All we are as people is a collection of stories — those we are told, those told about us, those we tell to ourselves and others. They explain our identity and express our values, and they’ve long shaped societies — Sparta as a culture of warriors, America as the land of the free and so on. But when several conflicting stories are being told, they can also limit us, delude us and divide us. Too often they suit only the teller, not the audience.
I am a professional storyteller, and the stories I’m particularly concerned about are the ones that distract us and divide us about climate change — the fierce I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong of it all — given the stakes.
I grew up in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, a land of natural-born storytellers — both the kind who entertain and the kind that break our hearts. An invisible line cuts Ireland, my island home, in two. North of that line, the particular story around which we’ve built our divided identity is the perception of an enemy who lives just across the street — Catholic nationalists who identify as Irish, and Protestant loyalists who identify as British — whom we must constantly resist. If our enemy believes that something is right, it must, by definition, be wrong.
For years now, and not just since Oct. 7, 2023, Catholic areas of Northern Ireland have flown the flag of Palestine in solidarity with what was once a similar plight of occupation and oppression. And whenever they do, Protestant areas inevitably respond by flying the star of David, not so much out of any particular alignment with Zionism as with the idea that your enemy’s enemy is your friend.
In government, this has (for most of the past century) been represented at the extremes by Sinn Fein, the political party of Irish nationalism, and the D.U.P., the Protestant political party that stands for British loyalism. The fact that they continue to get voted in as the two majority parties, even though neither has much track record of workable solutions for the broader population, shows that we remain as divided as ever.
To anyone who is not from Northern Ireland, the stories we tell about one another must surely seem absurd. (They probably seem that way to most people who are from Northern Ireland, as well.) Which is why it saddens and alarms me to witness that the same reductive ideas about one’s neighbors have taken hold in the United States. And what particularly unnerves me is the way these worsening divisions in the United States have poisoned our ability to act as a single unified force to find ways to strike a lasting balance with our natural world.
In Northern Ireland, we are the only ones who suffer from our small-mindedness. Our circumstance is often compared to that of the Middle East — but unlike Palestine and Israel, we are not a pawn in an international game of chess. We are what happens when you stick people on an island and let them fight it out. The world will hardly notice.
In the United States, though, where I am partly based and have a studio, the divisions cripple efforts to curb emissions from one of the world’s biggest climate polluters. At the same time, it is one of the nations best positioned to lead the way on fixing climate change, both politically and economically.
My recent book, “Begin Again,” looks at what happens if we zoom out and look at ourselves from space. What you see from up there is land, water, clouds. You see how little we are. How rare we are. It suddenly makes no difference who on earth is right or wrong. It becomes brutally obvious that our climate doesn’t care about us, and that the stories we tell are only for (and against) one another.
A shared enemy can be a galvanizing force, but I can tell you from the experience of where I grew up that it won’t succeed in creating a better future for anyone who gets swept up in it. Think about the debates you’ve had in your life. Have you ever changed people’s minds simply by insisting to them that they’re wrong?
Those of us worried about climate change are too often guilty of belittling the other side because we’re preoccupied with being right about the existential threat we face. We don’t see that losing your livelihood to, say, a fracking ban or a shuttered coal plant is a kind of existential threat, as well. And so protecting it — protecting that livelihood, and the families and towns that it sustains, is the noblest of things to defend.
In my work as an author, I’ve noticed that we have this subconscious habit of underestimating the power of stories. We know, but we forget. If we can recognize that our stories about climate change, and about fools on the other side who don’t agree with us, are what got us into this state of paralysis, then perhaps we can start working together on a new story that could liberate us from it.
For starters, what if we replaced the words “right” and “wrong” with “better” and “worse”? Who could argue with wanting things to be better? A simple reframing makes the story about the future we want. Now imagine we were able to do so in a way that made everyone feel included in the outcome, rather than excluded, overlooked or left behind.
Does this sound too naïve? A little simplistic? Creating new, climate-friendly jobs, after all, is not so simple. But in order to escape our inaction, we have got to find a place where we can begin to stand on the same side.
Whichever version of our single future story we pick is down to us. Down to all of us to tell. But will it be a story in which half of us are right and half of us are wrong? Or will it be a story that leaves us all better off?
The post An Artist Rethinks Climate Change in Words and Pictures appeared first on New York Times.