This blog/podcast collects stories about how people in different parts of the world navigate towards more sustainable lifeforms. These stories carry valuable insights about how new worlds are born. The stories point at the radical transformations that occur when people take matters in to their own hands and reconnect to place and to other (non) human beings in ways that regenerate life in communities, soils, and waters. As more and more people take their first steps towards radically changing their lives, you could also say that the collection of these stories make up a larger narrative on how new worlds are born, one story at the time.
In our daily lives, it can be hard to distinguish the contours of the larger ongoing grassroots transition towards more sustainable lifeforms. The voices of those carrying out the change are rarely front page news in the newspaper. Instead, the headlines about the urgent global climate emergency, the youth’s street protests, the droughts and forest fires, the oceans of plastic waste take up most of the space in the news. The news on climate change, in particular, is very focused on science, (green) innovations, and global cross-governmental agreements. This narrative suggests that the solutions lie in the hands of the experts, the innovators, and the politicians, and that our own role as individuals is to consume ourselves towards a better world. Very little of this narrative deals with the actual earthly relations – how we interact with the wider web of life on this planet and how that network creates particular kind of (un)sustainable worlds. To capture the change that is taking place at the grassroots level, where people together with other beings in the natural worlds are sowing the seeds of change, we need to listen to the voices of those who are leading the way towards new ways of relating to the world(s) beyond themselves.
The idea behind the texts, stories and voices gathered on this site is that we humans do not live in one single world. Instead the world we live in consists of a complex web of relations that sustain the wider web of life that we continuously (re)create together with other visible and invisible beings. How we relate or respond to others and understand ourselves in this wider web of life will also shape the kind of world(s) in which we ourselves live. Thus the processes of sustainable change go through multiple worlds of relations, all connected to the location where the story is being told and where the change is taking place.
Through the pods published here, my intention is to give these kinds of stories the space to be told. Stories hold agency to change the world(s). The more these kinds of stories are being told, the stronger they become. They can open up for new ways of looking at ourselves and our role in the wider web of life that weave the future(s) of a living planet. They provide clues about how sustainable change happens ‘from below’ in different spheres of life. The whole collection of these kinds of stories creates a patchwork of a wider narrative about new worlds being born. It is this patchwork of stories that this site seeks to stitch together through the conversations with those involved in leading the change from below, and through their interaction with the grassroots of wider web of the living planet that we collectively call home.
Worlds in Transition 