Millennium Fellowship Sustainability Initiatives Series
On September 23, visiting faculty member and previous Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum Dr. Jennifer Turner held a discussion supported by DKU’s Environmental Research Center titled “Climate Storytelling is Serious Business”, focused on reporting complex climate-related information.
In the event’s introduction, Professor of Environmental Policy Coraline Goron highlighted how Turner’s work at the Wilson Center was a key source for information on Chinese environmental policy in the English academic sphere for the past 25 years.
Turner’s presentation focused on a problem facing climate-related media: complicated information can lead to misinformation. Furthermore, for messages to have an impact, they need to ‘stick’ with audiences, Turner’s way of emphasizing the importance of audiences remembering what they read or hear.
Turner encouraged audience members to practice making their own interests or research fields ‘stick’ in their readers’ minds by engaging them in a Mini Shark Tank activity. Participants were given the opportunity to pitch a topic to the room in the most engaging and memorable way possible. Pitches from the audience included issues like performative environmental activism, recent flooding in Pakistan, bird-window collision in Jiangsu province, and a more centralized stray cat care system on campus to better protect the bird population.
In addition, Turner sat down with the LilyPad to discuss her career and journey to teaching climate storytelling at DKU as an avenue for sustainability.
This session, Turner is teaching a 2-credit writing course called “Communicating Climate Solutions: Writing for Action”. It is described as a course where students “explore opportunities for local and national solutions to address climate change” and “write opinion blogs and create infographics that make arguments about actions DKU, the city of Kunshan, or Jiangsu province is (or should be) doing to address climate change”.
Turner says the class was inspired by her experience with the importance of translating scientific information into broadly digestible language. “The topic is looking at local solutions to climate change,” Turner said. “Because climate change communication has failed in many ways.”
Turner says the crux of the course is to coach students on how to be more engaging while telling stories without sounding overly academic. “I really see myself first and foremost as a storyteller,” Turner said. “You have to be able to take the science, take the complexity of the environmental issues that you’re working on and communicate it to a broader audience.”
She also emphasized the local aspect of the course. Turner says her experience has shown her the importance of seeing local climate initiatives on people’s personal reception and drive towards climate action. “Complex science is really hard for people to know, what do I do?” Turner said. “It feels so out of your control in some ways. A lot of it is because individual action is not necessary. My individual action isn’t going to solve climate change.”
Turner says this is why she is encouraging students to stay local with their stories. “There’s a lot of innovation and bottom up work from NGOs, local governments, even businesses,” Turner says. “When you see things happening locally, you feel like you have a dog in the game. This is the kind of selling point that I feel like we need.”
Connecting climate storytelling and action to the broader concept of sustainability, Turner says she views sustainability as “closing the loop” between pollutants (such as plastic, coal or fossil fuels) and clean energy.
Turner said she has been impressed by the campus’ energy efficiency, during her time at DKU so far, highlighting the modest AC usage and operation of the sports complex. She also expressed concerns over single use-plastics and overall food waste on campus.
Turner’s interest in China was sparked in 1987, when she came to Hunan to teach English. Turner says, “after two weeks in China, I said, I’m not going to leave this place, because I’m totally head over heels.”
She was concerned with the way she saw the country’s water infrastructure developing. She came back to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Comparative Politics from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation explored local government innovation in the implementation of water-related policies in China.
Afterwards, in 1999, Dr. Turner went on to serve as the Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China and Environment Forum for 25 years. In this position she engaged governments, NGOs, business and researchers in the US and China as well as throughout BRI nations in climate, energy, and water related collaborative projects. Turner says one of her biggest roles as Director was reflective of what she is teaching now: helping put out blog posts communicating scientific and climate information to the general public on their New Security Beat website. The Wilson Center was closed in April this year by US President Donald Trump’s administration.
She was also a co-producer of an educational video game called The Plastic Pipeline. The game is aimed at raising “public awareness on the plastic product lifecycle and policies that can be enacted to help stem the tide of pollution going into our oceans.”
Her relationship with DKU began back in 2013, when she was contracted by Duke University to assess whether DKU should open an environmental masters program. Her recommendation would assist in the creation of DKU’s International Master of Environmental Policy (iMEP) program. She was scheduled to visit and assess the operation of the program in March of 2020, but could not due to COVID-19 related travel restrictions.
Reflecting on past interactions with the university, Turner remarked her visit this semester has felt like a “long overdue reunion of a family I’d never really met.”
In addition to teaching at DKU, Turner is currently also a senior fellow at the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. She will be in China until October 30.
