Caught in the Web

Sad news today: “The internet is killing storytelling.” Recently there’s been much debate about the role of storytelling in helping us understand, and take steps towards managing / mitigating, the human contribution to our changing climate. Robert Butler, Alette Willis and Robert Macfarlane (following Bill McKibben) have all thought through the importance of stories in this context, and the issue has been a major concern of this blog. Yet the fact that the preceding sentences contain a number of links to other pages on the web demonstrates that a lot of the public discourse of climate change is taking place online. So while storytelling is crucial to understanding changing climates, and while a large proportion of the myriad debates on this issue take place on the web, the latter is anathema to the story. Why? Due to issues of temporality. While the web (as its name suggests) enables connections across previously prohibitive geographical distances, allowing debate across millions of miles, the appetite for quick as well as easy access prevents the telling of tales that unfold over a period of time in excess of the morning flit from blog to blog. While we associate the web with the futuristic and the cutting edge, it can offer (suggests Ben Macintyre in The Times) only glimmers and glimpses of stories about the future (or, for that matter, the past). Macintyre claims that “The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative.”

Macintyre’s claim recalls the public concern about the shift from the long-length undifferentiated format of nineteenth century newspapers, to the imaginative lay-outs and ad-heavy prints of the papers of the modernist period. There was concern that the newspapers were pandering to a public appetite for “minces and snippets” (claimed Edward Dicey, writing in 1905). Yet it was technology that facilitated the shift towards the new ways: roll feeders that allowed a swift flow of paper through the presses, ultimately enabling up-to-the-minute reports; new developments in typesetting; cheaper paper after customs duties were no longer levied per page etc. We have a familiar debate here: did the public demonstrate an appetite that was sated by the developing technologies of the press, or was the readership fed fragments until it became attuned only to that way of reading? If coherent narratives are our best chance of imagining our climate futures, and therefore a promising prompt to action, and if the web is the place where people increasingly head for information on climate issues, perhaps it’s time for “restorying” the web (to borrow Alette’s term) in the hope that public appetite for a nourishing narrative might be re-established. But as Macintyre states “The blog is a soap box, not a story,” so I dismount.

Future-Oriented, Radically-Imagined Polar Bears

In a 350-word statement commissioned by Bill McKibben’s 350.org, Rebecca Solnit hits upon several ongoing preoccupations of this blog: polar bears as the poster boys of climate change and indicative of synecdochic thinking, the temporal models of the discourse of climate crisis, and the possible role of the imagination in averting that crisis. Solnit begins: “Remember that twenty thousand polar bears are on your side,” a well-worn opening gambit, and therefore an odd choice of starting point for a piece that ultimately makes the claim that “what needs to be the most radical is your imagination.” She is not alone in beginning here, with reference to an animal with particular appeal, of course. The Scott Polar Research Institute’s excellent online archive of expedition photographs contains a section devoted not (as elsewhere) to specific expeditions, but to “penguins,” testament surely to the appetite of the press for these images as a kind of shorthand for our fragile world.

For Solnit, our responsibility in placing pressure on governments to make tough decisions for the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change (and the saving of the bears) is to shift our orientation away from the present moment, and consider the “tens of billions yet unborn who could live decent lives over the next several centuries if we get radical in this one.” In a recent lecture, inaugurating his Personal Chair in Ethics at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, Michael Northcott suggested that the Communion of Saints offers a model for this kind of trans-generational thinking, potentially moving us away from our status as “now people” (as defined in this recent IPPR report). The Communion connects the dead, the living and the unborn in a web of mutual responsibility (although, as Northcott noted, after the twelfth century this web was somewhat reimagined as a narrative, in which a foretaste of future paradise was available in the present). Solnit claims that the path to future-oriented activism is a radical imagination that contributes a vital emotionally compelling aspect to climate forecasting: “Scientists have described the inferno this world could become with runaway carbon levels. Will we let it happen because we could not imagine these glaciers melting […] these seas dying, these croplands failing, these famines taking away millions?” The role of the imagination within environmental activism, and in particular within climate change campaigning, has been much discussed in recent years, but Solnit’s piece, after an unimaginative beginning, finds a new way to frame what is at stake here: if climate change continues unmitigated, it will in part be the result of a failure of the human imagination.