Leveraging Climate Fiction to Create a Sustainable Future with Dr. Denise Baden
Trailblazer Interview with Dr. Denise Baden, Professor of Sustainable Business at Southampton Business School (SBS) and Founder of the Green Stories Project, January 2023
Denise is the founder of the Green Stories Project and a professor of Sustainable Business at Southampton Business School, working to create a more sustainable future through collaboration with the creative industries and supporting the authorship of original climate fiction.
Hi Denise. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. Great to connect with you! How did you get into working on sustainability?
I'm a professor of sustainable practice at the University of Southampton and have done a lot of work academically in the field of sustainability. I became worried that we were preaching to the converted the whole time, and while I can write an article about something, very few people will likely ever read it. So I was looking for a way to reach more people. That introduced me to a number of things. One is working with hairdressers giving them information about sustainable hair care, and another one is fiction stories.
Then I became aware of two things. One back in 2018, all stories, all news, and everything to do with climate were catastrophe-based. My background is in psychology. And I know from my own personal research that when you take a catastrophe, a very negative perspective, it can engage people through fear, but it can put just as many people off, and they can go into denial or avoidance. Those that do pay attention aren't necessarily going to respond by thinking, “Okay, I'll give up flying and beef and vote for green policies”. They're just as likely to go into prepper mode and buy up all the toilet rolls. So it doesn't always lead to the responses you expect, and there seems to be a real gap of solution-focused ways of communicating with a mainstream audience.
So I set up the Green Stories project, and we've had sponsorship from a variety of people. That meant we can offer free writing competitions. We've had about 15 now across all formats, novels, short stories, screenplays, plays, and so on.
I still found that a number of things happen. Writers would always focus on the problems like people going off to fight evil loggers. Now, your average reader is not going to drop everything and go and fight an evil rainforest logger, and they're not always evil. Sometimes it's poverty. There are other constraints.
Alternatively, if you have stories that show genuine solutions that people can engage in, that's actually more effective. So I wrote a few books myself to try and show the difference between raising awareness and inspiring solutions. The first one was ‘Habitat Man, which was based on a real-life green gardener. It's about a guy who left his job in the city to show people how to make their gardens wildlife friendly. So I smuggle in a load of green solutions there.
My research found that you can both entertain and actually inspire people to emulate green activities. And that's how I got to know Steve Willis from Herculean Climate Solutions because he entered one of my competitions. He said, “I love what you're doing and that we've got all these solutions up our sleeve. We need to put them in an anthology and put them in front of COP27.”
That was back in April. We basically had six months to get an anthology together with experienced writers working with climate experts. It seemed an impossible task, but we managed it, and we ended up with 24 really good stories. One of the things we did is we thought we don't just want to show a climate solution, we want to show how you can go from A to B.
I was really intrigued by fiction. It is a safe space to imagine transformative policies. So, for example, you might have a government, and they're working on four-year electoral cycles. And all they'll want to do is maybe be a bit better and more sustainable, and the policies that arise from that are piecemeal. They address recycling or improving electric vehicle infrastructure. But if you look at our current situation with a clear view, informed by evidence, we realize that we need to imagine what a sustainable society actually needs to look like and then work back from there. You come up with completely different policies. We can't all shift to electric vehicles, there isn't enough lithium for the batteries, and getting lithium out of the ground is messy. A really sustainable solution is making public transport so brilliant that you don’t need a private car. Cities like New York and London already have that, so we know it can be done.
Now we need someone to make those decisions. It's not going to be elected leaders in a four-year cycle, quite often lobbied by businesses. Instead, citizen assemblies and citizen juries have been shown to make much more sustainable decisions when you engage the people who are going to live with the results.
We need to be informed by experts, not misinformation, which has been a big issue in the most recent elections across the world. Over the last sort of 10-20 years people are not being informed by correct information. I've got a colleague and the politics department. He really believes that citizen assemblies are the magic bullet that will get us to sustainable long-term decision-making, but he thinks there's a lack of public awareness. So we've got one story in the anthology called ‘The Assassin’ where there are eight people in a citizens jury all debating climate solutions, and one of them's an assassin. The fun is to determine who committed a crime, but actually, you get a chance to engage with real climate solutions.
What is interesting about combining stories is that you're engaging with so many people who are really passionate about the climate. All have completely different ideas about how we should get there. It was a diplomatic challenge. So you got your chemical engineers, you know, people like Steve, and they want the big engineering projects. The more audacious, the better, the more difficult and impossible, the better. And then you've got your ecologists and nature lovers who say, why spend fortunes building mangrove terraces where they don't belong or refreezing the Arctic if we're still consuming as hard as we can? It's like drawing down carbon while pumping more back out – like pulling the plug out of the bath with the hot tap still running on full.
You need to look at the consumer society, and what's driving consumption, you need to look at culture.
We had some people send in stories about great big solar shades that can block out the sun. Engineers love this kind of thing, but you know, the social scientists are thinking, who's going to be in charge of this, and you're assuming a world with benign power. Look around you. What you've designed is a weapon. So trying to balance between these nature people, the consumption people, and the engineers was really interesting. We actually have one story that is specifically focused on a couple who took very different perspectives on that.
How did you try to balance all of these different perspectives?
Well, you should have been in some of the conversations between myself, Steve, and Martin. There were three driving forces. Steve's the engineer. I'm a social scientist and Martin is a freelance comedian. He wants to make a sitcom about the debates that we had that were quite fierce! We dealt with it by debating. I did not allow that solar shade one in. But Steve got his refreeze of the Arctic, and I got mine in that looks at the cultural aspects, the social science aspects, and the political and legal aspects. So we all got our way. Some of the authors create pure poetry on the page. The concern is that introducing a climate solution will spoil the flow. But I managed to convince them that the most precious resource is the reader's attention. So first and foremost, the stories have to be entertaining. And I think we've managed to tick both boxes, but it's a challenging process.
Balancing the social sciences perspective with engineering perspectives, how can those two best work together?
Well, they are different stories. So, for example, one of the Climate Solutions debated by ‘The Assassin’ in the setting of the citizens' jury is personal carbon allowances, which is the idea that everyone has a certain ratio of carbon they can spend as they want. If they want to go over it, they have to pay extra, and that money is funneled into all these kinds of big engineering projects like carbon capture and refreezing the Arctic. So that is a device that can bring finance and political economy together to fund big engineering projects. So narrative exploration worked quite well, and it mirrors what's happening in the real world.
Another question then is whether that may work in a certain geopolitical or socio-economic context. How do you introduce solutions to areas of the world that can't necessarily use a system like that at this time?
We've got stories set everywhere. One story takes place in Egypt and is about bringing water and agriculture to the desert. That's quite technical, and it's very much about how a community comes together to make that happen. Another story is set in Australia, where guys in the Outback are looking for work. They work out that they can get money by preventing carbon emissions by extinguishing fires in coal seams that have been burning for centuries. With stories, we can explore a lot of different contexts. This has been a great project which we might do again next year.
Would you say that all of the different narratives that have emerged are representative of all the different ways of even understanding the crisis and addressing it?
That's right. We have also tried to vary the point of influence. There's one story that talks about a guy trying to pitch a cost-for-nature accounting software to his firm so that these aspects can be included in every decision. He fails, but then he goes off, and the story merges into my Habitat Man, green garden consultant story. He gives up his job, and he thinks, “Well, I'm not going to work for them. I'm going to help make gardens wildlife friendly and help nature directly.” The second half of the story is about what we can all do, really easily, in our own back gardens to help nature. So it goes from “I've tried to make this work at the organizational level. It didn't work. Now I'm going to bring it back to the individual level.”
Climate stories work on different levels, some require policy, some require funding, some require technical expertise, some are just about communities coming together, and some are about the individual. There are all these different levels of action, and stories can explore all these different contexts. That's part of the benefit. Suddenly we can engage with perspectives that we otherwise wouldn't have even known about.
This also relates closely to my personal background. For example, I've worked in business. I've been self-employed. I've worked for big businesses and small businesses. My first degree was in politics and economics, and I did a Ph.D. in Psychology. Now I’m in the field of sustainability. It gives me quite a broad systems view of how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.
“I always think, if you look at society, and what it would look like for it to be sustainable, and think about how we can get there, it is easier to work back and look at the order in which things need to happen.”
For example, I think things like different decision-making processes at the political levels are essential. Here in Britain, Wales has a future generations Commissioner, where decisions have to be okayed by the person who's considering future generations. That doesn't need to be a person, it needs to be an entire ministry. Citizen assemblies are another way to make longer-term sustainable decisions.
Having systems like the sharing economy, for example, or a local library of equipment where you can get tools, toys, kitchen materials, and sports gear, instead of going to a department store and buying stuff. You could buy a membership to the fashion library or tool library. Consider how little we use most of what we own. We just need access when we want it. And space will get more constrained with climate change, ownership instead of being a status thing is likely to become a burden. Switching to an access-based economy could really work. But people will only support public transport or Libraries of Things with proper incentives. You need tipping points driven by incentives that drive innovation where enough people use a system for it to become desirable.
How would we introduce these kinds of incentives?
That's the challenge. We need to have decision-making processes. No one's gonna go for citizen assemblies until they understand what they are. This is why I came back to the fact that politicians can't talk about this. It's not a soundbite; it could be so without proper information and a full outline of all the pros and cons, who benefits, who loses, and who could gain within the system. This is what fiction comes in. This is where you can raise these ideas through stories, and you can create a bottom-up awareness.
We're very familiar with science fiction. Experimenting with our new technologies, imagining how they could be used and abused. I see climate stories as social science fiction. There are plenty of utopian novels and books. These climate stories let us explore the trade-off decisions that will be inevitable. We might not be ready to make them now, but we will need to be ready to make them. Looking clearly at the future, we can't carry on as we are now. It is frightening. For me, this anthology is our first step to saving the world, and for myself and the other authors, also a little bit of a way to cure our own eco-anxiety. When you're working in the field of sustainability, you don't want to look at it too closely because it can be frightening. When you write down these stories, and you look at our anthologies of ‘No More Fairy Tales, Stories to Save Our Planet’, and think of the stories as a blueprint for action, if we did all this, I think I'd feel safe. And we can see how to create the future. We have this feeling when we're writing, and I think that's why so many great writers like Kim Stanley Robinson gave us three chapters. Paolo Bacigalupi, gave a lovely chapter. I think it's a form of therapy. If I write it, it will happen. So build a dream. If I build it, they will come.
I was curious about your background in psychology and how that relates to this writing as therapy. Can you talk a little bit more about how it's related to your academic interests?
Yeah, sure! When you look at the psychological theory of behavior change, the standard model is that behavior is a product of attitudes, beliefs, and social norms. What is everyone else doing? And feelings of agency, which they call perceived behavioral control or self-efficacy. Do I think I can make this happen?
Pretty much all climate change communications focus on beliefs and attitudes and raising awareness. But the fact is when you look at the research, and there are huge amounts of research, not always in climate behavior, but maybe health behavior, shopping behavior, and so on, behavior is much more affected by how everyone else behaves, and also how easy it is to do that behavior.
So if you recycle, you might have positive attitudes toward recycling, but what will really affect it is whether everyone else recycles and if they approve/disapprove of you. So much of our climate change communication focuses only on attitudes and awareness. And I think if you're not aware now, it's because you're choosing not to be and putting your head in the sand, and that is a rational thing to do. If no one else is going to judge you harshly and you think, Well, I'm just one person in a big world. I won't make a difference. Why would you look too closely at something that is scary?
That's why all the fiction I encourage and write, puts together the hazard and solution. There's something the reader can do. We tie the stories to a web page as well, which shows you, whether you're an individual or a funder or policymaker or business or community organization, what might happen next if you’d like this story to happen,
How can societal expectations around climate-focused behavior be shifted?
I think it's a jigsaw, and I think every part of the jigsaw needs to be there. So at the moment, I'm working with BAFTA. Many are familiar with the name. It's like the UK Oscars for Academy Film and Television Awards. I'm working on a project where we're looking at cultural projections of behavior. Nowadays, if we look at a film or TV series, and the character is sexist or racist, it's quite jarring in a way it might not have been 20 or 30 years ago. This is because we've changed our attitudes. For me, when I look at really high consumption behavior, especially when it's portrayed in a way that we're supposed to aspire to, it's just as jarring. That’s because I'm so aware of the connection between that behavior and the environmental impact. I don't think that's quite the case yet for the general public.
If we look at shows like Sex in the City, every day is a new matching outfit, you know, a hat, bag, and shoes, a walk-in wardrobe. I asked my son's girlfriend, ‘What do you see when you see this character?’ She says – ‘I see goal’s. She wanted a walk-in wardrobe. Take, for example, Emily in Paris. She's in a tiny little apartment in Paris. She could not fit all her clothes in there. The character there is basically marketing fashion, but she could just as easily, have her cute French boyfriend and lovely Paris locations and be marketing the new fashion swap apps and pre-loved clothes and retro fashion. She could be part of the same plot without needing to be promoting that same old trope of girls with endless shopping bags, shopping. So this comes down to the writers.
So we've got this fun project starting now called hashtag climate characters and hashtag HotOrNot. We're just about to launch, and we've got social media posts that compare James Bond with his single-use Aston Martin. That behavior would require 20 planets. And then you've got Jack Reacher, who also takes out the bad guys, but he travels by bus, and he shops at thrift shops. He only requires one planet to keep himself going. We're trying to develop fun ways to make people aware of that link and just ask the question, “is it still okay to be portraying this kind of excessively high carbon consumption as something to aspire to?”
Image Courtesy of #ClimateCharacters
So returning to the start of our conversation, I think at the moment, our society is almost a bit schizophrenic. It's like, we're not buying enough, but we need to keep the economy growing, and then you see documentaries of dying whales full of plastic and fires in Australia. Can no one else see the connection? How am I supposed to behave to be a good citizen? Shop or don't shop. But we need to consume less to live within our planetary boundaries. So I think culture is a big part of it. But business is a big part of it. So one of the issues with business is it's used to make profits by encouraging people to consume. Marketing teams are basically paid more than anybody else because they're trying to create a need that we can then satisfy. So looking at business models, I think we shift this to reward people for consuming less, thereby incentivizing ourselves.
A number of companies have done this. So incentivize the design of durable products so that you know you don't have to replace the whole thing. Just looking at more sustainable business models. For example, France has been very innovative. They now have put into the legal requirements for businesses to address social and environmental impacts. The British Academy is trying to get a similar thing going in Britain, and the American Business Roundtable has moved from a focus on shareholder maximization towards a broader focus. We need to consider whether the corporate form and purpose fit for the present. It arose through historical reasons, but now it has more power than many governments, is unelected, is undemocratic, lacks transparency, has huge power, multinational power, and even if you're a nice guy in charge, you still have to work within that competitive landscape, or the shareholders will kick you out. So should we be switching towards benefit corporations as a no-alternative form?
So in a business legal form, one idea is giving legal status to nature. Lawyers have a part to play in protecting nature.
Switching the way we measure success is hugely important at the moment. We measure success by the Gross Domestic Product. Now there's a big overlap with well-being, but they're not the same thing. Chop down every tree, and your GDP will look good because it's creating jobs, and you're selling it. Your GDP will increase by burning things down and building them back up. That is certainly not increasing well-being by looking after people and caring for them. Planting stuff for free doesn't affect it. So clearly, GDP is not the same thing as well-being. So I think switching to a well-being index, or Happy Planet Index, as a way to measure our success would be beneficial. Lots of countries have done that. I think New Zealand, I think Bhutan did a happiness index. So we had a big campaign in the UK. We didn't quite make it to the point of change. But for me, how we measure what success looks like and if we're basing that on consumption is fundamental. All conversations are going to be about the economy, not about well-being. And we need to change those conversations. I say there is an overlap, but they are not the same thing, and they don't lead to the same policies.
It sounds like behavior and our perceptions of the climate crisis are largely affected by culture, but how do you define culture?
Oh my gosh, you hit me with a definition. Culture is so multifaceted. Our culture says so much about our assumptions about what is valued and what's valuable. I think a lot of culture is unexamined. We take so much for granted. But I do think books and stories and films and TV have a part to play in our own consciousness of ourselves and what's important, and it really helps with attitudes as well.
For example, we might have had laws about homosexuality or campaigns to legalize it going back decades now. But it was shows like Will & Grace that normalized it. Star Trek is often talked about as featuring the first interracial kiss. When you look back at how women have been portrayed, really up until the last 10 years, the idea that a woman would have her own story and her own agency to achieve something other than getting a man was very rare in any plot. And now, that's changing so rapidly, and it changes how women think about themselves, their aspirations, and what they hope for and expect. That's culture. I think you can fit climate into all that quite easily. That's why our climate characters introduce a new perspective.
The climate characters' work is with BAFTA at the moment. It's on the green stories website, greenstories.org.uk. So in March, we will launch that via social media #hotornot #Climate Characters and fun videos.
What's the best way to support the stories and your narrative work at this point?
If you're a writer, check out greenstories.org.uk because we run regular competitions. We have a stories novel prize of 1000 pounds ($1200) for the winner, plus we mentor them toward publication. We've got a graphic novel competition coming out where winners' stories will get turned into a comic strip. If you are a reader, then buy our Anthology. No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet. If you'd like a rom-com ‘Habitat Man’ is another fun one. So every story does link to a web page where we will show how people can help make that solution happen. ‘The Assassin’, which includes the citizen's jury, we're currently writing up as a play. And we're going to be running educational entertainment events where we show the play and then engage the audience in some of the issues. The audience can vote for the solutions they like. And there's a moral dilemma at the end. So if there's anyone in the US who thinks that sounds fun, I'd love to put on such a play, get in touch with me.