Doom and Gloom Vs Tales of Victory

For any environmental writer the goal is to motivate and inspire. Transforming words on a page into global activism. However, when doing this an important question arises. Should you aim your focus on the risks that we face if action isn't taken or the stories of success and mobilization? Both of these narratives will affect your readers in drastically different ways.

You may feel that the doom and gloom rhetoric encompasses the right amount of urgency for these sets of problems but in reality too much of this can be crippling for the reader, furthering that feeling of hopelessness towards a undefeatable problem. We want to move away from that type of influence and instead promote the idea of hope. However, when people only read about environmental victories it undermines struggles and hardships. This can potentially take away from the amount of concern the reader might have for that specific issue, ultimately leading away from public participation and action.

If done incorrectly both of these positions can be dangerous. Throughout my experience, environmental writing has been the most effective when blending these two types of narratives, bringing both the urgency and hope to the table. For a writer, balancing these two types of stories can be challenging but in the end it's what we really need. People look to writers and story tellers for direction and the closer we get to perfecting this, the closer we get to repairing our environmental problems.