EmailIn her extraordinary book Flight Behaviour, novelist Barbara Kingsolver uses powerful visual metaphors brilliantly to bring the challenge of climate change into rude relief. The plot uses the disruption of the Monarch butterfly’s amazing trans-continental migration as a key twist to illustrate how our natural systems may be bumped brutally into difficult change.
She’s not averse to a colourful turn of phrase in her character’s speech. In one memorable scene, a beleaguered scientist, responding to yet another journalistic probing on the consistency and veracity of the climate evidence, deploys a devastating and haunting visual metaphor:
The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, ‘the canary is dead’. We are at the top of Niagara Falls [Tina] in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?
In over thirteen years of communicating around climate change I have rarely come across a passage that resonates better with people. I’ve used it extensively in talks around my own book Only Planet as I visited the butterflies’ over-wintering grounds while in Mexico during my flight-free adventure around the world. It leaves audiences emotionally reeling.
The mental image Kingsolver creates embodies the tipping points of climate science, our gentle, blissful and largely innocent rather than ignorant journey to where we are, and the imperative for action not debate, in a few coruscating sentences. It is powerful, memorable story-telling that really matters.
The new Weather Forecasts from 2050 that the UN have mocked up in advance of the next, genuinely critical, global climate summit attempt a similar feat: the generation of ‘salience’, the ability of an idea or issue to be prominent and conspicuous, to be comprehended in one’s mind’s eye, to feel real. We need these stories more than we can imagine.
We are creatures of time and space and what is proximal spatially and chronologically takes precedence and priority. As a result many have argued climate change is perfectly positioned to paralyse us. We enjoy our “lazy paddle” then panic when it’s all but too late at the point of the “audible roar”. We yearn for stories to help us make sense of the world, to understand it, our relationships with it and to each other.
Veteran communicators and campaigners like myself will recall the buzz of activist excitement around the film The Day After Tomorrow back in 2004. We were delighted, despite the Hollywoodisation of the story, that climate change was becoming more salient as a challenge.
At the time we dismissed the hyperbolic hysteria of the polar vortices that created the vicious cold snap in the movie as classic excitable exaggeration. But I can’t have been the only one last winter watching weather warnings in the US of “air cold enough to freeze your eye-balls” with concern. Dramatised blockbuster had become reality. It was a story of sobering salience.
Beyond the slick holographic and retro The Day Today graphics, the UN’s mid century weather reports make interesting viewing. A pragmatic mix of problem stories, severe droughts, extreme heat, Venetian-style urban flooding, with opportunities like the Anchorage Olympics, solar farms and Arctic tourism, the content is balanced and even-handed.
This is not propaganda, it is provocation – generating salience, asking questions, challenging assumptions and telling stories from our possible, or perhaps quite probable, future. Clever creativity like this won’t be world-changing by itself, but the paradigm shift underway as we respond to climate change is as much a cultural revolution as it is an environmental imperative and economic challenge.
Movies, movements, literature, drama, art and activism all have a role to play as we crank our close-to-home, short-termist brains from an immediate, instinctive, intuitive ‘lion-in-savannah’ mode and into a ruminative, reflective, radical ‘creeping-middle-distance-threat’ defence.
In doing so, our ability to imagine ourselves in achievable futures, both a little dystopian but most importantly potentially more utopian, will be instructive.
Now where’s my paddle? We’ve got some tricky waters to navigate.
• Ed Gillespie is author of ‘Only Planet - a flight-free adventure around the world’ and Co-Founder of sustainability change agency Futerra.
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