Storytelling for Nature Connection Environment, Community and Story-based Learning

“We are all playing a part in the story of our beautiful world. In too many places the beauty now lies sleeping. . . . This book brings fuel for the imagination, techniques for telling tales and hope for a happy ending.” — Fraser McKechnie, ranger, National Trust for Scotland

Storytelling for Nature Connection is a treasury of 43 stories, creative activities, techniques, tips, and descriptions of inspiring practice to both empower newcomers and seasoned practitioners. It is a handy, unique, and authoritative resource for developing innovative story-work, and a key sourcebook of lasting usefulness.

This handbook offers—in 21 chapters—time-tested stories, creative activities, and methods that environmental educators and storytellers can use to affect people’s pro-environmental behavior. Whether it is a brief mention of seeing a skein of geese flying in an evening sky or children from a rough neighborhood being inspired by kittiwakes, both adults and children can engage profoundly with nature through the imaginative power of story with lasting personal and environmental changes.

The book explores the links between storytelling and emotional literacy, place, environmental justice, connecting with alienated young people, encouraging children and adults’ curiosity about nature, building community, sustainability, and indigenous peoples, local legends, human-animal communication and co-creating a sustainable future.

Storytelling for Nature Connection brings together the wisdom of cutting-edge storytellers, offering a range of distinctive and complementary approaches to the art of telling stories for environmental education.

This is a handy, unique, and authoritative resource for developing innovative story-work, and a key sourcebook of lasting value. Facilitators can adapt all of this to their own situation.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.” — David Orr, author of Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect

C O N T E N T S:

Foreword by Jonathon Porritt
Introduction by Alida Gersie, Anthony Nanson, and Edward Schieffelin

Part I. Core Ideas and Techniques
1. Storytelling in the Woods (Jon Cree & Alida Gersie)
2. By Hidden Paths (Malcolm Green & Nick Hennessey)
3. The Sustaining Story (Eric Maddern)
4. Stories in Place (Gordon MacLellan)
5. Jewels on Indra’s Net (Ashley Ramsden)

Part II. Becoming Familiar with Stories
6. Apollo’s Lyre and the Pipes of Pan (Hugh Lupton)
7. Jumping the Gap of Desire (Anthony Nanson)
8. Listening to Stories with an Anthropological Ear (Edward Schieffelin)
9. Feeding the Story (Chris Salisbury)

Part III. In and around the City
10. Fishing Tales and Catching Connections (Helen East)
11. Bringing Nature Home (Alida Gersie)
12. Kittiwakes on the Bridge (Malcolm Green)
13. Voices in the City (David Metcalfe)

Part IV. In the Great Outdoors
14. Stories, Houses, and Dens (Chris Holland)
15. A Riverside Journey (Sara Hurley & Alida Gersie)
16. “I Saw the Heart of the World” (Fiona Collins)
17. “Miss, Is Skomar Oddy Extinct?” (Mary Medlicott)

Part V. Engaging the Wider Community
18. Beyond the Crisis of Return (Martin Shaw)
19. The Forgotten Tongue (Kelvin Hall)
20. Stepping through the Gate (Kevan Manwaring)
21. Envisioning the Future (Charlene Collison)

Acknowledgments
List of Stories and Story Fragments
Recommended Resources
Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index