From doom-scrolling to Content Rising: Takeaways from a climate comms event
When I think about the climate emergency, I’m quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale and inevitability of it all. I find myself guiltily scrolling past the doomsday headlines and images of raging wildfires because really, what can I do?
Wakehurst Woodland Sculpture, Jim Holden. Image source: Kew Wakehurst
So when I heard about Content Rising, a new event promising to “help us rise to the challenge of communicating effectively on climate”, I was intrigued. Even though I’m not in climate comms, and would be something of an impostor, I wanted to go along.
Firstly, the event sounded refreshingly optimistic. It’s right there in the language: rising to the challenge, not getting bogged down by seemingly intractable problems. Perhaps it would help me stop and engage with climate stories, rather than switching off and feeling bad about it.
As a copywriter, I was also curious about the craft angle. How do you communicate effectively about the highest-stakes subject matter there is? There might be lessons I could apply to my own work.
Last but not least, I’d get to spend the day amongst interesting folk in the beautiful setting of Kew Wakehurst. As a freelancer who works from her spare room, often with the curtains closed, it seemed like an excellent way to spend a Thursday.
So I packed up my hay fever essentials and headed off to Wakehurst. Here’s what I learnt:
The power of collective agency
For me, the most exciting theme that arose from the talks was ‘agency’.
Writer Jon Alexander explained that our agency is determined by how we see ourselves. Since the post-war era, we’ve been taught to think of ourselves as consumers: independent individuals who should pursue our self-interests. As consumers, we have the power to choose, but only between the products and services presented to us, and we have agency, but only at an individual level.
Jon has long been advocating that we stop being consumers and become citizens: interdependent individuals who can pursue societal interests. As citizens, we have the power to participate in shaping the future. We have collective agency, which has greater potential than individual agency alone.
He posed the question: “How do we invite people into their agency as citizens?” And I guess that’s at the heart of effective climate comms. These stories can’t preach at people from on high; they must empower them to participate at ground level. This thread was picked up by filmmaker Matt Golding in his talk. The answer, he said, lies in our “collective creativity”. Through his film studio Antidote, he’s sharing inspiring stories of people clubbing together to achieve incredible things within their communities.
What I really liked about Matt’s talk was that he realised that these “inspiring” achievements could also feel unattainable. As I watched the video of Mark from Lawrence Weston housing estate talk about how they built their own wind turbine, I thought, “Wow, that’s amazing. Good for them.” But I also thought, “God, I’ve done nothing.”
Matt uses storytelling to address that very feeling of unworthiness – and the apathy that follows in its wake. He’s creating a podcast to talk about how these people have done such seemingly impossible things. And they’re developing an AI tool to help you find initiatives that are already happening near you. This made it all feel a lot more manageable: you don’t have to start your own initiative – you can just join in. Now that’s an AI tool I can get behind.
So it turns out that agency is not something we own, like an iPhone, to use for our own purposes. Agency, Matt said, “can be built, networked and spread”. I think the shift from the individual to the collective is particularly helpful when trying to think positively about the climate emergency. Carrying individual responsibility is a burden: tapping into collective power makes it feel like positive change is possible.
The joy of cross-pollination
I got chatting to a fellow freelancer during the afternoon workshop, and we agreed that working alone means you can get stuck in your ways – you miss out on new ideas and different ways of thinking. That’s why these events are so important, he said, it’s the “cross-pollination”.
Exactly! I couldn’t think of a more apt word for the day. And the more I thought about it, the more I could see cross-pollination everywhere. Even Jon and Matt had borrowed from other disciplines to help them communicate more effectively.
In his talk, Jon took a model from therapy – “the drama triangle” – and applied it to climate action. This model describes a destructive relationship pattern between three roles: the perpetrator, the rescuer and the victim. In climate terms, capitalist organisations are the perpetrators, we (as consumers) are the victims, and governments are expected to be the rescuers. He showed that we can break this pattern by claiming our agency and transforming from victim into “creative citizen”. I love this approach. It brings a global-scale challenge down to a relatable level, which feels a lot less daunting to engage with.
Matt talked about the need for climate comms to apply techniques from other types of storytelling, such as marketing. As any marketer knows, you lead with the benefits for the reader/user/citizen. Yet climate comms doesn’t do this – it gets stuck on the negatives of the current situation, rather than imagining the potential benefits of the future. As he put it: “Imagine a marketing ad for a car that just focusses on why your current car is shit.” Touché.
And I was surprised to discover that the ideas about agency at Content Rising crossed over with my sociolinguistic research. My paper explored how female consumers’ agency is represented by wellness brands in their comms. I coined the term “assisted agency” – when brands endow a consumer with agency, but only through buying their products. Citizens’ agency feels fundamentally different. It’s not bestowed from above by organisations, it’s co-created from the ground up. “Empowered agency”, perhaps?
Nature, the great unblocker
In the afternoon, I went to Gail Muller’s workshop, ‘Unblock your creativity in nature’ – and I’m so glad I did.
Firstly, because a chunk of it was spent walking in silence through woodland. It was the perfect antidote to a morning spent sitting and absorbing verbal information. To get outside, move around, and listen to the shuffle of our feet over the grass was just what I needed. It energised me to take on the final talks of the day.
Also, this workshop did exactly what it said on the tin. It genuinely unblocked my creativity. And it was so simple. At the start, Gail told us to write down a problem. Then, on the walk, she asked us to notice one object. After the walk, we had to address our problem from that object’s perspective. What solution could it offer?
The problem I came in with is an old chestnut of mine. I love writing and I will write anything on any topic for any client – but I find it nigh on impossible to write as myself, for myself.
On the walk, I spotted a weathered bench that had no doubt seen many bums come and go over the years. When we returned, I asked the bench what to do about my problem. It told me to just make my mark with my words and not agonise over it.
So I did. And you’ve just read the result.
Wanna cross-pollinate?
If this article sparked any ideas you’d like to chat about, drop me a line: alex@alex-woodward.co.uk
Thank you!