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“We need new stories to live by,” says ecolinguist Arran Stibbe on the Climate Curious podcast. Current narratives based on growth and consumerism are leading us down the wrong road. Instead, let’s focus on new stories that show nature as not something to be exploited, but as a home for all life. Tune in to learn how your metaphors might just save the world!
Learn how to analyse the stories we live by in Arran’s free online course, ‘Stories We Live By’.
Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
Transcript
Introduction to Climate Quickies
[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite sized nuggets of climate goodness from our 10x London experts in under 5 minutes.
[00:00:08] Ben Hurst: In this week’s Climate Curious, we’re asking, can your metaphors and your similes save the world? Let’s head over to Aaron Stibbe, this week’s resident ecolinguist and [00:00:20] professor, who shares why we need new stories to live by, and what those stories might be.
[00:00:27] Stay curious!
Meet Aaron Stibbe: The Ecolinguist
[00:00:31] Arran Stibbe: I’m Aaron Stibbe. I’m Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire. And what I teach is mostly about [00:00:40] ecological communication, but I do it in various degrees. So I do it in literature degree or I do it in education. And it’s really a message that goes across all disciplines.
[00:00:51] This idea that the stories we live by are leading us on a path towards destruction and we need to search for new stories to live by.
The Power of Words and Stories
[00:00:59] Arran Stibbe: We need new [00:01:00] words for nature because words shape how we see the world. Words convey particular kinds of stories, and stories are in our minds, and they shape how we think, how we talk, and how we act.
[00:01:14] So, we think in terms of words, and therefore, our actions [00:01:20] depend on the words in our minds. So, Stories are what shape the way that we see the world. And in our industrial civilization, there’s certain stories that are not particularly helpful. Stories of consumerism, stories of unending economic growth, stories that see [00:01:40] nature as a machine.
[00:01:41] Just these general stories that are putting us on a path towards ecological collapse.
[00:01:52] I think it’s a little bit deeper than just Stop using this word and start using this word.
Rethinking Society and Consumerism
[00:01:59] Arran Stibbe: I think that [00:02:00] we need to fundamentally rethink our entire society. And that will need a new vocabulary, it will need a new grammar, it will need new narratives. So we have to have like a fundamental change in how we see the world.
[00:02:16] So one simple thing would be, is it a [00:02:20] climate crisis? Or is it a consumerism crisis? That if you think about climate change as a symptom of some deeper economic stories that are not working, then perhaps we could start to change these, these deeper levels of [00:02:40] our society. So we could start to think of radically different ways to think about consumerism and economic growth.
[00:02:51] What it means to be human, just really fundamentally reconsidering what it means to be human. So, deep changes, uh, and where [00:03:00] do we start?
Inspirational Leaders and Eco Narratives
[00:03:00] Arran Stibbe: Well, I, I think we should start by looking at inspirational leaders, inspirational speakers from around the world who are expressing a different vision and doing it using particular phrasings and particular grammatical ways of expressing things, particular metaphors and narratives.
[00:03:18] We can look at these [00:03:20] leaders. And we can try and extract what some of these techniques they use are, and then we can put that into practice in our own communication. Rachel Carson is often credited with starting the whole environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. And she starts Silent [00:03:40] Spring with A fable.
[00:03:42] She starts with the words, There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. And in a fable, often, it starts with, like, an equilibrium. But then, there’s a degeneration. Something terrible happens. And [00:04:00] she says, A strange blight crept over the area.
[00:04:03] Some evil spell had settled on the community. Everywhere was a shadow of death. So she’s using very lyrical. Powerful writing to really encourage people to think deeply and to care about nature.[00:04:20]
Analyzing Texts and Challenging Stories
[00:04:23] Arran Stibbe: So there’s many kinds of eco linguistics, but the kind that I practice analyzes texts of various kinds, which could be everyday texts like magazines and newspapers, even the weather forecast, analyzes these texts to reveal the underlying stories. of our [00:04:40] unsustainable civilization. And then we have to resist those stories.
[00:04:46] But more importantly, we have to search for new stories to live by. So we look at traditional and indigenous cultures around the world, we look at various movements, and we reveal some [00:05:00] positive, inspiring ways of using language that can build a fundamentally different kind of civilization. So one example of the stories we live by is this story that retail sales are good.
[00:05:13] So when supermarkets and shops are selling lots of things, and that’s represented really [00:05:20] positively in newspapers, but when sales go down, that’s represented as a disaster. And one Christmas, supermarket sales went down. And it was represented in newspapers using words like appalling, slump, horror show, decline, disastrous, dismal.
[00:05:38] But then, the summer [00:05:40] before that, there was a heatwave, and there was a lot of sales of meat, and alcohol, and hay fever remedy. And then this was expressed incredibly positively. Golden, buoyant, boosted, uplift. Excellent. So we’ve got this fundamental story that the more that gets sold, the better, but of course [00:06:00] all of these things have ecological consequences and consequences for climate change.
[00:06:05] So this is a story that we really need to rethink and at a deeper level. Just this whole story that the point of a company is to make a profit no matter what the damage is to the environment or the harm is to consumers. [00:06:20] That point of being a consumer is just to consume as much as you can possibly consume.
[00:06:26] So these are the kind of the stories of industrial civilization that we need to challenge.
Framing Climate Change
[00:06:37] Arran Stibbe: So there’s various ways to frame climate [00:06:40] change. So, you could think of climate change as an environmental problem, which a lot of people see as something which is a long term issue, it’s about future generations and it’s a kind of thing to be solved through recycling. Or if you wanted to make it sound more urgent, you could frame climate change as a security threat.[00:07:00]
[00:07:00] Which it is, and then that makes the whole thing sound more urgent and you would put more resources into solving it. If you wanted to frame climate change in a way that makes it an ethical issue, then you could think about climate change as a form of violence. So it’s violence against people in the developing countries that is caused by [00:07:20] overconsumption in the richer countries.
[00:07:23] Sometimes metaphors are really useful. So there’s a metaphor which is attributed to Chief Seattle. It says, Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. And this [00:07:40] metaphor is useful for representing humans as part of nature. That if we destroy nature, we’re also destroying ourselves.
Eco Narratives and Their Impact
[00:07:55] Arran Stibbe: Eco narratives. are stories which are in the traditional story format. [00:08:00] They are a sequence of logically connected events. And stories in this sense are fundamental to human cognition. So we can use stories, eco narratives, in ways that can really get to the heart of the way that people think about the world.
[00:08:18] So one example is [00:08:20] Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she wrote a book which you could say is about sustainability, but she started it with a creation story, a sky woman falling from the sky, being caught in the embrace of animals who, and then working together with the animals to create the earth. And so this story shows a very different [00:08:40] attitude from the traditional way of thinking about the world.
[00:08:42] The world in industrial societies, that nature is not there to be exploited, that you work with nature to provide a home for humans and all of life. So this use of eco narratives can be very powerful [00:09:00] to convey things to people.
Free Online Course and Final Thoughts
[00:09:07] Arran Stibbe: We have a free online course. www. storiesweliveby. org. uk And at the moment there’s 3, 600 people who are taking that course. [00:09:20] And this course will walk you through how to analyse the texts that surround us in everyday. Society, how to reveal these negative stories, and also how to search for the positive news stories that we live by.
[00:09:37] The starting point, I would say, is to work [00:09:40] out your own value system, which we call an ecosophy or ecological philosophy. Because then you can think about what kind of world you want to bring into being. And that’s an essential first step before you then start to think about what kind of language do we need to find to bring that [00:10:00] world.
[00:10:00] Ben Hurst: into being. Thanks for listening to This Quickie.
[00:10:04] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon. Until next time,
[00:10:09] Ben Hurst: stay curious.
