We grow up listening to and telling stories. In fact, every night, as millions of moms and dads put their kids to bed, they will read books to or tell tales to those kids. And in turn, those moms and dads, just like everyone else, reflect their lives and the events that are happening, big or small, in the structure of a story. Narrative structures allow us to gain understanding of events and how they relate to one another and to our lives. This is not something we learn at school, but something we already experience as small children (Alda 2017: 164–165). As Alexander puts it: we are all story-telling animals (Alexander 2003: 84). A good story can be suspenseful, engaging, building a sense of belonging, give meaning and order to a complex world. And it can be persuasive. This book is about such stories, trying to make sense of one of the biggest environmental crises we have faced so far: climate change. And it is about those who tell these stories to fight climate change: environmental activists, politicians, civil society actors, and even artists. Climate change is a highly complicated problem; it is made up of complex climatological data, of economic reasoning, empathy for others and day-to-day and long-term politics. It touches on the kind of society we live in, its logic and its shortfalls. But in order to make the fight against climate change a priority, climate advocates need to tell stories, to mobilize people and guide their actions (Shenhav 2015: 5). In its 2016 flagship report, the German advisory council on global change called for narratives of and for change (WBGU 2016) to encourage innovations and to connect with the cultural fabric of society. But the current discourse about sustainability and changing environmental conditions is not taking place in a vacuum. It is already spun into a web of meaning, the problem gets translated into a story with all the required elements: heroes, villains, victims, an object of struggle, a beginning, middle, end, and morale of the narrative.
Climate change as a macro-environmental issue meets the criteria of “super-wicked problems” (Lazarus 2009: 1159), i.e. problems that are characterized by uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge, and high stakes. Climate, as a common pool resource (Renn 2011), poses one of the most pressing policy problems our society is facing today. However, climate change seems to be the first environmental crisis in which experts appear more alarmed than the public. “People think about ‘global warming’ in the same way they think about ‘violence on television’ or ‘growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all” (Hamblyn 2009: 234). The impacts of a changing climate are hard to grasp and solutions to the problems are diverse, complex, and controversial. Public perception of associated risks plays a huge role when it comes to support for climate policies and this perception is culturally determined: “Culture affects how humans understand the world, because we make sense of the world by cultural means” (Arnoldi 2013: 107). Berger and Luckmann ([1990], c1966) famously stated how our reality is the result of social construction, a collective effort to make sense of the world as we see it. The way we construct this reality by means of social communication has been subject to a wide range of sociological research. Goffman (2010) introduced framing as a means to read and understand situations and activities in social life. Helgeson et al. stress the role of cognitive structures in his concept of a mental model, which is “a person’s internal, personalized, intuitive, and contextual understanding of how something works” (Helgeson et al. 2012: 331). Boholm provides the concept of culture as shared schemata that allow us to process meanings and order information due to defined categories, relationships and contexts (Boholm 2003: 168).
This book analyzes narratives in qualitative data – interviews conducted with US-American and German climate advocates, i.e. people who are dedicated to fighting climate change and to engaging and motivating people around them. The analysis draws on existing narrative theory and suggestions for narrative analysis. The aim is to add to the understanding of environmental communication, especially in the field of climate change. Much existing discourse analysis addressing the topic of climate change focuses on media representation of the discourse (Boykoff 2008; Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Downs 1972), the debate between climate sceptics and climate advocates (Hoffman 2011; The Pew Research Center 2007), or takes an instrumental stand on the issue by asking how climate change communication should look like in order to achieve agreements (manipulate) within the civil society (Hart and Nisbet 2011; Moser and Dilling 2011; Moser 2010). Focusing on media representation is valuable to see which information the wider society gains, however, this field analyzes communication elements that have already been processed and are shaped according to the rules of the media landscape. Focusing on the tensions and arguments made between climate advocates and their opponents enhances factual understanding of pro-/ con arguments and might help to address them properly (if one’s goal is to better climate change communication). But this approach neglects that mistakes have been made in the communication process before the pro-climate arguments are re-told by the media. A purely instrumental in-order-to-approach won’t reveal the cultural process of civil discourse, because it is too strongly focused on providing recipes for communication handbooks. With the help from cultural theory social sciences can contribute to the understanding of environmental communication by considering that communication processes are not at all specific to one subject but follow inherent rules that need to be uncovered. For this, narrative analysis can “help investigators think about ‘non-rational’ characteristics of environmentally relevant situations” (Shanahan et al. 1999: 417).
Using This Book
This book is on the one hand a coherent story itself, making the case for strong narrative research in the social sciences and presenting empirical findings to exemplify how such research efforts could look like. On the other hand, the different chapters can be used on their own and serve different purposes: the second chapter, that deals with social sciences’ research into the topic of climate change proposes a starting point for those who are interested in the social and cultural sciences’ role in climate communication and environmental studies. The third chapter on narrative analysis might be of interest for students who are just starting out in the field of narrative analysis. It provides an in-depth overview of the origins of narrative analysis and application examples. The fourth and fifth chapter presents and discusses findings in the empirical data conducted for this study only. It suggests a blueprint on how to make use of narrative theory for understanding stories and their use for environmental communication.
This book is not a cookbook for communication strategies; you will not find direct recommendations, claiming to put this topic or that topic at the center and one actor group as a villain and another as a hero. What you will hopefully take away from this book are insights into the art and power of telling stories about real-life events and the pitfalls that come along with them. Mostly, instead of focusing on the audience and trying to figure out what a specific audience might want to hear, this study goes where those stories originate, before they are observed by an audience: the people who are telling these stories, their reasoning and their struggles. This book tells the story of the storyteller.
References
- Alda, A. (2017). If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. New York: Random House.
- Alexander, J. C. (2003). On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama. In J. C. Alexander (Ed.), The Meanings of Social Life. A Cultural Sociology (pp. 27–84). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
- Arnoldi, J. (2013). Risk (1st ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
- Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. ([1990], c1966). The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology ...