How to Build Narrative Power and Co-Create a Just Future

By Adam Szymanski, Post-Growth Institute

Before we can set to work tearing down old systems and building up better ones, we first have to imagine where we want to go.

The Kind of Heroes We Need to Actually Save the Planet

By Rena Priest, YES! magazine

As storytellers, we plant beliefs that blossom into the structure of the world. In these times, we need a new structure—a narrative built on climate justice.

Here in these End-Beginning Times

By Laura Johnson, Tikkun

Now, here in a changed world with a broken-open heart, I look into the eyes of beauty and invite in the fullness of it all, the grief and the love, the fear and the hope, the pain and the joy.

The Cost of Knowing

By Dougald Hine, Bella Caledonia

What we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change calls our way of living into question. To take this evidence seriously leads to difficult questions about the stories we have been telling about the shape of history, the nature of the world in which we find ourselves and the virtue of achievements in which we have taken pride.

Courting the Wild Twin: Excerpt

By Martin Shaw, Resilience.org

This condition of wondering is still absolutely intact in us. It is. Amongst the loaded shopping trolleys of Walmart and Tesco, the fluorescent tech hubs, flicker-screens and finger-beckoning apps, it’s still there. This raw, imaginative, holy thing. There’s an audacity to it, but it’s what we’ve always done.

‘The Story of Our Lifetime and Our Planet’ — Environmental Journalism in Troubled Times

By Tara Lohan, The Revelator

But I feel like this story is really the story of our lifetime and our planet. It’s the story that crosses every boundary that we humans have artificially put upon the world. Anybody who can be engaged in dealing with it, on any level, should do that. And so, being a journalist, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell these stories.

Rumpelstiltskin, Debt and Economic Liberty

By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta

Modern economic systems have sanctified the payment of debt but this is not some natural or God-given rule, rather a situation designed by financial elites. The wisdom of Rumpelstiltskin needs to be revisited and adapted for modern times.

In Search of a Lexicon for the Deep Core

By Charlotte Du Cann, Charlotte Du Cann blog

The three R's of Deep Adaptation are tasks, they demand we leave a lot of our identity and cleverness behind, our comfort zones, our egoic insults, the traumas we cling to like antiquated gas masks, long after the war is over.

Storytelling, Imagination and Activism

By Shana McDavis-Conway, Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

Storytelling is a powerful political tool.  Becoming better storytellers has been shown to make a huge difference to the impact and efficacy of activist groups and campaigns.

The Sun: A Mystery (Excerpt)

By Courtney White, Resilience.org

A murdered ranch employee. A vanished suspect. A stolen rodeo horse. A black helicopter. Angry environmentalists. Menacing oil-and-gas developers. A Sasquatch hunter gone astray. A mysterious billionaire. A missing can opener…

Hedgespoken, ‘a Vehicle for the Imagination’

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth.  The story that we are separate.  Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive. 

Singing Stories, Telling Tales

By Shiba Desor, Dark Mountain Project

Stories have always had an important place in human history. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, ‘Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination’.