Beyond Climate Breakdown

Despite enormous scientific and media attention focused on the topic, real progress against climate change has been frustratingly slow. Why? Peter Friederici claims that this failure is largely due to narrative--specifically, to the existence of numerous compelling narratives of denial that are closely tied to our political, economic, religious, and psychological belief systems. By analyzing how those narratives lead us astray from a full recognition of both the problem and potential solutions, he argues that only by coming up with new story frameworks can we hope to effectively address climate breakdown. Specifically, he calls for finding stories that utilize comic perspectives, radical hope, and much broader democratic participation than we have generally found in mainstream accounts of climate change--