Post-Revolution Interpretation

Part 3of 3: Interpreters and the Big Story

Post-Revolution Interpretation

The theatre stage is nearly empty. And no professional association has signed up to star in the Big Story: that worldview drama that civilization acts out with respect to natural, cultural, and social resources. As global indicators worsen — global warming, water scarcity, population, violence, depression, area of wildlands — the calls for performers grow ever louder. Re-writing the worldview script implies interpreting new ideas and meanings in order to move society toward sustainability. As I argued in the first two articles, the interpretation profession whether in Australia, Spain, or America is the field closest to the theatre stage, closer than filmmakers, educators, clergy, or even actors.

But to take the stage and manage this fundamental factor, the interpretation field needs to pass through a revolution. Lethal arms will not win this revolution; civil disobedience will not win this revolution. Only a paradigm shift will bring this revolution about. As I described in Part 2 of this series, “Carrying Interpretation Across the Divide,” a revolution in science replaces theory and practice of the earlier paradigm.

In the post-revolution theatre, the interpretation field will have changed two big themes.

1. Strategic communication. Interpretation belongs to a broader family of persuasive communication tools such as rhetoric, social marketing, environmental education, and others. These tools are designed to be used strategically to fulfill objectives. In the post-revolution world, erstwhile interpreters will refer to themselves as communication strategists targeting leverage points in society to help move its worldview toward sustainability. Sam Ham writes that these different approaches must be viewed strategically (in this case, he addresses environmental educators, but the same could be said to interpreters):

Thinking as communication strategists, we can see that a broad range of communication specialists from classroom teachers and park interpreters, to zoo curators, print and broadcast journalists, extension agents, ecotourism entrepreneurs, and religious and military leaders has a strategic role to play in the environmental education process. Each of us, by virtue of our jobs and the mission of the institutions or organizations we work for, is positioned to reach a different segment of society.

2. On-site Resources. We strategic communicators (formerly “interpreters”) will have expanded our focus beyond those applications for on-site natural and cultural resource protection professionals. The former focus limited interpretation to people principally working for protected areas, zoos, aquaria, historical sites, and museums. Strategic communicators for worldview change will be focusing on the larger system of information and beliefs that affect how civilization treats natural and cultural entities. (They will no longer refer to other species as “resources” for humans.)

By broadening both the view of interpretation as strategic communication and beyond just on-site resource applications, the new membership would include many other professionals, but all would share the mission of helping people interpret their Big Story and shift it toward a belief structure (aka, “story”) that values sustainability within the limits of our natural and cultural world.

They would actively believe that no growth can last forever. All exponentially growing stocks are eventually slowed down and reversed by negative feedbacks in the system, like cowboys slowing down a wild stallion with their lassoes. Specifically civilization's worldview (“growth at all costs”) drives the economy exponentially and the negative feedback currently underway but not yet strong enough to slow down the wildly bucking bronco are all the people modifying their lifestyles and joining like-minded groups that promote sustainable lifestyles. Over the past 30 years, there has been exponential growth first in international development efforts, then environmental groups, and now 1,000s of alternative living, low-impact lifestyle, human rights, and sustainable development organizations around the world.

The Natural Marketing Institute coined the term “loha” for people pursuing a “lifestyle of health and sustainability” and estimates that a third of the adult American population could be considered Lohas. Whatever the true number, Loha numbers and their influence are growing fast around the world. This is the negative feedback that strategic communicators need to strengthen, so that the growth rate of the global economy can be tamed down and stopped, rather than collapse suddenly and violently.

For interpreters, these changes will first be felt in conservation, a sector of sustainable resource management, and then later for sustainability issues in general. It will start with certification trainings like those of NAI which already are focusing on effective conservation goal writing and later full training in strategic communication, systems theory, and worldview change. Many people have done strategic communication with the Big Story, but have not seen themselves in the spotlight of this paradigm. Consider such luminaries as Daniel Quinn (Ishmael), Donella Meadows (Limits to Growth), Bill McKibben (End of Nature), Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Gandhi (human freedoms and land use), Oscar Arias (peace, poverty, and environmental protection), Winona LaDuke (indigenous worldviews and our current situation), John Muir (ecological system perspective and conservation), and others.

This all may sound good, but you don't really believe this could happen. You are probably thinking that I am not even talking about interpretation at all. Imagine then how people who lived at the time of Copernicus must have felt. “Sure,” they said, “may be it is possible that our world could revolve around the sun, Mr. Copernicus. But what you’re talking about isn’t even our earth and sun anymore.” Or Roman citizens living in the early 400s: “Yes, of course, we have our problems in the West, but the Roman Empire will never fall!”

It takes time to accept a new paradigm, and some people will carve their denial on their gravestones. We all need time to think and discover, but remember that civilization’s degradation of our natural systems and cultural resources isn’t going to wait even a second for us to make up our minds. As French writer Marcel Proust wrote, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”

Jon Kohl is a writer and conservationist. This article concludes the 1.5 years of the “International Interpreter.”

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