The importance of telling new climate stories--stories that center the
persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.
"How dare you?" asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the
United Nations in 2019. How dare the world's leaders fiddle around the
edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the
enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter
Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and
that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we
have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they
come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism,
Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the
nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic
activity.
Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The
story that "the economy" takes priority over everything else may seem
foreordained, but, Friederici explains, actually reflect choices made by
specific people out of self-interest. So we need new stories--stories
that center the persistence of life, rather than of capitalism, stories
that embrace contradiction and complexity. We can create new stories
based on comedy and radical hope. Comedy never says no; hope sprouts
like a flower in cracked concrete. These attitudes require a new way of
thinking--an adaptive attitude toward life that slips the narrow yoke of
definition.
