Ep93 Grian Cutanda on social and environmental activism, storytelling, and the Earth Stories

Grian A. Cutanda has a PhD in Social Education from the University of Granada (Spain) and a Degree in Psychology from the University of Valencia. He is an author of fiction and essay, with 16 books published, some of them translated into 12 languages, and a number of academic papers and chapters at the request of various universities. To highlight his international bestseller The Gardener, published in English by Thorsons (HarperCollins) in 1998.

Social and environmental activist, Grian has been an organiser and coordinator in different fields within social movements such as the Indignados Movement in Spain, forerunner of the Occupy Movement in 2011; the People’s Climate March in 2014 and the subsequent 2015 climate campaign in Edinburgh (Scotland); and Extinction Rebellion, as co-founder of XR Spain and regional liaison for Latin America in XR International. The impact of his environmental activism reached an international level with a documentary screened at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, The Earth Stories Collection, or How to End Modernism Once and for All (Cutanda, Kendall & Borecky, 2021) and when, in September 2021, he held a 33-day hunger strike as part of the Global Earth Fast campaign organised by Extinction Rebellion from the UK. This made him, along with Karen Killeen, the activist who held his hunger strike against climate change the longest in the world.

Founder of the Avalon Project – Initiative for a Culture of Peace, Grian has been linked to the University of Granada as a researcher. His main research led to the creation of The Earth Stories Collection, a global bank of worldwide traditional stories capable to transmit an ecocentric and systemic worldview, illustrating the different principles and fragments of the Earth Charter. In this line, he is also working, with the partnership of the Earth Charter Secretariat at the United Nations’ University for Peace and the Scottish International Storytelling Festival, on spreading these stories through the creation of a global network of storytelling activists, Earth Story Tellers.