How does the Anthropocene change human stories? In a word, drastically. Many people don't want our altered planet to alter their stories. This group, in the spirit of "anything goes," ignores or attacks the science and sometimes the scientists as well. But more and more, writers, social scientists, and humanistic scholars are beginning to engage seriously with Anthropocene science and its radical vision. This engagement results in two new types of narrative. The first kind is the singular collective story of humans from our ancestral species moving out of Africa through all our evolutionary permutations until we became a global force, an Earth System agent, in the mid-twentieth century. The other way of telling human stories in response to Anthropocene science is to acknowledge our species as an Earth System agent, but to point to the many textured, contingent, and small-scale human stories. Some of these are congruent with the overall global narrative; others point to alternatives. This essay takes the reader on a tour of how humanists and social scientists are responding to the Anthropocene through three kinds of stories: those that deny scientific evidence; those highlighting humanity as a collective planetary force, and those focusing on diverse alternative histories within planetary limits.

The function of the beginning of a story. You don’t have to get the opening right before you can make any progress. Different kinds of openings. Starting with exposition. Starting in medias res. The necessity of having a sense of an ending while writing. Judging when to stop. The importance of how the story lands, rather than where it ends. The role of tension in a story. The cliffhanger. Arousing the reader’s curiosity. The importance of pace and how to sustain it. Methods of interrogating your writing for tension and pace.

‘Each chapter needs a narrative function. If you can’t summarise the purpose of a chapter you would be wise to check that it really does have a function. The other way to interrogate your writing for pace and tension is to ask yourself: What does the reader want to know at the end of this chapter?’

In this chapter, the second limitation of the human rights-based approach is examined. The chapter develops the argument that the human rights-based approach casts the personal scope of the refugee definition too widely, as anyone who is exposed to a 'sustained or systemic denial of human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection' is, by definition, persecuted. Such a definition, however, incorporates a wide range of individuals who would not, having regard to the 'ordinary meaning' of the term, be described as 'persecuted', including people who die because of failures of the state to maintain effective disaster risk reduction infrastructure (as in the case of Budayeva v Russian Federation). The argument is advanced that this dominant definition of being persecuted misses what is fundamental to the experience of being persecuted within the meaning of the Refugee Convention. In this context, being persecuted cannot be understood without reference to the role of discrimination as a contributory cause of a person's exposure to serious denials of human rights. Employing the methodology at Articles 31-33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a recalibrated definition of being persecuted is articulated.

The concluding chapter applies the recalibrated human rights-based interpretation of the refugee definition in the context of disasters and climate change. A three-step methodology for determining refugee status is set out, making clear that the methodology applies in the same manner for any kind of claim for recognition of refugee status, not only those relating to disasters and climate change.