Storytelling and Ecology by Anthony Nanson

I happened upon this book while doing literature review for my MA studies. I love it. It is an academic book, but it's written in a manner that makes it approachable to general audiences.

I will try to nutshell it: Oral storytelling offers a powerful medium for connecting meaningfully with people and creating space for the listeners to respond. By telling stories of place in those very places the experience of the story may be enhanced in significant ways, especially for encouraging ecological action. These factors are inherently absent in other modalities of narrative like the written word, film, and other recorded works.

There are also countless words of wisdom for storytellers and anyone interested in environmentalism and a sustainable future for humanity.

There is a slightly spiritual or new-age slant to the entire book, but it is balanced somewhat by the author acknowledging the bias and that it may not be something all audiences can swallow, and making an attempt at neutral language and nearly equivalent non-spiritual constructs.

Nanson put a lot of disconnected ideas that I've happened upon myself together into a cohesive text, rich with examples from a life's work as a professional storyteller. More than that he put them together into a meaningful thrust towards a utopian ideal that I can really get behind.