position of being lectured to or being treated as somebody who’s not capable of knowing, or treated like an outsider, and that’s a very valuable lesson for me as a writer…I want everything that I write to end with this note: Here’s what I saw, what do you think? Instead of saying “here’s what I saw, and here’s what you should believe. Despite my own failings, as a writer and as a human being, the driving thing behind, is if you’re going to tell a story, tell a story that helps…and to find common cause with people whose desire is to help — not to direct the show, or tell people what to think — but to help.”
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets and Writers, 22:2. March/April 1994.