Newsletter #37
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Hi everyone,
Whether you’re regrouping, resting, grieving or fighting, we’re sending you much strength, love and resolve ❤️
This will be our last full newsletter of 2024. It’s been quite the year! Huge thanks – to all 1,030 of you – for being here with us, and for continuing all of your efforts to move beyond these dark times towards brighter futures.
We’ll look forward to seeing you in 2025.
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Key: 📋 Report | 📝 Article | 🎙️ Podcast
Beyond the Carbon Fixation: Pathways to Regenerative Futures
Culture Hack Labs
A new compilation of research, delivered in four parts with nine complementary articles, which serves as a “navigational tool” to show how “systems change emerges through practice, not just theory.” The authors work from the deep “roots of the metacrisis”, to look beyond “carbon-centered approaches to the climate crisis limited by reductionist metrics and market-driven solutions” and find different possibilities in already-existing pathways “embodied by living examples.” These pathways are intending to “liberate land, waters, ecosystems, and communities from the enclosures of capitalism and colonialism…rooted in justice, solidarity, community stewardship, regenerative economies, and shifts towards more ecological consciousness.” In particular, see their Narrative Analysis Summary.
#insight #narrativestrategy #deepnarrative
The Plan to Help Defend the Palestine Movement
Jewish Voice For Peace
“The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think-tank that has promoted far-right policy agenda in the U.S. for decades. Not surprisingly, its latest plan, Project Esther, is a frightening escalation of the ongoing rightwing campaign to launch coordinated efforts aimed at destroying progressive movements. While using anti-Palestinian racism to advance the far-Right’s dystopian plan for the future, Project Esther also explicitly plans to cynically use the Jewish American community to undermine the legitimate case for Palestinian freedom and drastically expand authoritarian politics… Supremacy anywhere is a threat to us all. In the face of mounting repression and threats from the far-Right Christian nationalists, we are undeterred in our commitment to fight for an end to this genocide and for Palestinian freedom. All of our futures depend on it.”
#insight #tactics
📝 See here
Language and Violence
Sunil Amrith, Rachel Donald; Planet: Critical
An exploration “from first principles” of the systemic nature of violence, “how it permeates the human project at every level, and how language is deployed to obfuscate, distract and even deny that which we bear witness to.” Covering different points in history, beginning with the Iberian conquest of the Americas, Amrith, author of The Burning Earth, and Donald reveal “the incontrovertible relationship between violence against the earth and violence against people”, and how “the justification to extract life from the non-human world inevitably justifies the hierarchies which then see the world’s most vulnerable human beings exploited and even killed.” We learn of the injustice with which not just modern capitalism, but “the human project” overall was built, and about the ideologies that have “justified rampant destruction and extraction”, considering how to imagine “a better world tomorrow with the political language the past has to offer.”
#deepnarrative #framing
🎙️ Listen here
Post-election '24 All-Star Special
Ellen McGirt, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Celeste Headlee, Amy Westervelt; Scene On Radio
Host John Biewen gathers his co-pilots from recent seasons of Scene On Radio, which have covered capitalism, racism, sexism, and climate, to discuss the US election result. They share their analyses, worries and advice for how to respond, offering reassurance that we’re not starting from scratch. They encourage us to “turn to people in movements who are already working…find those people, amplify their stories, and make sure they continue to do the work.” They warn that “we can get into messaging and all these other tweaks, but at some point we're going to have to tackle the dominant understandings of how we understand the world…and if we don't get to that, you can do all the tweaking you want...but you're going to see the same cycle continue to play out.” One way to do this is to accept that ultimately, “we can only talk our way out of this…forming an empathic bond between two humans is the only way we have ever found to eventually change someone's mind.”
#tactics #deepnarrative
🎙️ Listen here
What Happened In France (in the Summer)?
Sarah Durieux, Anat Shenker-Osorio; NEON
A reflection on the snap election this summer in France, when the left-leaning alliance rallied to resist the far right with a surprise “come-back” in the second vote. This offers specific lessons for resisting fascism, e.g. “we have to cast elections against authoritarian leaders as elections that are a fork in the road for two futures – not a competition between two existing agendas.” It also describes how its success was due to a rapid coordination that centred organisers – “people who wanted to do things” – and that by working from shared goals and messaging, this coordination across movements was able to reach a lot of people quickly, inviting them in to choose “care” instead of “hatred”, with the emphasis on what they were ‘for’, rather than just ‘against’.
#insight #tactics #messaging
How to Get a White Supremacist to Leave the KKK
Daryl Davis; Larger Us, The Sacred
“What happens when an African American befriends members of the Ku Klux Klan? Daryl Davis has persuaded more than 200 white supremacists to leave groups like the KKK. He shares how his extraordinary journey began, what drives him to do this work, and what the rest of us can learn from his approach. Please be aware that this episode contains a description of a violent and racist incident and use of offensive racist language in that context.” Resonating with the advice: ‘don’t try to change people’s minds, help them to change their own’, Davis says “I did not convert anyone, I am the impetus for people to convert themselves,” by being “curious not furious”, and “offering a better perception” instead of “attacking their reality”.
#tactics
🎙️ Listen here
Decoupling The Good Life From Capitalism
Miho Soon; Post Growth Institute
Soon explores their experience of China, where unlike what we are told, “beneath the veneer of the new modernism and policy intervention, capitalism’s familiar cracks have emerged.” They see that “‘The Good Life’ created under the conditions of capitalism today, imposes, for many around the world, a fallacy of being able to truly meet our needs. Even if it does, it ends up being at the expense of others.” With a warning that unless we can address those being left behind by this fallacy, they will be “scooped up by harmful extremism — all under the illusion of care”, and that to offer “a meaningful alternative economic system, it is essential that we engage with what we dream of as ‘good lives‘ – the diverging stories, in their own framing and in their own language, of what this looks like to different people all around the world.”
#deepnarrative #stories
Pop Culture: Bursting the Climate Communication Bubble
New Zero World
In their whitepaper last year, New Zero World suggested that “to create a sustainable future, we must inspire the public's imagination and emotions and set out the media and creative industries’ unique abilities to captivate audiences through their superpowers of storytelling, entertainment and engagement.” One year on, they “hope to build on those insights, by providing simple, actionable frameworks and examples to empower communicators of all kinds, working across disciplines around the world to go beyond awareness raising and information sharing, and instead use culture to shape a future to fall in love with, not fear”, seeing culture as a “cheat code”, and the need for a “cultural ecosystem view” instead of a “firehose”. They conclude that “what got us here, won’t get us where we need to go”.
#messaging #tactics
Signal in the Noise: Trends in the UK Climate Discourse in 2023/24
Climate Barometer, ACT Climate Labs
A visually engaging, detailed look at how the climate discourse evolved in each month of the year, peppered with quotes, data and insight. The report concludes with “five signals in the noise,“ which suggest 1) Labour need to “show that higher ambition on net zero won’t result in higher costs for consumers”; 2) “Despite plenty of reasons to remain optimistic about the social mandate, public opinion can’t be taken for granted; 3) Anti-net zero “has a clear political constituency in Reform” and sceptical Conservatives; 4) Net zero support is stable, but support for EVs has wavered; and 5) Support for clean energy infrastructure “hinges on persuading communities that they’ve been heard and their concerns are being addressed.” Also see.
#insight
📋 See here
Jobs & Events
Key: 💼 Job | 🗓️ Event
Cultural Advocacy Lead
Wellcome
Deadline: Jan 6th | Permanent
“We plan to spend £16bn over the next ten years, funding new discoveries in life, health, and wellbeing, and taking on three global health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate and health. These challenges need the bold science we support, but they won’t be solved by science alone… We are looking for a Cultural Advocacy Lead to join our newly-formed Creative & Cultural Advocacy Team, which aims to win the hearts and minds of international decision-makers in order to bring about systemic change on global health challenges. This is a chance to play a key role in shaping how culture can be a powerful tool within ambitious, integrated initiatives that build public support and drive action from decision-makers on issues such as climate change, mental health and infectious disease.”
Head of Messaging
NEON
Deadline: Jan 22nd | Permanent, Hybrid, 4-day week
“We believe that building movements is central to winning social justice. We offer hands-on support and training for campaigners, organisers, communications and operations teams working across social movements… The purpose of this role is to lead the messaging programme at NEON. That means developing messaging guidance, training and coaching support. You will be the go-to person for messaging work in the Comms Hub, working closely with the rest of the team - and the Spokesperson Network in particular.”
Into The Dark – 5-week Deep Winter Community Adventure
Becoming Crew
Jan 23rd - Feb 13th | Online + Nature Solo
“Into the Dark is an invitation to slow down, to pay attention to the roots, to let go of what is no longer useful and to nurture the seeds of intention within you. What would it be to go consciously into the dark in community? As we sit in the dark time of the year, how can we use darkness as a container to begin to root our intentions for where we place our energy in 2025 as the light returns and to do so in relation to a larger web of life? What unexpected gifts await you in the time of breakdown, darkness & decay?”
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications. See a full list of all the previous quotes.)
“The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries – the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination – don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet.” – Sharon Blackie
"I like to envision human supremacy as a baton that's been handed forward for millennia, from the Neolithic village to classical antiquity to Judeo-Christian and Muslim cultures to our modern mechanistic era. By coming to understand this past, we can begin to understand that our current struggle isn't simply to expedite an energy transition, to save some acres and wildlife here and there, or even to stave off the extinction of Homo sapiens. To put it accurately, our struggle is to change the course of history, to break with our history, to drop the baton." – Eileen Crist
“Poor countries don’t need charity, they need justice.” – Jason Hickel
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Live with uncertainty and do not let it come in the way of right action – you can't control the outcome – live in the moment with all the complexities and relationships in mind." – Vandana Shiva
Thanks for joining us, see you here again in two weeks.
A reminder that if you have something that you’d love to see in these newsletters, or work you’d like to share in the community sessions, or if you have any feedback, please reach out at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org
Very best,
Paddy & Ella