The Greatest Story Never Told

• Meaghan Parker

“If the pope is interested, everyone is interested,” said Alexandre Roulin, accepting the 2019 Environmental Peacebuilding Research Award in Irvine, California. The University of Lausanne professor’s project—on how conserving barn owls in the Middle East brings together people in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine across political divides—is certainly unique and intriguing. (Also, cute owls!)

The spiritual leader of the world’s 1 billion Catholics reached out to Roulin because the “Barn Owls Know No Boundaries” project promises a possible way to build peace in one of the world’s most intractable religious conflicts. A tremendous story, right?

But despite having all the hallmarks of a great tale, a quick Google search finds only a handful of stories about it. This lack of media attention is unfortunately an ongoing challenge for what I have long viewed as “the greatest story never told.”

Environmental peacebuilding—the idea that working together to resolve cross-border environmental problems can help build a foundation for peace—is not only a powerful concept, it’s an incredible story. But it is rarely covered by the mainstream press.

A search on “environmental peacebuilding” and “environmental peacemaking” turns up a stream of articles mostly posted on the New Security Beat (natch!); and a number of stories on EcoPeace Middle East’s innovative and award-winning work. This coverage is a testament to EcoPeace and its charismatic leader Gidon Bromberg’s dedication to spreading the word and engaging reporters at all levels, from local green blogs to the New York Times.

But why haven’t other environmental peacebuilding projects garnered even a small fraction of this attention? The work shares many of the same barriers to media coverage of other environmental issues: complexity, specialized jargon, uncertainty, to name just a few. But it also has a few problems unique to the field.

By crossing the streams of environment and security, it falls between media “beats” the same way it falls between disciplines in academia. This can make it extra challenging to find the right reporters, editors, and outlets—and to pitch them in the right way.

In addition, since many examples of environmental peacebuilding stories are in the world’s conflict zones, it can be hard for reporters—in an era of nonexistent travel budgets and attacks on journalists—to not only get to the story, but also to stay safe once they are there.

Six Storytelling Tips

So how can proponents of environmental peacebuilding help get the greatest story told? Here are six tips for sharing your story with journalists, communicators, and your own audiences:

1. Use Your Enthusiasm: Seek to create converts. Your voice, your writing, and your pitch should clearly convey your passion for the project. Make it personal: tell YOUR story. How did you get involved in environmental peacebuilding? What about it drew you in, what convinced you it was important? Don’t undersell it. This is the greatest story never told, and you’re going to tell it!
2. Keep It Real, Keep It Local: Specific stories about real places and people have the most impact, particularly if they are timely and involve well-known conflicts that are already in the news (see, e.g., EcoPeace Middle East). For less well-known conflicts, find a connection to the security situation in developed countries. Or look for a local angle: pitch a newspaper in a city with a sizeable population of refugees or members of a diaspora community originally from the conflict zone. If your story is not about a particular place, be sure to use illustrative examples featuring real people in real places to put a human face on the points you are trying to make.
3. Run the Numbers: Just like a sense of place, a sense of scale or magnitude is critically important for reporters and their readers. Using data to tell your story can ground your theory in reality and quantify the impact of environmental peacebuilding. And don’t be defensive about the lack of a strong evidence base or missing data; it’s OK to say, “we are just not sure, but here’s what we do know.” The challenges of getting the data can even be part of the story.
4. Code Switch: Since this story crosses disciplines and beats, remember to adjust your framing and language for your audience. For a birding magazine, highlight the cute owl photos and go deep on the conservation angle. For a foreign policy reporter, emphasize the threats to national security and links to larger conflicts. And for a general interest outlet, where they write for an 8^th grade average reading level, just imagine you’re explaining it to a bored teen – and avoid jargon.
5. Do It for the Gram: If the reporters can’t go to see your work on the ground, bring them with you virtually. Take photos, videos, and share them on whatever social platform you’re comfortable with. If you have the budget, hire a professional to take high quality shots and footage that could be used in an exhibit or documentary. Even better: help interested reporters and photojournalists find travel funding from editorially independent story project funders, like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and National Geographic Society.
6. Don’t Forget the Conflict! Even if your work or research focuses on the peaceful end of the conflict spectrum, don’t neglect to start with the problem you are working to solve. For a story to have a strong narrative arc, it needs to describe a compelling problem that affects people’s lives in a direct way. That’s likely the conflict, and most likely not the academic problem that your journal article might focus on.

Finally, be patient and be prepared to fail. Working with reporters and photographers, writing for mainstream publications, and spreading the word beyond the converted is not an easy or painless process for scientists and policy experts. It takes time to build relationships with journalists or find the right editor or outlet – and that’s particularly challenging in today’s volatile media industry. More often than not, an editor loses interest, the reporter gets reassigned or laid off, or you get a rejection letter. That’s just that #writinglife.

There is a tarnished silver lining: Due to the persistent cycle of conflict, most of these stories are (sadly) evergreen, so that idea you pitched five years can be dusted off and pitched again. With perseverance, you will find a reporter, editor, filmmaker or publisher who, like me, will become a fervent fan of the Greatest Story.

As James Orbinski, the former President of Médecins Sans Frontières (Canada), told the Environmental Peacebuilding Conference about his conversion to believing in the power of environmental peacebuilding: “It just makes sense. I’m possessed with it. I’m here to stay.”