Imagining the Unthinkable
The Power of Storytelling in Climate Action
“ Examine climate change as an idea of the imagination rather than a problem to be solved ”
Mike Hulme Why We Disagree About Climate Change
“ Make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and thus of the imagination ”
Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement
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If, as geographer Mike Hulme argues, we should see climate change as an “idea of the imagination rather than a problem to be solved” then screenwriter Robert McKee tells us “storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world”.
Novelist Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (2016) questions why artists have averted their gaze from the many-headed hydra of climate change and left the Anthropocene chaos to science fiction. “But why?” he asks, “are the currents of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration?”.
Ghosh sees this absence of story as a reflection of the deeper failure of imagination paralysing humanity’s response to its existential crisis; what George Marshall describes as our evolutionary ‘hardwiring’ to ignore climate change.
Ghosh says “global warming’s resistance to the arts begins deep underground”, in that we are…
