“When you put those imaginative, hopeful stories into action, it makes it a lot easier for people in the here and now to envision and start acting out what they also hope for.” - Hannah Ascough, Co-Editor of New Climate Stories, May 2022
New Climate Stories is an emerging community group created by environmental activists Hannah Ascough and Nancy Bayly, who both saw the need for more accessible and empowering communication around climate crisis in Kingston. New Climate Stories recognizes the urgent problem of ecological grief (feeling intense sadness about the loss of nature or devastation of the environment). The group honours the stories and work of activists in (re)imagining an alternative future. Ascough explains that their group is focused on “a way of thinking about not only the futures that we wanted to see and create through art, but as well as thinking about redefining what it really would mean to communicate about the climate struggle.”
For New Climate Stories, art plays a vital role in inclusive and multi-perspectival communication. Bayly and Ascough emphasize that as a settler-led organization, it is their responsibility to support Indigenous Nations who are leading the climate struggle globally. The complexities and challenges of the climate crisis are overwhelming; New Climate Stories emphasizes collaboration and critical thinking through artmaking as a means of making discussions on the climate crisis more accessible. For New Climate Stories, storytelling through art is a crucial part of ecological and climate activism.
“Art is a communication about what we care about.” - Nancy Bayly, Co-Editor of New Climate Stories, May 2022
