The pace of climate change continues to outstrip the incremental measures that governments have been implementing to make our ways of life more sustainable in line with the COP process. The failure of governments, along with individuals, corporations and civil society, to make sufficient changes to avert and mitigate climate change should be recognised as a failure of the imagination.
On the one hand, we have been unable to imagine the full horror of the devastation that climate change will cause and respond to it with the urgency it demands. On the other hand, we have been unable to imagine living in societies that are sufficiently different from the dominant socio-economic models to make them properly sustainable.
To imagine the future that we need to create – and to avert the disaster that will befall us if we don’t – we need to draw on the power of literature and the other verbal and narrative arts, including storytelling, film, television and theatre. Scientific models and data have failed to galvanise action in spite of over fifty years of the patient gathering and presentation of evidence.
Stories, poems, plays and films, by contrast, can win over hearts and minds, making people realise vividly and for themselves the implications of what is happening now and the possibility of changing our future for the better. They can help us to connect with other cultures and people around the globe, as well as with the non-human beings with whom we share this planet, and to imagine different ways of living with one another. They can remind us too that the most fundamental human values are neither instrumental nor commercial.
Through mobilising the imagination, stories can restore hope by giving us something to hope for: a better future, not a worse one; a full life shared well, not a precarious existence in ever more desperate competition; a revitalised and beautiful world, not a degraded and depleted one.
