Listen: Fear and anger are two of our natural responses to great disasters. Since both can divide and limit us, how can we come together to do more?
Two solutions lie in the stories we tell, and we hear from others. True and false, they shape and motivate us. So, if we reframe our stories, and listen closely to each other, we can rise to our daunting challenges.
We can see the climate crisis, for example, as “an opportunity to live on this planet differently than we have, because we want to protect it…coming from a place of love and stewardship and protection, rather than a place of fear and self-preservation,” says Alina Siegfried, a Wellington writer who works widely with people and organisations on big changes to societal systems.
Her latest book, A Future Untold: The power of story to transform the world and ourselves, was published last week. We hope this podcast about it will help you – and us – navigate through the welter of emotions, the tsunami of information pouring out of the COP 26 climate negotiations in Glasgow over the next two weeks.
As you might expect, we begin our conversation with a story. Alina tells of her encounter some years ago with a hunter in a DoC hut in the Te Ureweras. He was angry about many things, including the death of one of his dogs, killed by 1080 poison meant for predators of our native birds. By listening without prejudice to him, they gradually built a rapport.
“The subtle art of story listening is the yang to the yin of storytelling. You're just letting the story be,” she says. “It's not good. It's not bad. You don't have to take a stand on it. You just let it be told; and listen. And when you do, that's an incredible gift for the teller of the story, because it allows them to bring out their story, let it be heard.”
My usual journalistic mode tends more to interrogation, I admit to Alina. But thanks to her I’ve broadened my listening skills since we first met four years ago through our work in the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. We are among 532 fellows from diverse backgrounds, one-third of us here in Aotearoa and two-thirds aboard. We apply our wide range of skills to a common cause: deep sustainability in all senses of the word, from ecologic and economic to social and cultural.
That’s the big context Alina sets for her book. Appropriately the foreword is by Johan Rockström, the earth systems scientist who led the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s pioneering work on Planetary Boundaries. He now heads Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Rockström makes important contributions to New Zealand’s sustainability journey. He was, for example, part of the team that produced the New Zealand Planetary Boundaries report for our Ministry for the Environment last year; and he was the 2017 Laureate of the Hillary Institute of International Leadership, the EHF’s parent organisation.
In her practical guide, Alina explores storytelling and listening in four sections, including one of her powerful poems in each. Since she is a former New Zealand National Poetry Slam Champion, a QR code with each takes you to a video of her performing it.
“There are no wrong stories and right stories. But there are stories and narratives that are good for humanity or the planet, and those that are harmful or destructive. Predominantly a lot of the narratives we’re living are the latter.”
It’s best to approach conversations with people “from a place of curiosity and wanting to understand why they think the way they do.”
She also advocates seeking out “strange bed fellows. By that, I just mean collaborating with people who think in a very different way than you do...towards some common goal. They're all around. They are your neighbours. They're people you share some common interests with, but perhaps have different views on certain issues.”
In the fourth section, Alina applies that learning to myths, which arguably are our most powerful stories, though often disparaged today. “I make the case for reclaiming the word myth as a force for good. Nowadays myth has become synonymous with lies or falsehood, or a theory we believed before we knew better.”
“Originally the word myth was something beautiful. It was a seed of truth wrapped up in a story made more understandable through human communication and storytelling.” They hold “implicit human truths that are really at the essence of our being.”
Her “Ten New Myths for Humanity” express shifts we can all make such as From Me to We; Sustainability to Regeneration; Stuff to Enough; Scarcity to Abundance; Competition to Collaboration; Human Doings to Human Beings; West to the Rest; and Now to Forevermore.
While her prose is insightful and compelling, her poetry tells the richest, truest stories of all. To that end, she wraps up our conversation reading one of them, Big World, Small Planet, which encapsulates 75,000 years of human history in five minutes.
