Case Study
Context: This research, led by Culture Hack Labs and Ma Earth, was conducted in 2024 and set out with the intention of finding pathways to liberate land, waters, ecosystems, and communities from the enclosures of capitalism and colonialism. It focused on Small Listening through interviews conducted with 28 participants from thematic areas related to key areas of land-based work transforming the current system.
UNDERSTAND |
Attention, Network Power analysis of Narrative Communities:
1) Greenwashing: Development & Growth:
Climate change can be solved without disrupting capitalist economic growth, often through market-based mechanisms like carbon credits. Land is a commodity or asset to be managed or offset in service of economic growth.
- Attention: Central to conversations is carbon reductions (e.g., via carbon credits) as a solution, which is a new facade for profit-seeking and land grabbing corporate capitalism
- Network: The World Economic Forum, and Davos; to COP28.
- Power: Hegemonic and largest.
2) Greenwashing: Techno-solutionists: Silicon Valley and tech will save us. Land is a technical issue solvable through data, efficiency, and scaling of solutions. There is little political analysis – sidestepping the political, historical, and social dimensions of land ownership.
- Attention: Silicon Valley positions itself as a leader in tackling climate change
- Network: Actors in the global North: policy-makers and governmental officials, corporations such as Microsoft, Society Groom, Google, ChatGPT, etc.
- Power: Another large hegemonic with strong influences.
3) Liberatory Technology: new technologies ( decentralized technologies such as blockchain, and web3) can be at the center of redistributing and redesigning systems for regenerative and liberatory ends. However, the community is not always imagining systems beyond traditional capitalist frameworks.
- Attention: Blossomed during popularization of decentralized technologies such as web3, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and the regenerative and decentralized finance movements in the 2020’s.
- Network: Web3, blockchain and decentralized finance activists; Data commoning movements; Land based DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations); Green cryptocurrencies.
- Power: Very small among the current space
4) Rights of Nature: Using the law to recognise the intrinsic value of nature – including Rights of Nature as well as Ecocide (ecocentrism).
- Attention: Popularized in 2008 when Ecuador recognized rights of nature in its Constitution. Ecocide has become more prominent in recent years.
- Network: Organizations & social movements, (e.g. Earth Law Centre; Ecocidio Stop); governments (e.g. New Zealand, India, Mexico [rights of nature]); Belgium, France, Bangladesh, Brazil [Ecocide])
- Power: Led by legal rather than public contexts so relatively small relatively small but coherent.
5) Liberation and Justice: This narrative community focuses on capitalism and colonialism as root causes of the metacrisis and countering hegemonic narratives, oppressive forces, and calling out harms and corporate responsibility.
- Attention: Surge of attention over the pandemic (e.g., Black Lives Matters protests).
- Network: Organizations & social movements, (e.g. Intersectional Environmentalist, Earthrise, and Slow Factory)
- Power: Largest in terms of the most prevalent response to identifying capitalism and colonialism as root causes.
6) Centering & Uplifting the Marginalized: Rather than focusing on dismantling, resisting, or uprooting explicit causes of our current systems (unlike Community 5), it endeavors to uplift BIPOC and/or grassroots voices as embodied examples of pre existing systems or systems change.
- Attention: highlighting the work that is being done but remains outside of mainstream conversations—work that has been led or practiced by marginalized communities
Network: activists, academics, and decolonization thought leaders - Power: community is pervasive in this research group, although influence is nuanced, depending on context and audience.
7) Crisis of Relationality: Attributes the metacrisis to human separation from nature and calls for relational, trauma-informed, and spiritual reconnection
- Attention: This conversation has become more coherent and popular as the public seeks reasons for the metacrisis that underlie fragilities in the current system.
- Network: Indigenous activists (e.g Land Back, NDN Collective); funders (e.g. Kalleopia Foundation); food sovereignty movements (A Growing Culture, Planting Justice); creative publications (e.g., Atmos, Emergence Magazine)
- Power: Pervasive and large in the current space.
8) Community Land Trusts: pursuing different models of land ownership
- Attention:
- Network: Local communities and governments, including a growing youth-led movement; Projects such as Soul Fire Farm, Wild Seed Project.
- Power: popular and holds potential as a transition pathway.
9) Bioregional Governance: land management by ecological and geographical rather than political features
- Attention: developed in the 1970s in the USA but has reemerged in the last few years with the metacrisis and people seeking another way of living.
- Network: NGOs, policymakers, activists and Indigenous peoples, bioregionalism researchers (e.g. Earth Regenerators, Planet Drum Foundation
- Power: small but becoming more popular in seeking alternatives
10) Regenerative Foodways: redesigning food systems – strains include regenerative agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty, which all recognize the fundamental right to control, decide and manage the means of producing the food we consume.
- Attention: conversation has always existed among rural worker movements, yet it has become more popular during the metacrisis.
- Network: Ecovillages; Indigenous organizations; food sovereignty movements (La Via Campesina); NGOs, food systems activists
- Power: medium-sized; growing as an alternative
11) Indigenous Lifeways: led by Indigenous communities focusing on restoring their lifeways through rematriation, land reunion, and a “coming home” to right relations.
- Attention: always existed yet has edged further into the mainstream especially since research demonstrating that Indigenous people protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity has circulated in UN and global media spheres
- Network: Indigenous people, including movements
- Power: small but influence potential is high because of the existing work and interest in uplifting this community among other (e.g., non-Indigenous) thinkers.
Linguistic Analysis:
Narrative Community | Semantic Frames | Conceptual Metaphors |
Greenwashing: Development & Growth: continuing economy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions | Commercial_transaction | MORALITY IS STRENGTH PEOPLE ARE COMMODITIES |
Greenwashing: Techno-solutionists: technology as solutions to metacrisis | Judgment_communicationCause_to_make_progressResolve_problem | ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE MACHINES ARE PEOPLE IDEAS ARE OBJECTS |
Liberatory Technology: technology provides enabling infrastructure for systems redesign | Cause_impactResolve_problemTransition_to_a_state | CREATING IS GIVING AN OBJECT CREATING IS MAKING ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE IDEAS ARE OBJECTS |
Rights of Nature: nature/environment has intrinsic value independent of humans | KillingLegalityProgression | NATURE IS AN AGENT SOCIETY IS A PERSON |
Liberation and Justice: countering and calling out hegemonic narratives | Being_necessaryCause_changeConfronting_problem | IDEAS ARE OBJECTS /CHILDREN IMPROVING A STATE IS MOTION TO A PREFERRED LOCATION |
Centering & Uplifting the Marginalized: uplifting community initiatives | Cause_changeSupporting Social_connection | IDEAS ARE OBJECTS RIGHTS ARE TERRITORIES SOCIETY IS A BODY |
Crisis of Relationality: human-centrism and separation from nature as casual to societal issues | Becoming_separatedFragmentation_scenarioSocial_connection | IDEAS ARE OBJECTS RELATIONSHIP IS KINSHIP SOCIETY IS A PERSON |
Community Land Trusts: establishing community land trusts for alternative experiments | Becoming_awareAccess_scenarioTransition_to_a_state Giving_scenario | ALTERNATIVES ARE DIFFERENT AVAILABLE PATHS NATURE IS AN AGENT ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE |
Bioregional Governance: philosophy for management based on ecological versus political features | Becoming_awareTransition_to_a_state | BELIEFS ARE LOCATIONS ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE WELL-BEING IS WEALTH |
Regenerative Foodways: new and emergent regenerative food systems | Becoming_awareResolve_problemTransition_to_a_state | IDEAS ARE OBJECTS ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE |
Possibility Models: experiments in post-capitalist, regenerative living | Cause_changeExperimentationFreeing_from_confinement | ADDRESSING SOCIAL PROBLEMS IS TREATING A PHYSICAL AFFLICTION ALTERNATIVES ARE DIFFERENT AVAILABLE PATHS IDEAS ARE OBJECTS |
Indigenous Lifeways: restoring Indigenous ways, rematriation, land reunion, and right relations | Indigenous_originRecoveryResponsibilitySocial_connection | NATURE IS AN AGENT NATURE IS A WEB PERCEPTION IS RECEPTION RESPONSIBILITIES ARE POSSESSIONS |
Narrative Mapping & the Window of Discourse:
Shifting the Window of Discourse: from the “carbon fixation” to “possibility models”
- Disrupting the public, political, and philanthropic fixation on carbon as a transition pathway out of the climate crisis.
Making common sense a pursuit of climate solutions that do address root causes of the crises: post-capitalist, post-extractive alternatives that prioritize justice, equity, and regeneration and biodiversity restoration.
You have completed the Understand phase of the Culture hack Method!