Climate Crisis

How do we cut through the ‘white noise’ of climate change?

Helen Shaw makes the case for the power of imagination and storytelling

Visual reporting by graphic artist Eimear McNally at a recent DCU workshop on communicating climate action
Visual reporting by graphic artist Eimear McNally at a recent DCU workshop on communicating climate action
Helen Shaw
Thu Jun 13 2024 - 06:00

The Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason, in On Time and Water – A History of Our Future wrote that for most people the phrase “climate change” is just white noise. We know it’s out there, but it is often hard to relate to the mundane details of our daily lives.

I was reminded of Magnason, and his storyteller’s sense that the vastness of climate change must land in our own personal histories, during a recent workshop with people working to communicate climate action. Some described apathy as being more challenging to confront than climate denial and that the “climate” label itself is a block to engagement. “It’s become a stop sign”, one said, “We’re very good at telling people the things they have to stop doing but not so good at showing them the benefits – how it can make life better”.

In many ways phrases like “climate change” or even “global warming” cannot begin to allow us to imagine an entire reordering of human society and how it will shape us. It’s no wonder we deny, deflect and avoid it. We’re being asked to think about an existential crisis that is outside the horror stories we know.

The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh in his book The Great Derangement describes the climate crisis as one “of culture and thus of the imagination”. But if it is a question of “imagining the unthinkable”, as Ghosh puts it, we’ve also been slow to ignite our human creativity to go beyond the doomsday scenarios and begin to envisage an alternative and better future.

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A recent powerful report by The Guardian captures the frustration and despair of global climate scientists who say we are not listening. It has wrongly been framed as “doomism” and giving up on the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming to a 1.5-degree increase over pre-industrial levels. The 380 scientists, all researchers in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe dystopian futures, with a 2.5 degrees increase in global warming, not because they are doom merchants but because they say they have failed to get political leaders to care.

“They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know,” Dr Ruth Cerezo-Mota is quoted. But then as journalist David Wallace Wells expressed in The Uninhabitable Earth “we have engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever did in ignorance”. More than half the global carbon dioxide emissions, through burning fossil fuels, has happened since the landmark UN Framework Convention Climate Change in 1992.

So if facts alone are not enough, what do we need to do to make people care? At the time the IPCC scientists released their stark 2023 report, poet Jane Clarke wrote a short poem called Morning Ireland. A mother and a child sit in a crowded waiting room while the radio is a background buzz. The young girl hears the phrase time bomb and asks what it is. Something that will be dangerous, her mother says, if it’s not dealt with before it’s too late:

But when is it too late? her daughter

persists and now we’re all listening

to hear what her mother will say.

Poetry, like visual art and music, invites us in. It raises questions. Clarke’s poem is now being used, with her permission, as a way to open conversations within community climate cafes. Connecting climate science with the toolkit of creativity, storytelling and the imagination can help shift knowledge into understanding and turn empathy into action. It lets us ask questions.

The power of first-person stories is also that of shared experience. I could tell you every fact about grief, but it is only through experience, either your own, or through the story of someone else, even through a book or film, that you can begin to understand it. If climate change, as Margaret Atwood says, is everything change then it is also a story of how we understand profound loss, our place and our part in it, and how we envisage a shared future.

Beyond facts people need to see themselves in the complexity of the story; to see their daily lives reflected in what’s happening and what is possible. First-person stories of impact and positive change, like Connecting Cabra’s urban grassroots work or Hometree’s restorative approach to land use show how transformative action demands personal ownership. To cut through the “white noise” people need to know what agency they have. When we unpack what moves us from passivity to action it is not just about caring – but about believing we have the ability to make a difference like in Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small To Make a Difference book.

So how should we respond to the despair of climate scientists? As the New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert says, in her essential Climate Change from A-Z, “Despair is unproductive. It is also a sin.” We have no alternative but to work to engage hearts and open minds, but we need a broader coalition of influence bringing research and culture, including sport (look at Bohemians) together. That influence needs to push up as well as down. Policymakers respond to electorates but challenging policy actions like the smoking ban twenty years ago show the impact of focusing influence on those who have leverage. Even Margaret Thatcher, influenced by Sir Crispin Tickell, played a decisive role in mainstreaming green issues in the 1980s and tackling ozone depletion.

Climate scientists need to accept that the knowledge deficit theorem, described by philosopher and activist Kathleen Dean Moore, is at play in relation to climate change. Knowledge alone won’t move us unless it carries meaning for us. Moore says the big question we need to bring into the public discourse is “what do we love, what do we value, so much that we’re not prepared to lose?” and then use that as a compass to guide action.

Anything done out of fear will ultimately result in failure, the only way that we can create a sustainable future is to act out of love

—  Nick Roth - composer

Another way is to ask people to describe what their deepest fear for the future, for themselves or their children, in ten- or twenty-years time, and then what is their deepest hope, their imagined future, and then ask what is the gap between hope and fear and what are they doing to bridge it. This can work for policymakers and corporate leaders too.

The idea that the bridge from knowledge to understanding, apathy to empathy, passivity to action is through love, not fear, is why imagination holds such potency in climate engagement. But it is also why nature itself is the most creative persuader. There’s a scene near the end of Birdsong, the documentary film featuring ornithologist Seán Ronayne, when he and his partner stand in awe under the extraordinary beauty of a murmuration. Love of what we have and what we may lose, is a powerful trigger to action.

“Anything done out of fear will ultimately result in failure, the only way that we can create a sustainable future is to act out of love” composer Nick Roth concluded in a radio series We Only Want The Earth, we made in March. For Roth, and Ronayne, that love is triggered by the wonder of being in nature. Sitting under a night sky on a cliff in Portrane, along with strangers, watching for traces of the Aurora Borealis, reminded me how wonder makes us look up, pay attention and see our place on Earth and in poet Mary Oliver’s “the family of things”.

If we shift from listening to caring, from apathy to empathy, climate scientists and activists agree we already have the most powerful tool to act – by voting for political leadership prepared to envision and realise a climate-just and resilient future for all.

Helen Shaw (@athenamediaie) runs Athena Media, has an MSc in Climate Change and is working with DCU Centre for Climate & Society to develop resources to enable climate engagement