The Stories We Tell

The Stories We Tell

“The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability. They are found in Native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practices, but most of all in stories, the ones that are told to help restore balance, to locate ourselves once again in the circle.”

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

As the temperature rises, and the world continues to build ever more complex systems dependent upon perpetual economic growth based upon diminishing stocks of fossil fuels and rare minerals, a great simplification seems inevitable. Addressing this challenge, The Way Home raises urgent questions about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that speak to our cultural values and beliefs, the stories that have led us to this civilizational inflection point that Gus Speth, Chair of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, Founder of the World Resources Institute, and Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls The Big Mistake.

Culture is embedded in the themes of the stories that we tell about ourselves. Preserved in our arts, oral histories, literature, folklore, music, architecture, history, law, and religion, these are the stories that remind us who we are, where we came from, what we value, and where we’re headed. The stories clarify what we owe to the past and what our obligations are to the future. These stories give shape to the way we perceive reality, and the way we perceive reality determines our responses to it.

For thousands of years we told ourselves stories about living in an intimate, respectful relationship with the natural world we were a part of. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we began to harness the God-like powers of coal, oil, and natural gas. Our narratives changed as our unlimited use of these Promethean energy sources altered our relationship with the world around us. We told ourselves we had transcended all limits and could live apart from nature.

We can see the results of this storyline in the planetary emergency we have created. Believing this story was The Big Mistake.

In this new story, our objective changed from living in a harmonious relationship with nature to stripping nature’s assets in order to make short-term profits. We began converting “nature” into “natural resources,” and turning trees into timber, animals into livestock, land into real estate, and people into workers and consumers. Our current cultural and environmental predicament suggests that by following this story we have transgressed critical planetary boundaries, and that by doing so we have put ourselves and the rest of the planet in peril.

This Big Mistake leads us to ignore our cultural trusteeship by discounting both the past and the future. We insist that there is no other way of life than inhabiting an eternal present, ignoring the lessons of the past while stealing the inheritance of the next generations, and in the process producing copious amounts of waste. Demonstrating an acute lack of vision and imagination, we call our reflexive devotion to this story “living in the real world,” and we dismiss older and wiser alternative ways of living as either romantic, nostalgic, antiquated, or completely unrealistic.

The once abundant and low cost energy and minerals that built and fueled modern industrial society are in terminal decline, but long before they run out they will become far too difficult, and far too expensive, to extract. It didn’t take long to reach the point of diminishing returns, perhaps a century and a half or so, and yet our demand for these resources continues to grow. And so we tell ourselves the comforting story that we don’t really need them, that surely we will find and deploy even better substitutes. Somebody, somewhere, will figure something out.

We are at a civilizational crossroads. Modern industrial society is increasingly unsustainable, headed for a great simplification, and needs an exit strategy. We are unprepared for what is coming, and there is no realistic plan, no believable story, to guide us into the future. As the story of The Big Mistake unravels, we double down on what worked before, and we dismiss creative and imaginative responses that actually work. Instead of acknowledging that using ever more highly complex technology will only lead to more ecologically destructive mining, more fossil fuel consumption, more pollution, more extractive colonization, more dispossesion of indigenous peoples, and more environmental damage globally, we keep retelling the story of The Big Mistake — that more of the same unsustainable and highly energy and materials intensive ideas that got us to this point in the first place will eventually solve all of our problems.

During the Covid-19 pandemic our industrial economy all but shut down, and we got a glimpse of what a less technologically complex, less energy and materials intensive world can look like. For the first time in living memory, around the world the air cleared, waters ran clean, and wildlife populations recovered. Pointing to this seemingly miraculous transformation, more than 11,000 scientists from 150 countries responded by stating the obvious: “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live”.

Well.

That statement has been completely ignored, the industrial economy has come roaring back, carbon emissions have soared to new heights, and the true stories of recovering ecosystems have been totally forgotten.

Change is hard. People have an understandable aversion to risk and loss, and changing the way we live will require limiting our wants and thinking about what we owe the future — people we will never know — which is the cornerstone of all cultural longevity. This in turn will call for a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly. Once we do, we will tell the old true stories again, and we will return to a world where we live among relatives. It is our good fortune to still have wise guides such as Inuit and Sami to lead us home. Even at this late date we still have the stories we need to help us rebuild the guardrails. We just need to hear them again.

The Big Mistake is a crisis of spirit and culture, not technology. Whatever social contract we once believed in appears to be broken, and today there is an inchoate but intensifying loss of faith in our institutions, leaders, representatives, and traditions. Our current system is no longer working for most people — even those living in affluent societies are overworked and speak of living ever-more precarious, lonely, and purposeless lives. Many young people especially wonder what the point of it all is. We tell ourselves the story that we are the richest civilization in world history, but this boast rings hollow as rates of depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and obesity soar. American life expectancy — the most telling gauge of how people are really faring — is actually experiencing an unprecedented sharp decline.

If our culture’s goal was to create pro-social, pro-environmental, sustainable societies where we take care of each other and our life support systems, most of us would probably get behind that. But instead economic inequality continues to rise, our natural life support systems are themselves on life support, our culture is fragmenting, there is no common storyline to follow, and we can’t agree upon our direction of travel.

Perhaps it’s time we look to other cultures for guidance. If we do we will see that every enduring culture in human history has been built around an essential, satisfying, unifying story about the personally, socially, and environmentally beneficial relationship between humans and Nature. This story offers the chance to live richer, fuller, deeper, and more meaningful lives. Cultures that last understand that living within the boundaries set by this core belief is a cultural requirement, and their stories reflect this wisdom.

Around the world our industrial economic system has contributed to the destruction of local, self-sufficient cultures and the ecosystems in which they were once embedded. For centuries we told ourselves that this was “modern life” and that it was self-evidently positive and for everyone’s benefit. We still tell ourselves that it is sad that traditional cultures wink out one by one as a result of industrial society’s inroads, but we shrug it off as inevitable.

Defying this tale, for centuries Inuit and Sami have resisted deculturization and displacement attempts by industrial society, and their ways of life have remained models of freedom, egalitarianism, and sustainable living in a truly naturally — not merely digitally — interconnected, vibrant, and enchanted world.

Despite the intrusions of industrial society, today many Inuit and Sami still live in multi-generational, supportive, and classless communities in their traditional homelands. Many Inuit and Sami pursue the ways of life they love, see little distinction between social life and economic life, enjoy ample leisure time and affluence, and have a negligible impact upon their environment. These are modern, stable societies with healthy, living traditions, and they pose a serious challenge to the orthodox worldview of modern fossil fuel-based consumer industrial society.

Instead of telling ourselves stories about tweaking the Big Mistake, swapping out a few parts here and there and carrying on as we have for the last century or so, we might instead listen to and learn from Inuit and Sami stories about local, egalitarian, community-based, sustainable ways of living that underscore how fundamentally inextricable people are from place.

Stepping outside of the stories we tell, and into the stories they tell, is revealing; the contrast is stark.