Taking on Climate Change with Stories
Building connections, understanding, and empathy, supercharging the superpower of design, and promoting prosocial collective action
Stories connect us to one another and to the world at large. They allow us to see the humanity in others - their perspectives along with the the raw emotions, struggles, suffering, and triumphs they experience. Stories about the future, near or far, are often visions of what could be, consisting of varying combinations of inspiration woven together with cautionary tales. As such, stories can be used to help promote prosocial collective action.
Some of the stories from the devastating fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui (made more dangerous as a result of climate change) that have really struck me are the ones involving people fleeing into the ocean or behind seawalls to escape the flames and smoke that ravaged the town of Lahaina. One family of seven, a mom and dad with their five kids, abandoned their car and raced to the ocean to save themselves:
We found a floating board that we hung onto. And we were out there floating. It was just so surreal. And everything was burning around, explosions, cars blowing up, like, embers just flying. Just, we couldn’t breathe, when the — we couldn’t breathe. There was no air. It was just the carbon monoxide. And we held on as best as we could, my wife and my kids. My older ones helped with the younger ones. And we tried to stick all together, the waves just trying to take us out to the ocean. We had to come back.
Here is one short video (not of this family) to give you a better idea what this must have been like:
Some reported being in the ocean for up to 8 hours before being rescued. And some of the deceased were found in the water, likely having succumbed to heat, smoke, or exhaustion before help arrived. This is a terrible tragedy, fueled by a variety of factors including climate change, invasive vegetation, the collapse of Lahaina’s water system, the history of plantation farming and Native Hawaiian loss of water and land rights, among others, that as of this writing we are still learning about.
This act of retreating to the water is what many Australians were forced to do during the 2019/2020 wildfires that raged across parts of that continent. In an early 2020 article I wrote for ArchDaily, I referenced the apocalyptical image of a young boy, mask over his face, steering his family’s boat as they fled a large bushfire. Around 5,000 people were reported to have gathered around the boat dock on that day in December of 2019 as the unbearable heat, smoke, and ash from the bushfire took hold of the town of Mallacoota (similar to the situation in Lahaina, though Mallacoota residents had more warning).
It's hard to breathe, even with a mask on.
It’s this inability to breath - either in the air that’s been transformed into a smoky, ashy, hellish furnace or in the water that becomes the only available refuge - that resonates with me. I almost suffocated to death as a kid, and I can still recall my body’s physiological responses to the lack of oxygen as my wind pipe filled with grains of wheat. I remember the terror that came with the realization I might die with seemingly no power to stop it. I remember the despair as my panicked struggles weakened and my oxygen-deprived brain faded into blackness.
These physiological and emotional connections to the victims of such disasters, woven into their written and video-recorded stories, help convey the desperate reality of their situations; these are real people struggling with the occurrences and aftermath of local disasters made more likely, as well as magnified by, climate change. They’re no longer anonymous people from half a world away mentioned in a random article or someone’s Twitter feed. They could be our friends and neighbors, loved ones, or ourselves. Effective stories and narratives allow us to see ourselves, our own experiences, and our own humanity, within them.
Nor is the comparison lost on me of choking in the smoke from a wildfire, whether it be in the town of Lahaina as it burns or in New York City as the Canadian forests burn, to that of the planet choking in the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) produced from our own activities. Will a perceived lack of power, a lack of seemingly being able to do anything meaningful to rapidly address these huge challenges, with so many other distracting issues and day-to-day struggles, also overwhelm us? Lead to despair? To giving up and fading into the blackness of an atmosphere increasingly difficult to live and breath within?
In that 2020 ArchDaily article I referenced earlier, I noted then that
[m]any of the horrors of climate change that not long ago were thought to be decades into the future, are showing up in the here and now.
This showing up has only increased over the last 3+ years. We’re seeing more extreme droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, etc., as well as increasing evidence of the negative impacts of climate change on our environments, individual health (mental and physical), communities, and society overall. And there are indications that climate change is happening more rapidly than previously thought, increasing the difficulty of doing what needs to be done in the time needed. At the end of this post, see a list of articles and studies from the last few months providing a snap shot of all this.
That’s not to say progress hasn’t been made. In the U.S., the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) could help significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as the costs of clean energy technology. There is evidence that climate protests, as well as advocacy from industry professional organizations, do make a difference. A judge recently ruled in favor of Montana youth in a landmark climate case. Communities are banning single-use plastic bags. New York recently banned natural gas in most new construction. The federal government has offered states $1.2 billion to adopt more stringent energy codes. Many corporations are continuing their sustainability / ESG (environmental, social, and governance) journeys. The AEC Industry continues to innovate technologies and strategies for creating healthy, sustainable, Net Zero, and even regenerative environments.
And a global movement (Built Environment Declares Climate and Biodiversity Emergency) has arisen among “all strands of construction and the built environment” to “take positive action in response to climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse.” As I’ve stated previously:
For individual AEC firms, such an alliance would help mitigate the risks from advocating or walking away by distributing it more equally among individual members, and therefore minimizing it for any individual firm. However, this requires reaching agreement with competitors and partners on the specific advocacy and value add criteria for evaluating whether or not to walk away from a project, along with the necessary monitoring and sanctions mechanisms. Assuming that’s accomplished, an alliance like this could very well facilitate more direct action from individual firms, increasing the pressure placed on these larger [economic, political, and social] spheres of interaction to change.
More efforts along these lines have the potential to increase the rate of prosocial change within the AEC Industry.
As Dr. Katharine Hayhoe has stated, we aren’t doomed. We still have time. We can prevent evolution from taking us to where we don’t want to go, as Dr. David Sloan Wilson would say. But it’s also true there’s a lot of hill left to climb with a great deal of weight slowing us down.
The weight of fossil fuel corporations and lobbyists influencing legislation, policies, standards, and codes. The weight of hyper-partisanship, mis/disinformation, and authoritarianism. The weight of white nationalism, white supremacy, and institutional racism. The weight of gross wealth disparities and lack of sufficient social services and public health infrastructure. The weight of not adequately understanding and taking individual and collective behavior into account. And ultimately, the weight of “the big structural political, economic, stuff” as George Monbiot put it in 2019, that use very narrow definitions of value centered on annual profit margins and annual GDP growth (though perhaps it’s more about modifying, as opposed to overthrowing, capitalism as Monbiot has promoted).
All of this greatly limits how aggressive sustainable decision-making is within individual construction project meetings, board rooms, code and standards committees, city commission meetings, state legislatures, and national governing bodies. They create and/or exacerbate disconnects between the decisions that are made day to day on individual projects or within state legislatures versus the wider impacts of climate change.
Ultimately we need to address these social/cultural, political, and economic barriers at all scales of human society as well as better understand the nuances of individual and collective behavior. I’ve written about this elsewhere, focusing specifically on the AEC industry and the scale of the individual project as well as referenced the work of others at larger scales. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to focus on the power of stories, how they can bridge these disconnects, supercharge design and help promote prosocial collective action.
Climate fiction (cli-fi), because of its ability to “bridge science with the humanities and activism” has been portrayed as a “… valuable tool in collective efforts to address global warming,” particularly for younger readers. Such stories are arguably most effective (in terms of inspiring action) when they humanize the sterile numbers, connect the dots between larger scale biodiversity losses, changes in weather patterns and food production, political instability, etc. and an individual’s day-to-day, taking a variety of demographic perspectives into account. People need to see themselves in the story, and it should be to told in a manner that doesn’t suggest all hope is loss.
One of the most effective climate fiction works I’ve read is Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, reviewed here by the New York Times. You can listen to an interview of the author on David Robert’s Volts podcast. The story is roughly set between the 2010s and 2040+ and follows the lives of dozens of individuals of various demographic backgrounds, though some are followed more closely than others. Markley weaves their narratives into the larger ongoing story of climate change and the resulting local to global impacts, including our struggles to mitigate and adapt along with the growing social, economic, and political instability the world finds itself within.
While poor minority neighborhoods turned to flooded ruins, the wealthiest Miamians scrambled for high ground, but now even those neighborhoods are experiencing untenable nuisance flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program has fallen nearly half a trillion dollars in debt despite Congress’s efforts to raise rates for at-risk properties. Rating agencies continue to downgrade the bonds of coastal cities and tax bases are collapsing, which then hamstrings much-needed repairs to the infrastructure needed to keep these cities dry. Much of this has been predictable, but that does not make it any less frightening. - Markley, Stephen. The Deluge (pp. 693-694). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
No longer can we restrict ourselves to the machinery and equipment of industrial capitalism. We must confront the actors who make this genocidal system possible. We must make it dangerous to profit from the holocaust of our world. What the last two decades have taught us is that systems of militarism, carbon energy, and white supremacy will do anything to hold on to power. The people whose lives we took on August 15 are being described as innocent. They were not. They were the factotums of a machine that is killing millions daily with its ultimate endgame the annihilation of every species on the planet, including humankind. If there was ever a moral argument for initiating a campaign of violent resistance, this is it. There is no neutrality in this war. - Markley, Stephen. The Deluge (p. 811). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
It’s a chilling story because it presents a vision of the next 15 to 20 years that, based on where we currently are, could easily be seen as coming to pass. It’s a world and a U.S. in increasing turmoil with increasing acts of cruelty and violence. And it takes significant suffering and many things going way off the rails for Markley to end the story in a place of tentative hope. Grounding the story in our current reality and following the lives of these multiple characters from various backgrounds both help the reader see themselves as well as their loved ones within the narrative.
Master Patrol Officer Andrea Sanchez, who’d worked every overtime shift she could that summer, who from the first day of all this had felt stirrings of dread, who told herself no matter what she would not do anything she could not explain to her seven-year-old son, took off her helmet and threw up. She would never forget what she saw there: The first body she came across was unrecognizable, just a sizzling pile of meat and blood. She stepped on something and had to stare at it for a second before she realized it was a piece of someone’s bit-off tongue, lying like a pink sponge on the sidewalk. - Markley, Stephen. The Deluge (p. 546). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
You stand there watching them read. Toby’s hearing aids stopped working a year ago, and you haven’t been able to afford a new pair. You’ve held on to them, hoping you can find someone to repair them, but he’s managing. Worse was his asthma, and when you were close to getting kicked out of the trailer, he finally got an attack so bad, you thought he might die. He was writhing on his bedroom floor, clawing at his throat, eyes bulging, and you and Raquel couldn’t calm him or get him to take a sip of water. She’d wailed and begged you to call an ambulance, but you both knew it was pointless. By the time they got there, it would either be over or Toby really would die, and either way, you’d owe so much money on the bill you’d never get out from under it. You couldn’t live in the trailer anymore. There was this thing called photochemical smog, Raquel said, and it was coming from the plant across the river. Mix that with ragweed season and hay fever, and Toby was lucky to go more than a couple days without his throat swelling shut. That’s when Casey told you about the abandoned Walmart, how people getting booted from their homes were just moving in there and the cops weren’t doing a thing about it. - Markley, Stephen. The Deluge (pp. 758-759). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Part of Markley’s intent is to shock us into action, to help us see how we are figuratively and literally the frog slowly boiling in a pot of water, leading us to accept increasingly dystopic social, political, and environmental conditions without taking adequate action. While the story ends in a place of hope (sort of), Markley is relying heavily on fear, for ourselves and our loved ones, to generate action. But we also need stories built heavily around positive actions and hope.
Author, speaker, and advocate Heather McGhee has produced a wonderful nine episode podcast series entitled The Sum of Us, based on her book of the same name (with a younger reader’s version). She also partnered with the racial justice organization, Color Of Change, to create the podcast’s companion guide. The series of episodes presents stories of everyday Americans “… crossing demographic, cultural, and political lines to build a better future for all of us.” These are real prosocial collective efforts, at a local and regional level, effectively dismantling, or at least chipping away at, some of the social/cultural, political, and economic barriers standing in the way of affective change.
Episode 4 told the story of Kansas City, MO fast food workers, from different demographic backgrounds, banding together to advocate and work for a $15 minimum wage in Kansas City. Heather focused on two individuals with fairly different life stories, who also happened to be leaders of the local movement, and their efforts engaging in multi-racial strikes and protests. The struggle was won at the city level, but unfortunately blocked by the state. Despite this setback, the two “… launch[ed] a new state-wide organization called the Missouri Workers Center that organizes low-wage workers across racial and geographic dividing lines.” Their prosocial story continues (at the next scale or level up).
“I came to realize,” Terrence [one of the two leaders] said, “it was only through the movement, that we get more together than we do apart. So nowadays when I go to work and I clock in, what I have that's greatly different from in the past is hope.”
We get more together than we do apart. Wise words whose truth stretches back to the dawn of humanity (and likely further back than that). Not surprisingly this truth is also embedded within Dr. Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles for protecting the commons.
Speaking of stories, collective action, and the dawn of humanity, “[s]torytelling is a human universal, with roots extending deep into our prehistoric past.” I stated this in a brief review of a 2017 paper entitled Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling, summarized here. The authors of the paper conclude that (quote from my review):
… among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, storytelling likely functioned to help coordinate group behaviors and facilitate cooperation among group members. It would have done this in part by providing individuals with “… social information about the norms, rules and expectations in a given society.” A selective advantage would have been provided to both the groups with effective storytellers, as well as to the effective storytellers themselves.
If the authors of the study are correct (and I suspect they are, even if there is still more to learn), then hunter-gatherer storytellers were essential for promoting social values of cooperation and egalitarianism. The stories would have served as mechanisms for education, reinforcement, and regulation, strengthening social cohesion while promoting cooperative norms and limiting selfish behavior.
And they would have been effective in part due to the requirements of cultural relevancy and members seeing themselves within the stories being baked into the process - these were smaller groups, whose members were essentially of the same demographic background having a high percentage of shared experiences. Contemporary applications of such lessons must take this into account.
It’s also important to note that stories exist in multiple formats. They exist as the spoken word in person, in video, or in audio. They also exist as written text, directly as stories but also embedded within doctrine, policies, legislation, curriculum, etc. They underlie data, statistical analyses, and charts and figures. They’re literally and figuratively woven into clothing, art, and artifacts. And they’re built into architecture itself (in the physical form as well as the associated organization of spatial voids). These stories help define shared cultural traditions.
And that is one reason why the loss of Lahaina’s National Landmark District and the Na'Aikane o Maui Cultural and Research Center is yet another devastating tragedy resulting from Maui’s wildfires. It represents a loss of stories that help identify and bind Native Hawaiians, a loss of the ability to instruct future generations, a loss of a key tool to help Native Hawaiians reclaim land and water. If you listen to the interview, you can hear the anguish in Ke'eaumoku Kapu’s voice (the curator, president, and even janitor of the Research center).
All I have [now] is what I have in here [pointing to his temple]. I just cried. It's like we got erased.
It’s difficult for white Americans to really understand the full meaning of this. But if you listen to the interview, if you hear the suffering in Ke'eaumoku Kapu’s voice as he tells his story - this story of Native Hawaiians, you should be able to connect to his basic, raw human emotions and see a fellow human in deep pain. You should be able to connect to his humanity. And maybe that’s a starting point for some to explore the history of discrimination against Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. Addressing climate change can’t be done without also addressing inequity, discrimination, and racism.
According to Dr. Holly Jean Buck, environmental social scientist at the University of Buffalo, it’s important for stories to create an emotional connection and tie into people’s day-to-day (in other words, that they be pragmatic). In an interview on David Robert’s Volts podcast, she states the following relative to framing a new narrative to address climate change:
First, I think it is important that we are measuring progress towards a goal for accountability reasons. But I think there needs to be more than just the metric. I think we have an obsession with metrics in our society that sometimes becomes unhealthy or distracts us from the real focus. But I do think there should be some amount of measuring specific progress towards a goal. I think that the broader story also has to have some affect or emotional language. There has to be some kind of emotional connection. I also think we have to get beyond carbon to talk about what's going on with ecosystems more broadly and how to maintain them and have an intact habitable planet and then just pragmatically. This has to be a narrative that enables broad political coalitions.
This perspective recognizes that the answer to why our climate actions often don't reflect the urgency of what the models, or the science, is telling us is predominantly human-focused. It's about individual and collective behavior shaped by our evolutionary history as well as the nested hierarchies of groups we live, work, and play within from the community to global level. It's about policies, governing, politics, and economics. It's about our relationships with nature and other species. It's about the stories we tell and the connections we make - as individuals, communities, corporate entities, political parties, etc.
And those of us within the AEC Industry should take these lessons and insights regarding stories and storytelling to heart. 2023 AIA Gold Medal winner Carol Ross Barney, FAIA has stated that design is a superpower to create the equity that our society demands and to make lives better. It’s also a superpower for addressing climate change given the contributions of the built environment to greenhouse gas emissions, though in both cases it arguably doesn’t live up to it’s superpower potential as much as it needs to.
More effective storytelling could probably supercharge that superpower. As I wrote previously:
Storytelling is an inherent part of building brands, promoting company cultures, or in the case of building/construction projects, achieving a successful outcome. Establishing a vision and set of goals early on, communicated through both a written and visual narrative of what could be, can help facilitate cooperation among the diverse set of key stakeholders involved in pursuit of their common set of goals (relative to a specific project). Such successful storytelling would theoretically increase the fitness levels of the organizations involved, as well as the individual storytellers themselves.
But again, this process of visioning, goal setting, story development, and storytelling must be inclusive, reflective of the diversity of the key stakeholders impacted. In Dr. Erica Thompson’s book, Escape from Model Land, and in her interview on David Robert’s Volts podcast, she argues that there is need to increase the diversity among those doing the modeling, a key part of storytelling within design as well as climate science - an important part of envisioning what could be. As I’ve summarized elsewhere:
This [increasing the diversity among modelers] increases our ability to capture more of the relevant variation in inputs and incorporate a more nuanced assessment of the outputs, which in turn results in a more comprehensive view of potential outcomes and a more equitable risk or cost/benefit assessment. And since value judgements underlie model construction, choices of inputs, and analyses of outputs, another good reason for increasing the diversity among those doing the modeling is that it’s always easier to see value judgements that aren’t your own (that aren’t shaped by your own cultural background(s), formative years, and intellectual or disciplinary traditions).
And if the design team, including the modelers, aren’t as diverse as they need to be, particularly relative to a given project (they don’t fully represent the key stakeholders impacted), then it’s critical to incorporate underrepresented key stakeholder groups into the larger design/construction process and include their needs, wants, and values. Taking thermal comfort modeling as an example, are the clothing insulation and metabolic rate values reflective of the actual occupants who will be using the spaces?
In settings with high degrees of variation in these factors, such as some high school and university environments, if the modeling doesn’t adequately capture that variation, then the output results like Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) are less likely to reflect the actual story. Worse, by ignoring the needs of certain minority groups, you may be creating spaces that exacerbate existing inequities. A hypothetical example of this I pointed out elsewhere consisted of the following:
If the clothing insulation values of women wearing certain traditional Arab styles of clothing, such as the Daraa, Abaya, Hijab or Burqa, haven’t been accounted for in the design of these spaces’ indoor environmental control systems, the women may be uncomfortable and avoid these spaces.
When we ignore different key stakeholder groups in such a manner, we are in essence making a value judgement that they need not be included within the modeled story of what could be. Equitably meeting everyone’s needs is effectively not valued, and that’s typically to the detriment of general health and productivity as well as building performance. The same can generally be said about not consistently including quantified estimates of occupant health and productivity impacts within our models and any associated life cycle cost analyses (LCCAs). We are making value judgements that the occupants’ quality of life and success in their day-to-day is less important than first costs, energy/water costs or consumption, and other types of building operating costs.
Within these larger social, political, and economic constraints, quantifying health and productivity as part of the modeling process and including the results within LCCAs can often help maximize individual project sustainable and healthy decision-making throughout the design/construction process. With the costs of personnel being significantly greater than the costs of energy, water, and other building operational costs, even small annual improvements to health and productivity can dwarf not just annual building operational savings, but even the total annual building operational costs.
The table below is from the retrocommissioning of a Federal office building that had undergone multiple additions and renovations over the last 100 years. Proposed improvements were presented as performance enhancement measures (PEMs), and grouped into four packages. The table presents the results of a net present value (NPV) analysis for the different investment terms shown (5 years to 30 years), using a discount rate of 6% (black text are positive values; red text are negative values). The left set of analyses (in light blue), consider first costs and building operations costs and savings only. However, the right set of analyses (in light orange) include health and productivity savings as well (primarily as a result of IEQ improvements, also considering respiratory infection risk).
The financial story told is significantly different once modeled health and productivity impacts are included. Without them, most of the PEMs and PEM packages aren’t profitable - they don’t have returns exceeding the discount rate.
The argument for a Net Zero school becomes significantly stronger if, in addition to energy and water operational savings, we also include quantified estimates of the positive impacts on cognitive performance, sick days, and airborne viral transmission, as shown below.
Quantifying health and productivity impacts can increase the likelihood a community will pass a school bond. If done early in planning or design, it can change the direction of a project at a stage when such changes are more likely, especially if transparently made available to all of the relevant key stakeholders.
The figure below displays the relative benefits or losses of varying implementations of different design strategies, such as comparing the impacts of MERV 8 versus 13 filters on cognitive performance or annual COVID or Flu sick days. Incorporating health and productivity in such a manner makes the modeling effort and subsequent LCCA or ROI analyses more comprehensive, supercharging the superpowers of design. It becomes harder to sacrifice the benefits from certifications, outdoor classrooms, operable windows, or geothermal HVAC systems on the altar of first cost when everyone has a more comprehensive understanding of those benefits.
But to Dr. Holly Jean Buck’s point quoted above, these quantified estimates of health and productivity, while helping maximize sustainable and healthy decision-making within the limits set by a focus on annual profit margins, lack emotional details. Year-to-year financial stories are a small slice of our larger human experiences (hence the problematic nature of an economy beholden to annual profit margins and annual GDP).
Integrating ethnography within the planning and early design process, as part of facility assessments and audits, retrocommissioning efforts, commissioning activities, workplace studies, and pre and post occupancy evaluations facilitates the gathering of occupant and operator stories more reflective of the totality of the human experience within the built environment. It adds nuance and richness to the existing baseline stories of what is as well as design stories of what could be. It can increase the accuracy of modeling health and productivity impacts by further understanding the in-context nature of such impacts, who is being impacted, and how often.
Ethnography helps uncover existing problems, better understand why they’re occurring, and potentially avoid them in future design efforts. It can increase the number and diversity of occupants and operators heard from, increasing buy-in and limiting design inequities. It can add emotional context, a sense of urgency for taking action, and help push the decision-making process passed the constraints of focusing on annual profit margins. It truly supercharges the superpowers of design.
Just a few examples of such gathered stories include:
The very serious and urgent manner of a high school Librarian pointing out the ability to see up the skirts of those on the second level standing next to full height glazing. Think through how this could facilitate sexual harassment and otherwise impact the relationships among students and between students and teachers/staff (with potentially greater stakes for trans-women). This was an unintended consequence of providing large expanses of exterior/interior glazing flooding daylight into spaces and exposing beautiful outdoor scenes to the building population.
The story of IEQ conditions successfully contributing to the “vibe” of a coffee shop / lounge space within a university residence hall, indicated from students verbally as well as through observations of the use of the space. Our normative expectations of what the IEQ conditions in a public coffee shop should be contribute to the acceptance of noisier conditions and the smell of coffee - in fact they are part of the draw to the space. Note that this acceptance is contingent on a) quieter spaces available for student to retreat to and b) the noises are associated with conversations and the making of coffee - a noisy, blasting mechanical system would not be acceptable.
Speaking of noisy mechanical systems, in the master planning process for a school district, out of seven elementary schools surveyed, one had a classroom intelligibility rating by the teachers significantly lower than the rest. A major contributor to this was HVAC noise from the RTUs serving the classrooms and other spaces, directly ducted into each of the spaces they served without any effective means for sound attenuation apparently added. In addition to the impacts on communication, comprehension and learning (and the associated inequities compared to the other schools), the stress and fatigue resulting from trying to teach and learn in such conditions negatively impacts one’s health. In this interview clip you can hear the the HVAC shut off approximately 15 seconds in, along with the reactions from everyone at the sudden change in background sound level:
Stories help bridge disconnects - disconnects between occupants, operators, owners, and designers; between what was to be, what is, and what could be; between people of different backgrounds and life experiences; between values of profit margins versus values of quality of life for all species; and between getting from here to there. At the individual project level, they can supercharge the superpower of design. At all levels they can function as mechanisms for advocacy, education, reinforcement, and regulation, promoting prosocial cooperation to protect the commons of the planet.
But story development and storytelling require a diversity of perspectives. People need to see themselves within the stories as well as within the storytellers. They need to connect to peoples’ day-to-day. Numbers, facts, and figures can be important, but emotional context is likely more important. For those who may not have certain lived experiences, stories may be a major factor pushing them to take action.
Episode 2 of The Sum of Us podcast told the story of Memphis, TN’s efforts to protect it’s water supply from the installation of an oil pipeline targeting “… a ‘sacrifice zone’ of all-Black neighborhoods that had already been poisoned by nearby heavy industry.” For the white local environmentalists (and their communities), the threat to Memphis’s famed “sweetest water in the world” was what initially spurred them into action (not the threat to the all-Black neighborhoods).
But it was the involvement of a charismatic 26 year old, Justin J. Pearson (also Black), who rose to the challenge of activating these all-Black neighborhoods and building a multi-racial coalition uniting Black and white neighborhoods in a common cause. A diversity of perspectives under the leadership of Justin, as well as stories that linked the what if of an oil pipeline with the potential resulting what if of everyone’s day-to-day, contributed to successfully stopping the oil pipeline.
We aren’t doomed (at least yet).
So maybe we need more efforts to inclusively tell the story of where we collectively want to go - stories that also weave together the urgency stemming from fear with the sustaining power of hope. And then we draw on our diversity in social/cultural, political, and economic backgrounds, as well as our diversity in intellectual traditions and disciplinary knowledge, to make it happen.
Let’s continue telling stories of how we get more together than we do apart.
Miscellaneous Recent Climate Change Related Articles and Studies
‘We’re in serious trouble’: Why a hotter world will be bad for our health
Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health
What Wildfire Smoke, Gas Stoves and Covid Tell Us About Our Air
‘The fire equivalent of an ice age’: Humanity enters a new era of fire
Like smoking 30 cigarettes in 8 hours: NYC’s air quality crisis, tallied
New York City had plans to deal with climate change — but they didn't involve wildfire smoke
Indoor Air Quality in Passivhaus Dwellings: A Literature Review
Wildfire Haze and Poor Air Quality: Here’s How Schools Are Responding
Teens Are Struggling With Climate Anxiety. Schools Haven’t Caught Up Yet
Evergy slashes planned renewable energy additions, proposes more natural gas
Kansas faces mental health crisis for kids suffering from COVID-19 pandemic, anti-LGBTQ legislation
‘My life and my home’: young people start to testify at historic US climate trial
Ecological tipping points could occur much sooner than expected, study finds
Half of Americans have faced ‘extreme’ weather in the last six weeks
In Texas, Dead Fish and Red-Faced Desperation Are Signs of Things to Come
With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth
Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century
Atlantic collapse: Q&A with scientists behind controversial study predicting a colder Europe
Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record
Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so now
‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president
A Republican 2024 Climate Strategy: More Drilling, Less Clean Energy
First Scorched, Then Soaked: Weather Whiplash Confounds Farmers
So much to contemplate...