The stories we tell

THIS ESSAY IS ESSENTIALLY A REVIEW OF A REVIEW.  ON AUGUST 4, THE JOURNAL NATURE PUBLISHED A REVIEW OF A NEW BOOK, CAPTURED FUTURES: RETHINKING THE DRAMAOF ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS.   The book was written by two Dutch political scientists, Maarten Hajer and Jereon Oomen.  The review was written by another political scientist in the Netherlands, Philip Mcnaughten.

I haven’t read the book.  The critiques I offer here are aimed at assertions in Mcnaughten’s review, which may or may not apply to the book itself.  The headline of the review— “Environmental politics is doomed to fail unless we tell better stories” — caught my attention because I’ve spent my entire adult life telling stories intended to move people to care for the planet.  After graduate study in wildlife ecology, I spent the next 40 years telling those stories in a variety of venues and media.  I tell them still.  And after a lifetime spent in the effort to galvanize public interest in the health of our communal environment, I fully agree with McNaughten’s opening statement:

“The book starts by marshalling evidence that environmental politics is falling short on global environmental health.  It’s a familiar list, including unmet targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and continuing losses of biodiversity, fertile soils and fresh water.”

Mcnaughten is right about that.  However, he immediately adds that the problem is not “a lack of political will, or regulatory or state obstacles, but because of the conceptual framework— the “dramaturgical regime”— through which the rules and conventions of environmental politics are being enacted and performed.”

My difference of opinion on this observation and others Mcnaughten makes may arise from a difference in geography— the situation may be much different in western Europe than here in the United States.  I can only say there is overwhelming evidence of a “lack of political will” in environmental debates here in the U.S.  This is, to some degree, the result of sophisticated influence campaigns mounted by well-funded special interest groups.  It leads to a variety of “regulatory and state obstacles,” as well as legal deliberations, that interfere with the adoption of sound environmental practices and/or their implementation.

These special interests have existed for at least as long as modern capitalism, but, here in the U.S., they’ve often been overwhelmed by populist movements that galvanized support for conservation and the environment from the public at large.  Such movements grew in power and influence from the 1870s through the 1970s and resulted in significant reforms.  The world’s first national park and park system; national forests and grasslands; federal wildlife refuges; effective protection of game and nongame wildlife, including endangered species; protection of wild and scenic rivers; massive conservation programs to protect water, soil, and wildlife on farmland; federal acts to control air and water pollution— the list of environmental programs adopted in the U.S. over the vehement objections from special interests is long.

It seems to me that the difference between that era and the modern circumstance is the public’s dwindling interest in such matters.  For 40 years, I’ve watched the conservation/environmental coalition fracture and erode while the vast majority of the American public has steadily lost interest in the natural world that supports us all.  As the consensus has fallen apart, the environmental community has fallen back on feel-good compromises, the search for “win-win” solutions and “positive-sum outcomes,” which, as Macnaughten rightly implies, are hard to find and seldom effective at large scale.  Real environmental reform has nearly always had winners and losers; the difference today is that the potential losers seem to have the upper hand in any debate over sustainable use of the planet.

Is this, as McNaughten suggests, because we aren’t telling the right stories or aren’t telling them well enough?  I guess that depends on which storytellers we consider.  Mcnaughten is critical of the environmental messages popular with what he describes as the “liberal establishment”— subjects like decolonization, market-based solutions, and “value-neutral facts.”  I might agree with him there, but he goes on to write that   “ecological politics needs to tell a more aspirational story.  We need to move from stories that evoke fear and despair towards ones that give hope and renewal.”

I wonder about that.  There are many stories being told that evoke hope and renewal.  Consider the recovery of iconic species like the bald eagle, trumpeter swan, whooping crane, and California condor.  These stories have been told over and over again since the first efforts to save them began.  Have these heartening examples of success resulted in redoubled support for the programs that saved them?  I think not.  Our efforts to avoid polluting our rivers and lakes have been overwhelmingly successful.  Have the stories of those successes led to more enthusiastic support for the programs and technologies that keep our water clean?  I think not.  Funding for soil and water conservation on the nation’s farmland has reduced loss of soil and pollution from fertilizers and pesticides and slowed the loss of many species of wildlife.  Have the stories covering those successes increased public support for farm conservation programs?  I think not.

It’s been widely asserted that all the depressing articles on environmental degradation have pushed the American public to despair.  People have lost hope, the argument goes, and have just given up.  I wonder about that.  I think it far more likely that the vast majority of Americans simply aren’t aware of the condition of the environment, and, when they happen to encounter the introduction to a story that might enlighten them, they turn the page, change the channel, or swipe to a different video.  Despair is not the problem.  Willful ignorance is the problem.  And all the good news stories in the world won’t solve that.

It may well be that a century of success in the environmental arena has led us to a paralyzing sense of complacency.  Conservation/environmental progress in America began in the nineteenth century, not with good news, but with the worst possible news.  The extinction of the passenger pigeon— five billion birds erased in the space of one human generation.  The Carolina parakeet.  The bison.  Catastrophic wildfires that killed thousands of people.  Floods that did the same.  The loss of millions of acres of fertile topsoil.  The Dust Bowl.  Rivers catching fire.  It took a drumbeat of gut-wrenching stories to move America to action, and I suppose we’re to be forgiven if the results of those actions have left two or three generations with the impression that nothing more needs to be done.

If there’s a silver lining to the black cloud of environmental emergency that afflicts us, it may be that the Public, capital P, is now being forced to confront problems they would prefer to ignore.  That pressure to pay attention is bound to intensify.  The first rule of communication is that it requires two people— one to speak, one to listen.  As the environmental realities of the twenty-first century reach out and touch people— wildfire, flood, drought, lethal heat, pollution, lack of food, lack of water— more will begin to listen.  The stories may not be pleasant, but people will want to hear them because the first step toward solving a problem is understanding it.

Set against that goad is our continued growth as a species, which steadily increases the tension between our demands on the earth and the capacity of the earth to fulfill them.  Can 10 billion humans make room for the rest of life on the planet?  And even if it’s theoretically possible, are we willing to make the changes, the sacrifices, necessary to accommodate the diverse ecosystems our fellow species require?  I struggle to find a good-news way of considering that future.

I can’t begin to guess where the contest between these two forces will finally come to rest.  My ecological training tells me that we’ll find our way to a sustainable relationship with the earth simply because there’s no other workable option, but it also whispers that the way will be long and fraught with pain.  We’ve painted ourselves into a corner— there’s no comfortable way out.

Mcnaughten thinks we should sugar-coat that message.  I don’t see how we can.  Or why we should.  Nothing in the history of the conservation and environmental movements suggests that a focus on good news moves the broad majority of people to action.  People respond to trouble, particularly the kind of trouble that touches them personally.  As the gravity of the environmental situation impinges on more lives, more people will begin to pay attention, not only to the difficulties they see themselves but to the broader forces that cause the trouble.  If the stories we’re telling now haven’t motivated more people, it’s because many people aren’t ready to listen, not because the stories lack force.

Like many people who have labored in the movement, I mourn our communal inertia over the last 40 years, the loss of time that could have been put to such good use, but changing the stories we tell won’t move people to make the hard choices we face.  They have to be ready to listen, and it’s increasingly clear that the trajectory of environmental problems will inevitably open their minds.

As for hope: it’s an overrated commodity.  The most casual review of history will reveal dozens of examples of people continuing to strive without any hope; in fact, those are some of the people we most admire.  What we need is a clear-eyed understanding of what needs to be done, even if the outcome is in doubt.  With hope or without it, the choice boils down to Andy Dufresne’s hard-edged line in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

That’s damn right.