Time to do some imagination exercises. Here's the setup:

• You're hosting a session to understand potential climate-related impacts of a project. You've prepared carefully, cuz you're awesome. Obviously.
• There are maps on the walls. A very genuinely cool-lookin' report on the table. You even packed a few extra copies.
• You have a draft session guideline with questions about water, habitat, wildfire, and resilience. Important topics.
• You're feeling good. You slept well. Even meditated. That Calm App you've been using is doing wonders for you these days. You look up around the room, and confidently ask of no one in particular:

"What changes are you seeing on the land?"

No one responds for a while. One person raises their hand. And then proceeds to tell you a story:

Once upon a time, a little girl stood beneath a rooftop in lands far away and caught the rain in her hands. As she watched the drops shimmer in her palms, the land remembered their journey.

Before they touched her cheek, the drops had drifted as clouds. Before that, they rose as mist from the leaves of a tree. Before they rested in those leaves, they travelled through roots deep beneath the earth. Before that, they slept in darkness beneath the soil. Before that, they danced in rivers. Before that, they lay as snow upon distant mountains.

They had been travelling. Since the beginning of time.

That is the way of the world. Nothing stays. Nothing is lost.

And though the little girl did not yet know it, she belonged to the same story. The water in her blood had travelled across valleys and oceans. The breath in her chest had passed through forests. For the land carries all things for a time. The rivers. The clouds. The rain.

And someday, when the little girl stops walking upon the land, the land will gather her and carry her onwards, just as it has carried the rivers, the clouds, and the rain.

Now....how many of you read this story and went "Huh?"

Sure, there is a theme about the water cycle. But what about the impacts? What does this tell us about climate change? What does it tell us about the project? What should we write down in the engagement summary?

What do we ask next? What do we do with it?

And perhaps most importantly:

What does the story say? What does it not say? How do we make sense of it?

Now my first reaction to the story is not analytical whatsoever. Full disclosure, I'm vibing! I'm distracted imagining the little girl. I'm imagining my grandma telling the story. I'm imagining drops of water travelling through rivers, mountains, soil, trees, clouds, and rain.

The story, for me, creates images long before it creates conclusions.

And that is precisely its power.

Stories do something that technical reports rarely accomplish. They evoke emotion. They create relationships. They invite us into a way of seeing.

As cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner observed, human beings make meaning through narrative as much as through logic. Facts tell us what happened. Stories help us understand what those facts mean.

The challenge for practitioners is that stories often communicate differently than the forms of evidence we are trained to recognize. A technical report seeks to reduce ambiguity. A story often expands it. While a technical report tells us what to think about, a story invites us to think. Full stop.

So how might we approach a story like this in an impact assessment or planning process?

In case you were tempted, the answer is not immediately translating it into bullet points. And certainly not dismissing it because it doesn't resemble conventional evidence.

Instead, we begin with curiosity.

What is the story teaching?

At first glance, the story appears to be about water. That was easy. At a deeper level though, it may be teaching something about relationship. Water is never presented as an isolated object. It moves continuously through mountains, rivers, soil, trees, clouds, rain, and people.

The story also repeatedly dissolves the boundaries we often impose between these things. The little girl isn't separate from the water. The forest isn't separate from the atmosphere. The river ain't separate from the snow. Everything exists within a larger cycle of movement and reciprocity. From an impact assessment and planning perspective, that alone is significant.

Many environmental assessments organize knowledge into categories: hydrology, vegetation, wildlife, atmosphere, people. The story organizes them differently. It presents them as one system. That means perhaps how we think about water and the climate needs to be more holistically, more in-relation-with-everything else.

What questions might you ask?

Short answer: please don't just repeat the question. Think deeper. Think with your inside voice first before asking the questions out loud. Put differently, the questions below are the questions of curiosity for how to engage with the story:

• What relationships in this story matter most? (remember those network diagrams you geeked out about in first year uni?!)
• What connections are being highlighted? (yup still the network diagrams. Just a bendier, more beautiful way to consider them)
• What changes would disrupt these relationships? (therein lies a nugget on impact pathways and stressors)
• What responsibilities do people have within this system? (therein lies a nugget about the biophysical/human connection)
• What would it mean for water's journey to be interrupted? (voila! - impact!)
• What parts of this journey are vulnerable? (aha - this might deepen your perspective on risk)
• What has changed within living memory? (oooh cumulative impacts alert!)
• What must continue for future generations? (mitigation much?!)

Notice how different these questions are. They move beyond extracting facts. They seek to understand meaning.

What is absent from the story?

Now, this bit is equally important.

The story contains no measurements, thresholds, predictions, percentages, recommendations. That doesn't make it incomplete. It just means the story is doing different work. Its providing the frame through which impacts become meaningful.

The technical studies may tell us how much water is available. The story may tell us why water matters. While technical studies may identify a risk, stories may reveal what is at stake.

Both forms of knowledge are necessary.

Reading Stories as Practitioners and Planners

Folklorists have long argued that stories are not merely containers for information. They are expressions of worldview. Anthropologist Keith Basso wrote that stories often function as repositories of cultural knowledge, carrying teachings about relationships, responsibilities, place, and identity.

When looked at it this way, the question is no longer about what facts a story is trying to communicate, but more what way of seeing the world is this story inviting us to understand? And often its that shift that unlocks a much deeper understanding of the story and its relevance to the conversation.

This shift matters. Because impact assessment planning are ultimately not about projects. They're processes about about relationships. Relationships between people and place. Between present and future. Between humans and ecological systems.

Between what we value and what we choose to protect.

The Practitioner's Task

When someone shares a story in an impact assessment and planning process, our responsibility is not to immediately convert it into a mitigation measure.

Our first responsibility is to listen. To take a beat to understand the worldview being expressed. To recognize that stories often carry knowledge in beautiful forms that resist simplification.

And to sit with the possibility that the most important thing a story offers is not an answer. It is a different question.

Perhaps the story of the little girl and the rain is not telling us about water at all. Perhaps it is asking whether we understand that we, too, belong to the same journey.

And if we do, what responsibilities follow from that understanding?