Image courtesy of USGS
The Climate Stories Incubator is Blue Lab’s flagship area of research-driven storytelling and creative practice. The incubator is inspired by this question: how are different people and places experiencing climate change and advancing climate action?
Working against the grain of dominant approaches to environmental narrative, CSI projects investigate how, for whom and why climate change and related challenges become both urgent and meaningful, or not. The incubator in turn documents how diverse communities make sense of real-time climate change—and in some cases catastrophic loss—in relationship to places they love, value and call home. Current Incubator projects are based in British Columbia, California, New Jersey and the Eastern Seaboard, North Carolina, Paiute and Shoshone lands in northern Nevada and the Philippines.
Incubator projects interweave multidisciplinary research, multimedia storytelling and aesthetic experimentation to explore localized experiences of planetary problems. Our projects bridge climate science, paleoclimatology, hydrology, science communication and the environmental humanities and employ that interdisciplinary research to create innovative climate stories on behalf of communities in the places where CSI projects take place. Those stories adapt and interweave such art forms as documentary photography, audio narrative, digital and stop motion animation, story mapping and data visualization.
Long term, Blue Lab will build a living library of climate stories as well as a platform and toolkit for collaborators—from media and science organizations to community organizers, arts groups and policy think tanks.
