Can “Explorable Explanations” Help Combat Climate Change?
Creating an informed and engaged citizenry around environmental issues
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In a small yet growing corner of the web, a website called Explorable Explanations describes itself in this way:
We’re a totally unorganized “movement” (if you can even call it that) of artists, programmers, and educators who make things & tools for active learning.
With the internet’s not-so-long-ago capitalization on information distribution, the journalism industry has sought to leverage new forms of web-based storytelling with growing urgency. This has given rise to a new subset of journalists called data journalists, who blur the lines between software engineers and storytellers by conveying ideas through data visualizations and infographics. (Here’s a pretty great explanation by matthew_daniels of the kinds of things data journalists make.)
Explorables take this trend one step further by encouraging (even requiring) readers to interact and engage with the story to affect its outcome. Not only can this help readers learn about complex concepts (as with the above example from the Guardian) –– it can reinforce the reader’s agency in engaging with a problem.
Here’s my hunch:
If journalism is about increasing the engagement and political participation of the general public on important issues, then explorable explanations should be the future of journalism.
As an environmentalist, I am most interested in the idea of using explorable explanations as a vehicle for educating and reporting on environmental issues like climate change.
I often hear people ask, can I really do anything to stop climate change? Recently, a friend also confessed to me that he sees climate change as a huge, mega-complex challenge that only policy makers are equipped to tackle. This lack of agency leads to overall apathy among the general public for confronting and engaging with environmental issues. Based on the years I’ve spent doing environmental education and advocacy work, this is one of the primary barriers to widespread participation in climate action.
Can explorable explanations help overcome this barrier? I think so. By demonstrating to readers the impacts of their decisions, explorables empower them to act with more intent and engage with more thought on the pressing issues of this century.
Here are some awesome examples of explorables already tackling environmental and climate education.
Possibly my favorite example is an article from Bloomberg called What’s Really Warming the World.
The article provides an engaging learning environment for understanding the fact that climate change is caused by but can also be tackled by people like us.
Here are two other examples, not from traditional journalism outlets, from which to draw inspiration:
Earth: A Primer is an app that lets students build mountains, affect the weather, and explore the earth’s core to learn important concepts about ecology, geology, and climate science.
Then there’s Bret Victor’s What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change.
Instead of supplying all the information for passive consumption, it links to all of the underlying data for its graphs, encouraging readers to perform their own analyses. Some graphs are also interactive, allowing readers to explore different scenarios.
Imagine with me all the different applications for explorable explanations in environmental journalism.
How about an explorable demonstrating different ways California residents can make small lifestyle changes to stay mindful of the drought? You could use a slider to explore the effect of shower length on water use; you could toggle through a list of common grocery foods to see which purchases consume less water.
Or, what if this NYT article about the key players of the Paris Climate Agreement took the form of an explorable? Instead of reading a linear list of countries, imagine hovering over different regions of the world map to reveal tool tips with the same information. Then imagine clicking on the different key players to see their spheres of influence on other countries and perhaps even predictions of how their climate goals could stall climate change.
The above examples, both real and aspirational, demonstrate the potential for environmental journalists to create powerful educational narratives through explorables.
Of course, there are a couple challenges to overcome before explorables see widespread adoption.
Namely, they take time and coding skills to build. Both of those facts add up to significant monetary investment for online publications, which is mostly only sustainable for large publications.
Fortunately, a sprinkling of tools have emerged that make it easier to build little interactive moments within your articles. (This is by no means a comprehensive list.)
- Tangle (Bret Victor strikes again) is a JavaScript library that helps make interactive moments as seen in his explorable shown above;
- Ractive.js (built by the Guardian) is a template-driven UI library that transforms HTML templates into blueprints for interactive apps;
- d3.js is a JavaScript library for making responsive data-driven visualizations;
- and Northwestern University’s Knight Labs has some other tools for journalists.
As more interactive storytelling tools emerge over time, the barriers for creating explorables will lower.
So what are we waiting for?
Environmental journalists have an incredible opportunity to reimagine the relationship between their stories and their readers. Let’s drive the effort forward.
