MAY 2026  |  SEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE  I  SEED WORLD EUROPE   I   41
community. Images of organic farms, food 
forests, people working together with their 
hands in the soil are warm, intuitive, and 
emotionally appealing.
For WePlanet, the core values are 
autonomy, freedom, choice, and progress. 
Those are sometimes harder to translate 
into comforting visuals. A greenhouse does 
not immediately evoke the same emotional 
response as a food forest. Yet the benefits of 
that greenhouse exist elsewhere. The high 
productivity of places like the Westland 
is precisely what makes it possible to pre­
serve and restore landscapes such as the 
Ardennes, Alsace, or the Black Forest. The 
beauty is displaced, but it is very real.
What I increasingly see, especially in 
the Dutch context, is that this story reso­
nates with a much broader political spec­
trum. Christian democrats, liberals, social 
liberals, and parties like Volt show genuine 
interest in this approach. For many of them, 
it feels like a new option that simply did 
not exist before. They had absorbed many 
elements of the classic green narrative not 
because it was a perfect fit, but because 
there was no credible alternative sustaina­
bility framework available.
For a lot of people, encountering the 
ecomodernist perspective creates a real 
moment of recognition. There is another 
route, one that aligns better with their 
values. It can be a liberal story, but it is also 
very much a social-democratic one. It is 
about an active state that invests heavily in 
sustainability, that allows economic growth 
genuinely believed that expertise would 
speak for itself. I had just completed a PhD, 
I understood the science in depth, and I 
assumed that if I explained the evidence 
clearly, people would listen. That turned out 
not to be true at all. Very quickly, I learned 
that you need a compelling story, not just 
correct information.
The choice people make between sus­
tainability narratives is rarely about facts. 
Whether someone supports nuclear energy 
or renewables only, genetic technologies or 
their rejection, land sparing or land shar­
ing, these positions are fundamentally 
about values. They reflect the kind of soci­
ety people want to live in. Data may inform 
these choices, but it does not drive them.
That insight completely changed how 
I think about persuasion. If you want to 
convince people of the value of land spar­
ing, you do not do it by throwing scientific 
papers at them. You do it by telling a story 
they can see themselves in.
In Paved Paradise, for example, we 
went to Costa Rica to make that story 
tangible. Together with a former minister, 
we travelled through the country to show 
what land sparing actually looks like in 
practice. Costa Rica is the only country in 
the world that has deliberately implemented 
a land-sparing strategy. It has doubled its 
forest cover while simultaneously becoming 
a global leader in the production of tropical 
fruits. Those outcomes are powerful, but 
they only really resonate when people can 
see them and feel them.
and environmental progress to reinforce 
each other, and that ensures people actually 
experience the benefits of that progress in 
their daily lives.
That is what makes this narrative so 
powerful and, ultimately, more attractive. 
But it remains an uphill battle. We are 
challenging a story that has been dominant 
for half a century, supported by deeply 
entrenched interests and institutions. Ideas 
take time to reshape societies. The environ­
mental narratives born in the 1970s took 
decades to fully translate into policy. I can 
only hope, and work toward the goal, that 
this new story will move faster.
SWE: ACROSS YOUR FILMS (WELL 
FED, PAVED PARADISE, ORIGIN OF 
FOOD), YOUR NGO INITIATIVES, AND 
EVEN YOUR THEATRE PROJECTS, STO­
RYTELLING SEEMS CENTRAL TO THE 
WAY YOU TRY TO SHIFT PERSPEC­
TIVES. WHAT ROLE CAN ART, FILM, 
AND NARRATIVE PLAY IN REDUCING 
POLARISATION IN THE FOOD DEBATE, 
AND HOW DO THESE TOOLS SUP­
PORT THE VISION BEHIND THE FIRST 
SUSTAINABLE GENERATION?
HB: In many ways, this question touches 
on the most important lesson I have learned 
over the past 20 years, or perhaps more 
accurately, since finishing my PhD. And 
that lesson is a painful one for a scientist 
to admit: facts alone do not change minds.
When I first entered the public debate, 
especially around genetic modification, I 
Hidde Boersma (right) and Karsten de Vreugd (left) working on ‘Paved Paradise’. Source: Hidde Boersma

View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.