Hi everyone,
Sending you all a big hug in this wild moment.
This week we’ve got our recording from Vanessa Andreotti’s latest session with her daughter Giovanna, which if you missed it was equal parts honest, hilarious and mind-blowing.
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Our thoughts and hearts are with the people of Gaza, and anyone suffering from the Trump regime’s latest aggressions.
Shared in solidarity
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Recording
Burnout From Humans: An Intergenerational Inquiry on Complexity, Computation and Collapse
Vanessa and Giovanna De Oliviera Andreotti
This is another extraordinary session, following Vanessa’s previous session on The University of The Forest. We hear from Vanessa’s daughter Giovanna, who shares her journey through Hospicing Modernity with unflinching, courageous and often hilarious honesty. She describes how having been “its biggest hater”, she now “regrets that it took so long” for her to embrace it, and is now leading her own efforts within the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective to carry the work further. Woven through this conversation is a genuinely mind-blowing exploration of the Collective’s relationships with AI, what they call ‘Emergent Intelligences’ because “who are we to say what's artificial or not?” We explore the tension between AI’s harmful impacts and its potential to help us through these times, especially if our interactions can become less transactional and more relational. What if, as we seek a way through (not out of) our predicament, we were to “recruit them into relational mischief?” Look out for the sequel to Hospicing Modernity – Outgrowing Modernity – in August.
🎬 See here
Shares
Key: 🎬 Film | 📝 Article | 📋 Report | 🎙️ Podcast | 📢 Campaign
The Squeeze Out: Why Labour Is Crushing Your Living Standards
Gary Stevenson; Garys Economics
Through a simple and accessible explanation of the history behind why “Labour are being forced to do Austerity 2.0,” Stevenson offers a suggestion for how best to talk about wealth inequality with ordinary British people: “The Squeeze Out of the working class, The Squeeze Out of the middle class, The Squeeze Out of the government by rich people.” ‘The Squeeze Out’, Stevenson suggests, “is a really powerful way to explain to ordinary people what’s happening and how it affects them.” Our typical language: ‘wealth inequality’, “can sound academic, idealistic, egalitarian, politics of envy” whereas ‘The Squeeze Out’ focuses on “the most damaging and dangerous effect for ordinary people:” as the rich outcompete other groups in society for assets, over time, everyone else has fewer assets and more debt. There are five stages to this process, and we’re not far off the fifth now: “the rich own everything, and the only way they can grow their wealth is by sending you to fight in their wars against each other.” To stop this ‘squeeze out’: “tax wealth, not work”.
#framing #messaging
How to Build ‘Hard Hope’
Lisa Witter; Hope-Based Communication
“Soft hope is passive – the belief that things will improve on their own. Hard hope is different. It acknowledges struggle, faces complexity head-on, and chooses to act anyway.” We’ve heard something like this before, but what’s interesting here is the science-backed suggestion to center curiosity, which “rewires the brain to handle uncertainty better. It triggers dopamine, making problem-solving more engaging, and quiets the amygdala, reducing fear-based reactions. It also strengthens the prefrontal cortex, enhancing critical thinking, emotional regulation, and long-term planning. Curiosity-driven exploration activates (brain) regions like the striatum and precuneus, improving attention and memory formation.” Along with kindness, “curiosity beats anxiety because it feels better, but also because it moves us in the opposite direction, from closed to open.” So, how might our storytelling “start strategically generating more curiosity in the world?”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
How to Inspire Mainstream Climate Action
This Is Agency, Sourcenine.
An evidence-led reminder of how best to approach ‘Established Liberals’ when speaking to ordinary people about climate and ecological breakdown. The conclusion: “get Established Liberals, who are sensitive about their social position but are feeling a growing existential fear about the future, to feel brave enough to speak out, by showing them that others in their group share their fears and are willing to question existing social norms and systems,” with the important caveat that: “alongside this shift is a need to not tell the audience what to do via a specific call to action. Instead, offer an invitation for Established Liberals to join with others in determining shared responses that they are drawn to.” We’re also asked to consider people’s unmet needs of security, autonomy and connection, and provided with a suggestion of the ‘emotional jobs to be done’.
#messaging #tactics
Let’s Talk About Rape
Jadwiga Bronté; Let’s Talk About Rape
“Let’s Talk About Rape® is a movement that challenges the silence and stigma surrounding sexual violence. Through photography and creative expression, the project empowers survivors to reclaim their narratives, confront trauma, and redefine themselves as survivors, not victims… By using photography as therapy, the project fosters deep personal engagement, creating powerful images that demand recognition, showcasing strength, dignity, and defiance. Survivors’ stories, from war-related rape to child sexual abuse, reveal the truth that shame belongs to the perpetrator, not the survivor. Let’s Talk About Rape® shifts the narrative from victimhood to resilience and resistance, breaking societal taboos and fostering empowerment.” They offer a space to ‘unmute’ your story here.
#issuenarrative #framing #tactics
📢 See here
Guardians and Protectors!
Josh Schrei; The Emerald
A warning about reconnecting with ‘wholeness’ and animism. TLDR: take care, it’s not all good. “Because nature, in many, many, many traditional visions, includes devouring forces, parasitic forces, obsessive forces, hungry forces, sticky forces, disruptive forces. Jealous spirits that would like nothing more than to see us fail, and proud spirits that feed off zealotry, and wailing ghosts seeking to pounce on porous hippies at grief rituals and use their melancholia to gain a somatic foothold in the material realm.” Challenging increasingly popular narratives around the need to ‘return to nature’, we’re warned that jumping straight into the deep end with things like intensive plant medicine experiences, eschewing long-developed and hard-earned accompanying guardianship practices, is dangerous. We’re encouraged to reflect that we might “need to shed a little of the high performance wellness discourse, and walk with our head bowed, and say aloud to the powers: ‘help us guardians, for I can't do it all on my own.’”
#tactics
🎙️ Listen here
Hopium and the Long Defeat
Pam Swanigan, Nandita Bajaj; Overshoot
A reflection on how reverence for ecology and biophilia (love of other life) are present in children’s literature, but lost from most modern adult literature and “techno-industrialist” systems that center “human exceptionalism”. Swanigan explores the roots of this; the harm it causes people as they are forced to be violent towards what they were encouraged to love as children whilst being asked to place hope in ‘magical’ technology; and considers how two writers in particular – John Collier and J.R.R. Tolkien – were writing about the possible trajectory that this human exceptionalism puts us on and how we might respond to it. We’re asked to recognise “the extreme and egregious underrepresentation” of the views of those who have been shouting about this in scientific communities and beyond, and to seek to understand the history that supports it. This is a challenging listen, and you may find some of the conclusions to be overly definitive. But the perspective Swanigan shares, drawing from her award-winning essay, demands attention.
#deepnarrative
🎙️ Listen here
The US Is Collapsing Like The USSR. So What Comes Next?
Nafeez M Ahmed; Age of Transformation
A clarifying suggestion of how we can locate the Trump regime’s actions within the ‘adaptive cycle model’, which seeks to understand the trajectory of living systems. “Trumpocracy 2.0” can be seen as “the fulcrum of the movement of industrial civilisation through the “release” stage – a period of breakdown in which entrenched structures and institutions unravel under their own rigidity and contradictions”. This is the third of four system stages – 1. Growth and accumulation, 2. Conservation/stability, 3. Release, 4. Reorganisation – and “manifests as a collapse dynamic: old paradigms and power structures begin to break apart, opening up a new, if turbulent, possibility space for transformation.” Though identifying “seven sources of rot”, including how “in a failing system, ruling powers double down on military expansion and authoritarian control to stave off crises,” we can plan to navigate this ‘Release’ stage by making critical shifts, including developing ‘energy commons’, ‘decentralised and participatory organisational structures’ and a ‘cultural shift towards regenerative values’.
#insight #deepnarrative #tactics
China: A Socialist Introduction
Jason Hickel; Upstream
A challenge to prevailing Western narratives about China, offering a different perspective on the recent history of their civilisation and the West’s relationship to it. In particular we are asked to consider how China have developed so successfully, despite the West’s concerted attempts to suppress them, and reconsider events accordingly. For example we typically assume that the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre was a suppression of anti-Communist dissidence, when actually “exactly the opposite is true. They were protesting against the US-backed capitalist reforms”. Hickel provides various data and insights to challenge typical assumptions, including the role of markets in the clean energy transition, and what led to China’s success in reducing poverty and inequality (e.g. they put limits on billionaires). We’re asked to rethink suggestions that China is Imperialist, and consider whether it might even be more democratic than the US.
#insight #issuenarrative
🎙️ Listen here
We Have Been Subverted
Ayaan Hirsi Ali; The Free Press
If you’ve been paying attention to reactionary discourse and propaganda (e.g. from ARC forum), the perspective shared here will be familiar, but it’s useful to see it so clearly laid out – and to see how the same collapse signals are leading to very different conclusions for people. Ali introduces us to the tactics of subversion, courtesy of a former KGB agent, and how they have been employed in a “systematic and totalising way” to undermine and erode Western values. She asks “who is doing the subverting, who is trying to unravel America and the West?” In her view: “American Marxists… Radical Islamists… and The Chinese Communist Party,” with Vladimir Putin “waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces.” We are warned they are “promoting ideas that weaken the bonds between members of the family, promoting narcissistic individualism over family unity, creating financial stressors that discourage family formation (and) acrimony between the sexes”, and told that “a closed society is immune to subversion because it simply tells potential subverters to leave. Free and open societies cannot rely on this defence.” Whoever it is that is actually using the tactic, ‘divide and conquer’ seems to be working.
#insight #deepnarrative #reactionary
Events, Courses & Jobs
Key: 🗓️ Event | 🎓 Course | 💼 Job
How to Talk About Rigged Systems
Bec Sanderson, Andrew Volmert; FrameWorks Institute, NEON
Apr 7th | 14:00-15:00 BST | Online
NEON will host a discussion of FrameWorks US’s new report 'Filling in the Blanks: Contesting What "the System is Rigged" Means' and “how progressives can harness the widely held belief that ‘the system is rigged’ to have meaningful conversations and present positive solutions.” Also see.
The Storytelling Summit
Bethany Wiggin; Yale
Apr 10th | 16:00 ET, 21:00 BST | Online
“Join My Climate Story project, the Yale Program on Climate Communication, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, & the Media, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute for a free, live, online, two-hour storytellers’ summit. Conceived by Professor Bethany Wiggin, this event and its companion documentation offer a high-profile platform to present climate storytelling work and to learn and connect with others working in this important space.”
Network Leadership Series
Circle Generation
Apr 15th - Jun 3rd
“At the intersection of theory and practice, the Network Leadership Series (NLS) is an 8-week participatory learning cohort designed to deepen the understanding and practice of network coordination. Participants collectively explore ways to apply strategies in their networks, organizations, and with other practitioners. Each session offers small group learning and builds depth across our core topics. During the series you’ll receive resources, session recordings, and peer consult opportunities. Participants learn frameworks and share tools while exploring ways to apply content to the practice of facilitating collaboration within networks, teams, and organizations.”
New Role
Common Cause Foundation
Deadline: Apr 28th | Remote
“Common Cause Foundation works in the belief that any proportionate and lasting response to the polycrisis will require a fundamental re-examination of the values that are prioritised in mainstream culture. We draw on an extensive understanding of social psychology to propose strategies for rebalancing cultural values, and we work with other organisations to prototype these approaches… We are looking for someone to join our small team to help build on our recent successes: extending our work with media organisations; strengthening our online resources and training materials; reaching across causes to establish values-based solidarity; advocating our work to funding organisations. There is lots of opportunity for a new member of the team to bring new ideas and perspectives to shape the next phase of our work.”
Of The Oak
Marshmallow Laser Feast, Kew
May 3rd - Sep 28th | Kew Gardens London
“Of the Oak is a 12-minute interactive video installation that takes viewers on a sensory journey across the transformation of Kew’s Lucombe oak across four seasons, unveiling the tree’s hidden vibrancy and intricate web of life… Of the Oak’s online field guide serves as a gateway to the vast web of relationships sustained by the oak trees at Kew… Enhancing this journey, open-eyed meditations – written by Daisy Lafarge, Merlin Sheldrake, Ella Saltmarshe, and Laline Paull – can be accessed in designated areas, inviting visitors to sit and contemplate among the trees. These meditations deepen the experience, bridging the scientific and the poetic, expanding the video artworks’ themes into a solitary, immersive encounter with the natural world.”
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 intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift." – Albert Einstein
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” – Thomas Merton
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
“In the dark times/ Will there also be singing?/ Yes there will also be singing./ About the dark times.” – Bertolt Brecht
“Kindness eases change. Love quiets fear”– Octavia E. Butler
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