Storytelling in the spotlight 

Environmental Defenders Office is presenting two thought-provoking discussions at WOMADelaide festival’s Planet Talks sessions this year. CEO David Morris will facilitate a discussion titled Tackling Greenwashing, with guest speakers Belinda Noble from Comms Declare, Dr. Debra Dank, Gudanji/Wakaja and Kalkadoon author and Enterprise Fellow with the University of South Australia, and Ebony Bennett from The Australia Institute.   

Greenwashing is on the rise, undermining efforts needed to tackle big issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and plastic waste. How do we know the positive stories companies and governments tell are not just a smokescreen for inaction, or worse? This session will explore what greenwashing is, how to spot it, and how to fight it.  

ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas presenter Natasha Mitchell will facilitate a discussion on Storytelling for Change with Arrente and Kalkadoon woman and writer, director and producer Rachel Perkins, and author Tim Winton.   

This session will explore what the roles of stories and storytellers are to tackle the big issues. Two of Australia’s best storytellers will explore how stories can be told in new ways to help Australia reckon with its past actions and attitudes towards the environment and First Nations people. How can storytellers help us imagine possible futures that will help orientate us going forward?  

We recently spoke with Rob about the Planet Talks program and what to expect from this year’s event. 

Rob, you’ve been producing WOMADelaide’s Planet Talks for several years now. What made you want to bring discussions about environmental and social justice challenges into a music and arts festival? 

About 12 years ago Planet Talks was incorporated into the festival, and it was just really about noting that there’s this decline in civil debate of people actually listening to one another. Increasingly now the more the world has come online the more we see polarisation. I think it’s a really nice thing to be able to do, to get up at this very big festival and have this stage dedicated to having these talks and debates about some of the big issues of our time.  And because it’s at a music festival you do get a bit of an accidental crowd, so people that come along might not ordinarily go and buy a ticket to a writers festival or a conference, but they’re walking past and they stop in and listen and hear some ideas that they might not otherwise hear. 

The topics we’re exploring during Saturdays Planet Talks sessions this year – greenwashing and storytelling for change – are both incredibly relevant to EDO’s work. Why do you think these topics are important to focus on now? 

The first session on greenwashing feels really relevant right now, we’re faced with a lot of stories about what companies and governments are doing to tackle some of the big issues like climate change and environmental loss, and so we have to navigate these stories  and work out what’s real and what’s sugar coating, and at Planet Talks we’ve got a great panel of speakers there to unpack that from different perspectives. 

The second session on storytelling for change with Tim Winton and Rachel Perkins, well I’m really looking forward to this, because its exploring how storytellers are able to reckon with the past and confront the past in a way we might not be that comfortable with, and how stories help us to imagine how different futures might unfold. And the presence of Tim in that session’s great because he’s just done this new book called Juice which some people would describe as dystopian, but it imagines a climate changed future and pulls out aspects of humanity and the positives of what we want to foster, and within that dystopian frame there is an element of optimism and a call to action.   

In your work with WWF-Australia focusing on energy transitions, and through producing Planet Talks, you must see some big storytelling challenges and opportunities when communicating environmental issues. Can you talk to us about these? 

Being in the environmental space for a long time now it’s an almost daily challenge to think about the ways that we’ve been telling this story of environmental crisis, and the climate crisis, and how are they being perceived. 

We need new stories to help people engage with them in new ways. We’re really seeing that challenge of keeping people engaged and motivated to change, it’s really tricky. At the same time, we’re also up against competing stories and narratives about what is happening to the world and trying to account for that and looking for ways to elevate the stories that need to be more prominent if we’re going to survive.   

One of our sessions focuses on greenwashing. At EDO, we’ve seen growing concern about corporate greenwashing, and it’s now a big focus of our work. What do you think is changing about the way companies communicate their environmental commitments? 

We’ve seen over the last 10 or so years a real rise in companies and governments making claims about what they’re doing on climate change and their environmental impact, and a lot companies are moving towards talking about ways in which they’re managing their nature risks and impacts. There are a lot of companies out there saying things and there’s a real need to be able scrutinise that and have some way of getting to the truth of what companies are actually doing.  

And it’s a tricky one because we want to be encouraging those companies that are doing the right thing or trying to shift their business models in a way that’s good for planet but at the same time we’re seeing a lot of exploitation of that and a lot of attempts to treat it as a PR exercise. 

The Planet Talks greenwashing session will be fantastic because we have Belinda Noble from Comms Declare who understands how PR, media and communications are being used for greenwashing and is calling that out. We’ve also got author Debra Dank who’s coming at it form a very different perspective as a First Nations woman, who’s experienced first-hand stories from gas companies seeking to frack on First Nations land. 

What role do you think the law plays in holding companies accountable for greenwashing? 

The law in Australia has a critical role to play ensuring that we’ve got the right guardrails in place to keep companies and governments in check. The law is the bare minimum and acts as a sort of protection and first line of defence. 

The work of the EDO is critical to helping civil society groups and people on the ground who are really faced with these real-life impacts from developments to be able to fight back and have a voice. 

One of the challenges of tackling greenwashing is helping people to understand what it is, and its real-world impacts. How do you think the Planet Talks session will help audiences better understand the practice? 

I’m hoping that the greenwashing session will help people work through how they identify where information is coming from and the motivations behind that. We’re seeing a huge rise in disinformation, it was even named as the number one global risk by the world global risk report recently, so there’s a real need for people to be able to think critically about where claims or information is coming from. I’m hoping the session will help unpack some of that and give people the tools to move forward. 

What role do you think forums like Planet Talks play in generating awareness and inspiring action on environmental issues? How do you want people to feel after attending a Planet Talks session, what would you hope they do? 

For every session at Planet Talks we brief our speakers so that sessions should leave people with something they can do and feeling inspired to act in some way. Within each session there’s room for the conversations to get quite heavy or go where they need to go, but towards the end they hopefully pull up and help people make sense of what they can do in their own lives. 

The second Planet Talks session with Rachel Perkins and Tim Winton is about the power of storytelling and how it can be used to create meaningful change and move society forward. As a storyteller in your own right, through making music and children’s books, how do you see the relationship between art, storytelling, and environmental advocacy? 

I think for a long time we dismissed or didn’t pay enough attention to the role of art in shifting people’s thoughts and feelings about these big issues. Increasingly what we call “artivism” is critical because people respond in the longer term more when their hearts and minds are shifted through art, whether its music or stories. Planet Talks is trying to tap into that and help people go back to that very long experience that humans have had with stories. The role of stories has been important for a very long time in society, we often now think about it in terms of kids’ books, but for adults, it’s an important way to help us engage with the present and think more imaginatively about the future and what’s possible. 

Planet Talks brings together diverse voices – from legal experts to artists, First Nations leaders to scientists. How important is it to have a range of voices and perspectives when you’re tackling large and complex environmental issues? 

WOMADelaide was built on that foundation of bringing diversity into the frame through music and dance of different cultures around the world, so with Planet Talks we’ve made a really conscious effort to try to make sure we’re decolonising the sessions as much as possible by including as many different perspectives and First Nations people that we can. This year we’ve got quite a lot of First Nations panellists involved which is great. I think there’s a real need to look deeply about the way in which we relate to our environment here in Australia, and First Nations perspectives can help us challenge some of the stories that non-indigenous Australians have been telling ourselves. 

Visit the Planet Talks website for more information about the program.