Breaking the Paradigm: Storying Climate Change

Despite warnings from scientists and increased manifestations of its dire consequences, the climate crisis continues to worsen. Considering the climate problem as teacher, we can discern key features of the crisis that must be foundational to any effective pedagogy of climate change. These key features include transdisciplinarity, the spanning of large scales of space and time, complex interconnections within and between human and biophysical systems, and the central role of power hierarchies and inequality. This chapter argues that the dominant paradigm of modern globalized industrial civilization is the Newtonian or mechanistic paradigm, a way of constructing reality that is reductionist, atomistic, impersonal, and leads to the fragmentation of space, time, and relationships; as such, it is incapable of making sense of climate change. Dominant paradigms are maintained through stories, explicit and implicit, and therefore can be challenged by other stories, those that do allow us to understand the climate problem on its own terms. Beginning with real-life stories of marginalized communities and considering also stories that emerge from science, along with speculative fiction and cultural stories, this chapter elaborates on how stories can play the role of boundary objects, allowing travel between disciplines, perspectives, and paradigms, and challenging power hierarchies.