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Storytelling and Environmental Memory in the Digital Age Alicia Daniele

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Storytelling and Environmental Memory in the Digital Age Alicia Daniele Mind the Spatiotemporal Gap: Storytelling and Environmental Memory in the Digital Age Alicia Daniele Whether referred to as “global warming” or “climate change,” the mention of the current shift in worldwide weather phenomena associated with the rise in average global temperatures brings a few standard images to mind: a lone polar bear on a piece of ice adrift at sea; Al Gore speaking in front of a graph showcasing skyrocketing carbon dioxide numbers; and tidal waves felling landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or the London Bridge. The first is often too spatially distant from one’s day-to- day life to engender the empathy that leads to action; the second too didactic and, frankly, boring; and the third too temporally distant as well as apocalyptic and farfetched for the current time. The majority of damage caused to the environment, and, therefore, to humankind and its constructions, is not immediately tangible; it is a creeping, invisible violence that accumulates over time and across space. This type of violence is often not given its due in the mass media because it lacks a notable event or spectacle. This creeping violence also lacks clear-cut signification in the rock strata, as exemplified in the debate between stratigraphers whether to establish the end of the Holocene and declare our current geologic time the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene is declared, then stratigraphers will have to decide where to establish the geological time boundary, known as the “golden spike.” Some geologists argue the spike should be placed several millennia ago when the agricultural cultivation and domestication of crops began; others for the industrial revolution and its iconic invention, the steam engine; and others for the mid-twentieth century when the nuclear age dawned.1 1 The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, led by stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz, decided recently that the Anthropocene began in the mid-twentieth century, but as of now they have not been able to choose a golden spike. They are assembling candidates for review: microplastics, Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 33 In 2019, Dr. Jane Goodall, a working primatologist and anthropologist who began her career sixty years ago, briefly shared her firsthand experiences of the violence—the quick, temperate, and slow kinds—enacted against the environment with Time magazine. She recounts witnessing wildfires engulf Africa and California, beholding the remains of animals who died in droughts, and watching a Mount Kilimanjaro glacier shrink.2 Although experiences like Dr. Goodall’s are useful, they will only amount to information, a form of knowledge whose value is contingent upon its newness, if they are not transformed further into narratives that can provide counsel for years to come. Since creeping environmental violence is often invisible to the collective, a different process needs to be enacted to bring it to the forefront of society’s consciousness: memory. Specifically, an environmental memory supported and proliferated by digital storytelling.3 In order to understand how digital storytelling can create and sustain a collective environmental memory, it is important to analyze how memory can be a carrier of environmental understanding and a stimulus to environmental intervention. Although this is not an easy question to answer, it merits unpacking. Each generation inhabits a world that is more deteriorated but is also that generation’s status quo. Just as our ancestors before us did and the generations to follow us will, we live in environmental circumstances generated by the actions of the deceased, which muddles the question of who is responsible for exposing, curtailing, and stopping the damage society enacts against the world which it inhabits. It is imperative for humans to find a way to bring the well-being heavy metals, fly ash, and, Zalasiewicz’s current forerunner, radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons. (Nicola Davis, “The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a- new-phase-of-planetary-history.) 2 Jane Goodall, “These 4 Issues May Not Seem Related to Climate Change. But They Are and We Need to Solve Them Now,” Time, September 12, 2019, https://time.com/5669043/jane-goodall-climate-change/. 3 At its core, digital storytelling is the practice of using multimedia to tell stories. It relies on digital technologies (those that allow the user to be both consumer and producer, which excludes the technology associated with the culture industries, like photography and cinematography) to empower the consumer to take control of their agency and participate in the world through its transformation. Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 34 of the environment—and, therefore, themselves—to the forefront of social consciousness. The way forward is through storytelling, specifically the crafting and sharing of the stories of those who are often voiceless and whom climate change will affect the most, and, in fact, is already affecting: the vulnerable and underserved populations of the world. The stories we tell have to be able to rise above the hum of everyday reticular life, which becomes more difficult in a mediascape that is inundated daily with various images and discourses of the world. By analyzing two examples of environmental memory–forming media objects, the documentary Plastic China (2016), and the multimodal virtual reality documentary, Collisions (2016), I will demonstrate how strong storytelling techniques coupled with digital technology can lift the various voices that have settled among the sediment to the surface, constitute the transindividuation of experience, and act as a catalyst for true social transformation. In 2018, the United States experienced a recycling crisis when one of its biggest buyers, China, suddenly stopped buying American recyclables. Although “Chinese manufacturers and American companies alike became dependent on the exchange … the rise of single-stream recycling in U.S. communities ushered in higher contamination, resulting in lower-quality materials” and China’s decision to stop buying foreign, low-quality goods and strengthen its own domestic recycling infrastructure.4 But what caused China to change its policy and decide to stop accepting its sixth- largest import?5 Known as Operation National Sword,6 some experts, according to 99% Invisible, suggest that one documentary film, Plastic China, sparked the change. 4 Beth Porter, “US Recycling Industry, Worth $100 Billion, Needs Creative Solutions Amid Ongoing Downturn,” International Business Times, November 30, 2018, https://www.ibtimes.com/us-recycling- industry-worth-100-billion-needs-creative-solutions-amid-ongoing-2737606. 5 “Understanding National Sword in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center, February 26, 2018, https://d12v9rtnomnebu.cloudfront.net/diveimages/Understanding_National_Sword_in_PA.pdf. 6 Operation National Sword, enacted January 1, 2018, is the policy in China that bans the importation of certain types of solid waste (CenterForTechnology.org). Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 35 A film by director Jiu-Liang Wang, Plastic China tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl named Yi-Jie who does not go to school in order to help her parents at the plastic recycling facility where they work. The film’s official website describes Yi-Jie as a truly global child who learns the outside world from the waste workshops that her family lives in and works in—also known as the “United Nations of Plastic Wastes.” She lives her happiness and sorrows amongst the waste, as well. Small packs of discarded instant black powder tell her the bitter taste of “coffee”; the English children’s learning cards teach her words like “summer” and “father’s day”; and broken Barbie dolls are her best friends to talk to. This is her world.7 Featured at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017, Plastic China went viral and then shortly thereafter disappeared from the Chinese internet.8 A portrait of the “true face of China,” the face of its poverty instead of its global prosperity, and the disease, pollution, and death that make up the lives of its poorest citizens, Plastic China is also a portrait of the American consumer. The documentary demonstrates what happens to America’s recycling after its citizens toss it into a recycling bin and stop thinking about it. Before Wang’s work, it would have been difficult for an American consumer to fathom—let alone imagine—a Chinese girl living and playing amongst their refuse halfway across the world. It is a portrayal of the impacts our consumer culture has on others spatially distant from ourselves. Ji-Yie and her family’s story is one of secondary pollution. One does not need to read statistics and data representing this reality in order to believe it, one simply needs to bear witness to their story. As 99% Invisible describes it, the documentary shows the families cutting up plastic, melting, soaking it and turning it into a sludge—then turning it into hardened pellets. The little girl washes her face in the gray plastic-polluted water and eats fish that have choked on bits of plastic. They live and work (and eat and sleep) near a plastic shredding machine, inhaling dust and microparticles that are byproducts of the process. The whole village is enveloped in plastic detritus.9 7 “Storyline,” Plastic China,
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