This week, we begin a series of interviews called Bearing Witness: Voices of Climate Change. They're stories told by longtime Arizonans about changes they've seen in the familiar landscapes of their lives: Watering holes gone dry, food sources vanished, tribal customs changed because of drought. Personal experience, in and of itself is not scientific conclusion, but many researchers believe long-term observation is a critical component to understanding how climate change affects humanity and the planet. Our series starts with Stefan Sommer, director of education at the Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research at Northern Arizona University. He spoke with KNAU's Melissa Sevigny about the importance of climate change stories.
MS: Why stories? We have all this data about climate change that tells us what’s happening and what’s going to happen in the future. Why do we need stories?
SS: That’s the key question. I’ve made lots of presentations on climate change… in events sponsored by the Northern Arizona Climate Change Alliance. They’re very data driven presentations that I made. And the data connects to some people. But not everybody.
So, we put our heads together, and thought, what would reach those folks who aren’t reached by the data? And we thought: stories. Stories are a universal thing for our species. We are a very social species, and we’ve been learning from each other through stories since the beginning. Certainly, stories are very anecdotal things and scientists will not draw conclusions from that kind of information. But, the stories, these anecdotal stories certainly match what we've seen in the data.
MS: One of the things that struck me about your vision was you wanted these climate elders to tell stories not just about the changes they’ve seen but how these changes affected their own lives, in many cases.
SS: Yeah and climate change has been affecting human lives and ecosystems across the globe in larger ways all the time. So, for the climate elders who spoke at our event, they had seen rivers drying up, flowing for shorter lengths of time, and that affected the river running community. It also affects the ranching community. We're seeing longer droughts of greater intensity, storms of greater frequency and intensity. We're seeing these kinds of things globally, and we're seeing these kinds of things in Flagstaff as well.
MS: S,o these stories help us remember that things really have changed in a lot of ways?
SS: They can help us to understand that things may have changed in bigger ways then we ourselves observed. But also a story is easier to access than a graph or a figure, data. We scientists deal with data all the time, we’re used to reading graphs and figures and understanding immediately what that means, but for a lot of folks, this is new, a new way of looking at things. But stories connect to everybody.
