Our entangled future
“To access and activate our most radical potentials as a storytelling species,” the AdaptationCONNECTS project has issued an innovative call for short stories of ‘our entangled future’: stories to engage our imaginations with ‘quantum social change’ in the face of our accelerating climate crisis. “We need stories that confront the limitations of a dualistic, deterministic, and inanimate worldview and instead offer insights into a reality that is connected, entangled, uncertain, and ripe with possibility – a world of complementarity, non-locality, and potentiality.” Their call places an important emphasis on “the power of language, meaning, and metaphors to create a new reality.”
Coinciding with the recent IPCC report focusing on limiting global temperature rises to the 1.5oC ceiling marked in the Paris Agreement — “this extraordinary point in history” — this call identifies the need for agency to match the urgency. It’s a gap that the slew of apocalyptic and dystopic climate stories, films and other fictions make it harder to bridge — compelling though they are (and increasingly non-fictional for parts of the world).
“We need to both imagine and actualize alternative ‘not-yet-here’ realities. In the long and short term, activating such a shift may represent the only truly successful adaptation to climate change.”