The Storyteller’s Story: Cherish Dean’s Reflection on Why Telling Stories is Crucial to the Sustainability Movement
Have you wondered at all about the person behind the Climate Diaries? Here’s a chance to hear directly from her during her final days at LSA. Written in about the same amount of time she would take to interview, photograph, and craft a profile for the 19 others she spoke with, she leaves you with this sentiment: “An imperfect effort is better than not trying at all.”
You know how, when you’re growing up, whether it’s close friends, or family, you have those people in your life who will tell the same story over and over? I think everyone is guilty of this, storytelling animals that we human-beings are. You find something that’s relevant to you that also gets a reaction and now it’s part of the repertoire.
Anyway–growing up, there was this story my mom would always share about when she was growing up. We’re a native Michigander family: she was raised in Saginaw and I grew up in Burton, and it was in that thread of Michigan Weather jokes. Every year on April Fools when she was a kid, she’d tell me, her mom would wake her up and shout “Come on, get up! It’s SNOWING outside.”
The punchline being that, during my mom’s childhood in the 70s, it never snowed on April 1st. What a distant memory that seems.
If I were to go through the interview process that I led 19 others through over this past year, this is one of the personal anecdotes I know I’d pull out. My mom has told this to me so many times that it’s become one of my own repetitive stories.
Before I returned to LSA this year as a staff member and began conducting interviews and snapping pictures, I was a student here. A 2022 grad who majored in Organizational Studies with a focus on “creating a culture of storytelling,” with a minor in Writing through Sweetland to complement it. It did not take much for me to be convinced of the power of stories while growing up, to have an impact on both mind and heart.
In a way, even before that, I think I’ve been telling stories about climate change, or seeking them out as a way of understanding it. In my conversations with the broader Year of Sustainability team this year, another anecdote that came to mind was a story I wrote in middle school. I forget the precise premise, but it was related to your run-of-the-mill dystopias, following a newly teenaged protagonist in an apocalyptic future. Desertification ran rampant around the globe and our pale blue dot had started losing its hue, with water in short supply. Plants were a fairytale and fiction to the generation of children this protagonist belonged to, but not so far gone that they did not exist in the memory of their family. Having set the scene thus far, I’ll hand-wave away the other details, but will add one last thing: this protagonist, digging through their grandfather’s desk, found a pressed flower and subsequently discovered they had a supernatural ability to bring plants back to life.
A snap of the fingers, the will of the people, and voila! We can save the planet.
In the context of my work this past year, I’ve found it interesting to revisit this old story of mine, and to consider the thirteen-year-old I was when writing it. My family wasn’t a bunch of gas-guzzling-oil-baron-run-the-planet-into-the-ground types, but neither were we crunchy-granola-every-moment-spent-in-nature-is-a-gift types. I can’t say for certain I was even aware of the term climate change, more than vaguely, at that time. Perhaps global warming was more prominently in use. All this to say: how interesting nonetheless for all this to permeate into my subconscious understanding of the world and to mix with my imagination to create an accelerated worst-case scenario future. I look back and I wonder: was the choice to have a young protagonist a simple instance of self-insert similarities or was it an already internalized sense of adults telling us it’s up to you to fix this, your generation can save the world.
It can be easy to linger in the frustration that sentiment inspires. To simmer in resentment or anger at previous generations for not acting sooner, for not cutting down on emissions earlier, for not lobbying at those in power more aggressively to change policies, but I ask you to turn your energy elsewhere, to not let those feelings immobilize you, but to let them energize you to act now.
Over the past year, conducting the Climate Diaries project has absolutely influenced my feelings around climate change. This work has left me feeling more empowered to make a difference and more encouraged and excited by the other people involved in sustainability and climate action across campus.
Before this project, I already considered myself someone who believed in climate change. I’ve seen its effects within my own lifetime, chiefly through the shift in Michigan winters. I recycle. I compost. I utilize buy nothing groups and try to follow the adage reuse, reduce, recycle as much as possible. I cared already, but talking with others who care has expanded and deepened my understanding. To quote Meghan Duffy, in both this wonderful study and subsequent article, I’ve recognized the power of “[preaching] to the climate change choir,” and “composing new verses.” This past year has deepened my understanding of the breadth of the climate action movement and inspired me to expand the ways I contribute.
If this hasn’t been communicated already, I live my life through stories. The ones I read, watch, or listen to. The ones I tell myself, and tell to other audiences, like you. The emotional impact, the opportunity to connect, the call to action. People these days talk a lot about big data and data-driven decisions and those things matter, but no one is going to care about a few data points if they don’t understand the story that you are telling with them. To call back to one of my many interviews and paraphrase climate scientist Kelsey Dyez, he said that other climate scientists like him can’t be the only ones working on this problem.
Well, I’m no climate scientist nor the magic kid in my untitled magnum opus, but I’ve got my background in the humanities and social sciences, and my desire to read and learn and understand and distill into public communications what it is that I’ve learned and understood, and I’m ready to talk about it and do something about it. Many of the people I spoke with this past year said themselves (or referenced other prominent climate communicators like Mary Heglar or Ayana Elizabeth Johnson) and said the crucial way to act now is find the intersection of what you care about, what you’re good at, and what needs to be done. This is one way I’m doing that.
With my love of creativity and art and stories, there is this quote from James Baldwin which I often return to and which I’ll include below:
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
I feel like I’m speaking in cliches and pithy punchlines, but I’m trying to be earnest and sincere. This is why I love stories, and why I’ve loved the opportunity to share the experiences and fears and hopes of your fellow students, staff, and faculty this past year. You are not alone in caring about climate change. You are not alone in your uncertainties of how to act or where to begin. You are not alone in your climate anxiety and grief in what has already been lost and what is not being done, or is not being done fast enough. You are not alone in your search for a silver lining, or a life raft to cling to on these waves of change. You will not be the first to act, and you should not be the last.
