Mike Osborne, a third-year PhD student in the Department of Environmental Earth Systems Scienc,e is teaching “Communicating Environmental Research Using Narratives and Stories” this quarter. He talked to Leland Quarterly about this love of literature, scientific research, and a quality zombie movie.

What motivated you to teach a course about narrative and the environment?

Zombies motivated me. The idea for a class started when I was having a beer with Miles Traer, a GES Masters student who’s been crucial to the development of this course. We talked about the apocalyptic rhetoric people use to describe global warming, and we immediately got onto a tangent about our favorite apocalyptic movies and books. Miles and I thought it would be fun to survey some apocalyptic stories as a way to envision the global warming worst case scenario. Not all apocalypses are the same, though, and the best stories conclude with images of a world that you recognize in today’s world: empty skyscrapers, grass growing in the streets, rivers of blackness, bones scattered in the desert, drowned cities. We recognize these elements in our everyday lives; these are environmental stories with the Earth as a main character.
The more Miles and I thought about it, the more the class became about science communication. In general, scientists have a reputation for being bad communicators. I’ve found that when any given conversation is running dry, I can always start a conversation about pop culture. So I thought, Why not apply the same idea to science communication? This is a humanities style class masquerading as a science class, using fiction to invite earth scientists to think creatively.

In the course description, you write “the course takes an experimental approach to the challenge of science communication.” What are your hypotheses and some of your intended methods for this “experiment”?

That’s funny, I hadn’t thought of it that way when I was writing the course description. I guess I’m testing a premise I have that Earth scientists have unique imaginations, because they have to think about how the Earth acts on a spectrum of time and space scales. It takes a while to get your head around the idea of geologic time, so that when an earth scientist talks about something that happened 1.2 billion or 350 million or 20 thousand or 300 years ago the numbers actually mean something. Those kind of numbers just sound big to most non-scientists. The same thing goes for space. Earth scientists deal with phenomena in nature on scales ranging from the molecular to planetary, and everything in between. Getting comfortable with this spectrum of space and time is a humbling experience that challenges the imagination. So I guess my hypothesis is that this imaginative quality we’ve had to learn can be funneled into great storytelling when given the right opportunity and attention.
As for methods, I’d think the first thing to do is to get the creative juices flowing. I want to blend creative writing with science, and call it something other than science fiction. More like science non-fiction, though that sounds kind of corny. This class will probably be a ‘spaghetti at the wall’ kind of approach where we’ll try a bunch of things out and see what sticks.

What major environmental issues have been effectively popularized by story and narrative, and what elements of those stories do you think made them successful?

I’m mixed about An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore did a great thing in bringing the issue to the forefront, but there are moments in the movie that feel like a prolonged political ad. At the same time, I think that the global warming story is really tough to tell, because the problems are complex, the consequences are uncertain, and the impacts are so different from place to place.
The problem with most environmental stories is that there is often a lack of human interaction, and therefore a lack of character. Let’s say you want to tell a story about destruction of coral reef ecosystems. The setting is fantastic, there’s tension and a sense of threat, but what you’re missing is a protagonist. The tendency is to anthropomorphize, but that risks coming off like a hippie tree-hugger. My point is that environmental value is not innate to an environment- it arises from human interaction with an environment.

What has been your experience in translating your own technical, scientific research for a non-scientific, popular audience? What are the particular challenges you face?

Scientific jargon is probably the biggest problem. One thing that happens when you’re immersed in science is that you get used to the terminology of your field, and you forget that most people don’t use these words in their everyday conversations. People are usually hesitant to speak up and say they don’t know the meaning of something, so you have to rely on your ability to read your audience and anticipate what they will and will not know. You have to be conscious about language to be a good communicator. But if you’re passionate about what you study and you want people to understand it, eventually you will figure out a way to explain yourself.

Much of the discussion about communicating environmental issues revolves around instigating change—campaigning for policy responses to global climate change, raising awareness about unsustainable agricultural practices, reducing industrial waste, etc. Is there such thing as apolitical environmental writing and film?

Most people have some connection with nature that is very personal, and I think we all grapple with the significance of those connections regardless of political inclinations. It seems inevitable that when you paint of picture of an environment there is an implication that you want to conserve and preserve that place, but I’d like to think that there are apolitical writings and films that only serve to explore our relationship to the environment without necessarily advocating a behavioral change.

What civic responsibility do you think a researcher has (or doesn’t have) to communicate his/her findings to a non-scientific audience?

For me, there’s no point in pursuing knowledge for its own sake—it has to inform our lives and our decisions. Over the past 20 years there’s been a movement to have more outspoken scientists, and I think this is a good thing. Speaking out, however, can be dangerous, because you risk the integrity and objectivity of your science. You have to remain unbiased if you want to be a good researcher. That said, it’s crucial for important information to be disseminated to the public, if for no other reason than to maintain trust in scientific expertise. It’s also important to get beyond some of the stereotypes people have about scientists, and this only comes through with more exposure.