Please Look After This Land

springcoppice apologises for the long period of radio silence. I’ve been in the Pacaya Samiria, the largest national reserve in the Peruvian Amazon, co-leading an expedition of young people from around the UK with the British Schools Exploring Society (BSES). Some field updates are available on our blog here, but once our zap email connection failed we were reduced to telegrammatic messages by satellite phone, so when it comes to written reflection on our activities, that’s going to have to happen after the fact, here and elsewhere.

The post-expedition blues are a well-documented phenomenon, and many of our young explorers are reporting feeling very flat now that they’re back in the UK. But the period after a long time away offers a great opportunity to do a lot of careful thinking about the expedition experience – thinking that simply isn’t possible when you’ve got food, clean water, shelter etc. to worry about, and when (in our case) there are 62 of you on two fairly small boats up the Amazon. This post-expedition reflection phase can be a difficult time, but it’s an important one.

BSES is committed to the completion of meaningful scientific projects on all of the expeditions it puts into the field each year. This year we were assisting a team of Peruvian scientists from the University of Iquitos in gathering biodiversity data. The information is given to the authorities of the national reserve, and helps make the case for the ongoing protection of the region. This worthy cause has to be reiterated at the more tedious moments in our survey work – baking under the sun in a boat, drifting down river looking for turtles for many hours, it’s important to remind yourself how your efforts will ultimately be used in the maintenance of the area’s status as protected land.

While our expedition is given meaning by this scientific context, the Pacaya Samiria’s designation as a national reserve is not to be accepted unquestioningly. During our expedition we were keen to find out about the people who were displaced from their land, by military force, in 1970 in order for the government to establish this reserve. While our contemporary notion of the rainforest as the “lungs of the Earth” chimes with an attempt to protect and conserve the Pacaya Samiria, questions must be asked about the complex web of motivations that actually contribute to conservation status for any area of land. Rumours abound of government interest in this region’s natural resources – predominantly wood and oil, the very industries that, along with agribusiness, place the rainforest under greatest threat.

The people previously resident in the Pacaya Samiria were mostly of the ethnic group Cocama-Cocamilla. Since the 1970s, many of them have stayed within approved villages near the edges of the reserve, close to their hereditary land, but given only restricted access to its resources. Many more have left the area for Iquitos and Lima, beginning an entirely different way of life. For those that have stayed, the negotiations with the park authorities have not been easy. It is the Cocama-Cocamilla people that know this land best, and yet their levels of education in matters of policy and government cannot compete with those sent from Lima to run the reserve. Many C-C people are determined to work for the reserve, helping to protect and monitor its resources, but they are limited to guarding and guiding roles, while those with real power are imported from the capital. This educational gap will only be filled when external scholarships are available, so that C-C people can achieve the necessary degrees to take powerful positions within the Pacaya Samiria. There is great sadness and anger amongst C-C people and their friends that the lands of their forebears are being controlled by those who, by dint of background, do not understand the way of life that persists, in displaced and modified form, within the reserve. But there is hope, too, that by forming alliances with organisations beyond Peru, some of these problems might be shared with the world. The people of the Pacaya Samiria want the land protected – a situation such as that in Bagua is to be avoided at all costs. But the designation of a reserve, for all its protective powers, is not a simple matter. Our primary job in the Amazon this summer was the monitoring of birds and mammals, but it was by factoring people back into the equation that we really came to understand the contested status of any conservation area.

Once Upon a Time

All this talk of stories in relation to climate change, and it turns out Philip Pullman got there about thirteen years before the rest of us: "we'd all do well to remember that 'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart." Pullman was writing, in an article entitled "The Moral's in the Story, Not the Stern Lecture," on the issue of children's moral education, not specifically on issues of climate, but what an effective and concise way he found to express the role of storytelling in creating behavioural change. He writes:

"True moral education takes place whenever anyone, of whatever age, encounters a story with an open mind. Why else is the Bible full of stories? Why did Aesop tell fables instead of saying 'Thou shalt not'? Were the great teachers fools? They taught with the help of stories because stories work."

But there are pitfalls in the unthinking adoption of stories as a route to changing attitudes and behaviours, since "we might fall into the danger of assuming a mechanical connection. Hear this, behave like that. [...] It doesn't work like that." And several factors must be in place for the morally or socially transformative power of stories to be invoked:

1. "Stories work secretly, and almost never in ways we can predict."

2. "They work in silence."

3. "They work when they're given time."

4. "They work when they're left alone."

5. "They work when they're not explained"

6. "They work when a reader encounters a character whose fate rings true, and when a thrill of recognition makes the skin prickle or the heart pound."

7. "Good stories work better than bad ones because they're more interesting [...] they're richer. [...] They're built to last longer."

8. "They show that actions have consequences."

9. "they pass the time, they help us to endure."

Points 5, 6 and 7 seem of particular importance to stories of our changing climate, encouraging us to steer away from bald didacticism towards rich, complex tales that have aesthetic and artistic value as well as the ring of truth. Pullman notes in conclusion that, in educating children in moral matters (and, we infer, in educating any person of any age in relation to climate change) we need only three things: "books, time and silence." In this way, climate stories might be enabled to "help us to endure." With such stories forming an important body of ethically oriented work alongside climate science and policy reports, we might say that "The Moral's in the Story, Not the Stern Review."

More Stories

The following reports on the recent "Changing Climate Stories" event are now posted:

Dan Box, "Storytelling"

Robert Butler, "Journeys into the Future"

Robert Butler, "The Action of Telling Stories"

Samantha Ellis, "Coping and Hoping; Stories About Climate"

Caspar Henderson, "The Child in Time"

Caleb Klaces, "Narrative Shift: Telling Stories About Climate"

The Answer, My Friend

Having spent the last week thinking about the potential of various forms of storytelling to mobilise action for the mitigation of climate change, I’ve been led back to a longstanding interest: the protest song. In this excerpt from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Hugh Laurie sends up Bob Dylan, mumbling the end of the refrain “All we’ve gotta do is...” to indicate that, while protest songs have (or certainly had in Dylan’s '60s/'70s heyday) cultural caché, they rarely provide the answers to the calamities they catalogue. While Laurie’s performance works – the audience know the song tradition that is being sent up here, and they associate it with Dylan – his target seems mis-chosen. Dylan’s connection to bona fide protest songs was limited to the earliest stages of his career and, as archive footage of press conferences included in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) attests, he was not keen on the label “protest singer.” Dylan’s rejection of the chance to make explicit statements about his social and political beliefs infuriated some – Joan Baez’s “To Bobby” being perhaps the most heartfelt example of the left’s feelings of abandonment. Today’s environmental campaigners persist in adopting Dylan – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) is consistently wheeled out as an early environmental campaign piece, a response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Dylan’s rejection of this reading is, it seems, of no consequence. The singer’s departure into thematically obscure and fascinating lyrics for the main body of his long career cannot save him from this uncomfortable “protest singer” tag. But Laurie’s performance is about more than the persistence of Dylan’s image as countercultural hero. It indicates that a song which laments contemporary predicaments has a responsibility to suggest solutions. Not doing so creates an empty gesture – one which is, apparently, laughable. This is a major issue, beyond the scope of this blog, but one which is worth considering in light of this week’s thinking about stories. How much emphasis can be placed upon “awareness raising” or protest in relation to climate change without sensible suggestions being made as to alternative policies or behaviours? Is this the job of art? Should we – must we – send answers blowin’ in the wind?

Telling the Times

On the 20th June springcoppice took part in a discussion entitled “Changing Climate Stories,” organised by Robert Butler (whose blog post here summarises our day), warmly hosted by ArtsAdmin and funded by Artists Project Earth. Robert’s post here gives a partial line-up of the sixteen writers, activists, journalists and academics involved in the discussion – an eclectic mix which was rather surprised to find itself on common ground in one particular way: it seemed we all had a lot to say about stories. The subjects covered, loosely framed by issues of displacement and migration, were wide-ranging, but storytelling recurred as our leitmotif. I wondered why that was. Were we preselected to be fascinated by narrative and by stories? Had the title of our discussion sent us all scurrying in search of the latest thinking on the links between storytelling and climate change activism? (We could start here if so).

I want to suggest that links between climate change and stories are deeper rooted than this; that the story – any story – and the discourse of climate change are logical bedfellows. A story is constructed in language and unfolds over time; whether spoken or written it is particular to its teller and that teller’s locale; each retelling shifts its meaning, each new audience its interpretation; it charms and persuades; it has the power to captivate and bewitch. To consider climate change is also to consider language. The language used to describe the concept of climate change is itself contested – are we dealing with “global warming” or “global heating,” “climate change” or “climate catastrophe”? Are those displaced by a situation exacerbated by environmental factors “refugees,” “climate migrants,” or “forced climate migrants”? Climate change, as it is represented in scientific, popular scientific, journalistic or creative work, is also a matter of history, of unfolding. Climate science attempts to predict the future, with competing models vying for the greatest claim to accuracy. Campaigners rely upon sand timer models which implore both the public and the policymakers to appreciate that time is running out. Those that deny the scope of the human contribution to climate change do so through the suggestion that the past has been misunderstood, and the future misforecast. Popular scientific and journalistic discourse is filled with tipping points, apocalypses and imagined futures.

In this narrative landscape, of course our stories – poems, novels, plays, memoirs, essays – will approach issues of history, time and memory in an unprecedented way. While the formal revolutions of postmodernism created narratives in which time became uncertain, such strategies often resulted in a breaking of the narrative frame – we were invited to think again about the nature of storytelling, of the status of the story as a constructed, open ended work. Today, our narratives play with time in response to the overarching question of climate change – the priority has shifted from the storytelling itself, to the tale told, the message of the story, and the likely responses of the reader. This imagined future on the smallest scale – the future anticipated thoughts and actions of the reader of or listener to the narrative – is the point where storytelling meets activism. Stories have the advantage over scientific data in this respect. While science has the analytical tools to predict the future, beyond modelling it cannot imaginatively inhabit the future it predicts. This is where stories come in.

Andrew O’Hagan’s description of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as “The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation” is a problematic one due to the uncertain cause of the apocalypse it depicts, but it is interesting because is suggests a) that a new trend of fiction has arisen in response to our increased awareness of impending environmental catastrophe, and b) that there is a generation of the globally warmed – a generation that understands itself as such, that situates itself in history by association with an environmental predicament that is considered, in all discourses, as in part a matter of the control of time through accurate forecast and prediction. This is, then, an era in which our stories rethink issues of temporality in response to the discourse of climate change. In doing so, such stories take up imaginative residence in a future that science can predict, but cannot make vivid. To tell a story, as we agreed on Saturday, is to perform an action. But more than this, we are in an era that is, as a result of these journeys into the future, peculiarly self-reflexive. We look back at our present efforts to address climate change, to tell adequate stories about that process of change, with the critical eye of our imagined future selves. What we discovered on Saturday was that we all – as various kinds of storyteller – had an acute sense of our place in a globally warmed generation.