Debora Freitas López, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, joined other global experts Wednesday to spotlight how storytelling and partnership can mobilize public will and financing toward a positive impact on planetary health.
At a time when the future of the planet is top of mind, Freitas López led a discussion at the SDG Media Zone, which is part of the 80th UN General Assembly in New York. The topic: how storytelling can be a powerful tool for understanding and addressing planetary health challenges.
Panelist Lydia Dean Pilcher said that using history as a lens offers a way to view contemporary environmental challenges.
Pilcher, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, shared the story of the “Radium Girls,” a group of women in a watchmaking factory in the 1920s who developed severe radiation poisoning after painting dials with radium-laced paint, a process that involved licking their brushes to get a fine point. Pilcher produced a Netflix movie about what happened to them.
Their story, Pilcher explained, wasn’t just about individual struggle, but about how collective action can create lasting societal change, ultimately leading to critical occupational safety regulations.
She also spoke about how cultural narratives can inspire environmental thinking. She highlighted the movie “Black Panther,” which grossed $1.3 billion while subtly embedding environmental consciousness. For example, the film’s portrayal of Wakanda as a vertical city without cars demonstrates how cultural narratives can inspire alternative visions of sustainable living.
Jessica Kronstadt, the program director of Planetary Health Alliance at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health, emphasized the deep emotional impact of personal narratives.
She spoke about an initiative she and her colleagues participated in called “We Are Possible.” Led by the University of Exeter, it culminated in workshops where people were able to write little pieces of their own stories related to planetary health that were then woven into one anthology.
“It really demonstrated how exciting it was to have literally over 100 co-authors in one collective story about how climate change was affecting our lives,” she said.
By its very nature, Kronstadt said, planetary health is complex. “It is about all of the different types of environmental change, so climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and an equally wide array of different health impacts,” she said.” And although we really encourage transdisciplinary studies, most research is about one of those pieces of that. And I think that’s part of the power of storytelling, is it can weave together these different pieces of research into one coherent story.”
She gave an example of wildfires. There’s a body of research that demonstrates how climate change contributes to the increasing frequency of wildfires, and then there’s a separate body of research that looks at current building materials and how they are making the aftermath of the wildfires so much more toxic in terms of what we breathe in and what happens to our soil, she said.
“Imagine a story that really looks at one family or one community and talks about how they’ve had to evacuate, talks about living with the consequences of having the air not safe to breathe for their family afterward,” Kronstadt said. “And then you have to layer on additional stories, too. There’s the cost story. So not only the health costs, but the financial costs. What does it mean to rebuild?
“So how can you have one coherent story that says, here’s what the problem is, here’s what it’s costing us, and here’s how we might envision a brighter future for us?”
William Nix, a producer and co-founder of the Social Impact Entertainment Society, underscored the political dimension of storytelling, citing Plato’s observation that “those who tell the stories rule society.” He highlighted how storytelling transcends traditional media, spanning film, games, theater, and comedy as powerful vehicles for inspiration.
When Freitas López asked the panelists about the most critical collective action necessary to secure a livable future, they suggested people can practice systems thinking, break down barriers between different sectors and learn from indigenous perspectives about human-environment interconnectedness.
“This conversation reminds us all that work doesn’t stop here,” she said. “Let’s take these ideas and think about how each of us can turn awareness into action – whether through film, media, partnerships – and continue driving solutions and change toward impact.”
