This week My Climate Story and I have been traveling. This installment in the “WE in Wednesday” is coming at you from a train in Belgium—woops now in France!—on a Saturday. I’m on the way west and homeward bound after a series of meetings in Paris and then in Germany, in Cologne. Welcome to this multilingual dispatch of My Climate Story—mon histoire, meine Geschichte. I’ll be explaining how we’re building a collaborative community of storytelling practice, a we, nous, wir. Come along (Viens! Komm mit!) for the ride for glimpses into a policy workshop at UNESCO and a Futures Literacy conference amd climate storytelling workshop at the University of Cologne,

I feel privileged to serve on the Governing Council of UNESCO-BRIDGES, a program designed to expand the sustainability science-policy interface with indigenous and community knowledge and a healthy dollop of humanities (history, literatures and languages, arts & media, philosophy and ethics). BRIDGES is part of UNESCO’s Ministry of Social Transformation. MOST met all week and its Intergovernmental Council ended the week by unanimously voting to adopt the BRIDGES manifesto and policy framework. The BRIDGES team completed at least 5 of Hercules’s labors in getting the docs drafted, circulated, commented upon, revised, and approved on up increasing levels of governance—all in just a few months. The work is urgent, but it’s so important to pause and recognize it 👏👏👏

I talked with and listened to so many fascinating people over the course of the two jam-packed days I was there, and I facilitated a “Policy Relevance for Humanists” workshop that I’ll write about another time. I had expected 12 people, but 29 showed up. But more about that another time.

Although I almost missed my train (!) because I took too long writing up the policy workshop’s first findings, I spent the latter half of the week in Cologne to attend a conference & give a workshop on climate storytelling to students at the university there who, with their professor Roman Bartosch, are collaborating this fall with My Climate Story and with students and faculty at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Bristol (England) and Gävle (Sweden) (more on that in a later weekly dispatch).

Roman and co-organizers put together a terrific program, and I was glad to have the opportunity to try out some new writing about participatory research and climate storytelling and about what I’m increasingly thinking of as “climate civics.” I asked participants there for questions which I could pose in this dispatch. They gave me a lot to think about!

Both Franz Krause and Nadia Maestro get credit for making the connection for me between the MIT (with) in the German Mittwoch (Wednesday). Nadia followed up with with an email and an amazing set of weekday wordplays, going from “Mittwoch ist zum Mitkommen” (Wednesday is for coming along) to “Samstag ist zum gemeinsam sein—>gemeinSamstag” (Saturday is for being together—>Satogetherday). And she took it further into Italian and proposed merCOOLedi. A little different—and I love it.

I got great questions about forgetting versus unlearning and, from Anni Lenz, about how to help students learn to connect self care to community care and civics.

It was an enormous pleasure to learn from Carmen Sippl’s keynote—anyone who includes Astrid Lindgren’s words on the importance of children’s books is already my shero. Like the pages of the Wimmelbuch that dotted her talk, Carmen’s work teems with conceptual resources and practical tools for anyone who wants to teach and learn about how to construct (better) futures. I’m already scheming up how I can adapt her Zukünfte Labor am Campus (Futures Laboratory) for next semester’s students on campus…

It was a special treat to talk with Kate Rigby of MESH who also generously got me invited to the party to celebrate that the Uni zu Köln is (again) an Exzellenzuniversität! Congratulations to their many fine scholars and students!

East is east and west is west, but home is where I like the best, and so I’m happy to be zooming at super high speed on this super fast train ever closer in that direction. Until next week!