At least mitigating our crisis might be possible, Rees says, if we can somehow change the story humans tell ourselves about our relationship with the natural world. “Human beings don’t live in the real world,” he says. “We live in socially constructed stories. We make up narratives.” And the dominant economic narrative today, he notes, is a neoliberal story that tells us the economy and the environment are separate systems, and that technology can find substitutes for goods or services provided by nature. “Our model springs from ‘human exceptionalism,’ a notion that human activity is separate from the ecosystem,” he says. “We think we’re decoupled from nature. That humans are exceptional.”
Maybe that’s what shook 10-year-old Bill Rees when he sat down to lunch on his grandparent’s farm: the unnerving awareness of a new narrative—one in which humans are again coupled with nature and we do not try to invent our way beyond nature’s laws. The world that such a narrative would support is sometimes called a zero growth society. Rees refers to a “controlled contraction.” It’s his most optimistic (least chaotic) vision of our shared future.
