Humans are storytelling animals.
That, at least, is one of the stories that humans tell about themselves. We are not logic machines or information processors; we need the tug of a narrative thread to carefully follow an argument.
This poses a challenge for science, especially climate science, which has such a long timeframe, such a vast playing field, and way too many characters. But climate scientists, social scientists, reporters, and activists have tried, in permutating collaborations, to meet this challenge. And they have stories to tell about their efforts. (Or should we call them quests?)
This special selection presents six recently published titles.
The list starts with the recognition that technology shapes the kinds of stories we tell. The authors of “Story Tech” put some new teeth into this truism. They point out that our phones now routinely collect such detailed information about our actions and habits that companies and governments can create stories about us that we may not want told. New story technologies also affect how we aim stories at audiences and measure their impact. This thread in the story about storytelling can only get longer and thicker.
The next four titles offer more traditional plots. “Science v Story” and “Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions” explain how stories function within science and advocacy. “Hot Takes” and “Spectacle Earth” present the standpoints of journalists and artist-activists.
The final title spins a plot that is not merely traditional but foundational: the end of the world. How has climate change, our critical literary theorist asks, changed the way we imagine the end of the world? The way we imagine our own endings?
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.
Story Tech: Power, Storytelling, and Social Change Advocacy by Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan, and Ariadne Vromen (University of Michigan Press 2025, 262 pages, $29.95 paperback)
Story Tech explores the increasingly influential impact of technologies—such as databases, algorithms, and digital story banks—that are usually invisible to the public. It shows that hidden “story tech” enables political organizations to treat stories as data that can be queried for storylines and used to intervene in news and information cycles in real time. As political stories shift to being “on demand,” they reshape power relationships in key public debates in ways that produce moments of tension as well as positive narrative change. Story Tech examines these trends and illustrates how storytelling success can be achieved in conjunction with personal dignity, privacy, and empowerment for storytellers and their communities, particularly marginalized ones.
Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators by Emma Frances Bloomfield (University of California Press 2024 (Feb.), 286 pages, $29.95 paperback)
Science v. Story analyzes four scientific controversies—climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19—through the lens of storytelling. Instead of viewing stories as adversaries to scientific practices, Emma Frances Bloomfield demonstrates how storytelling is integral to science communication. Drawing from narrative theory and rhetorical studies, Science v. Story examines scientific stories and rival stories, including disingenuous rival stories that undermine scientific conclusions and productive rival stories that make science more inclusive. Science v. Story offers two tools to evaluate and build stories: narrative webs and narrative constellations. These visual mapping tools chart story features to identify opportunities for audience engagement, thus deepening storytelling and strengthening science communication.
Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions, edited by Emily Coren and Hua Wang (Springer Nature 2024, 442 pages, $49.99 paperback / free download available)
The climate is changing faster than our cultural practices are adapting to it. This Open Access volume, co-edited by science communicator Emily Coren and communication scientist Hua Wang, presents surveys the latest in agency-focused climate storytelling. Together, practitioners and scholars across different fields share their knowledge, experience, and insight about how stories can be designed and told to engage, enable, and empower individuals and communities. You will learn a wide range of narrative strategies and exemplary applications of climate storytelling in terms of professional practices (e.g., education, literature, journalism, popular media), genres and formats (e.g., drama, comedy, fiction), media platforms (e.g., television, radio, mobile), and communication modalities (e.g., text, visual, audio, multisensory).
Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change by Sadie Babits (Island Press 2025 (June), 304 pages, $35 paperback)
It’s Monday morning and your editor assigns you a story about a housing project where several residents have been hospitalized because of heat stroke. Is this a climate story? Is it a climate justice story? No one would have thought so 20 years ago. In fact, when many of us were studying journalism or reporting our first stories, those terms did not even exist. Today, it’s a whole different story. Because climate affects every human, animal, and plant on Earth, it’s a factor in all our reporting. So whether you’re still a student or a 50-year veteran, chances are, you could use some up-to-date guidance on how to report on this critical and endlessly complex issue. No resource has all the answers, but Hot Takes engages the big questions that determine how climate change is covered and the stories we tell our audiences—and ourselves.
Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change by Andrew Kalaidjian (University of Virginia Press 2025 (April), 222 pages, $35.00 paperback)
What does it mean to watch a disaster unfold? Does exposure to a source of dread spur people to action or lull them into fatalism and complacency? Andrew Kalaidjian takes up these and other vital questions in Spectacle Earth, a lively and wide-ranging consideration of media engagement and virtual environments in relation to ecological crises and climate change. Tracing the long trajectory of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that led up to the Anthropocene, Kalaidjian looks at the lessons learned from artist and activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s before laying out the new challenges in the digital age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The groundbreaking result is a new media literacy that goes beyond individual therapeutic experience to promote the solidarity and connection needed to heal the planet.
We All Die at the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse by Sam Haddow (Manchester University Press 2025, 200 pages, $89.99)
We all die at the end offers a survey of contemporary end-of-the-world fiction, spanning literature, children’s fiction, video games, theater, and film. It draws on eco-critical philosophy and narrative theory to show ways in which the climate crisis is reorienting storytelling in the face of foreseeable human extinction. In the process, it argues that such stories have a role to play in helping us come to terms with the severity and scale of the crisis that we face.
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