Storytelling and Ecology

Empathy, Enchantment and Emergence in the Use of Oral Narratives

Anthony Nanson

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350114944
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Langues et linguistique
• Thema: Sociolinguistique

'Finalist' in the PROSE Award (2022) for Language & Linguistics
Awarded Honors at the Storytelling World Awards 2022 Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world. Anthony Nanson offers an in-depth examination of how a diverse ecosystem of oral stories and the dynamics of storytelling as an activity can catalyse different kinds of conversation and motivation, helping us resist the discourse of powerful vested interests. Detailed analysis of traditional, true-life and fictional stories shows how spoken narrative language can imbue landscapes, creatures and experiences with enchantment and mediate between the inner world of consciousness and outer world of ecology and community. A pioneering ecolinguistic and ecocritical study of oral storytelling in the modern world, Storytelling and Ecology offers insight into the ways that sharing stories in each other's embodied presence can open up spaces for transformation in our relationships with the ecological world around us.

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Storytelling and ecology: Reconnecting people and nature through oral narrative

We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures, and the whole of nature in its beauty.¹

The storytelling movement in Britain is permeated by ecological sympathies and overlaps in part with the ‘green’ or ‘alternative’ subculture descended from the counter-culture of the 1960s. Many storytellers express in their work a sensitivity to living landscapes and have been influenced by the practice of storytelling among peoples who live in more conscious relationship with nature than do most people in industrialized countries; storytelling has found a growing professional niche in environmental education; and storytelling also has an important place among communities of people seeking to nurture a spirituality that’s rooted in the landscape and honours nature as sacred. Critics warn against naive desires to return to a romanticized pre-industrial past.² Better, in contemporary circumstances of ecological crisis and intercultural exchange, is to invite into the future new ways of being that reincorporate from the past that which is useful and discard that which is not.

How exactly do storytelling and ecology interface with each other? What kind of synergy exists between them? This chapter brings together insights from scholarship and from observation of and interviews with a number of storytellers in Britain to reflect upon ecological applications of storytelling. I begin by outlining the deep-rooted disconnection between nature and modern industrial society which I believe underlies the escalating ecological crisis and is linked to a gap of understanding between a dominant discourse of science and economics and a marginalized discourse of experience and imagination. I then examine – in both theory and practice – the ways that storytelling can help to bridge this ravine of modern society’s alienation from nature and to counterbalance the logic of economic self-interest with values rooted in ecology, community and compassion. I explore, in turn, the challenge of bringing science and story together in environmental education, the power of storytelling to facilitate a sense of connection with that which is physically present around you, the openness of the storytelling moment to nature’s active agency, and the capacity of stories to facilitate compassion for non-human entities and reverence for natural landscapes. Finally, I venture beyond the domain of education and awareness to consider how storytelling might contribute to processes that could make an actual, transforming difference to people’s treatment of nature – at both personal and collective levels.

Modern society’s disconnection from nature

Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, one species among an ecology of wild species in a wild landscape. In many parts of the world, people continued to live this kind of life until quite recently. In some places, though, people chose to control and modify their environment in such a way that their daily life became progressively more distanced from awareness of participating in ecology. In Europe this process escalated rapidly after the rise of modern capitalism and the scientific and industrial revolutions. European colonization of the rest of the world imposed similar change on other peoples, most devastatingly on the hunter-gatherers of Oceania, the Americas and Southern Africa. The exploitation of nature continues to this day, consuming and polluting the earth’s resources to meet the needs of a rapidly increasing human population and a growth-driven globalized economy. Hand in hand with the destruction of nature goes the destruction of oral traditions of knowledge that once mediated relations with the ecosystem but are not valued by the colonizing ideologies of capitalism and science, except when commercially exploited in the entertainment industry.

Humans have not changed genetically since the onset of modernity; an ancestral hunter-gatherer sensibility remains within us all. Hence the alienation that is inherent in a modern way of life distanced from nature and may find expression in mental illness.³ Ecopsychologists interpret psychological problems as deriving as much from the environmental stresses of modern life as from the social domain in which psychotherapy conventionally pursues them.⁴

A procession of technologies – motor cars, aircraft, telephones, television and the burgeoning plethora of ICT – that are designed to facilitate communication and access have also had the consequence of disconnecting us more and more from what’s physically present around us. This has a social facet – a tendency to disregard people around you as if they are not real people with whom you have any relationship – and an environmental one: a veiling of the senses to the destruction of nature and to the ugliness that often replaces it.

Those who’ve experienced in their own lives a displacement from nature may be more conscious of the process of alienation. I experienced this in a modest way at the age of ten when I moved from a village where I had the run of the meadows and woods to a town where my freedom was circumscribed by fast roads, housing estates and industrial sites. Far greater is the alienation of indigenous people who’ve seen their land taken from them and transformed by industrialized development, and their culture obliterated by the colonizing forces of modernity. Indigenous storytelling traditions convey knowledge about the land and its creatures and how to sustain a living from them.⁵ The storytelling of the Hebrides and the Scottish Travellers, writes Donald Smith, is a remnant in Britain of comparable traditions that ‘animat[e] the social, psychological and natural worlds as a single living whole’.⁶ When the land is completely converted to human use, such traditional knowledge counts for nothing and is replaced by the colonizers’ written and audiovisual culture – geographically transferable knowledge that’s not rooted in the physical reality of the land.

The silencing of indigenous languages and stories has meant the loss of local ecological knowledge that took millennia to build – knowledge not only about the creatures native to the lands in question, but about the relationships of predation, pollination, competition and cooperation among them. The indigenous language of an area includes specialized vocabulary for its natural phenomena, including terms that refer specifically to such connections between different species. Much of this knowledge is unknown to science. If both the indigenous language and the ecology are destroyed, then these phenomena will be wiped out of mind and existence as if they’ve never been.⁷ And nature is silenced too, both physically, as in the disappearance of birdsong, and spiritually, in the loss of any idea of what nature may have to teach us.⁸

The arrival of television has been potent in the demise of local storytelling traditions.⁹ Gary Paul Nabhan has investigated among desert children of the American southwest ‘the phenomenon that Robert Michael Pyle has termed “the extinction of experience,” or the termination of direct, hands-on contact between children and wildlife’.¹⁰ Children’s learning from direct experience outdoors and from the storytelling of elders is displaced by learning from television and classroom schooling, so that what they gain in knowledge of national or globalized culture they lose in knowledge of local ecology:

Tell me, why do you think the younger generation is not keeping up these traditions?

Laura [an O’odham elder and educator] listened, stopped dead in her tracks … and pointed straight at the camera, frowning. ‘it’s that TV! They’re all watching that TV! They just sit around in front of it, they hardly go outside anymore … That’s the problem, right there!’¹¹

In urban and suburban Britain, where children have little access to natural spaces, this ‘extinction of experience’ has become progressively more complete. My own early knowledge of wild flowers, trees and birds, for example, was much poorer than that which my parents acquired during their childhood. For teenagers from inner-city London, even a large city park can be terrifyingly alien.¹² These kinds of circumstances have led to the provision of compensatory activities by specialist facilitators of outdoor play and learning.¹³

Technological media facilitate a dislocation between image and reality. A television wildlife documentary may present an image of East Africa as endless savannah teeming with wild animals, but the reality I experienced living in Kenya was of land mostly given over to livestock and crops; only in game reserves were you likely to see wildlife. In advertising, popular photo-art and many products aimed at children, wild animals are commodified as charming images that reveal little of the animals’ true being.¹⁴

In prioritizing output that will optimize their return on investment – material that nourishes consumers’ ‘self-gratification and self-justification’¹⁵ – the mass media can be perceived as ‘engaged in the mass production of social ignorance’.¹⁶ Their purveyance of ‘spectacle’ sustains people’s alienation and passivity through an overwhelming impact on the senses and valorizes violence as the means to resolve conflict.¹⁷ Lacking much direct experience of the natural environment, the public may believe by default in a romanticized and generalized picture of the world and thereby fail to comprehend the scale of ecological damage it has sustained.¹⁸ This disconnect between image and reality can widen the gap between thinking and action. You may espouse green views – believe that something should be done about particular issues – and yet fail to modify your own actions accordingly. The displacement of the real by the virtual allows you to behave as if nature doesn’t really exist.¹⁹

Despite its rising profile in the public eye, the ecological crisis remains to many a theoretical idea. In wealthy countries the media’s relentless promotion of products to consume seems to belie the notion the living earth’s resources are endangered. The consequences of consumption are often invisible to consumers.²⁰ The impression you may gain is that ecological crisis lies too distant in the future to require much response right now. But the reality of the crisis is already demonstrated through the roll-call of lost species and habitats and, in parts of Africa for example, the consequences of starvation, disease and war that follow when the need for resources exceeds their supply. Humans have caused ecological crises before, only not on such a global scale. The lessons of history are there to be told, such as the deforestation of Easter Island which led to its society’s decline and/or collapse;²¹ the extermination of the world’s most populous bird, the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius);²² or the destruction of the Aral Sea and its entire ecosystem through the diversion of water to irrigation projects.²³

Evolution has bestowed upon humans an intelligence that gives us unusual power over nature and at the same time a sense of morality and our own mortality. In mythic terms, this intelligence can be seen as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge which brought human beings out of the Eden of animal innocence.²⁴ Human power has become so great that, unless tempered by a higher ethics, the biological imperative towards self-interest and procreation may be expected to continue to wreak destruction upon nature and other people.

Indigenous peoples are motivated by self-interest like everyone else, but their dependence on resources from their immediate environment clarifies for them how their self-interest depends on the well-being of the ecology they inhabit.²⁵ This is why indigenous peoples need, as a tool of enlightened self-restraint, their stories that transmit knowledge and ethics about how to live sustainably in their environment.

More severe ecological destruction seems to happen when human populations move into new territories; biodiversity being most stable in areas where the population is least transient.²⁶ Arrival in a new land is a defamiliarizing experience. Migrants tend to be younger people, with an impoverished knowledge of the oral tradition known to the elders left behind.²⁷ Ecological knowledge in the stories they do remember may not be applicable in the new land. It takes time to become attuned to the new land, to cultivate knowledge and stories about it.²⁸ The arrival of humans in Oceania and the Americas was evidently the decisive cause of mass extinctions of megafauna in these regions. By the time Europeans arrived, thousands of years later, ecological constraints had compelled the descendants of those first settlers to adapt to their environment and develop cultural traditions mediating a sustainable relationship with the local ecology. The European colonists in turn brought a devastating new wave of ecological damage which has yet to run its course.²⁹

In this light, I’m aware, as an Englishman, that my people have a problematic history. The Anglo-Saxon settlers in Britain were alienated from the traditions of the ancestral lands they’d come from and then converted to a Christian spirituality based more upon scripture than relationship with the land. The Norman conquest brought a new ruling elite who had themselves previously migrated from Scandinavia to France and who subsequently led English invasion of the o...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Storytelling and ecology: Reconnecting people and nature through oral narrative
• 2 Storytelling as a means of conversation about ecology and sustainability
• 3 Time, desire and consequence in ecological stories
• 4 Composting snakes and dragons: Ecological enchantment of local landscapes
• 5 The listening place: The space of transformative stillness
• 6 Supernatural ecology and the transcendence of normative expectation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint