The Metaphor Project teaches and promotes more effective ways for everyone to communicate with mainstream Americans about becoming a sustainable society.
Through our website, online newsletter, and brainstorming workshop model, people can easily learn a systematic method for creating positive and exciting new language -- slogans, catch phrases, and neologisms -- which play on core American images, themes, and stories. We also publicize our best workshop and research results, if participants agree to it, as well as examples of powerful new language from other sources, including submissions from our readers, website visitors, and friends.
In addition, we critique those common sustainability metaphors in use today that actually cause communication failure and suggest better choices. Custom workshop design and free individual consultation on proposed metaphors and the stories they imply are also available. For details, see the appendix of this online brochure.
"Terminator seeds" and "frankenfood" are dramatic examples of highly successful new language being used by progressives right now. These two inventions work by bringing together strange wordfellows-saying a new thing in terms of two other well-known things never before linked. That structure is the essence of what a fresh new metaphor is. The metaphoric wittiness of these two novelties has attracted attention, making it easier to insert their highly compact "new story" into public debate, at conversational speed. This "new story" then helps to redefine the public's sense of what is real and right.
In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that we actually think largely in very familiar metaphors all the time, such as "time flies." Since we don't experience them as novel, and thus metaphorically strange, they pass unnoticed; these are called "dead metaphors." But we still need even the dead metaphors just to get through the day. E.O.Wilson explains why in Biophilia: metaphor provides a way for our limited brains to process large amounts of information at survival speed. Root metaphors like "reality is a machine," or "reality is organic, biological, and interactive" also form the hidden core of the myths, stories, and visions that underlie all social behavior, as Stephen Pepper showed in World Hypotheses.
Metaphor, carried by images or by words, is, in fact, the most effective communication tool used today by the mass media. Many politicians hire people to watch network tv, in order to pick up the themes and images embodying popular culture's new metaphors. According to Elisabet Sahtouris, author of EarthDance, and co-author with Willis Harmon, of Biology Revisioned, when speaking of anything new, one must use metaphor.
Why the emphasis on positive metaphors?
Although there are important sectors of American society that already grasp the basic principles of sustainability and are trying to implement some of the changes it will require, we do not yet have buy-in at a conscious, consensus level by our whole society on the complete package. Yet our collective survival depends on moving our whole society toward sustainability as quickly as possible. As a movement, we advocates of sustainability have not yet found truly compelling metaphors to engage the mainstream public in a broad consensus for transforming our whole society. Negative metaphors like "frankenfood" or "terminator seeds" are highly effective in the heat of individual battles and we need them for that purpose. But we can win quite a few of those and still lose our ecosphere. Ideally, negative language and metaphors should always be paired with their positive opposites to make a stick and carrot story.
In the long run, the only way to completely transform the way our society operates is to draw people toward positive visions of a sustainable future. To do this effectively, we must combine sustainability themes (or memes) with familiar language and ideas that appeal to the unmet desires of ordinary Americans, not just their fears. For example, recent Metaphor Project workshop participants have turned "manifest destiny" into "green destiny," "the bull market" into "the green bull," and "a chicken in every pot" to "organic in every pot," or "a free range chicken in every pot"(For more workshop and research results, see resources listed below.)
What The Metaphor Project
Offers Online at www.metaphorproject.org
1. Easy Directions for
Creating New Social Metaphors (exercises and workshop models
suitable small groups, trainings, conferences and college or school
classes)
2.Key Tools: American Metaphor Sources, American Story Elements, Current and Emerging Metaphors List, Tweaks and Metaphor Criteria List
3. Results To Date
and Free Feedback on your proposed metaphors and the stories
they imply.
NOTICE OF SITE UPDATES, PUBLIC WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENTS AND ONLINE NEWSLETTER:
To receive the online Metaphor News and other Project announcements
(infrequent, don't worry), send an email message to <metaphorproject@earthlink.net>
with the words "metlist" in the subject line.
If you are interested in receiving more information, getting feedback on your metaphors, sponsoring a workshop we lead for you (see APPENDIX below), or in working with us on outreach, please contact The Metaphor Project at <metaphorproject@earthlink.net>.
If you would like to send us comments, ideas, submissions or
examples, that would be very welcome as well. We also like to
hear about other books, projects, articles or people doing similar
work.
See Appendix below for:
Metaphor Project Workshop Descriptions
Organizational Information
Short Founder Biography
Short History of the Project & Some
Future Plans
Project Logo Explanation
www.metaphorproject.org
tel.925-254-7198, fax 925-254-3304
Post Office Box 892, Orinda, CA 94563
e-mail:metaphorproject@earthlink.net
Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., founder
Basic metaphor project workshop
Learn an easy method for making up lively new earth-friendly phrases or slogans with mainstream appeal. Did you know we talk in metaphors all time? Find out how to make this work for you, for your favorite issue, or for classes you teach. Get an introduction to how story kernels work.
Issue-focused version of the Basic workshop
Visioning version of the Basic workshop
Please see descriptions of these Basic workshop variations on the website at <www.metaphorproject.org>. Write metaphorproject@earthlink.net or call 925-254- 7198 for more information or to schedule for your group.
Story kernel workshop
Using the American Cliché Clusters List, the American Metaphor Sources list and other tools, we experiment with creating new story kernels and complexes that can carry an Earth-friendly message into the mainstream. Led by Project members only at this time.
The Metaphor Project is a non-profit activity whose mission is to facilitate interest in and skillful experimentation with new metaphors for sustainable initiatives and for sustainability as a new national consensus goal. Metaphor Project Committee members include Tom Atlee, Ed Bernbaum, Christina Bertea, Bridget Connelly, Ann Hancock, Lois Jones, Ken Lebensold, Sandra Lewis, and founder Susan C. Strong. The Project operates as an unincorporated public benefit volunteer association; all donations are used to fund workshop supplies, equipment, and room rental, web domain name and forwarding service fees, copying and other dissemination and public relations costs. Tax deductible contributions over $50.00 may be made via LEAP, with memo line reading "for Metaphor Project." Special thanks are due webhost and webmaster Tom Atlee.
SUSAN C. STRONG has worked as a public educator and writer for the last twenty years on issues of peace, environment, and sustainability, as well as on alternative economics. She is a co-founder of The Who's Counting? Project, former Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic Conversion, and a former Peace Action National Board member, representing California. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and taught literature, communication, and contemporary issues at U.C. Berkeley's Rhetoric Department and the Communications Department of St. Mary's College prior to beginning work with the progressive non-profit sector. She is also a published poet.
The Metaphor Project was born as a spontaneously developed workshop in the fall of 1997 at a Natural Step "Open Space" Conference in Berkeley, CA. In late 1997 with some friends, founder Susan Strong had helped organize a community-based conference in Berkeley on the Natural Step, Swedish doctor Karl Henrik Robert's compass for guiding a society toward environmental sustainability. We all felt the need for a popular version of what some U.S. Natural Step trainers had already done -- translate the challenges of moving toward sustainability into the kind of positive language business and government leaders could get. Our conference was using Harrison Owen's highly creative "open space" process, which allows participants to propose and conduct their own workshops as they go along.
As the conference opened, Strong was inspired to propose a workshop around "creating sustainability metaphors Americans can get." The workshop participants experimented with brainstroming core American stock phrases, images, and clichés and then tweaking them just a bit to carry a green message. (Examples of this process include going from "manifest destiny" to "manifest harmony," from "toys r us" to "trees r us, " or "a chicken in every pot" to "organic in every pot.") People also seemed to be getting new energy and a feeling of hope from the creative play with language.
An e-mail description of the Project and invitation to participate or give feedback was first sent out in early 1998, and updated versions, including new results, are part of the online METAPHOR NEWS, sent out periodically since. Many more workshops have been held since 1997; participants have included eco-writers, trainers, activists preparing educational materials among others, church-based sustainability study group members, teachers of classes in language arts, writing, critical thinking, and environmental education. During 2000, a Project written letter about our work was headlined in THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST and EARTH LIGHT Magazine published an item about it, stimulating interest from points as far away as New Zealand. A booklet based on project results and research is also being prepared.
THE METAPHOR PROJECT'S LOGO, THE
BUTTERFLY stands both for the metamorphosis we hope and work for
to a sustainable society and economy and for the now famous "butterfly
effect" of scientific Chaos theory-a good catalytic metaphor being like
the butterfly's power to change far away weather.