Stories from the Shoreline: An Exploration of Sea Level Rise and Storytelling Practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p><strong>This thesis combines creative non-fiction writing about sea-level rise and critical consideration of storytelling about sea-level rise with a specific focus on Aotearoa New Zealand. It is inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s 1989 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,’ which is widely referenced in the environmental humanities – including by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway – as an approach to storytelling in the Anthropocene. It features my own creative non-fiction essays and poems, interviews with sea-level rise storytellers (including scientists and science communicators), and reflections on other writers’ sea-level rise stories, all in conversation with the wider what of sea-level rise and the how of storytelling. In some parts of this thesis the critical and creative components are woven together, in other parts of the thesis they stand as separate sections. I put scholarship from science communication into dialogue with approaches from the environmental humanities. I argue that calls to harness the power of storytelling to help us understand the magnitude and impacts of the climate crisis are not enough, instead consideration must also be given to the aforementioned how of storytelling. I suggest that a carrier bag approach to storytelling can be used to explore the infinite facets of sea level rise without limiting ourselves to a fruitless search to tell the “right” story. I explore the boundaries and margins between land and sea, my own and other people’s connections to places both near and distant, how to shift a hero story into a human story, intergenerational responsibility, and the importance of joy and hope in the face of the climate crisis. The creative sections contain experimental writing taking Le Guin’s approach as the framework and applying it to the task of telling sea level rise stories. My creative writing was informed by walking, swimming and travelling along different Aotearoa coastlines, thinking about the global processes driving sea level rise, including climate change and the impact of the warming ocean on Antarctica, and my own personal responses to learning about sea-level rise. The result is a collection of stories that seeks to both trouble and sooth without offering up simplistic resolution.</strong></p>