The Stories We Need
Digging Into the Central Role of Stories -
As I steered my truck down the on ramp, it came to me; a minute earlier I’d given the gas attendant the wrong answer. After sizing me and my truck up, he asked “you goin’ huntin’?”. Merging onto the highway rising toward the Coast Range foothills it struck me that though hunting deer or elk is not my purpose, I am hunting for something else. I seek something that is much rarer and more important - the stories that we need.
Months earlier, I made a discovery that I couldn’t shake. A quarter mile up the footpath from the trailhead, a huge, rambling building loomed up out of the forest. Built of well weathered wood and now rusting metal roofing, its many leveled sprawl stair stepped down the mountainside. Because I had seen it before, the only surprise was how much more imposing it was than I recalled. I knew that it had once done the hard work of processing the ore from the Lookout Mountain Mine. Long abandoned, the building was well preserved in the dry climate of Oregon’s Ochoco Mountains. Walking below and beyond the now silent relic, I found my mind racing with questions: “What was mined and processed here? When was it established - and abandoned? Who worked here? Where did the wealth extracted from this mountainside go - and why…”. Returning home, I fired up the computer, confident that an online search would lead me to answers to many of these questions. But before I could enter the key words and hit “search”, I was stopped short by a realization. “I already know this all too familiar story; why do I need to relive it yet again?” Though the names, faces, and dates may vary, I have encountered some variation on this tale at every twist and turn of my life. People arrive in a place - they understandably size up how their interaction with the place might provide the sustenance that their lives depend on - and how they might extract money from the place - they extract the wealth, most often in ways that degrade the place and/or leave some form of a mess - and they move on in search of “the next opportunity”.
One reason why I know this story well, is that my family did it - mining forests from New England west to the Pacific. Several decades ago, the work of researching and writing two theses left me all too familiar with - and tired of the story. As I thought back to the mine and my reluctance to engage with yet another variation of the all too familiar story of greed, extraction and exploitation, I was reminded of the well-respected student of story and myth, Joseph Campbell’s well supported thesis that in spite of the sea of stories that we all swim in, there are a relatively small number of stories, each with countless variations. When I back away from the Lookout Mine, my mind quickly bump into the story of the John Day River pumped dry and ecologically impoverished by irrigators growing and exporting alfalfa in a desert – some of which might be headed to camels in Saudi Arabia. Recoiling north from there I land in the Columbia River with its salmon runs on the ropes and swimming in waters impacted by nuclear waste from the Hanford Reservation, one of the world’s greatest messes. Fleeing that, I cross the Rockies and wind up in the tales of once immense herds of buffalo shot nearly into extinction –and starving native peoples toward assimilating into Euro-American culture. And then the passenger pigeon and the expanding dead zone off of the Mississippi’s mouth - the pumping down of the Ogallala Aquafer - and the Cuyahoga River catching on fire - and Atlantic Cod fished to commercial extinction – Chernobyl – and on to the east to return to the west coast of North America. And stretching above it all is an atmosphere with ever increasing levels of greenhouse gasses.
We all know so many of these stories - that are ultimately variations on one central story. The story of selfish, greed, extraction, exploitation and the creation of degenerative conditions and fewer options and opportunities for those who follow. Aldo Leopold captured this well in his oft quoted “One of the penalties of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds”. Are we taught these stories in school? Not much. Why not? Even though they shape our worlds and identities, we seem to have a hard time looking them in the eye - owning and acknowledging them. As a book buyer once explained her choice not to stock books about the exhaustion of the cod fishery: “It hurts too much to read those stories...”. Has the wealth extracted and products produced helped to build important assets like schools, hospitals, cities, roads and railroads on which our lives depend? Absolutely, but that does not change the realities of how the places and people were degraded and repeatedly our shared wealth was converted to private wealth. You get the point. We’ll call these stories of extraction and exploitation the “A” stories and move on.
While I was recoiling from one A story only to walk backwards into another, I could see that the same landscape held other categories of stories. Again, though the specific details vary, there are clear, common threads. Balancing, stimulated by and in reaction to the A stories, we have a whole category of what I will call “B” stories. In response to the widening use of pesticides, Rachel Carson penned Silent Spring and changed the world. When science clearly showed that CFCs were creating an ozone hole, citizens came together to say “enough” and craft a solution. In response to exploitation of farm workers, Cesar Chavez and many others figured out how to organize the reduce the exploitation… . ending the gunning down of birds for their feathers, imposing limits on fishing and hunting, outlawing slavery - in the US. Of course, you know this category of story too. Given that they are more uplifting and inspiring stories than the A stories, we’re more likely to embrace, share and celebrate them, though that doesn’t mean that as you read this there are powerful forces doing their best to prevent the next, emerging B story from gaining traction. Coming of age in the Pacific Northwest in the ‘60s, I was encouraged to look up to people seen by many as heroes. Looking back, I now see that they were a blend of people whose leadership led to A stories, viewed as “successful” due to the fortunes they’d extracted from places and people, and brave creators of B stories, standing up for the public good. In ways that deserve recognition and celebration. While the B stories are ones that we, humans, need, if we aim to reconcile our demands on the planet with the realities of what it can reliably provide, are they enough?
This parsing of categories of stories could end here, but if it did, we’d miss the central point. The B stories are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Most often, by the time the B story brought the extraction and exploitation of the A story to an end, what was left were degraded communities, ecological and cultural. This reality opens the door to a third category of stories. In contrast to the taking and degeneration at the heart of A stories, C stories are anchored in giving, healing and regeneration – rebuilding communities, ecological and human. Instead of hunting for deer and elk that the gas attendant assumed I was, I hunt for, raise up and learn from the C stories. Unlike the A stories that we inescapably find at every turn, the Cs are gems, often hidden in unlikely places and are all too rare. In the deserts of the American Southwest, since 1997, hard pressed ranchers have come together through the Quivera Coalition to successfully restore degraded range lands, on which their livelihoods depend, and create new and positive opportunities for their communities. In Boston’s Dudley Street neighborhood, a diverse mix of community members have worked hard, creatively and persistently to transform a once struggling place into a vibrant and thriving one. When foresters, ranchers and farmers in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley were hard hit by major reductions in wood available from federal forests, leading to downwardly cycling communities, they came together through Wallowa Resources to create new and positive pathways for the region’s ecology, economy and culture. And finally, there are so many excellent C story examples all around the world, including the African Greenbelt Movement led by Mangari Maathai and others and the Chipko Movement in India.
For every bit that I am sickened when I once again encounter another A story, I’m even more inspired and uplifted by each new C story that I discover and learn from. Though the C stories are too scarce, it’s possible to develop a knack for spotting them, not unlike training oneself to spot the bird in the dense forest. In my experience, there is often a relationship between the three categories. Ideally A is stopped by B which creates the seedbed from which a C story can grow. Too often, either the A continues on or the sprout of regeneration has not yet grown out of the B story. Variations and subtleties are endless - and they matter.
Having suggested this three story framework for making sense of the world we live in and the stories we swim in, I should share why it is more than an intellectual exercise - why it matters. In my experience, a question on the mind and in the hearts of nearly everyone, consciously or subconsciously, is “where is our species headed?”. Driven by my inescapable curiosity, I grab chances to invite people to share their thoughts and feeling. There is much to be learned from their answers. Essentially all believe that the path that we’re on leads to places that we do not want to go - and are worried about that. Some are confident that we can and will change course. Some are certain that we won’t, and many inhabit the space between.
Listening to people’s perspectives, I wonder about what will most powerfully shape the outcome? I believe that the key is - and will be - the stories that we acknowledge, share and, most importantly create through the choices that we make or don’t make. Will we continue to be a species whose identity is largely shaped by the A stories and our failure to control greed, extraction and exploitation? Or will we summon the will and ability to change course and become a species whose identity is anchored in the B and C stories - stories of respect, care and renewal?
When you go hunting, you never know what you might find. An important discovery for me is that it is a mistake to be overly simplistic in trying to distill stories into the three categories shared above. It’s more complicated and the nuance matters. The stories of my home place run deep and include stories with continuity from thousands of years ago to the present day. I assume that the A, B, C stories are largely a product of world views, cultures, economics, religion and politics brought here by Euro-Americans relatively recently and aggressively superimposed on older world views, cultures, economies, religions and politics that co-evolved with this place for millennia. These people – my neighbors – had and have their own powerful and treasured traditions of stories that continue to bring and shape meaning, structure and guidance. Though I know enough to appreciate that these stories include cautionary advice on the dangers of greed, short sightedness and exploitation and the need for care and reciprocity, I make no assumption about whether the A-B-C framing has useful applicability beyond the now dominant Euro-American culture. That’s another story that deserves more attention than time allows for here.
One final dimension deserves mention and attention beyond what will be given here. While it may be tempting to simplistically lump stories into one of the three categories, doing that is often both challenging and a mistake. All too often, the same activities may be viewed by one group as a disastrous A story yet as a wonderful C by another. Additionally, both groups might agree that one activity blends aspects of A and C – solving problems while causing new ones. A current example of this is the proposal to build a large lithium mine near the Oregon – Nevada border, very close to the site of a settler-native battle/massacre. The site is viewed by some as a sacred site. Climate activists, putting a premium on accessing lithium for batteries to enable the climate solution of electrification, are quick to present the project as a potential C story. Many native people and their supporters look on it as yet another extractive and exploitive A story. Once again, engagement with details, nuance and ambiguity matter.
What does all of this have to do with you and me and the choices that we’ll make in the coming days, months and years? Because I believe that it has everything to do with you, me and the here and now, I invite you to join me in taking the following steps:
1 - A Stories - Acknowledge and engage with and share the A stories, particularly of your home place. How ubiquitous were and are they? To what degree are we all complicit in them? When we encounter the fatalistic explanation of “that’s just the way we do things here..”, offer a counter perspective.
2 - B Stories - Acknowledge, celebrate, support and lead the B stories. Embrace the distinction between our inevitable need to be sustained by the world around us and the reality that it is possible to gain sustenance without degrading the systems on which our - and all - life depends. Keep in mind that B stories are essential - but not sufficient.
3 - C Stories - Hunt for, find, celebrate and support the C stories, particularly in your home place. Create your own, even it might be small and humble. Join and support the work of others. Remember that they come in so many shapes, sizes and locations. Insist on making the cultural shift from being defined by the A stories toward being defined and inspired by the Bs and Cs. Work with others to find and share the stories that most powerfully shape your home place, regardless of your feelings about them.
4 – Your Dream? - Develop and work to realize your personal dream related to this work. One of mine is that within ten years, every high school graduate will know the A stories closest to them and be as capable of sharing B and C stories and their role in them as they are to share the A stories.
I invite you to join me as a hunter, sharer and humble investor in the stories that we need. Our future depends on it.
