‘1,001 Voices on Climate Change’ Explores the Human Side of Climate Crisis
Seven years ago, I walked out the front door with a cardboard sign around my neck that said “tell me a story about water” on one side and “tell me a story about climate change” on the other. My goal was to humanize an issue often discussed in terms of numbers: millimeters of sea level rise or degrees of temperature change.
I didn’t know exactly what I was doing at the time, but it felt right. When possible, I traveled by bicycle and by boat. People talked to me — all sorts of people: students, activists, climate scientists, climate deniers, and passersby. I listened and I documented what I heard. At first, I thought I would only be listening for one year. But once I started paying close attention to these stories, I didn’t want to stop.
On August 24, 2021, my first book, 1,001 Voices on Climate Change will be published by Simon & Schuster (Tiller Press). The book features deeply-reported interviews with people who are experiencing the impacts of climate change on every continent except Antarctica.
I’ve found, in my years of listening to these stories, that personal details often move the hearts of others more than even the most dire stats and headlines. My goal is to advance the climate change conversation beyond its current stalemate.
Stories are the way we define ourselves in real time—a collection of narratives and ideas that transfers from my brain to yours, or vice versa. They are snaps, moments. No two storytelling events are ever the same. I could speak the same words I’m saying right now in Whanganui, New Zealand, or under a bridge in Abisko, Sweden, and the resonance would be different.
Some of the best stories are the oldest ones. The oldest surviving manuscript of Alf Layla wa-Layla, or One Thousand and One Nights, likely dates from the fifteenth century. But even before that, it was shared as an oral tradition for hundreds of years. The story flowed from Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic, adding new interlocking tales with each iteration. Even now, retellings of One Thousand and One Nights appear on television and films throughout the Middle East during Ramadan.
Picture a murderous king. Incensed that his wife had cheated on him, King Shahriyar ordered that she be executed, and then, as an act of vengeance, he proceeded to wed every woman in the kingdom, one by one, enjoy their company for a night, and then murder them in the morning.
But Shahrazad is a trickster. She sees a way out. When it’s her turn to marry Shahriyar, she tells him a story that keeps him riveted all night but ends with a cliffhanger in the early hours of dawn.
The king, caught up in the suspense of her storytelling, decides to keep her alive for another night, and another night, until it’s three years later, they have two children, and he has forgotten his desire to kill her altogether. This time, cumulatively, amounted to 1,001 nights.
The idea to collect 1,001 stories started as something of a joke. When I was in San Francisco in October 2014, passing through on my way to Fiji, I told Sophie Lee, a fellow cyclist: “What if I recorded a thousand and one stories?”
“You could do it,” she said.
Hearing those words reflected back at me, I decided I would.
Norway: An addiction to oil
Katrine Boel Gregussen is a representative in her late twenties for Norway’s Socialist Left Party. “I’m really afraid of how the future’s going to look if we’re digging for oil,” she told me at her kitchen table. “It’s a matter of money. We have been living good because of the oil in Norway for so many years, but now we know so much better.” The only way to continue to drill for fossil fuels, she added, is to blatantly disregard the future impacts. She described her country as “addicted”—not only to oil, also to the wealth that it brings.
“I think one of the biggest problems here in Norway is that we still have people who don’t believe in environmental changes,” Katrine added. “It’s a big problem because if people don’t believe in something that is so well documented, how can you get them to believe in anything? I think you don’t get a good discussion if people don’t believe in the facts.” She finds these conversations frustrating.
In 2016, Katrine traveled to Greenland, a country where people see climate-related changes daily. “The ice is melting, and there’s less fish and a lot of weather problems,” she said. “It was so good to be in a country where everyone believes in the facts.
“We are one of the richest countries in the world, and I really don’t think that we do enough for the rest of the world. In Norway, I think that it’s easy to close our eyes,” she told me. “We’re so lucky to live in such a safe place, and I don’t think we do enough for those who aren’t as lucky as we are.”
She is heartened by the generation of environmentalists coming up behind her. “They understand that this is no joke,” she said. “I think that does a lot for the generations that come after us.” Katrine maintains hope that even though oil is so inextricably tied to Norwegian identity, “we’ll move in the right direction.”
Tuvalu: What it means to do laundry
I ask people for stories about water because we often don’t know how to talk about climate change. The language of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is awkward and technical. I once heard Christiana Figueres, a key negotiator of the 2015 Paris Agreement, say that she wished she could paint every molecule of carbon dioxide in the sky a bright color. That way people would be able to see the impacts more clearly.
I didn’t bring a paintbrush with me to Tuvalu, but I did bring an audio recorder. My mission: to listen to stories about water and climate change.
Why water? Water is a substance that we can see and feel. When water is not present in our lives during a drought, we experience its lack acutely. Water is rationed. In the most dire cases, our throats go dry. When water is present in overabundance in a flood or sea level rise, it becomes a force for destruction, washing away homes and businesses and lives. Many (but certainly not all) of the impacts of climate change are experienced through water.
Even under the shade of a coconut tree, it was hot. I felt sweat behind my knees and under my arms and at the nape of my neck—my body’s attempt to maintain equilibrium. Each home, concrete and brick, has a rainwater tank affixed to the roof by a pipe. The sides of these tanks read: “Donated by the EU” or “Gift from the Commonwealth of Australia.”
When the rain came—fast, thick, and percussive—I watched the most agile members of each household leap outside. They shook rainwater out of their eyes as they assured that the pipe was attached properly to their roof and tank. Water here is precious and threatened.
Once, during my month in Tuvalu, I asked Alofanga if I could wash my clothes.
“We have to wait for the rain,” she said.
Later, I asked if I could help out after a meal by washing the dishes. She flatly refused. “White people don’t know how to wash dishes without using all the water,” she told me.
Denmark: The Little Mermaid
I met Lupita Pocket at a food truck in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Nørrebro,
where she was serving tacos. She grew up in Mexico City, where her family would buy big jugs of water for drinking. “We are not allowed to drink the water from the taps in Mexico,” she said. Her mom would tell her, as a child, to “hurry and drink a lot of water before it gets bad.”
This comment didn’t make sense to Lupita, until once, after not drinking the water for a few days, “small green plants” started to grow inside the bottle.
Lupita wouldn’t let her mom throw it away. She thought of it as her aquarium. A few days later, “little bugs” began to squiggle around. After a week, she told me, there were fish. Lupita had her aquarium. She loved it.
When she was five years old, she fell in love with the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Mermaid.” At the end of the book was a picture of the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen’s port. Lupita decided then and there that she wanted to become a mermaid. She knew that there must be mermaids in Denmark. She promised herself that one day she would become a mermaid, too. She decided that Danish girls must go to school in the morning and in the evening, learning how to be mermaids. She wanted that life.
“When I was old enough, crazy enough, I just grabbed my things, moved here, and found out,” Lupita said. One day, by chance, she met the director of an art school. “He thought I had some talent, and I was funny,” Lupita said, “so he gave me a scholarship for physical theater school.”
She trained as an actress, and now she performs as a mermaid at an outdoor theater in Copenhagen. The show is about redefining notions of success.
“Of course, I’m not really a mermaid inside of the sea. But you know, you can form that on the street and still feel that you hit one million dollars every day,” she said. “I don’t care a shit about money,” she added. “It’s just that, hey, I did what I wanted.”
Stories are doors
This will be, like any story, incomplete. If you don’t see yourself or your experience with water and climate change reflected in these pages, I would love to hear it. You can tell your own story—or record someone else’s—at 1001stories.org.
I believe that we make the world through our actions. In the face of a challenge as large and universal as climate change, we need all kinds of people to listen and join. Yes, it can feel overwhelming. But as long as these stories prompt some kind of shift—no matter how small—then we are moving forward. And movement is what I’m all about.
What can you do? Start where you are. Start small. To quote an organizing toolkit from the People’s Climate Movement: “To change everything, it takes everyone.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: 17 Young People on the Moment the Climate Crisis Became Real to Them
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
