Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope

by Peter Friederici, Kathleen Dean Moore (Foreword)

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 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.

Genres: Climate Change

184 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2022

Reviews

[M. Heitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written discussion of how we talk about climate change. I'm familiar with most of what's here so I was a bit impatient to get to the point. Friederici argues that we need to change the narrative, the stories we tell. So much of our discussion of climate change focuses on the old frames, like jobs vs. the environment, not centering that there is a far more complex story to tell. He talks about how people become disheartened with the apocalyptic story line and the frustration of seeing no progress. We need to talk in terms of a collective "we" to gain that collective energy of acting together, to find hope and even comedy, in the work of mitigating climate change, rather than only talking in terms of tragedy. By working together, the act itself creates hope and more resilience against the uncertainty and the unknown of the outcome, as well as the power and self-interest in the way.
I'm oversimplifying the message I took from this. And it even inspired some of my own writing. But I really wish there was something more concrete for building that collective effervescence. There are a lot of ideas here for ways of thinking -- but not necessarily for ways of acting.