Climate Conversations to Save the World

Environmental researcher Matt Law reviews an online performance about climate conversations: an interactive journey inviting us to consider how different connections and storytelling could have led to a different world today, and help save the world for tomorrow.


1,180 words: estimated reading time = 4.5 minutes


Are there pivotal moments where, if only somebody had said something different, the progress of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock could have been slowed? What if you could be transported to one of those moments? What choices would you make? Would you know what to say? In a talk to TEDWomen in 2018, US-based Canadian climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe tells us that the most important action we can take on climate change is to talk about it, not by bludgeoning people with depressing facts, but by connecting the risk to your audience’s core values. Tassos Stevens and Michelle McMahon’s How We Save The World, commissioned from Coney by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), explores the ways our conversations about climate change can shape our futures, by putting decisions in the hands of the audience.

Meaningful interventions

We are time travellers, guided on an interactive 75-minute journey by our reassuring and informative pilots (Naomi Stafford and Richard Popple, who also represent all of the characters we meet on our journey and are a joy to watch) to choose from a selection of places and times where we could make meaningful interventions. At a house party in Clapton in 2009, can we plant the seed of an idea about consumerism and plastic waste in the mind of young Fergus, playing in the kitchen with his Hot Wheels; or reassure Lucy, drinking gin on the balcony, who has abandoned her vegan lifestyle, having become jaded with the complexities and enormity of the sustainability choices we face?

Before audience members are called on to talk to the characters we meet, a disembodied voice, the voice of NERC-supported research, tells us about some of the psychology that impacts our choices — the rewards of consumerism, our reluctance to speak up out of fear of being judged; or the physical science of climate change, such as the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide on clear air turbulence, and importance of forests for diversity.

Showing an image from How We Save The World
How We Save The World
Photograph: Thomas Scott on Unsplash

How to save the world

Interventions having been successfully made by audience members at Clapton, we are presented with further choices of times and places to visit. Can we suggest a more successful term than ‘global warming’ at a focus group in Dallas in 1989 (the winning suggestion from our cohort was ‘Bonfire of the World’), or convince the daughter of a wealthy industrialist in early nineteenth-century Bingley of the dangerous path those profitable factories and fossil fuels are leading us down? The crunch choice comes in South Sumatra, in 2005, where we — now assuming the role of islanders of differing financial circumstances — are split into break-out rooms to discuss the choice between allowing PalmOilCo use of our forest, with an immediate monetary benefit, or to allow EuroNGO to protect the forest, giving us less of a financial reward, paid less immediately. Do we lift our families out of poverty now, or listen to the person from half a world away telling us what is best for the planet?

Matt Law’s screenshot from How We Save The World

Placing the audience in control of the decisions, making a game out of climate conversations, forces us to think with empathy and care about the interests of the characters we are talking to. What angle can we use to help them see that the consequences of climate change will be to their detriment too? And how confident are we that we can do that on the spot in front of an audience of strangers? Drawing from research in environmental psychology, How We Save The World distils the idea that storytelling and human connections are among the most powerful tools in climate action at its most immediate and intimate level: the way we talk to each other about the part we can play in climate action.


Find out more

Matt Law was one of five ClimateCultures members who took part in recent conversations with fellow member Julia Marques for her series Directing the Change, which Julia discussed in her recent ClimateCultures post, Conversations with Work That Connects. In his interview — which you can see in full as well as an excerpt in Julia’s post — Matt discusses how he is crossing disciplinary borders within Bath Spa University and has co-created a piece of theatre with the drama department there: The Last Hurrah (and the Long Haul) is a piece very much focussed on the community level of climate change and how incremental changes can unravel but also eventually strengthen a tightly-knit group.

You might also like to read a previous post by Julia, where she explores theatre as a space for thought about our options and what climate change means for us individually.

How We Save The World is a story game by interactive theatre-makers Coney. Written by Tassos Stevens and Michelle McMahon’s, it was created in collaboration with environmental scientists and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). It was first presented in 2018 at The Natural History Museum in London, and then re-imagined for our new global context as a live online performance, on Saturday 20th February 2021. “By looking at how we got to where we are today, together we’ll explore moments where small actions might create a ripple of change in the world – and learn how to take that forward in our own lives.”

You can read an interview with Michelle McMahon hereConey will be announcing new performances of How We Save The World in the next couple of weeks — do check their blog for news.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is an independent, nonprofit organization that gathers a diverse array of informed and influential voices tracking man-made threats and brings their innovative thinking to a global audience. The Bulletin focuses on three main areas: nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. What connects these topics is a driving belief that because humans created them, we can control them. The Doomsday Clock is a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet. When the Doomsday Clock was created in 1947, the greatest danger to humanity came from nuclear weapons, in particular from the prospect that the United States and the Soviet Union were headed for a nuclear arms race. The Bulletin considered possible catastrophic disruptions from climate change in its hand-setting deliberations for the first time in 2007.

Katherine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, where she is director of the Climate Science Center. You can join the 3.8 million people who have watched her TEDWomen 2018 talk The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it — and then talk about it. 

Matt Law
Matt Law
An environmental change & sustainability researcher interested in environmental archaeology and public engagement, working on a theatre project to explore climate change's disruption of everyday lives.

The Anthropocene Writ Small: My Friend Jules

Artist and game designer Ken Eklund shows how working with stories offers popular and accessible routes into the past and present of our life with energy, and imagining possible futures as part of the Stories of Change project. 


880 words: estimated reading time 3.5 minutes


For the past three years, there’s been a digital storytelling initiative at Stories of Change relating to the national transition to lower-carbon energy. This AHRC-funded project draws on history, literature, social and policy research, and the arts to encourage more imaginative thinking about current and future energy choices. When Joe Smith from Stories of Change and I met last year, we knew from our research that people ‘don’t appear to think or care about their relationship with energy, because they can’t see it’ and that set off conversations about adding a storytelling game to the initiative to explore that dimension.

I’m an artist and game designer; I develop innovative game approaches to real-world problems. In my view, the key is to find a playful way to present the issue, one that encourages people to ‘play along’. In World Without Oil (2007), my gamerunning team pretended that an oil crisis had actually begun, and people played along by creating stories of how the oil crisis was affecting their lives. In FutureCoast (2014-7), a game about climate change, we pretended to be recovering voicemails made in the future – and people played along by creating those voicemails that sounded as if they had leaked back to our time.

FutureCoast: two players recover a voicemail from the future that had materialized in New York. By recovering this ‘chronofact,’ they revealed its voicemail, which is a robocall advertising ‘Glacierland Resort,’ an arctic theme park with an artificial glacier, from the year 2048. Tweet by Kate de Longpre’, 2014.
Photograph: Ken Eklund © 2017

For Stories of Change, we decided to collect people’s personal stories about their relationship to energy, quite literally as their personal stories about “my friend Jules.”

A complicated relationship

“Like it or not, you’re in a relationship with energy. How’s that going for you:” is the beginning of the game’s storytelling prompt. Visualising energy as though it were a person in your life – your friend, Jules – is a fun exercise in imagination, but it can also be revelatory. On one level, Jules is undoubtedly a great friend: lighting up your home, whizzing you around the country, and so on. On other levels, though, Jules can be more of a problem friend: chronically hitting you up for money, occasionally abandoning you completely, and engaging in some questionable dealings in your name while out of your sight.

My Friend Jules opens up discussions about our complicated relationship with energy to the vocabularies we use to characterize our human relationships. At the game’s website you can find an elegy, a character reference, a how-we-met love story, a short play, a limerick, essays short and long, a video interview, superheroes, captioned photos, an Amazon product review, and more – all featuring the protean character Jules, standing in for some aspect of the role energy plays in our lives. The project is expanding the ways we can collaboratively envision the anthropocenic structures that shape our common future. 

My Friend Jules: people describe their relationships with energy in the form of its persona, Jules. ‘Hey Jules, can we make a deal?’ Jules stories are told through a variety of media; this image comes from the Stories of Change photobooth at Didcot, May 2017.
Photograph: Ken Eklund © 2017

Take the storytelling challenge

To weave these many threads together, and to reward people for their participation, Stories of Change has engaged artist (and ClimateCultures member) Vicky Long to create a work inspired by the ideas expressed in the first iteration of My Friend Jules. Jules stories received before midnight, Sunday 11th June will be considered for inclusion in her work, to be unveiled by mid-July. Follow My Friend Jules on Twitter (as @MyFriendJules) or Facebook for updates about Vicky’s creation and its possible live performances.  

My Friend Jules is a storytelling challenge, as you will discover if you put pen to paper (or press RECORD) to create your own Jules story. It’s designed to be the easiest possible on-ramp to a difficult road: re-imagining what exists and what will come to pass in the Anthropocene.

If you take up the challenge, it’s easy to contribute your Jules story via the email link at My Friend Jules, site below. 


Find out more

You can find out all the details (including all the entries) at My Friend Jules.  And you can explore the Stories of Change project that the game is part of.

You can explore worldwithoutoil.org, another project that Ken has contributed to.

There’s an interesting CNET article about the World Without Oil game.

Ken Eklund
Ken Eklund
An artist whose immersive what-if storymaking games explore real-world issues through collaborative play to bring possible futures into clearer focus, and imagine positive action

Questioning Energy? Space for creative thinking...

Unsurprisingly, our main creative thinking space this time is made over to My Friend Jules - so get over there and post your story!

But I also found this excellent suggestion at World Without Oil (a quote from Stephanie Olsen, author of the CNET article mentioned above): “If you want to change the future, play with it first.”  What do you think? What would you play with to help create a different path into the future? Share your ideas in the Comments box below, or use the Contact Form."