Our Entangled Future: Stories to Empower Quantum Social Change

© 2019 Karen O’Brien, Ann El Khoury, Nicole Schafenacker, and Jordan Rosenfeld

This book was produced as part of the AdaptationCONNECTS research project, which is studying the relationship between climate change adaptation and transformations to sustainability. This 5-year project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (Project Number 250434/F10) and the University of Oslo.

O’Brien, K., El Khoury, A., Schafenacker, N. and Rosenfeld, J. (eds). 2019. Our Entangled Future: Stories to Empower Quantum Social Change. AdaptationCONNECTS Research Project, University of Oslo: Oslo, Norway.

The copyrights for individual chapters, stories, and artworks are owned by their respective authors and artists.

Our Entangled Future can be downloaded free of charge from the following websites:

https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/projects/adaptation/news/our-entangled-future.htm

http://cchange.no/ourentangledfuture

ISBN (ePub): 978-82-691819-0-6

ISBN (pdf): 978-82-691819-2-0

ISBN (paperback): 978-82-691819-1-3

Cover: Michelle Fairbanks at Fresh Design

(mfairbanks.carbonmade.com)

Interior Design and Formatting: Qamber Design and Media

(qamberdesignsandmedia.com)

Contents

Preface

Stories of Quantum Social Change

The Witnesses by Chris Riedy

The Drought by Jessica Wilson

The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store by Catherine Sarah Young

Synergy by Otter Lieffe

Cool Burn and the Cherry Ballart by Jude Anderson

The Green Lizard by Albert van Wijngaarden

The Visitor by Julia Naime Sánchez-Henkel

Let Us Begin by Saher Hasnain

The Legend of the Cosmos Mariners by Kelli Rose Pearson

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Images

I wanted to stay in that place, whatever it was.

© Elin Glærum Haugland, primusprimus.com

Light Waves

@ Tone Bjordam, tonebjordam.com

49%, or Polypropylene from the series, Rising Horizon

© David Cass, davidcass.art

The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store

© Catherine Sarah Young, theperceptionalist.com

Untitled

© Kristin Bjornerud and Erik Jerezano, kristinbjornerud.com

Three Pines

© Danielle Eubank, danielleeubank.com

Untitled

© Emma Arnold, emmaarnold.org

The Park from the series, Presence of Things Unseen

© Siri Ekker Svendsen, siriekker.com

Reverberations IV

© Jill Ho-You, jillhoyou.com

Nest 4

© Annerose Georgeson, annerosegeorgeson.com

Preface

Can we tell a new story about climate change? Can we use characters, imagery, and metaphors to communicate a sense of collective agency and reveal the potential that exists in every moment for social change? We thought it would be a good idea to try! This project came together because of a shared desire to bring potentiality to the forefront of our storytelling. We live our lives through stories, and if we want to create a thriving, sustainable world, we will need to change our story. We need narratives that convey our deepest values as humans and our greatest potential to respond collectively to climate change.

Our Entangled Future: Stories to Empower Quantum Social Change is part of the AdaptationCONNECTS research project, which is funded by the University of Oslo and the Research Council of Norway. AdaptationCONNECTS focuses on the relationship between adaptation and transformations to sustainability and explores the contributions of creativity, collaboration, empowerment, and new narratives. It also investigates the potential for new paradigms or thought patterns to shape the future, including those based on ideas drawn from quantum social science. The research engages with a growing recognition that to adapt successfully to climate change, we need to adapt to the very idea that we are creating the future right now. Adaptation is about transformation at the deepest levels, and there is no better way to transform than by telling new stories about ourselves and our significance in an entangled future. Could the use of new metaphors and images really contribute to a different narrative about climate change?

We announced a call for short stories related to the notion of quantum social change, fully recognizing the ambiguity of the term. We wanted stories to explore a quantum paradigm, and were curious about the different ways that this would be interpreted. We deliberately pitched the call to both writers and researchers, in recognition that many of those who work daily with climate change are engaging with wider and deeper solution spaces. We sought stories that engage with a creative agility to reimagine the world from the perspective of a new paradigm.

The nine authors featured in Our Entangled Future responded with thoughtful, agency-driven characters and a revitalizing view of our world and the context in which we find ourselves. One of our favorite aspects of this collection is the global character of the stories. The writers or their work originate in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa. A development process for each text was also built into our project and we are grateful to writer and co-editor Jordan Rosenfeld for her careful hand in bringing forth what makes each narrative exceptional.

Three of the nine stories received jury awards for their innovation and excellence from our expert panel of Amy Brady, Adeline Johns-Putra and Rebecca Lawton. The award winning stories, The Witnesses by Chris Riedy, The Drought by Jessica Wilson, and The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store by Catherine Sarah Young provide three different interpretations of quantum social change. Interestingly, all of them take place in the future, yet draw attention to the potential we hold right now to generate transformative shifts. Partway through the project, we recognized the opportunity to feature compelling and evocative visual art, and we paired each story with an original image that relates to entanglement and the natural environment.

This book is a response to society’s tepid progress on addressing the root causes of climate change. We consider these root causes to be fundamentally about how we see ourselves in the world, how we relate to each other and to the environment, and not the least, how we engage with the future. Writer and ecologist Robin Kimmerer speaks about writing as an act of reciprocity with the world.¹ Reading too, can be a reciprocal, even a quantum, act. In fact, readers of these stories are participating in the unfolding possibilities described in this anthology. We hope you enjoy these nine stories and the accompanying art. Better yet – we hope that they inspire you to write your own story about quantum social change!

Karen O’Brien, Ann El Khoury, Nicole Schafenacker, and Jordan Rosenfeld

September 2019

1 Kimmerer 2013, p. 152.

I wanted to stay in that place, whatever it was.

© Elin Glærum Haugland, primusprimus.com

Stories of Quantum

Social Change

by Karen O’Brien, Ann El Khoury, Nicole Schafenacker

and Jordan Rosenfeld

New metaphors have the power to create a new reality.

(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 145)

1. Introduction

Anyone who reads the news these days will recognize that climate change is anything but fiction. Real stories of risk, danger, and loss are conveyed to us daily, whether in relation to wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, glacial melting, rising waters, coral bleaching, species losses, or any other type of ecological distress. The protagonists in these stories are many – they include firefighters, farmers, coastal communities, elected officials, scientists, activists, governments, and those of us who have a stake in maintaining a planet that is hospitable to life. The protagonists in climate change are not merely observers; they are also taking action, for a good story always includes action. Our protagonists are marching in the streets, running for public office, standing up in the boardroom, directing theater pieces, organizing meetings and festivals, and introducing alternatives to our energy-intensive, consumer-oriented lifestyles.

The antagonists in today’s climate stories are numerous as well, including the oil industry, capitalism, agribusinesses, mining interests, mass tourism, and people like us who have adapted to paradigms of perpetual progress, endless consumption, unlimited growth, or the idea that technology will save us. The story of climate change is often told as a heroic battle of good versus evil, right versus wrong, and us versus them. As this plot unfolds, many people are starting to look more closely at the narratives underlying the story of climate change. What kind of stories are we actually telling ourselves and each other about our future in a changing climate? More importantly, what messages are we conveying about our potential to influence the future, right here and now?

Stories play a powerful role in transmitting personal and collective experiences. They allow us to feel climate change in ways that can move us emotionally and open our imagination to new possibilities. They raise our awareness not only to what is happening in the world, but to how it may be experienced by others, both now and in the future. In doing this, stories can change our world. Indeed, the climate crisis requires us to imagine other ways of living—a task to which, of all cultural forms, fiction is the most suited. As Amitav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement, let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.¹

Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a literary genre that is rapidly expanding in response to the climate crisis, with new books and anthologies coming out every day. Cli-fi is located within a broader genre of speculative or science fiction. Speculative fiction is particularly well suited to addressing the climate crisis, as it can activate both reflection and engagement and thus serve as an effective vehicle for expressing experiential impacts, social criticism and alternative scenarios. Speculative fiction can also be used to develop strategic thought experiments related to both practical and philosophical ideas. As an art-science form, it has a unique capacity to envision possible, probable, and preferred collective futures based on projections of available scientific data. It can also draw attention to the importance of consciousness, subjectivity, agency and lived experiences of the climate crisis. It demonstrates humanity’s complex co-implication with the natural world in a more subjective and emotional way. Speculative fiction has the potential to help us to recognize our own potential in co-creating the future. This potential has not yet been fully activated.

Much of contemporary climate fiction depicts a dystopic world that has been radically transformed by the impacts of climate change. For example, in the introduction to Change Everything: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Manjana Milkoreit and her coeditors write that most of our stories imagine gloomy, dystopian future worlds in which much of what we cherish – and take for granted – about our present realities will be lost.² In the Foreword to Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, editor John Joseph Adams describes the stories as a warning flare to illustrate the kinds of things we can expect if climate change goes unchecked. However, he also suggests that they may reveal some possible solutions that inspire the hope that we can maybe still do something about it before it’s too late…³ This is critical at a time when many are giving up hope on the future.

Stories have to offer us more than hope. They have to help us to imagine and actualize alternative not-yet-here realities that enable people and our planet to thrive. They can encourage us to question dominant modes of thinking, relating, acting, and governing, and they can inspire new understandings of the patterns and relationships that are shaping our future. Speculative fiction offers the opportunity to activate thought patterns that empower us with agency and leave us knowing that we can collectively create a better future. They can help us perceive, feel, and activate the possibilities for social change.

As Ernest Callenbach, author of the 1970s classic, Ecotopia, said in an interview: It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now. But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center. And we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.⁴ Callenbach’s Ecotopia was a forerunner to an eco-future movement of practical utopianism known as solarpunk. In contrast to the darkness of popular apocalyptic science fiction, solarpunk offers more viable, optimistic stories about the near-futures and coping with the climate crisis, with the goal of encouraging and inspiring people to change the present. Recognizing that political, social and cultural shifts will be necessary for more sustainable futures, it deploys radical optimism to bring greener futures into being. It is at once a countercultural movement, an adaptation art form, and a form of futurism that focuses on what we should hope for rather than on what to avoid.⁵ Its themes are thrivability and generativity. At its best, propositional speculative fiction and solarpunk can function as a realism of the possible, helping us think through the world as it is and as it may be.

The full realm of possibilities for social change is not likely to be realized through a mechanistic Newtonian paradigm. This scientific paradigm emerged during the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. Among other things, it distinguishes subjects from objects; views space and time as absolute; sees individuals as separate and discrete; includes a limited role for free will and consciousness; and considers causality to be deterministic. This is indeed a problem, for if humans are responsible for climate change and environmental degradation, our lack of conscious agency and real connection make it unlikely that we will transform systems at the rate and scale that is called for at this time. Quantum social change suggests that there may be other ways to understand and generate transformations to sustainability.

2. Quantum Social Change

What do we mean by quantum social change? Quantum social change describes a nonlinear, non-local approach to sustainability transformations. This approach recognizes that our deepest values and intentions are the source of individual change, collective change, and systems change. Drawing on metaphors from quantum physics, and referencing the ambiguous interpretations of its fundamental meaning, quantum social change recognizes the potential for transformations through concepts borrowed from quantum physics, such as entanglement, the wave-particle duality, complementarity, superposition and not the least, by generating a metaphorical quantum leap. This leap, which can be considered a transition that is sudden or discrete (i.e., without intermediate stages), calls for us