The Case for Environmental Keywords
Environmental Storytelling is More Vital Now Than Ever
Why We Need Environmental Keywords.
Environmental keywords will be important tools in helping us tell new stories about environmental problems and their solutions: improving stories we already tell, but also helping us tell the stories that go untold.
Human-environment relationships involve a complex tangle of social, cultural, ecological, political, economic, technological, and scientific stories.
To make sense of this complexity and tell new stories that can heal damaging human relationships with the natural environment, writers, scholars, and scientists are contributing to new toolkits of environmental keywords to tell more powerful stories that compel people to take action. Dan Heath, in his wonderfully practical, no-nonsense guide to effective storytelling, Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die, writes:
“You will not get people to change without appealing to the rational, triggering the emotional, and oftentimes addressing the practical, such as a lack of alternatives.”
— Dan Heath
What words can help us get individuals, groups, organizations, governments and maybe even society, to change? Do the…
