Climate Change and Storytelling: Narratives and Cultural Meaning in Environmental Communication

© The Author(s) 2018

Annika ArnoldClimate Change and StorytellingPalgrave Studies in Environmental Sociology and Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69383-5_1

1. Introduction: Why Narratives Matter in Climate Change Communication

Annika Arnold¹ 

(1)

Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Abstract

To understand the nature of the political and public debate about climate change, we need to understand the narrative structures that produce this discourse. Narratives, occurring in media, in public discourse, political agenda or even scientific debate, are vehicles for complex phenomena, such as climate change. The science behind this, the intricate interrelations and differences between daily weather occurrences and climate, between various factors – from natural causes to a changing climate to anthropogenic climate change – and the sheer amount of voices in this debate, make climate change a hard topic to sell. Climate change policies are complicated and in need to factor in a large amount of different aspects. As story-telling animals, we perceive facts, numbers and urgent appeals that surround climate change inherently as a story.

Keywords

Climate change communicationStorytellingNarrativesUSAGermanyCommunication research

We grow up listening to and telling stories. In fact, every night, as millions of moms and dads put their kids to bed, they will read books to or tell tales to those kids. And in turn, those moms and dads, just like everyone else, reflect their lives and the events that are happening, big or small, in the structure of a story. Narrative structures allow us to gain understanding of events and how they relate to one another and to our lives. This is not something we learn at school, but something we already experience as small children (Alda 2017: 164–165). As Alexander puts it: we are all story-telling animals (Alexander 2003: 84). A good story can be suspenseful, engaging, building a sense of belonging, give meaning and order to a complex world. And it can be persuasive. This book is about such stories, trying to make sense of one of the biggest environmental crises we have faced so far: climate change. And it is about those who tell these stories to fight climate change: environmental activists, politicians, civil society actors, and even artists. Climate change is a highly complicated problem; it is made up of complex climatological data, of economic reasoning, empathy for others and day-to-day and long-term politics. It touches on the kind of society we live in, its logic and its shortfalls. But in order to make the fight against climate change a priority, climate advocates need to tell stories, to mobilize people and guide their actions (Shenhav 2015: 5). In its 2016 flagship report, the German advisory council on global change called for narratives of and for change (WBGU 2016) to encourage innovations and to connect with the cultural fabric of society. But the current discourse about sustainability and changing environmental conditions is not taking place in a vacuum. It is already spun into a web of meaning, the problem gets translated into a story with all the required elements: heroes, villains, victims, an object of struggle, a beginning, middle, end, and morale of the narrative.

Climate change as a macro-environmental issue meets the criteria of super-wicked problems (Lazarus 2009: 1159), i.e. problems that are characterized by uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge, and high stakes. Climate, as a common pool resource (Renn 2011), poses one of the most pressing policy problems our society is facing today. However, climate change seems to be the first environmental crisis in which experts appear more alarmed than the public. People think about ‘global warming’ in the same way they think about ‘violence on television’ or ‘growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all (Hamblyn 2009: 234). The impacts of a changing climate are hard to grasp and solutions to the problems are diverse, complex, and controversial. Public perception of associated risks plays a huge role when it comes to support for climate policies and this perception is culturally determined: Culture affects how humans understand the world, because we make sense of the world by cultural means (Arnoldi 2013: 107). Berger and Luckmann ([1990], c1966) famously stated how our reality is the result of social construction, a collective effort to make sense of the world as we see it. The way we construct this reality by means of social communication has been subject to a wide range of sociological research. Goffman (2010) introduced framing as a means to read and understand situations and activities in social life. Helgeson et al. stress the role of cognitive structures in his concept of a mental model, which is a person’s internal, personalized, intuitive, and contextual understanding of how something works (Helgeson et al. 2012: 331). Boholm provides the concept of culture as shared schemata that allow us to process meanings and order information due to defined categories, relationships and contexts (Boholm 2003: 168).

This book analyzes narratives in qualitative data – interviews conducted with US-American and German climate advocates, i.e. people who are dedicated to fighting climate change and to engaging and motivating people around them. The analysis draws on existing narrative theory and suggestions for narrative analysis. The aim is to add to the understanding of environmental communication, especially in the field of climate change. Much existing discourse analysis addressing the topic of climate change focuses on media representation of the discourse (Boykoff 2008; Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Downs 1972), the debate between climate sceptics and climate advocates (Hoffman 2011; The Pew Research Center 2007), or takes an instrumental stand on the issue by asking how climate change communication should look like in order to achieve agreements (manipulate) within the civil society (Hart and Nisbet 2011; Moser and Dilling 2011; Moser 2010). Focusing on media representation is valuable to see which information the wider society gains, however, this field analyzes communication elements that have already been processed and are shaped according to the rules of the media landscape. Focusing on the tensions and arguments made between climate advocates and their opponents enhances factual understanding of pro-/ con arguments and might help to address them properly (if one’s goal is to better climate change communication). But this approach neglects that mistakes have been made in the communication process before the pro-climate arguments are re-told by the media. A purely instrumental in-order-to-approach won’t reveal the cultural process of civil discourse, because it is too strongly focused on providing recipes for communication handbooks. With the help from cultural theory social sciences can contribute to the understanding of environmental communication by considering that communication processes are not at all specific to one subject but follow inherent rules that need to be uncovered. For this, narrative analysis can help investigators think about ‘non-rational’ characteristics of environmentally relevant situations (Shanahan et al. 1999: 417).

Using This Book

This book is on the one hand a coherent story itself, making the case for strong narrative research in the social sciences and presenting empirical findings to exemplify how such research efforts could look like. On the other hand, the different chapters can be used on their own and serve different purposes: the second chapter, that deals with social sciences’ research into the topic of climate change proposes a starting point for those who are interested in the social and cultural sciences’ role in climate communication and environmental studies. The third chapter on narrative analysis might be of interest for students who are just starting out in the field of narrative analysis. It provides an in-depth overview of the origins of narrative analysis and application examples. The fourth and fifth chapter presents and discusses findings in the empirical data conducted for this study only. It suggests a blueprint on how to make use of narrative theory for understanding stories and their use for environmental communication.

This book is not a cookbook for communication strategies; you will not find direct recommendations, claiming to put this topic or that topic at the center and one actor group as a villain and another as a hero. What you will hopefully take away from this book are insights into the art and power of telling stories about real-life events and the pitfalls that come along with them. Mostly, instead of focusing on the audience and trying to figure out what a specific audience might want to hear, this study goes where those stories originate, before they are observed by an audience: the people who are telling these stories, their reasoning and their struggles. This book tells the story of the storyteller.

References

Alda, A. (2017). If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. New York: Random House.

Alexander, J. C. (2003). On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust from War Crime to Trauma Drama. In J. C. Alexander (Ed.), The Meanings of Social Life. A Cultural Sociology (pp. 27–84). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Arnoldi, J. (2013). Risk (1st ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. ([1990], c1966). The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Available Online at http://​www.​loc.​gov/​catdir/​description/​random0414/​89018142.​html

Boholm, Å. (2003). The Cultural Nature of Risk. Can There Be an Anthropology of Uncertainty? Ethnos, 68(2), 159–178. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​0014184032000097​722.​Crossref

Boykoff, M. T. (2008). Lost in Translation? The United States Television News Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change, 1995–2004. Climatic Change, 86, 1–11.Crossref

Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2004). Balance as Bias: Global Warming in the US Prestige Press. Global Environmental Change, 14, 125–136.Crossref

Downs, A. (1972). Up and Down with Ecology – The Issue-Attention-Cycle. The Public Interest, 28, 38–51.

Goffman, E. (2010). Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Hamblyn, R. (2009). The Whistleblower and the Canary: Rhetorical Construction of Climate Change. Journal of Historical Geography, 35, 223–236.Crossref

Hart, P., & Nisbet, E. C. (2011). Boomerang Effects in Science Communication: How Motivated Reasoning and Identity Cues Amplify Opinion Polarization About Climate Mitigation Policies. Communication Research. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​0093650211416646​.

Helgeson, J., van der Linden, S., & Chabay, I. (2012). The Role of Knowledge, Learning and Mental Models in Public Perceptions of Climate Change Related Risks. In A. E. J. Wals & P. B. Corcoran (Eds.), Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change (pp. 329–346). Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers.Crossref

Hoffman, A. J. (2011). The Culture and Discourse of Climate Skepticism. Strategic Organization, 9(1), 77–84.Crossref

Lazarus, R. J. (2009). Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future. Cornell Law Review, 94(5), 1153–1234.

Moser, S. C. (2010). Communicating Climate Change: History, Challenges, Process and Future Directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(1), 31–53. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​wcc.​11.​

Moser, S. C., & Dilling, L. (2011). Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science-Action Gap. In J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard, & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (pp. 161–174). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Renn, O. (2011). The Social Amplification/Attenuation of Risk Framework: Application to Climate Change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2(2), 154–169.

Shanahan, J., McComas, K., & Pelstring, L. (1999). Using Narratives to Think About Environmental Attitude and Behavior: An Exploratory Study. Society & Natural Resources, 12(5), 405–419. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​089419299279506.​Crossref

Shenhav, S. R. (2015). Analyzing Social Narratives. 1. Auflage, Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. New York [u.a.]: Routledge.

The Pew Research Center. (2007). Global Warming: A Divide on Causes and Solutions. Public Views Unchanged by Unusual Weather. Washington, DC.

WBGU - German Advisory Council on Global Change. (2016). Der Umzug der Menschheit: die transformative Kraft der Städte. Berlin: WBGU.

© The Author(s) 2018

Annika ArnoldClimate Change and StorytellingPalgrave Studies in Environmental Sociology and Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69383-5_2

2. Climate Change Communication Studies: Inquiries into Beliefs, Information and Stories

Annika Arnold¹ 

(1)

Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of selected aspects of social sciences’ studies on the phenomenon of climate change. In particular, this chapter discusses studies in the realm of risk perception and risk communication; it pays specific attention to insight from discourse analysis and findings in media research, such as the norm of balanced reporting. Scholarship of public understanding of science and science communication provides additional information on how societies perceive the risk of climate change. With this in mind, the chapter closes with a closer look at cultural theory and cultural study approaches to the topic before introducing the cultural sociological perspective as the theoretical basis for the following empirical analysis.

Keywords

Climate change communicationMedia analysisDiscourse analysisRisk communicationCultural sociologyCultural theoryPublic understanding of science

Before diving into an application of narrative theory for a cultural-sociological take on climate change communication, it is worth to lay out previous research in neighboring fields that have significant influence here: from media studies to risk communication, from inquiries into public understanding of science, discourse analyses and cultural studies approaches – communication itself is a multi-layered phenomenon and in combination with a super-wicked-problem (Wiesenthal 2010: 184–185) like climate change, its analysis should make use of all those different approaches. The body of significant literature has grown enormously over the last years; to review and discuss every single strand in this field would go beyond the scope of this study, so the following chapter will rather highlight some of those studies that are directly connected to the analysis in later chapters.

Risk Perception and Risk Communication

Environmentalists and commentators across the board agree – to a large part – at least on one specific challenge when it comes to addressing climate change: it feels far away, both in terms of time and in terms of space. This is a specific interesting conundrum for risk perception scholarship, addressing questions like:

How do people perceive and estimate the risks related to global warming (Whitmarsh 2008; Leiserowitz 2005, 2007)?

How do people react to the uncertainties within climate change research (Renn 2008)?

If people are faced with uncertain consequences of risks and if they do not have the resources to address these risks properly, they tend to resolve this cognitive dissonance in order to go on with their every-day life (Aronson 2008). This observation has to be considered when talking about successful ways of climate change communication examining the role of fearful messages. Operating with fear as a motivational tool can be risky: it is difficult to sustain fear in the long term because the audience might become desensitized to fear appeals. Drawing on results from social psychology and behavior studies, scholars point out dangers that lie in using fear as a motivator. Painting overly dramatic pictures of doom and the devastating effects of climate change might draw public’s attention for a short time, but if clear and applicable guidelines are not provided people are only left helpless and scared (Moser and Walser 2008) and – confronted with a sheer irresolvable challenge – will retreat and disengage completely (Ereaut and Segnit 2006; Hamblyn 2009: 235). Fear appeals are likely to jeopardize audience’s trust in those organizations that