Energy, the environment, and storytelling

RO: So do you know from your training as an actor anything that might help the science/environmental world to communicate more effectively?

EB: Definitely. You have to be able to tell a very good story, and it has to be clear. And you have to have an action at the end of your point. Some kind of action, whether it’s contacting your representative, or buying light bulbs, or taking public transportation, or whatever it is, you have to have a good story, clear points, why it is, and where people can verify that it is so. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about today, with the access to information, it used to be in the early 90’s when I was doing this stuff, “You can go down to the library, go to the archives, and check it out for yourself!” Now it’s so simple – just go to the internet. And yet, I tell people, “Don’t go to any environmental websites, don’t go to any environmental radio hosts websites, don’t go to their websites!” I say that regularly and some friends are shocked, they are taken aback. But let me just make my point, stick only with reputable scientific or nature magazines, things like National Geographic and the website Real Climate. But here’s the scary thing, Randy. There is a guy, I can’t remember his name and I don’t want people to know it, but he has this website where he says, “Peer-reviewed science is dead, don’t you get it Begley?”

As for which web sites you read, I think a critical detail is what you do with which kinds of content. If you pick up a reference here or from Wikipedia or wherever, what matters is what the sources says, its credibility, etc. But Ed does have a point about quoting things that (gasp!) bloggers or any special interests say, and you shouldn’t take at face value what I or anyone else says online unless it’s someone you know you can trust.

But the main thing I wanted to comment on is Ed’s point about telling a good story (which will, I’m quite sure, be wildly misinterpreted by the knuckle-draggers). This is the critical detail at the heart of why so many scientists stink on ice when it comes to communicating with the public. They grossly underestimate the value of narrative in relating sometimes complex and counterintuitive concepts to lay people.

Let me give you a concrete example from my own work. Sometime back, I gave a presentation on peak oil to a local group with a strong environmentalist presence.

The usual way that people talk about peak oil is to start by talking about Hubbert and his famous 1956 projection that world oil production would peak in roughly the year 2000. They then get into all the minutiae of which countries have already peaked (a lot), and oil demand, the aging supergiant fields, etc. Most of the audience checks out pretty early with that approach.

I tried something different. I talked about how we use oil, which countries it comes from, and what’s the most logical way for oil companies to operate–i.e. exploit the cheapest stuff first, which say a lot about all those ultra-deep water oil fields being developed. Then I talked about the countries that have peaked and the gap between yearly discoveries and production. I didn’t get to Hubbert until slide 20 out of 26, and talked about him only briefly. I wrapped up by talking about things we should and shouldn’t do.

This seemed to work very well because I had a narrative structure–I followed the oil from consumption backwards through the production and discovery process and showed why a lot of very smart people are very worried about our ability to keep producing oil at a rate that won’t cause us a lot of economic pain. (After all, that’s what peak oil is concerned with, not “running out of oil”, but “running out of cheap oil”.)