Stories Kill Action

Why Sustainability Storytelling Has Become Our Favourite Form of Climate Denial

TL;DR

Sustainability storytelling has become climate denial with better manners. This essay argues that the dominant narratives we use—whether apocalyptic, technocratic, or regenerative—often soothe, distract, or defer. Stories that once mobilised action, like the moonshot, now mask inaction. They reinforce cultural myths of agency, progress, and innovation while sidestepping biophysical limits. Instead of confronting the unspeakable—degrowth, triage, restraint—we build narrative scaffolds to avoid it. The result is optimistic procrastination. Stories may help humans cope, but in a world of planetary overshoot, they have become our cleverest excuse for doing nothing. Sometimes, a story is the most dangerous technology of all.

---

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in which he famously committed the nation to achieving the ambitious goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the decade. This announcement marked the formal beginning of the Apollo program. It was also a strategic move during the Cold War to assert American technological and ideological leadership, particularly in response to the Soviet Union’s early successes in space exploration.

At Rice University in 1962, Kennedy called the moonshot a national mission—not because it was easy, but because it would summon the best of us. By casting space as the “New Frontier,” he tapped the pioneer myth and turned a Cold War weapons program into a moral crusade. It worked. The mobilisation that followed showed how stories do not just shape what we think is possible; they tell us what must be done.

Imagine what these two fellows would have thought about a man putting a boot on the moon. Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1825–30) by Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840)

A few months later, in October 1962, an American reconnaissance flight over Cuba revealed Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction just 90 miles from the U.S. coastline. A shocked Kennedy administration initiated a tense diplomatic confrontation with the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev. President Kennedy opted for a naval blockade to prevent further Soviet shipments of military equipment to Cuba, while demanding the removal of the missiles already in place.

For nearly two weeks, the world watched as the two superpowers exchanged threats and attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Behind closed doors, both sides engaged in intense backchannel communication. The crisis reached its peak when a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba. It was tense, but diplomacy prevailed when Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites in exchange for a public U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

The Cuban Missile Crisis marked a pivotal moment in the Cold War. It exposed the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship and spurred efforts toward arms control.

And so far, so good.

However, today, we face environmental challenges that dwarf even the audacity of the moonshot or the risk in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Climate, biodiversity, soil health, food security, overdependence on fossil energy, geopolitical instability… take your pick.

Yet our response remains fractured, halting, and insufficient. The contrast is instructive. While the Space Race narrative successfully linked technological capabilities with deep-seated cultural values, current environmental discourse struggles to do the same. The modern polycrisis extends not just to our physical systems but also to the stories we tell ourselves about limits, progress, and our relationship with the natural world.

Just as Kennedy's frontier metaphor created meaning that mobilised collective action, our environmental future hinges on developing narratives that can translate abstract planetary boundaries into meaningful frameworks for shared purpose.

The uncomfortable truth is that we're succeeding brilliantly at solving the wrong problems because our stories define what counts as a problem. Every sustainability report, every ESG framework, every climate target exists within narrative boundaries that predetermine which solutions are even imaginable. When we frame climate change as a "carbon problem," we get carbon markets. When we frame biodiversity loss as a "conservation problem," we end up with nature reserves. These are not solutions. Instead, they are more like rituals designed to signal commitment while preserving structural continuity. Each ritual defers reckoning, consuming energy to preserve coherence in a system drifting toward entropy. But planetary boundaries are connected. Breaching them represents system design failures that our professional vocabularies systematically obscure.

Neither the apocalyptic framing of ’planetary boundaries’, the techno-optimistic language of ‘sustainable innovation’, nor the unrealistic and marginal ‘saving the whale’ comes close.

We all need to win and to believe in the story. So what might that story be?

Let’s begin with this premise, which states the importance of narrative…

Cultural narratives ‌shape how we perceive and respond to planetary boundaries.

Planetary boundaries are science’s attempt to draw chalk lines around chaos. Step over them and the system buckles. The question is not whether they exist, but whether civilisation can live inside them.

For instance, a society that views nature as a resource to be dominated is likely to frame environmental degradation differently than one that sees humans as stewards within a living system.

Cultural narratives determine which planetary boundaries are prioritised. Climate change, for example, dominates global environmental discourse, in part because it aligns with existing beliefs in technological progress, risk management, and economic growth. In contrast, boundaries like biodiversity loss or soil health receive less attention because they do not easily fit into the dominant policy or economic storyline, except as a catastrophe or tragedy. In this way, the visibility and urgency of environmental issues are not determined solely by biophysical reality, but by how well they resonate.

Cultural identity, historical memory, and moral imagination are more important to how we think and respond to an issue. In some cultures, degrowth or ecological limits may be seen as threats to prosperity or autonomy; in others, they resonate with deeper traditions of moderation or reciprocity. Culture not only affects understanding but also collective action, or lack of it. Recognising this helps explain why responses to environmental challenges vary so widely across regions and why scientific communication is so often sidelined.

Here are some broad-brush examples.

In the West, progress is still measured by mastery and growth. The Enlightenment myth of human superiority over nature survives in the language of sustainability, where science and technology are cast as management tools. Carbon capture, geoengineering, renewable transitions—these are the rituals. They acknowledge planetary limits only to insist they can be overcome. Adaptation is heresy; domination remains the creed.

Innovation has become a moral duty, a secular salvation narrative. Proposals that suggest restraint—less growth, lower consumption, behavioural limits—are treated as eccentric, or worse, dangerous. Civilisation is addicted to acceleration and disguises it as progress. Take the enthusiasm for carbon capture. It is packaged as the silver bullet that lets fossil fuels continue. Money and policy flood into the idea despite its technical fragility. Belief in salvation tomorrow proves more powerful than change today.

The same faith sustains the renewable boom. Solar and wind expand not to cut energy demand but to meet ever more of it. They are built as add-ons, not transitions. Consumption continues to rise, material footprints continue to widen, and sustainability becomes a substitution rather than a transformation. The system insists on continuity, so growth is not questioned, only powered differently. And so the pursuit loops endlessly, burning energy to preserve the illusion of progress.

Ironically, Earth couldn't care less about humans and their unsustainable behaviours, for she has seen disruption thousands of times before. Earth (1735) by Johann Justin Preissler (German, 1698–1771)

But not everyone thinks this way.

Many Indigenous cultures see humans as one part of an interdependent web of life. In these worldviews, such as those of Australian Aboriginal peoples, the Andean Buen Vivir philosophy, or North American Anishinabe traditions, planetary boundaries are not external scientific limits but embedded in cultural laws, oral histories, and practices of reciprocity and restraint. These cultures often have long-standing governance systems based on observation of ecological thresholds and provide models for living within limits. In rural Botswana, a man can still cut a mopane tree for his rondavel, leave it where it fell to cure and come back months later to retrieve it. However, these perspectives are frequently marginalised in global policy settings, despite their relevance to sustainability.

In much of the Global South, the story is about scarcity rather than limits and a lot about justice. For example, India, Brazil, and South Africa are nations still clawing their way out of poverty. People in these countries typically see planetary boundaries through the lens of history. The North burned the carbon while the South carries the debt. Environmental responsibility is reframed as inequality, not ecology. Growth is defended as a right, poverty reduction as non-negotiable making any talk of restraint look like colonialism in new clothes. Climate justice, technology transfer, and tailored development pathways become bargaining chips in a negotiation that treats limits less as physics than as politics.

Philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists have dissected these categories into specifics, but there is little doubt that the premise remains valid. Perception and response to limits imposed by a finite biophysical planet are culturally confined, and not often in a good way.

This leads to the second premise…

The dominant frames of crisis, collapse, and apocalypse create psychological resistance.

When people are presented with messages of impending doom without corresponding pathways for action, they often respond with denial, avoidance, or rationalisation to protect themselves from anxiety. Classic cognitive dissonance. When crisis stories contradict core beliefs, people retreat.

Research from Cambridge University's Social Decision-Making Lab found that apocalyptic climate messaging increased psychological distance from the issue. Participants exposed to ‘catastrophic’ framing showed 23% higher levels of disengagement compared to those receiving ‘local impact’ messaging. Similarly, Yale's Cultural Cognition Project documented how environmental information processing follows ‘identity-protective cognition’ patterns, where increased scientific literacy increased polarisation on climate issues rather than creating consensus. Both contradict the assumption that more information leads to better environmental decisions. Renee Lertzman's research on environmental melancholia from a longitudinal study of 847 environmental professionals, gives us what she called ‘optimism fatigue’. Many reported psychological exhaustion from maintaining positivity when it contradicted their held private pessimism about outcomes.

Exhaustion is the expression of cognitive dissonance, the conflict between values and actions that was first identified in the 1950s. It is the mental discomfort that arises when a person behaves in ways that contradict their beliefs, prompting rationalisation, denial, or change.

Apocalyptic and crisis-laden narratives trigger these defensive psychological responses when they overwhelm an individual's sense of agency or belonging. As a result, alarmist framing can backfire even when people accept the facts because it activates emotional defences that block engagement. I see it in people I talk to about the crisis, even when they ask me about it. After a minute, less sometimes, they glaze over, shuffle in their seat, and abruptly change the subject.

Note the term defence. Dissonance is beneficial for the individual as it helps the mind reduce psychological stress by altering one of the conflicting cognitions. Here, it's easier to change the belief about the severity of the threat or one's responsibility than to live with the anxiety of impending doom and helplessness.

I wrote a Mindful Sceptic Guide entitled Escaping the Malthusian Trap, which the preface says is about

…more than providing straightforward answers to whether we escaped. Instead, it's about equipping you with the knowledge and analytical tools to navigate one of the most pressing issues of our time—population.

And that was a huge mistake.

The ‘P-word’ is taboo for an audience from Western liberal democracies. Their narrative simply cannot cope with the implications of exponential population growth for personal or collective action.

And yet, constant exposure to messages of collapse can foster a sense of fatalism and learned helplessness. People believe the situation is already beyond repair or that their actions are meaningless in the face of global-scale problems. This kind of existential overwhelm is now widely recognised in phenomena such as climate anxiety or eco-paralysis, especially among youngsters. Instead of mobilising action, repeated crisis narratives lead to burnout, apathy, or nihilism. This can be especially acute when the story fails to connect with local realities, collective agency, or alternative visions of the future.

What we know is that the framing matters.

Messages are more effective when they combine realism about threats with narratives of resilience, solidarity, and transformation. Stories that offer meaning, connection, and possibilities for action can reduce resistance and foster more sustained engagement. The antidote to apocalyptic framing is not optimism, but empowering narratives that integrate truth with purpose and community. Like stable ecosystems, enduring engagement arises from feedback-rich, self-organising meaning systems.

Matthew Hornsey's meta-analysis of 165 environmental communication studies found that messages combining "threat + efficacy + identity alignment" were 3.2 times more effective than threat-only messaging. Professional audiences showed the most substantial resistance to emotional appeals and the highest responsiveness to methodological frameworks. Most of my work crashes into this problem. I try to tell stories that explain the situation, but they often fail to offer solutions. Realising this was why minsdful sceptic was coined. If you are curious, think critically and have some healthy awareness, solutions will appear to you as if by magic.

Reality is more pragmatic. Climate Outreach research, which tracked 12,000 participants across six countries and measured their responses to identical climate data presented through different narrative frames. The ‘technological optimism’ frame generated 67% more engagement among university-educated professionals than ‘crisis’ framing, despite containing identical scientific information. Crisis narratives triggered what the researchers termed a ‘finite pool of worry’ response, where acknowledging one existential threat requires psychological resources that reduce capacity for others.

This is a critical insight. Optimism is seen as overreach and unrealistic to many who have taken the time to understand the evidence for the crisis.

So what should the frame look like?

There are plenty of suggestions. Here are three more popular options to reduce psychological resistance and promote engagement when people need a softer frame for the global crisis.

The Regeneration Narrative, where ‘We can restore what we've damaged’ shifts the focus from doom to renewal by emphasising nature's resilience and humanity's capacity for repair. Rather than viewing ecological limits as endpoints, it invites participation in a shared project of regeneration to restore degraded landscapes, revitalise local food systems, and rebuild relationships between people and planet. It draws from Indigenous knowledge, agroecology, and permaculture, and frames environmental action as a hopeful, hands-on endeavour. Regenerative narratives are particularly effective in reducing feelings of helplessness because they present concrete, place-based actions that individuals and communities can take.

The Transition Narrative, where ‘We’re already on the way to a better future’ highlights the idea that a global transition is already underway. It is happening from fossil fuels to renewables, from extraction to circularity, from consumerism to sufficiency. It draws on real-world case studies and local successes to demonstrate momentum, helping people feel part of a larger movement. This narrative offers a sense of historical direction and shared purpose, countering the paralysis of collapse stories with an evolutionary mindset that says change is inevitable, and we can shape its trajectory. When combined with justice and inclusivity, it becomes a powerful driver for engagement.

The Deep Adaptation Narrative, where ‘We can face what’s coming with courage and care’ acknowledges that some degree of ecological and social disruption is now inevitable, but reframes the response not as futile panic or retreat, but as an opportunity for values-driven adaptation. Sure there is risk but that always comes with opportunity. It invites reflection on what to preserve, how to support each other, and how to reimagine meaningful lives within changing conditions. Rather than denying the depth of the crisis, it provides emotional and ethical scaffolding for responding wisely. By foregrounding human dignity, compassion, and local resilience, this narrative reduces the fear of collapse and replaces it with a sense of shared responsibility and moral clarity.

Regeneration comforts the hopeful. Transition suits the pragmatic. Deep Adaptation unsettles everyone, but it is the only one that assumes collapse is not optional. I am a believer in adaptation because I think it is inevitable. It is what will happen after a collapse but it is also a way to prepare. But it would appear I am in a tiny minority. Adaptation is not the narrative they make films about.

So, to gain a deeper understanding of why adaptation is often overlooked, consider the following premise, which uses climate change as an example…

The technical language of climate science fails to engage moral intuitions and lived experience.

Climate science is rooted in data, models, and probabilistic projections, often conveyed through abstract terms like radiative forcing, carbon budget, or 2°C pathway.

While this language is precise and essential for scientific dialogue and policy design, it is emotionally detached from everyday life. It tends to speak in trends, averages, and numbers rather than people’s values, fears, and experiences. As a result, it often fails to evoke the kind of moral urgency and personal relevance that move people to action.

For example, a single story of a family displaced by flooding or a community preserving a forest, even the rescue of koalas from a bushfire, can generate far more empathy and moral reflection than a technical explanation of sea-level rise or carbon sequestration. Did you know there is more carbon in the soil than the atmosphere? No, and so what? Without a connection to lived reality, even that soil carbon is essential to food production, climate communication can seem distant, or even manipulative, especially when delivered through institutional channels that already lack public trust.

Ezra Markowitz's research at the University of Massachusetts tested comprehension and emotional response to identical climate information presented in technical versus narrative formats. Technical presentations scored highest on perceived ‘scientific credibility’ but lowest on ‘personal relevance’ and ‘motivation to act’. A follow-up study found that audiences exposed to technical framing were more likely to delegate responsibility to ‘experts’ rather than engage personally. Just establishing scientific authority inadvertently reduced public agency, the opposite of intended outcomes.

When I was giving university lectures on ecology and biodiversity, I confess that all I was concerned about was the scientific credibility. I wanted to be objective and as accurate as my knowledge allowed. I also assumed that students would apply the knowledge and critical thinking skills that came with it as they wished. It would help them to act, rather than motivate them to do so. I had no idea that my framing had limited personal relevance to the youngsters in the lecture theatre and that their values, which I knew little about, would lead them.

People interpret climate messages from what they know and experience. How do I feel in the smog? Will my house flood, and what happens if I lose my job and can’t afford to run the air conditioner? Technical language rarely bridges these domains. Stories rooted in local experience, cultural meaning, and ethical responsibility are more likely to activate a more profound sense of care and agency. This kind of engagement does not replace science, but complements it by speaking to the whole rational, emotional, and moral human being.

This is all true. We prefer stories that resonate with our lives rather than scientific abstractions framed for their effects on everyone, but there is a much deeper problem. It is best understood by asking why the Deep Adaptation narrative is barely told.

Adaptation asks people to accept that significant ecological and societal disruptions are no longer preventable. They will have to give up technological optimism to accept moral and emotional readiness. This is confronting. It easily triggers resistance, denial, or fatalism, particularly in audiences not emotionally prepared to engage with the implications. Unlike the Regeneration or Transition narratives, which offer agency, action, and a future-oriented hope, Deep Adaptation begins with a premise of loss and limits, which can be interpreted as defeatist or paralysing unless carefully framed.

Adaptation implies that what is to come is bad (it will be) and challenges dominant narratives of progress and growth. It requires that people change from continuous making more that our savanna brains implore us to do. Adaptation undermines the belief that technology, policy, or markets can solve our ecological crises. It is politically inconvenient as it invites uncomfortable conversations about triage, retreat, and rethinking systems of power and economy, topics that are hard to frame as ‘positive’ or ‘marketable.’

Numerous people involved in climate and environmental work prefer to focus on solutions, momentum, and transformation. Deep Adaptation can feel like it asks you to grieve, let go of certain hopes, and shift from focusing on systemic change to developing psychological and communal resilience. Its unflinching honesty has profound value, but that very honesty narrows its appeal, especially in a culture accustomed to either denial or the power of solutions.

Up to this point in the discussion, we are stuck in the Global North, where the typical worldview is of a growth economy and consumerism. But there are another 7 billion people in the world, and not all of them follow such cultural traditions.

What do they say about understanding limits?

Here is the following premise…

Different cultural traditions offer alternative narrative frameworks for understanding limits

While dominant global discourse on planetary limits often stems from scientific and economic reasoning about carrying capacity, tipping points, or sustainable development, many cultures have long incorporated the concept of limits through narrative, custom, and cosmology.

Many traditions see people as part of a relational system of balance. Limits in these contexts become moral and spiritual boundaries that guide behaviour, identity, and governance. For instance, in many Indigenous cultures, including those of the Yolŋu in Australia, the Haudenosaunee in North America, or the Māori of New Zealand, limits are encoded in ancestral stories, totemic responsibilities, and seasonal protocols. These stories offer a deep sense of reciprocity where humans take only what is needed and give back to the land, maintaining a sacred trust with other species and future generations. Similarly, Buddhist, Taoist, and Jain traditions offer philosophical framings that stress moderation, non-harm, and humility, suggesting that true well-being lies in restraint, simplicity, and inner balance rather than material expansion.

Such alternative narratives challenge the dominant linear models of progress and growth that underpin much of contemporary environmental degradation. They offer pluralistic and place-based ways of understanding limits, not as constraints to overcome, but as guides to living well within a shared world. However, recognising and engaging with these diverse frameworks is tough when your worldview comes from Netflix and Instagram.

In many Indigenous and philosophical traditions, cultural stories function as foundational myths or deep narratives that shape collective behaviour over generations. They embody archetypal themes of balance, humility, and cyclical time, in contrast to the linear-progressive arc of modern industrial storytelling that valorises conquest, growth, and mastery over nature. For example, in Haudenosaunee storytelling, the Seventh Generation principle anchors decision-making in the long view of intergenerational ethics. Similarly, Yolŋu songlines map ecological knowledge into moral geographies, ensuring each being and place has a role and limit within a larger web of reciprocity.

In this context, authentic storytelling is not about appropriation or synthesis but about listening, honouring, and learning how to live well within limits through diverse, relational lenses.

And it's not just the content. The emotional tone and structure of environmental stories influence how people respond. Solutions that resonate with values of stewardship, resilience, or intergenerational care are more likely to gain traction. This underscores the importance of storytelling not as an accessory to science and policy, but as a foundational force determining which futures we can collectively imagine and strive to realise.

It also explains why a neo-liberal narrative of growth, despite finite resources, is so damaging and brings us to the last premise…

Developing new narratives is as important as developing new technologies.

Without compelling stories, even the most advanced technologies can be resisted, misused, or confined to elite enclaves. For example, electric vehicles or carbon capture may be technically feasible, but public support, regulatory frameworks, and behavioural shifts to travel less depend on shared visions of a better, more just future. These visions are carried by narrative, not engineering.

Narratives also help to define what counts as a solution in the first place.

A dominant techno-optimist narrative might frame climate change as a challenge to be solved by innovation and efficiency, privileging high-tech solutions like geoengineering or AI-driven resource management. In contrast, an ecological justice narrative might call for low-tech, community-based, or regenerative practices that promote equity and sufficiency over growth. The problem of climate is solved by restraint. Each narrative influences funding priorities, policy choices, and public engagement, often more powerfully than data alone. In this way, the social meaning of a technology is co-produced by the stories surrounding it.

What we know is that stories help people make sense of uncertainty, connect personal experience to systemic change, and imagine alternative futures. Writers, artists, educators, and community leaders play as crucial a role as engineers and scientists.

And we have known this for a long time.

Farm fields and Mount Śnieżka in the background (1859 - 1879) by Arthur Blaschnik (German, 1823-1908)

When Norman Borlaug bred his disease-resistant wheat in Mexican test fields during the 1940s, the Green Revolution that followed wasn't solely propelled by its scientific breakthroughs in hybridised crops, synthetic fertilisers, and irrigation systems. Rather, it gained its tremendous momentum from a compelling story. Humanity's moral imperative to feed the world and vanquish hunger through scientific progress. This was a heroic quest. It positioned scientists and policymakers as saviours wielding technology to rescue humanity from a Malthusian catastrophe.

The power of this narrative can't be overstated.

The Green Revolution succeeded not because it was sustainable, but because its narrative perfectly aligned with post-war techno-optimism. It transcended technical journals and research stations to capture the imagination of governments, foundations, and international development agencies. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and later the World Bank didn't just fund agricultural inputs. They invested in a story of modernisation and humanitarian triumph. This narrative framed traditional farming practices as backward and inadequate while positioning Western agricultural science as the enlightened path forward. The language of miracle seeds and agricultural revolution created a compelling moral framework that justified sweeping changes to farming systems across continents.

And it worked.

Between 1960 and 2000, global grain production more than doubled. India transformed from food dependency to self-sufficiency. Millions who might have starved didn't. Yet the compelling narrative that drove global adoption also blinded us to significant unintended consequences.

By framing the problem exclusively as one of production volume rather than access, distribution, or resilience, the dominant story marginalised alternative approaches and obscured emerging problems.

What's particularly instructive about the Green Revolution is how its narrative silences were as significant as its proclamations. The story of feeding the world through higher yields focused attention on metrics of production while diverting attention from mounting ecological disruptions. Groundwater depletion, chemical runoff, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss are all consequences of agricultural intensification. The narrative's emphasis on technical expertise also sidelined concerns about who controlled the new technologies and who benefited most from them. Local knowledge systems, ecological farming practices, and questions of economic equity became footnotes to the triumphant main story.

Regions like Punjab, often celebrated as the Green Revolution's greatest success, now face the complex legacy of this narrative. The initial productivity gains were real and significant, but they came with depleted aquifers, resistant pests, indebted farmers, and contaminated watersheds. The technologies themselves weren't inherently flawed. Many innovations brought genuine benefits. But the narrative framework through which they were implemented shaped their application in ways that created long-term vulnerabilities alongside short-term gains.

Many sustainability narratives are failing for exactly the same reason. They try to sell system change using system maintenance language, promote "circular economy" to people embedded in linear extraction systems, or advocate for "regenerative agriculture" using industrial efficiency metrics. We market "sustainable development" through economic growth frameworks. It's like trying to explain quantum physics using Newtonian vocabulary—the conceptual infrastructure can't support the load.

Counting The Change (1905) by Harry Brooker (English, 1848–1940)

The same applies to the more recent digital revolution.

Information wants to be free became the rallying cry of a digital revolution promising to break down barriers between people and knowledge, democratise communication, and create a more egalitarian world. When the early internet pioneers gathered in Silicon Valley garages and university computer labs, they built network protocols and software architecture. But they also crafted a powerful mythology that would reshape our relationship with knowledge itself. The nascent internet wasn't evangelised through technical specifications but through an intoxicating narrative of information liberation.

This narrative did what technical blueprints alone never could. It mobilised diverse communities around a shared vision, from libertarian-leaning venture capitalists to countercultural cyberpunks, from open-source developers to digital rights activists. The story transcended technical feasibility to address deeper human yearnings for connection, fairness, and self-determination. It wasn't merely that we could build digital networks. The narrative insisted that we should build them as a moral imperative bound up with human liberation.

What's particularly instructive about the internet's founding narrative was its ability to bridge technical innovation with broader social aspirations. It created a framework where coding decisions became ethical choices and where building digital infrastructure became an act of creating a more just world. This storytelling prowess helped secure funding, recruit talent, drive adoption, and overcome institutional resistance in ways that technical specifications alone could never have achieved.

Today, as we face the mature internet's monopolistic platforms, algorithmic manipulation, and privacy concerns, the irony is crushing. We are living through the limitations of the original narrative. The same story that fueled remarkable innovation also blinded us to emerging vulnerabilities and power imbalances. The technologies weren't inherently flawed, but the stories we told about them shaped their development trajectory in ways that created blind spots.

This pattern offers profound insight for our current environmental challenges. As we develop renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, and circular economic models, the narratives we construct around these technologies will prove as influential as their technical specifications. Without compelling stories that connect innovation to our deepest values and aspirations, even the most brilliant green technologies risk remaining niche or being implemented in ways that perpetuate existing problems.

We all love a good story.

And we all know intuitively that narratives shape our relationship with planetary boundaries, and the stories we tell about environmental limits are as consequential as the limits themselves. Throughout human history, from Indigenous knowledge systems to modern scientific frameworks, how we conceptualise constraints fundamentally determines what solutions we can imagine and implement.

Apocalyptic framing, technical language, and cultural narratives reveal that environmental communication enables or constrains collective action. What we say to each other matters. The stories we tell determine what is possible and what is not.

Narratives don't just describe technologies; they're foundational. They determine which technologies get developed, how they're designed, who benefits from them, and what safeguards are built in from the start. We adopted various development paradigms through this method, but we did not anticipate many of the consequences. The AI revolution is just the latest in a long list. Today’s climate dashboards, impact metrics, and AI-led governance tools risk repeating this. They narrate control while deepening dependence. Today’s climate dashboards, impact metrics, and AI-led governance tools risk repeating this. They narrate control while deepening dependence.

Understanding how we use narrative frames could help us. For example, instead of seeing planetary boundaries as barriers we shouldn’t cross, perhaps we could use them as guides to living well. And if we can do this, the most powerful innovation may not be a technology but a story. A story or three that connect abstract ecological limits to our deepest cultural values and sense of shared purpose.

When Kennedy spoke of reaching the moon, he tapped into America's foundational mythology, transforming a technical challenge into a moral imperative and collective identity. Our environmental future demands similar narrative craftsmanship—stories powerful enough to make widespread adoption of sustainable practices feel not just necessary but deeply meaningful.

But here is the thing.

What if the stories about the environment are sophisticated forms of denial that prevent us from confronting biophysical reality? What if the stories are the problem?

I would argue that the most sophisticated climate denial isn't coming from fossil fuel companies anymore, it's coming from sustainability professionals who've perfected the art of what we might call optimistic procrastination. They tell stories so compelling about future solutions that they justify present inaction. Every "net zero by 2050" target, every "breakthrough technology" investment, every "nature-based solution" pilot project functions as a narrative permission slip to avoid the immediate, unglamorous work of using less energy, growing less food more carefully, and building fewer things more thoughtfully.

The moon shot narrative worked because it was achievable; environmental limits aren't but narrative solutions are how educated elites avoid admitting powerlessness and focusing on better communication lets us pretend we have agency when we don't.

A story is nice, cuddly, and warm by the fire. It can smooth over cracks, soften blows and make unbearable truths bearable. The story becomes a substitute for action.

And, of course, telling stories is a form of entertainment, and procrastination as a way to avoid confronting that no story can make degrowth emotionally acceptable to growth-dependent humans.

There is no doubting the sophistication of the storylines that align with cultural values of progress, innovation, and human agency. For example, promoting circular economies or decarbonisation through technology sounds proactive and achievable, but easily masks continued material throughput and dependence on non-renewable resources. This doesn’t mean that all environmental narratives are wrong or misleading, but it does mean that many fail to make thermodynamic constraints, trophic limits, or system-wide feedbacks explicit. In this sense, the denial is not always conscious or malicious. Instead, it is embedded in the language, incentives, and institutions that shape discourse.

However, it would be overly reductionist to claim all environmental narratives are denials. Some, like ecological economics, degrowth, planetary boundaries, or deep adaptation, explicitly confront biophysical reality and try to reorient politics and policy accordingly.

The real challenge is discerning which narratives genuinely reckon with entropy, energy constraints, and biospheric thresholds, and which ones offer symbolic reassurance while enabling delay, distraction, or further extraction.

These could be quite interesting, dissonance-busting stories.

And the most ethical story we can tell now that it’s too late for comfort, but not too late for courage. Every day we delay the reckoning, we write another chapter of professional deceit. Refuse the story. Take the action.

---

---