The Gift and the Curse
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Recently I told a friend of mine that I thought the environmental movement was using scare tactics too much and was too depressing in its arguments. He replied that it may be true about the fear, but he didn’t think the environmental community was depressing enough. |
There is a story that a human life is like a man riding a donkey with a tiger walking behind him. The man lives in fear of the tiger. Sometimes he goes faster, sometimes he goes slower. Sometimes he looks and feels more. Sometimes he goes to sleep on the donkey. The man is always afraid that if he turns and looks at the tiger too closely the tiger will eat him. But the truth is the tiger does not care whether the man looks or not. Death waits for us all – while walking right behind our shoulders.
This denial of death, allowing us to find joy and satisfaction in our lives, is the same denial that troubles environmental storytellers. Human beings need that denial; we need not to look too closely at the facts of life as they are stated so often. But we also need to recognize that denial of the environmental disaster we have been living out for the past five hundred years is not really useful, as demonstrated by precedent.
The advantage that storytellers bring to this dilemma of how to talk about environmental problems is that we have a whole set of tools to get around the denial built into the human experience. We are able to build worlds and bring our audience to them. We are able both to educate and create awareness in a single action. We can use fairy tales and myths to talk about hard things.
Using storytelling it is possible to get Americans to see that environmental policies are above politics. Storytelling can allow us to move past knee jerk responses of tired political campaigns to understanding that the environment belongs to us all. In storytelling you can only take an audience to where you have been. Oral narrative is dependent on the story- teller’s development. You have to educate yourself about the actual environment to be an environmental storyteller – not just the theoretical, but what really is there. There is no replacement for time spent outdoors in the real world. To be an ecological storyteller, to be an environmental storyteller ultimately is to be someone who knows the ecology, the environment and storytelling.
So for those of you who may consider yourself storytellers but not eco-tellers, here is my invitation: spend half an hour a day sitting quietly in the woods, in a park or on the lawn near your home. Within a year you will see how quickly this experience builds you into a qualified environmental storyteller. We have no shortage of need for more eco-tellers.
Eric Wolf, a.k.a. Brother Wolf, has an M.S. in Environmental Education from Lesley University. He lives and gardens in the Vale, the oldest (1940s) residential nonreligious land trusted community in the United States. He also produces “The Art of Storytelling”at http://www.artofstorytellingshow.com/category/environmental-storytelling/
This Article was previously published in the Late Spring Issue of Story Times, Florida’s Storytelling Organizations Ezine.
Tags: Art of Mentoring, Environmental Activities, Environmental Education
Brother Wolf, Environmental Storytelling, Griot, Healing Storytelling | Brother Wolf | 
August 29, 2010 12:20 pm
