Epic Hope
Reckoning with the uncertain future by reaching for a storytelling technology from the ancient past- plus, how you can get involved!
Hello folks! Happy first day of spring! Today I’m offering a guest post from Andrew Benedict-Nelson about a recent collaboration of ours. He’s a strategist, coach, and facilitator who primarily works with leaders in the helping professions. You can read more about him here.
The philosopher Timothy Morton has called climate change a “hyperobject” — a phenomenon so vast and significant that perceiving it shifts our notions of reality. Perhaps this is why all efforts to organize political action around climate have grappled with a sense of vertigo or disconnection. In the halls of Congress, a brilliant exposition by James Hansen somehow carries the same weight as James Inhofe tossing a snowball. The false equivalence isn’t just C-SPAN shenanigans; it proceeds from the difficulty for humans to perceive change on the scale of Earth.
Over the past decade, the climate movement arrived at a makeshift solution to this process: organizing our efforts around a countdown — specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment of warming above the historical baseline. IPCC’s analysis taught us all to think of 1.5 degrees of warming as an acceptable threshold, even though limiting warming to that amount would require a 45 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030. Two degrees bad, three degrees worse — it’s tattooed on our brains, even though we know the inadequacy of thinking this way.
In November, Anya asked if it was time to move past the countdown. The election of Donald Trump virtually guarantees that the 2030 goal will not be reached. She asked if we might need a different way of articulating the problem.
When I read Anya’s piece, I immediately wrote to her and said: “This problem needs an Insight Lab.”
An Insight Lab is a discussion format developed by Jeff Leitner that was originally designed to help nonprofit groups facing intractable challenges. In the 2010s I helped elaborate on Jeff’s invention, and we have since used the format in a variety of settings, from intergovernmental organizations to classroom exercises. Earlier this year, Anya and I set out to adapt the format to the current crisis.
Our plan was to organize a critical mass of thinkers in person in New York City who already see climate differently: specialists in communications, psychology, and community organizing who have long sought a broader concept of what climate action could be. We threw everybody into a room for an afternoon and asked them what might serve us better than counting down.
They emerged with a solution that is as challenging and exciting in its own way as the idea of a “hyperobject.”
The problem of climate demands an epic narrative — as in the Iliad, the Torah, or the Mahabharata. Here’s my take on how the group got there and where we could go next.
1. We had good reasons to organize around a number - The early debate in the room addressed the question of whether the countdown was really so bad. Perhaps we were going to blow through 1.5 degrees, some group members said, but the number at least gave us a sense of what is likely to occur. And several observed that the urgency embedded in the IPCC number made possible the more broadly-based, populist climate movement of today, which has moved from scientific observatories out into the streets. As one participant put it, the countdown helped the shock troops get organized.
Yet the downsides of a quantitative deadline are also clear. Its abstraction makes it universal yet also inaccessible. Its scientific objectivity makes it concrete but also elitist, a truth contained in a faraway box. Its intergovernmental pedigree is an asset… until it isn’t. Nobody thinks we should ignore the IPCC number, but the basis for a global movement has to be something bigger. We need to organize not just the shock troops, but a supermajority of the species.
2. The movement has found villains, but that’s not enough - When considering alternatives to the countdown, Lab participants pointed out another shift in the climate movement over the past decade: a new focus on holding the powerful accountable. As Mary Annaise Heglar put it in 2019, we realized it is time to stop focusing on individual environmental “sins” and instead hold billionaires’ feet to the fire. Keystone, Standing Rock, Exxon Knew, Willow — these are the watchwords of the climate movement today.
There are lots of good reasons to organize around pivotal conflicts with villains. We may not be able to agree on whether GDP growth is part of a sustainable future, but we can certainly agree that fossil fuels are not. The people and organizations invested in them are identifiable and, to some extent, vulnerable. Their loss really is a planetary gain.
Yet sages from a dozen spiritual traditions would also line up to tell us that organizing around opposition alone is not good for the soul. And as much as we may want to shake the paradigm of individual responsibility, most of us (in the West at least) are still part of the fossil fuel system. We need something more than a common enemy to change that.
3. The best alternative to a countdown is a story - The consensus that emerged in the room was that the reason villains matter is because they are a dramatic element in a larger story. And a story is the most viable alternative to the countdown as an organizing device. While only a small minority of humans could explain the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming, everyone has heard and told stories. We need to get serious about using this universal human tradition to save our world.
The communications experts in the room identified a number of compelling traits of a story that a quantitative countdown just can’t offer. They included an ever-present source of emotional motivation, substantive roles for multiple types of characters, and possibilities for heroic or even miraculous actions.
Maybe my favorite trait was the idea that stories emerge from our collective need to make sense of trauma, grief, and change. One of the inadequacies of the countdown is the false inference that if we avoid a 2 degree increase, everything will be fine. When of course we are already coping with climate consequences that will forever change our world. A story gives us room to grieve yet also get to work.
4. An epic is the only kind of story that meets our needs - One of the communications experts in our Lab, Genevieve Guenther, asked: “If we need a story, what kind of a story is it?” Drawing on her academic training in Renaissance literature, she quickly concluded that the categories of comedy and tragedy were too constrained, then turned our attention to a more ancient poetic form: the epic.
I’m no literary expert, so I quickly pulled up traits of an epic from Wikipedia. Here are a few of the most salient:
• The setting is vast, covering many nations, the world or the universe.
• Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization.
• The hero generally participates in a cyclical journey or quest … and returns home significantly transformed by their journey.
The thinkers in the room continued to build on the idea. Here are some of the traits of epics they felt could serve the climate movement:
• Epic poems are part of an oral tradition with many participants over generations, from regular people to specialized bards. This widens the scope of people who could be seen as a part of the movement.
• The retelling of an epic is a ritual of gathering people together and reminding them of what’s most important. It’s a collective story of where a people came from and sometimes where they are going.
• The time scale of an epic can be vast and often cosmic, transcending our present reality. This reframing of time can help us recontextualize current events as just one part of the epic struggle — a much needed correction if we are going to stop doomscrolling.
• Epics call for many different feelings and themes. And we sure as hell aren’t going to change human behavior without marshaling all the emotions in our repertoire.
• Epics involve the gods. We considered that our gods might include globally significant concepts like science and capitalism, which would need to be worked into the epic narrative.
This is the kind of realigning idea an Insight Lab is meant to produce. Yet by the end we were left with an inspiring yet vexing question: how do you organize a movement around an epic that hasn’t even been written yet?
I don’t have a definitive answer to the question, but the Lab process gave us some clues.
When we were still preparing for the session, Anya and I discussed what we hoped to produce. We considered the idea that even if climate cataclysms are severe, a new version of human culture will exist on the other side of each catastrophe. After 1.5 degrees there will still be relationships, people, networks. We should seek to coordinate our work today with the future culture those people will create.
We might conceive of an epic as a storytelling technology that enables such intergenerational communication, especially if you consider epics that include a promise of future redemption. “Next year in Jerusalem,” we say, even when the words feel bitter in our mouths. How could the climate movement operate on such a transcendent timescale while continuing to serve the needs of the present?
Another interesting aspect of the epic form is that while it is undeniably ancient, it is also tantalizingly contemporary — sort of. As we discussed narrative dynamics in the room, people referenced any number of “epic” stories: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and more. The Internet itself is a kind of epic technology, with storytelling forms that dwarf all previous ones in scale, from TikTok to Minecraft. Though not quite so popular, new climate-focused genres like solarpunk are also part of the mix.
Yet many of us associate all these proper nouns with escapist fantasy rather than current action. And even the most popular entertainment brands do not have the kind of visceral relationship with our culture that ancient epics had with theirs.
How might we use emergent “epic” storytelling technologies more effectively to mobilize our culture on climate?
Finally, there is the promise and peril present in the word “culture” itself. Everyone in the Lab longed for the climate movement to be more “cultural,” marshaling the power of narrative, art, and belief. Yet what culture do we mean, exactly?
There is already a deadly disconnect in discourse between the nations responsible for the most carbon and the nations most likely to suffer from climate catastrophe. And plenty of observers have observed that the climate movement needs the wisdom of indigenous people, who are frequently ecosystems’ most competent caretakers.
How might a new climate epic include or even center previously marginalized voices?
We welcome thoughts on these questions and any reactions to the idea of a climate epic. Perhaps the idea has more potential as metaphor than reality. But even if it is just a concept, it has brought me comfort.
Since we held the Lab in January, we have seen an erosion in American life as startling as an ice shelf’s collapse.
Yet I have also steadied myself by remembering this is just one part of the human story. Anya’s “What happened” posts also recalibrate us to the timeline of the planet and not our devices. Here’s hoping that all of us find new ways to pursue this necessary work on a grander scale.
Please share your thoughts on the idea of a new climate epic in the comments below. We are contemplating a follow-up event on Zoom; please indicate if you would be interested in contributing or attending.
 | A guest post by
|
One other idea that I’m not quite sure how to place.
My son is obsessed with the Magic School Bus books. His two favorites are the last two Joanna Cole wrote MSB and the Climate Challenge and MSB Explores Human Evolution. I really like these two books because 1) they are gigantic in scale yet still accessible to kids 2) they address “controversial” topics and 3) they both include students from other countries who join the kids.
Anyway, when I was leaving to go do this Lab, I told my son that I was going to go work on the climate challenge. And I thought how much exciting that sounded than “I’m going to talk with some people about climate change.” For him and his generation, it certainly will be a challenge and not some far-off thing.
I am not proposing more wordsmithing on climate change/crisis— I think that topic is overdone. But I wonder if there is some way to tell this story so kids (and all of us) feel like they are part of the story and always have been… that it’s not an activist choice but just a part of being alive. Certainly my son cannot conceive of the idea of a world without Legos or Paw Patrol… for him those aren’t things that happened in history, but a part of his ongoing being.
I think epics are like that too — that’s what I recognize in the Star Wars comments. The scale makes you feel like this story has always been around and will always be around. I think that’s what we have to achieve.
I just wanted to say how happy I am about how *generative* all these comments have been. One thing I felt very aware of as I was writing was that I was not walking on untrodden ground… that people living and dead have also approached the problem of how we address this crisis with story. Now it seems even clearer to me that “epic” is just a way of organizing those ideas.
Those ideas include the works cited by LeGuin and Macy… I wonder what else might belong there. Certainly some works of fiction. It almost feels like the establishment of a new canon, but one that can still be alive in the present moment, the way religious people read their texts.
I like the idea of beginning to weave the epic with some of the stories from the recent past. I think we can use the way Greta’s story unfolded as a case study of that. I kept a picture of Greta on my desk for a long time — she was like my saint. Specifically, I felt like she reminded me to focus on being courageous and not viewing everything I do through the lenses of my career or what people might think. And that made me feel less alone.
I think that’s what we are going for, especially in a time when the narratives we might have felt we were once part of are collapsing. Some new story that can include all of us and our future on this planet.