A Just Transition Needs Transformational Cultural Strategies

When I first started working at the intersection of culture and climate six years ago, a small but growing part of the environmental movement was getting interested in arts and culture. Scientists and activists were increasingly frustrated by the insufficient public response to climate change, despite overwhelming evidence about the urgency of action. Cognitive scientists suggested that the problem was that the impacts were just too slow moving and far off for most people to comprehend and that the technical language of climate change coverage only compounded the abstraction. So, some scientists and activists began turning toward culture and storytelling to help make climate change feel more personal, salient, and “emotionally resonant.” The idea was that by speaking to the emotions, art and culture could motivate people to care more, which would drive the political will for change.

Things are different today, though it may have less to do with any particular advocacy approach and more to do with the progression of climate change itself. Many people now have visceral experiences of what climate change means for them as intense hurricanes, wildfires, hundred-year floods, crop failures, and heat waves become our “new normal.” This existential threat that we’ve been warned about for decades is no longer some other country’s or future generation’s problem to worry about; it’s here, now.

People are waking up. And they are scared. A majority of Americans now believe climate change is real (72%) and caused by humans (57%), and a third are “very worried” about how it will impact their own lives. Belief and worry is even greater among people under 35 — regardless of political party, fully three-quarters of young people see climate change as a “serious threat” to their future. “Eco-anxiety” and “climate despair” are on the rise, and a new field of “eco-psychology” has emerged specifically to treat climate-related mental health issues.

And yet — despite a slight slowdown caused by COVID19 — carbon emissions and ecosystem destruction are continuing to skyrocket , keeping us on track to surpass planetary boundaries necessary for life. People may care more than ever, but it turns out widespread awareness and worry aren’t enough to create the change we need.

As the research suggests, when it comes to “super wicked” challenges like climate change, simply believing in the need to change does not often lead to change itself. This makes sense: the transformations required to address climate change are not as simple as signing a petition or switching a lightbulb, as much as we might wish them to be. They are in fact extraordinarily difficult, unclear, and disruptive to our societal systems, especially given that our psychology and sociopolitical structures reward short termism and self-interest. So while most people now accept the facts of climate change, we all engage in various forms of denial in our day to day life to avoid confronting the overwhelming reality. Climate believers and environmental activists engage in this kind of denial too, and it isn’t because we are bad or stupid. Avoidance, bargaining and denial are tactics that our brains use to cope with situations that are traumatizing, overwhelming or beyond our control. Sociologist Kari Norgaard suggests that both climate change effects and the changes we must make to mitigate it are so disruptive to our understanding of the world and ourselves in it that we experience them as “cultural trauma.” Our belief that we can’t do anything to change the situation makes us try to minimize the threat, which ironically prevents us from taking the actions we need to take to actually change.

Lately, I have found myself preoccupied by this disconnect between beliefs and action. If the main barrier we face is not a lack of knowledge or concern, but a lack of agency, what should we be focused on as artists and cultural strategists working for a just transition?

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in the power of artists and culture to reshape the narrative on issues like climate change. There is now an incredible proliferation of creative content and artistic activism, led by Big Green groups and grassroots environmental activists, independent artists and Hollywood alike. But a proliferation of creative content does not equal effective cultural strategy. The majority of climate-related arts and culture is still focused on trying to raise awareness by reflecting the tragedyback to us, even though there is an increasing amount of evidence that the relationship between climate concern and climate action is relatively weak. Partially in response to this, the current trend in climate communications is towards inspiring people with “solutions stories” instead of “doom and gloom,” however there is thin evidence that feeling hopeful is any more likely to catalyze action than feeling worried.

As artists and cultural workers who care about a just transition, I believe we have a strategic and moral imperative to go beyond waking people up to the problem (or potential solutions). We need to do more than develop consumable creative content that aims to provoke the right emotional state; we need multi-dimensional cultural strategies that cultivate agency and support people in actually making change. For a just transition, we need transformational cultural strategies.

What gives me hope is that helping people navigate transformation is one of culture’s most ancient, essential, and enduring societal roles. Societies throughout time have had rituals, practices, stories, and guides that have served this function. And although art and culture has become reduced to a consumer commodity in much of the Global North today, this deeper social function is not just a thing of the past.

Environmental and climate justice groups like El Puente, UPROSE, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council, Indigenous Environmental Network, NDN Collective, Cooperation Jackson, and Movement Generation understand the transformative power of the creative process. These groups use participatory, embodied, shared cultural practices to support their communities capacity to heal, build collective power, and make sense of a rapidly shifting reality. But this kind of cultural practice has received very little funding and attention to date, despite the growing interest in using arts and culture to address environmental issues. If we want culture to play a role in a just transition, this needs to change.

So, what would it look like for culture (meaning artists, cultural strategists, cultural rituals, and creative practices) to support the actual process of a just transition? There are some essential stages that appear repeatedly across the world, in myths, in teaching stories from wisdom traditions like Buddhism, as well as in disciplines that study societal change, like anthropology, sociology, psychology and political organizing. I offer a distillation of some of those stages below, in the hope that they might spur those of us working in and through culture to begin having deeper discussions about how to better serve the full arc of cultural transformation.

Steps of transformational cultural strategy

1. Waking Up (the Precondition)

At the beginning of every transformational process, there is a moment when we wake up. Something happens that makes us realize that things are not what we thought they were — we have to change. Mythologist Joseph Campbell famously talks about this as the beginning of the hero’s journey, a framework he synthesized from studying myths across cultures worldwide. We are at this point now with regard to climate change, racial justice, and many other challenges that reveal the ruptures in our systems. The stories we have used to explain the world no longer work. People are getting “woke.” Systems theorist Donella Meadows calls this a “paradigm shift.”

But although waking up can happen in an instant, the journey of actually transforming — getting from where we are now to some changed state — is a process that takes time and effort. Waking up is a precondition for change, but it is not the final destination.

As we wake up, we enter what anthropologists call a “liminal” phase where we are “betwixt and between” what was and what is to come. Although this phase is defined by fear and disorientation, it’s also characterized by a powerful creative energy that can be harnessed and directed toward change. In fact, it is a realm of pure possibility. The liminal stage, I believe, is where we are now as a culture, and may underlie much of what we call climate anxiety. We are struggling to orient ourselves in a world that no longer makes sense, and yet we do not have a picture of where we are going next.

Far too often, after provoking a moment of awakening, climate change advocates leave people adrift in liminality with the expectation that the rest of the process will naturally unfold. But looking more deeply at transformational processes, it is clear that this is insufficient and perhaps even irresponsible. It took us many decades to develop, internalize, and operationalize the worldviews, structures, systems, and ways of being we have now, and it will take time and effort to change them. Addressing the causes of climate change and making a just transition means a profound shift in our dominant values, norms, beliefs, and behaviors. As journalist Naomi Klein says, we are being called to change everything — what we eat, how we work and think about money, where and how we live, how we consume, how and why we travel, our political landscape, and, most of all, our growth oriented economy. This is legitimately overwhelming, and it does not happen overnight.

Creative rituals, cultural practices and artistic guides can help us keep moving through this process until we get to the other side. The remaining “post-woke” stages below — feeling and healing, imagining, and creating the new — are non-linear and iterative, and it may be appropriate to engage with a particular one at different places and times. My hope is that, as cultural workers dedicated to the better world we know is possible, we become adept at intervening at whichever stage is most appropriate to keep things moving. As indigenous scholar Vanessa Andreotti asks, “how can we hospice a dying way of knowing/being and assist with the birth of something new, still fragile, undefined?” We must become doulas between worlds, helping midwife a new way of being as we simultaneously provide hospice to the old.

2. Feeling and Healing

To transition to a more just and sustainable society, we will need to be able to feel, and ultimately heal, the harm our system has caused and continues to cause, especially to poor people and people of color. Our economy relies on “sacrifice zones,” places where resources can be extracted, polluting industries can be located, and people can be exploited for cheap labor. Stopping the harm being done to these communities is the first priority, but it is not enough. Creating space for frontline communities to heal, on their own terms and as part of a larger society-wide process of acknowledgment and reparations, is also necessary if we want to move forward together in a way that is just in process as well as outcomes.

But it isn’t only frontline communities who are harmed by imperialism, industrial capitalism, and neoliberalism. Even among middle and upper-income citizens of the U.S (ostensibly the “winners” in this system) there is a widespread “epidemic of alienation,” manifesting in declining happiness, lack of trust in other people and institutions, social isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, and obesity. These and other social ills, like gun violence, crippling debt, widening inequality, and deaths of despair are different symptoms with the same cause — a deeply inhumane and alienating economic system that perpetuates inequality and separation by design. Over the past several decades we have become more and more disconnected from each other, from nature, from our bodies and from our own deeper humanity. Climate change is another symptom of this collective trauma — the state of our outer environment reflects this inner wound.

We have to begin to heal our psyches and our communities so that a different consciousness can emerge from which we can create a different future. Otherwise, we are certain to replicate the same kinds of dysfunctions with many of our so-called solutions. As Einstein famously said, you can’t solve a problem from the same mindset that created it. In fact, we are already are seeing perverse “solutions” emerge from our current mindset: massive renewable energy farms that destroy ecosystems,governments that achieve their “green” goals by exporting their waste and emissions to poorer countries, and eco-fascists who blend their environmentalism with a desire for racial purity and violence.

Finally, we need to find a way to acknowledge and work with the feelings that arise as we begin to let in the full reality of climate change and its implications for our way of life. According to eco-psychologists, feeling depression, anxiety, grief, vulnerability, and/or guilt about the climate crisis is not pathological, but actually a “sane, healthy response.” In fact, it is the repression and denial of these real and appropriate emotional responses to the situation we face (often because we feel like it is the only way we can keep functioning within the system) that compound our anxietyand prevent our decisive action. Seen this way, creating the space and societal permission to allow these feelings is not a sentimental distraction from the “real” work of solving climate change, but a necessary part of the change process.

How can culture help?

Culture is a powerful tool for healing and navigating uncertainty. People have always told stories to help make meaning out of chaos, and interpret and convey moral lessons across generations and communities. Sometimes and for some people, cultural expression can be the only socially acceptable place to grapple with and process pain. Culture is a way we grieve, as well as how we acknowledge and lift up what we value, what we love, and what we hope to carry forward. It provides languages for the paradoxes and complexities of life, allowing us to express and experience seemingly contradictory things, like joy and pain, at the same time.

For communities that are already experiencing land loss and displacement due to climate change, finding ways to preserve and pass on place-based cultural traditions is urgent. Organizations like the Bayou Culture Collaborative in Louisiana and Re-locate Kivalina in Alaska are helping their communities document and pass on traditional life ways as they are forced to resettle. For some communities — including African-American, Native American and immigrant groups in the U.S. — climate change continues and intensifies a historical pattern of disenfranchisement and forced migration. In these instances, cultural practices have long been a lifeline to simultaneously stay connected to tradition and adapt to change.

Moreover, to navigate the changes we face in ways aligned with justice, we will need to reconnect to our ability to have empathy and care for one another, especially because the impacts of climate change will not hit us all equally or at the same time. Addressing climate change will require us to come together and coordinate across ideological and geographical divides. Culture can help us connect with each other and our own deeper humanity, and can be a critical tool for building bridges. Artist projects like the Water Bar, which uses storytelling and conversation to engage people with different perspectives, can help nurture relationships and enable people to find common ground.

3. Radical Imagining

For a more just and sustainable future we will also need a radical imagination that goes beyond the boundaries of our current socially constructed reality. We must conceive of a new way of living, and living together, that is different in almost every way than what we know or have experienced. There are few rules or guidelines to follow because most of the principles that undergird our current society are at the very root of the problem.

Some of the problematic assumptions of our dominant culture include the ideas that land and natural “resources” can be owned, money equals value, growth is always good, and technological advancement will always improve things. If challenging some of these norms seems impossible, it is partly because we have forgotten we made them up. Instead, we relate to our economy and social system as if it were a fixed, inevitable and objective reality, and we are merely living in it. The late, great Ursula le Guin urged us to remember: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Large parts of the climate movement have embraced the idea that the lack of public imagination about how things could be different is one of the biggest barriers to change. In response, the last few years have seen a proliferation of solutions-focused communications and positive visions of what a more just and sustainable future could look like. While visionary ideas may help break the trance of the status quo, inspire hope, and expand the Overton window of what is possible, we must be careful not to imply that addressing the climate crisis is simply a matter of some lifestyle tweaks and techno-fixes that leave the basic features of our way of life and economy untouched. As Gopal Dayaneni of Movement Generation notes, our insistence on technosolutions represents a profound lack of imagination about how our world could be different than it is.

In fact, rather than an appealing vision of any particular future, what we need most is to remember and reclaim our ability and our responsibility to re-imagine, period. We have to understand ourselves as creators once again, while having the humility and wisdom to understand the true scope of our human power — which happens to be both more and less than we think.

How can culture help?

Artists are specialists in imagination and have expert skills at rendering creative ideas in tangible ways. But while artists may be helpful guides to the creative process, imagining our shared future cannot be the domain of specialists, be they artists, engineers, or politicians. We need creative people power widely distributed across communities, something that organizations like Springboard for the Arts, the Village of Arts and Humanities, Cornerstone Theatre, and the US Department of Arts and Culture are building through supporting the creative agency of everyday people. We also need to build cultural power — that is, our ability to organize and exercise collective influence to shape and shift society’s dominant norms and values and how they are expressed in our policies and systems.

Over and over again, we have seen through our research and the on-the-ground practice of many grassroots groups that people reclaim their imaginative capacity through engaging in artistic creation. Even when the creative act is “purely” artistic — like making a mural or a play — just the act of making something new sparks a sense of agency that translates to other areas of life as well. This is one of the reasons why frontline community organizers such as El Puente, UPROSE, Movement Generation, and PUSH Buffalo often embed arts and culture in their work towards a just transition.

4. Creating (and iterating) the new

What I’ve learned in my time working on this issue is that climate change is not predominantly a technical or scientific challenge, where we know where we want to go and we just need to figure out how to get there. It is a truly creative challenge, in the sense that we are making something up and we don’t yet know what it is.

We can wake up, heal our wounds, and imagine something different, but ultimately, for a just and sustainable future to become a reality, we have to actually behave in new ways, as individuals, as communities, and as a society. We need to reinvent and rebuild our systems and structures so that they embody and reflect different values and mindsets — values and mindsets we may only be able to discover through living into them. In other words, we have to make the road by walking it.

This stepping out into the unknown is truly challenging and often terrifying. Of course, there are cultures that have known how to live in ecologically and socially harmonious ways in the past (and even some who manage to do so in the present), and we can and should learn from their practices. But there is no example of a society as large, complex, diverse, and globally interconnected as ours that has managed this kind of massive transformation at the speed and scale we need now. Staying the course will require incredible commitment and courage. But if there is anything we have learned from the pandemic this last year, it is that we can meet and overcome tremendous difficulties, especially if we join with others.

How can culture help?

The creative process is about confidently walking into and through the unknown, again and again, and coming out on the other side with new ideas, new insights and new pathways to pursue. Through active experimentation and iteration, as well as paying attention to subtle feedback from the environment and making adjustments in response, the creative process can nurture the skills necessary to re-making the “real world.” This is why the creative process is one of the greatest gifts that culture can offer right now, and indeed, why some artists are already embracing a “world-building” role, often in collaboration with specific communities. Sweetwater Foundation, the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, and Utah Diné Bikéyah are all examples of place-based cultural interventions that seek to fundamentally shift dominant paradigms of how things work by pre-figuring how things could be different.

Often these creative prototypes of new systems and ways of living are small and local, leading some critics to dismiss them as insufficient relative to the scale of the problem. But climate change has global causes and local impacts, so local adaptations might be just what we need to flip the paradigm on its head. Dayaneni again has said, “the scale of the problem does not dictate the scale of the solution. In fact, the scale of the problem is part of the problem.” Moreover, who knows which of these local experiments might carry the seeds of systems change — seeds that can germinate and spread? Regardless, we need more and more of us to practice living in new ways, in order to rewire our brains and build confidence in possibilities beyond what currently exists. This is why art forms like speculative fiction can be transformative — we temporarily click into a different world and worldview that is not bound by the logic of our current one –and we emerge changed. Researchers are beginning to uncover the elements of narrative structure and strategy that are necessary to ensure that stories actually cultivate agency and lead to action.

Conclusion

Adapting to new conditions and remaking society will be a profoundly creative process, which is one of the reasons why I believe that artists and culture can be particularly helpful in helping us navigate this transition. We need cultural guides, shamans, death doulas, healers, priests, teachers, and midwives as well as communicators, agitators, problem-solvers and visionaries.

To play these myriad roles, artists and cultural leaders must be authentically engaging with transformation, on both inner and outer levels. Thankfully, there is a growing number of resources for people of all backgrounds to engage with the inner and outer dimensions of transformation, including deep organizing offerings from Movement Generation and Deep Adaptation, programs to support creative activism like Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Climate Leadership and the Center for Artistic Activism, and teachers like Charles Eisenstein, Prentis Hemphill, Mia Birdsong, adrienne maree brown, and Joanna Macy, among many others.

Culture and creative practice allows us to see new truths, feel and heal, connect to each other and the world around us, and feel empowered to imagine and make change in our own lives and in the world. It develops our capacity to be both resilient and visionary, able to respond to what this moment is demanding while we create a better future.

Climate change and our adaptation to it will change almost everything about how we live and who we take ourselves to be. While the path ahead of us has no roadmaps, the “post woke” stages of transformation I’ve outlined here — acknowledging the truth, feeling and healing, radical imagining and creating the new — can offer a bridge.

This is an updated version of an article commissioned by the Center for Cultural Power. Most of this piece was written prior to Covid-19, though some updates were made to reflect the changing context.