This book explores how to engage audiences both beyond and within the academy more deeply in environmental research through arts-based forms. It builds on a multi-pronged case study of scripts for documentary film, audio-visual and stage formats, focusing on how the identity of a place is constructed and contested in the face of environmental concerns around fossil-fuel extraction in a globalized, visual society.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016
Reviews
“Scripting the Environment is an outstanding example of how arts-based research–and scripts in particular–can be used in service of environmental research. Indeed, Geo Takach has taken the fields of arts-based research and environmental studies forward, by showing how the former can be used in service of the latter. This is a well-written, engaging, and insightful book that offers environmentalists new, creative ways to think about conducting and sharing their research. I highly recommend it.” — Patricia Leavy, author of Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice and editor of the Social Fictions series
“Drawing on environmental communication praxis, Takach combines cutting-edge scholarship and applied experience as a screen and stage writer to address the world’s largest industrial project in Canada. It is work such as this, persuasive and poetic, that we need to engage to learn how to address the complex challenges we face with greater imagination and renewed hope.” — Phaedra C. Pezzullo, co-author of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (4th ed.) and author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice
“Environmentalists have spent most of their energy appealing to that side of the human brain that likes bar graphs and pie charts. Here’s a timely reminder that we need to think of all the ways that humans perceive the world,and speak to them with equal urgency!”
— Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth and co-founder of 350.org