Small hands shot up: “The sea rises and floods everything,” one child said. “Fires are gonna burn all the forests,” another added. “We all die.”
Silence.
And that was pretty much it.
But ask these children to picture what we do about it, and suddenly their extraordinary imaginations contract to a recycling bin.
The climate movement, of which I’m a proud member, has been complicit in this communications crisis. Most messages shared by progressive forces are merely an ad nauseam echo of: climate change is real, humans are to blame, and the consequences are catastrophic. I call this framing the earned dystopia, and it’s so ubiquitous most pre-teens can parrot it.
One reason for this imagination deficit is that storytelling has been treated as merely the spoonful of sugar to help the scientific medicine go down. Storytellers are asked to act as the marketing department for climate science.
We have clear science and brutal direct experience of climate change, so why haven’t politicians and populations sprung into action?
Long before humans measured atmospheric carbon, we whispered tales of flood and fire. Stories have always helped us understand who we are and what we might become. Increasingly, researchers are proving this singular power of stories to spark ideas, possibilities, and acts of imagination.
Today, we don’t particularly lack information about heat pumps, electric vehicles, or regenerative agriculture. More details than you could ever want are just a click away. What we’re missing is an emotional architecture for change; how it feels to want a different future and to believe we can reach it.
Climate politics has sensed this power, but translated it into the narrower language of “public narrative.” Politicians now plot narratives for electrification and renewables. Campaigners construct counter-narratives to fossil fuels. Brand teams test sustainability narratives against each other. In climate circles, everyone is searching for the breakthrough narrative that will finally unlock action. But too often the term is simply a cypher for messaging. And messaging is not the same thing as mythology.
We need a plot twist in climate storytelling, moving beyond the threat and into the thrilling adventure of solving it. Tales of the messy decades in which billions of people change how they power homes, grow food, travel, build cities, and protect one another from a climate that has already changed
Culture makers are beginning to catch on. I’ve been invited by television and film writers, social-media creators, and brands to help climate solutions appear in comedy, drama, adventure, and everyday life. Ever more box-office hits, like The Wild Robot, Avatar, and the upcoming Digger, reflect our fight against climate and nature crises. Sesame Street is helping kids cope with extreme weather. New climate fiction novels weave answers into stirring worldbuilding. These all work because they are compelling and moving stories above all, not climate science lectures dressed in a thin veil of narrative. Many other scriptwriters, novelists, social media creators, musicians and artists must add to this list.
When I return to that classroom over the coming years and ask the same two questions, the first answers will remain frightening. But when I ask what we can do about it, I hope every hand will shoot up, because we’ll have filled kids' imaginations with enough possibilities that they can start inventing answers we haven’t thought of yet. That will be a good day.
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