Tag: fiction

  • Can fiction help us get to the truth about climate change?

    Can fiction help us get to the truth about climate change?

    Truth in fiction

    That’s where fiction can come in. But most climate fiction presents gloomy scenarios: think the waterless world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series or our earth after a virus wiped out most of human life in Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy.

    In contrast, Baden’s story showed more positive solutions. Her own research found that 98% of her readers changed their attitudes. A month after reading the story 60% of readers actually adopted a green alternative.

    She’s set to release “Murder in the Climate Assembly“, a fictional story about the ramifications of a murder that takes place in a citizens’ assembly on climate.

    Some media organizations are now including climate change awareness initiatives that use fictional examples into their marketing campaigns.

    Baden worked with BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, to create social media content that provided solutions with a tinge of humour. For example, they contrasted the carbon footprint of two popular characters from books and movies: James Bond who drives a gas guzzling sports car and has a walk-in wardrobe versus Jack Reacher who traveled by bus and shopped second-hand.

    Making environmentalism fun

    Pilot testing showed interesting results: “If we just presented the negative one like James Bond, some people laughed and thought it was funny, but a few people thought they were being a bit preached at and switched off,” Baden said. “Whereas when you kind of had both together with a bit of humor, that seemed to hit the right spot.”

    Pike agreed: “Comedy too allows us to let our guard down. When we open our mouth to laugh, our mind is open to learn.”

    When Pike was in Chile working on the PhD that led to her book she found that she loved the animated series “The Simpsons“. In 2008, one of the three TV channels played Simpsons episodes endlessly, she said. Simpsons creator Matt Groening intended his show to make people aware of environmental challenges and complications in ways that start conversations, she said.

    Context makes a difference too. “I read ecoactivist discourse in South America and it seemed so darn white and privileged,” Pike said. “If you read “Burning Rage of a Dying Planet” in a comfortable U.S. suburb, it’s one thing. If you read the same book in Chile, it feels different, almost too precious, definitely not the tone I would take in talking about ecology in South American countries.”

    The Center for Health Communication at Harvard University says that showing, not telling induces stronger emotional responses as visual imagery and helps our brains understand abstract and complex associations like those between climate and health.

    Connecting emotion to change

    Telling stories through books, plays or social media also help to create emotion, and change beliefs and behaviours. They may also reduce feelings of anxiety and depression that surface when bombarded with alarmist news about the climate crisis. Focusing on solutions is more effective.

    Pike said the way to get through the barrage of media messages and talk about the climate crisis is with honesty, independence and humour. “Acknowledge the hypocrisy and move on toward solutions,” Pike said. “A solution offers me a choice, agency, a chance to put up a sail and navigate to a goal.”

    Pike taught a class called “Environmental Reporting for a Hopeful Planet” in the spring 2024 semester. One assignment was “Forest Friday”: students were asked to read, watch or listen to examples of environmental storytelling.

    One week, the students were assigned a video of Rebecca Solnit. She’s a writer, historian and activist who has been examining hope and the unpredictability of change for more than two decades. In 2023 she co-edited an anthology called “It’s Not Too Late”, a guide for finding hope even while climate change-induced disasters continue. This is what one student said after they watched that video:

    “I felt reassured by her calmness and her endless lists of knowledge of times and places in which meaningful change has occurred. I think she makes many great points about the way that just because ideas don’t always get the opportunity to fully take shape they are still impactful on society as a whole.”

    So, what’s the best way to write about the climate crisis?

    “Read environmental writing and write,” Pike said. “Be so deeply curious about how ecology works, how nature and culture interact, how businesses and institutions works and their role in the climate crisis.”

    Ways to write effectively

    Having a community of people who also write about and care about the environment can also help. But most importantly, Pike said: “Work to tell a story well.”

    This means reading the publications which interest you and seeing if your story would be a good fit. Try different mediums. Take Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax”. It’s a children’s book written in 1971 about a character who speaks for the trees as a business tycoon destroys the environment. The story encourages activism and involvement in making the situation better. In it the Lorax tells us: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

    More recently, there are films like “Flow“, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best International Feature Film, and “The Wild Robot“, which was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Animated Feature.

    In both, climate change is a world-building element; one showed a submerged Golden Gate Bridge, the other showed a flood of biblical proportions. But they’re both animated films, with cute animals coming together to save the world, reaching a younger audience who will grow up with climate change and its impacts.

    Creating a story that can make people think about our planet and how we can tackle climate change isn’t easy. Pike said it is worth persevering.

    “If you get tired, don’t give up,” Pike said. “Rest and get back to it when you can. We all plant seeds and it’s hard to say which ones will take.”

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What makes you switch off the news when a story about climate change comes on?
    2. What happens to our brain when we show, rather than tell, in our writing on climate change?
    3. What might you learn in a course like “Environmental Reporting for a Hopeful Planet?” 

     

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  • Stranger than fiction: The Young Warrior saga at the Institute for American Indian Arts

    Stranger than fiction: The Young Warrior saga at the Institute for American Indian Arts

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    David John Baer McNicholas’s first novella is inspired by a darkly comedic poem he once wrote about a town that outlawed canned food and built a massive trebuchet, or catapult, to hurl the cans into the distance — only to receive thank-you notes tied to bricks hurled back at them.

    Lately, McNicholas has been entangled in a real-life plot eerily similar to his writing. At the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, food pantries were empty despite a $50,000 grant meant to support them. When student publication The Young Warrior printed criticisms of school officials for these failures and the Associated Student Government began investigating, administrators swiftly retaliated — kicking students out of housing, putting them on probation, and even threatening them with lawsuits.

    This may sound like the plot of a neo-noir film bleak enough to rival “Chinatown,” but for McNicholas, a creative writing student at IAIA and the founder and editor of The Young Warrior, it’s reality.

    Young Warrior editor David McNicholas recalls, “Oh shit, they’re going to throw everything at me” for exposing the administration. (Ponic Photography)

    McNicholas connects IAIA’s pattern of silencing dissent to broader institutional failures. He recounts how during a faculty meeting with the Board of Trustees, a sculpture professor once dared to mention an academic paper written by a former IAIA department head. The paper showed that even conservative estimates put IAIA’s staff turnover rate at about 30%. McNicholas says when the professor brought it up, “everyone in the meeting clammed up, and later they came down on him hard. They told him he embarrassed the dean of students and demanded he write a public apology and retraction. He wrote a coerced apology and quit the next day.”

    The Young Warrior published the academic paper before quickly being told to retract it.

    “We want better,” says McNicholas. “Student retention is 50%. Graduation is 25% . . . The faculty, staff, and students here are top-notch people, but the administration just supports the rising stars and lets everyone else evaporate.”

    McNicholas’s own showdown with the administration began when he published an anonymous student letter and flyer accusing the dean of students of bullying and suggesting food-pantry funds had been misappropriated. The letter and flyer resonated with the student body, according to McNicholas, and many came forward to thank him and to offer support. 

    I love this school. I love the community. I love the students and the faculty. I struggle with the administration after this, but I think that that struggle was there long before I came along. I just kind of exposed it.

    When McNicholas published the anonymous letter and flyer, he says students were being forced to buy meal plans they couldn’t always use while the dean of students, McNicholas says, dismissed the need for food pantries altogether, claiming, “Students have meal plans; they don’t need food pantries.” 

    This explanation rang hollow for McNicholas who, like many of his peers, falls below the poverty line and relies on food pantries to survive. 

    Collage of advertisements in the Young Warrior student magazine

    After the letter and flyer came out, the administration promptly accused McNicholas of “bullying” staff with his publication, and IAIA Provost Felipe Colón put him under investigation. 

    “They came down on me primarily, but also on a peer who had made an Instagram post, of all things,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Oh shit, they’re going to throw everything at me.’” 

    Anticipating housing sanctions, McNicholas preemptively left campus and lived out of his van. 

    “It sucked, because I wasn’t prepared for it. I had to go sleep in a friend’s driveway,” he remembers. The forcefulness of the school’s response only made McNicholas more suspicious, bringing to mind Shakespeare’s famous line, “The lady doth protest too much.” 

    Institute of American Indian Arts Can’t Ignore the First Amendment

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    Tell the Institute of American Indian Arts to lift sanctions against David McNicholas and revise its anti-bullying policy.


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    The situation escalated when the administration denied that the grant even existed during a meeting with McNicholas and other members of the Associated Student Government who had taken an interest in the matter. Despite the administration’s denials, an anonymous source provided McNicholas with a photocopy of a grant award letter for the rumored $50,000. Armed with this evidence, McNicholas and the ASG president confronted the administration, only to face threats of legal action. 

    The administration’s behavior took an emotional toll on students, according to McNicholas. One day, the ASG called a meeting to discuss the situation — just ASG members, since advisors employed by the college couldn’t be trusted — and the ASG president showed up in tears. She had just come from a meeting with IAIA President Robert Martin, who delivered a shocking ultimatum. 

    “She said that he told her the school was seriously considering suing ASG — and her — because of the bad publicity,” McNicholas says. “She came to us and said, ‘They told me to fix it.’ She was in tears, you know, and that made me mad.” 

    When they confronted the provost with the grant award letter, he changed his tune. 

    “He showed up at the next meeting and said, ‘Oh, you know what? I did some looking, I researched it, and I think I found the grant that you guys were talking about, and I’d like to come and explain how it was spent,’” McNicholas recalls. “I was like, yeah, I bet you do.”

    Meanwhile, Provost Colón’s investigation of McNicholas for publishing the student critiques found him responsible for violating the school’s unconstitutional anti-bullying policy. Exhausted and beaten down, he was unable to attend the meeting where the provost attempted to explain the grant’s expenditures. McNicholas says, “I got the sheet he handed out, which showed budget-to-actual figures, but when pressed to release the ledger, he claimed bank statements might not go back that far. We’re talking a year, maybe two at most. I think he thought you could say that because he was with a room full of like 19, 20 year olds. But if I had been in that room, I would have pushed back.”

    Though McNicholas later successfully appealed the housing sanctions and recovered about $2,000 in lost fees, he remains outraged at how other students were treated. 

    McNicholas never did accept IAIA’s “as little as possible” philosophy, in which truth had no place, power thrived on silence, and the ones who dared to ask questions were the first to pay the price.

    “What I really can’t stand is that they did the same thing to a 19-year-old freshman for making an Instagram post. That person didn’t move out on their own accord. They lost all their housing and meal plan money. They lost $2,000,” McNicholas says. “They kicked that person out, kept their money, and made a 19-year-old student homeless. As far as I’m concerned, that’s unconscionable.”

    Not only did the sanctions against McNicholas affect his ability to participate in campus life, they also threatened his employment opportunities, including a federal work-study opportunity that should have been protected from administrative interference. 

    “I was hired to be an orientation mentor at the end of last summer,” he says “And the day before I was going to start, I got a call from the director of that program who said, ‘Yeah, you can’t participate because you’re on institutional probation.’”

    Finding himself ruthlessly targeted by the administration, McNicholas turned to the press. Teaming up with a few peers, they went to the Santa Fe Reporter, and the article that followed — which detailed the administration’s retaliatory actions against him — made an immediate impact. 

    “When that article came out, both the interim director and dean of students were gone within days,” he says. “Like, they were gone.” 

    David McNicholas at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico

    Anticipating housing sanctions, Young Warrior editor David McNicholas preemptively left campus and lived out of his van. “It sucked, because I wasn’t prepared for it. I had to go sleep in a friend’s driveway.” (Ponic Photography)

    After the Santa Fe Reporter exposé and leadership shakeup, the food pantry miraculously transformed. A 20-foot-long conference table in the Student Success Center, once filled with nothing but cans of tomatoes that no one was using, suddenly became a bounty of groceries. 

    Last semester, McNicholas delved into the intersection of journalism and free speech through an independent study. His research included works like Dean Spade’s “Mutual Aid” and FIRE’s “Guide to Free Speech on Campus,” laying the groundwork for his evolving understanding of rights and responsibilities. 

    This semester, McNicholas has already published a new issue of The Young Warrior, which reflects his growing interest in matters of free expression. The issue includes a letter from FIRE written on his behalf and a personal acknowledgment of his own rights and responsibilities as a journalist. 

    “Yes, the school violated my rights and they need to be held accountable, but also, I could have been a better journalist. And there’s room to talk about that,” he says with characteristic humility. The issue also strikes a lighter tone with a comic poking fun at the provost — because, as McNicholas says with a grin, “why not?”

    The intersection of art, politics, and personal freedom is a driving force for McNicholas. “My work is very personal,” he explains. “I live in a political morass metaphorically surrounded by people on both sides of a binary who think censorship is fine as long as it’s censoring the other guy. I’m a non-binary thinker. I’m an anarchist. For an artist like me to make art, I can’t be worried about who I will offend. I can’t tailor my work to thread between all these idiots who can’t think for themselves, who can’t be critical without taking sides. If I worried about that, I couldn’t get up in the morning. I couldn’t be an artist.”

    McNicholas never did accept IAIA’s “as little as possible” philosophy, in which truth had no place, power thrived on silence, and the ones who dared to ask questions were the first to pay the price. Nevertheless, he speaks with deep affection about IAIA. 

    “I love this school. I love the community. I love the students and the faculty. I struggle with the administration after this, but I think that that struggle was there long before I came along. I just kind of exposed it.”

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