Winter’s Coming

I go back to my house for a second sweater before heading down to my sit spot – the weather is colder than I was expecting. When I arrive, fall seems to have been stripped from the trees in a hurry. Two weeks ago the leaves were just starting to turn, but we got a few bright reds, lots of yellows and browns and now many of the leaves have already fallen. It’s okay – I cozy up inside my sweater and settle in to enjoy the wintering activities of the little waterside world around me.

My neighbour’s heavy equipment rules the soundscape today – he’s preparing for winter with home improvement projects before the snow comes (is he using sustainable materials and/or retrofitting for better energy efficiency, I wonder?). Once again, the critters are absent from my sit spot. I wonder if it’s because they aren’t used to me yet, or maybe they’re just too busy preparing for the cold season ahead to be foraging the river’s edge today. One (I believe invasive, just like me) ladybug sits motionless on a wet rock – I think his or her short life might have already departed.

As I cozy up in my sweater and gaze across to the village on the opposite shore, I think warmly of the coming hygge season ahead. I am so grateful for my vibrant, lively, spunky little rural community of activists, artists, farmers and eccentrics. Across the river, I see the local pub where I know my cousins-in-law and their friends will be converging many a night in the coming months. I hope to join them for a few beers and to have some inspiring conversations in the pub’s warm dark glow. We’ll also surely go cross-country skiing: last time we went together, I recall, I had some inspiring conversations with a high-school teacher friend from the community about climate change advocacy and sustainability – both of us being mutually inspired by each other’s important work and dreams. Maybe I’ll also get a chance to sit with a friend who I don’t see often enough in the busyness of the warmer months; we’ll cozy up on her warm living room couch, drinking tea and working on our crafty projects that slowly progress over the winter months. I think about all the climate change and social justice projects that I’ve been contributing to with my local advocacy group too – the beginnings of a food sovereignty, community resilience-building and permaculture-based community garden that I’m co-launching with another volunteer at a local park, the Town Hall on Green New Deal resolutions that our group is hosting just before winter, and the many other advocacy initiatives we’re involved in. Winter will be a time to take stock, regenerate, re-vision and rally forces behind those many initiatives. I hope the extra time indoors and contemplative nature of the cold season will find us more prepared and stronger come springtime. While some of these projects will be lending crucial support to larger provincial, national and international initiatives, I hope that our local projects will lead to our membership expanding and to a strengthening of our community’s social fabric that will help us to weather the storms ahead. This winter is forecasted to be a very snowy one too – I’m confident that my neighbours and I will rally together no matter the obstacle and dig ourselves out of any situation. Each season has its advantages, each challenge has its silver lining; we will all have the opportunity to grow and move through adversity together.

Academic citations and connections: While Connor et al.’s research findings pointed towards gain-framed messages on the themes of competence, communality and development being less propagated in the long-term on social media than loss-framed messages on the topics of nature and health (2016, p. 469), I chose to frame my post using a gain-framed format on the topics of communality and competence. I found Connor et al.’s discussion compelling, when they explained that although less conventional messages initially have a stronger impact on the reader, they are less likely to be passed on beyond the first share because of societal normative pressures and also because it can be challenging to find the words to express less conventional messaging (2016, p. 471-472). As well, in their closing statement they suggested that climate change communicators could play an important role by normalizing those less conventional messages, bringing them into the mainstream and ultimately making them more shareable (Connor, 2016, p. 473). For those reasons, I am inspired as a climate change communicator to share those messages more often, in an effort to diversify the pool of positive and effective messaging being shared in social media. In this writing, I also attempted to follow the five storytelling traits proposed by Downs (2014) and Green et al. (2018) as cited by Bayer and Hettinger: my purpose was to respond to the prompt and instructions provided for this assignment by sharing a personal experience with detailed descriptions inspired by my five senses (2019, p. 5). I hope that my experiences of winter life in this part of the world, the positives of that season for me and some of the other personal experiences that I shared are relatable to some of my readers (Bayer & Hettinger, 2019, p. 5). My concluding question, after reading Bayer and Hettinger’s work is: how might I engage my community in a conversation on some of the topics I shared in my post (2019)?

(Tiny Ecology post 2)

References

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. https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1542

Connor, P.; Harris, E.; Guy, S.; Fernando, J.; Shank, D.; Kurz, T.; Bain, P.; Kashima, Y. (2016). Interpersonal communication about climate change: How messages change when communicated through simulated online social networks. Climatic Change 136(3-4), 463–476. doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1643-z