Climate Narratives : What is Modern about Traditional Ecological Knowledge ? 1

The literature on traditional ecological knowledge has established the importance of community narratives for capturing and communicating complex environmental information and linking it to practice. We make the case that narratives are important not just to traditional communities but modern, cosmopolitan societies as well. Principles of narratology are employed to examine how ―moderns‖ talk about climate change. As the analysis suggests, people make sense of complex issues by crafting coherent narratives about them. Rather than be seen as an inferior form of knowledge, these narratives instead display a rich integration of multiples ways of knowing – including scientific, normative, and cultural dimensions. In contrast, discourse emerging from institutions such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) do not display the same narrative properties. The analysis also suggests that, in order for issues such as climate change to become sufficiently salient to society and enough to spur more vigorous action, they need to be integrated into the everyday narratives that people tell about themselves and the world around them. If it is true that society has not sufficiently responded to the urgency of climate change, perhaps it is because this issue has not become ―narrative truth‖ to them.