Ecosystemic Writing: Working across discipline to communicate climate change

It may be hard to remember now as we prepare for Christmas, but over the past summer drought was declared across the south-west of England and much of the country faced water restrictions. This followed a period of unprecedented weather with temperatures exceeding 40°C for the first time on record. Across Europe high temperatures were also recorded along with severe wildfires. As is often the way, events such as these heatwaves and fires are loud enough to push the conversation around climate change on to the front pages. For those of us engaged in communicating climate change, the challenge is to promote the ‘quiet violence’ of the wider climate emergency into popular media.

Daniel Immerwahr, writing in the Guardian explains this in the context of wildfires. He writes, “picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate image is smouldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and you watch your daughter — short for her age — leave school a year early.”¹ Outside of the more media-friendly (and photogenic) climate events, such as heatwaves and mega-fires, Immerwhar’s is exposing the wicked and often incommunicable nature of climate change.²

The challenge in any climate change communication is in linking the local and immediate to the global and remote. As David Wood writes: “if my tree is dying, I notice. But the earth slowly dying is not obvious, not something I can see at a glance out of my window … there is a gap between what I can see and what may really be happening.”³

We can see the megafires across parts of Europe this summer or the recent floods in Pakistan and while these events are devastating and rightly of immediate concern and focus, climate communication must look forwards to find a way to keep the wider emergency, the oftentimes quieter emergency, front and centre within public consciousness.

Through my research and creative work, I am developing a hybrid narrative form of the prose novel, which will go some way to meeting this challenge. I call this narrative form Ecosystemic Writing. Working across disciplines to draw on critical theory within memory studies, comics studies and ecocriticism among others, Ecosystemic Writing incorporates photographic images, comics and data visualisation with prose to create a narrative mode that can articulate the spatial and temporal scale (or layering) of climate change.

Ecosystemic Writing is only one possible response to the challenge of finding narrative forms that can engage audiences and communicate across the broad spectrum of climate-related consequences. What it provides is an example of how climate narratives do not need to keep to their own disciplines and traditions especially in the face of the indiscriminate impacts of this emergency.

Bibliography

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/03/a-deranged-pyroscape-how-fires-across-the-world-have-grown-weirder
2. For more on the term ‘slow violence’ see Rob Nixon’s work around the impact of climate change on what he calls the ‘global poor’. https://www-hup-harvard-edu.uea.idm.oclc.org/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343.
3. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge : The Anthropocene As a Threshold Concept, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015

This blog post was written by Logan Scott. Logan is a PhD student within the School of Arts, Media and American Studies. His PhD is a creative and critical response to the challenge of articulating through fiction the contemporary experience of living with climate change. He is focussed specifically on climate-related issues of water scarcity within the Western Cape region of South Africa. Logan’s theses will be presented in the form of an original novel, which will be accompanied by a supporting critical enquiry. This critical supplement to the novel explores the relationship between climate imagery and data visualisation to public perception of climate change as well as links between trauma and memory and our experience of the contemporary climate emergency.