Stories,crisis,and meaning-making: storying possibility and community in the terrain of cultural struggle

Abstract

In a time of multiple, competing, and nested crises, the draw to storytelling is intuitive. Stories help us make sense of the world around us. People are drawn to stories because of their emphasis on community, and the way they create possibilities when it feels like there are none. This paper builds upon geographic research on storytelling, articulating how stories are critical for creating meaning in light of crises. Based on 14 months of fieldwork with storytellers in Appalachia and Alaska, two regions facing profound social, climatic, and economic change and with culturally rich storytelling traditions, research for this paper discusses the practice of storytelling, as told by storytellers, and how different approaches to storytelling help address the climate crisis specifically with notes for crises more broadly. Further, considering calls to use storytelling to address climate change, this paper examines and critiques the stories that are currently being told and valued. Finally, this paper outlines the kinds of stories that could be told to address crises, noting specifically how stories are sites of cultural and political struggle.

Introduction

According to the most recent report from Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a small window of opportunity to address the climate crisis before crossing a threshold into a world irreparably damaged by warming temperatures. ¹ The report is dire but, importantly, not bleak. While recognizing that many around the world are already facing extremely difficult circumstances due to climate change, the report’s authors emphasize there is a chance to stave off its worst impacts. While many of the stories written about climate change are apocalyptic, the larger story of climate change is still unfolding. As such, the stories we tell about it matter in the way they shape our imaginations, and thereby our actions. If the larger story of climate change is presented as a foregone conclusion, we are already doomed. However, the story of climate change is one of possibility. The stories we tell about climate change, about crises more broadly, enable or disable possibility, and it matters what kinds of stories we tell.

The link between storytelling and crisis is intuitive. People are drawn to storytelling for its ability to create meaning, which is needed most amid crises. ² The proliferation of storytelling practice across multiple mediums – popular media, corporate branding, digital platforms, and research methods – signals its popularity, which is further evidenced by its presence in formats as diverse as political rallies and academic conferences. For example, there were multiple sessions on storytelling at the 2019 Annual Meeting of American Association of Geographers, including Derek Alderman’s past president’s address, ³ which discussed the role of storytelling in geographic education in the context of a ‘post-truth’ world. This article contends there are different stakes associated with different approaches to storytelling, and that this larger trend toward storytelling is indicative of, and shaped by, an era of multiple, competing, and nested crises. It attempts to answer the following questions: how do the stories we tell mirror or respond to these crises?; and how can the stories we tell help us navigate crises? Research for this article is based on 14 months of fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Appalachia and Alaska, two regions that are experiencing profound and interrelated climatic, economic, and social change. These regions are also culturally rich in storytelling traditions. Fieldwork was conducted with six different organizations – three in each region – that do storytelling work, although each practice it differently. By working across these traditions and regions, it is possible to begin to discern not only the kinds of stories being told in the present, but also, and importantly, what it means to do storytelling work, particularly, as I learned, in an era of crisis.

This paper begins with an overview of geographic engagement with storytelling, noting how, and in what ways, storytelling is a practice of meaning-making. The next section contextualizes the climate crisis – like all crises – as conjunctural, meaning that its manifestation in the present is a product of histories of cultural and social struggle. Using three theorists of storytelling – Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and Sylvia Wynter – this section sketches a brief history of storytelling and crisis, pointing out how stories help navigate crises through building community and centering possibility when it feels like there is none. This paper then turns toward to my research to show how there is a distinction between the kinds of stories being told, and the cultural political trends they follow, and the kinds of stories that could be told to better address the climate crisis specifically and, arguably, crises more broadly. Finally, the paper ends with a call for geographers to engage more intentionally with storytelling as a means to engage in cultural political struggle, especially in the face of what feels like shrinking possibilities for a viable future.

Geographies of storytelling

As Emilie Cameron notes, a new interest in – and practice of – story has developed over the last few decades in the discipline. ⁴ Story means many things to many people, and this diversity is reflected in geography’s commitment to studying multiple scales of stories, from ‘small stories’ to larger stories (e.g. cosmological myths).^5,6 Stories enliven geographic research, ⁷ providing deeper context for engaging with and broadly communicating geographic thought. ⁸ Story has been essential to geography’s study of place,^9,10 which has extended to how geographers understand landscapes and environment.^11,12 More specifically, story has become integral to cultural geography,^13,14 creating pathways for thinking with and through mediums like photography and poetry.^15,16

While discourse analysis ¹⁷ and narrative policy analysis ¹⁸ are widely used geographic methods, less attention, at least explicitly, has been given to story as geographic method. Many scholars engage with storytelling in their work in a variety of applications, from studying food consumption patterns to thinking more creatively about medical geographies.^19,20 There has been an effort to study narratives as a means of creating ‘narrative space’ within geographic methods. ²¹ Elsewhere, scholars have utilized narrative inquiry as a reflexive practice in research and teaching. ²² Similarly, the proliferation of literary geographies signals an interest in how fiction expands geographical methods through engaging with literary and cultural theories. ²³ The act of writing is also a popular method that connects geographers to storytelling.^24,25 Beyond text and writing, geographers have also turned toward telling stories with objects. This is especially the case when assembling stories from archives.^26,27 Given the increasing attention geographers pay toward understanding the sociopolitical context in which archives form, ²⁸ it is important to consider the ‘work’ that stories do. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith points out, storytelling has the potential to decolonize geographic research, as stories allow the teller agency over their experiences. ²⁹

However, decolonizing geographic research requires critical engagement with Indigenous scholarship. Stories are central to many Indigenous communities’ traditions. As Julie Kruikshank points out, stories, when shared by Indigenous communities, have lives of their own, as living, evolving knowledge systems. ³⁰ Indigenous stories of place and land challenge Western epistemological and ontological presumptions about the environment. ³¹ These stories open space for contemplation and reflection in cosmologies that precede and exceed Western knowledge systems. ³² As such, engagement with Indigenous storytelling can potentially decolonize geographic research by creating counter-stories to histories of harmful research practice.^33,34 It is important to note that Indigenous stories, like traditions, are not static. Rather, they evolve to respond to their contexts, providing insights into topics as diverse as GIS and the colonization of outer space.^35,36 Further, Indigenous storytelling, which tends to focus on the collective rather than the individual, is especially generative for understanding the transformative capacity of storytelling, as a method that simultaneously challenges historic structures of power while providing paths toward building new futures.

A commitment to transformation is also present in recent geographic scholarship on storytelling to address social change. Here, I will focus only on two examples: storytelling to address racial injustice and climate change. According to Sherene Razack, storytelling can be in opposition to established knowledge. ³⁷ She goes on to explain how storytelling is at the heart of social change. Storytelling has been key in helping scholars formulate a critique of and response to histories of racism, especially in education. ³⁸ Regarding geographic education, Derek Alderman and his collaborators utilize ‘regional storytelling’ as anti-racist pedagogy. ³⁹ Regional stories challenge systemic and structural racism by highlighting the social and cultural context of racism and, through this understanding, provide ways to address it. Considering ongoing struggles for racial justice in the U.S., storytelling as pedagogy makes the sometimes-abstract social constructions of racism more legible to students. Further, in making these issues more apparent, it highlights the interconnectivity of racial injustices with other forms of injustices, such as climate injustice.

In many ways, climate change challenges the limits of human cognition, its spatial and temporal scales nearly too abstract to comprehend in their entirety. As such, communicating about climate change is less a matter of communicating facts, ⁴⁰ and more a matter of communicating emotions, making climate change more visceral and therefore more knowable. ⁴¹ Climate stories are important because they re-configure the language of experts, ⁴² creating meaningful truths from a barrage of facts. ⁴³ As Cameron et al. point out, Indigenous perspectives on climate change broaden the scope of what is possible regarding adaptation, which is key for addressing the multi-faceted nature of the climate crisis. ⁴⁴

This, I think, is the true power of stories, especially in the face of crises: they create possibility. Katherine McKittrick writes, ‘telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are relational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people, places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots. The process is sustained by invention and wonder’. Further, while ‘the story has no answers’, ‘the story opens the door to curiosity. . . [it] asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially’. ⁴⁵ In other words, stories invite us to sit with, and deeply feel, both complexity and possibility. Importantly, sharing stories is communal; it is a collective experience that requires a relational practice between at least two people. However, it certainly matters what kinds of stories are being told. So many stories of climate change, for example, focus on apocalypticism, disabling possibility. ⁴⁶ It is the tension between enabling/disabling possibility, constricting imaginative and political capacities in light of crises, that signals storytelling as a terrain of cultural struggle over what futures are made possible despite crises.

Storytelling the climate crisis: possibility in the terrain of struggle

From recent findings that the Greenland ice sheet is melting much faster than models anticipated, fast-tracking a timeline where significant global sea level rise is likely within this century, ⁴⁷ to the devastating floods in Pakistan that have submerged nearly a third of the country, leading to food crises, ⁴⁸ the climate crisis is a threat to a viable future, ⁴⁹ pivoting on an axis of possibility and impossibility. It is critical to understand, however, that the climate crisis, like other crises, is conjunctural in nature, meaning that its manifestation in the present is the result of histories of intersecting struggles over power and powerlessness. In his 1987 essay Gramsci and Us, Stuart Hall outlines his conceptualization of conjuncture, noting the ways histories inform the present: ‘When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no going back. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, violently, with all the pessimism of the intellect at your command, to the discipline of the conjuncture’. ⁵⁰ Further, ‘Gramsci warns us in the Notebooks that a crisis is not an immediate event but a process’. ⁵¹ Understanding crisis as a process helps to contextualize the multiple perceived crises of the present, climate change being one of many, not as anomalous, but, rather, as the result of the nested nature of crises from the past. Further, following Gramsci’s idea of the war of position, which envisions cultural politics as the bedrock of social change, I argue that the climate crisis, and our perceptions of it and ability to act on it (or not), are enmeshed in the terrain of cultural struggle. ⁵² Engaging in the war of position, over meaning-making for viable futures, is paramount, and the stories we tell are key.

By briefly examining the writing of three philosophers of storytelling – Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and Sylvia Wynter – it is possible to sketch a history of storytelling and crisis over the last century. Benjamin’s storytelling is a response to what he perceives as a threat to meaningful communication in an era of mass media, whereas Williams’s stories are a response to what he deems a crisis in communication. Wynter conceptualizes storytelling as a form of ontological politics, as a phenomenological response to the human condition. Each of these writers also address crises in their historical context: war, colonialism, social unrest, and climate change to name only a few facets.

Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller discusses the declining art of storytelling after World War I, noting how ‘information’ (e.g. news bereft of what he terms ‘experience’) became the modality of communication post-1918. ⁵³ He wrote extensively about poverty of experience, which is the result of multiple forms of crisis, namely a world-ending war, the rise of alienating technology, and financial calamity. In a passage from Poverty and Experience, Benjamin explicitly states, ‘. . .our poverty of experience is not only an impoverishment of private experience but of human experience as a whole. It is, therefore, a new kind of barbarism’. ⁵⁴ Both essays were written by Benjamin as he was in exile after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. ⁵⁵ Through understanding this history and examining the oeuvre of Benjamin’s writing on storytelling, it is possible to see the links he makes between crisis, barbarism, and the decline of storytelling. Further, he articulates these linkages as a continuation of the impoverishment of experience from WWI’s end in 1918 and its relation to the rise of fascism during his lifetime.

Nearly 50 years later, in another era of cultural and social tumult, similar sentiments were echoed by Raymond Williams. He argued that communication – given ‘its material means are intrinsic to all distinctively human forms of labor and social organization’ – is itself a means of production. ⁵⁶ I link Williams’s conceptualization of communication to Benjamin’s articulation of storytelling as a means of communicating experience. If, as Williams argues, communication is a means of production, and if capitalist production is prone to crisis, I contend that an era of crisis is indicative of both crises of capital and communication (e.g. storytelling). However, from crisis, Williams argues, ⁵⁷ it is possible to build new means of production, and ‘through these new means of production a more advanced and more complex realization of the decisive productive relationships between communication and community’. The desire for community amidst crisis is intuitive; however, the draw to storytelling is perhaps made clearer by understanding its relationship to social change.

Writing about how Western conceptualizations of humanity have become the standard story for all humans, Wynter argues, ‘We shall therefore need. . .to relativize the West’s hitherto secular liberal monohumanist conception of being human, its overrepresentation as the being of being human itself’. ⁵⁸ Rather than speaking of the human in the absolute, she contends, ‘We need to speak instead of our genres of being human’. ⁵⁹ It is the crisis of meaning-making, of finding ways to be human otherwise, that Wynter sees as the terrain of struggle for understanding the intersectional crises of racial inequality and climate injustice. Other modalities of being human (of being Black specifically), as evidenced in her 1994 essay No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues, are simply not perceived as human. ⁶⁰ This provides historical context for understanding why movements like Black Lives Matters are interconnected with issues of climate injustice: ‘the single issue with which global warming and climate instability now confronts us and that we have to replace the ends of the referent-we of [the] liberal monohumanist. . .with the ecumenically human ends of the referent-we in the horizon of humanity. We have no choice’. ⁶¹ It is critical, then, to tell other kinds of stories of the human, celebrating and uplifting other genres of existence.

In sum, storytelling helps navigate crises. ⁶² This is due, in part, to storytelling’s ability to break down complexity into less abstract, more actionable knowledge, ⁶³ reconfiguring and reframing facts to allow people to see multiple possible futures. ⁶⁴ Given storytelling’s capacity for meaning-making, I argue it is necessary to tell stories with the knowledge that they are critical for engaging in the terrain of struggle. Regarding the climate crisis specifically, stories can counter the hegemonic trend toward apocalypticism, a vision of the crisis that enables certain (often market-based) pathways forward that tend to privilege certain ‘genres’ (e.g. Western, liberal, white) of humanity over others. While geographers have long engaged with story and storytelling, it is this understanding of story – as a terrain of struggle, especially within crises – that informs this article.

Methods: an ethnography of a practice

Data for this article was collected by working with storytellers over 2 years (2018 and 2019) in Appalachia and Alaska. They were contacted through sustained engagement with six organizations – three in each region – that do storytelling work, although each practice it somewhat differently. Of the three organizations based in Appalachia: one is a guild for storytellers, providing access to a network of tellers from different backgrounds (e.g. folklorists, balladeers, etc.) that work across the region; another was founded during the storytelling revival movement of the 1970s and hosts an internationally-attended annual storytelling festival; and the final organization collects stories from their community as a part of their ongoing mission to preserve Southern Appalachian culture since 1966. Of the three organizations based in Alaska: one works with Indigenous communities in the Arctic to document their experiences of climate change (among other shifting realities); another, founded in 1988, houses an archive of multiple oral histories, much of which are story-based and come from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities; and the last organization focuses explicitly on personal storytelling.

Rather than studying specific stories or studying the storytelling traditions of groups in these regions, this work aimed to study how, why, and in what ways storytelling is practiced. In other words, this research focused more on the cultural practices of storytelling than the cultures telling the stories. Specific stories were sometimes shared during research, but this methodological distinction is intentional for two reasons. First, exploitative legacies of ethnographic research, notably among Indigenous communities, are critical to keep in mind, especially considering the centrality of many stories to their cultural contexts. ⁶⁵ Much has been written about the ethics of ethnographic research. ⁶⁶ Building trust with communities through sustained engagement requires time. Given the geographic scope and limitations of this work (e.g. funding), and keeping my own positionality and limitations (e.g. language skills) in mind, I knew that I would not have the adequate resources to do in-person, long-term ethnographic research. Instead, I spent time prior to and during research building relationships with organizations practicing storytelling in these regions. During the initial phases of contacting these organizations, I made sure to distinguish that I was not necessarily interested in their stories. Rather, I was interested in how and why they practiced storytelling. Further, I pre-established ways that my research could be reciprocally beneficial and less exploitative. Second, I wanted to study different approaches to storytelling. It was not my intention to establish an ultimate definition of what counts as storytelling. Rather, it was my intention to distill elements of storytelling from these different practices to get a sense of what it means to do storytelling in the present.

Although my initial research focused explicitly on storytelling and climate change, many of my interviews drifted from climate change more toward discussions of crises more broadly. Many of the storytellers I talked to are community leaders, and they discussed their roles as storytellers as helping navigate crises in their communities, which ranged from conversations about the opioid epidemic in Appalachia to discussions of ongoing settler colonial violence in Alaska. These conversations honed my understanding of stories as a means of engaging in cultural struggle, specifically around intersecting crises. Further, and importantly, I developed a sense of how different approaches to storytelling enable or disable possibility in the face of crises. The following sections outline my findings, noting how it is critical to understand the relationship between kinds of stories and their abilities to address crises.

The kinds of stories being told: from the collective to the personal

In 2018, I attended the National Storytelling Festival, one of the largest storytelling festivals in the world, in the idyllic small town of Jonesborough, TN. The festival is hosted by the International Storytelling Center, also in Jonesborough, which was founded by storytellers largely interested in reviving folklore as response to the social and cultural tumult of the 1960s. ⁶⁷ For many in the storytelling community I interviewed, the festival, which takes place over 3 days in early fall annually, is the single-most important event of the year. It is where storytellers spend time together, catching up and learning from one another in workshops. Importantly, it is where storytellers connect with their listeners in a format that resembles the Center’s original vision of building community through storytelling. The founders’ focus on folklore still drives the overall programming of the festival; however, due to the rising popularity of ‘personal tales’ the composition of tellers, and the culture of the festival, are changing.

While at the festival, I connected with a teller between a morning storytelling performance and an afternoon workshop. When asked about her perception of that year’s festival, she responded, ‘. . .something new to storytelling is the concept of “The Moth” [a popular project that champions individual stories] and personal tales. To me, that has really picked up in the past 5 years and found its place. It’s not as popular in other countries I don’t think. . . but in the U.S. and parts of Canada, it’s a major part the storytelling scene’. ⁶⁸ Our conversation veered toward discussing the increasing presence of personal tales at the festival, to which she said, ‘We need to hear everyone’s stories, and we need to be open to that kind of communication, but. . .I don’t think there would be as much personal storytelling if people weren’t feeling as isolated. . .’ ⁶⁹ Throughout the festival, I attended both ‘traditional’ (e.g. folkloric) storytelling sessions and personal storytelling sessions, and the tension between the two became apparent through ongoing conversations with storytellers. While there is a general appreciation for the art of personal storytelling and an acknowledgment that this form of storytelling resonates with younger audiences, many tellers were apprehensive about the sea change, noting how it signals a shift in the perceived role of storytelling from the 1960s, as a means of addressing social issues. When climate change was mentioned in interviews, tellers gravitated to discussing crises more broadly, noting how the many crises of the present have resulted in a society-wide feeling of loneliness and isolation (like what Benjamin discussed in the early 20th century), and that the move toward individual storytelling resonates with these feelings.

When asked about the trend toward personal stories, a storyteller commented:

I’ve traveled, looked in other countries but what strikes me about the U.S. is that we were formed as an individualistic nation. . . that it was all individuals going forth and settle in this country. . .It was like, You stand alone. You stand on your own. You homestead. You get that. . .in the U.S. ⁷⁰

He and I and another storyteller met at a diner, where we discussed their perceived social role of the storyteller. Again, I brought up climate change, asking them to consider how storytelling may (or may not) help address the climate crisis. They both paused for a moment before the teller from the quote above said:

People don’t get magazines. . .any newspapers. They may go online and if they do there are no gatekeepers. . .There is no pyramid of who’s controlling the message, so they’re getting messages in all directions everywhere or no message. The result is cacophony, and I think it creates a sense of wanting to belong. . .Where do I belong? What is important?” I think in a very real way. . . storytelling is filling that void. . . ⁷¹

This sentiment was echoed by another storyteller, who said storytelling ‘helps connect people, and it helps us see ourselves in other people in a world where you can often feel disconnected and alone. . . It’s church for people who don’t go to church’. ⁷² From these interviews, I began to understand how storytellers see themselves addressing the core of present-day crises (e.g. isolation, fear, loneliness) through the stories they tell. However, I kept returning to questions about the kinds of stories people were telling, asking storytellers to reflect more deeply on growing interests in ‘personal tales’ and how these mirror larger trends in the U.S.

During my first few weeks of fieldwork, I met with a storyteller, whose responses to my questions about the storyteller’s role in society shifted the trajectory of my research. This teller, a Black woman, discussed how she uses storytelling to deal with histories of racial trauma. She went on to explain that ‘stories applied full strength are medicine, for whatever the listener is needing’. ⁷³ In her opinion, many of the conflicts in society stem from the fact that ‘our culture is bereft’ because there is a ‘disconnect that Western culture has with its soul. We don’t believe anything anymore’. ⁷⁴ While this storyteller acknowledges that personal tales are important, she explains that stories, to be successful at healing, ‘have to be rooted in something that people can both intuitively and viscerally connect to’. ⁷⁵ Because, without connection, as another storyteller put it, society risks being overcome by crisis: ‘The storyteller is the one that can pass on traditions so things aren’t lost. They can help you survive. . .The storyteller is the person that connects the past to the future, the future to the past, so that there is none a forgotten place’. ⁷⁶

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh outlines how the stories society values have increasingly narrowed from ones that center collective experiences to ones that focus almost entirely on personal experiences. ⁷⁷ At the same time, he points out that the issues society faces – climate change, for example – have grown in scale. In short, the stories society values are at odds with the problems it faces. He suggests that society’s ability to tell stories at the scales necessary to address these collective issues is damaged.

It is not my aim to suggest that personal tales are unimportant. Rather, it is my aim to highlight how, increasingly, people are drawn to individual stories, as evidenced by their growing presence at the National Storytelling Festival and by the popularity of programs like The Moth, ⁷⁸ which a storyteller mentioned specifically in an interview. Following Ghosh’s analysis of the stories society values narrowing in focus as the issues we face grow larger, and listening to storytellers discuss recent styles in storytelling practice, it is possible to see how the draw to personal storytelling mirrors social trends in the U.S. that track with neoliberalism’s emphasis on hyperindividualism, which has, as many storytellers note, come at the expense of feeling connected to a community. Crises, like the climate crisis, are often the result – and persist – because of social isolation. ⁷⁹ This, according to many storytellers I talked to, points toward why it is imperative to understand storytelling as a means of not only engaging in the terrain of cultural and political struggle, but also as a means of creating possibility – of creating connections – amidst crises. Thinking of stories as a terrain of cultural struggle, it is crucial to tell stories that challenge hyperindividualism, creating a path out of social isolation. It is worth considering, then, the kinds of stories that could be told.

The kinds of stories that could be told: from the personal to the collective

During fieldwork, I spent several months working at an organization that preserves folk culture in Appalachia. I sifted through hundreds of oral histories, some of which were explicitly about storytelling and some of which were about topics as diverse as spiritual healing and natural dyeing practices for yarn. I began to understand how this organization, and its archive specifically, acts as a memory bank, almost like an organ, for the community it serves. As I continued studying different approaches to storytelling, asking different storytellers how their work could help address climate change, I found that tellers engaged in folkloric traditions (e.g. people who identified as such) were the most articulate about explaining how storytelling can, and does already, have the capacity to cohere meaning from a crisis as complex as climate change. ⁸⁰ More specifically, folkloric storytelling, which, for many tellers, includes some element of social justice awareness, ⁸¹ speaks to two key issues inhibiting climate change communication: (1) imagining at the scale of the collective rather than solely the individual ⁸² ; and (2) avoiding apocalyptic (e.g. impossible) stories of climate change. ⁸³ In other words, by intentionally telling stories to foster community and to create possibility, folkloric approaches to climate storytelling counter feelings of hopelessness and isolation that accompany and fuel crises.

Folklore hinges upon sharing knowledge collectively. ⁸⁴ Earlier in my research, I met with a storyteller who helped me understand the role of community – and the emphasis on the collective – inherent to folkloric stories. He lives in a medium-sized town, where he runs a storytelling series. While we were chatting at a table outside of a café, nearly every person that passed by stopped to say hello, to thank him for his work for the community. When asked about his perceived social role as a storyteller, he said, ‘I believe that part of my charge as a storyteller is to keep the stories of the community alive’. He went on to explain, ‘the role of a storyteller is to share with the community what the community needs to hear even when they don’t want to hear it’. When asked what he would say to climate scientist aiming to tell an impactful climate story, he stated, ‘Story builds community and it keeps community together. . . That’s what I would do for this particular scientist. It’s like, let’s just be real with people so that we can build a community because once the community is established then we can start to address the issues’. ⁸⁵ Rather than speaking to a community, he emphasized that it is critical that scientists – and activists – speak with a community, which requires long-term engagement and commitment to building connections. Importantly, the work of building connections is central to folkloric storytelling, as another teller noted, ‘In sharing the stories in the folkloric tradition, I am also communicating a bit of myself as well as the connections we can make’. ⁸⁶

Here, it is important to note how folklore builds upon, and sometimes appropriates, ⁸⁷ Indigenous storytelling, which also tends to emphasize the collective. An Athabascan teller said, ‘stories are like neighbors. When I hear a story, it’s like being at a neighbor’s table. . . having supper’, ⁸⁸ which highlights the relational practice of storytelling, of speaking and listening, that is so critical for building community in the face of burgeoning feelings of isolation. Further, in the Alaskan Arctic, for example, storytelling is central to Iñupiat communities, which are on the frontlines of climatic crises. One teller I interviewed explained to me that there are three different words for story: unipkaaq refers to legends, fables, and myths; quliaqtuaq refers to life experiences and testimonies; and uqaluktuaq refers to historical accounts of events that happened in the last two or three generations. Within all these framings of story, sharing knowledge by and for a community is centered, transferring knowledge across generations about topics as varied as cosmogony to family history. ⁸⁹ The scale of story represented in the Iñupiat lexicon – the way collectivity is centered – speaks to the kinds of stories needed to imagine/act at the scale of climate change. However, without a sense of the future being possible, the scale of stories being told is irrelevant.

After crossing paths a few times, I was finally able to connect with a storyteller who sees their work as combining personal and traditional storytelling. I asked her about how she might discuss the climate crisis, to which she responded with questions: ‘What can we learn from the past to help us in the present? How do we help those that know in the future this is going to happen to them?’ ⁹⁰ This series of questioning led to a longer conversation, in which she explained how she keeps an eye on the future in her storytelling, sharing lessons and ideas that will, ideally, help build a better future for her listeners. On the topic of the future – and of possibility, specifically – another folkloric teller shared, ‘belief in the possible, whatever that is, to me, that’s what storytelling is. It’s sharing that’. ⁹¹ Because climate change, specifically, has no clear end in sight, I would often ask storytellers how they would craft a story that speaks to possibility while also being honest about the realities of climate change. When asked to speak to possibility and climate change, a self-titled ‘Afri-Lachian’ (Appalachian + African American) teller introduced me to what she termed ‘riddle tales’, which trace their origins to the African continent. In these tales, community leaders tell a story with an intentionally ambiguous ending: ‘The riddle tale would be told, and then it wouldn’t have clear ending. It would end with something like, well what do you think might happen, which was a deliberate call to discussion and communication’. Speaking specifically about riddle tales as calls for collective action, she recalls tales from her grandfather:

My grandfather used to end some stories. . . if they didn’t live happily ever after. . .they lived they best they could, and I think that is the best we can hope for in this type of storytelling. These are the best outcomes. . . not necessarily best being ‘this is a good outcome’ but these are the clearest possibilities of what could happen. . . a kind of open-ended storytelling that leaves people thinking, not necessarily feeling that the story ended. . . but carrying the story with them as what could I do to approach this possibility. ⁹²

Rather than offering a solution of their own, the storyteller tells a ‘riddle tale’ to discuss solutions collaboratively with community members. People are presented with multiple pathways forward, and collective storytelling is used to discuss and communicate those possibilities. Further, it is important to notice the emphasis on community in this version of storytelling, as the community’s participation is critical for planning for the future, which, again, counters feelings of hopelessness and isolation.

Stories of possibility, ones that center collective thought and imagination (and ideally action) should be told now more than ever. While this section has focused largely on the collective nature of folkloric and Indigenous storytelling as means of speaking to the climate crisis – of finding ways of engaging in the cultural terrain of struggle of climate messaging – it is important not to fully discount the role of personal storytelling. Many traditional storytellers are coming around to the idea of personal storytelling, and many of them engage in both forms of storytelling (as well as any number of variations of storytelling between the two). There is certainly room for all kinds of stories to help us address the climate crisis. If storytelling is fundamentally about meaning-making, and if the climate crisis, like so many crises, can be understood as a crisis of meaning, it is critical to tell stories that counter the cultural logistics – of hyperindividualism, of growth at all costs, etc. – that have brought us here.

Conclusions

The most recent report from the IPCC presents a dire future, but, again, it is importantly not bleak. ⁹³ There is a chance to stave off its worst impacts. Stories are a critical terrain of struggle for directing the outcomes of crisis, climate change being one of many, by countering feelings of hopelessness and isolation that often accompany crises while also pointing listeners toward more equitable outcomes through shared decision-making (e.g. riddle tales, in which tellers and listeners co-create visions of the future). While there are many calls being made for stories to help address the intersecting realities of the climate crisis, there are few studies that point to the way different approaches to storytelling speak to climate change differently. Further, as this paper has articulated, there are elements associated with certain storytelling practices (e.g. folkloric and Indigenous storytelling) that are capable of addressing the spatial and temporal scales of climate change by engaging directly in collective and speculative imagination.

While geographers have worked with story and storytelling in a variety of ways, this paper aims to direct geographers toward thinking with story as a means of engaging directly in the terrain of cultural and political struggle. I have written about how now-popular approaches to storytelling track with larger sociocultural trends toward hyperindividualism, and how these stories mirror typical political responses to climate change that draw on individual actions (and responsibilities) to address the climate crisis. I have also written about how other approaches to storytelling – what was often referenced as ‘traditional’ storytelling in my fieldwork – counter these trends by providing stories about collective thought and action, stories that center possibility despite, and in spite of, the world-ending stories that are so often told about climate change. Though this paper has largely focused on folklore and Indigenous storytelling as two methods for engaging with collective storytelling, these are certainly not the only ones. For example, much has been written about how literature helps us to better understand the climate crisis.^94,95

There is still much more to learn about how storytelling helps us better understand ourselves and our world. Following lessons learned from storytellers in this research, geographers can more explicitly think about their work – the stories they tell – as entering a terrain of struggle and to think of storytelling as a critical means of producing possibilities: the conditions of future survival.