Falling in love with life
in the places we live
In the places we live
Could it be that the integrity, stability and beauty of nature is the wellspring of human intelligence? Could it be that the conquest of nature, however clever, is in fact a war against the source of mind?”
David Orr
I feel like a load of projects, inquiries and missions are starting to converge right now. As my last post for 2020 intentions noted, I’m trying to catalyse a mobilisation mission to get deeply into this year and beyond, properly funded and resourced with partners who are 100% in the ‘re-imagine everything space’ and aware of the urgency for a system shift if we are to adapt and build resilience as a culture to survive and hopefully thrive in what is coming our way.
I’m several years down the line exploring and experimenting with how radical collaborations across cultural and creative sectors, in the spirit of becoming crew, could play a role in the shift to a new paradigm.
At the end of 2019 I started working on an experimental project with The Green Economy Coalition and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, two global networks working on economic transformation. We believe that while social and environmental crises are taking hold around the world, there seems to be no public narrative that explains how we can fix our predicament. We lack stories of possibility rooted in new credible beliefs grounded in ecological limits and human dignity. We recognise that before change can happen, we need convincing and credible stories of change. More on this project coming very soon.
In 2019 just after the Extinction Rebellion provocation to the advertising and marketing sector I found myself in a remote house in France and was motivated to write a short draft paper, working towards an open, networked, collaborative brief that starts to explore how we might shift our way of thinking and seeing the world and our relationship to the more than human world, especially locally where we live.
It was thought starters on how creative culture and communications businesses who are motivated to evolve might respond to the climate and ecological emergency, to help us re-imagine a new way of being in the world, beyond consumerism, that might catalyse the healing, restoring and regenerating of people, communities and the wider more than human world which supports all life.
I can see more and more creative businesses, studios, creators and cultural influencers are going to have to start stepping into this moment in time and using their energy, skills and gifts to work on shifting our collective cultural narrative and experience away from this planet and soul destroying way of being on the earth, to something with the potential to heal, regenerate and sustain life. To work beyond just their own projects, clients and businesses.
Why ?because no one else is going to do it for us, in the timelines we have. It’s going to require mass participation and radical collaboration with a living, emergent strategy, which can adapt and evolve as a field of change.
The stories we tell about ourselves and our relationship to the world and how we experience them is a big part of this enormous complex mission that we must go on as a species in light of the climate and ecological crisis.
This crisis is happening because of how we are living on this planet. Completely out of sync with the natural world, which creates the conditions for life, we are now destroying ecosystems at a rate which is accelerating towards irreversible tipping points.
Here’s a starters for 10 from last year on one way to start changing that story, it’s draft, raw but I thought I’d publish it….you know, so the universe might respond.
This is a mission that I feel deeply motivated to help bring into the world. It’s one which we will be exploring with others in the next phase of this project outlined above.
Towards a brief…
“Stories matter, they’re not just entertainment — they matter because humans are narrative creatures. It’s not simply that we like to tell stories, and to listen to them, its that narrative is hard wired into us. It’s a function of our biology and the way our brains have evolved over time.. We make sense of the world and fashion our identities through the sharing and passing on of stories. And so the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, shape not just our own lives, but the world around us. The cultural narrative is the culture.”
Sharon Blackie
We are living in a story where nature meets culture head on, a culture of globalised consumption and industrial growth society — this is what is driving climate breakdown and ecological collapse.
Today we are living on a dying planet — species extinction, biodiversity collapse, oceans choking on plastic, overfished and heating up to dangerous levels, soil degraded by intensive agriculture and pesticides, air pollution, rocketing carbon emissions, the fundamental elements of life are in serious danger.
And this is driven by a story of fear, greed, power, material wealth, getting ahead of everyone and the illusion of separation, that we are somehow not part of this wider cycle of life.
We are at the tail end of a belief that has powered industrial societies, that ‘nature is a resource — dead material’, it’s a spell and that spell is weakening.
But this story of infinite industrial growth, of dominion over nature, a few hundred years old, which when we think in longer ‘earth time’ has only evolved in the last few minutes of the human civilisation project, well this story could bring to an end the miracle of billions of years of the evolution of life as we know it and the collapse of the awe, wonder and diversity of life on this incredible life sustaining planet.
To change that we need a new story of a living planet, a world that is alive and intelligent, complex, beautiful and interconnected, a story of relationships between all living beings and sentient landscapes, where the health of ecosystems and species creates the conditions for all life, including humans of course.
In this story we cannot measure or monetise the value of all these things, we must feel the value through experience, connection, wonder, awe and community, this is a story of relationships, not of stuff and things. It requires a feeling revolution. A story from the heart.
Charles Eisenstein’s ‘Climate — a New Story’ work feels like an exciting, new, emerging and meaningful place we could work from, it also feels that we all have a sense that local is a place calling for focus and urgency.
As the volume continues to rise on global emissions and the policy changes needed to radically reduce them, what of everyday people and the places we live, the collapsing biodiversity that supports all life here, that contributes to keeping climate stable, carbon drawndown, this is the best ‘technology’ that exists for carbon drawdown in parallel with a rapid descent of carbon emissions .
And critically the nature around us which offers untapped healing potential through awe, wonder, connection, creativity, play and wellbeing for awakened communities.
In Charles Eisenstein’s words
It’s not that emissions don’t matter. It’s a call for a shift in priorities. On the policy level we need to shift towards protecting and healing ecosystems at every level, especially the local.
On a cultural level we need to reintegrate human life with the rest of life and bring ecological principles to bear on social healing.
On the level of strategy and thought we need to shift the narrative towards life, love, place and participation.
Even if we abandoned the emissions narrative, if we do these things surely emissions will fall.
Local places is interesting in many ways
To create a new narrative based on an ecological culture shift, where we begin to see the world as alive, as a complex intelligent living system, where every living thing participates in co-creating the conditions for all life, the operating system for all life — this means to be in relationship with all life — with self, with community and with the more than human world.
That is not a top down global or institutional thing, it’s not a consumerist thing, that requires a culture shift at a local level through our everyday lives.
Nature doesn’t commute, it is inherently local,
Diverse local ecosystems and biodiversity shaped by the very local flavours of landscape and microclimates, by what places speak and call for, it’s that which creates abundance and resilience — it’s the antithesis of globalised consumption culture — the monoculture of industrial growth society.
It’s much more DIY, independent, folky, remixed, strong locally flavoured and creative in its local expression and diversity.
I mean just look at a forest or edgeland anywhere, it is always unique, different in every place.
“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
Gary Snyder
Social healing and ecological healing are the of the same mission
Local places have been ripped apart by the pursuit of industrial growth society — homelessness, poverty, inequality, refugees and migration, pollution and violence that we see so acutely in so many places today are in synch with the clearing and destruction of these places, the concreting over, the deforesting, the vanishing of civic spaces, the dissappearance of species, the pollution of air, soil and water systems.
If we can heal our places ecologically and in doing so fall in love with the wider non human world that supports all human life in these places, surely we can start to heal human societies at the same time ?
This feels really key, engaging more people in the ecological crisis requires bringing the story into the reality of their everyday life, which for many is all about the places and communities they live, family and tradition, work and experience. Brexit Britain for example is a clear signal for this or the recent elections in Australia.
Local offers many ways for the creative communities to participate
When it comes to challenging the creative industry, local means there is huge opportunity to invite localised media, talent, comms infrastructure, brands, agencies to participate in this journey in really creative ways to help people fall back in love with place, it gives loads of ways for the industry to participate.
Other Provocations/Thought starters
“Why have we settled for a world that grows uglier and more degraded every year?” Charles Eisenstein
Shifting from an industrial, consumerist linear view of the world, where the earth is dead, where nature is a resource for humans to extract and consume, to seeing the world as alive — this is a Gaian shift
The healing of our planet will not come without love for our planet, and love for the local places we live our lives in
Ecology owns economy
We are at war with nature. We are killing the land.
To be biophilic — to love all life
The ingenuity, creativity and extraordinary innovation of nature — 3.8 billion years of innovation R&D
To collaborate with nature
Promote/rebrand Gaia theory — the world as a complex living being — using the best creative ingenuity we have
What does good look like, what will have happened?
“But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field’s forces [become] what we call very loosely the ‘spirit of the place.’ To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.”
Gary Snyder
How could comms/creativity/culture help us wake up to a new story that the world around us is alive?
To see sacredness in the places we live and all life that exists there?
To see awe and wonder in the trees, woods, forests, edgelands, parks, streams, ponds and rivers, the soil under our feet, the insects, birds and animals, the wildlflowers and plants, the wider intelligence in these places and within the diversity of non human life.
Imagine if billboards and advertising encouraged you to go outside, or nudged you to notice nature, to listen deeply at dawn and dusk.
Challenged you to climb trees, listen to birds, chuck seed bombs, go out into the dark at night and look at the stars.
Inspired you to connect with life
What might happen if advertising powers creatively amazed us through communicating the intelligent carbon extraction/air purifying potential of moss on walls?
Or the internet of fungus and mycelium networks?
Or the community care of mangroves,
Or healthy oak trees that feed sick oak trees,
Of the extreme generosity of pollinators and earthworms and phytoplanktons that give us food, healthy soil, and half the oxygen we breathe.
Of water systems and coral reefs, that are all in relationship with each other, to create the conditions for all life.
That practice gifting and generosity every day.
How might we promote local ecosystem intelligence in the way we promote hi tech, high value products?
How might we change the idea of nature and ecosystems from on tap human resources to sacred, complex, smart, highly intelligent connected generous living things based on 3.8 billion years of R&D….
How might we shift from consumers of stuff to citizens of place, to co-creators and stewards of life, regenerators of places and species.
To become life giving and life-centered
More Rad Quotes from thinkers of place
“The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”
Gary Snyder
“…along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”
David Abram
“If we look after people and nature the economy will look after itself”
Satish Kumar
Some stimulus/stuff that feels relevant interesting
People emailing trees in Melbourne
How can a love of life become a love of place
Imagine if we took time out everyday to just Notice nature — noticing is the first part of re-connecting to the more than human world
We are ocean, the human water story — exploring the human/ocean connection
Using outdoor media to bring the non human world into urban culture
What nature can do to us, from a doc film we released back in 2013
How the lack of wildness in our places and societies is creating an obediant culture
Potential ways forward -
1. Work with funder(s) to support the design of this new system of communications and experience which sets up this new story of a world that’s alive, to use awe and wonder to help reconnect humans to the non human world, to the living world around them through the lens of local places.
Then challenge the wider industry to take the assets/design principles and blow it up/express it/localise it in their own way. Using the model of global marketing and brand creation through local market activations that they know so well!
2. Release new briefs/challenges for local action directly
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I believe that any global business/brand, that is serious about the climate and ecological crisis and wants to be in business within a decade will need to invest in approaches like this. Collective action, where we take responsibility beyond our core business. Because as we know, ‘there’s no business to be done on a dead planet.’
We’re imagining a big collaborative fund, with diverse foundations and backers to creatively activate stories and ideas.
Trust, open-ness, transparency, responsibility.
Courage, imagination and action.
Be on the right side of history.
We’re open to conversations on this, if you’re a brand, funder, foundation, let’s talk!
Peace and Out
dan