Interpreting Climate Change Means Understanding People’s Worldviews
People with different worldviews don’t just see different worldviews, but live in different worlds, and interpreters need to understand this to interpret climate change.
Have You Ever Played Catch with a Hyperobject?
Have you ever played catch with a hyperobject? It is like playing chess on a pitch-black night or grabbing at a slippery frog in a pond or reading a book whose pages randomly reorder every day like the walls in Maze Runner. Yet interpreters often toss these hyperobjects to their audiences only to find that some visitors cannot play.
According to philosopher Timothy Morton a hyperobject is something so wicked, so massively distributed across time and space, that it totters on the precipice of the unknowable. Consider what may be the greatest hyperobject of all: Climate change stretches across millions of years of Earth history, with multiple cycles at different time scales. It interacts with weather, biology, soil chemistry, ocean acidity, and converges with multiple flows of variables that cascade across space like the Amazon rushing to sea: fluctuating clouds, rainfall, melting glaciers, permafrost, and burning forests. Rising storms, new diseases, floods, droughts, and heat waves dare plants and animals, including humans, to adapt or die. The beastly phenomenon accelerates changes in technology, politics, economy, culture, and spirituality, all intertangled with mountains of cause-and-effect chains. These causes, feedbacks, tipping points, delays, overshoots and death spirals go on and on, provoking heated conversations about what we should: adaptation, mitigation, transformation, or business-as-usual.
But when one corn farmer in Kansas raises her head to the sky, she senses a completely different world than that of a Chinese businessman who peers out over his spreadsheets from the 100th floor of a gleaming skyscraper, or a child who trips in a puddle in the paved-over playground of an inner-city Harlem school, or a climate scientist who fine-tunes a climate model humming on a supercomputer, or a National Park Service interpretive ranger in Yosemite who takes beautiful landscape images of El Capitan and the Merced River.
What these people see and understand influences what they tell their families, the policies they want their politicians to support, actions they will take in the cornfield or office, the themes that most resonate with them, the kind of future they expect for their children, and how well they rest at night.
You can only ever see a part of climate change. This is the nature of hyperobjects, and how you play with them depends a lot on how you view the world.
Interpreters Must Modify Climate Change Interpretation According to Audience Worldview
We all intuitively realize that people understand things differently: a newborn cannot perceive anything but its inner desires for food, warmth, and mother; as she grows, she learns to distinguish her hands from the environment, her feelings from those of everyone else. Eventually she matures enough to realize that when a puppet disappears behind the door, it still exists.
Her sense of self-identity grows to include not just her immediate family, but later friends and distant relatives, then larger social groups, such as those of her race, religion, and nationality. She thinks at first only in concrete terms and later she conceptualizes abstractly, metaphorically. And this process doesn’t stop once she reaches fully formed adult — people continue to grow in how they make meaning of the world around them, using more and more complex reasoning, across larger swaths of space and time.
They can, however, plateau along the way. Some adults seem to persist in thinking childishly, such as failing to reason, staring blankly when arguments demand evidence, and even pursuing immediate gratification when they should be thinking about the future. While others continue developing their entire lives, cultivating higher powers of awareness and thinking, mind over body, and deep empathy and self-sacrifice. Developmental psychologists have researched this pathway of growing and changing that unfolds through a spectrum of worldviews, or lenses through which we make meaning.
But if people operate with different worldviews, and interpreters present climate change in terms that audiences don’t comprehend, then their messages may fly over heads. We see this all the time in the news when climate scientists spew information about long-term trends rippling across the Earth’s surface with multiple feedbacks, delays, and tipping points that allow us a mere 12 years to radically reverse course — and many people recoil. These scientists think that if only people understood basic climate science and fear the consequences, then a rising universal consciousness would save us all. This is what communicators call the Information Deficit Model. But people’s perceptions of climate change are extremely complicated, mixing political ideology, values, emotions, and the very way that they organize meanings to make sense of climate change itself. If only it were simply a lack of information.
STAGES Model Applied to Climate Change
Here, I build on Gail Hochachka’s use of the STAGES Model, a developmental psychology model, in which she employed a method called Photo Voice to understand at a deeper level why people make meaning of climate change in such different ways. Understanding this background should help interpreters better communicate complex environmental issues like climate change. In her study, Gail asked people in El Salvador what climate change meant to them, and people took photos to explain their answers. She and STAGES developer Dr. Terri O’Fallon then analyzed the captioned photos with a validated scoring assessment to determine the worldviews underpinning responses. The table below reflects their findings.
None of this though should surprise interpreters. Freeman Tilden never studied developmental psychology, but he did capture most of the point in his Sixth Principle: “Interpretation addressed to children (say up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach.” If only Tilden had not limited his principle to 12-year-olds!
How Different Audiences Understand Climate Change
In a Legacy article years ago, I presented worldviews for interpreters (“Way Beyond Darwin: Evolution of Human Consciousness and the Future of Interpretation,” May 2010), so you can read descriptions there. Many developmental psychologists, philosophers, and education researchers back to Piaget have mapped these worldviews. I only talk about the most prominent four worldviews for adults today. Their conflicting values account for most clashes in the daily news between Right and Left, oilmen and conservationists, creationists and evolutionaries, technologists and spiritual leaders. And, of course, everyone with an opinion about climate change.
The STAGES model shows that people vary across worldviews according to four key factors in how they organize meaning.
Number of Perspectives
First person: People see only through their own eyes.
Second person: People see through the eyes of others.
Third person: People see objectively to navigate between multiple perspectives, necessary for rational, scientific, thinking.
Fourth person: People recognize the role of context in constructing meaning, necessary for Postmodern critical thinking.
Fifth person: People view the constructed nature of all reality.
Object Awareness
People can be aware of only concrete objects (rain, river, weather change), abstract objects (precipitation rate, climate change, idea of democracy), or be aware of their own awareness; that is, they are aware or conscious of what they perceive and how they think.
Complexity of Thought
Thought starts with fragmented bits and pieces to a more mechanistic and logical cause-and-effect. More complex thinking implies that people understand that realities are contextual, systemic, and change across local differences. Finally, some people also see how different values and worldviews influence the systems and objects they perceive and create.
Time Scale
Starting with children who do not live in time (only in the present moment), the next stage is perception of the present with limited stretch into the past, and then into the future. As development increases the time scale increases to distant past and future and then finally the entire evolutionary span from the Big Bang (or before) to eternity and timelessness.
The table shows how worldviews construct their notion of climate change and some corresponding themes that interpreters might use with them. Remember as we move up worldviews, people see more and more of the hyperobject and can address facets that previous worldviews don’t even know exist.
What Interpreters Do with This
When interpreters understand that different people hold diverse ideas about climate change, they can better transcend name-calling (“Ignorant conservatives!” “Bleeding-heart liberals!”), fighting, and frustration, and can instead connect with the various ways that people understand. This builds on the capacities that interpreters already have, being skilled at translating meaning into different stories, values, and metaphors. They already know how to do this with different audiences and understanding worldviews offers yet another tool to know them better. Sam Ham says, after all, “audience is everything.”
Interpreters that increase their own awareness will be able to work with more audiences. Interpreters can develop themselves by reading and discussing other points of view, considering how context influences the issues that they work on, and to learn about how climate change meanings vary from person to person.
The more eyes you see through, then, the more concrete objects begin to reveal their abstract angles and textures, the more time extends backward and forward, the more walls recede and ceilings rise, leaving you in a larger room with more to comprehend. Wise interpreters know that people build different meanings from the fragments that they see of the entire climate change hyperobject. So next time a senator shows an audience a snowball, bumbles to be interpretive, and declares there’s no climate change now, remember that what really melts in his hand is a hyperobject, mostly invisible to him and his audience. Then, ask him to toss it to you.
References
Hochachka, G., 2019. On matryoshkas and meaning-making: Understanding the plasticity of climate change. Glob. Environ. Change 57, 101917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.05.001
Morton, T., 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Posthumanities, Minneapolis.
Salzer, Jeff. (November 2019). Video interview with Gail Hochacka and Terri O’Fallon. The Daily Evolver. www.dailyevolver.com/2019/11/climate-changes-at-every-stage/
If you would like to see a shorter version published in Yale Climate Connections, click here.
