Wild Things: Stories,Transition, and the Sacred in Ecological Social Movements

This article examines the role of stories in ecological activism. It first situates stories inside object ecologies, encompassing relationships of reliance, care, and maintenance of things. It suggests that ecologies of this sort work as an extended mind where our cognition takes place and meaning is apprehended, so that what we can think of is always a function of what we have “at hand.” The article then considers how these ecologies are impacted by discourses on climate change and peak oil, which stress the impossibility to keep ordering our lives through the same entanglements that have supported them so far. A dissonance arises between the sort of demands and dependencies we are still subject to on a daily basis and the anticipation that those demands and dependencies shall not be able to endure. Stories of transition, which tread a middle ground between denial and collapse hysteria, dissipate this tension. In so doing, they contribute to the growing of alternative sacred forms, working as attractors that constitute groups as moral collectives. These forms are woven through alternative entanglements of objects, bodies, and other stories, providing determinate implication for action, from the indeterminacy of the unknowns of climate change and peak oil.