Narratives

Timothy F. H. Allen, theoretical ecologist and founder of ecological hierarchy theory, has put forward one perspective on methods for conceptualizing socio­ ecological issues: the narrative. A narrative is a theoretical context within which more reductionist views can be interpreted. According to Allen, a narrative is a set of elaborate scaling operations that make things of different sizes commensu rate – earthquake, pestilence, and drought. You can make them commensurate by turning them into events. Thus, generally speaking, the point of science is to improve the quality of the narratives it tells. It uses models to do this, but it also uses narratives. Ultimately, science tells stories. In this perspective, Allen appears to take us a step forward in showing an intrinsic interrelationship between quantitative and qualitative methods. It’s not just that we need them both, but also, that they are in many ways already intertwined, and we benefit from making this more explicit.