Oh. Hello and welcome you are listening to an upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition Project.

I'm here with Jacob Rask and we are joined today by Inez Aponte for an interview.

Inez is the founder of Growing Good Lives. She is a storyteller, facilitator, and community organizer who

uses the human-scale development approach in her workshops and seminars. We will talk about how she came to do this work, why we need

this new way of thinking and talking about economics and development, and the role of

story and language in encouraging lasting behavioral change.

Inez, thank you for joining us.

Let's start with your idea of change, how we change, what leads us to change, and why sometimes we don't change, and

how this relates to your understanding of economics.

So I became interested in that question when I started my own journey of change,

which was when my son was about a year old. I saw that film an inconvenient truth, which we all know.

And there was a moment when I was sitting there with a bunch of friends watching it, and

the graph goes up and he gets on that kind of lift and it goes up and up and I was watching the

dates as it went up, you know, 2030, 2040, 2050 and my child was then a year old and all I could think about was that's when he's going to be this age and this age.

That's when he's going to want to have children.

That's when, and I just really literally saw the future disintegrating before my eyes and it plunged me

into that sort of dark night of the soul and I thought because I've been working as

a storyteller for over a decade then and I'd been I guess a kind of

of low-level environmentalist in the sense that I was doing a lot of stuff to reduce my own impact, but at that moment I felt

that that wasn't enough, my individual activism really.

I needed to extend myself.

So, but what was interesting for me around that time was that I then

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