Excerpt: We are in the beginning of a climate and ecological emergency. The biosphere is not just changing it is destabilizing. It is breaking down the delicately balanced natural patterns and cycles that are a vital part of the systems that sustain life on Earth are being disrupted and the consequences could be catastrophic. And no unfortunately this is not the new normal. This crisis will continue to get worse until we manage to halt the constant destruction of our life supporting systems until we prioritize people and the planets over profit and greed. We will not be able to adapt to this. Our societies were built for the Holocene which is now becoming a geological Epoch of the past. The world we use to safely inhabit no longer exists. Since the founding of the IPCC in 1988 our emissions of CO2 have more than doubled. One-third of all anthropogenic CO2 missions have been emitted since 2005. Global CO2 emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021. This is the progress that the people in power have made over the past three decades, the progress that they say should not be dismissed as blah blah blah. If we are to stay below the target set in the Paris agreement and thereby minimize the risks of setting of irreversible chain reactions we need immediate drastic annual emissions reductions on a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen. And since we don't have the technological solutions that alone will do anything even close to that in a foreseeable future it means we have to make fundamental changes to our societies. This is undeniable. It is also currently the most important piece of information we have when it comes to protecting the well-being of humankind and the only civilization we are aware of in the entire universe. And yet still in the year 2022 it is completely absent from every part of the global conversation. Our safety as a species is on a collision course with our current system. The longer you pretend this is not the case and the longer you pretend that we can solve this catastrophe within a global societal structure which has no laws or restrictions whatsoever protecting us long term from the ongoing self-destructive greed that has brought us to the very edge of the precipice the more time we will waste, time that we no longer have. Some say that we are not doing enough to halt and address this crisis but that is a lie since not doing enough indicates that you are doing something and the Inconvenient Truth is that we are basically doing nothing. Or to be fair world leaders have been very busy. They have actively created loopholes and benefited the interests of destructive Industries. It is very difficult to do anything to improve or turn things around when we are at best playing defense the forces of greed prophets and planetary destruction are so powerful that our fight for the natural world is limited to a desperate struggle to avoid a total natural catastrophe. We should be fighting for people and for nature but instead we are fighting against those who are set on destroying it. Today our political leaders are allowed to say one thing and then do the exact opposite.  They can claim to be climate leaders while they rapidly expand their nation's fossil fuel infrastructure. They can say that we are in a climate emergency as they open up new coal mines, new oil fields and new pipelines. It has not only become socially acceptable for our leaders to lie it is more or less what we expect them to do. The people in power do not need to wait for anyone else in order to start acting. Nor do they need conferences treaties or International agreements to start real climate action. They could start right away. They also have and have had for a long time endless possibilities to speak up and send a clear message about the fact that we must fundamentally change our societies and yet they actively choose not to. This is a moral decision that will not only cost a deal in the future it will also put the entire living planet at risk. Throughout history we have been adept at keeping historic atrocities as far away from us as possible. The problem has always been someone else in some other far away place. But the climate crisis was created by us, the nations of the global North. It is a crisis of inequality that dates back to colonialism and beyond. Those who have done the least causes are the ones who will suffer the most. All this is ultimately a symptom of a much larger crisis, a crisis arising from the idea that some people are worth more than others and therefore have the right to exploit and steal other people's land and resources as well as the right to use of the planet's finite resources as an infinitely higher rate than others. A crisis shaped my mindset that still infects our societies today. It is naive to think that we can solve this without confronting the roots of the problem. The destruction of the biosphere, the destabilization of the climate and the wrecking of our common future living conditions are in no way predestined or unavoidable nor does human nature we are not the problem. The problem is the systems which allow and even encourage this to happen. This is all happening because we the people haven't yet been made fully aware of our situation or of the consequences of what is about to happen,. We have been lied to, we have been deprived of our rights as Democratic citizens and been left unaware. This is one of our biggest problems but it could also be a great source of Hope because once we understand the nature of this crisis we can act. Given the right circumstances there are no limits to what we can do. We are capable of the most incredible things once we have been given the full story and not something that has been conjured up to benefit certain short-term economic interests we will know what to do. There is still time to undo our mistakes to step back from the edge of the cliff and choose A New Path, a sustainable path, a just path, a path which leads to a future for everyone. Not just for those who think that their money can buy them a way of adapting to dying ecosystems and mass extinctions. Right now we are in desperate need of hope, but hope for whom? The relatively few of us who might initially be able to adapt to a rapidly warming world? Or for the overwhelming majority who will not be so fortunate? What does hope even mean in this context? Is it the notion that we can maintain a system that is already doomed, that we can go on living our Lives more or less the same way as we do today in a system which most people do not even benefit from? To me hope is not about pretending that everything will be fine. It is not about sticking your head in the sand or listening to fairy tales about non-existent technological solutions. It is not about loopholes or clever accounting. Hope is not something that is given to you, it is something you have to earn to Create. It cannot be gained passively through standing by and waiting for someone else to do something. Hope is taking action. It is stepping outside of your comfort zone and if a bunch of school kids were able to get millions of people to go out on the streets and start changing their lives, just imagine what we could all do together if we really tried. So instead of looking for Hope start creating it yourself we are approaching a precipice and I would strongly suggest that those of us who have not yet been greenwashed out of our senses stand our ground. Do not let them drag us another inch closer to the edge. Not one inch. Right here and right now is where we draw the line. This is where we stand our ground. I have spent the last one year and a half putting together a book with over 100 contributors that will share expertise and experiences from people all over the world in an attempt to communicate a holistic picture. These crises are the biggest story in the world and it must be spoken as far and as wide as our voices can carry and much further still. It must be told in books and articles in movies and songs at breakfast tables lunch meetings and family gatherings. In lifts at bus stops and in rural shops. In schools boardrooms and marketplaces in the fields in the warehouses and on the factory floors. At Uni meetings political workshops and football games in kindergartens and in old people's homes in hospitals and at music festivals on social media and evening news. On dusty country roads and in the streets and alleys of our towns and cities everywhere all the time it has been estimated that we humans who are alive today make up seven percent of all Homo sapiens that have ever lived we are all related in time and space together we stretch back through time and forward into our common future we have now gained enough information and knowledge to begin safeguarding our living conditions and our well-being this has given us an unprecedented possibility to create a fair world but that enormous collective achievement perhaps unique in the entire cosmos is now slipping through our fingers. Up until now we have been failing. We have allowed greed and selfishness the opportunity for a very small number of people to make unimaginable amounts of money to stand in the way of our common well-being. But now you and I have been given the historic responsibility to set things right. We have the unfathomable great opportunity to be alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. The time has come for us to tell this story and perhaps even change the ending together we can still avoid the worst consequences and start to heal the wounds that we have inflicted. Together we can do the seemingly impossible. But make no mistake no one else is going to do it for us this is up to us here and now, you and me.

Narrative: The climate crisis is an emergency
Narrative type: Frame
Notes: Have taken the frames listed in Table 1 and crafted a narrative from them
Source paper: Ponton & Raimo (2024)