Artist, writer and practical activist Nicky Saunter remembers weekly act of creative solidarity during the Covid-19 lockdowns: plague poems for plague times, reminding us that writing may be a solitary pleasure but sharing is an act of magic. ...
Explore more great content – recent and archive – from our members, below.
Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments
ClimateCultures is an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. Launched in 2017, we are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces. Novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, climate researchers — and more.
Scroll down to see a rich taster of our evolving content — all exclusively from our members: our regular blog, a showcase with short examples of creative work, a growing collection of longer essays, and several special series featuring themed content.
The ClimateCultures blog
You can see our current post above. One of our members publishes original content on our blog every few weeks.
We now have over 200 posts from more than 80 authors. You can find these under our Blog menu arranged by year or by our categories: * A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects * Art & Eco Activism * Challenges of Creative Engagement * Conversations * Creative Works * Cultural Change * Endangered Worlds * Environmental Change * Environmental Keywords * Gifts of Sound and Vision * In the Elements * Learning in the Anthropocene * Longer * Preview * Review * Signals from the Edge * Spaces * Speculative Worlds * Spiritual Ecology. And you can explore individual members by searching for ‘Authors’ in the ClimateCultures Members Directory. And in our sidebar you can see some of the popular posts and pages that people are reading right now.
Writer David Guenette shares creative insights into his Steep Climes Quartet, a longitudinal study into climate futures unfolding across an American county. This post accompanies David’s essay for our Longer feature, where he asks "What is Climate Fiction?" ...
Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by. ...
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care. ...
Researcher Anna Hartnell marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the human causes of New Orleans' crisis (“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”) while questioning ‘Anthropocene’ labellings of human nature as hard-wired for destruction. ...
Mary Waltham introduces her and fellow artist Jackie Amies' joint exhibition on their local ancient woodland. Their art invites our curiosity about these rare, ecologically rich areas, which have been largely untouched by human activity since before 1600. ...
Animist farmer & writer Paul Featherreviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives. ...
Geographer Martin Mahony returns with new student contributions to our Museum of the Anthropocene that suggest 'ownership' as a theme in narratives of this age - and expands this notion in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives. ...
Curator and writer Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using GroundWork Gallery's recent exhibition to explore artists' roles in helping change how we value what we discard, viewing our waste as art and heritage. ...
Entrepreneurial thinker, practical activist and artist Nicky Saunter shares the Hope Tales project she's working on to find creative ways to make sustainable futures and talk about the role of hope, imagination and story in facing climate change. ...
Legal researcher Niels Hoek explores the phenomenon of Shifting Baseline Syndrome in our experience of the ever-changing natural world, exemplifying a generational amnesia that conservation lawyers, environmentalists and creative practitioners can help combat as we navigate the Anthropocene. ...
Writer Philip Webb Gregg embraces our Environmental Keywords theme on Transitions with an urgent call to abandon our language of endings for one of beginnings, where we embrace the deepest change: a radical transition to more honest stories. ...
Ecopoet Dr Helen Moore's latest collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas, is celebrated as confirming her "as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time." She reflects on the book and the genesis of one poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward. ...
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White celebrates the Rivers of Film Festival he curated in Cambridge, working with local partnerships. James commissioned 10 short films as a catalyst for conversation and deeper thinking on rivers and water bodies and as a response to growing activism on water health and water care, meeting water knowledge with heart. ...
Artist Ifeoluwa Abhulimen shares her new sculpture using reclaimed, discarded materials, which is born from observing the subtle yet powerful determination of life to adapt and persist. The flowers in Delicate Resilience are not pristine; they are negotiating their environment. The work acknowledges that human excess has altered the landscape irrevocably, while honouring nature’s quiet ...
In this original piece, novelist and essayist David Guenette suggests that, too often, 'climate fiction' fails to bridge the planetary-scale climate crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges: more stories we can identify with may relieve suppressive social silence on climate change. ...
In this original essay, artist and researcher Iain Biggs builds on his earlier essay for ClimateCultures to explore 'wild deep mapping'. This approach offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information. ...
In this original essay for ClimateCultures, poet and writer Joanna Guthrie recalls her time with fellow students on a course exploring connection with trees, their biology, lore, patience and weathering. And deep connection with people, place, love and grief for personal loss and planetary: our links with each other providing the buoyancy we all need. ...
As well as these regular features, we run special series on particular themes, gathering creative content and thoughts across a topic, such as our Quarantine Connection series during the first Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, and our exploration during 2022 of three Environmental Keywords — ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ — as part of a project by the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.
And we’re pleased to host an online Museum of the Anthropocene, bringing a selection of the objects nominated by students on the University of East Anglia’s 3rd-year undergraduate course, Human Geography in the Anthropocene.
Some of the contributions to the Museum of the Anthropocene
ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what the climate and ecological predicaments of our times mean, and what they offer us as ways forward. It’s a beginning.
Do explore our archive, use the comment features to join the conversation, and let others know about us.
How ClimateCultures began, What we’re about & Who we are
You can find more about the initiative’s genesis and context in our About pages: About our platform, About the global predicaments we focus on, About our Members. The ClimateCultures Members Directory gives links to each of our artists, researchers and curators and the work they are doing and the posts and other content they share here on our site.
