Down on the Ground with Small Steps in Big Stories

By George Sibley

This year’s Headwaters Conference at Western State College posed an interesting topic. Entitled “Small Steps, Big Stories: Climate Solutions in the Headwaters,” the conference explored the challenge of developing positive, life-affirming “cultural stories” for addressing the big problems the society faces.

“Climate change” was selected as a focus for the discussion mostly “because it’s there,” in the immortal words of British climber George Mallory, on being asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest. Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels is what’s out there for us, our Everest, if you will. But there are many “lesser peaks” we could assault if we want to get into resolving cultural problems “because they are there,” all of them equally formidable. For example, finding new energy resources to replace the soon-to-be-exhausted cheap and easy oil and natural gas that currently power our world, feeding and watering populations that just won’t stop growing, reviving some kind of an economy capable of providing meaningful participation (work) for all who are willing to participate, etc.

The Headwaters idea was that most of the “small steps” we take toward addressing any of our big problems are driven by the stories we tell ourselves about this or that situation. Storytelling (and storyhearing) seems to be important in the foundations of human culture around the world. CU professor R. Igor Gamow said that “being able to tell a story is perhaps humans’ most distinguishing feature .… Storytelling was a means of holding early groups together and thus, since this was an advantage, was selected.”

Most of the positive cultural stories we heard at Headwaters were, however, not “big stories.” We heard Winona LaDuke tell the story of the revival of the “foodways” of her own native culture in the headwaters region of the Mississippi River. We heard of a Chicano community’s victory over the nuclear industry down in the San Luis Valley. We saw documentaries about how cattle ranching can be a land-conserving operation as well as part of a food supply. We ate plant food that had all been rounded up within the local region.

However, something that was missing was a real consciousness of the dominant cultural story that drives the whole world today – and the story that is the root cause of that whole “range” of problems listed above. I think of that story as the story of the Industrial Revolution, which has become such a big story – first in what we call “the developed nations” (meaning nations that have embraced the Industrial Revolution wholly and uncritically). But now, globally, we don’t think of it anymore as just another cultural story; we think of it as the way things are – and are supposed to be.

The essence of the story of the Industrial Revolution is fundamentally similar to old cultural stories found around the world where a story’s hero finds some magic device or substance – a lamp with a genie, a magic bean, a magic stone, whatever – and it solves all of the people’s problems, erases their poverty, and heals their ills. The magic substance that gave us the Industrial Revolution, of course, were fossil fuels – particularly the light “sweet” petroleum that, early on, gushed out of the earth like artesian water. Add to that the natural gas that at first was just flared off as a nuisance, but was then also controlled and constrained to do our work.

Around 1900, the Industrial Revolution truly looked like magic; something that could transform the whole world, creating infinite wealth that would – once a few problems of social and economic organization were worked out – enrich all people everywhere. And it has in fact done that, at least in so-called “developed nations.” It is true enough – so far as it goes – that even the majority of those people who qualify as “poor” in industrial societies today have more creature comforts than even the wealthiest people before the Industrial Revolution.

But if that is all a cultural story we tell ourselves – where are we in the story? That list of Everest-caliber problems cited at the beginning, taken together, give us a clue: the Industrial Revolution is winding down. The magic substances no longer gush out of the ground and we have to work harder to get ever-diminishing supplies of them. Much of the Headwaters discourse was about making that story renewable and sustainable. But, we do want to keep our cars and clothes and airplanes and electronics; we just want to convert them to renewables, as though there were some way to turn the long slow processes of the earth themselves into another magic substance that would replace the ones we have used up – have used so profligately that we have used up a century what it took those long slow processes millions of years to store up.

I am probably coming across as a little skeptical, maybe a little discouraged, about where we are in our cultural story. In fact, I am. But it is always good to go to the Headwaters conference at Western because it increasingly attracts the cream of the coming generation – really sharp, idealistic young people who don’t fit the cultural image of irresponsible party animals or self-serving MBAs. Some of these students spent most of the week before Headwaters running around the Gunnison Basin collecting “locally grown food” for the conference meals, and then preparing that food in the college’s brand new dining hall kitchen, thanks to a generous and forward-looking food service manager. Other students had worked on preparing and setting up the conference, and many of the best questions following presentations came from students. They were really there. Much of this is due to a very dynamic and interdisciplinary Environmental Studies program at the college – a program with a large component of “service learning” and community involvement, and some faculty that very deliberately work hard to discipline minds without killing imaginations.

But what has become very evident to both the faculty and graduates of the program – our industrial society today has no room for these students, however much it might need them. They are going to leave college ready and willing to go to work saving our cultural story from its earlier unforeseen tendency to devour itself – but they go into a society whose leadership is not the least interested in addressing, or even acknowledging, that Himalayan range of challenges. Not while there is still a barrel of petroleum or a deposit of natural gas to plumb, or appropriate from some weaker region. That is the power of a powerful cultural story; it will try hard to play out to its end, however bitter and impoverishing that might be for most of us.

A workshop exercise on finding your own story and tying it into bigger stories reduced one former Western student to tears. This student graduated with honors from the Environmental Studies program last year, a really bright young woman who wants almost desperately to be about the business of addressing the big problems mentioned earlier, and certainly has the qualities of character and some of the skills that qualify her for such tasks. But she is working as a barista at a coffee shop, and volunteering for a local energy-related non-profit. She was overwhelmed at Headwaters by the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the personal story she worked to develop in college, and any opportunity to realize that personal story in a culture dominated by old men with an old worn out story that denies any need for her.

Thinking of that, I found myself thinking of the old European folk stories like those collected by the Brothers Grimm – stories called fairy tales, but often with more grimness than fairies. These cultural stories grew out of the common people in a feudal society, people whose lives were consistently grim, with the wolf never very far from the door. They tended to be either cautionary or exploratory tales about “problem-solvers” – people who worked “outside the box” to solve a family or community problem (usually the oppressive box of chronic poverty).

The stories I remember best were those in which the youngest child or a stepchild, usually judged to be stupid because he or she didn’t look at the world conventionally, succeeded in helping the family or community because of those unconventional perceptions. They were sent forth as a last resort to find help for the family or community, after their “smarter” older siblings had failed. They saw a helper or resource in an old beggar or witch woman who had been shunned by the older siblings, and with that unlikely help, they saved the family or community from poverty.

If they are going to find situations worthy of their energy and enthusiasm, young people today are going to have to be like the youngest son, the ash-girl, the kid in the Grimm tale who everyone dismisses as too dumb or naïve to be useful, but who – in the inspiring words of John Gardner (“Grendel”) – “looks strange-eyed at the mindless world, and turns dry sticks to gold.” We are certainly developing a backlog of dry sticks we need to transform into something useful.

We cannot persist in the kind of denial that denies them their opportunity – because they may eventually just take it and create an “American Spring.”