Someone posted this on a Charles Eisenstein forum. Love the approach: I have been thinking about the story of interbeing since the 1980s. I didn't call it that, I called it interdependence, but I prefer interbeing. I am an educator and for over 40 years I have been working to help children and young people think about the stories we tell ourselves about the world and which they prefer. In 1989 I wrote materials for schools on the different stories we tell ourselves to get young people to think how the stories shape how we think and how we interact with the world. Below is one of the activities aimed at 14-18 year olds. There are 4 different stories about our relationship with forests. The stories are shared with the class and then they are invited to think and talk about them. First I reproduce the short stories - vignettes really and then I describe the activity. --- # Story 1 He is like a man in a dream who has discovered a treasure. He has come upon a forest untrod by human beings for hundreds of years. A dream. Transformation. In a trance, he makes the figures. The numbers of the trees. Their size. Three to four million board feet for every forty acres, he whispers to himself. Centuries of growth. Centuries of rainfall. The very moisture of the air is golden. Machinery, boilers, engines, pumps, axes, chain saws, hauled in from the city. Sawmills, cookhouses, bunkhouses. The woods are alive. The harbour is a thick forest of masts, this is the last and greatest timber bonanza. Clear cutting the virgin stand and replanting the desired species is recommended. By autumn, trees falling, moving upstream. Two thousand board feet a day. They see $70,999 and each year increasing. --- # Story 2 What forests bring us – soil, water and clean air; the basis of our life. Trees provide us with so many of our basic needs. All our buildings are made from timber and a thatch of leaves provides a strong and waterproof roof. Our animals feed on the leaves, branches and fruits of the trees, the pigs clear areas of the forest which we would fence and plant crops in. The time spent in the forest gathering wood and tending animals teaches us the many uses of trees including providing fibres for cloth, mat-making and basketry. Many trees are used as a source of food, offering vegetables, nuts and fruit and even vines. We also know the medical uses of the various trees and plants. The rich forests provide berries and wild fruit, firewood, fodder and fibres. If the trees go all this will go too. --- # Story 3 My research at the university is to study tree physiology and hybridisation in more detail. The timber company that help finance the faculty wants us to produce strains of the best timer for use in the ever-expanding building industry. My research has shown that Eucalyptus can withstand and thrive in this climate. It is among the fastest growing species; it grows straight and makes excellent wood pulp for the growing market in builder’s chipboard. It will meet the primary demand of commercial forestry for profitable extraction. Many years of laboratory work have provided us with a strain that displays a high and sustained rate of cell division in the growing tips of the roots; and the further experiments are aiming to produce a more widely branched root system in order to withstand the periodic heavy rains and maximise their water uptake. The best strains are now being grown in large nurseries at the plant research faculty, and they will soon be transferred to the village where they will be planted in allocated areas to provide employment. This is in line with government policy on forestry. --- # Story 4 The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, learning in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look you can see the different ways we have taken Oak, Beech, Ash, Birch; wherever we grow there are many of us; Pine, Yew, Cherry, Maple, Hazel, Alder, Elm, Willow, Holly, Rowan. And we are various and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to know purpose that you can understand. Yet what you fail to know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable, none of us beautiful when alone but all exquisite as the stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. --- # Activity to reflect on the stories Procedure: Set up a rope down the middle of the room and ask them to place the stories on the line in response to the following: Place the stories from the most to least dominant in our society (put a card ‘most dominant’ at one end and ‘least dominant’ at the other). Encourage students to give reasons for their choices, to disagree with each other and move the stories up and down the line, always ensuring they give reasons for their choices. Next ask them to re-place the stories according to which they think most people in our society would probably agree or disagree with (put a card ‘agree’ at one end and ‘disagree’ at the other). Finally ask them which they would prefer to be the most dominant story in the future. Again, encourage them to move the cards around and agree and disagree with each other (put a card - most preferred to least preferred - at either end of the rope).