Sometimes, made-up characters can get through to people more effectively than real-life scientists and educators.
Hiding behind a shelf of books, Dr. Seuss’ Lorax tells the cat from the animated movie “Flow” that he speaks for the trees. (Illustration by News Decoder)
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Tim Redfern feels like he’s hit a wall. He’s single, in his mid-50s and hates his job. He’s only slightly obsessed with birds — bluebottles, collared doves, hedge sparrows — and hopes the last three years he spent developing an environmental software will absolve his guilt for being complicit in the climate crisis.
After a disastrous pitch of the software to his company, Tim knows he’s had enough. He quits his job and comes face to face with a confronting question at a life-coaching session: when was the last time he felt joy? Tim could only think back to 30 years ago, when he got his hands dirty to help nature during his ecology module at university.
So, a new business begins: turning gardens into habitats for wildlife. What ensues then is the entertaining and chaotic plot of “Habitat Man”, Denise Baden’s fictional rom-com humanizing climate change.
“It’s a story about a guy who gives up his job to make people’s gardens wildlife friendly and he digs up a body and he falls in love and so on,” said Baden, a writer and professor of sustainable business at University of Southampton who’s been researching how the news, especially stories about climate change, affects human behavior.
Baden’s story has no alarming statistics. But it does point out things that many people may not know like how using a worming or flea treatment on your pet might affect the wildlife in your garden.
“A lot of people wrote in saying they changed their will to have a natural burial because they didn’t know that traditional burials have really toxic chemicals that pollute the entire area,” she said.
Getting beyond guilt
Climate change is a big topic. It’s complex but also endlessly talked about. Some people don’t believe it’s real, despite years of scientific evidence. It’s all very bleak and doesn’t inspire much action. And the news around it is alarmist, with facts and figures that are mostly irrelevant for the average person.
Deidre Pike is a professor of journalism and Mass Media at the California Polytechnic University Humboldt and describes herself as a hopeful environmentalist. She teaches courses on environmental journalism and is the author of the book “Envirotoons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television“.
“If you are 19 years old, you know the climate problem is real and you feel responsible and guilty,” Pike said. “But what to do?”
Businesses and institutions capitalize on this guilt. Pike said that their solution to your eco-guilt is for you to buy more stuff, especially those advertised on their platforms. In exchange they might plant a tree to combat global warming.
“’Why bother trying?’ is the way we soothe our consciences,” she said. “Our culture isn’t supporting the conversations we absolutely need to have to solve the problem.”
Today we celebrate World Storytelling Day, a global event to mark the importance of stories. Around the globe people are telling stories orally. This year’s theme is oceans.
News Decoder is all about the telling of people’s stories all across the globe so we thought we would help celebrate with a week of stories that about the importance of storytelling and the effect stories — and the silencing of stories — can have.
On Monday, we published a story by journalists Sajad Hameed and Qazi Shibli about the persecution by the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of journalists in South Asia. On Tuesday, we published a story by two student journalists about how politicians and political parties use social media to influence the news stories we see, read and hear. Yesterday, we republished a story by correspondent Jeremy Solomons about the importance of oral storytelling for teaching children about the world around them.
Today’s story, by correspondent Norma Hilton focuses on the power of storytelling to help people come to terms with climate change and find ways to help protect our planet.
Truth in fiction
That’s where fiction can come in. But most climate fiction presents gloomy scenarios: think the waterless world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series or our earth after a virus wiped out most of human life in Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy.
In contrast, Baden’s story showed more positive solutions. Her own research found that 98% of her readers changed their attitudes. A month after reading the story 60% of readers actually adopted a green alternative.
She’s set to release “Murder in the Climate Assembly“, a fictional story about the ramifications of a murder that takes place in a citizens’ assembly on climate.
Some media organizations are now including climate change awareness initiatives that use fictional examples into their marketing campaigns.
Baden worked with BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, to create social media content that provided solutions with a tinge of humour. For example, they contrasted the carbon footprint of two popular characters from books and movies: James Bond who drives a gas guzzling sports car and has a walk-in wardrobe versus Jack Reacher who traveled by bus and shopped second-hand.
Making environmentalism fun
Pilot testing showed interesting results: “If we just presented the negative one like James Bond, some people laughed and thought it was funny, but a few people thought they were being a bit preached at and switched off,” Baden said. “Whereas when you kind of had both together with a bit of humor, that seemed to hit the right spot.”
Pike agreed: “Comedy too allows us to let our guard down. When we open our mouth to laugh, our mind is open to learn.”
When Pike was in Chile working on the PhD that led to her book she found that she loved the animated series “The Simpsons“. In 2008, one of the three TV channels played Simpsons episodes endlessly, she said. Simpsons creator Matt Groening intended his show to make people aware of environmental challenges and complications in ways that start conversations, she said.
Context makes a difference too. “I read ecoactivist discourse in South America and it seemed so darn white and privileged,” Pike said. “If you read “Burning Rage of a Dying Planet” in a comfortable U.S. suburb, it’s one thing. If you read the same book in Chile, it feels different, almost too precious, definitely not the tone I would take in talking about ecology in South American countries.”
The Center for Health Communication at Harvard University says that showing, not telling induces stronger emotional responses as visual imagery and helps our brains understand abstract and complex associations like those between climate and health.
Connecting emotion to change
Telling stories through books, plays or social media also help to create emotion, and change beliefs and behaviours. They may also reduce feelings of anxiety and depression that surface when bombarded with alarmist news about the climate crisis. Focusing on solutions is more effective.
Pike said the way to get through the barrage of media messages and talk about the climate crisis is with honesty, independence and humour. “Acknowledge the hypocrisy and move on toward solutions,” Pike said. “A solution offers me a choice, agency, a chance to put up a sail and navigate to a goal.”
Pike taught a class called “Environmental Reporting for a Hopeful Planet” in the spring 2024 semester. One assignment was “Forest Friday”: students were asked to read, watch or listen to examples of environmental storytelling.
One week, the students were assigned a video of Rebecca Solnit. She’s a writer, historian and activist who has been examining hope and the unpredictability of change for more than two decades. In 2023 she co-edited an anthology called “It’s Not Too Late”, a guide for finding hope even while climate change-induced disasters continue. This is what one student said after they watched that video:
“I felt reassured by her calmness and her endless lists of knowledge of times and places in which meaningful change has occurred. I think she makes many great points about the way that just because ideas don’t always get the opportunity to fully take shape they are still impactful on society as a whole.”
So, what’s the best way to write about the climate crisis?
“Read environmental writing and write,” Pike said. “Be so deeply curious about how ecology works, how nature and culture interact, how businesses and institutions works and their role in the climate crisis.”
Ways to write effectively
Having a community of people who also write about and care about the environment can also help. But most importantly, Pike said: “Work to tell a story well.”
This means reading the publications which interest you and seeing if your story would be a good fit. Try different mediums. Take Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax”. It’s a children’s book written in 1971 about a character who speaks for the trees as a business tycoon destroys the environment. The story encourages activism and involvement in making the situation better. In it the Lorax tells us: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
More recently, there are films like “Flow“, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best International Feature Film, and “The Wild Robot“, which was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Animated Feature.
In both, climate change is a world-building element; one showed a submerged Golden Gate Bridge, the other showed a flood of biblical proportions. But they’re both animated films, with cute animals coming together to save the world, reaching a younger audience who will grow up with climate change and its impacts.
Creating a story that can make people think about our planet and how we can tackle climate change isn’t easy. Pike said it is worth persevering.
“If you get tired, don’t give up,” Pike said. “Rest and get back to it when you can. We all plant seeds and it’s hard to say which ones will take.”
Three questions to consider:
- What makes you switch off the news when a story about climate change comes on?
- What happens to our brain when we show, rather than tell, in our writing on climate change?
- What might you learn in a course like “Environmental Reporting for a Hopeful Planet?”
Norma Hilton is an independent journalist who covers everything from K-pop to human rights violations.