Today is International Day of Non-Violence. To achieve a better, more peaceful future we need a new story: a new narrative of the future we all want.

In a very interesting article George Monbiot writes about how we humans need stories to navigate our way through the world. People tend to reject facts and views that do not conform to the narrative of the story through which they interpret the world. The two overarching narratives that have dominated the last seventy years of British, European and North American politics have been Keynesian social democracy and neoliberalism.

Many voices have been trying for decades to tell another story. It has not yet got one agreed name. Monbiot uses ‘the Politics of Belonging’; others have talked about an ‘Earth centred’ or ‘human centred’, ‘Green’ or ‘Gandhian’ politics. It is this other story and the telling of it that has appealed to me since childhood. I don’t think I am alone in this. I, like Monbiot and many others, believe this other narrative would be very appealing to most of the people of the world if they had access to the story and a way to help implement it.

Let me try and sum up what is the core of this other story. It is a story that puts the welfare of people at its heart and which understands our utter dependence on a healthy and thriving biosphere. Healthy populations of phytoplankton providing the oxygen we breathe, worms providing our soils fertility and bees the pollination for our plants are important indicators of success. The relative strength of nation states and their rates of economic growth have been the obsessions of the old Keynesian and neoliberal narratives. It is my belief that we can provide a comfortable standard of living for every human on earth and do so in ways that are not only ecologically sustainable but ecologically restorative. At the heart of this new story is the importance of liberating the human capacity for empathy, cooperation, connection and community. Only by sharing can we find individual happiness. Only by organising in our local and global communities can we hope to make this new story of universal peace and prosperity, ecological restoration and human fulfilment achievable.

The established media and major political parties still hang on to the old Keynesian and neoliberal stories of how the world is. Millions of us are trying to tell another story. For the last seven and a half years I’ve been writing this blog and giving talks under the title ‘Global Problems: Global Solutions’. We could solve many, or all, of the major problems facing humanity. Technologically and philosophically so much is possible. Changing the narrative that dominates the media, politics and what people believe is possible is our principle challenge. Only when enough people believe this new and more hopeful story can we possibly achieve a better future.