Excerpt
However compelling, data-based, disaster-fueled narratives crowd out other ways of knowing, conveying, and addressing pressing environmental problems. In How Climate Changes Comes to Matter, Candis Callison shows that whether and how differently-situated groups— from Inuit leaders to science reporters— “become engaged” with a problem like climate change has to do with how the problem “becomes meaningful— by the forms of life it assumes.”8 By “forms of life,” Callison means not only expertise nor only firsthand experiences but also the values, institutions, epistemologies, and practices that the problem both stems from and draws into relief. More pointedly, Callison shows that climate change comes to matter when it “promiscuously inhabit[s] the spaces of ethics, morality, and other community- specific rationales for actions” with which scientific findings and projections alone cannot compete. In turn, how climate and other environmental stories are crafted and circulated significantly effects for whom they are sensible and meaningful. As a corollary, people can be living intimately with the effects of climate change and nonetheless discount, distrust, or outright reject facts and figures about it. One explanation for this incongruence has to do with the “forms of life” that facts and figures themselves assume in the context of what Heather Houser has termed the infowhelm. Akin to other equivalently complex and urgent problems, many people encounter climate change as an explanatory concept through “myriad streams of information types— scientific, demographic, experiential, economic, cultural— [that] gush out from this tentacular, ongoing crisis.”
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Taking narrative’s “world-making, world- changing capacities seriously, EH scholars, students, and practitioners are building a field where “alternative framings, approaches, and solutions that operate outside the dichotomized understandings of society and environment” are not just studied or critiqued, but also created and tested. However aspirational, the field in turn works to know and imagine futures that arc away from disaster and toward livability and justice.
