Want to save the world? – Become an author!

 

We’ve got narratives for everything. How we deal with war, with sickness, with other (intelligent) species. All of this are things we wrote about a thousand times, had different ideas, different moral ways of dealing with those situations. We – as a society, and as a species – talked about those ideas, about those books and articles, and, as a society we managed to decide which of those narratives are “right” and “wrong; which ones might work out, might happen, and which ones should definitely be avoided.

Those are crises that humanity has already thought through. Some for good reason (war and sickness), some just because we are interested in the novelty of it. But when we get hit by a crisis that doesn’t fit in those schematics (fighting against other humans, against a threat nature is throwing at us, or against “the other”), our narratives fail. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how we deal with the climate crisis, THE crisis that we – as a species – are going to spend at least the 21st and 22nd century (likely way longer) dealing with. It is a slow crisis, self-inflicted and preventable. And in this combination, it is not a crisis like we know it, and know how to deal with.

So, this leads us to not really knowing how to work with it. We don’t “know” – on a societal level – which things to deal with the crisis are “good”, which sacrifices are valid and right, and which ones are wrong.

Luckily, this is something we can stop! Write! Write the stories about the crisis that will define our lives, and the lives of coming generations. Write stories about the good endings, how the world will look when we have “won”, and managed to get through the climate crisis. Write stories about the sacrifices we’ll have to make, about the insecurity when our life changes. Write stories about the bad endings, how the world will look when we fail, and even RCP 8.5 looks like a dream compared to the nightmare we are in. Give us stories that give us the heroes to root for, the good guys that beat the crisis against all odds. Give us the villains, the people we will learn to view as enemies. Don’t be afraid to try out new ideas, to think outside the box. We need this. We need those ideas to give our collective sub-consciousness the narratives to deal with the climate crisis.

Giving the world those narratives will help, maybe more than any act of community organizing can do.

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