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Until recently, we lived territorially and intellectually confined. The vast majority of people were born, lived and died in a few square kilometers. Suddenly, new communication and information technologies allowed us to ‘know the world,’ to compare. They have allowed us to know the surrounding and distant reality. Appreciate what we have and the precariousness of others. The Earth Stories Collection is an excellent work that, through small stories, brings us closer to realities so distant but, at the same time, so close …

The Earth Stories Collection offers a most valuable contribution which demonstrates that shared human values, as those articulated in the Earth Charter, are embed in our traditional cultures. This unique research gives visibility to the role traditional stories can play as an instrument of social transformation towards a planetary citizenship. I commend Grian Cutanda for his humongous work in putting this together and in connecting traditional stories from cultures from around the world to each Earth Charter Principle. I trust this will enrich our collective efforts to develop new narratives regarding what it means to be humans and how our relationship to one another and the large living world ought to be.

Our current western society lives in a contradiction between proclaimed values and everyday behaviour. This inconsistency shows that the education we implement has not been sufficiently pedagogical or transformative in relation to the environmental issue. The transformative proposals are born from everyday life, from our roots, configured from our morphic fields, that is where myth emerges in a powerful and transversal way to life. In that sense, The Earth Stories Collection offers invaluable resources for our pedagogical activities.