Can Interdisciplinary Insights Encourage a Meaningful Response to the Climate Crisis? Narratives from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Abstract

How we understand the contemporary socio-environmental challenges associated with climate change is shaped by our research disciplines. This paper explores how interdisciplinary collaboration can form new understandings of, and communication about, environmental change. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, mass coral bleaching prompts researchers to consider how our work can contribute to environmental stewardship that more effectively addresses the causes and consequences of climate change. Here, we report on one element of an ongoing collaboration involving researchers working in the fields of coastal geomorphology, human geography and art. In the spirit of geohumanities as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding places, we explore the work of narrative as a device for engaging with and communicating about the environmental challenge of coral reef degradation. Through independent and plaited narratives based on field research on the Great Barrier Reef, we undertake a deconstructive practice of “uncommoning” to consider what interdisciplinary collaboration enables, and how it opens up possibilities for engaging with, and communicating about, environmental crises. Sharing a curiosity about the island environment, each participant uses metaphors to evoke landscape features; however, they each work through different imaginative and emotional connections to place, by: reducing observations to measurements, evoking emotional responses, and provoking thinking about the multifarious, often global, processes contributing to the state of the environment.