Transformation through Story Telling

While on a rational level, most people agree that a fundamental shift in society and culture is necessary to tackle the problems of today, it seems very hard to make that leap on a personal level, leave alone a community or institutional level.
I was reminded of that when I watched the speech that UK prime minister Gordon Brown recently gave at the TED conference. He states that we are at a unique historic moment where we are more interconnected than ever before and we are also developing a global ethic, both promising preconditions for solving global problems - poverty, climate change, economic crisis - in a global way.The solution he proposed remained vague but he clearly saw a need for a central institution which would have the means to globally enforce agreements or regulations. While this may certainly be part of the solution, I missed concepts of co-creation, empowerment, collaboration and individual responsibility in his vision. Being inside a politician's story maybe did not allow him to see that new forms of governance would be central to such a solution, if it is not just to repeat the patterns of administrative institutions stricken by political power-struggles.

Another example for a solution that repeats past patterns is the idea of a British company to put RFID barcodes on trees so that controlling the sustainability of forests becomes more transparent. They even assume that tagging trees could play a role in fighting deforestation, and therefore, could be seen as a measure to stop global warming. But the underlying concept is still that we can care only for things that we can control and that nature has to be properly put into our warehousing system for us to see its value. An alternative to applying technical control mechanisms could be to bring forests and communities together, something that Roald Gundersen and Amelia Baxter are trying to do with their Community Supported Forests. Members will get a specific part of the forest where they "can camp, hunt and garden on the land. They can forage for mushrooms, garlic mustard and wild ginger. They can get firewood, sustainably milled lumber, landscaping stone or fresh spring water." And in doing that, they will have a chance to get to know the forest as a friend and not just as a distant resource. That's a very different story, right?

Recently I heard of the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement to rewrite the stories that we base our assumptions on. "We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world."

Becoming aware of the narratives that we live by and re-inventing them is very much what we need, in my view, to have a new context for transformation - on a personal, community or even institutional level.