In the conclusion to The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, the writer Amitav Ghosh (2021) remarks that that the ‘first step is to find a common idiom and a shared story’. Above all we need a ‘narrative of humility’.

The French philosopher Bruno Latour (2018) in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime declares that ‘we can no longer tell ourselves the same old stories’.

Writer and climate activist Naomi Klein (2014) in This Changes Everything claims that the fundamental task is to articulate a radically alternative story’ of our relation to the world.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020), urges us to unearth old stories and to tell new ones and asks: ‘who will tell them?’ She turns to her own indigenous stories and knowledge and the science of the evolution of moss from 400 million years ago.

Michel Serres turns to many ancient stories and myths but also invites us to look at the grand narrative from the multiple scales of the evolution of things, through the eyes of geologists, geophysicists, chemists and astrophysicists (The Incandescent page 5).