Narrating Massive Distribution: Climate Stories from Early American Periodicals to Citizen Science Blogging

Scientists who want to share their personal and professional concerns about planetary conditions at the Earth-systems or local ecological level are increasingly advised to engage publics narratively,1 but calls for scientists’ narratives face various headwinds from directions and forces not squarely in scientists’ control. Both the trend toward storytelling and its challenges raise questions of econarratological interest. Econarratology remains, as Timothy Clark remarks, a bit of a neologism (653), but it names an enlarging cluster of scholarship that crosses the bibliographies of ecocriticism and narrative theory. Econarratology is both prompting attention to works not conventionally recognized as environmental literature and raising new questions about canonical texts to the environmental humanities. Beyond its critical deployment to assess texts and narrative techniques, econarratology has, from its inception, also kept an eye on narrative’s uses as a component of “environmental understanding” and medium of encounter, making it a useful orientation within narratologies of science, especially where environmental sciences appear in narratives distributed to broader publics (James and Morel 1). There are several headwinds facing narrative communication of environmental science. Enthusiasm for scientists’ storytelling depends—as do calls for open science and initiatives to move scientific knowledge out of privatized paywalls—on the ethos benefits of transparency, trusting that