‘Write as an Ecosystem’: One Simple Writing Prompt
How writing as an ‘ecosystem of the imagination’ can energize your environmental storytelling
Can good environmental storytelling shape our world for the better? And if so, what do these stories look like?
One thing I believe — and I bet many other writers who are trying to tell good environmental stories believe too — is that a good environmental story is not just about the world, it is of the world.
In other words, the power of storytelling lies in its world-making, and world-changing potential: to change us from the inside out, and hopefully in time, change the world for the better too. A story does not just represent a version of the world, but has the power to be a roadmap for action, guiding what we do, and how we live in the world.
Science historian Donna Haraway calls this ecosystemic approach to writing: “storytelling for earthly survival.” But I especially like how environmental philosophers Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose describe this approach, where ‘storying the world’ involves,
“a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos.”
All this is to say that well-told environmental stories connect us up to the world in new ways, like a slowly growing web linking our thoughts, emotions, and actions to a more expansive landscape of knowledge, feeling, and accountability.
“Telling stories has consequences, one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections and, with them, new accountabilities and obligations.”
– Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose
We just have to ‘eff it.’
Environmental writing often involves grappling with the ineffability of our personal experiences in nature. But however ineffable our phenomenological experience of interconnection with nature might be, as writers, we just have to ‘eff it.’ Telling your reader ‘you just had to be there’ doesn’t cut it. This was the challenge for Michael Pollan when he needed to write about his experience of having ‘psychedelic trips’ as part of the research for his book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence:
“Well, I had to ‘eff’ it, I couldn’t just let that lie and say you had to be there.”
To help illustrate the problem he faced, Pollan draws on an analogy of a caveman coming to present-day New York City. When he arrives, he sees subways zooming by, planes overhead, the commotion of traffic, people talking on phones. What does he say to his friends back in the cave? It was loud, fast, and crazy? The caveman just doesn’t have the language to describe what they’re experiencing. And just like the caveman back from New York, for Pollan to tell his readers what he experienced during his psychedelic trip — that the universe was a giant tub of limitless love–just sounded like a Hallmark card, a ‘banal platitude.’ Pollan had to devise a way to ‘eff’ it.
The poet Camille T. Dungy describes a similar conundrum in her essay, Losing Language:
“What I’m trying to say is that most of the time, I am overwhelmed by the feebleness of language. Some current experts suggest that we lose a species every five minutes. Earthday.org estimates that, at our present rate of extinction, each year between 10,000 and 50,000 species will disappear from the planet forever.
Trying to find a way to speak to all these losses feels like walking around a denuded arboretum disappointed in myself — and a little panicked — for not being able to picture the trees in full leaf.”
Writing as an Ecosystem: 6 steps
Below I outline a simple writing prompt that works wonders for helping me ‘eff it’ when I struggle to string words, experiences, and stories together.
I first learned about this idea of ‘writing as an ecosystem’ from a great course on nature writing offered by Emergence Magazine, and led/created by their staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, an insightful environmental storyteller. (The 6 steps I give below are summarized from just one activity in the much more in-depth and rewarding multi-week course that Chelsea offers on nature writing. I can’t recommend it enough!)
Sometimes all that’s needed to trigger your writing is a shift in perspective, to look at your subject from different historical, scientific or personal vantage points, for example. This prompt helps you do this by multiplying perspectives on a chosen topic. It allows you to layer memories, stories, and experiences on top of one another until a richer picture emerges of your subject, in all its many vivid dimensions: “to picture the trees in full leaf” as Dungy puts it.
The key approach at work here is the opening of yourself to a non-judgemental process of serendipitous self-discovery. Fair warning: this method isn’t a surefire tactic for writing success, as it has the potential to lead you into new territories as much as dead-ends. In her course on writing as an ecosystem, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder offers this quote to think about the serendipitous and organic process of nature writing:
“When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject?”
–Anne Dillard, in ‘The Writing Life’:
6 steps for ‘writing as an ecosystem’
- Find an item of any kind: ideally, it should invoke an idea of nature or the environment, and is something small that you can hold in the palm of your hand. For example, it could be a weed, a leaf, a rock, a pinecone, a handful of sand, a shell, or perhaps a photograph of a plant, animal, or natural place.
- Place the item next to a blank piece of paper
- You can either write the name of your natural entity in the center of your paper, or alternatively, you can simply place the item itself at the center
- Then, begin pondering this item: what memories, ideas, feelings, sensations, and associations come to you as you think about it? Mindmap these ideas out on your paper. Important: keep your mental editor at bay giving your mind the space to wander into new territories for 20 minutes or so. As your imaginative wanderings unfold, connect the flow of your ideas with lines or arrows that link them together. After 15–20 minutes, look at your mindmap. This is your writing ecosystem.
- Next, select a location in your ecosystem that is away from the center, at least two steps removed from your item. Then, using that location as your starting place, write for five minutes. There are no wrong responses here, the aim is simply to generate writing in dialogue with the subject at that location. Now, choose a different location in your ecosystem, and begin the dialogue again from there. Repeat this as many times as feels right to you.
- Finally, beginning with the center of your web, write a reflection of your natural item for 15 minutes, bouncing between your previous writings of different locations, as well as the whole ecosystem you created. You should let your imagination run wild, and see where it takes you, whether it be into new territory or dead-ends.
Conclusion: The ‘Carrier Bag’ Method of Environmental Storytelling
The magic of this simple little prompt is in the creative friction generated from moving between your previous writings and the whole thought ecosystem you created. As you gather the narrative threads among your previous writings on memories, associations, and ideas related to your natural item, your imagination will take you in new narrative and descriptive directions.
As a writing-generating tactic, writing as an ecosystem encourages you to evade the constant surveillance of your top-down internal editor, allowing your ideas to messily emerge, branch out and fuse with other ideas.
You might think of your mindmap with its natural item at the center like a massive Wood Wide Web: an underground fungi network in a symbiotic relationship with your chosen item. Here, the cobweb of fine filaments around your item – associations, memories, quotes, sensations, and emotions – act as a kind of prosthesis to support and nourish the emerging stories you will eventually link together, ‘thickening’ the filaments of the network as you go. Writing as an ecosystem is just this process, of steadily extending a network of meaning that expands outwards into the soils of your experience, which then acquire nutrients, floating them back through the network to nourish your developing ideas.
As far as metaphors for the writing process go, this might not work for everyone. But for me, the ‘Writing as Ecosystem’ metaphor appeals to my nonlinear, ‘foraging-style’ of writing, where stories never finish but are left, perhaps to be returned to and extended later on with the help of a fresh set of new connections.
I often use this prompt to start writing on almost anything or to jostle new ideas for later drafts of an essay. What makes this writing prompt so simple yet useful, I think, lies in how it helps to operationalize a mode of environmental storytelling which Ursula K. Le Guin calls “The Carrier Bag Theory” of writing.
Anna Tsing, an environmental anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz, has mastered this approach to writing about the wild entanglements of people and the planet. She puts it much better than I ever could:
“In this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories. In the intellectual woodlands I have been trying to encourage, adventures lead to more adventures, and treasures lead to further treasures. When gathering mushrooms, one is not enough; finding the first encourages me to find more.”
– Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
