That was the question running through my mind as I sat under the plum tree in my yard for the first time. I chose this particular spot as the place from which I would practice increasing my awareness and connection to nature. It is just outside my front door, which will increase the likelihood of frequent visits.
So there I was. Sitting. In my spot. Observing with all my senses. Wondering about how on earth I was going to stay mindfully aware for a whole 30 minutes. Wondering what on earth I would write about.
As someone who loves nature, being outside, watching birds, gardens, trees, bees, butterflies, and the like, I was surprised at my resistance to this project and to using the sit-spot as a mechanism for practicing climate communication. What stories of interest could I possibly tell from my front yard that relate to climate change?
I looked around my immediate surroundings at first, looking at things and cataloging what I saw with my eyes, looking in my usual way for the obvious things with no detail: tree, bird, sunlight, and shadows, a lizard darting out of the rock wall. I listened to the dominant sounds from traffic, the hum from the highway down the hill, and cars driving by my house.
I recalled the TEDx talk by John Young and thought about connection to nature. About really getting quiet and paying close attention to everything. I drew upon my inner “bird-watcher”. Observant. Quiet. Still. Wide-eyed. Ears perked. Connecting my senses beyond the noise.
I zoomed in.
I looked more closely at the plum tree, noticing the lichen and moss-covered trunk. I thought of Kimmerer’s (2014) notion of nature having “personhood” and wondered how old this tree-being was, and what it has experienced throughout its life in this yard. Has a child climbed up its branches? How many birds and insects have nested or rested here? I noticed the sun filtering through the deep purple-maroon coloured leaves as they rustled softly in the breeze and the silvery flash of a spiderweb through the sunlight. I heard the sound of a hummingbird squeaking from the top of the tree, making his/her presence known. I listened to the chatting of the chestnut-backed chickadees and the “tick tick tick” of the dark-eyed juncos as they rustled around in the leaves beneath the nearby rhododendron searching the soil for snacks. I felt the moss under my feet that has taken hold over the concrete slab my chair rests on. I surveyed the yard just beyond where I was sitting and saw some mushrooms sprouting up in the grass, reminded of the hidden world of mycelial networks, and the subterranean community of critters living in the soil, doing their important work.
I looked up and softened my gaze and opened my senses beyond my immediate surroundings. A pair of gulls flew overhead toward the lake. Turkey vultures circled up higher, off in the distance, maybe riding the thermals or looking for carrion. A jet cutting through the sky so high up I couldn’t hear it but could see its contrail and the silvery shimmer of its body as it moved through the bright blue backdrop. The not-so-distant sounds of lawnmowers and backyard construction projects. I became acutely aware of this tension between the human world and the natural world. The fast-paced, hard-surfaced, noisy human landscape within the slow, rich, interconnected world of birds, insects, fungi, trees, and dragonflies.
Questions started percolating up.
I thought of the concept of reciprocity as introduced by Kimmerer (2014). How can I support this place and the beings that live here? How can I give back to this tiny ecology, this little corner of soil and vegetation providing habitat to so many beings? Knowing the effects of climate change that we can expect here – increasing heat and drought in summer, more intense wind storms, and more intense precipitation events in fall and winter – how can I help build resiliency in this place?
Ah. So this is what I’m doing here.
I’m here to practice applied mindfulness, to learn from these ancestral lands and all their inhabitants. I’m here to communicate from a hyper-local place and reduce the abstractions of the global scale language of climate change. I’m here to restore and do what I can to support resiliency here in this little corner of the earth and see what happens next. I’m here to reawaken my connection with the natural world right outside my doorstep.
“Big awareness equals big connection” (Young, 2020).
Drawing upon our course readings thus far, I have selected a number of evidence-based criteria and these are listed in the table below:
Values: Speaks to the shared values of the target audience (Christiano & Neimand, 2018; Dupar, et al., 2019; Hodson, 2019; Moser, 2015)
Holistic framing for action through hope: Messages about climate change are framed holistically (linking people and social/economic systems to ecological systems) in a way that empowers the target audience to take action by evoking feelings of hope (Armstrong, et al., 2018; Hodson, 2019; Young, 2021)
Local narratives and visuals: Uses narratives/stories and images that have local/community relevance (Bayer & Hettinger, 2019; Dupar, et al., 2019; Hodson, 2019)
Audience Analysis
The Narwhal is an independent, non-profit, online environmental magazine based in Canada that endeavors to “bring evidence-based news and analysis to the surface for all Canadians”. From this description, I can infer that the core audience they are writing for is Canadians who care about the natural world and are looking for more in-depth information on topical environmental issues. Having said that, I think they are also appealing to Canadian audiences who might not necessarily consider themselves “environmentalists”, but care about nature. In the context of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s, “Global Warming’s Six Americas”, the audience profile for The Narwhal’s core readers would likely fit into the “alarmed” category, while they might be reaching a wider audience nationally when cited in major new media outlets like the Globe and Mail and CBC (Yale Program on Climate Communication, 2021; “About Us”, 2021). This means the core target audience, “the alarmed”, believes in global warming and represents those most concerned and motivated to support climate policies and take individual action.
Climate Content Analysis
For this assignment, I have selected an example of open climate communication content in the form of an in-depth news article about the June 2021 heatwave in British Columbia, written in August 2021 and published in The Narwhal online magazine. I will assess the visual and narrative approaches in this article, using a set of evidence-based criteria that I argue are suitable to the target audience and style of communication, as defined above.
The approaches I used for this analysis first involved pulling apart the various topics covered within the article to look at the framing, language, and key messages they highlighted by creating the following subheadings:
From 570 devastating heat-induced deaths, to fish die-offs, to berries being baked on the stem, British Columbians are experiencing the multitude of impacts of a growing climate emergency that the province urgently needs to adapt to
‘There was no escape. None’
Action needed to address inequality, mitigate effects of extreme heat
Climate change means hotter, drier, riskier B.C. summers
Extreme heat a threat to B.C. wildlife
Economic impacts of B.C. heatwave could be ‘huge’
B.C.’s adaptation plan called ‘disappointing’
Then I reviewed the visuals/images and links to other Narwhal articles and external information sources they used to support their narrative report.
Criteria 1: Values
A key strategy for effective climate communication found throughout the literature reviewed was the approach of speaking to the shared values and goals of the target audience. Christiano & Neimand (2018), highlight the evidence that “people engage and consume information that affirms their identities and aligns with the deeply held values and worldviews”. This requires stepping into the world of the audience and messaging accordingly. Speaking at a values level also helps the audience connect to how they see the world and be motivated to action (Christiano & Neimand, 2018). Social identity challenges are addressed with targeted values-based messages that are framed in the most effective way for that community/target audience (Hodson, 2019).
Given the audience profile comprising people who already care about nature, The Narwhal article does a good job of speaking to a multitude of likely values associated with their core audience. These include speaking about impacts to various key subjects, like wildlife, people (including vulnerable populations), food systems, and the economy. By covering a wide range of impacts in this way, the article has a wider reach within the target audience, and possibly beyond, to capture those shared values.
Criteria 2: Holistic framing for action through hope
Framing messages in a way that is more likely to empower people to action is important for climate communication (Armstrong et al., 2018; Dupar et al., 2019; Hine, et al., 2016; Hodson, 2019). This includes the way the science is framed and how positive and/or negative emotive content is used (Christiano & Neimand, 2018; Hodson, 2019). The Narwhal article does a relatively good job of framing the impacts from a holistic perspective (ecology, human, economic), though Indigenous perspectives are missing throughout, which was a notable gap.
This article focused on reporting the reality of impacts due to the heatwave, from health consequences, including deaths, of seniors and other vulnerable populations, to the impacts of heat on birds, salmon, and marine life and ocean-dependent industry sectors to food security. The article did a great job of communicating the gravity of impacts arising from the heat event, however, leaving the reader with a sense of hope and empowerment is also important, and I don’t think this article did as well on that front (Armstrong, et al., 2018; Dupar et al, 2019; Hodson, 2019). Hine et al. discussed the use of negative emotive content to motivate action on adaptation in particular, so perhaps a case could be made for that here, though the call to any specific action is missing as well. The only mention of action is within the final sentences of the article, stating:
“The risks were laid bare this summer: illness, death, economic losses, and ecological destruction. Some of those consequences can be avoided or at least minimized, but only with concerted action.“
The Narwhal article fails to provide the reader with possible concrete actions to take, in light of all the impacts “laid bare” in the article. Overall, the framing was effective for explaining the science and the impacts of the heatwave but does not inspire action.
Criteria 3: Local narrative and visuals
As outlined in Bayer & Hettinger (2019), stories can serve as an effective tool, particularly when they are place-based with local knowledge. Krauß & Bremer (2020) highlight that matching people’s lived experience of climate change at a local level through narratives, rather than focusing on the scientific abstractions often discussed at a global scale, can help motivate people to action.
In the Narwhal article, each subheading topic links directly to the main heatwave event and uses vignettes to illustrate impacts with first-person accounts of extreme heat experiences from multiple perspectives, and through interviews with meteorological science, wildlife, and health experts. The article does a good job of weaving together the myriad impacts of the heatwave and builds trust with the audience by using place-based narratives and local expertise to back them up. Additionally, the article embeds links to relevant, local stories and reports that provide more information to the reader to click into, including the Lytton wildfire, links to BC government statements and reports related to heat-related deaths, and another Narwhal article on the connection between clear-cut logging and the heatwave.
Visuals were used primarily to illustrate the place-based context of this story, which mainly centered in Greater Vancouver, so the largest images were of people in the Downtown Eastside, and a scenic shot of Burnaby. Video satellite imagery of a storm-cell building near Lytton, and a screenshot of a tweet from one of the wildlife groups were also used in the article.
In terms of how these visuals supported the local narratives, I think they mostly aligned well. The satellite video imagery seemed a little out of place, as the article did not speak specifically to the weather/storm cell development shown in the visual. It was embedded within a brief general discussion about the increased risk of wildfire with increasing temperatures and drought conditions, but even that was more focused on the Okanagan region, not Lytton. I think the author could have used images of fire as a more effective visual representation of the narrative there. Hodson (2019) highlights how image selection to accompany a story can affect how people engage with the information in the message, therefore a more careful consideration of aligning the images with the key messages would have strengthened parts of this article.
Conclusion
Overall, the Narwhal article effectively conveys the key messages and climate content to its intended audience through speaking to shared values, holistic framing of the issues with its audience in mind, and highlighting local, place-based narratives throughout the story. The effectiveness of the article reaching its audience could have been strengthened with some suggestions and support for actions to take, to answer the question of “ok, now what?” that follows after reading the article. Additionally, some better/more effective use of visuals could have supported the messaging and helped to explain some of the more technical concepts touched on in the article.
Bayer, S., & Hettinger, A. (2019). Storytelling: A natural tool to weave the threads of science and community together. Bulletin of the ecological society of America, 100(2), 1-6.
Hine, D.W. et al. (2016). Preaching to different choirs: How to motivate dismissive, uncommitted, and alarmed audiences to adapt to climate change? Global Environmental Change 36, 1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.11.002
Hodson, J. (2019). An ecological model of climate marketing: A conceptual framework for understanding climate science-related attitude and behavior change. Cogent Social Sciences 5(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2019.1625101
Krauß, W. & Bremer, S. (2020). The role of place-based narratives of change in climate risk governance. Climate Risk Management 28, 100221.
Young, A. (2021). Episode 232: Gopal Dayaneni on the exploitation of soil and story. for the wild. [Transcript of podcast
