Dec 16, 2021 11:23 PM
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/can-a-...ommentary/
EXCERPTS: Storytelling about the climate crisis -- called climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’ -- has generally focused on end-of-the-world stories that serve as a warning. But can they inspire change?
Research has found that the majority of cli-fi is associated with negative emotions which can lead to apathy, which is the enemy of action. But stories can get through to us in ways that facts aren’t able to. Could this mean that we need different types of cli-fi stories to inspire change?
A new op-ed argues that it may be time to add new stories to this potentially world-changing genre. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
[...] Stories can also change the world. They have precipitated many important moments in history. For example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in bringing about the American Civil War, in the fight to end slavery. Dictators including Hitler and Augusto Pinochet were in such fear of the power of books that many were collected and burned, according to Will Storr in The Science of Storytelling. “Transportation changes people,” writes Storr, “and then it changes the world.”
Fiction broadcast on TV can also be a force for change. The American sitcom “All in the Family” produced an episode which showed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in a negative light in October 1974. At the time it had become apparent that CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, and pressure was mounting for global action. According to an article published by PBS, the aerosol industry attributed the episode of “All in the Family” as that which sparked their decline.
Stories can also alert us about an encroaching menace. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and 1984 by George Orwell warned us about the rise of totalitarian states. These books have now become part of our cultural fabric. But is there any proof behind the power of stories to influence and shape our beliefs and actions?
[...] Narrative structure is coming to be seen as an effective method of science communication. This is because we can engage and lose ourselves in a story, through narrative transportation. We reach this state through empathizing with characters and living vicariously, and also by “being suspended from reality.”
Yet there are plenty of other reasons why stories can reach us in ways that non-fiction simply can’t. Morris and colleagues suggest that stories tend to fit in with our neural maps, which ultimately determine how we interpret and understand the world around us. Loick Roche and John Sadowsky also suggest that stories have an element of universality about them, enabling them to be understood by many people, irrespective of their age or culture.
[...] In their 2019 research paper published in Climatic Change, Morris and colleagues carried out three studies exploring whether stories or facts encouraged people to act on the climate crisis. They found that when narratives were presented as stories, they were more effective at encouraging people to take action, compared to narratives of a factual nature.
Should we therefore see more stories in science communication, especially around the climate crisis? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this idea has merit...
[...] Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingslover, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson are just some of the authors who’ve penned cli-fi novels. Yet the cli-fi genre can count its published works in the hundreds, meaning there is clearly scope for a wider range of novels.
“The best cli-fi,” writes Ellen Szabo in Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi, “Seamlessly intertwines literary fabrication and science; it’s a literary collaboration between the disciplines of science and the humanities.” Cli-fi makes climate change personal by living vicariously, says Szabo. This means we need strong and realistic characters. Grounding cli-fi in the present with solutions also matters when we’re trying to inspire the world to immediate action.
What we need therefore is a new wave of cli-fi which encompasses some or all of these ideas. I believe there is one novel that embodies everything that this new wave of cli-fi could be; The Last Bear by Hannah Gold... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Storytelling about the climate crisis -- called climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’ -- has generally focused on end-of-the-world stories that serve as a warning. But can they inspire change?
Research has found that the majority of cli-fi is associated with negative emotions which can lead to apathy, which is the enemy of action. But stories can get through to us in ways that facts aren’t able to. Could this mean that we need different types of cli-fi stories to inspire change?
A new op-ed argues that it may be time to add new stories to this potentially world-changing genre. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
[...] Stories can also change the world. They have precipitated many important moments in history. For example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in bringing about the American Civil War, in the fight to end slavery. Dictators including Hitler and Augusto Pinochet were in such fear of the power of books that many were collected and burned, according to Will Storr in The Science of Storytelling. “Transportation changes people,” writes Storr, “and then it changes the world.”
Fiction broadcast on TV can also be a force for change. The American sitcom “All in the Family” produced an episode which showed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in a negative light in October 1974. At the time it had become apparent that CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, and pressure was mounting for global action. According to an article published by PBS, the aerosol industry attributed the episode of “All in the Family” as that which sparked their decline.
Stories can also alert us about an encroaching menace. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and 1984 by George Orwell warned us about the rise of totalitarian states. These books have now become part of our cultural fabric. But is there any proof behind the power of stories to influence and shape our beliefs and actions?
[...] Narrative structure is coming to be seen as an effective method of science communication. This is because we can engage and lose ourselves in a story, through narrative transportation. We reach this state through empathizing with characters and living vicariously, and also by “being suspended from reality.”
Yet there are plenty of other reasons why stories can reach us in ways that non-fiction simply can’t. Morris and colleagues suggest that stories tend to fit in with our neural maps, which ultimately determine how we interpret and understand the world around us. Loick Roche and John Sadowsky also suggest that stories have an element of universality about them, enabling them to be understood by many people, irrespective of their age or culture.
[...] In their 2019 research paper published in Climatic Change, Morris and colleagues carried out three studies exploring whether stories or facts encouraged people to act on the climate crisis. They found that when narratives were presented as stories, they were more effective at encouraging people to take action, compared to narratives of a factual nature.
Should we therefore see more stories in science communication, especially around the climate crisis? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this idea has merit...
[...] Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingslover, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson are just some of the authors who’ve penned cli-fi novels. Yet the cli-fi genre can count its published works in the hundreds, meaning there is clearly scope for a wider range of novels.
“The best cli-fi,” writes Ellen Szabo in Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi, “Seamlessly intertwines literary fabrication and science; it’s a literary collaboration between the disciplines of science and the humanities.” Cli-fi makes climate change personal by living vicariously, says Szabo. This means we need strong and realistic characters. Grounding cli-fi in the present with solutions also matters when we’re trying to inspire the world to immediate action.
What we need therefore is a new wave of cli-fi which encompasses some or all of these ideas. I believe there is one novel that embodies everything that this new wave of cli-fi could be; The Last Bear by Hannah Gold... (MORE - missing details)