There’s a bit of a reading theme to our newsletter this week as climate commentary ramps up ahead of COP27. We start with an excellent interview with architect Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs in the FT. “The scale of what we’re about to face is completely underestimated,” he states. “I think we’re going to have to redesign everything around us, our clothes, our food, our furniture, what we value, what the price of goods is, who owns matter, how we value durability and resilience, how we shift to an intangibles economy over a material economy.” Read it here

Co-founder of the Reset Narratives community, Ella Saltmarshe has written about the importance of resisting the narrative that all humans are catastrophically bad for the planet and, instead, urges us to “cultivate stories of interconnection, courage, humility, stewardship and awe for the extraordinary web of life that we’re part of”. “How can we possibly expect hundreds of millions of people to evolve our societies into ones that supports life, if we’re telling them that they are inherently bad?,” she asks. Read the piece here

Staying with the importance of narratives, writing for the BBC’s Future Planet site, Becca Warner argues that “we need a subtler, more varied portrayal of climate change in film than just climate disaster blockbusters”. “There is no single emotional lever to be pulled, but rather an artist's palette of optimism and unease, joy and jeopardy. This kind of depth and variety has the potential to mark a new chapter in the bigger story of our relationship to climate change,” she says. Read the piece here

Most plastics marketed as “home compostable” don’t actually work, with as much as 60% failing to disintegrate after six months, The Guardian reports. “The bottom line is that home compostable plastics don’t work,” said Professor Mark Miodownik, an author of the paper, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability. “Let’s just stop. Let’s not pretend to ourselves that it’s going to be some sort of panacea, and you can sell people stuff without really having infrastructure to deal with the waste and hope that it’s all going to go away.” Read the article here

Final reminder that URGE’s Alexie Sommer will be talking about Design Declares! and its toolkit with co-founder Jo Barnard of Studio Morrama at the Design for Planet festival on November 8. Join for free here

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