permission to share this photograph; original image credit: Dwight Owens).
By Karen Anderson, Katherine Crichton, and Angela Gallego-Sala.
Life on Earth is facing a variety of threats including climate change and biodiversity collapse. Policy makers have failed to respond proportionately to mitigate the worst effects of these crises. In this piece we argue that unfolding environmental emergencies place urgent demands on environmental scientists to experiment with new ways of communicating their work. The crux of our argument is that the dominant form of science communication lies in dispassionately written manuscripts that respond to an imposed norm of objective writing, putting us at odds with our own nature. Scientific writing intentionally masks the writers’ feelings and purposely severs empathetic connections between reader and writer. We argue that this may be one cause of inaction. We show how it can be possible to maintain the necessary objectivity of classical scientific accounts while augmenting this writing with more creative forms in an aspiration to alert society to the crises. Experimenting with this, as we do in the paper, reveals the human side of science, exposing the feelings and emotions of the scientists themselves. We show how storytelling within science has the capacity to improve science communication within and between disciplines as well as with the public; deliver improved critical understanding of our own subjects; and provide a vehicle for communicating our lived experiences on the front line of environmental change.
Relational Thinking 