Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The future will be a series of shifting baselines, where perhaps the gift of a spare bedroom will be an incredible act of generosity. But without members of a community working together, supporting one another, future wellbeing will collapse like a poorly made bridge.
What are the seeds we need for a new story for humanity and the Earth to become fully alive? This future, although it seems so far away, is in the ground under our feet, and in the love we have for each other, for our communities and for the Earth Herself.
Ann Randolph is an award-winning writer and performer. She has performed her solo shows in theaters across the U.S, garnering awards along the way. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
In order to write creatively about food cultivation, climate change, and social justice, we need to understand how they operate in the world we live in. Imagining a better future, therefore, requires keen and purposeful observations of the present. It requires science.
The wider ‘Ecosinema’ programme offers a chance to expand our collective consciousness around what we can do to care for the health of our waters and our world. And weather the storms to come.
As modern society faces climate change and the sixth extinction, these oldest stories of place and survivance are evolving. And they are also remaining the same, allowing us to see the past and imagine alternate futures as we move with the Earth around the sun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
