{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Circle For Original Thinking","title":"Oral Tradition and Climate Change","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3681,"description":"Since tie immemorial, people have been telling stories. Storytelling has served as a way of building coherent, cohesive community. It is also a way to pass down wisdom from earlier generations for the benefit of future generations. The wisdom of storytelling could be applied to today’s ecological challenges, such as climate change. But this has not occurred often enough.\n\n\n\nEver since the invention of the printing press, the written word has rapidly eclipsed the voice of oral tradition— similarly, truth-telling, once the function of stories, has been largely usurped by modern science. Of course, oral storytelling has never gone away, and it continues to thrive even as it has shape-shifted into other forms, such as film, theatre, dance, hip hop, and spoken-word poetry.\n\n\n\nWhen it comes to climate change, there has been a rush to rely on modern science. Science is the accepted means for predicting and controlling the weather. But the discipline of climate science has a very short history. We have been only recording daily temperatures for less than a century-and-a-half.\n\n\n\nThe oral tradition, on the other hand, has been recording changes to the climate for millennia. Virtually all cultures have flood stories that date back to the ending of the last Ice Age. Some stories date back to the Stone Age. Moreover, stories have long provided a means for living in harmony with all our relations. They teach not only by telling us what to do, but what not to do. We can learn from everyone and every creature—even if the only thing we learn is how to identify a bad example. During times of crises, the perennial wisdom of storytelling is needed more than ever. How can storytelling augment the work of climate science in understanding what is unfolding today? How can traditional stories provide the larger wisdom we need to reset our imbalance with the natural world? Join us as we explore the continuing relevance of storytelling today, with our guest storytellers Regina Ress and...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/vSyRjf6eirP2Ay2hIpmFdcThamdhULjPmKyxBxF0Nqk/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzI3NDEyLzE2NDE5/NDkyMjUtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}