Daniella Ortega was trying to find a way to tell her kids about the environment and how it was changing.
âI have a five year old and a 12 year old. When my eldest was younger, when he was about five or six, I was really trying to find ways to talk to him about our changing world. He was only small, and so I was trying to find ways that were authentic and real and factual, but also engaging and also not going to scare the pants off him,â she explained to me. âI would tell him little bits and pieces know, I’d tell him about, you know, how, where carbon is in us. And I would take his hand and I would say, you know, do you realize that you come from the stars?â
And then she would tell him about how we breathe, and about how plants breathe in what we breathe out.
She thought, âit’d be great if I had this sort of foundational story. I could tell him, you know, I could show him, not just tell, I could show him.â And then she realized that even though she knows a lot about the environment and climate change, she didnât know about this thing called âcarbonâ that is at the core of it all. âYou hear about it all the time, and yet I kind of didn’t really know what it meant.â
Tell me a story
So, she started doing research in part so she could tell her kids a story. Sheâs a writer and filmmaker, so naturally, she started to write something.
It sounds like she started with the proverbial storytelling model of, âOnce upon a time in a land far, far awayâŠâ only this time, she started with the story of an atom.
âI can see the journeys of this atom. Maybe I can take that, maybe I can extend on that idea,â she recounted about her thought process in developing the story. âBut the writing, the poetry of it, the visual sense of it, it really, it sparked something. So with the internal rumbling, that external spark, you know, it led me to, to start to imagine the life story of carbon, which is what the film is. It’s the life, It’s a biography. It’s the life story of carbon.â
Ortega ended up writing, codirecting and coproducing a magical documentary called, âCarbon: An Unauthorized Biography,â (trailer above) starring âSuccessionââs Sarah Snook as the voice of carbon. Ortega personified carbon, making it a female, so she could tell her kids a story about whatâs happening to their planet. It also has a range of scientists and animation and other footage of climate events.
Thatâs one way to engage people on the climate story and inspire them to take steps to protect it.
âWhat surprised me was actually how profound, how deep I managed to have this relationship with carbon. Like, because in the end, I found, through the writing and embodying carbon for so long, I found the connections, the entanglement of carbon across so many aspects of all our lives so illuminating, so surprising. Sometimes I just felt so moved by the wonder of it all, and I still do. Just thinking about it now makes me think, God, itâs so wondrous,â Ortega exclaimed with wonder in her voice in the interview.
Using creativity to have an impact on people
Storytellers and professional communicators are wrestling with how to tell the climate story in a way that moves people to take steps to protect the planet and our lifestyle. Ortega found a way to do it by using her filmmaking techniques.
Jill Tidman and her team at The Redford Center, a nonprofit founded by the actor/filmmaker Robert Redford and his late son James Redford, describe their work as, âadvancing environmental solutions through the power of stories that move.â
They provide small grants and production support to films about and by local communities and what they face as the climate warms, for example. In 2022, for example, they provided support to 130 new films and scripts and distributed $3.3 million in grants for projects, enabling those projects to leverage their support to raise much more and get their films produced.
The projects The Redford Center supports has to have an impact, not just be entertaining. âItâs really making sure that we understand whatâs at stake and what the impacts are and who the impacts are hitting, and also seeing people in action addressing and dealing with the situation at hand,â Tidman explained in an exclusive interview.
Itâs not just about the weather
Telling the climate story and engaging people about climate change is about so much more than the weather, but maybe because we all experience the weather itâs an entry point to reach people. As I wrote in Forbes previously, how we talk about the weather matters. How will they talk about it at COP28?
Freya Williams, the former founder of Ogilvy Earth and others talk about the need for a new narrative to accelerate action to mitigate climate change, focused on positive outcomes. Instill hope and show solutions, she insisted, not gloom and doom. Ortegaâs story about the wonderment of carbon dovetails with that strategy.
Gaming and naming, not shaming
Other communications mavens and executives seeking novel ways to engage people to drive behavior change, such as Kathy Baughman McLeod, former Director of the Arsht-Rockefeller Center for Resilience at the Atlantic Council teamed up with videogamers to develop a video game that enables people to experience climate change effects and take mitigating action.
They also developed a naming protocol for heat waves, like we have for hurricanes, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Whatever storytelling is used at COP28, maybe they will tap into the unique strategies that Ortega, Tidman, Williams, Baughman McLeod and the gamers are using.