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Beyond Climate Breakdown

Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope

Part of One Planet

Author Peter Friederici
Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore
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Paperback
$25.00 US
The MIT Press
On sale Oct 11, 2022 | 184 Pages | 9780262543934
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The importance of telling new climate stories—stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.

“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity.  
 
Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici explains, actually reflect choices made by specific people out of self-interest. So we need new stories—stories that center the persistence of life, rather than of capitalism, stories that embrace contradiction and complexity. We can create new stories based on comedy and radical hope. Comedy never says no; hope sprouts like a flower in cracked concrete. These attitudes require a new way of thinking—an adaptive attitude toward life that slips the narrow yoke of definition.
Series Foreword vii
Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Prediction 13
2 Metaphor 43
3 Narrative 63
4 Tragedy 99
5 Comedy and Complexity 123
Notes 145
Index 165
Peter Friederici is Professor in the School of Communication and Coordinator of the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University. The author of several books on nature and the environment, he has published essays and articles in publications ranging from Audubon and the Georgia Review to Orion and Dark Mountain.
 
Peter Friederici View titles by Peter Friederici

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The importance of telling new climate stories—stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.

“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity.  
 
Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici explains, actually reflect choices made by specific people out of self-interest. So we need new stories—stories that center the persistence of life, rather than of capitalism, stories that embrace contradiction and complexity. We can create new stories based on comedy and radical hope. Comedy never says no; hope sprouts like a flower in cracked concrete. These attitudes require a new way of thinking—an adaptive attitude toward life that slips the narrow yoke of definition.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii
Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Prediction 13
2 Metaphor 43
3 Narrative 63
4 Tragedy 99
5 Comedy and Complexity 123
Notes 145
Index 165

Author

Peter Friederici is Professor in the School of Communication and Coordinator of the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University. The author of several books on nature and the environment, he has published essays and articles in publications ranging from Audubon and the Georgia Review to Orion and Dark Mountain.
 
Peter Friederici View titles by Peter Friederici

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