Tsering Yangzom Lama: I think most of us know how hard it is to convince anybody. Of our perspective, it’s just a very difficult thing, right? What storytelling does, or what narrative can do is shift the arena, shift the parameters of the conversation by bringing something more interesting. don’t play with their, the terms of that they’ve set, say, actually this issue is not about X, it’s about Y. Now you’ve shifted the conversation to a completely different space, perhaps a space in which you have not just the truth, but the moral authority and the backing of the stakeholders who can say yes, and that creates, now they’re on the defensive as opposed to you being on the defensive. So, I always think it’s better to tell a more interesting story, a story that more people can relate with a story that is very clear. Morally, most people know the difference between right and wrong. even if we have disagreements about how to get there.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors. Scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the Newscast we speak with Tsering Yangzom Lama, a published author and the story manager at Greenpeace International. In a recently published book by Patagonia Tools to Save Our Home Planet. Lama has written an essay on how to reject dominant narratives. In this conversation, she explains what dominant narratives are, how they shape our society and environment, and how we might counter or reject ones that harm our planet and human rights. She explains why simply using logical appeals or facts and figures isn’t enough. Can backfire by reinforcing inherently false narratives. Instead, Lama urges reframing the debate entirely using the power of story to directly appeal to people’s morals and emotions. Ultimately, she explains why the end goal isn’t just to change the narrative around how humans perceive nature or the environment, but to change the method and conditions of our politics. Whether you’re an activist, a public communicator or not, Lama’s points have many applications for anyone’s life and creating the world they want to live in.

Mike: Tsering, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Tsering: Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike: So, this essay that you’ve written, it contains a lot of detail on countering narratives, which is what we’re gonna talk about today. Right out the gate when you wrote this, you nailed something that I have long felt really strongly about, which is that we experience the world through stories. Now to me, this essay was one of the most convincing guides on how to, counter or reject dominant narratives, which is something I think is really incredibly important right now at this moment. And so I wanted to hear you expand on it. Can you tell our listeners what exactly is a dominant narrative and what is a harmful, dominant narrative about biodiversity or conservation that you feel is crucial for people to understand?

Tsering: Sure. Yeah. So a dominant narrative, I mean, it actually depends on who’s defining that dominant narrative. It’s, you could ask somebody on the right in MAGA America, and they might feel that they are facing a dominant narrative that villifies them in some way. So from the perspective of environmental or social activism, a dominant narrative in reality would be anything that supports the status quo. Right? So what we have right now is a system in which we’re trashing the world in which a small minority, is profiting off of that destruction and in which the vast majority of humanity does not have the basic necessities for a dignified human existence, not to mention all the non-human beings who are also being, who are also facing a lot of hardships as a result of our current economic and social system. From my perspective, dominant narratives are everywhere. They are quite innocent. That’s the thing with dominant narratives, it’s hard to almost see them because they’re so prevalent. So for instance, this idea of perpetual growth. That’s a dominant narrative that is in, that has permeated the world. Whether or not it’s come from that part of the world, it’s permeated the world because of modern industrial capitalism. And so we seem to believe that we always need more to be happier and you see that in homes and you see that in governments and you see that in economic, systems. So these are things that we can kind of identify if we really pay attention and I believe that we can begin to counter them and perhaps shift them, if there is a, like a societal level awakening and a rejection of these concepts. So the idea is basically what are the beliefs undergirding, a society or a group of people that lead to emotions and actions and, eventually structures that support that belief being reinforced over and over again when it seems eventually that’s the truth, but it’s not, it’s a belief.

Mike: Can you pick out from there a specific example that you think directly pertains to like nature or the environment, of a harmful dominant narrative that you see kind of thrown about?

Tsering: Yeah, I think one of the oldest ones is the separation between man and nature. That there could be a possible world in which I could have a separate fate from the trees and the plants and the land around me and the water around me, and I think, I mean, of course that also extends into man being split, mind versus body, that my body could fall apart and I, my mind could be healthy. And I think that a lot of ancient traditions, many of which have been abandoned, but which Indigenous communities and local peoples have held onto, or perhaps they’ve gone underground. They typically maintain this sort of belief in the, connection, the deep interconnection between nature and man. And once you recognize nature as a part of you, as you, yourself, as being nature, as nature as being a kin, and the inseparability of our fates. Then you start to hopefully treat a tree as valuable, when it’s living rather than only what it’s dead. And a piece of lumber, which is unfortunately where we’ve gotten to in the current, sort of prevailing wisdom, if you wanna call it that. We look at a forest and think, what can we get out of that forest as opposed to the forest being home for so many people, so many animals, and not to mention absolutely necessary for the continuation of like life on earth as it is. And as a result, right now, we’re destroying the forest, across the equator of this planet. All the major basins in the Congo Basin, Papua, Amazon, these forests are being decimated at a rate that should concern all of us because they’re integral to the continuation of our species.

Mike: So you also mentioned that it’s important to, it’s important to study a story and to an extent, to recognize the effectiveness of that narrative in order to understand who the story serves and why it’s been effective. So you, in the essay you give the example of book bans, and how the narrative there appeals to the anxieties of parents by painting books as harming their kids. So I was hoping you could go into a little bit more detail about how doing this kind of work helps us understand who these stories serve and why this is so important to understand.

Tsering: Yeah. I think like actually if you look at many, many of the popular narratives that are pedaled by the powers that be or the, or sort of, the powers that have taken control in many of our societies, they will typically utilize fear. Or a sense of division, a sense of threat, fear of the unknown, hatred of the unknown. All of these things are really taking us down to the most base levels of human emotion, reaction, beliefs, and that’s why they’re so effective. And I see that in the left. I see that in the right. I see that all across, the world, right? Whenever there’s an ingroup, there’s an outgroup. And so these dynamics, when they’re provoked or when they’re invoked, they can be really powerful for people who feel, themselves not empowered or themselves not able to, I guess execute their agency in the world. And then that gets them into a state of further disempowerment, because they can’t see clearly. I believe that fear, hatred, division, selfishness, greed, all of these things are form of blindness, that can be activated for evil, honestly. And the true answer to that really, when I look to movements of the past, they come from a higher plane. They come from, ‘yes, of course there’s anger and there’s a defiance, but it comes ultimately from love.’ From Eros, from connection, from recognition of the oneness of all of us, including humans and non-humans. So, these are much higher minded kind of ways of thinking about things, and I think that’s the only real solution. Because if we come at these kinds of base emotions or beliefs with similarly, I guess, lower kinds of ways of thinking and being, we don’t really have a way out of the system. It just creates a battle of negativity honestly. And movements for me are important because they’re about, well, physically and literally they’re a movement. They’re coming together of people at precise moments, when it makes sense and when there is a potentiality for real change. And that has many layers, right? So, they’re the activists who are always doing something, and then there’s the broader base that joins at a moment, and sort of falls away and gets back into their regular life. And so I also just think that if you want to bring people into your movement, the messages of solidarity, kinship, love, mutuality. The belief in human dignity, the belief that we’re all, we have so much in common, much more in common than we do in division. And the belief that everybody wants peace and everybody wants to be happy. These are the things that actually can bring people together. And it doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt to have, an opponent, but If we sort of get into the level of the opponent’s perspective of like just creating sowing division and creating fear, I don’t know what the long-term benefits are for movement building and ultimately for consciousness raising and awareness, in a society that I would wanna live in.

Mike (narration): Hello listeners. Thank you as always for tuning in. If you enjoy this show, please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It is truly one of the best ways to help support our show. And of course, please do subscribe. If you have extended thoughts or feedback, we always welcome it. Please send us an email at podcast[at]mongabay.com. And if you want to support Mongabay’s nonprofit journalism, go to mongabay.com. Click on the donate button in the upper right corner of the screen. Thank you so much for listening. Back to the conversation with Tsering Yangzom Lama.

Mike: So, you dedicate a part of this essay to countering these dominant narratives, and something you point out is that it could be really easy to fall into this trap of unintentionally reinforcing the dominant narrative in your counter argument. Can you explain what that might look like and how someone can sort of sidestep this mistake, as it were?

Tsering: Yeah, I think, okay, so this is a funny thing about trying to change a narrative. I don’t think we can just approach it from a rational perspective of just making arguments. So, like whenever you try to convince somebody, right? Somebody makes an argument and you wanna, you wanna respond. And if you come at it purely from a rational thing, you say, okay, ‘you said point A, B, and C.I wanna respond with to point A with this and point B with this and point C with this.’ Well, what’s happened there is they have created the arena, they’ve created the parameters of the discussion because they’ve started, right? And when we’re dealing with dominant narratives, those are things that have been built over years, if not decades, often with a concerted effort from think tanks and so forth. And so, if they’ve created the arena and we try to dive in there and just like respond point by point. I mean, I think most of us know how hard it is to convince anybody of our perspective, it’s just a very difficult thing, right? What storytelling does, or what narrative can do is shift the arena, shift the parameters of the conversation by bringing something more interesting. Don’t play with their…the terms of that they’ve set. Say, ‘actually this issue is not about X, it’s about Y.’ Now you’ve shifted the conversation to a completely different space. Perhaps a space in which you have not just the truth, but the moral authority and the backing of the stakeholders who can say yes, and that creates, now they’re in the defensive as opposed to you being on a defensive. I always think it’s better to tell a more interesting story. A story that more people can relate with. A story that is very clear morally, most people know the difference between right and wrong. Even if we have disagreements about how to get there.

Mike: So, walk me through how that would look like in sort of an argument or debate that we’re having about nature or the environment. What would this look like if someone who is advocating for the environment look like?

Tsering: Right. So, one of the, another key, narratives in this space is that there is a choice, a binary between, economic development. And the environment being in a good state, we have to choose. We can either be hungry or we can see a forest around us. And I think that is one of the most dangerous fallacies, that’s been around us. Because if we look at the truth, we have these huge agricultural companies, like I’m not talking about small farmers. I’m talking about big agricultural monopolies that own vast swaths of the Amazon that are destroying the Amazon have caused so much violence. And destruction for the Indigenous communities there. One of the world’s longest gold rushes is in Brazil, and it’s still ongoing. So, these are things that companies and people have been doing for decades, if not centuries. And they’re saying that, ‘oh, we’re feeding the world. Oh, we’re making Brazilians rich.’ Well. Who’s really being fed? We have more hunger now than ever before, although we’re producing so much food. The reality is like nobody can afford to eat nowadays. Like the grocery bills have gone out of control. And so, there’s something about this, this binary that is like extremely, extremely false and dangerous and has served a system that has continued to starve many people and create a permanent food crisis. So, I think, I mean, I think it’s important to counter the lies for sure, and to present the facts, but also to say there’s a world in which people can have enough to eat because they preserve nature. Bernie Sanders in the US, the Green Revolution, sorry, it’s not the Green Revolution, but I can’t remember the name. That’s in India. But basically they brought together the frames, they said “why should we have to choose, we can bring together, environmental sustainability and great jobs for people. And I think actually—”

Mike: –The Green New Deal.

Tsering: Yes. The Green New Deal. Thank you. Yeah. Exactly. So, I think that these kinds of, that’s like a bit of a hack, like a narrative hack actually. When you see things have been presented as separate, bring them together and present a world in which actually this is not a choice between two possibilities, but actually we deserve both.

Mike: I think it’s…I think it’s a really interesting insight. When you mention, and this is something I’ve heard other people say too, is that facts and figures are not necessarily gonna reach people that are not on your side. And reframing the entire debate is necessary, just like you outlined it right there. Rather than simply using logical appeals. Can you talk about this importance of using a story that appeals to emotion and why that’s so effective?

Tsering: Yeah, I think, I mean, if you talk to people who study this, they say that actually—or like cognitive behavioral scientists is what I mean—they say that actually, decision making isn’t rational. It’s like highly, emotional. Because it’s at the level of like symbolic associations that we have within ourselves. And they’re quick and they’re not, they’re irrational, in fact. And they’re repetitive. We can show all the infographics we want and insist on all that, but that’s, yeah, that’s just good for the people who already agree and it’s useful. And we do put out stuff like that so that people can reach their friends and neighbors and say, “see, here’s the fact. Here’s how the ocean levels are rising. Or here’s. Here’s how much pollution, methane causes and so forth.” But for the public out there, their realities might look very different from somebody who’s interested in environmental causes. They’re working on trying to get enough food for their family. They’re trying to figure out how to get to work safely in a huge mega city, in which buses are dangerous and unreliable. And cars are too expensive. They’re trying to figure out how to even find a job as many young people around the world are. So, I think actually, if we connect to what people are actually dealing with, these are environmental campaigns, getting to work in a way that should be, that’s easy, safe, and pleasant is something that has to do with mobility and what a nation or a city invests in for the good of all. So, I just think that there are many entry points, and they might not look like environmental speak and actually that is the future. And, we have to see it all as interconnected.

Mike: I think that might be really pertinent to this sentence that you write, which is, and this is a really beautiful sentence, you wrote: “Changing the narrative isn’t the goal. The real goal is to change the method and conditions of our politics,” which is just again, really beautifully stated. Can you elaborate more for us? What does that entail?

Tsering: Yeah, I mean…narrative, narrative. Okay. So, there are a lot of things we say about our societies. I’m Canadian, so we pride ourselves on being for human rights and multiculturalism. And then there are moments in which our national narratives are like deeply shaken. For instance, with the residential schools that were discovered during COVID and all of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children. That was a real moment of reckoning for the Canadian people and a necessary one in which we had to look at ourselves and say, ‘oh, this is not done. We haven’t dealt with this at all.’ And so actually narratives can be dangerous if they’re like, too affirming. And, I think a nation, often has these sort of I guess big narratives, the American mythos, the story of progress, of somebody going out into the hinterlands and discovering land. I mean all these, all of these narratives are full of holes and problems and erase so many violences and so as a Tibetan, we are a small people who are small population and a nation in exile and under occupation. The narratives are primarily controlled and disseminated by the powers that be, whether it’s Western media and politicians or the, colonizers’ narratives. And we have very little space, but we have the truth. We have the truth. If somebody wants to dig into the material conditions of what it’s like for Tibetan people living in Tibet, it’s very fact-based. Many journalists have written about this, think tanks have talked about how Tibet is one of the least free countries in the world, but it’s not related to the narratives. So, I just want to address the narrative shifting. If people say, ‘okay, Tibetans deserve freedom, just like in, in Canada,’ people want to express good feelings towards Indigenous peoples. But the reality is there’s so much violence and so much covering up of the reality of Indigenous peoples, then that’s a problem. The real goal is to change the material conditions and for that to happen it requires us to actually face up to our narratives.

Mike: Wow. There’s so much in what you just said. That is so incredible. I’m gonna have to go back and listen to that, like over and over again. Because that was just amazing, everything you said there. Yeah, I gotta put a pin in that one. That was great. One thing that you say to watch out for is that you mentioned that narratives such as environmentally progressive ones get co-opted for the wrong reasons. For example, greenwashing campaigns from corporations and it has this unfortunate effect of undermining the intent of these environmentally progressive campaigns and language and movements. So how do people, organizations deal with or respond to that co-opting?

Tsering: I, I think it’s actually kind of related to the previous point.

if there’s an over-reliance on narrative and not enough on the deep connection to that community or to the realities being communicated, then the co-optation can be successful. But if we are actually deeply embedded to and in touch with what we’re talking about, then this is a perpetual process of telling the truth, of witnessing, of amplifying and transmitting the truth, and in which case, like it’s never really over. There’s always more to fight for. There’s always more to protect. There’s always more people to align with and to show solidarity with. If we see it as it’s just a matter of finding the right phrase and then everything will be great, right? Then it’s like marketing and of course it’s gonna be co-opted because there’s…what’s underneath that? But what I see is like community, activists, people who are really deeply engaged, they are paying attention to what’s being said, and they’re also holding themselves accountable to their stakeholders. So that the co-optation isn’t possible because the narrative should always be grounded in reality.

Mike: And what is narrative activism? This is something that you outline in the essay, but please, what is narrative activism?

Tsering: I mean, to some degree, I think it’s basically just having consciousness of the role of narrative in activism. Like activism is many things and narrative shaping is always a part of activism, but sometimes we’re more conscious of it and sometimes we’re less conscious of it. And to me, a storyteller or somebody who is interested in activism from this perspective recognizes that narratives exist and that they can be analyzed, dismantled, and rewritten. So there’s a kind of a sense of an ownership of the narrative. That one is not just simply beholden to the narratives that one enters into, and that, it’s just a basic consciousness of, and a sense of agency around narrative.

Mike: Of course, one doesn’t have to be like an activist per se to dismantle these narratives. For the people that are listening right now, what are the things that you recommend, like anyone who’s listening, any strategies that they could employ into how they can communicate, that you think might be underappreciated or might be overlooked?

Tsering: I think the best thing is conversations. I know that it’s become increasingly more difficult to have conversations in our polarized societies, but I get into taxis and I talk to Trump supporters. That’s not the person I voted for, but I want to know. I wanna understand their perspective. And even if it doesn’t make sense to me, it’s a really important way for me to understand their frames, how they’re approaching, like basically what they believe about the world. And what they believe they can do or cannot do. And often there’s a sense of disempowerment undergirding the identification with a certain camp, right? ‘I have been overlooked in the..all of these senses and thus I need to be with this person,’ and I think it’s about being curious, about being non-judgmental, having a conversation and then just starting to ask questions like, does it have to be this way? Is this really true? I do this for my, with myself too, because we all have blindness as we all have blind spots, right? There are all these narratives that we hold internally and then I ask myself, is this really true or is this just a belief that I have? So I mean, beyond having conversations with people you disagree with, I think it’s important to read widely and to think critically, and to just ask questions wherever you can. And recognizing when things are coming from that like base fear-base. Really these things create limitations in our minds and our souls and our spirits, and trying to whenever possible, lead us, lead ourselves back into, something that comes from a higher and a better state, which is about love and connection and service. So, I don’t really know. It’s a hard one.

Mike: No, that was, no, you do know. That was beautifully put. No, I would say you know very well, I would…listen, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you have a novel called, ‘We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies.’ And we could have an entire podcast discussion about that book. But suffice it to say, I’m gonna link that in the show notes for listeners to check out. But what does this book illustrate that you’d like listeners to know as it relates to what we’ve discussed today?

Tsering: Yeah, I mean, this novel is basically a story of a Tibetan family that goes into exile, flees over the Himalayas in the early 1960s when the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong completed its invasion and colonization of Tibet, or the process of colonization of Tibet was begun. But, basically it’s a story of exiles. It’s a story of a simple Tibetan family that goes into a refugee camp and then gets split over decades of migration of people ending up in different parts of the world, which is a very common story among Tibetan exiles. When I wrote the book, I didn’t have a very specific goal. It’s not, I didn’t write the book as an activist, the way I do my work at Greenpeace. I wrote the book because I’m just genuinely trying to understand my community and our history and how we ended up where we did. But I can say that like when I was writing the book, there weren’t any other books like this. Over all, like we’ve been largely neglected by the annals of history, let’s just say. Especially in recent years. Since the invasion, nobody really cares about refugee stories to be honest. People don’t write about Tibetan refugees that much. There’s a lot more about if you’re French or Italian, you could go to any library and find thousands of books. But if you’re Tibetan, there’s not much. And so I saw a vacuum, I saw a gap, and I wrote a book for myself that I would want to read or perhaps for a 15-year-old version of myself that I felt she would want to read. And in my last three years of meeting readers all around the world and talking to journalists, and talking to my publishers the sort of consistent message I’ve gotten to my surprise is “I had no idea.” I had no idea this happened to the Tibetan people. Because there’s a very, a bite-sized version of Tibetan history that people hear about. But they don’t understand the depths of our trauma and the heights of our resistance and our strength. And I think that’s a really powerful story. So, I guess in one way, my book, countered a narrative, even if that wasn’t necessarily my intention, or perhaps created a narrative where there was almost nothing there for most people.

Mike: Wow. I’m, inspired to read this book, and, thank you so much for sharing that with us. What are some of the most important writers or speakers that are adjacent to the work that you do that you might recommend listeners to go check out to help them understand more about what we’ve talked about today?

Tsering: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s so many amazing writers and thinkers on this. I really often go back to black American writers, because they have done so much for, movement thinking. So, bell hooks is a really important writer for me. Just the simplicity of her language and the humanity of her message has touched me ever since I came across her in college. And she talks about what it means to love somebody, what it means to transgress in the classroom. So, there are many short little books from her that I think are very important and she takes from Paulo Freire’s writing. All of these things have a lineage, but I love bell hooks. I really think, oh, right now, Byung-Chul Han is a German philosopher of South Korean descent, I believe, and he writes about narration. And there’s a book called Crisis of Narration. He’s…he’s a little harder to get into, and has quite a European way of doing philosophy. But I think he’s interesting for people who are interested in philosophy and narrative thinking, because he talks about how, in the current capitalist sort of model that we have, there’s…we’ve gone away from rituals, we’ve gone away from connections, and we often just have these narratives that never close because we’re always trying to optimize ourselves in order to become better capitalist sessentially, in order to, let me, yeah, “Let me optimize myself so I can produce more or to turn myself into a product.” So that’s a completely different angle. I find his work very interesting. Also writers like fiction writers like J.M. Coetzee the South African writer who now lives in Australia and has won the Booker like several times. What I love so much about his writing is it’s highly political and he does not at all try to make anybody feel better. He’s telling the raw truth. And often I think with activism or messaging and activism, we’re not necessarily telling people anything different. Our job is to witness, to present rather than to tell people what to think or what to do. We need to say we have eyes all over the world and here’s what we see. Here’s the good we see and here’s the bad we see. And just tell people the truth so that, then—it’s not so much a hierarchical thing, ‘I have the truth and I’m the vanguard, and you guys are the lumping proletariats, that I need to tell you how to have”—I have a, yeah, I have a much more, anarchist perspective in that I believe in the autonomy of all beings and the wisdom of all beings. And my job, because I happen to be in this space in which I can think about the environment day and night, my job is to try to think of what are the best stories that we can just like witness and amplify. Yeah.

Mike: That’s a great list. Thank you. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Tsering: Well, I have Instagram. it’s my name Tsering Yangzom Lama, and then I have a website, although I’m redesigning it, so I’m not very good at this.

Mike: I mean, you’ve published a book, so you’re, definitely good at something here, yeah.

Tsering: Thank you.

Mike: Well, Tsering Yangzom Lama, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure.

Tsering: Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike: If you want to read ‘Tools to Save Our Home Planet’ by Patagonia, which I highly recommend you do, find the link to purchase the book in the show notes. And of course, if you want to read Tsering’s book, ‘We Measure the Earth with our Bodies,’ you can also find a link in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you wanna help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work that we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help expand our reach, but you can also pledge your support by becoming a monthly sponsor at our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so even pledging a dollar per month makes a really big difference. And it helps us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our podcasts and our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. But of course, you can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline at mongabay.com or follow us on social media. You can find us on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @mongabay and on YouTube @mongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.