How It Started
This project started with a question: Why do so many people know about the climate crisis, yet still take so little meaningful action?
As a researcher, I was struck by the gap between knowing and caring. We are surrounded by climate facts, but often untouched by them. Traditional environmental messaging gives us data (graphs, forecasts, percentages) but rarely gives us a reason to feel.
So I turned to story.
Specifically, I turned to allegory: a narrative form that invites interpretation, holds ambiguity, and allows us to emotionally connect with abstract or distant realities. This website began as part of a research project exploring how different forms of media, one data-driven, one allegorical, affect how people engage with environmental messages. It has since grown into something more: a repository for climate-related stories.
The Data
Despite increasing interest in affective and symbolic dimensions of environmental media, there is limited empirical research that directly tests the emotional and cognitive impact of allegorical storytelling, especially when compared to conventional, data-driven formats.
This platform is rooted in a mixed-methods study conducted in the UK. Two groups of participants watched short films about biodiversity loss:
One group watched a conventional, fact-based documentary -Untangled: Biodiversity loss - what on Earth is causing it?, by WWF International.
The other watched a poetic allegory - The Great Silence, By Allora and Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang).
There were two major components to this study - one qualitative and one quantitative.
For the qualitative component, semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed thematically, grounded in a constructivist paradigm that privileges subjective experience and interpretive depth.
In parallel, quantitative data was gathered through a controlled experiment involving surveys rooted in a positivist framework that seeks observable and generalisable patterns.
Both components addressed overlapping research questions, thus allowing for a comparative analysis..
The results? People responded more deeply, and remembered more vividly, when the story invited them to interpret meaning - they didn’t just absorb information.
The allegorical film evoked emotion, reflection, and even discomfor, but it stayed with them. It lingered in memory in a way the data-driven film didn’t. This suggests that symbolic storytelling may offer something data alone can’t: a sense of connection, empathy, and emotional presence.
The Power of Allegory
Allegory isn’t decoration. It’s how we’ve always made sense of the world. From myths to fables, from sacred texts to science fiction.
An allegory takes something familiar, like an animal, a place, or a voice, and uses it to say something deeper. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It asks you to feel.
In an age of ecological collapse, we don’t just need better facts. We need better metaphors. Stories that don’t just explain, but invite us in. Stories that speak sideways, symbolically, and emotionally.
This site is an archive of those stories. It’s also a call to make more of them.
If you have an allegory, a parable, a poem, a short story, a film, then we want to read it, watch it, and share it.
Because climate change isn’t just a scientific problem. It’s a storytelling one.
By Allora and Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang)
By Maya Av-Ron, Marion Coudert, Mylène Cominotti, Sixtine Dano
The Vision
My hope is for this repository to be used as a source of inspiration and entertainment by the wider public, as well as, particularly, people within the film industry.
So here is a shout to all filmmakers, writers, screenwriters, directors and producers - we need more of you creating and telling stories that brings us closer to a more-than-human world.
If you have an allegory, a parable, a poem, a short story, a film, then we want to read it, watch it, and share it.
Because the climate crisis cannot be understood and confronted by only data, but also the arts.
The Earthly Repository also recognises the importance of data in the climate conversation. This is why we publish Field Notes - our regular blog containing non-fiction material to accompany narrative work published in the repository.
Join the climate conversation now, and submit your work to the repository!
Contact Us
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