Climate crisis: storytelling is part of the solution - just how?

The race has begun to tell - or sell, the right story about climate change.

• How do you report on climate change?

  Foreign Policy

  author Jessi Jezewska Stevens is investigating

  this question

  .

• She says: Stories thrive on the uniqueness of national and local communities - climate change, on the other hand, is alarmingly global.

• And demands: if you are the first to find a solution, you share it with the others.

• This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by

  Foreign Policy

  magazine on November 9, 2021

  .

As nations around the world struggle over how best to save the earth, it is not surprising that our global general anxiety disorder has reached an author's fever level under time pressure: What is the plan to save the world like?

The 2051 Munich Climate Conference, which was organized by the Munich theater collective Büro Grandezza and hosted by the refugee center Bellevue di Monaco, met in September of this year to reconstruct an answer to this question.

The conference invited scientists from all over the world to speak on attitudes towards the climate in 2021, as if we were 30 years further into the future, exactly one year after the deadline for climate neutrality set in the Paris Agreement.

This unique call for papers promised an event that would be both academic and "fictional".

As Andreas Kohn, a founding member of the Büro Grandezza collective, told me a few days before the event at Zoom, the basic structure of the conference and the performance was an urgent thought experiment looking back on 2020: In 2051 people will look back on what we knew about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and asking, "Why didn't they do that?"

Fighting the climate crisis: telling stories as part of the solution - meaningful narratives

In the common perception, climate prognoses usually fall into one of the two categories: utopia or dystopia. The fictional framework of the 2051 Munich Climate Conference fits in with the lately increased interest in redesigning the public perception of climate adaptation in a way that breaks through existing clichés and expands the range of results to the wide range of possibilities between the extremes.

Since the 1960s, when the first conclusive reports were published linking fossil fuels to the greenhouse effect, climatologists have been marching for more or less the same urgent drumbeat. The discourse on 

 this science should be conveyed, however, took a decisive turn. As part of a larger storytelling trend in the social and natural sciences in general, the focus has shifted from providing the public with facts to providing voters with actionable climate narrative.

Everywhere that climate change is talked about, there is now evidence of the change in narrative style. Pulitzer Prize-winning climate journalist Dan Fagin has argued that storytelling is part of solving the climate crisis and that journalism about it is "packaged in a story, a narrative, with characters, drama and a thread." must be. Political scientists, economists and sociologists are also increasingly placing climate change in the context of meaningful narratives that societies use to organize themselves. In 

 Annika Arnold of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung locates the climate narrative in the midst of overwhelming evidence that adapting to climate change requires cultural change, media coherence and the overcoming of public inability to act, which favor apocalyptic stories and images.

In

 2017, the

magazine 

devoted an entire issue to the topic "Use of stories, narratives and storytelling in energy and climate change research".

The emphasis on narration and imagination has seeped into the public discourse from science via public exhibitions like the one in Munich, and politics has also begun to listen.

In 2016, the German Advisory Council on Global Change put these ideas into practice in its draft for a “normative compass” to promote cultural cohesion in questions of nature management and economic inequality.

Emissions target of the Paris climate agreement: 2051 - dystopia or optimism?

The consensus couldn't be clearer: the world is way behind emissions targets, and the right narratives can help build bridges. As a novelist, that fascinates me. The greatest challenge of the century was interpreted as a kind of writer's block: What kind of story should we tell? And how tragic or extreme does it have to be?

On the first day of the 2051 Climate Conference in Munich, the spatial-temporal paradox that made the incentive for the energy transition so difficult became clear: the sky was clear, the sun was shining, the mild temperatures lured brunch visitors to the street cafés and on the picnic blankets me to the pharmacy to buy a travel-size bottle of sunscreen. Although devastating floods had ravaged southern Germany only a few months earlier, the impending catastrophe still seemed a long way off on this mild afternoon.

The focus of the conference was the emissions target of the Paris Agreement - limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius - and thus the kind of binary thinking that is reflected in common climate arguments.

On the first day, the speakers spoke of a dystopian year 2051, in which the world exceeded 1.5 or even 2 degrees.

On the second day, they heralded a far brighter future with emissions curbed.

(The Middle East is one of the hardest hit by climate change - temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius are already a reality. The region is barely equipped to deal with the problem.)

In the dystopian version of the year 2051, the Maldives are sinking under the sea and possible adaptation strategies are thwarted by populist political opportunism.

In the more upbeat version, American Samoa residents have successfully sued oil companies to fund climate change adaptation measures, and carbon capture has proven to be a cost-effective silver bullet.

The fact that these scientists were speaking to us from some future at all suggested that some form of civilized life had survived in either world.

"New conception" of climate change: attention to detail, ethical nuances and problems at the national level

The various presentations made it clear why the talk of a "new conception" of climate change can be so attractive. (In fact, one of the better-attended lectures on the first afternoon was entitled “The transformative potential of sociological imagination for eco-social change.” As a voter and in the face of overwhelming ecological uncertainty you have the feeling of being seated at a dice table, and even then that someone else is throwing the dice.Hypothetical representations of the year 2051 add reality to a variety of possible political scenarios and make an unstable and seemingly distant future less abstract.

It is noteworthy that the most compelling of these depictions - like most compelling novels of the 20th century - tended to focus on national rather than global frameworks. In his lecture "Locked-in: Revisiting coastal adaptation policies in the Maldives", Geronimo Gussmann, sociologist at the Humboldt University of Berlin and specialist in oceanographic adaptation measures, describes the resilience and Innovative strength of a Maldivian people whose chance of climate protection had slipped through the mesh of political opportunism. Solutions identified included planting mangrove forests, building coastal walls and redistributing funds to islands that needed them most,instead of reserving these funds for islands that are most likely to vote for a particular candidate.

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Smoke rises from a coal-fired steel mill in the village of Hehal near Ranchi in the eastern state of Jharkhand, India.

© Altaf Qadri / AP / dpa

Another performance by English artist Nico Powell was in the form of letters to newspaper columnists and was delivered from a future where a stagnant Gulf Stream has left England under a permanent gray cloud and automation and fear have made citizens abandon their homes more to leave. (The COVID-19 lockdown itself is increasingly becoming a point of reference for possible future climate developments.) These presented scenarios - which also featured some of the best role-playing of the events I've seen - were based on specificity and attention to detail, ethical nuances and what is particularly important on issues that have been dramatized on a national rather than a global level.

Narratives thrive on the peculiarities of national and local communities - climate change, on the other hand, is global

During the presentations, the scientists became figures of themselves. They talked about the research they were doing “in 2021”, revised their age and pointed to their cracking joints.

You acted - and not without a touch of irony.

No wonder: in many ways they also adopted the perspective of the literary climate novel or the Hollywood disaster film, i.e. novels that are set in an ecologically changed future and investigate the dystopian or utopian consequences of neglecting environmental concerns.

As with any modeling, adapting the techniques and assumptions of a discipline like fiction for the purpose of extrapolating real-world results - and climate change narratives have a particularly urgent mandate to do so - is a delicate endeavor. The results can be confusing and even stressful. During a question and answer session with another scientist, who called for a more abstract renewal of the “eco-sociological imagination”, Gussmann asked his own pathetic question: “But to whom do we tell these stories? The public? Multinationals? Who is this 'we'? ”The silence that followed was one of those moments when fiction can brace itself against the urgency of the real.

There is still a lot that humans can and must do, but these activities can best be described in terms of avoiding extremes: We have entered the phase of harm reduction.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Gussmann's question addressed a problem that keeps all storytellers busy in a globalized age. Narratives thrive on the uniqueness of national and local communities (the nationalists have also been known to harness the power of storytelling). Climate change, on the other hand, is shockingly global. But with a phenomenon that so easily invites imaginative extremes, the question arises for climate storytellers as to how such narratives should end. Everything indicates that both apocalyptic alarmism and utopian technology optimism do not favor the necessary change, but instead lead to public incapacity and procrastination.According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is no longer possible to avoid measurable effects of climate change. There is still a lot that humans can and must do, but these activities can best be done under the aspect of 

 Describe

of extremes: We have entered the damage control phase.

Climate crisis: It's about damage control - "It could have been worse ..."

And damage control can be a problem when it comes to telling climate stories.

In the absence of overwhelming triumph or disaster, the narratives of damage control aim to appeal to a global audience with the various types of tragedies that lie in between.

When was the last time you saw a blockbuster that was advertised with the tag “It could have been worse ...”?

“Writing is like a huge lake,” the British writer Jean Rhys is said to have said to a friend. “There are big rivers that flow into the lake like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. And there are streams like Jean Rhys. I'm not important. The lake is important. ”Whether in the social sciences or in marketing studies, the call for narratives is often reminiscent of Rhys literary sensibility: each of us is a small tributary in the collective sea of ​​human experience.

However, with the advent of digital advertising, literary storytelling has given way to corporate strategists who harness the language and techniques of storytelling to sell: all that matters here is the results in practice. In the digital space, companies and individuals have become brands that no longer just satisfy the basic needs and desires of consumers, but also invite potential buyers to 

. The self-proclaimed marketing guru Joe Pulizzi wrote in a widespread article in 2012 entitled “The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing”: “Who would have ever thought that the future of marketing is actually not marketing at all, but publishing? "

The most famous advertising man of the 20th century, David Ogilvy, laid the foundation for marketing as a form of publication with his "soft sell" approach.

By using nuanced narrative to amuse consumers and get their attention, the seller is foregoing immediate business today in order to influence long-term buying habits tomorrow.

The “hard sell” approach, on the other hand, relies on impulse buying and prefers alarmistic, haunted language.

One could say that the discourse on telling stories about climate change has recently shifted from “hard sell” to “soft sell”.

Climate Change: Dramatic Potential of Damage Control as a Narrative Arc

There's a reason the kind of storyteller who wants to encourage action - to buy a ticket, to make a purchase, to support a political cause - is drawn to depicting extremes. Tales of catastrophes or the victory of good over evil take place according to simplified moral schemes and in areas beyond the control of the individual; support is easy because the villains and heroes are clear, as is the reader's commitment. Anyone aiming for quick and popular emotional attachment in fiction, therefore, might be wondering what dramatic potential damage control has as a narrative arc.

(In the course of worsening climate change, there are many incentives for cross-border military cooperation - also between opponents.)

Novelists call this a problem of content and form: the formal narrative structures that seem best suited to capture the public ecological imagination - dystopian thrillers, technological utopias, advertising campaigns, or political platforms that promise instant gratification - are not necessarily the ones that most are best suited to describe the potential realities we face.

This is, in fact, a solution to writer's block.

Climate change is not devoid of its own orderly moral scheme. Oil companies and politicians who actively oppose the energy transition are indeed doing a great evil to the world, while the inspiration for climate activism is claimed by new technologies and young people. From this point of view, the ethics of the energy transition seem to be quite simple. At the opening event of the 2051 Munich Climate Conference, Saleemul Huq, climate researcher and director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development, devised that a world in which climate change is contained, young people, economic development without fossil fuels and the leadership role of women and people of Color.Who could argue against the social and ecological value of this future or the associated redistribution of decision-making power?

For large parts of the population, adaptation will not feel like an immediate triumph

Yet the suspicion arises that between the oil companies and the charismatic, ambitious new generation of leaders we could build our hopes on, lies a vastly diverse segment of the world's population for whom adaptation will not feel like an immediate triumph : In no successful ecological future can a coal worker in West Virginia or South Africa keep his job; In no future climate will the citizens of low-lying atoll islands such as the Maldives or American Samoa escape an existential threat to their national sovereignty and their physical survival. A more complex narrative assumes long-term, achievable success, but also recognizes the short-term pain,that go hand in hand with economic change.

When I asked Bureau Grandezza about the role of damage control narratives that make room for results somewhere between sweeping triumph and disaster, there was a certain reluctance to accept the conclusion that a more optimistic future was out of the question . “I don't think we have to think about the in-between,” said Kohn, “because I think we're only telling this story at the moment.” He emphasized that it is still technically possible to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius stay, only "nobody seems to believe that it will happen". The aim of the second day of the conference was to make the 1.5-degree scenario credible without glossing over social injustices, he emphasized. After a break, his colleague Christiane Pfau added:“It's good for some, bad for others. And that's somehow dystopian and utopian at the same time. "

While marketing narratives are explicitly aimed at promoting targeted actions (sales) and reshaping reality (consumer perception), literary fictions, in contrast - to take up a concept of the writer Henry James - compete with reality.

Given the urgent need to change course in climate policy, what could an approach that prioritizes aesthetics over action do?

Narrative Policy Framework: Scientific data and facts for the public embedded in narratives

In an effort to use existing narrative styles for a climate game, a quasi literary narrative model has emerged, the Narrative Policy Framework, which argues that scientific data and facts of the public should be embedded in narratives that tell the story of political paths. The framework comprises four main elements: characters (victims, villains, and heroes), a political setting in which a problem is contextualized, a morality presented in the form of a solution to the political problem, and an action that encompasses these elements through relationships of Connects cause and effect. This is a welcome innovation that should and will be introduced in the field.

But it might also be useful to remember that for the modern novelist, the craft of storytelling beyond the paradigms of characters, setting, morals, and plot amounts to the art of steering reader expectations. In writing workshops, the thought of managing expectations is a true cliché. This is also true of other well-known tropes, such as the idea that the end of a story should be both inevitable and surprising: inevitable insofar as we expected it to be; Surprising insofar as the dissolution undermines these expectations to such an extent that the deal does not seem predetermined or artificial. The power of these stories does not lie in the fact that they provide a traceable,deliver a real purpose (truth and beauty are “purpose enough”, according to James), but rather in modeling how we prepare for and how we deal with an end that is impossible to predict.

Frank Kermode's 

, now considered to be one of the most important works of Western literary criticism of the 20th century, took the view that all literature, however different it may be, bears the traces of the age-old human desire, the end , especially the Apocalypse, to "make sense of it". This long-standing need to anticipate and manage crises through narrative is reflected in the history of our fictional frameworks, which, like scientific models, are constantly updated as our understanding of the world evolves.

When people began to recognize their own historical agency, the narratives moved away from the paradigmatic ancient narrative structures of the apocalypse - the Bible, the myth - towards undescribed structures that bypass any resolution; "They have become 'more open'", writes Kermode. The argument is that the Apocalypse is no longer seen as "imminent", as a conclusion to be anticipated, but as "immanent", as a permanent state that "extends" beyond the present; it has already arrived in the form of genocide, the hydrogen bomb and the environmental crisis. This opens up a vast, unpredictable space for what lies ahead, as we already live "in the midst of" extremes.

The climate crisis is difficult to grasp from a narrative point of view - ancient structures of apocalyptic prophecies

"In their general character, our fictions have certainly moved away from the simplicity of the paradigm," writes Kermode. And the relaxation of these genre conventions fundamentally changes the narrative experience for both the reader and the writer. The reader has fewer clues about the genre to set expectations from the start, while the author's responsibility is to discover new forms of narration that prepare the reader for a more moderate ending - one that closes the story but not necessarily the narrated world . An example: the reader of a classic tragedy knows that the play has to end with a death before he even turns to the text. For what we call modern literature, on the other hand, there are fewer guides. The author must teach the readerreading the plot from the ground up, building a "sense of the end" into each phase of the story.

American critic Francine Prose recalls discovering the power of controlling reader expectations in this way during a school exercise where she was asked to include the mention of eyes in Shakespeare's 

 that leads to the famous scene in which Gloucester's own eyes are gouged out: "[T] he language of sight and its opposite prepared us, consciously or unconsciously, for these violent mutilations." The blood is terrifying when it begins to flow - but in retrospect it becomes clear that Shakespeare prepared us for this outcome from the start. The fact that the reader is unable to divine the bloody ending, let alone explain its meaning, is part of what gives the piece its truthfulness. The more a story imitates the randomness and unpredictability of real life, the more it seems, according to Kermode, to belong to one of those stories “which, by upsetting the usual balance of our naive expectations,finds out something for us, something 

"

Perhaps one of the reasons why climate change is so difficult to grasp narrative is that this most modern of all crises so clearly reflects ancient structures of apocalyptic prophecies. Ordinary climate models predict the end of the world as literally and conclusively as medieval Christianity predicts the return of Jesus Christ in the year 1000 AD. This prophetic structure, relying on experts and data like previous prophecies, invites intuitive, ancient story arcs that dramatize the exploitative dynamics between divine powers and human mortals. At the same time, climate change couldn't be more topical, and neither could the attitude required to avert its most terrible manifestations; to prepare for less tragic endingsopenness to constant compromise is required.

Climate crisis: It's not about storytelling, it's about marketing - driving action in the real world

A few weeks after the Munich conference, I found myself at a Zoom seminar hosted by the Climate Transparency Report discussing how much the World Bank is lending to a coal-dependent, middle-income, segregated country like South Africa should, in which some 80,000 miners - most of whom live in rural areas, most of them black - could lose their jobs.

It is far too costly to keep coal-fired power plants in operation - but closing them also comes at a cost.

The modern novel models this type of modern consciousness, whose expectations are not so much tied to closed temporal ends, but to the negotiation of a present in permanent crisis: How difficult will the life of these protagonists be in the near future? The world did not end in AD 1000, just as it did not end on so many other times when it was believed. Nevertheless: "The apocalypse can be refuted without being discredited," writes Kermode. The raison d'être of modern literature is perhaps precisely to

the apocalyptic narratives 

which are so comforting in their simplicity and yet so terrifying in their finality. The end will always dominate the human imagination, but struggling with the knowing mindset that portrays it as imminent creates space for the frightening range of outcomes where life actually goes on.

So how can you sell compromises?

I went to the Munich Climate Change Conference as a novelist with the expectation to write about exercises on how to imagine different kinds of tragedies.

The longer I stayed in 2051, the more I became convinced that this was not about storytelling at all, but about marketing.

The more important the question of the audience's actions is for the story that is being told, the more it seems to me that we are moving from saying “The sea is important” to promoting action in the real world - especially about people sell short term costs for long term gains.

How do you write about the climate crisis?

Based on marketing methods

That's not to say that writers, novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights don't think about audiences, activism, or real-world outcomes. On the contrary: the interventionist theater methods of the collective Büro Grandezza deliberately blur the line between political activism and art. As member Benno Heisel said of the troupe's artistic relationship with the 2051 Conference: “It's an art project because that's what we're doing. However, the starting point and the aim of the project are political ideas. "

Yet even if artists may be politically motivated, most of them do not tell stories with the primary aim of influencing the behavior or consumer behavior of the audience in specific, measurable and reproducible ways. Even climate writer, journalist and activist Kim Stanley Robinson, whose latest novel 

 perhaps one of the most popular examples of climate narration, has said that above all else he wanted to "write a good novel." A salesperson, on the other hand, is only motivated to convince you to buy - or to participate in something you could not imagine before. They tell stories not only to captivate, but to convince.

Nevertheless, there is something fundamentally unsatisfactory, if not entirely inappropriate, when one imports the point of view of corporate strategists across the board. The ethical complexity of the energy transformation stretches across social and class hierarchies on a national and global level, complicates the roles of protagonists and antagonists and invites you to uncathartic limbo - coping with it requires enduring what novelists call “peripetias”, i.e. sudden strokes of fate that the energy transition will require.

Perhaps that is the reason why novels kept coming up at the Munich conference.

“So that everything stays the same, everything has to change,” paraphrased the climate economist Michael Pahle from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's 

, a modern Italian classic about a decadent Sicilian family in decline.

When I asked a young father who was attending the first day of the conference whether the morning's lectures had awakened any hope, he reached out to Franz Kafka: "There is an infinite amount of hope, just not for us."

Collective writer's block for climate narratives - if you are the first to find a solution, you share it with the others

Fortunately, it's not a storyteller's job to instill hope, but simply to strive for the truth - at least that's what Henry James says. The collective writer's block for climate narratives could therefore appear less insurmountable if the goal of saving life on earth is reduced to providing credible models for how people deal with expectations in a world that has deeply disappointed them - initially through the repeated Refutation of the impending apocalypse, then by the fact that the apocalypse can still sneak in through the back door of the present and its effects are also so unevenly distributed.

Climate change is one of the largest regressive taxes the world has ever seen. For policy makers in the uncomfortable position of devising plans to solve the problem while remaining open to a range of corrective actions, a good starting point might be to promise to end the losses for those who have to give up. to minimize. That probably means selling us the truth: in the short term, some will lose.

"The consumer is not an idiot," Ogilvy said in a famous phrase that turned out to be the best soft-sell selling proposition ever. This is how a novelist could tell a story about a quick change of course: If you take the 6:37 pm train from Berlin Südkreuz station to Munich, as I did to attend the 2051 Conference, you should know that it is shares in Leipzig. Half of them go to Munich, the other half to Jena, a city hundreds of kilometers to the north. If you pick the wrong half, you have a long night ahead of you.

Um meinen Fehler zu korrigieren, fuhr ich zu einem regionalen Knotenpunkt zurück, wo ich einen anderen Hochgeschwindigkeitszug nehmen konnte. Auf dem Weg dorthin traf ich einen jungen Arzt aus Mexiko, der den gleichen Anschlusszug nehmen wollte. Wir sprachen über Impfstoffe. Wir sprachen über die Fan-Fiction von Haruki Murakami. (Er hat einige solcher Werke geschrieben). Unser Regionalzug hatte Verspätung, und das Umsteigen würde knapp werden. Ein dritter Fahrgast ging in den Gängen auf und ab, um nach einem Schaffner Ausschau zu halten, der sich melden könnte. Arbeitete hier niemand? Wer zum Teufel war zuständig? Als wir in den Bahnhof einfuhren, unsere Taschen schulterten und uns zum Sprint bereit machten, scherzte ich: „Wer als Erster ankommt, hält die Tür auf.“

If you are the first to find a solution, you share it with the others.

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

 is a fiction and criticism writer.

She is the author of 

 and the forthcoming novel 

.

This article was first published in English on November 9, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.

* Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.

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