Storytelling and Storymaking:
A New Paradigm for Sustainability Management
Joshua Lasky University of the District of Columbia (UDC)
Paul Morgan West Chester University of PA (WCU)
The Power of Narrative
“Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future.”
Neil Postman, The End of Education
A story about Josh Lasky and his . . .
Ankle
West Chester University: Green Campus Pioneer (sort
of)WCU’s Green Campus Committee was charged by President Adler in November 1992 “to function as a
task force and spend one year studying the feasibility of West Chester University becoming a
green campus.”
But . . . . . .
By Fall 1999, the only remnant was the Campus Beautification Committee, which was selecting
furniture for Main Hall.
West Chester University Mission Statement
2000-2001
This did not appear in the 2001-2002 catalogs
“As part of this commitment to the future, the University is becoming a green campus designed to demonstrate that a community can, through inquiry and education, act in a
manner consistent with the goal of a sustainable earth.”
Plan for Excellence 2007 Update
“Encourage environmental awareness through training, curricula, and co-curricular programming, assess and reduce the ecological impact of the University, and promote research and service that foster regional and global sustainability.”
“Environmental Sustainability Across WCU”
Linking Pedagogy, Operations, Research, and Service – January 28-29, 2008Curriculum IntegrationWorkshop for WCU Faculty
• 2 Days, 2 Local/Organic Meals• 15 Participants• 3 Colleges, 13 Departments
Anthropology & Sociology, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Elementary Education, English, Geography & Planning, Geology & Astronomy, Library, Philosophy, Professional & Secondary Education, Psychology (History, Foreign Languages)
• $50 Stipend!Dr. Debra
Rowe
Mitch Thomashow
Visited WCU:February 23-25 2009
President Greg Weisenstein’s
Inaugural Address“Regardless of our students' choice of major, upon graduation from West Chester University, they should be clearly identifiable as champions of the environment.” (September 25, 2009)
Are you ready to start earning a certificate in Education for Sustainability? Learn how to help others understand the challenge of sustainability and become active
participants in solutions. You’ll be prepared to create real change in your profession, community, and daily life with courses that emphasize outdoor, experiential, and project-based learning.
Visit www.wcupa.edu or contact Dr. Paul Morgan at 610-436-6945 [email protected]
Sustainability Coordinator (Half-Time) Reports directly to the President
Peter Bardaglio
February 9-10, 2012
WCU Strategic Planning Process
WCU Strategic Planning Committee
“Sustainability” one of 5 Themes
Reflections & Lessons
•Think big, but don’t fail; it poisons the water for years•Learn how the bureaucracy works•Focus on critical leverage points (e.g. The Strategic Plan)•Make effective use of outside experts•Top-level support helps, but start where you are•Act like you belong at the table, not like a marginalized, glorified student environmental club•Reach out – go beyond the usual suspects
But . . . I often get the feeling that
all of this is happening in a bubble
Occasionally we glimpse a bigger story outside the
institutional bubble with its familiar paradigm of change management: goal-setting,
action-planning, implementation, assessment, evaluation, etc.
Once upon a time . . .
there was a planet
6th Mass
Extinction
6th Mass Extinction
Climate
Change
Crisis of Professional Narrative
This story of the planet has brought me to a crisis point in my story as a
sustainability professional. For sustainability in higher education, these are “good” times, but the
reality is that there is an enormous gap separating the severity of the planetary crisis and even my best
responses to it.
Grappling with the Crisis of Narrative
How can we operate in the old story – where we have our current jobs and a
habitual way of life – while simultaneously telling and making a new story in which we open up the
possibility of a viable future?
Here’s how I’ve been grappling with the gap . . .
What does the gap mean?
• It means sustainability is not exclusively, or even primarily, an engineering problem
• Sustainability is a metaphysical problem that calls for intervention at the level of personal, institutional, and cultural stories
“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.”
--Thomas Berry
Telling and enacting a new story begins with a clear recognition
that all narratives are imperfect, and potentially
dangerous. Yet we cannot live without them so we should tell and enact our stories wisely.
“Now for the first time in human history, a particular worldview is becoming conscious of its own impending fall (all previous civilizations collapsed probably without ever understanding why) and has the opportunity to consciously re-forge its worldview to confront the threat.”
--Jon Kohl (from www.jonkohl.com)
A Unique Historical Moment
We can deploy graphs and data or . . . .
A story about a civilizational train . . .
A Hard Truth
“Almost everything being done in the name of sustainable development addresses and attempts to reduce unsustainability. But reducing unsustainability, although critical, does not and will not create sustainability”
--John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design
“Avoidance”“Magical
Thinking”
Some Problems
Deliberate worldview change is
1) Unprecedented
2) Not widely desired
3) Fraught with paradoxes
Less Unsustainable
Can’t we just green the old
story? Can we really meet the challenge
of sustainability if we do not change the story of what higher
education is for?
Economic Utility, Consumership, and
Technophilia?
Critical Choice
Will we envision and make a new story or simply fulfill the story of the future we have been conditioned to
accept as desirable and . . . inevitable?
from www.mentaloptima.com
The story of the future?
Cultural Transformation?
Where do we go from here?
A Creative Storytelling Leap
How do we mind the gap?
Less Unsustainability Sustainability
What story will they tell?
What is the story people will tell – in 2212 – about how
we managed to get off track, cross the chasm, and begin telling and making a
new story?
Daniel Quinn
“If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they’ll go on living the way we do—and there won’t be any people here in 200 years.”
The New Renaissance
“The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. Nothing less than that is going to save us.”
- Daniel Quinn
What is the story of how this happened?
Sustainability
“the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever”
--John R. Ehrenfeld
Education for Sustainability
Starter Principles for Enacting a New StoryPrinciple #1: Buying time is OK if we know what we’re buying time
forPrinciple #2: Increase the creative tension – emphasize the
difficulty. More doom and gloom please!
Principle #3: Encourage couragePrinciple #4: Learn how to imagine and see around corners Principle #5: Short-circuit the game of school: the game only
makes sense if we’re committed to the current story
Principle #6: Provide glimpses of a new story, outside the bubble, off the tracks, and outside the Matrix
Principle #7: Always keep it realPrinciple #8: We learn what we live – require experiences, not
courses
Education for Sustainability
Some More PrinciplesPrinciple #9: Loosen the cultural grip with cosmology, big picture perspectives, and metaphysical-spiritual questions
Principle #10: Focus less on curriculum and more on culture and mindscapePrinciple #11: Unplug. The revolution will not be televisedPrinciple #12: Think in epoch-changing terms (the New Renaissance). This
is the Great Work, and these are transitional times; we won’t see the end of it. It must awaken in us a sense of incredible opportunity, privilege, and responsibility
Principle #14: Focus less on school and more on culturePrinciple #15: Resist temptations to be a winner in the old story and learn how to engage opponents in telling and making a new story
Education for SustainabilitySome PrinciplesPrinciple #16: Provide powerful, memorable,
transformative experiencesPrinciple #17: Love’s got a lot to do with it. Help others fall in love with
the world.Principle #18: Cultivate creativity, imagination, and real skillPrinciple #19: Heal the split between what we think and what we doPrinciple #20: Educate for real transformation – individual and cultural
Telling Our Stories
Keep it positive . . .
Be bold and visionary
Telling Your Story
1. What’s the story you have actually been enacting?2. What’s the story you want, hope, need to enact?
Are they the same?3. How can you retell the story of your work in a way that celebrates successes while acknowledging the enormity of the sustainability challenge?4. What can you do that makes it more likely that surprising, non-linear change will happen?
Inspiration
• What historical lessons can we take inspiration from?
• What will inspire us to see our work in epoch-making proportions?
Mastering Behavior Change
How can we take back the art of storytelling and put it to use in the
sustainability movement?
(Master storytellers are behavior change engineers. Right now, the masters are people who have managed to successfully get us to buy stuff we don’t need, get us to eat things
that are slowly killing us, and otherwise waste our time/health/money.)
Storytelling and Storymaking:
A New Paradigm for Sustainability Management
Joshua Lasky [email protected]
Paul Morgan [email protected]
Success in the old story tends to decrease creative tension
Buying Time?
“Avoidance”
Buying time for what?
Educate for Transformation
Cultivate a Big Picture Perspective
“The only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at
the same time, the cosmos.”-Vaclav Havel
“The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World” (1994)
We Learn What We Live
from www.mentaloptima.com
Narrative of Technology
It offers speed, efficiency, and convenience for all who
subscribe to it. It is a powerful story that has turned means into ends. It’s vision of the
future is a techno-utopia, but it is a false narrative.
The Narrative of Economic Utility
It is a passionless god, cold and severe. But it makes a promise, and not a trivial one. Addressing the young, it offers a covenant of sorts with them: If you will pay attention in school, and do your homework, and score well on tests, and behave yourself, you will be rewarded with a well-paying job when you are done. Its driving idea is that the purpose of schooling is to prepare children for competent entry into the economic life of a community. It follows from this that any school activity not designed to further this end is seen as a frill or an ornament – which is to say, a waste of valuable time.
Narrative of Consumership
You are what you buy. Clearly a false and distracting narrative, but
like other narratives, it has incredible power. Why? Because the greatest storytelling tools in our culture are fueled by and are
devoted to the narrative of consumership.
