Narrating Massive Distribution: Climate Stories from Early American Periodicals to Citizen Science Blogging Eric Morel (bio) Scientists who want to share their personal and professional concerns about planetary conditions at the Earth-systems or local ecological level are increasingly advised to engage publics narratively,1 but calls for scientists’ narratives face various headwinds from directions and forces not squarely in scientists’ control. Both the trend toward storytelling and its challenges raise questions of econarratological interest. Econarratology remains, as Timothy Clark remarks, a bit of a neologism (653), but it names an enlarging cluster of scholarship that crosses the bibliographies of eco-criticism and narrative theory. Econarratology is both prompting attention to works not conventionally recognized as environmental literature and raising new questions about canonical texts to the environmental humanities. Beyond its critical deployment to assess texts and narrative techniques, econarratology has, from its inception, also kept an eye on narrative’s uses as a component of “environmental understanding” and medium of encounter, making it a useful orientation within narratologies of science, especially where environmental sciences appear in narratives distributed to broader publics (James and Morel 1). There are several headwinds facing narrative communication of environmental science. Enthusiasm for scientists’ storytelling depends—as do calls for open science and initiatives to move scientific knowledge out of privatized paywalls—on the ethos benefits of transparency, trusting that [End Page 12] humanizing the work of science through its scientists will help dispel denialists’ aspersions about climate science as self-interested and grant-money-grubbing alarmism. Yet that denialist rhetoric, amplified during Donald Trump’s rise to power, now involves not just distrust of individual scientists, studies, or data sets, but of expert authority more generally, reinvigorating long lines of American anti-intellectualism to make the credentialled designation of scientific authority suspect in and of itself.2 From a decidedly different direction, some scholars have raised skepticism of narrative forms and practices to render, adequately and equitably, the cluster of issues that are escalating ecological crises. For example, citing Amitav Ghosh and Claire Colebrook, the coeditors of a recent issue from the journal SubStance note in their introduction that “a growing number of scholars have suggested that not any specific narrative template but rather narrative as such is incapable of reckoning with the scale of environmental change” (Bauer et al. 5, original emphasis). Throwing water on the enthusiasm of the science communication trend, they reason that “narratological inquiry should move beyond grand claims on the representational capabilities of particular forms of narration and instead attend to narrative’s reckoning with its own boundaries” (5). Indeed, a significant boundary worth noting as a third headwind stems from Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s and Eric Morel’s separate studies of cli-fi and its reading, which both underscore the dubious record that even narratives with intentional environmental messaging have of changing readers’ minds. Admittedly incomplete though it is, this sampling of issues clearly demonstrates that use of narrative for communicating environmental science merits thoughtful attention. This essay calls attention to collaborative narrative practices extant in scientific inquiry, more broadly conceived, arguing for these practices’ capabilities to face science communication’s current cultural and formal headwinds. More precisely, I am labelling the collaborative narrative practices I observe as collective narration and corroborative narration. In econarratological fashion, my argument suggests reciprocal value from studying these practices for both environmental and narratological purposes. For environmental purposes, I am interested in these practices’ inclusive elements, which broaden the kinds of expertise invited into the communicative space and the permeability of authorship and readership they convene. While not free from their own limits of narrative representation, they also model possibilities for narrative forms that meet some of [End Page 13] environmental change’s scalar challenges. As a contribution to narrative theory, my argument both elaborates scholarship on distributed forms that expands beyond more familiar digital narrative and engages questions about narrative unity. In exploring its examples of collaborative narration in scientific endeavors, this paper proceeds in two steps, first responding to contemporary claims about narrative’s capabilities and then suggesting a deeper historical tradition that countermands an overly presentist focus for such claims. In the first instance, I survey the ISeeChange app...
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Feb 17, 2023
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