Making stories for Gaia:A Terrestrial approach to teaching sustainability to practitioners

Inspired by a new perspective on life on Earth, Gaia, Bruno Latour suggested the Terrestrial as a new concept for humans to reorient themselves in what he called a climatic regime. By attending to local ecological conditions, the Terrestrial holds potential for mobilizing stories of soil, water, air, flora, and fauna in organizing for sustainability. Inspired by the Terrestrial, we develop an approach in which sustainability is seen as a work to be made from the outset of responding to a request from Gaia. Plural modes of existence are seen as unique stories that invite us to complete their journeys, a process called instauration. The article uses stories, including fictional ones, and letter writing, developed in relation to a project on sustainable development in rural areas, to think about how to become Terrestrial in our engagement with practitioners. Concretely, we organize our thinking in relation to two workshops, which we address as creative spaces of appearing and responding. The Terrestrial allows entering a spiritual dreamland that shatters the rational narratives that we are otherwise living in. The workshops are spaces of reimagining stories emerging in the tension between order and chaos. We organize this discussion into four themes: “the word for world is ocean”, “dreamlands”, “being grateful to the dead”, and “let my people go cycling”. <br/>Keywords: The Terrestrial, Gaia, organizing, sustainability, instauration.<br/>