Recycle, reuse—rethink? How a fresh approach to storytelling could put plastics in their place

By Joe Arney

We're going about environmental storytelling all wrong.

When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, it became a rallying point for the nascent environmental movement-not because it was a scientific book (though it is), but because of its haunting opening pages that described a town where the birds and bees had vanished, fish were gone, fruit wouldn't blossom, and disease ran rampant.

That scene moved people to ban pesticides and rethink humanity's role in the larger environment. But, Phaedra C. Pezzullo said, until we figure out how to tell stories about today's environmental crises-like plastic pollution and climate change-all we have are data that, alone, fail to move people to action.

"What many people are arguing is that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination and of communication," said Pezzullo, a professor of communication and media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder's College of Media, Communication and Information. "The idea is, we struggle to grapple with what is the climate-I can't touch it, I can't see it-so how do we tell stories that empower people, instead of only getting caught up in the data?"

Interdisciplinary insights

Pezzullo's interdisciplinary approach to the problem of plastics-the science of microplastics permeating the human body and the way of explaining that crisis in a way that inspires people to demand action-has helped her see a need for a fresh approach to how we talk about such complex problems.

It's partly what moved her to start a podcast series, Communicating Care, and her most recent book, Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care, which was published last year. The book has generated significant attention as the media struggles to cover the plastics problem; since the summer, it has won three significant prizes from the National Communication Association: a Diamond Anniversary Book Award, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address and, significantly, the Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication, named for a prolific scholar who Pezzullo met years ago at a conference.

"It's an honor to have this book recognized and affirmed by my colleagues with expertise in environmental studies, rhetoric, and across the entire field of communication," Pezzullo said.

In some ways, Beyond Straw Men and Pezzullo's search for impactful storytelling is the kind of scholarly work that's uniquely possible at a place like CMCI. The college was created to address the complex challenges of today's interconnected world, which require interdisciplinary perspectives to effectively engage.

It's an approach that resonates with partners outside the university. In her role as director of CU Boulder's graduate certificate in environmental justice, Pezzullo has been working with Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment to help update its quantitative database of communities most affected by environmental damage. Undergraduates in a new class she's teaching, Advanced Topics in Storytelling, Culture and Climate Justice, are updating story maps to help the state assess how the message it's spreading about climate impacts local communities.

At CMCI, expertise in 'how to move people'

"These stories need to be assessed so they can figure out if they are empowering residents," she said. "Are they rich enough, compelling enough, moving enough? Or did we lean too hard on data that maybe is too dense for this audience?

"And that's why the state would love more partnerships with people in CMCI who can help them build capacity for the storytelling component, because they spend so much of their own time in the weeds. There's a thirst for research that understands the climate science, but also brings to the conversation an appreciation for how to think about audiences, context and how to move people."

Part of that is finding ways to avoid confining stories about topics like pollution and climate to negative headlines, disaster movies, dystopian fiction and the like.

"We're getting to the point with climate justice where you have to change attitudes, beliefs and the culture, and that means you need a range of stories-including comedies, as my colleagues I work with across campus have shown. We have to use a whole range of human emotions to change a culture."

It also means those stories need broad appeal, so they aren't just preaching to the converted.

"The argument of folks who are working on climate storytelling in the industry is any film or media content created for the present or the future that does not have climate change as part of its backdrop should be considered fiction, because it is a part of life," she said.

The desperation to find the right storytelling techniques for plastics is easy to see in the endless drumbeat of bad news about plastics clogging rivers, causing floods; being burned, destroying air quality; and invading our drinking water, food supply and bodies. But like all good stories featuring hardship, this one has a protagonist we can easily root for.

"What I'm interested in right now is the idea of repair," Pezzullo said. By that, she means material repair-in May, Colorado passed its third right to repair law, empowering consumers to fix, not flush, things like broken phones-but also repairing relationships, especially in the case of well-meaning partnerships where, say, an NGO promised a solution to a plastic problem in the global south that failed.

"How do we have accountability, but also find a way to forgive people for mistakes?" she said. "It's very challenging right now to admit that people have made mistakes, and then-if they're willing to do the work or willing to do the repair work, forgive them.

"And, of course, how do we repair the earth? That's the most important question to me."

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