‘Heroes’ and ‘villains’
Often, we talk about the need for climate change stories to feature ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’. How do we tell these stories powerfully in a way that avoids descending into two-dimensional “us and them” melodrama, while also retaining a strong and direct focus on ‘the problem’, its causes, and the need for change?
The debate about ‘enemy narratives’
In a 2012 article that shifted the thinking of much of the climate movement and galvanised the campaign for fossil fuel divestment, 350.org’s Bill McKibben argued that climate change campaigners need to cast the fossil fuel industry as the ‘villain’. He stated:
- enemies are what climate change has lacked…
- A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies.
McKibben’s article offered a new story about climate change and its causes, presenting the fossil fuel industry as ‘Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization’.
Which storytelling direction do we move in?
- one direction involves an overly-simplistic “us and them” melodrama
- another involves a ‘heroic’ genre: see below (and the page: Genre shift: changing the focus from ‘business as usual’ to heroism.)
Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe address this debate in their book, Climate Change As Social Drama.1 They argue that the plots and characters in climate change narratives are too ‘thin and predictable’.
They warn against a climate change version of a ‘Punch and Judy’ show which loses a sense of civil solidarity or a greater common purpose, arguing that we need ‘not only a sense that the world is in peril but also a more romantic sensibility that empowers action and generates solidaristic emotional energy’.
Marshall’s position
Climate movement storytelling can also move in a third direction:
some have called for “enemy narratives” to be avoided completely. For example, George Marshall argues that the hero-villain line cannot be clearly drawn: ‘we ourselves are the baddies’, he writes. Marshall argues that ‘in high-carbon societies, everyone contributes to the emissions’, though we would rather not face this (pp. 39, 42). For him, fossil fuel companies are ‘not the enemy… They are an obstacle’ (p. 43).
Elsewhere, Marshall calls for narratives ‘about co-operation on common ground’, arguing that ‘solutions need to be presented that can speak to the common concerns and aspirations of all people’. He warns that enemy narratives generate enemy narratives from opponents in response: they ‘take on a life of their own and come back to bite us… As climate impacts intensify there will be a lot of confusion, blame and anger looking for a target.2
Heroic narratives
In navigating between a story with no conflict and a ‘thin and predictable melodrama’, climate change narratives can:
- feature heroes who take up the challenge of working for a better world
- highlight this better world as the story’s main goal and ‘horizon’3
- dramatise how this goal is at risk unless the protagonists succeed and the antagonists stop, or are restrained
- ’speak truth to power’: dramatising and calling out actions that endanger human and environmental wellbeing
- draw sharp moral contrasts between protagonists and antagonists, with clear and direct statements of ‘the problem’ and who and what are doing most to cause it
- keep these contrasts in focus while adding breadth and depth: avoiding being ‘thin and predictable’ by portraying more than two dimensions of the real human situation that we’re in, and still highlighting how particular responsibility for climate change is heavily concentrated amongst small groups.
- use the language of “we” and “us” as well as “they” and “them”, and present the challenge as a call to work together to address the issues.
Narratives might factor in answers to questions such as:
- what IS the position of people who consume the fuels that the fossil fuel industry produces?
- Or of people who are drawn to climate-denying propaganda and vote for climate-denying politicians?
- Or people who know about climate change, but find it hard to bring themselves to believe it can ‘possibly be that bad’?
- Or: how do ‘we’ share (and work to overcome) human flaws that ‘they’ are putting into action/ turning into policy? (E.g. a storyline – “Politician X is refusing to listen to the science. We all know what can go wrong when we refuse to face reality – this is something we cannot let happen in this case – too much is at stake. So let’s…”)
Gandhi – one way of dramatising conflict
Mohandas Gandhi’s approach provides an example of addressing a conflict (and at certain points intensifying it) without descending into melodrama.4 He
- powerfully condemned British colonial rule
- also turned the critique in the other direction, arguing that colonialism was only made possible because people in India accepted and cooperated with it. (Nonviolent strategist Gene Sharp draws on Gandhi’s approach in discussing the role of withdrawing consent).5
Gandhi responded by advocating
- non-cooperation with the British
- direct opposition and civil disobedience
- initiatives promoting self-reliance
- a focus on personal integrity
- a ‘constructive program’, working for changes to social practices where the problem was internal to Indian people and communities rather than being caused by colonialism.
Gandhian campaigns such as the Salt March powerfully dramatised the issues.
Gandhi – one way of dramatising conflict
Mohandas Gandhi’s approach provides an example of addressing a conflict (and at certain points intensifying it) without descending into melodrama.4 He
- powerfully condemned British colonial rule
- also turned the critique in the other direction, arguing that colonialism was only made possible because people in India accepted and cooperated with it. (Nonviolent strategist Gene Sharp draws on Gandhi’s approach in discussing the role of withdrawing consent).5
Gandhi responded by advocating
- non-cooperation with the British
- direct opposition and civil disobedience
- initiatives promoting self-reliance
- a focus on personal integrity
- a ‘constructive program’, working for changes to social practices where the problem was internal to Indian people and communities rather than being caused by colonialism.
Notes
1 Smith and Howe on climate change and social drama
Smith and Howe write as academics rather than activists, however activists will find plenty in their book that offers valuable food for thought on the dynamics of political theatre in climate politics and the challenges of reaching and persuading audiences.
2 ‘Fault’, complicity, and getting beyond the cycle of ‘confusion, blame and anger’
If there are four positions:
- A: “It’s all their fault“
- B: “It’s all my fault / our fault”
- C: “It’s everybody’s fault“
- D: “This is how I see • their fault, and • my / our part in the problem”
Marshall seems to mix some of “C” and “D”, while being reluctant to take a strong line on what is “their fault”.
While this website does not share Marshall’s call to leave “hero-villain” dynamics out of climate storytelling, his call for us to face our own “complicity” in carbon emissions is worth factoring in to the way we see our role in the climate story.
Marshall is also concerned about a vicious circle of “confusion, blame and anger” – where different groups throw position “A” at each other.
Ways of breaking this cycle, or moving beyond it, need thinking through. “Confusion, blame and anger” is erupting with new intensity in the US and other countries at the time of writing.
It is a cycle that is shaping climate politics, with an inflamed ‘political climate’ standing between the climate movement and its goals.
3 The ‘horizon of a better world
Climate change can be presented as the ultimate example of ‘we are all in this together’ – including when structural and other inequalities mean that some groups are disproportionately exposed to its effects, and have less resources to recover from them (and including when we are working to rearrange what ‘being together’ means).
4 Gandhi’s flaws
Gandhi had no lack of flaws and blindspots of his own. Critics during his own time like Ambedkar highlighted his paternalistic views about caste, for example.
However, his flaws stand alongside his strengths – his view of the dynamics of power and ways of achieving change continue to inspire the work of social movements.
5 The consent theory of power: Diane Nash on empowerment
Diane Nash of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key organisation in the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, represents this thinking when she reflects:
[An] important tenet, I think, of [our] philosophy was recognizing that oppression always requires the participation of the oppressed. So that rather than doing harm to the oppressor, another way to go is to identify your part in your own oppression and then withdraw your cooperation from the system of oppression. Guaranteed if the oppressed withdraw their cooperation from their own oppression, the system of oppression cannot work. An example of that would be the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56. For many years, Montgomery blacks assumed that Alabama whites were segregating them on buses. But in order to have segregated buses, it was necessary for the blacks to get on the bus, pay their fare, and walk to the back of the bus. When Montgomery blacks decided that there weren’t going to be segregated buses anymore, there were segregated buses no more. It didn’t take any change on the part of whites; when the blacks decided, then there were no longer segregated buses. So then, you have to ask yourself the question, well, who was segregating the buses all this time?
I think there’s a thin line between what’s known as blaming the victim and identifying appropriate responsibility, and I think that when you do identify your own responsibility in an oppressive situation, it then puts you in a position of power, because then you are able to withdraw your participation and therefore end the system.
The consent theory of power can be misapplied (e.g. in victim-blaming) or stretched too far- at most it offers only part of the picture –
however it raises the question of how the misuse of power is facilitated by people standing by and allowing it to happen.
Nash’s views imply that seeing our own part in allowing and maintaining what is going on can actually increase a sense of agency and power to effect change.
Images above: Adapted from Ratcliffe on Soar Power Station, UK. Sarah Horrigan, Flickr ‘Overpass Light Brigade’ in action, University of Wisconsin 4/4/14 depthandtime, #ExxonKnew Divest from Deception Rally Linda Cooke / 350 Antarctica – Neko Harbour Rita Willaert