Participatory Ecological Storytelling and Empathy
By Steve Lemeshko
Moving Stories at Het Nieuwe Instituut where experts and the public discuss participatory storytelling. Credit: Het Nieuwe Instituut, CC BY 2.0.
The recent article “Invoking ‘Empathy for the Planet’ through Participatory Ecological Storytelling: From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered Design” by Elise Talgorn and Helle Ullerup (2023) explores how storytelling can be more than just a way to communicate environmental issues—it can be a tool to cultivate ecological empathy, or what they call, “empathy for the Planet.”
There’s a well-documented problem in environmental science communication: it struggles to engage people emotionally. This narrative deficit leaves audiences feeling detached, unable to frame themselves as participants in climate action. Talgorn and Ullerup suggest that storytelling—particularly participatory storytelling—could help fill this gap by bringing in the emotional, empathetic, and compassionate dimensions often missing from conventional climate messaging, as well as design and management decisions.
Narratives, in this context, become more than just stories; they’re tools to connect with more-than-humans, be they living organisms such as animals and plants or non-living things such as rock formations. Environmental narratives allow us to practice perspective-taking which is the building block of empathy. Empathy through narrative makes it possible to imagine nature not as an abstract backdrop but as an active participant with a voice and agency. Such storytelling exercises become a soft approach to trigger pro-environmental behavior.
However, when trying to empathize with nonhumans, there’s always the risk of leaning too hard into anthropomorphism—projecting human thoughts and emotions onto entities with fundamentally different experiences. This false empathy can distort rather than deepen understanding. At the same time, the opposite can make nature an unknowable, impersonal "other" and thus reinforce psychological distance. The key is to balance cognitive empathy (using knowledge and imagination to understand another’s perspective) with affective empathy (emotional connection). This, in turn, helps build a richer, more nuanced empathy that recognizes both the similarities and the differences between humans and nonhumans.
Here’s where the article takes an interesting turn. Talgorn and Ullerup argue for moving beyond the traditional “storyteller-to-audience” model to the one where people can actively co-create them. This approach invites multiple perspectives into the storytelling process, with narratives that reflect people’s own worldviews, values, and emotional relationships with nature. This approach also ties into research from Yale, which found that the way people respond to climate narratives is shaped at least in part by the frames they already hold (such as political beliefs). Participatory storytelling allows for flexibility in adapting narratives to fit those pre-existing frames, making climate communication more personally and emotionally relevant. At the same time, sharing these stories with others creates a sense of community through diverse experiences and shared values. By engaging in collective storytelling, participants can experience openness, connection, and a sense of collective efficacy, all while representing the voice of nature itself.
Talgorn and Ullerup propose four key principles for participatory ecological storytelling:
Planetary characters – Characters can be human, animal, vegetal, or even geological. Anything can have a voice.
Character depth – These characters need depth—histories, motivations, personalities — to make them relatable.
Playfulness – The storytelling process should be open-ended to encourage creativity.
Open plot – There’s no predefined script; the story allows space for uncertainty and imagination.
In the workshops the researchers organized, the process of crafting these stories required participants to see characters (human or not) as individuals—a practice that lays the groundwork for empathy. For audiences, it’s narrative empathy, but for participants, it’s active narrative empathy.
Another aspect of participatory storytelling is its ability to create safe spaces for exploring uncomfortable truths. By embedding real fears and hopes into fictional characters, participants can grapple with the overwhelming scale and dispersed impacts of environmental destruction—what Rob Nixon calls slow violence. Stories make the abstract personal, creating meaning around changes that are too slow, too complex, or too distant. In this sense, storytelling becomes a counterforce to the eco-anxiety and psychic numbing that so often accompany ecological crises.
Of course, people create their stories not in a vacuum. They inevitably reflect dominant cultural narratives, particularly the Western tendency to portray nature as either a victim or an inspiration, reinforcing a human-nature divide. Yet the process of participatory storytelling also has the potential to break down these binary constructions of human and nonhuman, self and other. In these stories, there are “many tellers and many hearers”—including the Planet itself. This blurring of boundaries helps to reduce the psychological distance that often underlies environmental apathy and to view nature not just as something to be protected or admired but as part of a shared web of life.
However, participatory ecological storytelling isn’t just a creative exercise; it has broader applications:
System design competencies – It encourages designers to account for ecological needs.
Community building – Collaborative storytelling builds connection and shared purpose.
Communication strategies – It offers a flexible tool for reframing ecological and climate narratives to fit different audiences.
Design research – It helps researchers understand how people frame and understand ecological issues.
Behavior change – By building empathy, it can drive pro-environmental behaviors.
At its core, participatory ecological storytelling is an emotional and intuitive way to reconnect with the more-than-human world, and by doing so, it can create empathy for the Planet and open up new possibilities for designing and managing a future that is more inclusive, compassionate, and sustainable.
Full citation of the article:
Talgorn, Elise, and Helle Ullerup. “Invoking ‘Empathy for the Planet’ Through Participatory Ecological Storytelling: From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered Design.” Sustainability 15, no. 10 (May 10, 2023): 7794. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15107794.
For further reading, see the following articles:
Ecological Empathy / February 20, 2025
How Zoos and Aquariums Help Develop Empathy for Wildlife / January 30, 2025
Overcoming Cognitive Bias and Bridging the Climate Change Communication Gap / November 28, 2024