ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the practice of storying climate change. It focuses on stories told about collectives of humans and their roles in global climate change. Storying creates meaning through connecting events, beings and places into comprehensible narratives. Storying therefore both recounts and imagines, and in so doing, it normalises ways of relating and generates templates that people can inhabit. Many of the stories we tell about climate change – such as the suggestion to name the emerging geological epoch the Anthropocene – figure humans as homogeneous and inherently destructive. Yet because climate change is a collective action problem, breaking ‘humanity’ into individuals does not offer hopeful scripts either. This chapter demonstrates that stories of diverse, non-unified collectives of humans can be more promising. The figure of the ‘cloudy collective’ is offered as an example. Cloudy collectives are moody, ephemeral coalitions that congregate and disperse according to fluctuating affective responses to climate change. They are not coordinated, formalised or directed. Nevertheless, through their emotional relations, they generate affective transformation which is an important climate action.
