Resilient Stories? - How Do We Narrate the Climate Crisis

Resilience is a word at risk of being stretched to breaking point. Banded around as a catch-all, it crops up in discussions of mental health, sea defences, farming and cybersecurity. It has nudged sustainability out of its pole position in the climate crisis lexicon as an unarguable good thing. Yet resilience has an impeccable scientific pedigree straddling ecology and psychology that speaks to the capacity of any system to recover and react to change – and we face, in climate change, the greatest challenge to all our systems. So what role might artists and storytellers have in building resilience?

Design’s role in achieving a resilient future is largely uncontroversial, namely the fashioning of net-zero products in a circular economy that leave as little trace as possible. The task for storytelling is more debatable; and I speak as a playwright who has written a play hubristically, even ironically entitled Resilience – one half of a diptych of plays called The Contingency Plan, revived in 2022 by Sheffield Theatres.

One aspect of how stories build resilience, is how they might affect the manner of their telling. The material life of fiction varies radically in impact: a poem’s carbon footprint is minimal, whereas a multi-part TV drama is colossal. Yet one virtue of creating stories that don’t dodge the calamitous state we’re in is they compel all participants in the process to step up. Staging my plays about climate change in the hottest year on record necessitated Sheffield Theatres adopting the policies of the Green Book devised by the Theatres Trust to achieve more sustainable production processes.

In the context of the cost-of-living crisis, such a shift is commonsensical: re-using timber, upcycling as much of the stage set as possible, scoping out reductions of waste enabling a win-win convergence of form and content.

But storytelling’s role in building a resilient future surely goes beyond tweaks to our production processes; the very nature of our stories may need to change. In his seminal work from 2016 The Great Derangement, novelist Amitav Ghosh proposes an inversion of mainstream storytelling to address the magnitude of the challenges we face. In effect he argues that fiction should engage directly with the “uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman”, or what philosopher David Abram calls the ‘more than human’ world. Yet too often the dominant narrative frames of our time draw on the so-called Hero’s Journey, derived from the Monomyth deemed to lie behind all human narratives by anthropologist Joseph Campbell. In this schema, which now often serves as a model for narratives, the heroic individual advances into a hostile environment in search of an elixir to bring back to their Ordinary World. This matrix, which seems innately colonial in bias, is also predicated on the separation of human from nonhuman experience, as if narrative itself must celebrate human domination and exploitation. Can this model be shifted?

In my recent work I’ve tried to move the dial in my own small way, through my research project Song of the Reeds: Dramatising Conservation. Story design has been central to this. I have sought to frame narratives driven not by humans but by creatures –butterflies, snails, bitterns, and eels in the case of my seasonal drama for Radio 4 Song of the Reeds – or environments, as in my site-based collaboration with Tangled Feet Theatre company, Murmurations. In this endeavour, I’ve taken inspiration from the work of conservationists to whom such a focus is second nature (no pun intended).

This kind of work is interdisciplinary and the autonomy of the artists’ imagination must be ceded to accommodate the insights of researchers in other fields. No one can pretend that forging such collaborations are straight forward; art and science have separate languages, imperatives, and tempos. Yet stories can provide a bridge between the sometimes arcane work of the research scientist and the anxious lay audience.

Universities and artists lucky enough to work in them, have an advantage in convening such conversations. At UEA, for instance, we’re attempting to frame dialogues between fields through our Developing Resilience Through Climate Narratives initiative. Here, thanks to structured conversations across schools and silos, exciting collaborations are emerging. Take film scholar Dr. Christine Cornea’s work on Visual Narratives, in which she is creating accessible short films to envision malign environmental impacts, such as those of Microplastics. This is a truly global endeavour bringing chemists and filmmakers into a partnership extending from Norwich to Malaysia.

Likewise, poet and critic Dr. Jos Smith, whose Speculative Nature Writing, a collaboration with Bird Life International, attempts to envisage futures corresponding to emissions scenarios. Upstream of this kind of work is the very notion of discipline hopping, a structured set of conversation between scientists and writers led by Professor Jean McNeil. Out of such meetings storied solutions emerge to provoke new modes of problem-solving or thinking to break us out of the fatalism this crisis often provokes.

One thing is now abundantly clear, the climate crisis is not a future event, which can only to be addressed through sci-fi or cli-fi, it is a reality we will all be living in for the foreseeable future. Writers and artists must play their part in getting us out or through this mess. Stories have always been a tool with which humanity has imagined itself out of trouble; and as philosopher Donna Haraway has said, maybe the task of all art right now is “staying with the trouble”.

Steve Waters

Steve Waters is a dramatist and UEA Professor of Scriptwriting. He writes works for stage, radio, and screen, also writing about the pedagogy of playwriting and the nature of plays. Having written The Contingency Plan, a diptych of plays about climate change, in 2009, he has been at the forefront of artistic practice and reflection on climate change, most recently through his AHRC funded project Song of the Reeds: Dramatising Conservation which yielded a four-part seasonal drama for BBC Radio 4 starring Mark Rylance, and site-specific theatre project Murmurations with Tangled Feet ensemble. His books include The Secret Life of Plays and A Life in 16 Films: How Cinema Made me a Playwright.