Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Introduction to the Project

Seeking Spiritual Change Through Stories
Halting global climate change is as much about spiritual transformation as it is about our reducing our carbon footprint. We have lost emotional and metaphorical connection to the planet possessed by our distant ancestors. Across the world humans, "the people," were once inseparable from the earth. Even today, when the Koghi people of the Sierra Madre mountains in Columbia, South America, take gold from the rocks and fashion it into reverent images of jaguars and birds, they are careful to return the metals to the earth when they bury their dead. The Koghi believe that the snows on their high mountain peaks have melted because modern humans have failed to honor and return and honor what we've taken. Instead, we return only pollution. Clearly our scientific and commercial worldview has severed our ancient connections to the planet by turning its stones and trees and animals into objects to exploit for our comfort and pleasure.

How can we regain our lost spiritual connection? Imposing a new religion, enforcing onto the diverse cultures of the modern world a green ideology, attempting a return to a mythic past--all these seem improbable transformative paths. If change is to come it must be in a form that respects the great diversity of our beliefs and finds a new and creative way of re-envisioning our role in life.

The Planetary Story Idea
The Planetary Stories Project proposes "stories about place" as a vehicle for a new creative dialogue on, and discovery of, our role in the scheme of life. The idea is simple.

Let people around the world tell stories about the specific places they cherish and love. We envision stories that have been created, invented, researched or retold by people of all ages and backgrounds.

The planet teems with places that people have cherished on some way or other. The stories that can be told about these places are of all kinds: historical stories, legends, myths, imaginary tales, nostalgic remembrances, and encounters with animals. There may be sea stories, stories that cover vast geological changes, stories about neighborhoods and cityscapes, stories imagining the life of the planet before humans, stories about early humans, biblical and other foundational stories of sacred sites. The planetary stories people tell about the places that fascinate them will come from many traditions which hold different views of the relationship between humans and nature, different ideas of our destiny and of our responsibilities.

But stories have special powers that go beyond ideology and culture. They cross all boundaries. We believe the diversity of stories about places can open audiences up to new possibilities, foster a new global "gestalt" to self-organize in our thinking. Stories get us beyond our conceptual prejudices by presenting us with an immediate sensory encounter between humans and the physical world they live in. In the process we reinforce the one thing we all have in common: our rootedness in the environment.

Hallowing Through Stories
Places around the globe have been hallowed by stories. Thoreau gave us the stories of Walden Pond; Annie Dillard brought us to Tinker's Creek, Virginia; Edward Abbey told the story of his visit to the exquisite canyons that vanished beneath the Lake Powell when the Colorado River was dammed.

Naturalist Aldo Leopold's story of the cranes on his farm on the Wisconsin River is particularly illustrative. Leopold follows the river, its great marsh and the species of cranes as they emerge from the ice age. One story he tells about his farm leads his imagination to cross time to China where Kublai Khan ordered cranes fed so that he could hunt them with gyrfalcons and to a Swedish ornithologist who tracked the cranes from his Swedish heaths to their winter retreat on the White Nile. Leopold's story of his farm is a spiritual journey of the kind that connects us to the planet itself: "Thus," he writes in A Sand County Almanac, "always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish….Some day, perhaps in the very process  of our benefactions,  perhaps in the fullness of geological time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. High out of the clouds will fall the sound of hunting horns, the paying of the phantom pack, the tinkle  of little bells, and then a silence never to be broken, unless perchance in some far pasture of the Milky Way." (101)

Novelist Tom Kelley tells the story of Jimmy Dolan's visit to the tenement building in the Inwood section of the Bronx where he grew up. Dolan discovers, instead his old home, a vacant lot. He sits in front of it in the early morning hours and drinks a beer. Stories about place are often stories about loss of place.

Wolf researcher and Black Earth fellow Christina Eisenberg tells of a place in the American west which she can't name. Here wolves have come for hundreds of years to make dens. It was once a sacred place to the native peoples who now have become ranchers and will kill the wolves if she reveals where this wolf place is. The story of places is the story of our human failings, our human dilemmas.

A Web of Stories
We believe a network of stories covering the earth and reaching back into time would lead us from the microcosm of the particular places we love, remember, or visit, to the earth that gave birth to all places. Stories may help us in our journey to the revitalized spiritual consciousness we will need in order to work together across our traditions, knowledge and presuppositions to a reconnection with the large (but also quite small) place where we all live.