It is easy to underestimate how culture changes. Not because it moves slowly—though it often does—but because culture change rarely announces itself. The most consequential shifts happen not in whitepapers or policy briefs, but much more silently: in the background assumptions of television shows or broadcaster interviews, in the moral geometry of a plotline, in what a hero is allowed to want without explanation. These are the spaces the Pop Culture Collaborative has chosen to work in. Their premise is disarmingly simple: if you want to change the world, change the stories people live inside.
The organization’s work is not about education, slogans or persuasion. It is about narrative texture. A movie character’s job. The way landscapes are depicted, as constraint not as a backdrop. A future that feels imaginable rather than abstract. To many scientists and policy professionals, these details feel trivial, even indulgent. But the Collaborative’s wager—and it is a well-supported one—is that these details quietly shape what feels normal, what feels moral, and what feels possible long before anyone reaches for evidence.
That wager turns out to matter far beyond pop culture. It matters wherever we face problems that are widely documented, technically understood, and yet politically immobile. Obvious example include the roles and responsibilities of individuals in society, climate change, race, or freedom. Or the endless discussion between regenerative grazers or veganism. There’s another one lies closer to home, in the landscapes most of us pass through every day without truly seeing: agricultural land.
Narrative oceans and narrative power
The Pop Culture Collaborative uses the metaphor of narrative oceans to describe the deep story environments we inhabit. These are not opinions or beliefs in the usual sense. They are background conditions: the assumptions that make certain questions seem natural and others unthinkable. Within a narrative ocean, some ideas move effortlessly while others encounter drag. But: don’t ever think about asking a fish to describe the water that surrounds it – those most impacted by the narrative ocean are least able to perceive it. If you want to learn about water, you need to ask someone who crosses between land and ocean: an otter, or a frog. Forget about asking the fish.
Narrative power, in this framing, has nothing to do with the power to convince or even enforce. It is the power to set the terms of legitimacy. When a narrative ocean shifts, arguments do not need to be won; they dissolve. New possibilities appear not because they are proven, but because they suddenly feel obvious.
Crucially, narrative oceans do not shift through isolated acts of brilliance. They shift through infrastructure. Through many actors, speaking in different registers, repeating compatible assumptions across time and context. This is why the Collaborative emphasizes narrative networks: loose, distributed constellations of institutions and storytellers who are not coordinated in message, but aligned in worldview. Narrative power accumulates not through volume, but through repetition[1].
This way of thinking offers a useful lens for understanding why so many environmental debates feel stuck—not because solutions are absent, but because the underlying story has not changed.
The competition of symptoms
Consider the modern environmental landscape. Flooding. Drought. Biodiversity loss. Water contamination. Heat stress. Declining bird populations. Rising rates of chronic disease linked to diet and exposure. Road accidents caused by wind, snow drift, or dust. Plantations burning. Each of these problems has its own institutions, its own experts, its own funding streams, and its own language. They appear, on the surface, to be competing for attention and funding in an already crowded public sphere.
From the inside of an organization, this competition is often accepted as inevitable. “If you want the public to learn about landscapes, you have to draw more attention than the climate advocates. You have to outcompete the other movements!” an activist friend once told me. Organizations have confined by mandates: Health groups focus on health. Conservation groups focus on species and land conservation. Municipalities focus on infrastructure. Agricultural organizations focus on production. Ecological farmers associations focus on ecological farming. Each does important work. Each can point to real successes. And yet, taken together, the overall condition of the landscape continues to deteriorate.
What is striking is that nearly all of these “separate” problems are manifestations of the same underlying failure: the erosion of ecosystem functions at the landscape scale. Soil no longer stores carbon or supports diverse microbial life. Habitat connectivity has frayed. Microclimates have destabilized. Water no longer infiltrates and cycles as it once did. The land has become simpler, faster, and more brittle.
Despite this, our institutions rarely name the degradation of landscape ecosystem functions itself as the root cause. Instead, they organize around symptoms. Flood prevention. Species at risk. Best management practices. Grazing strategies. Nutrition education. Emergency response. These framings are safer. They are clear, fundable, fit within jurisdictional boundaries and organizational mandates. But they also fragment attention and make solutions appear unbelievably complex, prohibitively expensive or politically unrealistic, because each intervention is judged in isolation.
In this environment, good solutions compete with each other. A dollar spent on wetlands is framed as a dollar not spent on roads. A hedge planted for biodiversity is weighed against short-term yield losses. A grazing practice that improves soil is discussed as a niche innovation rather than as infrastructure. The system under management disappears behind its windows.
Windows into the same room
Allan Savory, in his work on holistic management, offers a metaphor that is helpful here. He describes academic disciplines as “windows into the same room”. Each window reveals something real, but none reveals the system itself. Problems arise when we mistake the view from a window for the whole. When we organize ourselves around windows, when we optimize through our window perspective. Because then, we decide which “window needs” we prioritize based on power and the ability to dominate.
Savory observed how good people are trapped in dysfunctional institutional structures, with decision options constraint by these ‘window needs’ perspectives. Good people start maneuvering their departmental preferences against other departments, outcompeting each other in budget allocation decisions. This structure mostly results in horrible decisions carried by good people — domain experts, topic advocates, issue champions.
Savory’s Holistic Management thus begins by defining the system under management—the social, ecological, and economic whole within which decisions actually operate. The room, not the window. Only then can trade-offs be evaluated meaningfully – not through competition but a shared system understanding. Without this crucial step, interventions optimize for parts while degrading the whole.
Applied to landscapes, this insight is almost embarrassingly straightforward. The system under management is not a farm, or a nature reserve, or a buffer strip, hedgerow, watershed authority. It is the living landscape itself: the mosaic of fields, forests, wetlands, roads, settlements, and waterways that together generate—or fail to generate—the functions society depends on. It is about the relationships within this living landscape, where sub systems play the role of organs in a larger organism.
Once this system is named, many institutional tensions look different. Conservation areas are no longer heroic islands but ecological anchors within a matrix. A vast stretch of agricultural land is no longer ecologically “neutral” space but the primary substrate through which landscape functions rise or fall. Municipal infrastructure is no longer separate from ecology but downstream of it. Health outcomes are no longer purely behavioral but environmental. Organizational mandates no longer compete for public attention or funding, but complementary human bridges into a shared system: the land and its functions.
None of this is radical. It is widely understood among ecologists. What has been missing is not knowledge, but a narrative that allows institutions to speak about the system without overstepping their mandates or exposing themselves to blame.
Language as practice
Narrative change, in this sense, is not about finding the right slogan. It is about changing what can be said calmly, repeatedly, and without heroics. Small shifts in language matter because they signal a different understanding of the system[2].
Consider the difference between describing farmland as “productive” versus as “ecological infrastructure.” Or between describing conservation as “protecting nature forever” versus as “holding reference points in a living landscape system.” Or between describing stewardship as “voluntary good practice” versus as “maintenance of shared commons that mitigate collective risk.”
Importantly, these shifts do not assign blame. They redistribute responsibility. They make it possible to talk about scale, coverage, and cumulative effect without accusing any one actor of failure. They allow institutions to remain within their mandates while participating in a larger, shared story. They allow applauding the success of a pilot project, while also lamenting the failure to scale.
This is where the abstract notion of narrative networks becomes very practical, concrete. A conservation organization does not need to tell farmers how to farm. It needs only to acknowledge, publicly and consistently, that its success (also) depends on the surrounding landscape functioning. A health unit does not need to become an environmental advocate. It needs only to connect outcomes to upstream land conditions, like the need for mycorrhizal abundance in agricultural soils to give human bodies what they need[3]. A municipality does not need to regulate agriculture. It needs only to name landscape structure as a form of risk infrastructure.
Individually, these statements are modest. Repeated across institutions, they begin to change the ocean – away from fighting symptoms by out competing our peers, toward standing together looking at the same system, the landscape structure.
Participating in a narrative network
To participate in a narrative change network around living landscapes is not to sign on to a platform. It is to adopt a shared orientation. It means speaking about one’s own work as part of a larger system under management, rather than as a self-contained solution. It means resisting the temptation to compete for attention by exaggerating one’s symptom, and instead situating that symptom within a common cause.
This kind of participation is quieter than advocacy. It does not offer the satisfaction of confrontation. It requires patience and trust that repetition, over time, will do its work. But it also offers something rare in contemporary public life: a way to address complexity without paralysis, and responsibility without blame.
Powerful agents within the Industrial Food System , have understood this issue well. After a brief revolt against neonicotinoids in Ontario, Bayer and Syngenta have deliberately funded the building of Narrative Infrastructure in Canada, as I elaborate in my blog Narrative networks in the Canadian Industrial Food System. With this infrastructure, they now carry their narrative into Ontario’s school classrooms, on YouTube channels, in legislature and academia. And part of this story establishes a wall of guilt and shame in eaters across the country: Food production is inevitably destructive to Earth, we can only minimize harm by intensifying production and increasing yields. Funny enough, this industrial narrative is a main barrier to promoting our regenerative cause: just educating people that they have a real choice, means that we regenerative farmers shift blame from “the inevitable system that must be destructive” to “destruction is the outcome of your personal choice”. Most eaters don’t want to know about this choice, and prefer the foggy yet convenient guilt of being part of an inevitable destructive system.
Yet the same strategy that works so well for Industrial Food also works for civil society movements – if we could coordinate at the scale that these corporate giants operate in. The Pop Culture Collaborative’s insight—that culture shifts when new stories become ordinary—applies as much to landscapes as it does to media. Agricultural land will not become visible as ecological commons through a single report or campaign. It will become visible when enough organizations, in enough unremarkable moments, speak as if that were already true.
When that happens, many of the solutions we already know how to implement may finally stop looking unrealistic. They will look, instead, like maintenance of the system we live in.
PS: My next blog will elaborate what this means for a diverse range of organizations that work on specific aspects of landscape functions.
[1] You can read more from Pop Culture Collaborative on their Medium page, https://popcollab.medium.com/
[2] Compare my blog From Soil Health to Living Land: How Our Language Leads Us Astray at www.ThorstenArnold.com.
[3] See my blog Soil Health, Plant Health, Human Health: How Living Soils Create Abundance at www.ThorstenArnold.com
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