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 pmorgan@wcupa.edu

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

Footprints and Consumption

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 jlasky@udc.edu

Paul Morgan pmorgan@wcupa.edu

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.