Transcript:
Have you heard about this city in Costa Rica that extended citizenship to bees & other pollinators? Edgar Mora, the mayor of Curridabat, a suburb of San José led this initiative to bring nature back into the city… I want to cover this story because it illustrates important lessons at the narrative level for creators & storytellers out there.
My name is Camille, You’re listening to Cosmic Dynamics, 5 minutes of exploration on art, change & the music of the universe
Pollinators can’t physically vote yet BUT the bee hotels are flourishing all across town, urban wildlife is now thriving and human citizens are getting involved as well. While urbanization is one of the primary drivers of biodiversity loss around the world, in Curridabat, green infrastructure and bio-corridors have become the new favorite tools for urban planning.
I’ll let you dive into the details of the story via the Guardian article I linked in the episode notes. What I want to touch on here is distance. We know that at a change communications level, distance between people and the issue you are communicating about is always the key challenge. We typically encounter 2 scenarios:
Scenario 1 - Most People are unlikely to engage because the issue you are communicating about is too far from their day-to-day reality.
Scenario 2 - there is a specific group of people within society - who care and talk a lot about nature protection in general, the Amazon rainforest and other global environmental issues, but they don’t practice the connection with nature, because of lack of access or, because of a simple contradiction in their discourse, which eventually leads to cognitive dissonance.
This is what Edgar Mora noted: people in cities are prone to defending nature when it is far away, when it is a distant concept, but they are negligent when it comes to protecting nature in their immediate environment. This is where the focus on local solutions is so powerful, at the narrative level as well. Because With a local initiative, our first group now gets involved because it’s about their neighborhood, and it’s about them, it’s about their identity even.
Our second group now has an opportunity to access meaningful projects and play an active role. Instead of being limited to sharing posts on facebook about distant issues and sending money to international NGOs, the local project helps them dilute this contradiction between their discourse and their actual day-to-day involvement. A contradiction that urban environments often amplify. Last but not least: from local action, people are then more likely to pay attention to global environmental issues in general.
In conclusion, a great way to tackle this distance dilemma that undermines most change communications is making your storytelling locally focused, and locally relevant. In the same way that most change projects need to be local for change to happen globally, stories and narratives also need to anchor on local framings for people to get engaged.
In that sense, the globalization of storytelling is maybe the biggest challenge we are facing on change communications. I still never encountered a polar bear, so although melting of the ice is making me very sad, that’s not the story that’s likely to change what I will do tomorrow... The story of Curridabat, sweet city as they call it now, is a great example of what’s possible, and what works.
In connection to this story, and strategy, I am featuring the work of Matt Willey, with a project called “The Good of the Hive”. Matt Willey committed to hand-painting 50,000 honey bees in murals and installations around the world, - the number necessary for a healthy, thriving hive - he’s going local each time. So far, he has painted 5,436 honey bees out of the 50,000 planned, and they are all beautiful. I invite you to check his webpage or his Instagram profile.
Send me your thoughts and questions on cross pollination of local storytelling? hello@cosmic.show or via facebook or instagram.
Cheers.
