The Potential of a Story: Reflections from the Fossil Free Convergence (2/3)
Saturday 11 and Thursday 16 March
“We are the next puppets to be thrown to the side in Santos’ money-making assault on culture, environment and the agricultural industry” — Emma Donaldson (fourth-year Engineering student and Fossil Free campaigner, NSW, Australia)
“Organizing is the muscle, strategy is the brain, and story is the heart and soul of social movements” — * Gopal Dayaneni (Community Organiser, US)
Who will set the scene for the next 48 hours, and how? I had just enjoyed a tasty bowl of Bircher Muesli and was soaking up the scent of eucalyptus as my friend and I climbed a hill to a suite of humble but functional rooms. I knew we would be spending much of the next two days in these otherwise lonely carpeted spaces and was contemplating the important role that the people setting the context for us as a group this morning would have. We located the correct room and took a place near the front. Someone read the morning’s agenda; we were going to spend the next hour listening to four unique (and true) stories from four different humans. I hesitate to recount the stories for you now; I have only my own reconstructed versions to impart. But it was something special to be present in the room as my peers recounted the sort of lived detail often reserved for memoirs, and to sense the collective emotional weight as we absorbed their words.
For me, the stories talked to harsh realities that had an unmistakable impact on the human condition. The four speakers told of watching helplessly as climate change researchers were laid off, and of the audacity of coal seam gas companies who considered it their right to drill cripplingly close to a 140-year-old family farm without consulting its owners. They spoke of their sadness and resentment when a friend from the Maldives traveled all the way to Australia for university, to find he was attending an institution who was investing in fossil fuel extraction companies who hold a large steak in creating an increasingly precarious life for his family back home. They spoke of their Pacific brothers and sisters who lost their houses to cyclones, yet who are the lifeblood of many of the nations transitioning to 100% * solar power. When it came time to stand and stretch, I distinctly felt the impact of a new, intangible, impetus to act.
A few hours later, I was taking my place in a smaller circle of chairs to attend a workshop on stories in campaigning. It was a good opportunity to reflect on why I felt that this morning’s stories set the context particularly well for the rest of the Convergence. Those stories were powerful because they gave “climate change” teeth; they made climate change personal. They made me realise that it was not enough for me to simply comprehend something of the frosty bite or fiery wrath of climate change. I, too, wanted to be able to impart that comprehension to others and to tell them of a fundamental truth about the dangers of meddling with nature and the atmosphere. If I was going to manage that, my messages, I could sense, needed to penetrate to the core of our individual psyches, as the speakers stories had for me this morning.
As we passed ideas back and forth about the benefits of stories, I moved on to mentally juxtaposing those benefits with some potential risks. I felt strongly that the stories I had heard that morning were far more effective than my own, but I was also acutely aware of the dangers of retelling someone else’s story in my words as if it were an indefatigable truth that I myself could own. I am blind, and my friends and I have been relegated to the sidelines in our own stories too many times for me not to feel trapped by the intruding antennae of that possibility. However, one participant’s idea spoke to this point for me. She suggested that stories were effective in large part because they were personal. They were untouchable in a way that an apparently factual issue could never (and perhaps should never) be. I was comforted by the idea that I could create my own story which built on those of others, without feeling a need to recount those other stories to the tee, in some attempt to avoid misappropriating them. After the workshop, I was very happy to remain in the now-deserted room to begin to write this post, these ideas in mind.
Five days later, I am looking back over these paragraphs. I realise that my own experiences at the convergence spawned countless snapshots like the one you’ve almost finished reading, which I can recount as stories. They are stories of listening, of vulnerability, of accepting help, of perseverance, of success, of reflecting, of banter, of insightful questions, of honesty. The Convergence has been all about “building a movement”. If other participants have had similar experiences to mine, surely we must be strengthening our own foundations as part of a truly sustainable and powerful force to be reckoned with.
* I couldn’t track down this quote so this version may be slightly paraphrased.
