The Power of Storytelling

I’ve been learning about the power of storytelling and narrative lately. Who tells the story, whose story is told, and which stories are told can shape both personal and collective paradigm. Amplifying the narratives of those whose stories are often overlooked or untold can help efforts toward equity and systemic change.

A recent Minnesota CERTs Seed Grant helped fund a special Outside the Box months-long project to tell stories about solar energy and environmental justice. I worked with other local creatives, youth at AICHO and energy and trades professionals in Duluth and the Twin Cities. "Solar Storytelling" is a series of three short videos (each under 4 minutes), highlighting people and professions related to renewable energy and environmental justice.

The three videos are the first of what we hope will be many stories told on the new Outside the Box YouTube channel.

Please watch them, share them, and use the links at the end of each video to learn more. At Outside the Box, we invite young people to tinker, to build, to create, and to imagine the possibilities for themselves and their world, outside the box.

CERTs staff recently interviewed me to share stories about the work I do through design, focusing in particular on my associations with Outside the Box and Green New Deal Housing. I’m grateful for the way the CERTs team presented these stories; I hope you’ll enjoy the read or the listen:

https://www.cleanenergyresourceteams.org/advancing-clean-energy-responsible-design

A Step In The Right Direction

In my last two blog posts, I wrote about the urgent need for a Green New Deal, breaking down what that term means and what steps our government can take now to enact it. 

On January 27, 2021, Joe Biden signed an executive order meant to tackle the climate crisis. The language includes an important section about the breadth of the order’s context: “to implement a Government-wide approach that reduces climate pollution in every sector of the economy; increases resilience to the impacts of climate change; protects public health; conserves our lands, waters, and biodiversity; delivers environmental justice; and spurs well-paying union jobs and economic growth, especially through innovation, commercialization, and deployment of clean energy technologies and infrastructure. Successfully meeting these challenges will require the Federal Government to pursue such a coordinated approach from planning to implementation, coupled with substantive engagement by stakeholders, including State, local, and Tribal governments.”

This is almost exactly what I called for in my previous posts—a big step in the right direction.

My green jobs post includes the idea of a "Green Corps"—a training and jobs program not unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression era, which put people to work building infrastructure, maintaining parks, preserving public land, and more, all for good wages.

Part of the new executive order establishes a task force to create a Civilian Climate Corps. This contemporary CCC will "mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs.  The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate." 

You can read the full text of Biden's climate order here (the CCC part is in Sec. 215).

And for more historical context on how the new CCC resembles the other CCC, read this article by journalist Kate Yoder in Grist Magazine.