# Narrative Frameworks — elSur.Global Source: https://elsur.global/narrative-frameworks # Narrative Frameworks Understandings of the natural world to inspire ecological action A practical guide for artists, writers, educators and communicators working with ecological stories From research to storytellingDeveloped by elSur.Global in collaboration with the ORA Community, these narrative frameworks draw on conversations with fellows across Latin America, India and Africa. They translate research on relational ecologies into ways of telling stories that invite care and action ## The narrative frameworks 01 ### Begin with belonging Ecology is more compelling when it is not treated as an external and geographically distant “nature out there,” but as the place where life develops and the medium where relationships are formed.  Explore + #### Home is where the heart is: the role of the natural world in shaping our sense of place, belonging and identity A river, a mountain, a crop or a landscape are not small details when they are perceived as living beings. Memory adds to the atmosphere. These traits are often what allow a story to become inhabitable. People do not only need to know what is under threat. They need to sense where life is taking place, and why that place matters for the web of life to continue. 02 ### Let memory carry the story Stories do more than illustrate ecological values. In many cases, they shape core identity traits and help sustain values that are under the strain of new beliefs.  Explore + #### Story, memory, and myth work as living infrastructure The goal is not to romanticize myth or memory. It is to recognize when there is an opportunity in the cultural backdrop to empower their narrative work—holding together a worldview, encoding responsibility, or making visible a relation that would otherwise disappear. 03 ### Give people a role in care Ecological narratives become more mobilizing when they show people tending, restoring, monitoring, feeding, teaching, sharing, or defending together. Care is a key element in compelling narratives and stories: it does not appear as softness, but rather as social practice, collective labor, and a way of sustaining life under pressure. Explore + #### Care, stewardship, and participation move people further than disaster These examples point to an important shift: crisis matters, but it rarely carries a story very far on its own. Narratives stimulate change and action when they show how care reorganizes relationships. They also move when the audience is addressed as a potential steward, witness, neighbour, and participant. Care gives people a role that exceeds that of a mere spectator of irrevocable disaster: it tells them where they stand, and what they can do. 04 ### Make relationships visible Many of the strongest ecological narratives abandon the idea that only one kind of knowledge exists. They bring together what dominant storytelling often keeps apart: scientific and ancestral, technical and spiritual, cultural and emotional, observational and affective, communal and experimental. This gives way to ecological and multidimensional understanding and ethics of care. Explore + #### More-than-human relations, multiple ways of knowing, and ecological imagination can build bigger stories Strong ecological narratives do not only add more facts. They alter perceptions. They make it harder to sustain the illusion that humans stand apart from the rest of life, or that institutional expertise is the only source of authority. Stories grow more memorable and alive when they reveal relationships instead of isolating categories. ## Words that Speak of Nature Language shapes the way we see the world.Shared by the ORA Community, these words open up other ways of naming nature and recognizing our relationships with it. ←Anga Baobab→ Guruni, Northern Ghana ### Anga Baobab Of or belonging to the baobab. Refers to relational belonging with the baobab tree, a symbol of ecological memory, intergenerational continuity, and rootedness in place. Akan language, Ghana ### Asase Ya Nature. Literally “the earth” or “earth mother.” Refers to the living ground as a sacred, generative presence that sustains life and holds ancestral continuity. West Africa ### Baobab Ancestral tree. Symbol of longevity, ecological continuity, and reciprocal care between land and community. Spanish, used in Uruguay ### Bicherío A group of animals, of diverse origin, that surrounds you. Shona, Zimbabwe ### Chi No Parakuya Committing a crime, especially a moral or sacred wrongdoing. Refers to actions that violate ecological or ancestral law, particularly harming protected species. Implies that certain plants and living beings are under cultural protection, where destruction is understood as an ethical offense rather than merely a material act. Sanskrit, Pan-Indian ### Durga Hindu goddess of protection, power, and cosmic balance. Embodies the paradox of creation and destruction, reverence and violence. Represents nature as both nurturing and fiercely protective, especially against forces that threaten life. Local language, Bogatoga region, Northern Ghana ### Farafara Regeneration. Refers to processes of renewal, re-growth, and the restoration of life through reciprocal relationships between land, community, and living systems. Gur language family and cultural grouping, West Africa ### Guruni / Gurunsi Refers to a group of related languages and peoples. Implies a shared cosmology grounded in reciprocity with land, ancestors, and living systems. Ibibio language, Nigeria ### Isong Earth, land, and nature. Refers to the living ground as a sacred, sustaining presence that supports life, holds ancestral memory, and connects community to territory. Gur language, spoken by the Kasena people in Ghana and Burkina Faso ### Kasem Name of a language. Also implies belonging to a specific land, culture, and ecological worldview embedded in territory. Guruni / Gur languages, Northern Ghana ### Koya Nature. Refers to the living world as an active, relational presence rather than a passive environment. Bengali and Sanskrit, South Asia ### Nanda Devi Name and form of the same divine feminine force as Durga. Refers to the generative, joyful, and sustaining aspect of nature, while still holding its latent power and capacity for transformation. “निसर्ग”, used in India ### Nisarg Nature, surroundings, but does not include green spaces. Shona ### Njuzu Mermaids or water spirits that guard sacred wells and rivers. Sanskrit, Pan-Indian ### Parisara Ecology, surroundings, or ecosystem. Refers to the relational field of living and non-living elements that sustain life. “पर्यावरण” ### Paryavaran Environment, what surrounds you, can contain green spaces. Scientific term, biological taxonomy ### Psocodea Booklice and barklice. Refers to small insects that live in close association with organic matter, symbolizing the microscopic life that participates in decomposition and ecological cycles. Sanskrit, Pan-Indian ### Prakriti Nature. Refers to the fundamental material reality and generative force from which all living and non-living forms emerge. English ### Pull of Nature An abstract force that acts as a spiritual pull and a universal homecoming. Akan, spoken in Ghana ### Sankofa To return and retrieve what was forgotten. Refers to the act of reclaiming knowledge, memory, and wisdom from the past in order to move forward. Emphasizes continuity between past, present, and future. Shona ### Sango Translates to “wilderness,” “forest,” or “desert”; the closest term to nature in certain African native languages. Guruni / Gur languages, Northern Ghana ### Sasia Nature, land, or the living surroundings. Refers to the ecological field of relationships that sustains and connects human and non-human life. Guaraní, used in Paraguay, Brasil, Argentina ### Tekoha Home, residency, whereabouts. But also habit, behaviour, way and way of being. Nasa Yuwe, Nasa people, Colombia ### Teguala (The’wala) Traditional guide, healer, and knowledge keeper. Refers to those who mediate between community, territory, and spiritual forces, maintaining balance and continuity of life. Guruni, Northern Ghana ### Tutulegbte Nurturing from the soil. Refers to the act of caring for and sustaining life through the soil, emphasizing reciprocal nourishment between land and community. Nguni Bantu languages, Southern Africa ### Ubuntu I am because we are. Refers to a relational understanding of personhood, where one’s humanity emerges through relationships with others, the community, and the living world. Guaraní ### Ykua Ñe’e Meaning “the word of the water” or “to tell the springs”; a project to give voice to nature through community memory. Lippia javanica, Shona language, Zimbabwe and Southern Africa ### Zumbani Medicinal plant used for generations to treat respiratory illness, fever, and infections. Refers to traditional ecological knowledge transmitted through rural and Indigenous communities. Its cultural protection—where cutting it is considered a wrongdoing—has helped ensure its survival and ecological continuity. ## Do / Avoid / Try What follows is a set of practical cues to support narrative work that draw on the insights and experiences shared above. Rather than fixed rules, these are loose guidelines—tips and prompts—that aim to shape stories that resonate more deeply and inspire ecological action. They seek to support narratives that invite action, meaning, and a sense of possibility in your audience.  [Do ⌄](https://elsur.global/narrative-frameworks#panel-do) [Avoid ⌄](https://elsur.global/narrative-frameworks#panel-avoid) [Try ⌄](https://elsur.global/narrative-frameworks#panel-try) ### Do Cultivate these habits 1.Start from a place, a relation, or something  at stake before introducing more abstract concepts. A river, a garden, a crop, a household task, a path, a spring of water—these make the story inhabitable before it becomes analytical.  This does not mean abandoning context or scale. It means giving the story a living threshold. Once the reader is inside a world, the larger ecological and political concepts, such as climate justice or environmental crisis can unfold with more strength. 2.Let care appear in the form of labor, practice, and structure. Treating notions of care as concrete actions means telling what it actually consists of (also interspecies care!). Sometimes it may look like protecting what nurtures a community, cleaning a river together, sharing food, passing down ecological instruction, tending land, observing species, or establishing limits around use and extraction. But care is not an emotional coating, or only a feeling, to make our stories and lives gentler. It is the very form through which survival, belonging, and collective action can be organized. 3.Invoke existing elements of memory, culture, inheritance when they are doing narrative work. Identity is composed of many ingredients. If a story is being carried through tales, folklore, ritual or culture, make it visible. The core of many successful narratives is to connect with who people are. Removing those layers too quickly in order to sound universal or global can flatten the potential of narratives and weaken its power. A living narrative often recognizes differences, and nuances, to bring them closer together. 4.Uncover the hidden ecology that is braided with everyday life. The strongest stories do not isolate ecology and the natural world from daily life. Food, labor, spirituality, education, gender, conflict, or identity are woven together with fauna, flora, environment. Ecological relations are already embedded in daily life: sometimes all it takes is naming them and making them visible. It helps to recognise ecological questions are not separate from people’s living conditions, memories and imaginations. 5.Use scenes, images, and gestures people can remember. People often carry an emotion longer than information. A cassava root that remembers shared moments, the taste of tomato grown in a backyard garden, the joy of a river that gathers a community, a mountain or water body where birthdays or marriages were held are not only examples. They condense shared lifetimes and worldviews. They give the narrative grip to broader senses of place and ecology. 6.Act with care, whatever the message. Imbuing care for nature can result from actions and contents that seem to be distant to the natural world or the crises we want to overcome. Care as a value needs strong roots: the way to tend to them is to understand the soil being sown. If a community or group is already engaged with an idea, cause or problem, understanding their concern and addressing the issue is likely to foster positive reactions and permeability to new ideas. Acting with care—or love, tenderness, solidarity—when working on other aspects of a community’s life, can transcend to invoking care for a place and actions to protect it. ### Avoid Notice what closes a story down 1.Do not externalize ecology. Don’t push it away geographically or socially. When ecology is framed only as “the environment,” it often sounds distant, uninhabited by human life (which sadly is many times the only valued kind of life by many), and detached from the ordinary. It seems to be something that exists in many people’s lives only when they are on holiday. A resonant story rejects this distance and presents ecology as home, care, continuity, food and life. The further away the issue, the harder it becomes for people to locate themselves inside it. 2.Do not flatten communities into narrative devices. Communities, projects and endeavors of resistance are not merely examples or characters for your story. It is crucial to be careful when narrating their contradictions, tensions, or conflicts and what that exposes for the community. When a story turns people into clean symbols—heroes, victims, keepers of timeless truth—it may become easier to package, but less faithful to life. Complexity is not a weakness. Often it is the source of narrative truthfulness. 3.Do not strip out spirituality, myth, or inherited meaning to make your story seem universal. Find ways to explain specific nuances rather than avoiding them. It is often the case that these dimensions are not an anecdote, they are central to how specific communities and their ecological relations are understood, remembered, and acted upon. Removing them can separate the story from its own complexity. Some narratives lose force when every image is decoded and every ambiguity resolved. Clarity matters. Over-translation does not. The challenge is not to exoticize them, but to narrate them, understanding them, when they are carrying ethical, practical, and emotional meaning that cannot simply be replaced by technical language. Perhaps the only way to truly understand this, is to get closer emotional to the people and the community, and try to draw from your first person experience  4.Do not force your own wishes and hopes into realities that are collective, unfinished, or contradictory. Not every story moves in a linear fashion, from problem to solution. Some move through repetition, return, fracture, or long internal conflict. Some hold uncertainty as part of their truth. Imposing an overly polished  story can make the whole narrative or piece feel artificial or false. Be faithful to the true life of the material, especially when the story is about survival, relation, or slow collective struggle. ### Try Make room for an experiment 1.Try asking yourself what the story proposes and what kind of action it inspires, not only what it denounces. This small shift can transform the entire potential of narratives. A story centered only on harm may communicate urgency, but a story that also shows what forms of life, memory, relation, or possibility are being defended often becomes more memorable and more politically generative. It gives the audience something to attach to, not just something to fear. 2.Try locating the forms of care already present in daily life. Before adding an external moral frame on individual actions, try understanding how we got there and where care is already happening. Caring can mean people grow, share, teach, notice, tend, observe, monitor, repair, reuse or remember. Already existing practices can become the spine of the story. They empower and inspire action without relying on external heroes. 3.Try explaining what a local word, metaphor, or relation means when translation would flatten it. Not everything needs to be converted immediately into institutional vocabulary. Sometimes a term, a rhythm, or a form of relation keeps the narrative alive precisely because it resists complete equivalence. Precision sometimes means staying close to the form in which meaning is carried. 4.Try testing what the story provokes. Does this story bring about more desire to action? At the end of drafting a message, it helps to ask one difficult question: does this piece only describe what is broken, or does it also make another way of acting more thinkable? Storytelling in the midst of the polycrisis grows stronger when it envisions what can be done around desirable futures, not only when it grows out of danger or consciousness. A narrative travels further when people can spread their world vision with it. ## Continue with the research [Relational EcologiesThe complete essay, seven learnings and field stories](https://elsur.global/relationalecologies) [The original guideRead Narrative Frameworks at ORA](https://orawards.org/narrative-frameworks-understandings-of-the-natural-world-to-inspire-ecological-action/) [The ORA Ecology zineExplore the companion publication](https://orawards.org/research/ecology/) [A conversation about the researchWatch the conversation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAgk-HgqV0)