The messages in these two readings were really eye-opening to me! And it is quite important that they opened my eyes. Before reading these pieces, I had sort of believed that having a slightly dramatic, dystopian twist on environmental news was a good thing. Dystopian wasn’t the word that came to my mind, but I did believe that it was important to over-exaggerate the consequences of our potential fate were we not to take action against climate change. I remember reading the dire scenario that Margaret Atwood laid out in the first article that we read and thinking, “This is good. We need more people reading this, we need to frighten people into caring.”
But these pieces have me thinking otherwise, which is pretty important considering I am currently working on a venture that requires us pitching the consequences of climate change over and over again. It is, of course, a fine balance between not being overly pessimistic but also not underemphasizing the risks. The opposite of dystopia is utopia, but I don’t think we should be infecting our stories with utopias because everyone’s utopia is different and so many utopias are often actually quite harmful. Hope is the correct thing to infect our news and stories with because we can still present factual information about list all of the threats of climate change, but we can instill a sense of hope in readers in doing this so that they can be inspired to take action, which seems to be much more effective than terrifying them into action (since, as we discussed in class, usually people just decide if there’s no hope at all, why should they even bother?). Solnit’s “Grounds for Hope” did a great job of doing this, in my opinion. She expresses a lot of the same concerns as Mieville: people find hope in the wrong things, widespread pessimism/lack of hope often prevents people from acting at all, we losing track of hope in general. However, her tone throughout the piece is a hopeful one, so the reader finishes the piece feeling inspired. Mieville, hypocritically enough, writes about how we must get the depressing stuff out of reports and climate news, yet writes with such a tone in this piece that you are left feeling kind of depressed at the end of it.
Learning the value of sharing stories of hope and using positive tones when writing about the complex issue of climate change is of great use to me. I plan to not present the consequences of climate change in such a drastic and depressing light the next time I pitch Phyta, our algae farm initiative. Additionally, my backup career (in case I can’t be an algae farmer forever) is to do something environmental communications-related. My current top choice would probably be PR for an environmental organization, but no matter what option I may pursue, it is important to remember to keep hope at the forefront of my writing.
