Can Stories Save The World? Writing For The Environment With Denise Baden

The relentless news about climate change can leave us despondent — but what if we can use fiction to help people with positive ideas of what the future could look like and the actions we can take to change things? Denise Baden talks about the power of eco-fiction and explains the Green Stories Novel Prize, sponsored by Orna Ross.

Denise Baden is Professor of sustainable business at the University of Southampton in the UK. She's also a screenwriter and novelist and founded the series of Green Stories Writing Competitions.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How stories can change minds
• How to smuggle green ideas into stories rather than preaching
• What is eco-fiction?
• The Green Stories Novel and Short Story Competitions
• Environmental issues in publishing

Click here to check out the Green Stories Novel Award and remember, there are short story awards and more, so even if the novel one isn't for you, maybe enter something else!

You can find Denise Baden at DABaden.com and on Twitter @DABadenauthor

Transcript of Interview with Denise Baden

Joanna: Denise Baden is a professor of sustainable business at the University of Southampton in the UK. She's also a screenwriter and novelist and founded the series of Green Stories Writing Competitions. Welcome, Denise.

Denise: Hello, nice to be here.

Joanna: Oh, great to talk to you about this topic.

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and also sustainability and environmental issues.

Denise: I've had a bit of a butterfly background. I actually worked as a sales rep for publishers many years ago. But I couldn't do that once I became a mum, so I went back to university and I did a bit of psychology.

I was harassing them on their green policies and not having a recycling bin. So when the person teaching business ethics, which is one of the things we're also doing, left, I got put in charge of that, and then I ended up doing stuff on sustainability. So that's my academic career, and also I've done articles on that.

I think I was inspired to be a greeny by a fictional book myself, which is why I'm quite interested in writing fiction. So I read Stark. It must have been back in the early '90s by Ben Elton.

Joanna: Oh, me too. I remember that one.

Denise: I'm not sure if it still stands the test of time, but I thought it was brilliant at the time. It was really fun. And right in the middle of this love story epic adventure, he says something like, ‘Dave was a water birth, but he died soon after being born.' It turns out that Dave is a dolphin that got caught up in a tuna net.

And I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. I can buy dolphin-friendly tuna.'

I never would have chosen to read a green-themed book. I read for fun. But that really made me think and I think it awakened my green conscience.

I realized what we're doing without really realizing it. It had loads of examples like that. And it gave me the idea that perhaps I might like to write fiction and perhaps smuggle green issues in myself.

Joanna: I love that. And I think it's so important what you said. We read for fun. And if people haven't read Ben Elton, his books are funny. Well, most of them. His more recent ones are less funny, but his early ones are really funny.

And you're right. Reading for fun. We read for escape. And the news is, let's face it, full of pretty dire stuff and people feel anxiety around the environment and just feel like it's too big. So obviously, you did psychology as well, which is great.

Why are stories a good way to, like you said, smuggle these ideas in?

Denise: Everyone turns to science as a way to address the climate crisis, but I think it's stories that engage our imaginations. It's stories that enable us to see things from other points of view, especially things like sci-fi and ones set in the future. They also say how things could be.

I think it's a real shame that actually a lot of stories set in the future are dystopian, because we think, ‘I don't want to go there.' And I thought, wouldn't it be nice if we had some stories set in the future that were utopian, that gave us a positive vision we could aspire to perhaps.

I love stories, and I also think, because I teach in the area of sustainability, you're always talking to the same people. So you're teaching those who have chosen to take that course and people who are putting the word out about climate crisis and so on. They're only reaching those who are choosing to watch that. We're preaching to the converted all the time.

I quite like the idea of using fiction to engage a wider audience, and also, perhaps focus a little bit more on what we can do rather than just on what's wrong. If you know what I mean.

Joanna: I'm still reading, because it's got many levels, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Have you read that one?

Denise: I have. Yes. It's an epic book.

Joanna: It is epic. It's massive. But I feel like that book has made a big impact on me. I feel like I was halfway there on many of these things, but it is actually what he talks about, for example, with his carbon credit system. The way he talks about it in the future. I've been getting into this cryptocurrency side of things.

Denise: I know. I've been trying to follow you.

Joanna: It was interesting because reading his book, I suddenly understood how a carbon credit economy could emerge that actually made sense. And what's so brilliant about his writing, he's obviously delved down into the research, but then turned it into a story.

And it's like you said. It's not the facts and figures that actually engage us. We actually couldn't care that… The 1.5 degree, like, people don't know what that means. But like at the beginning of The Ministry of the Future, if you have this heatwave, and you describe it, that just makes a lot more of an impact, doesn't it?

It's taking those facts and figures and turning them into characters and stories.

Denise: It's a great example because he imagines there was a Ministry for the Future and what it might do and he gets glaciologists on it, economists, sociologists, scientists, and they're all working together. And at heart, it's actually quite optimistic.

There are tragedies in it, but overall, we kind of crack it. The only issue I had, and actually, Joanna, and I'm so glad you brought it up because I consider you the expert on this, is one of his solutions is based on blockchain technology as a way to leverage finance towards low carbon solutions.

But my understanding of cryptocurrency is it's about 1000 times more energy-intensive than normal currency. Now, I understand that's being dealt with. But simply switching to a renewable energy supplier for that won't really crack it because we've got a supply issue as well as a demand issue with renewable energy. Do you have a view on that?

Joanna: Well, as you said, and I recently shared on the show, there are carbon-negative blockchains at this point, which I think is absolutely fascinating. I can't speak to the technology on it, but what I do know is many of the people involved in cryptocurrency and digital currencies are younger people who absolutely want to save the planet.

I think about it now, and also I'm into the AI side, what I think is that some of the smartest people on the planet are now thinking about this and do care about this. So that's why reading someone like Kim Stanley Robinson is good because obviously, he's a very smart dude who does a lot of research but then turned it into a story.

I always think with cryptocurrency and blockchain and all of this stuff, you don't necessarily need to know how it works technically to think that it might be a way of doing things differently in the future. And that's what we've got to think, isn't it? We've got to do things differently and try and make decisions in that way.

But just coming back to stories in particular. Tell us about your novel, Habitat Man. You call it eco-fiction as well as romantic comedy. So tell us about the book.

What is eco-fiction anyway?

Denise: Eco-fiction typically is quite doom-laden, most of it. I don't think it has to be, but it typically is. It often imagines that some terrible things have happened. We've messed up our planet and now we live in this post-apocalyptic world with no bees or nature. And so it's quite alarmist.

I wouldn't like to read it. I'm afraid I'm very frivolous when it comes to my reading matter. But I mean, not all of them are like that. Some of them just have very strong nature themes.

I think that The Call of the Wild is a classic by Jack London perhaps, and I think Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver is about butterflies and climate change and the human drama at the center of it. But most of it is quite dystopian, I would say. I call mine eco-fiction I guess because the aim of it is to try and share green solutions via fiction.

The b