Amplifying Desire-Centered Research Beyond Deficits and Fatigue: A Case Study of Environmental Justice ArcGIS StoryMaps in Colorado

INTRODUCTION

With the growing use of digital communication technologies, governments and researchers have begun creating digital maps of past and ongoing environmental and climate injustices. Some of that has involved increased engagement with big data. ¹ As Hartley et al. argued, “The U.S. EPA's freely available mapping tools, EJSCREEN and EnviroAtlas, have a unique opportunity to simultaneously communicate science and spur real change via motivated public engagement.” ² While a math-based approach to climate and environmental injustices long has been promoted by scholars and communities, improved mapping technologies and data access have made some digital tools increasingly common. ³

Quantitative approaches “can allow for standardization and accountability for climate goals, simplifying complex system dynamics to foster awareness, understanding, and action; yet, numbers can also be mystifying and alienating as the primary mode for engaging publics.” ⁴ As such, a growing number of voices have argued that quantitative geospatial mapping “data alone is, of course, insufficient for the justice we need and deserve” because solely quantitative approaches can distort the perception and impact of environmental injustices on communities. ⁵ These arguments echo longstanding Indigenous and feminist critiques about the partiality and situatedness of scientific and technical data. ⁶ We return, then, to Giovanna Di Chiro's question: “How do we tell stories about living together justly, mutually, and sustainably on a damaged planet?” ⁷

This journal has published the call for more educational materials to accompany environmental justice (EJ) online maps and the role of the environmental humanities in fostering storytelling as a methodology and a potential mode of community building. ⁸ The case has not yet been established for digital storytelling as an important tool to be developed alongside state efforts to foster public engagement in decision making and fenceline community efforts to expand epistemologies or ways of knowing in EJ policy. Incorporating stories amplifies lived experiences in communities facing environmental injustices and challenges the dominance of deficit models of communication in government designed geospatial digital maps for EJ.

In this article, we share an Environmental Justice Digital Storytelling Project pilot we co-created through a partnership between a course on the Foundations of Environmental Justice at the University of Colorado Boulder (as part of a graduate certificate in EJ) and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). We begin by defining digital storytelling and contextualizing it as a potentially decolonial, anti-racist practice that may reflect EJ values. Then, we share the rationale, possibilities, and challenges for using ArcGIS StoryMaps as a narrative tool to increase government accountability, emphasizing the traps of damage-centered research and narrative fatigue. We conclude by reflecting on our process and with a call for more support for digital storytelling for EJ epistemologies and public engagement in state decision making.

A RATIONALE FOR DIGITAL STORYTELLING

“Digital storytelling” is a relatively broad signifier that does not necessarily reveal the platforms (ArcGIS StoryMaps, interactive timelines, Adobe, podcast software, etc.) involved. While most digital formats allow for sharing a narrative with images, many are being developed that are nonlinear and multimodal, including images, hyperlinks, and audio files. Some locate the practice of digital storytelling in the early 1990s with a California Berkeley-based initiative, others locate it as part of New Media Studies, and recently more situate it as a vital part of the digital humanities. ⁹ Today, storytelling proliferates; but, whose stories are privileged and whose are marginalized remains an important site of struggle.

For this essay, we understand “digital storytelling” as an affective multimedia communication technology created to share and to constitute meaning, as well as feelings, in the public sphere. That definition still covers a broad terrain, but it clarifies that the goal is emotional, social, symbolic, and ideally consequential in public life. Some have parsed out expressive (sharing information), strategic (to move audiences toward new perspectives), reflective (highlighting multiple disparities), and transformative (promoting a future outcome) types of stories, such as McDrury and Alterio. ¹⁰ Our applied approach aims to combine these various intentions, as well as encourage the three public functions of digital environmental media more broadly: to alert broader publics, to amplify a particular crisis or advocacy, and to engage more people. ¹¹

In Catalina de Onís' study of energy democracy and injustice in Puerto Rico, she argued, “amplification involves strengthening rhetorical energy to achieve greater impact, as social movement actors and activists increase the voltage of their rhetoric” (p. 10). She wrote, ideally, amplification of fenceline movements can create a sense of presence, “which Pezzullo describes as ‘when we feel as if someone, some place, or something matters, whether or not [they/]she/he/it is physically present with us,’” and “function as an enactment of voice.” ¹² Some have found that Indigenous communities might particularly benefit from multimedia storytelling. ¹³

Not all stories are empowering. Armiero et al. made a distinction between narrative justice and toxic narrative violence, which has attempted to silence, erase, and, we would add, distort the experiences of fenceline communities. ¹⁴ We do not have the space to cover every relevant cultural tradition of oral expression, but it is perhaps worth at least recalling that the Laguna storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko has emphasized that stories long have been the energy sources of communities marginalized by the status quo:

You know, they talk about different geographical areas and different groups of people having a resource, like they have uranium, they have gold, they have timber as a resource. … Our greatest natural resource is stories and storytelling. We have an endless, continuing, ongoing supply of stories. ¹⁵

Storytelling also enables us to trouble paradigms such as “natural resources” and synthesize epistemologies that support proyectos de vida or life projects that involve not only energy sovereignty but also how energy planning may incorporate values such as joy. ¹⁶ Given the renewable resource of storytelling in many marginalized communities, it is unsurprising that efforts to counter negative stories of communities have played a pivotal role in EJ efforts.

The EJ movement in the United States often is said to have been born when a story of origin was articulated about Warren County, North Carolina. ¹⁷ Furthermore, the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit solidified the importance of voice or, as Dana Alston said, of “speaking for ourselves.” ¹⁸ Who tells the stories of EJ, then, long has mattered, as part of the original critique was the lack of a seat at the environmental decision-making table. ¹⁹ EJ storytelling “contrasts with environmental reports that rely heavily on scientific and economic data and challenges particular conceptualizations of what an educated presentation entails.” ²⁰ Some have argued that fictional storytelling can be a powerful mode of expression for addressing environmental racism. ²¹ Sharing global voices of environmental and climate justice leaders on a digital map troubles the omniscient authorship and authority of the state, offering what we might call a pluriversal interpretation of the world. ²²

In an age of a digital media content flood, ²³ there are high stakes involved in which storytelling energies we choose to invest in or dismiss. Storytelling is vital to identifying uneven power structures constituted through oppressive relations, such as hierarchies of capitalist individualism, hypermasculine competition, xenophobic border policing, white settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and fascist propaganda. To resist these unjust patterns, communities may critically interrupt hegemonic narratives to create a sense of presence about how power inequities create toxic patterns and how they are inspired to advocate for change. ²⁴

The proliferation of geospatial maps to establish evidence of environmental injustices, then, may risk reinforcing mechanisms of exclusion if community members are not involved in the data collection and analysis. As Alice Mah wrote:

Tackling the question of voice, and the related question of visibility, is central to the environmental justice movement, which aims to render injustices visible. But to render injustices visible … is also about examining the mechanisms of exclusion, focusing on structural questions of how invisibility, and lack of voice, is produced. ²⁵

In addition to the information and technological expertise required to create many EJ maps, then, it is important to not fall into the trap of the information deficit model of communication, which assumes that the problem is a lack of data and poses to remedy it solely through numerical assessments that then are shared one-way. ²⁶ Likewise, EJ communities too often are framed in a deficit model, only highlighting harms and problems without recognizing strengths and solutions. EJ researchers and policymakers should seek to develop communication technology tools in ways that engage and learn from disproportionately impacted community voices.

Of course, since “digital storytelling is characterized by interactivity, nonlinearity, flexible outcomes, user participation, even co-creation,” ²⁷ there are many choices that need to be made when developing it as a tool for environmental and climate justice planning. For example, there is a tension between identifying evidence of environmental injustices and honoring the dignity of residents in a way that reaffirms their resilience and value in a culture that constantly devalues some communities more than others. This ethical tension reflects work on Indigenous distinctions between what Eve Tuck, drawing on queer theorist Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, called “damage-centered” versus “desire-centered” research of communities oppressed in dominant society. ²⁸

As Sarah Amira De La Garza wrote about immigrant narratives: “Resistance is not simply critiquing and rejecting; it is the active and repeated insistence that the stories we tell are the ones that empower and maintain narratives that strengthen, repair, and sustain the dignity and honor we as humans merit.” ²⁹ We, therefore, consider desire and dignity to be key elements of narrative justice.

PILOTING THE COLORADO EJ STORYTELLING PROJECT

EJ studies might be most familiar with the state of Colorado for the compelling study of Lisa Park and David N. Pellow, The Slums of Aspen, in which they coined the term “environmental privilege” to goad research into the systemic use of power to grant or deny access to “coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods” with green parks and trees. ³⁰ Surely, studying environmental privilege remains salient for the state and beyond. Nevertheless, multiple environmental injustices—both past and ongoing—also exist in Colorado, the traditional lands of at least 48 Indigenous nations.

Of late, the state of Colorado has become newsworthy for its EJ policy leadership. In 2019, Colorado became the first state to establish an Office of Just Transition, with the purpose to prepare and support coal plant-dependent workers, employees, and communities for future closures. ³¹ In 2021, Governor Jared Polis signed the Environmental Justice Act into law, which created an EJ Action Task Force, an EJ Advisory Board, and an EJ Ombudsperson. ³² The Air Toxics Act, which aims to improve monitoring and protection of fenceline communities, was also signed into law in 2021. ³³ That year, the governor also passed laws for sustainable transportation, health equity, farmworker rights, and outdoor equity. ³⁴ These laws are not indicators that EJ has been achieved, but they are notable as indicators that the state government has made EJ a governing priority of late.

As part of this increased intent to improve EJ accountability, the CDPHE invested in a partnership with a research team led by Dr. David Rojas Rueda, a member of the CDPHE Environmental Justice Advisory Board and project lead of the Built Environment, Geospatial Centroid, and Rojas Public Health Laboratory at Colorado State University to establish an EJ mapping tool, which would quantify environmental health and climate risks, as well as demographics and socioeconomic factors. As plans to launch a new state-led interactive EJ mapping tool called “Colorado EnviroScreen” were announced in Fall 2021, the CDPHE Environmental Justice Program Manager, Joel Minor, repeatedly heard feedback that the state should include qualitative data and incorporate community voices.

As one step toward that direction, Minor partnered with our class, led by Dr. Phaedra C. Pezzullo (who wrote the rationale for digital storytelling for our class and established this partnership before the semester began). The digital storytelling content was mutually agreed upon for the communities that appeared most disproportionately impacted by environmental health risks according to the quantitative data featured in the new tool. Participation in the project was not mandatory, and we came to call our subset of the class the “Colorado Environmental Justice Storytelling Project.” Students involved brought interdisciplinary expertise to the project, including journalism, communication, theater, law, and environmental studies.

We ultimately chose ArcGIS StoryMaps as our platform for its media affordances. Our university provides us with access to the platform, and the CDPHE website was compatible with it. This platform allowed us to incorporate images, maps, text, and audio files; we also chose a structure that could be used across different locations, allowing for a similar appearance in engagement (including basic information on the place, issues faced, and resources for further engagement) with variation across sites.

CDPHE’s rationale for the project was to encourage further public engagement, such as inspiring people to go deeper into the website data, become more active in public participation processes (such as comments, surveys, signing up for radon testing, attending a public meeting, and more), and to continue to build better community relations. The office identified a broad audience: community members who might be drawn in by voices they know locally, industry actors who might be moved to improve practices, CDPHE employees themselves who are tasked with prioritizing funding and other resources, and academics who might use the stories as a resource for further research.

Different from some digital storytelling projects, the goal was not to create profiles or portraits of individual people, but to compile stories of places: why do people choose to live, work, and play in these communities? What do residents believe are the greatest strengths of their community, and how could those strengths be used to improve environmental and climate justice? How do residents define environmental crises where they live? Who was most impacted by environmental injustices in their community? And how could the state of Colorado address or remedy it? Our goal was to understand why a community held value, the ways community members articulated crisis or harm, and to try to find a memorable way to share possibilities for EJ.

Although this was a pilot project and imperfect, we designed our research, then, with both questions seeking evidence of harm, damage, and vulnerabilities (e.g., When did you first realize or hear that X environment might be polluted or unhealthy? How would you define the characteristics of the current EJ issue in X?) and with questions aiming to solicit stories of strength, repair, dignity, and honor (e.g., What do you see as the greatest strengths of your community? How could those strengths be used to improve environmental and climate justice? What do you love about X?). To write these questions, we began by establishing research teams to study each location to respect the work that had been done already to tell stories of these places.

Our pilot aimed to share stories for six locations: two better known and four lesser addressed in dominant public discourse that one of us (the teacher) and CDPHE anticipated would rank among the most disproportionately impacted in the state before the quantitative data becoming available (as the Colorado EnviroScreen scores were being developed and calculated simultaneous to our work). We ended up receiving the state's support to publish five, some with more and others with fewer community voices. The sixth did not rank as one of the top 10 most polluted according to the quantitative data, so it was left out (see Footnote 35).

As anyone who has conducted EJ research with or lived in fenceline communities knows, communities can experience narrative fatigue or exhaustion from repeatedly sharing trauma for outsiders, especially when such efforts feel like they do not often result in increased justice. Two sites in our project were at risk for such feelings. The only site on the EJAtlas at the time of our writing was the Suncor corporation's repeated emissions in the water and air of a northern Denver, predominantly Latinx community. ³⁵ The recognition of some fenceline communities' trauma of constantly having to repeat stories of struggle for the state moved us to avoid fetishizing the creation of all new audio and visual elements.

Instead, we decided to create our own or to seek permissions to reuse existing digital stories and to collage them anew into the context of the platform we were helping to develop. It was the state's decision to publish these stories on their website or not, but we hoped our short profiles provided a compelling starting point to pilot stories from these communities. Ultimately, they approved the Suncor story as part of a larger StoryMap of the Commerce City/North Denver community we created, which featured original photography and content, as well as existing reports, oral histories, and interviews to avoid exacerbating narrative fatigue.

As noted, the CDPHE identified four initial sites according to the quantitative data: Lower Arkansas River Valley, Pueblo, San Luis Valley, and the Ute Mountain Ute (UMU) Nation. One of us with journalism experience (Anthony Albidrez) was financially compensated to take the lead on creating the final ArcGIS StoryMaps for the CO EnviroScreen launch, which included two at the beginning of the summer, two at the end, and then the aforementioned UMU StoryMap. Each of the StoryMaps beyond Commerce City/Northern Denver involved interviewing two to three people for audio clips, taking photographs on site, and researching existing resources (including videos and maps), even though background research did not always end up in the final story.

The Lower Arkansas River Valley StoryMap opens with world-famous cantaloupe and ends up focusing on water and climate challenges; the Pueblo County StoryMap begins with a riverwalk and historical story of resilience and then turns to concerns over water and air quality; the San Luis Valley StoryMap begins with discussing recreation areas and agriculture while ending on water and climate concerns; and the UMU Nation StoryMap opens with traditional land relations and then turns to ongoing environmental threats such as water contamination and intensifying drought. Each also amplified voices from interviews, including frontline experts, such as a rancher and owner of a local veterinarian clinic, a farmer, and an Indigenous Environmental Program staff person.

We visited each community aside from the UMU Tribe (given its distance from campus and COVID concerns). With four sites, we invited participants from a list provided by CDPHE of people who were actively involved in local EJ issues; nevertheless, our response rate was less than 50%. Each student was provided grocery store credit of US$25 as a nominal sign of gratitude for community members sharing their expertise; some judged that the situation was not appropriate, as the project was imagined by some as similar to journalism, which does not compensate for interview experts. Compensation on our interdisciplinary team was a worthwhile conversation. Community members interviewed were provided opportunities to edit or to extend all questions. After each StoryMap was completed, CDPHE reviewed and edited them and approved the content.

Given the UMU Tribe is a sovereign nation, we approached it differently than our other sites. In addition to being overseen by CDPHE, our correspondence with tribal officials was overseen by a representative from the Colorado Commission of Indian affairs, Colorado's government-to-government liaison between the state and the UMU Tribe. During meetings with the UMU Environmental Programs Department, we made clear our priority to respect data sovereignty as well as establish relations based in responsibility and reciprocity to the UMU Nation even if that would extend our data collection period. ³⁶ One of us with experience studying Indigenous cultures and recording oral histories (Warren Cook) workshopped sample StoryMaps, interview questions, and potential interviewees with UMU officials past the EnviroScreen launch date to prioritize their consent.

As for potential benefits to the UMU nation, we explained the StoryMap would not guarantee additional EJ funding. Instead, it could provide environmental agencies as well as other audiences with a concise, engaging explanation of UMU EJ concerns, solutions, and already existing initiatives. This StoryMap could also direct viewers to resources already developed by UMU officials as well as be integrated into the UMU Environmental Programs' website itself. This story took the longest to establish with the deepest engagement work on our part, although we still completed it in half a year.

Since Colorado EnviroScreen was not initially designed for StoryMaps, to find them on the website is challenging at the moment. First, one heads to the website framing the tool: cdphe.colorado.gov/enviroscreen. Then, one has to click on a button to go to the tool. Then, one has to scroll down, find the map of the state, and select “Layers.” When the list of options populates, one finally can click on a box labeled “Story Maps,” and the ArcGIS StoryMap icons will appear in the regions in which the StoryMaps are about. This process subsumes the StoryMaps in a complicated way. One way we have begun to increase publicity is to provide interviews with campus reporters to write stories on the maps, directing readers to the site. ³⁷ Furthermore, the state has received positive feedback as they have begun to circulate. For example, the San Luis Valley StoryMap was featured by the Colorado Resiliency Office in its Annual Progress Report 2022 as a Community Spotlight for Supporting Strategies that develop and deploy community engagement and civic capacity tools, strengthen local resilience planning, and integrate equity. ³⁸

CONCLUSIONS

Online platforms potentially increase accountability and enable the prioritization of risks and vulnerabilities among a range of injustices in a particular jurisdiction. While quantitative data are important for transparency, qualitative stories can complement such approaches, enabling the publicity of a more diverse set of epistemologies and public engagement beyond focusing on deficits and exacerbating fatigue. This case study did teach us lessons and solidify our beliefs about best practices.

Our partnership with the state created both possibilities and limitations. For possibilities, we felt confident that our labor would be read by decision makers even if not published; this labor could matter to their own interpretation of the data, future allocation of funding, and, ideally, future public participation from the communities. Externally, we also hoped that signaling even a few qualitative stories that emphasized longer histories, why these communities are valued, and how solutions are being addressed would counter deficit models of communication that would be emphasized by the EnviroScreen going public. For limitations, we did not set up a website to publish the stories void of the vetting from the state, a partnership which included editing feedback, and a different perspective than if we were designing stories solely or primarily with communities.

It could be that some states might choose to partner with local journalists or higher education institutions to create digital storytelling platforms that are in dialogue with but independent of the state. The state approval across multiple agencies slowed down the publications of the stories. For purposes of the class, instead of a more open-ended, collaborative approach, now that a format is settled on, a clearer rubric may have encouraged more interviews and relevant research in the first round of storytelling. CDPHE recently created a more accessible page to find the StoryMaps based on feedback that it could be difficult to locate them using only the links in the Colorado EnviroScreen tool itself, and we anticipate more public engagement to follow. ³⁹

There often remains a tension between the time one has to establish stories in a semester or for a government deadline in comparison to ideal longer relationships for public engagement. Residents were not always eager to respond to our students in the timeline of a semester; so, we had uneven responses despite our efforts. We do not know if this was exhaustion in general (especially since COVID), resistance to working with the state, or fatigue from universities asking communities to share their stories in general. We have been inspired by the UMU Tribe's ongoing willingness to partner with us, and we believe the amount of time spent in dialogue with the community cultivated a compelling StoryMap due to its inclusion of more voices, if nothing else; that timeline, however, was longer than one semester.

We believe that more community feedback is warranted across the sites and have assurances from the state that they are open to edits in the future. For example, CDPHE has expressed interest and a willingness to expand these efforts to host bilingual community meetings where appropriate (as well as translating one of the StoryMaps into Spanish) and to offer ways for residents not on their recommended list of interviewees to provide feedback. We also believe that compensation should be made more transparent if the number of participants increases. We have recommended to CDPHE: (1) to host local meetings at each location; (2) to provide a way for residents to offer feedback moving forward to increase the number of voices engaged and highlighted; and (3) to continue to update the StoryMaps as the quantitative data are moving forward.

CDPHE has hosted community workshops about Colorado EnviroScreen in two of the communities (Commerce City/North Denver and Pueblo) and intends to hold more workshops with the option for community members to provide qualitative information that can be built into the tool in future workshops. It is striking that you can hear from both participants interviewed in the UMU StoryMap that they want non-Natives to visit their community and to listen to them, as well as their land.

In the end, environmental and climate justice relationships rely on building trust over time, and stories will need to proliferate for ongoing public participation to be encouraged; this pilot only aspired to those goals with uneven results, given our limited time frame, resources, and existing community connections. We hope governments, news outlets, and university centers establish similar ArcGIS StoryMaps with ongoing community engagement.

Although our project was a pilot, we conclude from this case study that more support for digital storytelling could enable amplifying EJ epistemologies and fostering accountability for public engagement in state decision-making. EJ is a practice of relationship building that requires ongoing communication between actors involved, not just one-way communication from the state and scientists to communities. Finding more ethical, reflexive modes of sharing environmental injustices and justices on digital platforms through storytelling is worth considering as part of mapping tools.