Lines I carry around, with where they come from. Each has a source, or says so where it doesn’t.
Where we are
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
“It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along.”
“The end of the world as we know it is not necessarily the end of the world. We can think about it instead as the end of a harmful habit of being, which has become untenable.”
“The point to remember is that it is a future in which we will still have agency. We can optimize the Great Unraveling with cooperation and foresight, or we can ensure a worse outcome through denial and conflict.”
“Some argue that it is irresponsible to put collapse on the table. We suggest that it is irresponsible not to.”
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered.”
“Sit, be still, and listen, for you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof.”
Understanding first
“I have been careful not to laugh at human actions, or mourn them, or curse them, but only to understand them.”
“Successful social change is not about information; it’s about norms.”
“In many ways the shift now required was comparable to the shift in view a small child undergoes when realizing that Mummy is a person in her own right and not just there for her or his gratification.”
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
“Emotionally, the future isn’t real.”
“The bottom line is that we do not accept climate change because we wish to avoid the anxiety it generates and the deep changes it requires.”
“If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.”
“If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?”
“Facing the magnitude of the task of enabling a world without separability (between us and the land, and each other) requires more than a change of narratives, convictions, or identities. It also requires more than a mere intention to change. It requires an interruption of harmful desires hidden behind promises of entitlements and securities that people hold onto, particularly when they are desperate or afraid.”
“The polycrisis is not a cognitive problem, it is a relational and affective problem.”
Stories and imagination
“The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”
“The narratives we have are the soil from which the regulation, the technology, the policy, everything grows, so we need to be working at that level to effect change.”
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
“The work: To make revolution irresistible.”
“The biggest challenge we face is shifting human consciousness, not saving the planet, because the planet doesn’t need saving – we do.”
“We are in an imagination battle.”
“To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.”
“We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial…”
“…it would be best to consider this a continuing ‘revolution of consciousness’ which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.”
“Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer…”
“We can’t have paradigm shift without a paradigm to shift to.”
“If climate isn’t in your story, it’s science fiction.”
“Even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”
Hope
“Anger is not sufficient to maintain motivation over time; you also need to have hope and to believe that you can make a difference.”
“We do it sitting with the trouble of being alive.”
“Authentic hope requires clarity – seeing the troubles in this world – and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”
“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”
“Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.”
“In modern societies, hope is held hostage by idealised images of the future. However, we need to liberate hope from this captivity so that it resides in the present: in the faith that we can heal our fractured relationship with the earth, with other species, among ourselves, and within ourselves.”
“You can’t talk about hope if you can’t see reality, and reality’s pretty bleak, but that’s the starting point.”
Power and justice
“Narrative power is the ability to create leverage over those who set the incentives, rules and norms that shape society and human behavior.”
“Climate breakdown… is a manifestation of existing systems of oppression namely, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism.”
“Populism exploits this. Its great deceit is the promise that by rejecting climate action, we can return to how things were.”
“You want us to worry about the end of the world when we’re worried about the end of the week.”
“To love other humans is not a broken hearts club; it is a philosophical and political responsibility that should be worked on with all the faculties of the mind, sometimes pushing our mental and emotional skills to the limit. It is a perpetual political action and a moral stance that is not for the fainthearted. It is the most serious invitation to challenge the bloody history of humankind.”
Craft
“Lead with shared values, not problems.”
“Describe what you seek, not what you oppose.”
“A great message doesn’t say what’s already popular; a great message makes popular what needs to be said.”
“If your words don’t spread, by definition, they don’t work.”
“Don’t take the temperature, change it.”
“People are capable of believing competing ideas…”
“Repetition makes common sense.”
“If you are having their conversation you’re already losing.”
“The only way to change the conversation is to have a different conversation.”
“I’ll see it when I believe it.”
Doing the work
“NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down.”
“The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles.”
“When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”
“…just as markets work because people believe in them, abundance from below will work because we believe in it – and we will believe in it because it works.”
“The good way to do it is by diminishing the restraining forces, not by increasing the driving forces.”
“If we’re trying to change the ocean, why are we measuring the drops? We need to measure the ocean.”
“Stories of progress are more compelling than stories of failure or radical change.”
“We owe a debt to young people, civil society and indigenous communities for sounding the alarm and holding leaders accountable.”
“Maybe we need to go underground – working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions.”
“This is not the time to wallow in despair and fear, this is not the time to waste our energies pointing fingers and casting blame. This is a time for us to organise, it’s a time for us to galvanise our efforts, and to unify in ways that we never have before, to protect what is sacred and precious to us.”
“If you want to change the world, throw a better party.”
“Let us continue to continue.”