Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The environmental activist, author, and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, maintains that the “real fight — all real fights — are over the zeitgeist. They’re about who controls the vision of the future.” David Orr, in his earlier work on sustainability, argued that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of education, where literacy must develop sustainable visions of communities and society. As McKibben and Orr make clear, how to alter the ways we perceive and imagine our environmental futures, and how we might advocate for them, depends upon who controls the story. This paper approaches environmental literacy education through digital storytelling as a pedagogy of sustainability practice and how it transforms social change. Drawing on methods in the environmental humanities, social practice, and sustainability education, I consider how storytelling has the power to change perceptions and behaviour and mobilize action through multimodal networks of digital media. When engaging in arts, creativity, and digital media, it is valuable to examine issues of production, language, representation, narrative, and audience to decipher meaning and then apply it to our social networks to imagine sustainable social and ecological stories of the future. As a case study, I will examine a viral UK Greenpeace media campaign titled LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome (2014) – confronting drilling for oil in the Arctic – to illustrate how digital storytelling as a pedagogical approach to sustainability practice can generate advocacy and mobilized change on a global scale.