Gersie et al, Storytelling for a Greener World

Alida Gersie, Anthony Nanson and Edward Schieffelin, with Charlene Collison and Jon Cree (eds.) Storytelling for a Greener World: Environment, Community and Story-Based Learning

Hawthorn Press, 2014 ISBN 9781907359354 £20.00 The 23 authors of these 21 articles are experienced workers in several established approaches in contemporary storytelling, including therapy, green and alternative spirituality and education. They have been meeting since 2005 as part of the Tales to Sustain programme. This engaging collection of essays has the air of proceedings from a rollover conference of almost twenty years’ duration. Formidable challenges lie in wait for anyone applying the art of oral storytelling to the problem of ecological crisis - let alone the problem of explaining in writing exactly why and how this approach might yield any tangible results. As an old proverb says: if telling stories could change the world, the world would already have changed. But storytelling can create a space where change can take place. Here we see it in action, seeking to do just that: there are some arresting and inspiring accounts of first-hand experience at the coalface of modern storytelling. This collection is at its most persuasive when it affords a glimpse of living traditionbearers such as Yabiye Sogobaye, the Bosavi storyteller from Papua New Guinea, recorded by Edward Shieffelin in 1968, only a couple of years a6er the Bosavi were first contacted by westerners, a6er generations living “more or less sustainably without exhausting their subsistence base or degrading their forest” (p.158). Shieffelin carefully describes some of the secrets of the Bosavi’s relative success, and the ways in which their