When our 5th grader volunteered me to come to his classroom and talk about science illustration, his teacher suggested it might fit well into their unit on the Amazon rainforest. I don’t know anything about the Amazon rainforest, but I thought I’d talk about the littlest creatures, the ones too small to photograph. I could show the kids how even unseen organisms like soil bacteria support the delicate balance of a fragile, endangered ecosystem. We could make them seen with illustrations. But then, things happened.
As I tried to make sense of the things that were happening, I decided we should rewind and start with a simpler question. What makes people care about something? My son and I brainstormed ways we might get people to care about the Amazon rainforest. His class had read the book The Most Beautiful Roof in the World by Kathryn Lasky about ecologist and biologist Meg Lowman, who has spent much of her life in the Amazon’s canopy.1 My son’s first idea was to make a graph about the loss of trees. It reminded me of a study I’d read a few years ago in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick, suggesting that data aren’t what make people care about something. Stories are.2 Then I heard the kids were writing illustrated fictional narratives, and a plan clicked into place.
Arriving a few minutes early, I perused science illustrations pinned to the board outside the room—colorful drawings of flowers, annotated with intricate insets of stomata and chlorophyll and chemical formulas of photosynthesis. I felt wistful for the time when I would have come here just to make something like this with them.
Instead, I started by sharing this quote from an old Native American proverb with the class: “Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.”
Then I shared the aforementioned study. A group of participants was paid $5 each to take a survey about technology products. But this, I told them dramatically, was not the experiment! On their way out the door, the researchers casually asked them to read a brief letter and, if they wanted to, they could donate some portion of their $5. Half of the participants read a letter about hundreds of millions of people in multiple African countries facing drought, hunger, and forced relocation. The other half read a letter about a 7-year-old girl named Rokia facing the same challenges, whose life would be “changed for the better” by any donation. The group that read the first letter gave an average of $1.14. The second group, $2.38.
I shared a quote from Mother Theresa that reinforced these results: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”3
While educating myself about what makes people care, I had encountered another compelling idea. If you want someone to care about something, you need to show that you care about them. Storytelling with an awareness of your audience’s struggles is powerful. Some groups even weaponize it while others continue to fight back with data and logic. Would the latter be stooping to some level if they used anecdotes that connected emotionally with the lives of their audience? Not at all. Storytelling isn’t inherently good or bad—it just depends on whether it’s grounded in truth.
We should all be skeptical of stories, and data too for that matter. The question is whether there is solid data to support the anecdote. This is where my son’s tree graph comes in. I learned that a few years ago, scientists discovered that heavily deforested parts of the Amazon, once hailed as the lungs of the earth, are now emitting more carbon than they absorb.4 Climate change researcher Luciana Gatti took stomach-turning flights—far above the canopy where Meg Lowman had spent decades—to capture the air samples that would reveal this reversal in earth’s fortune.
But for the kids, I kept it simple. I said to them that if they told me some big number of panthers in the Amazon rainforest is endangered because of clear cutting and poaching, I would think, “That’s awful. I hate that.” But what can I do? I work all day, come home, cook dinner, make sure the kids do their homework and brush their teeth. Within a day or two I’d probably forget what you told me. But if you tell me a story about one panther who is worried about keeping her cubs fed and safe in a changing habitat as other panthers around her mysteriously disappear and she doesn’t understand why any of it is happening or if it will ever stop, well, that story will live in my heart. I probably won’t quit my job and become Meg Lowman, but the next time I see a news article about poachers killing panthers in the Amazon, I’m much more likely to click on it, thinking of that mama panther. I’m more likely to do something.5
Then the kids started sharing the bones of their stories and we all brainstormed ways they could use the ideas we’d just learned to make their readers care. One of the 5th graders planned to end his story with his main character, a spider monkey, in utter despair. A 2018 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called The Science of What Makes People Care argues that while we want our stories to make people feel something, saddling our readers with guilt or hopelessness won’t make them care because we humans excel at avoiding these emotions. Rather, envisioning a hopeful future may be more likely to inspire action to achieve that future. I didn’t say any of this to the kids, and yet a wise student suggested to his friend a final act of kindness bestowed upon the spider monkey from a more fortunate animal.
Then, because they were tasked with illustrating their stories, I stepped onto more solid ground. I told them they didn’t have to be amazing artists to make people feel something with their drawings. I showed them Molly Bang’s beloved 1991 book Picture This, in which she watches herself respond emotionally while exploring with simple shapes. Using the story of Little Red Riding Hood, she casts the young prey as a red triangle. An assortment of vertical black rectangles soar off the top of the page, tucking her into a forest. Three black triangles become a wolf (later ten including teeth). She explores different compositions, relative sizes, and the emotional impact of colors, finding herself more connected to Little Red Riding Hood when she is closer to the foreground, and more afraid of the wolf when it is bigger. Tilting some tree trunks created a precariousness that added to the sense of foreboding and menace. Rounding out the sharp points of the wolf’s snout had the opposite effect. I wanted the kids to do this same kind of exploration on their whiteboards.
To make it relevant to their stories, I gave an example on the big whiteboard of a poison dart frog with a level of detail I knew many of the kids could easily pull off. I explained how placing it close up in the foreground made me feel more connected to it, and with it facing us, it couldn’t see what was coming up behind it. We imagined what that could be. Maybe fires set after clear cutting, often sweeping up unsuspecting little frogs like this one. (Later my son would start coloring it in but have to abandon it ultimately for recess.)
I also imagined a bird returning to what used to be her home, only to find farmland as far as her little avian eyes could see. Where once she had been protected by a canopy so thick it was nearly dark underneath, now the sun beat down on her. There arose such a murmur and burst of ideas that I didn’t even finish the sun’s rays.
Later a bespectacled girl who had been quiet until now showed me her drawing of a colorful macaw standing on a felled tree in the bright sunlight, gazing off into the distance. “Do you like it?”, she asked me. I did, very much. But I hope the 5th graders will learn to ask questions like, “Does this make you feel something? Does it make you care? Are you trying to make me feel something? What is the evidence that your story is grounded in truth? What is the evidence that mine is?”
Fun fact for my scientist friends: Meg Lowman’s son, who in the book is a young boy going up into the canopy with her for the first time, is one of the founders of OpenBiome.
Georgia Lupi, an information designer who takes a humanistic approach to combining data visualization with storytelling, may be creating the exception to the rule.
Could it have been the tragic story of one deceased child in Texas that prompted our health secretary to urge people to get vaccinated for measles?
There are many news articles about this and of course the primary research report which appeared in Nature, but I came to it through an excellent essay in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2024 by Alex Cuadros entitled Has the Amazon Reached Its Tipping Point? Another essay in this same collection called What Plants Are Saying About Us by Amanda Gefter fueled a lively discussion with the 5th graders about whether their story could be told from the perspective of a tree.
Turns out this effect came on sooner than I expected as a result of my visit. Within a day I would see an ad for bamboo toilet paper and send a link to my confused husband.
Great article! And I'm so glad that my kid got to be one of the students in this class. She brought it up independently this morning, and I then I saw your article!
Great story-telling, as always!