Australia has been burning since September, and as 2019 ends forests on all continents lay in ruin. The world is hot — hot, HOT! — and the things we need to absorb carbon dioxide are becoming things that emit carbon dioxide. The illustrations all around us are louder and shinier by the day, but we still can’t figure out how to write about it to translate people’s anguish about koalas and kangaroo habitat into sustained action to reverse the damage we can reverse, and to adapt to what we can’t.

The facts of the story are clear, but the whole thing needs to be rewritten. In this age — where cold expository writing shares a policy microphone with Twitter’s belligerent brevity and Instagram’s hyper-personal informality — where can we find a balance to convey complex, nuanced, and often seemingly contradictory ideas to a public that needs to know or they, their children, and their pets, and their planet, might… die?

The modern focus on “storytelling” offers a clue, and so in international policy and development we punctuate all our communications with still and moving images that highlight what’s happening at the field level — throwing the spotlight on the indefatigable charity hero or on aid recipients with an electric sparkle in their eyes that can directly light the bulb in the reader’s mind.

Converting our work into illustrated tales is extremely effective in a personal, primeval kind of way — the writing cue is to imagine sitting at a campfire while choosing words. But we still have to convey the abstractions too. 

Today’s holy grail of abstractions is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are the global community’s agreed-upon interconnected objectives for creating a better world moving forward. In order to strengthen the global network of good work, we’re supposed to build our projects with an eye on meeting some combination of those goals… and we’re also compelled to use them to place our projects in a larger context and show how we “efficiently and cost-effectively leverage” the work being done by others.

Climate mitigation and adaptation projects alike address SDG 13, “Climate Action,” whose name speaks to urgency in the way none of the other SDG names do. Action!! The word explodes with energy, resolve, and unity — an aspirational decision, no doubt, by the framers.

Synergies, Trade-offs, aaaaaaaand… ACTION!

For climate action as well as climate clarity, I love the Nobel-winning International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). So, for some straight talk, I went over to the IPCC’s FAQ page.

An FAQ, if you think about it, should be a place where expository writing is at its most conversational; after all, it’s a call-and-response attended by people who in being there have admitted they don’t know something but want to. Their guard is down. Talk to them. But bless its heart, IPCC’s FAQ 5.1 reads like this (with my emphasis in boldface):

What are the Connections between Sustainable Development and Limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels?

The Answer:

Summary: Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs of people living today without compromising the needs of future generations, while balancing social, economic and environmental considerations. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include targets for eradicating poverty; ensuring health, energy and food security; reducing inequality; protecting ecosystems; pursuing sustainable cities and economies; and a goal for climate action (SDG 13). Climate change affects the ability to achieve sustainable development goals, and limiting warming to 1.5°C will help meet some sustainable development targets. Pursuing sustainable development will influence emissions, impacts and vulnerabilities.Responses to climate change in the form of adaptation and mitigation will also interact with sustainable development with positive effects, known as synergies, or negative effects, known as trade-offs. Responses to climate change can be planned to maximize synergies and limit trade-offs with sustainable development.

OK. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, summaries are hard to make exciting because they’re like a map that needs to contain every major intersection and attraction — there’s no room for fanciful drawings of sailing ships and dragons. But they do also need to make the reader want to engage. Does this?

The full text is replete with great information. The synergies are wonderful. The trade-offs are lamentable. The reader leaves with no confusion about that — but walks away unchanged.

The author’s failed attempt to urgent-up the IPCC’s answer to qustion 5.1. Could a reader be “changed” by filtering global existentialism through the SDG diagram, where climate change is addressed by SDG 13, and also… 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, and for that matter the rest of them. This ain’t kitchen-table conversation here.

I present here no new approaches to reach readers in 2020 and beyond; I have no magic words or magic dust or wand to bring the lay reader into the well-meaning abstracted global tangle of SDGs. I don’t recommend screaming in the staccato language of Twitter, or chit-chatting like Instagram. But in my idleness I can see with new clarity the informational minefield of jargon — maybe, the opposite of magic.

Jargon, in 2019, plays a deadly role in the polarizing of public dialogue. Social media and political discourse run thick and bloody with it. And readers recoil from it. As for the field of climate change, after decades of well-funded science denial, you already have to walk through a hellscape of jargon just to introduce the subject— as I just did just now in calling it “climate change” rather than “global warming.”

It’s global warming for crying out loud, and the words “hellscape” and “minefield” apply too. But we tiptoe around them. How much of what we write do we write to avoid saying what we are trying to say, in order to say it?

There has got to be a better way to discuss the world’s problems, a way that’s more universal than the anecdotal stories we can tell (a sinking island, a windmill pioneer) but more effective than the call-to-action climax of the above paragraph:

Responses to climate change can be planned to maximize synergies and limit trade-offs with sustainable development.

How do we shake the readers from their slumber, when it’s existentially important that we do? Will it take the complete loss of an entire city like Miami, or another epic dust bowl across the entire great plains… or can we find a new language that can rise to the challenge of confronting the greatest challenge of human history as it unfolds in slow motion before us?