Storytelling: How to Make a Difference in the Global Climate Crisis

It’s hard to wrap your arms around a problem as massive as the global climate crisis. Although it threatens our very existence, it can be hard to see. A melting iceberg here, a receding glacier there ... but our lives continue, for the most part, exactly as they have for years.

We get up in the morning in our warm houses, take refreshing showers from a seemingly endless source, wear recently purchased clothing made somewhere in Southeast Asia, eat food packaged for our convenience, connect to our charged cell phones and plugged-in computers, drive – usually by ourselves – to wherever we need to be, toss aside a no-longer-useful Starbucks cup ... all with no thought as to the “cost” of what we have just done.

How do we, as PR professionals, address a topic so huge, so important, and yet so abstract and intangible as the climate crisis? Through stories.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28hedin.html

Take this story, “An Almanac of Extreme Weather,” which appeared as a Nov. 27 op-ed in the New York Times. It was written by Jack Hedin, a Minnesota farmer:

"THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.

"My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.

"He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.

"In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours. The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map. Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake. Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels. We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground. A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below."

Hedin continues his story, adding details about how seven years of unusual rainfall have ruined his farm. He adds: “Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather.” Powerful stuff.

Scientists warn us not to confuse “weather” with “climate.” Weather changes all of the time, from season to season. But the climate? Well, regular variations are the norm. However, many scientists are noticing patterns or conditions that are ripe for creating unusual weather events – heavier rains or more severe droughts, floods or fires, hurricanes or dust storms.

I’m not a scientist, and I can’t feed you the facts to support my experiences. But I know that the climate has changed drastically since I was a child. Late August in Minnesota used to be HOT! Every year on my birthday – Aug. 26 – I would spend the entire day at the Minnesota State Fair, never needing a jacket. On the other hand, Minnesota winters were COLD, with snow often blanketing the ground several feet thick. The lakes were frozen solid, making ice fishing ... and lake golf ... seasonal sports. Whereas Floridians brace for hurricanes, Minnesotans prepared themselves for tornadoes.

When I speak with my family in Minnesota these days, they tell me of unusually warm winters with little snow cover, which is so necessary for crops to grow in the spring and summer. My August birthday often is chilly. Parts of the Upper Midwest have been hit recently with unusual tornadoes in the fall (typically, the “second tornado season” hits further south, but the tornado window seems to be expanding). One Friday this fall, the temperature was in the 60s in Minneapolis and St. Paul. And then the next day, the temperature dropped rapidly as a foot of snow clogged the city streets.

In my neighborhood here in Tallahassee, plants seem to be blooming earlier in the spring, only to be damaged by a late frost. The allergy season seems to be expanding as the blooming time expands. Last year was our warmest summer in Florida ... and our coldest winter. That match-up isn’t supposed to happen. I know all of this is anecdotal, but as PR practitioners, we know that one of our research tools is observation. So this is the story of what I’m seeing.

Scientists tend to be reluctant to tell stories, choosing, instead, to focus on facts. Maybe it’s our job as PR practitioners to find the stories to help complete the picture of the impact of the global climate crisis.