This is The Guardian.

We need new stories on climate by Rebecca Solnet.

Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis.

This is as true of climate chaos as anything else.

We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing or believing in or acting on the possibilities for change.

Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda.

Sometimes the situation has changed but the stories haven't and people follow the old versions like outdated maps into dead ends.

We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind swiftly and decisively.

But what drives our machines won't change until we change what drives our ideas.

The visionary organizer Adrian Marie Brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action.

We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.

I believe that we are in an imagination battle.

In order to do what the climate crisis demands of us, we have to find stories of a livable future, stories of popular power, stories that motivate people to do what it takes to make the world we need.

Perhaps we also need to become better critics and listeners, more careful about what we take in and who's telling it and what we believe and repeat, because stories can give power.

Or they can take it away.

To change our relationship to the physical world, to end an era of a profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many, means changing how we think about pretty much everything.

Wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.

As the climate journalist Mary Higgler writes, we are not short on innovation.

We've got loads of ideas for solar panels and micro grids.

While we have all of these pieces, we don't have a picture of how they come together to build a new world.

For too long, the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts.

While we need their skills, we also need so much more.

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