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?" ...
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.
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. ...
Artist Jennifer Leach offers a ‘case study with no answers’; how (and whether) to engage with issues of right land relationship with resistance but not aggression: pausing, listening, acting with integrity, and being at peace with our choices ...
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer 'narrative deep mappings' as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain's new essay for our Longer feature, 'Wild' Deep Mappings. ...
Citizen artist Yky challenges fellow artists to consider their roles and responsibilities, alongside those of scientific experts, in how their art engages audiences and other citizens to overcome linear thinking in questions of urban resilience and social complexity ...
ClimateCultures editor -- and UK Architects Declare Manager -- Mark Goldthorpe looks at new initiatives for regenerative design, a paradigm shift embracing principles of being a good ancestor, coevolving with nature and creating a just space for people. ...
Writer Rod Raglin discusses his novel The Triumvirate and how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future ...
Ecopoet Helen Moore reviews Her Whereabouts, a new collection from fellow poet Joanna Guthrie, whose accumulated acts of noticing and subtle inferences weave her mother's debilitating strokes with ecological loss in the climate crisis into a poetic memoir. ...
Researcher Chris Fremantle reviews The Raven's Nest. This ecological memoir by Sarah Thomas addresses love and loss and coming to belong in the Westfjords peninsular of Iceland, evoking human and more-than-human relationships to draw out stories of interdependence ...
Artist Yky shares ideas and artworks he presented to an international conference addressing scientific, social, and governance issues around 'managed retreat' -- and how artists need to engage with pedagogy to contextualize and reimagine responses to climate change. ...
Writer Mick Haining discusses the role of stories in helping to bring about change to mobilise, not paralyse, the XR Wordsmiths group that he's part of, and their call out for new Solarpunk stories that give us hope. ...
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.
