Telling the story

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

By Brooke Williams

….when there is no more story, that will be our story. When there is no more forest, that will be our forest.
                        — W.S. Merwin, from One Story

Lately, it seems I’m often reminded about dialogue and the role that gaps in communication might be playing in understanding and addressing key conservation issues of our time. During last month’s ECO-Fair, I had the chance to talk with Rick Piltz, the author of many official government documents on the impacts of climate change. He wants climate scientists to learn how to better articulate what they know to general audiences.

I’ve spoken with lawyers working on cases involving the Endangered Species Act. The complicated terminology used narrowly selects who is involved in an issue and repels a huge segment of the interested public.

And last week, in an effort to make the mountains of information gathered by scientists known and accessible to everyone, the Chicago Field Museum announced the launching of the “Encyclopedia of Life,” a $50 million project in which every known species will be given its own Web page.

For me, interpreting the massive amounts of available scientific information for the public is only part of the role narrative might play in building more effective constituencies. The more I think about this, the more I believe that people working on either side of an issue – biodiversity, wilderness, endangered species, climate change, supplemental elk feeding – have at their core a personal story on which their political, scientific or professional opinion is built.

In a sense, the facts used are really only a means of supporting this personal story. All the charts and maps and lines on those maps, all the laws and all the strategies are on the surface, obscuring the real story, because for some reason, we’re not comfortable telling that real, true story.

What story lies beneath the surface of the issues we’re constantly confronting?
Climate Change: There are still those people who deny our role in the changing climate, choosing to believe that the earth is in the warming phase of a billion-year-old natural cycle. What are their stories? What is the source of their belief?

Biodiversity, endangered species, the Encyclopedia of Life: It may no longer be enough to argue over the laws necessary to protect all life. We need to go deeper into the narrative of why the lives of organisms are integral to our lives, what those who study each life form really know, and how each extinction contributes to the demise of our own species.

Wilderness: Besides details of roads and habitat on one side of the issue, and access and industry on the other, what if we were given the time and a safe space to tell why it is that we actually care?

Earlier this month, narrative was the subject of a four-day seminar at The Murie Center. Thirteen young career conservationists met as part of our Next Generation Project, the goal of which is to make the environmental movement accessible and attractive to more people. These people are Caucasian, Hopi, Hawaiian, and Rwandan, from Alaska, Arizona, Idaho and California.

Storyteller Laura Simms and writer Terry Tempest Williams guided our group through a series of exercises exploring narrative not so much to help us “solve” the issues, but to understand them at a deeper level.

To accomplish this, we each created a story. We began by simply describing a meaningful wild landscape from our past. By the time we’d finished, our stories had drilled down through our personal and unique relationship to those places to a magical point where somehow they took on the characteristics of a universal myth, like a thousand year-old fairy tale.

I still don’t know how it happened, but we had the feeling that we’d tapped into something that all humans share, a knowledge of a new place to begin thinking about not just how to take care of places, but why. We left not knowing exactly how to use what we’d learned. Fortunately we’ll be meeting three more times throughout the year. But something tells me that this is a never-ending process.

PERMALINK:
Telling the story | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

Leave a Comment