Stories for plants, animals, and people

Let me start by introducing myself to those of you who don’t know me.

I’m a writer with a background in literature and journalism. A couple of years ago, I landed in marketing.

When I was five, I told my mother that I didn’t want to go to school anymore because they weren’t teaching us how to read fast enough. Around that same time, I also thought I would live on a farm when I grew up. I had a list of names for all the animals who would live with me.

Heather and Brandy, 1982

All that’s to say, I sort of knew who I was: I definitely knew what I liked. I liked reading, writing, and art. I liked gardens and animals, even the bugs. I liked the everyday kind of stuff I had growing up. But if you asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I didn’t know. I just knew it had to be important.

For a while, I helped write grant proposals for small human service organizations, then I taught, undergraduates followed by international high-school students. I went into publishing; I did some freelance journalism; I moved into marketing and communications and I fell into the regular everyday kind of work so many people do.

And yet… A lot of that work can be important, but I couldn’t find the importance that resonated with me. I wanted to make art, and I felt guilty.

A professor once told me that writers and artists are in the business of saving souls. Unfortunately, I didn’t buy it at the time. To me, art was important, but it wasn’t that important.

“We’re not curing cancer,” I thought to myself.

Since that conversation with my professor, I moved from Louisiana where I was a graduate student to Illinois to Vietnam to Armenia to Washington, all after spending the earlier part of my life in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Over time I witnessed a changing world, which reshaped my thoughts on stories and the kind of work that matters.

Climate change

This week flash floods ravaged Texas. Rescue teams are searching for survivors. In Europe, temperatures are well over 100°F and several heat-related deaths have already occurred. And it’s only the beginning of July.

Each year is hotter than the last.

As a result, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, is seeing an increase in ticks and tick-borne illnesses, particularly Lyme disease. White-footed mice are the primary carriers of the Lyme disease bacteria. When mice populations increase with urbanization and a lack of natural predators, the bacteria is transmitted to more ticks. When ticks proliferate due to mild winters, more animals and people are bitten by ticks that transmit the disease.

I never even saw a tick as a kid. Now I just have to go into a field when I’m back home.

Another effect of increased heat is hurricanes with stronger winds that tend to move more slowly. They linger longer and wreck harder.

According to research from NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, hurricane intensity has increased due to human-caused climate change.

In the early 2000s, I lived in Louisiana. I evacuated from Lafayette not long after I arrived when Hurricane Lili hit, just days after Hurricane Isadore. I was also there when Katrina hit and then later for Rita, a storm that ripped rural homes right out of the bayous just south of Lafayette.

I remember a young man driving me and a French man to where the shrimpers lived. He pointed to a set of front steps that went up to nothing.

Empty space. 

Louisiana cypress swamp

“That was my grandfather’s house,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Louisiana coast continues to slide into the Gulf.

Research suggests the number of hurricanes isn’t increasing, though it can feel like there are more storms because we remember more of their names. They personify a giant collective loss.

But now I’m in Washington, far from hurricanes, though the potential for an earthquake-induced tsunami is ever present. However, the more immediately felt threats are fire and smoke.

Washington’s Department of Ecology claims that western U.S. wildfires have doubled between 1984 and 2015, and projections show that an annual rise in temperature of 1°C could increase burned areas by as much as 600 percent.

Unfortunately, these claims that Washington State reports aren’t easily verified. The federal sources linked from the Department of Ecology are no longer available. Even the information from globalchange.gov, a website dedicated to climate change, is gone. The site was terminated by the Trump Administration in late June 2025.

The National Security Archive and multiple news sources have reported that climate change information has been deleted from additional federal sites as well. I wonder how long my earlier link to NOAA in the section on hurricanes will continue to be available. 

Biodiversity loss

Many scientists argue that we are in a sixth mass extinction event, and it’s caused by humans. Species are going extinct at a rate not seen since the dinosaur extinction.

Individual species are on the brink of disappearing forever, and entire ecosystems are on the verge of collapse: coral reefs, mangrove forests, kelp forests, wetlands and more. The culprits are climate change, pollution, habitat loss from urban sprawl and animal agriculture, ocean acidification, disease, and poaching.

The cascading effects of dying ecosystems on food availability, soil quality, air quality, economics, medicine, the structural integrity of land, and the ability to maintain life on Earth are difficult to comprehend.

The last time I saw a lightning bug was around 2007.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a monarch butterfly.

I don’t remember the last time I cleaned insects off a car windshield.

I saw an aardvark in the Louisiana woods sometime around 2005.

Since then, I don’t remember seeing a wild mammal that wasn’t a deer, squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit or seal, though I still get really excited every time I see a seal, even if they’re pretty easy to find around the seafood restaurants along the Sound.

The point is I’ve spent a decent chunk of time in woods. I’m not an outdoor adventurer, but I don’t stay inside all the time either. This list of mammal species doesn’t add up to much for a person who’s been on this planet a few decades.

Aside on industrial farming

It’s totally gross and immoral. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now.

Why stories and not education?

For a long time, I believed in the value of education. I really believed in the value of a liberal arts education. Curriculums that encourage people to think critically, to evaluate, to be guided by logic while alert for fallacies, to admire the accrual of knowledge, to cultivate ethos.

My mother was an elementary school teacher. For a while, I was a teacher. Then I went to journalism school for similar reasons. Journalism’s intent is to educate the public.

I thought, “If people know, things will be better.”

I was wrong.

Behavior change scholars are saying “Stop raising awareness!” For a long time, we (as in the scholars plus myself) thought if people just knew the information, if only they were aware of the issue, they’d care about whatever it is. Then they’d obviously make whatever changes were necessary to make things better.

But that’s not what happens. People seldom change based on knowledge alone. We can know a whole lot about something and then completely tune it out to avoid changing what we do and how we live. We’d rather take the path of least resistance.

Literally.

My dog has worn a path in the backyard. The trampled grass is wearing to the earth, and I have to remind myself not to walk the path. Yet it only takes a few seconds before my mind wanders. When I look up, I’m back on the path. It’s ever so minutely easier to walk, and my body just goes for it every time I stop thinking and forget about the path.

We remember what matters, and to find what matters, we need to feel something.

Now we’re back to stories. Stories cultivate caring and empathy by firing up parts of the brain that factual information doesn’t.

We connect with a character who can often become a stand-in for another version of ourselves, another kind of person we could be if we choose to be.

Stories can give us clarity on how we see ourselves, making it easier to drop negative actions that don’t align with who we know we are and who we aspire to be.

Storytellers hold up a mirror and ask “who are you?” The follow-up is “how does someone like you live?”

This is when change can happen.

So that’s what I want to do. That’s why I’m returning to the world of creative storytelling, this time to focus on multimedia projects about the natural world and the human effects on plants, animals, and each other.

Stories inspire. They connect us even more deeply to the person we truly are. And maybe they can save our souls as well.

What kind of story do you want to hear?

Connect and let me know what kind of story you want to hear or if you know of a story that needs to be told.

Heather and Tiko in the Washington woods, 2017