What are environmental stories?

First, we thought we’d try to define the environment, but it’s a capacious term. Defining it is like trying to hold dark matter in your hand or knowing the national debt. Meaning, it’s big, it’s hard to put in a box or a paragraph, and seems to expand the more we try. If we think (and at TESS we do) that the environment encompasses everything in which nonliving elements (roads, dioxins, supermarkets) and living beings (owls, beech trees, millworkers) exist and interact, then this includes pretty much everything. And that’s where our definition of environmental stories begins.*

Environmental stories contain, examine, and illuminate the complex relationships between the environment, society, and politics.

We want to emphasize that environmental stories are not just about nature, which is another problematic term. Of course, environmental stories can include things found erupting from our planet’s DNA, but they have to be more than a pastoral or romantic view of fruit trees or fungi. The undercarriage of environmental stories contains love, but with sentiment, not sentimentality….love summoned by Icelandic epics, or worlds under our feet, or who is left behind after disasters above ground.

Environmental stories don’t bury you in an avalanche of data and facts even while they can be supported by them. “A fact does not fully obtain the depth of a fact, the power of a fact, until it becomes part of a story,” writes author and TESS collaborator, John Freeman, in his anthology, Tale of Two Planets. Indeed, humans process complexities, learn, and connect through stories. Stories—not data—change minds, as lawyers since ancient Greek times know. Stories can illuminate how our exterior landscapes affect our interior landscapes—and the reverse. In fact, the word environment comes from the French -environner meaning “to encircle,” thus environmental refers to the outside circling the inside, the “mental.”

Neuroscientists⁠ have found that stories create empathy and cooperation with other living beings. We have not found a statistic that can do that! Environmental stories can trace the relationship between technology, pollution, and ambiguity through humor and fiction. They can outline a person’s relationship to home through racism and hurricanes. We want to be moved, but not by narratives that traffic in preconceived emotions that spoon-feed the echo chamber of our grievances, but moved by complexities that great storytelling provides. We want environmental stories to raise stakes, not fists, ask more questions than answers they provide…stories that can fit in the palm of your hand or lodge itself in some small place in your heart or in your throat. We believe environmental stories can make bridges instead of moats.

*our definition is being tweaked every now and again, so don’t put this in hard quotes!