Why Stories Matter for Ocean Literacy

A guest article by our new associate in Storytelling, Marla Lise.

I grew up wanting to be a conservation scientist.

My stories, toys, and spare time were filled with nature-related words, animal species, and exciting adventures that characters would partake in hopes of preservation, rehabilitation, and exploration.

Later in my life, I realised that very few children grew up into adults searching for those same stories. While I continued, now reading, writing, and playing the main character in some of them, many others had moved on to books about how to get as much money as possible, in the shortest amount of time possible. Books about what time to wake up to be as productive as possible, to make more money. Books about what industry, business, or investment would make you the most money ... in the quickest time, of course.

Many of these adults, I also learned, were so busy making money (quickly), that they stopped reading stories. They stopped reading stories to themselves, and they also stopped reading stories to their children.

And so, along with the loss of storytime, imagination, and a creative use of words, the intrinsic human connection with nature also started to disappear.

Professor Miles Richardson published an article in the journal, Earth, correlating the disappearance of simple natural words, like tree, river, flower, and moss, with a 60.6% decline in people’s connection to nature.

And so, on top of losing stories, we’re losing a part of ourselves.

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David Attenborough said, “No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”

And for the majority of the humans that inhabit this vast and varied planet who’ll never have the ability to experience its true wonder, diversity, and magic – why would they care about its destruction?

There was a time, long ago, when people told stories of how the earth was made. They didn’t have scientific data or wear blinders of today’s modernity. They had stories - made up of whimsy, wonder, and lore. They told stories of ancient tortoises holding up the earth from the corners, of giant serpents who breathed life into living beings during the Dreamtime, of the Sky Woman who landed on geese feathers and cried out tears of trees and greenery.

All the stories portrayed Earth as a gift to us, the feeble human beings, who were allowed to be here on Earth as her responsible stewards. To live in harmony with other living beings, who were no better nor worse than us.

They are being, as we are being.

Inter-being and interconnectedness.

“I am because we are.”

But somewhere along the way, definitions changed to separate human beings from the rest of nature.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines nature as, “the phenomenon of the physical world collectively; especially plants, animals and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations”.

And it is not the only one. Currently, all English dictionaries separate humans from the rest of nature.

And if we are thought to be separate from, placed above, or labelled as entitled – why should we care?

And then, why would we protect?

Many tales, lores, fireside stories and songs have been lost over time, gone up in smoke along with the important messages they carried and the myriad languages that formed them.

We’re losing our culture to remain connected to nature as quickly as we’re losing nature itself. In 2025, the planet lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of tropical primary forest.

But how many people will know that?

How many will care?

And how many will understand the repercussions and consequences that losing primary forests will cause?

And those are statistics about forests. Artifacts, tangible, visible, physical trees, plants, and greenery that we can see.

How then the ocean, that most cannot?

Who will shed a tear when fish species become extinct, when salinity concentrations reach catastrophic levels, and when corals bleach to a point of no return?

This is how the vicious cycle keeps spinning, powered by infinite growth, apathy, and a belief that ignorance is bliss. And so, the planet continues to suffer – as we do – because essentially, we are nature.

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A lot of science doesn’t find its way into bedtime reading. It’s not some juicy bit of news you want to read on the commute home after a long day of work either.

It has been composed, a priori, in a deliberately convoluted, semantically labyrinthine, and epistemologically discombobulated manner; nevertheless, it remains internally coherent, methodologically defensible, and empirically watertight, and should therefore be read and absorbed.

You get my point.

How can we get people to care when they don’t understand the science?

How can we convince people to change when they don’t see a reason to?

People will not protect what they do not love. They will not love what they do not understand, and they will not understand what they do not know.

And so, we, who have the ability to teach and to communicate science, must.

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While stories inspire curiosity, ocean literacy turns that curiosity into understanding, which continues on like a sea of change, a ripple effect into more sustainable decision-making, eco-conscious values, and ultimately behaviours that protect our planet and all who inhabit it.

Teaching the rest of the world about environmental literacies like ocean literacy, for example, is a key to unlocking a whole library of new stories, encyclopedias of wisdom, scrolls of ancient wisdom.

We have now taken on the responsibility of sitting around campfires, meticulously repeating truth so that all generations remember, relearn, and act in a way that heals the planet, nature, and us.

Reiterating the knowledge until the world echoes back in unison.

Wrote learning.

Repeat after me.

We must tell stories slow, intentionally, and we must tell stories true. For the world around with its algorithms, fake news, and inauthentic entertainers looking for a quick buck – will confuse people. These stories can reinforce cultures of competition, inequality and endless growth, which influences how we value one another and the natural world.

We must revisit the stories of the land, the ocean, and the forests, of the sky and sea ...

Otherwise we will lose ourselves, all of nature, completely.

We must learn, so we can teach.

We must unlearn, so we can understand.

And we must seek to find our tribes, our communities, our islands of coherence – where we are not alone in this, our mission, our responsibility. Our purpose to be placed here on this planet as storytellers, educators, and changemakers.

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you… but when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship into a sacred bond.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Marla Lise is a global educator, eco-literary advocate, and good faith communicator. With a deep love for nature and the planet, she uses words as catalysts to drive systemic change. For more information on Marla’s work, see Our People and her webpage here.