 Hi, this is Jerry McCalskey again, story threading for Unfinished 21. This time the session is Virginie, interviewed by Ella. And here they are in my brain. Here is Virginie, who in 1992 had started a lab, or think tank actually, with her husband Jean-Christophe Victor, who died an untimely death, although he lived a really full life. But when he passed away, Virginie's life really changed dramatically. Her kids were four, five, and nine. And then she sat them down and they started rethinking and together planning their future lives, which were going to have to be really different. So her kids shifted from being victim to this change, to being actors of change. And there's a really there's a really lovely section of this conversation, which is about coping successfully over time with change, but also struggling with, at one point, she wanted to take her life. She just was really lost. But the piece of the conversation that really drew me in, that I'd like to head toward, is this idea of the fact that a unifying direction for addressing climate change hasn't been defined. And I'm going to get to it first by going to another talk that I sort of processed into my brain recently. It's one of my favorite talks. It's by George Monvio. It's a TED talk and from 2019 and I wrote down that it's excellent. That's a little bit of my editorial here. And in this talk, he says, hey, we actually don't have a story. You know, when we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates. And he then describes how the neoliberal story, which we are still in, replaced Keynes' story, and here's John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, and I'll do a quick summary because I took notes in my brain and the Keynes story was, hey, and this is how all the stories begin, disorder afflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the economic elite, which have captured the world's wealth. And then the hero of the story, the enabling state, supported by working class and middle-class people, will contest that disorder, will fight those powerful forces, by redistributing wealth and through spending public money on public goods, will generate income and jobs, restoring harmony to the land. And all the stories end with restoring harmony to the land. And this was the story kind of since World War II through the beginning of the neoliberal era, which happens around Clinton, Thatcher, that kind of era. We, you know, Reagan, the Reagan Revolution turns into neoliberalism, which Democrats buy into entirely. I have a whole other thread about sort of the rise of neoliberalism and how that worked. In fact, here's the thought, most progressives bought the neoliberal agenda, which is connected to, Bill Clinton was a good Republican president, which is one of my beliefs. The little purple thoughts are more editorial, more my beliefs. If I go back to the neoliberal story, you'll see that it's pretty different from Keynes. Disorder afflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the over mighty state, who's collectivizing tendencies, crush freedom and individualism and opportunity. That's our problem. And the hero of the story, the entrepreneur, will fight those powerful forces, roll back the state, and through creating wealth and opportunity, restore harmony to the land. And Mondio's statement in this talk is that, hey, we're missing the better new story. The progressives have shown up, I think a lot of people are really angry about the neoliberal story. It hasn't really worked out in a lot of places. It's destroying the earth while it's keeping a lot of people in poverty. And he proposes something he calls the restoration story. Disorder afflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of people who say, there's no such thing as society, who tell us that our highest purpose in life is to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin. The heroes of this story will revolt, or us, will revolt against this disorder. We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, inclusive, and generous communities, and in doing so, we will restore harmony to the land. And that's his story. He's offering it up in 2019 as what might replace neoliberalism, which is also a thought in my brain. So, when Virginie looks at this question, he's talking a lot about how to talk about this. So if you think about economic models or technical solutions, you pull in different directions. It's hard to make technical climate change issues sexy. The issue of climate makes people sometimes autistic. They don't listen to others. And then she tells the story about the formation of the European Union and tells it in a nice way about the steel and coal board that started not that long after the end of World War II, when France and Germany were mortal enemies, and here in the coal and steel board, they in England began to make friends again and figure out how to work together as a European Union, which later grows into the European Union, which Brexit has since torn asunder in some pretty big ways over the last couple of years. She also makes the statement that it's very hard to move systems, but when they do shift, it can be quite fast, which I agree with. And a piece of that is, how do we find the new story? But then she points out something I'm hearing more and more in lots of different places. More than half of young people are extremely concerned about climate change to the point where they're changing their behaviors. So she points to a report that came out, young people's voices on climate anxiety, government betrayal and moral injury, a global phenomenon. This is a recent 2021 study about climate anxiety, teen anxiety, and I've got this connected to a thought that I'll go to in a second, this 2020 marker generational tipping point. This is an important thought to me. But four out of ten young people fear having children due to climate crisis. This is pretty a pretty huge thing. So for me, I'm really really interested in what young people are doing right now between Greta Thunberg and school strikes for climate change in America, the Douglas High School students who are trying to do arms reductions, the Green New Deal, all of us, Jacinda Ardern being the Prime Minister of New Zealand, really young. There's a whole bunch of young people who are doing things and if they manage to link arms and work together, not in unison, in the uniform sense with only one message, which the far right has actually done really well, but with the unifying message that resonates, that unifies people and they can turn that into a convincing story, then I think we actually might have a whole lot of possibility to fix this mess that we're in. So I don't, this conversation of course didn't end with a solution to all the world's problems, but it dug into and opened up a whole lot of really interesting paths for me. So thanks for listening.