Love this essay from
Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian: "If you win the popular imagination, you change the game’: why we need new stories on climate..."
We need to find and tell new stories about our Climate Chaos.
"Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of
climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by
stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends."
"A lot of people don’t know that
we’ve largely won the battle to make people aware and concerned. The LA Times ran a well-intentioned
editorial last year about how most Americans don’t care about climate breakdown. That was true once, but no longer is. A
Pew Research poll in 2020 concluded that two-thirds of Americans wanted to see more government action on climate, but last summer the scientific journal Nature published a study
concluding that most Americans believe that only a minority (37-43%) support climate action, when in reality a large majority (66-80%) does. That gap between perceived and actual support undermines motivation and confidence. We need better stories – and sometimes better means more up to date."
"A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes
who is actually responsible for climate chaos. It’s been popular to say that we are all responsible, but Oxfam
reports that over the past 25 years,
the carbon impact of the top 1% of the wealthiest human beings was twice that of the bottom 50%, so responsibility for the impact and the capacity to make change is currently distributed very unevenly.
"By saying “we are all responsible”, we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but
a minority needs to change a lot. This is also a reminder that the idea that we need to renounce our luxuries and live more simply doesn’t really apply to the majority of human beings outside what we could perhaps call the overdeveloped world.
What is true of Beverly Hills is not true of the majority from Bangladesh to Bolivia."
Yes. Well, do yourself a favor, read the whole thing. We can change the story. Doom and apocalypse is not a given. "The Future is Unwritten." This is mainly a story of the "Haves" vs. the "Have Nots." It's time to change the story and the reality...
