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A few quick thoughts about the media and the planetary crisis, and why we're in this clusterf*** in the first place.
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2. Media and culture have key roles to play in increasing humanity's chance of successfully meeting the global emergency of climate change, biosphere degradation and the increasing instability of unsustainable systems.
3. Our societies discuss big-picture problems through the stories we tell about those problems.
Science, though critical, directly reaches very small audiences.
For the vast majority of humanity, stories largely told by professional storytellers shape our understanding.
Science, though critical, directly reaches very small audiences.
For the vast majority of humanity, stories largely told by professional storytellers shape our understanding.
4. To the extent we hope for action, there are three questions we need to be asking ourselves:
1. Are we the stories we tell addressing these unprecedented problems?
2. Are we telling the right stories?
3. Are we getting the meaning of those stories right?
1. Are we the stories we tell addressing these unprecedented problems?
2. Are we telling the right stories?
3. Are we getting the meaning of those stories right?
5. No one who gets the gravity of our situation thinks that a large enough share of the stories we tell are stories that address the crisis we're living in.
The planetary crisis is the reality defining this era for all humanity.
Stories about it are still relatively infrequent.
The planetary crisis is the reality defining this era for all humanity.
Stories about it are still relatively infrequent.
6. We could have a good debate about why that's so—lack of audience demand, poor leadership, generational disconnection, the difficulty of finding new ways to report these huge trends, etc etc
Fundamentally, tho, we're failing to give the crisis the coverage it deserves.
Fundamentally, tho, we're failing to give the crisis the coverage it deserves.
7. My personal take is that a major part of the problem lies with our practice of covering these stories thru a climate/environment beat in journalism, or in fiction crafting overt "message" stories (or worse yet, limiting them to a new genre).
8. These practices limit the kinds of stories we think to tell about the crisis around us, hemming us in when reality is that this crisis now runs deep into every field of human endeavor, and has already begun to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
9. The storytellers most trained to find interesting narratives in fields like finance, law, national security, health care (and so on) aren't trained to see the extent to which the planetary crisis is now a—if not the—driving realities in the fields they cover.
10. But scads of fantastic climate/sustainability stories about the changes going on in all these "non-environmental" fields are waiting to be told.
We're starting to see some great work done; that said, it's still a trickle running in the river of stories.
We're starting to see some great work done; that said, it's still a trickle running in the river of stories.
11. I think, though, that we may be about to enter a golden age for storytelling about the planetary crisis, because I see surprising progress on the most difficult part of all this: asking if we're telling the stories we're telling right.
12. This crisis is—at the core—a set of massive shifts in human systems. That means conflict.
Those conflicts say everything there is to say about who humans are, how power works in our societies, what we believe, how we see others, even what our place in the universe might be.
Those conflicts say everything there is to say about who humans are, how power works in our societies, what we believe, how we see others, even what our place in the universe might be.
13. The planetary crisis is a powerful new mirror held up to the human condition and the nature of our societies.
14. There is still a strong desire on the part of some to make the planetary crisis the "proof" that their old stories (about capitalism or the costs of a sinful society or human fallibility or whatever) are Truth.
Those are largely uninteresting stories.
Those are largely uninteresting stories.
15. There is also, though, a growing network of writers (and other storytellers) who see that the very newness of world ahead of us—combined with the technical capacities to tell stories in new ways—creates space to tell stories full of meaning we haven't yet explored.
16. Because if anything's true about the century ahead, it's that the physical world we built up in the last century—the world in which we live our lives, with all their fear, desire, emptiness, love, longing and hope—doesn't mean anything like what we thought it meant.
17. and, as @GreatDismal once said, "There are no maps for these territories."
18. So much predatory delay is, at it's root, a denial of this discontinuity.
19. Too little storytelling engages with the implications of discontinuous change—almost none grapples with what it means to be living in a world where predictability itself has been undermined.
20. Which is a shame, because it means some of the most powerful stories we could be telling—stories that could help audiences come to grips with their lives in this new world—are still going mostly untold... so far.
Telling those stories is the way forward.
Telling those stories is the way forward.
