July 2018 - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

The Riddle of the Trees: A Paean for the Natural World

Writer and artist Salli Hipkiss shares an extract from her novel’s manuscript — a glimpse into the heart of the story and its forest, and further into the development of character, meaning and writing for the ‘We Generation’.

2,560 words: estimated reading time 10 minutes

In her first post in this two-part series, My Voice in the Climate Change Crisis, Salli explored her motivation for setting out to write The Riddle of the Trees as a creative work on climate change.

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The Riddle of the Trees

Jeanie left the light and shimmer of the hilltop views behind her. The track curved northwest and soon she was enveloped in the cool, cushioning shade of the forest. Among the trees the sharpness of the light and the edgy whine of insect-sounds softened into a diffused hum. She followed the track through the Treefarm until she reached a junction. She knew the way well. Her route home took the neatly-kept right-hand track south through the Treefarm towards the town, while on the left two crumbling stone pillars were all that remained of an ancient gateway, and an overgrown path led into the heart of the old-growth forest: the wild place known as the Olgro.

The evening humidity was making her breathless and she stopped at the gateway, leaning her bike against one pillar. A large, moss-covered stone had long since fallen from the gateway making an impromptu seat. She sat down, pulling a bottle of water from her rucksack. While she drank she looked back into the Treefarm. The rows of managed pines and beeches stretched sedately into the distance. The trees seemed cool, quiet and orderly; but also quiet in terms of diversity, of life, of spirit. Jeanie turned to look through the gateway into the Olgro. Sitting here at the junction, the contrast between the two parts of the forest could hardly have been greater.

Have you ever been to an Olgro? An old-growth forest? A truly ancient old forest? A forest that has never been cut or cleared: where for thousands of years there have been trees at various stages of growing up, growing old, dying, or slowly sinking back into the earth to become nurseries for new sapling trees?

Have you been to a forest where the numbers of different species of plants and animals and insects and fungi are so great that new species are constantly being discovered even after centuries of scientific study? Where the different life forms have lived alongside one another for so long that insects have begun to look like flowers and flowers like the insects that feed from them? Where the contrasting scents of honeysuckle, damp moss, rotting wood, tang of fox, and a metallic mix of ozone and ore, constantly assault and allay your senses in equal measures?

Have you stood in a forest with your ears full with the fizz and hum of insect flight, the creak and rustle of giant trees in endless movement, and the staccato chatter of numerous birds? Where before long you can’t help but find yourself falling back into the steps of an ancient dance that has been going on, unbroken, for millions of years?

Jeanie let her eyes wander, flickering between the trees, plants and flowers on the other side of the gateway: seeing them tumbling over one another, winding around one another, or even growing up through one another. She measured trees supporting ivies taller than the tree itself; lianas draping themselves between branches; ferns and epiphytes growing in the crooks of trunks high above the moss-dampened forest floor. It looked chaotic but Jeanie knew from Gramps that it represented a harmony of the highest order.

Or it had done… Jeanie scanned the rich texture of the forest again, her eyes narrowing. As she looked more carefully she felt her chest tighten and something shift beneath her ribs. Something was wrong. Her heart began to thump, sounding a warning. Gramps was right. The trees had changed. She closed her eyes to listen to the subtle pulse of the forest, searching for an explanation or even an adequate description. But she couldn’t find one, just a strong intuition that all was not as it should be. Opening her eyes, thoughts began to form. On many trees the leaves had a certain transparency. A frailty. A ghostliness even.

Suddenly she knew what this was. It was what Gramps had feared the most. This was Disintegration.

***

Forest - 'Rooted' Acrylic and pastel on canvas. Image: Salli Hipkiss — ‘Rooted’ Acrylic and pastel on canvas
Image: Salli Hipkiss © 2000
www.sallihipkiss.com

Love for the natural world

Following on from my previous post about the writing of my manuscript for the young adult audience, I was encouraged by ClimateCultures to share an excerpt from the story. After deliberating, I decided upon the above passage from near the beginning of the book. I could have ‘cut to the chase’ (for there is a chase of sorts in the story!), but for a story like The Riddle of the Trees it feels more appropriate to give a glimpse into the heart of the story.

In The Guardian in 2015, Patrick Barkham, quoting from Matthew Oates’ book In Pursuit of Butterflies, wrote:

‘Environmentalists desperately need poets and storytellers, Oates contends, because ultimately conservation is concerned with “mending the relationship between people and Nature”. Science may clarify priorities “but the whole show is essentially about Love”.’

This love for the natural world is what motivates me to create work to inspire change, and it is what motivates several of the characters in the story. It is also a reason for creating a novel as a vehicle for exploring environmental issues. This is an art form that allows for a broad expression of emotion: one that can take on love and joy, and also despair, frustration, anger, animosity and other emotions that difficult challenges like climate change can invoke.

I have always been interested in stories that follow several characters with similar, if not equal, weight, and in writing The Riddle of the Trees I gave myself this challenge. Quickly, within a few chapters, the book establishes that we are following not one, or even two, protagonists but several, forming a sort of holistic composite character. In creative work I like messages that run deeply, like the grain through wood, acting at the structural as well as superficial levels, and in my story there is a deeper meaning behind having a number of viewpoints, which is to illustrate this idea of holism: that we need diverse talents and insights from various quarters in order to ‘crack the codes’ to solve many of the world’s environmental and other problems.

Forest — a riddle for the many

At the geographical centre of the story are Jeanie, a lonely teenage girl, and Gramps, her forest keeper grandfather, who separately realise that a serious, mysterious ailment has befallen their beloved forest. In his 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker argues that most stories fit into one of seven structures. At first encounter The Riddle of the Trees might appear to follow the structure of a Quest, one of the seven plots Booker listed. The fierce love Jeanie and Gramps feel for the forest certainly leads them to undertake a quest to save the trees. However their quest is just one aspect of the story, and actually, if pushed, the plot better resembles a Comedy, not in the sense of a humorous piece, but a comedy in the Greek tradition, or one of Shakespeare’s comedies, in the spirit of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. As the title suggests, The Riddle of the Trees is threaded through with riddles, muddles and misunderstandings that need a combination of wisdom, wit, courage – and love – from a number of characters to reach a resolution.

Forest - Puck's Glen, Scotland. Photograph: Salli Hipkiss — Puck’s Glen, Scotland.
Photograph: Salli Hipkiss © 2006
www.sallihipkiss.com

Thus there isn’t one main ‘celebrity character’. The driving forces are care and compassion, even from the apparent antagonist who rather than being evil is instead mostly misguided and attempting to solve the forest’s disease and its potentially escalating problems by exercising greater and greater control, but at the expense of other freedoms. His power, his inflexibility, and his inability to listen to others’ advice make him dangerous. But he is not evil.

This distinction was important to me. When I first started drafting the story I had a wonderful discussion with a Japanese friend about the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli and the sort of films that the house then created. My friend pointed out how the seemingly ‘bad’ characters in Studio Ghibli films were not ‘beaten’ by the good characters as they might be in a Hollywood movie, but instead underwent some process of transformation during which their frightening or dangerous power was dissipated. Often this was through their becoming properly understood where they weren’t before. For example, in Spirited Away, a witch figure returns to being a benign old lady, and a raging river spirit calms to a benevolent one when his polluted water is cleaned and he is called by his rightful name. This process of transformation and the possibility for redemption resonated with me and are further grains that run through the heart of the story.

The Riddle of the Trees is a story for young people about challenging the status quo, about following one’s own path and passions and conscience, and about forming friendships that transcend difference and constraint.

Reading again through the excerpt I have chosen above, I find myself bringing to mind the poem The Road Not Taken, published in 1916 by Robert Frost.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth…
…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Rootedness

Jeanie in the story starts as ‘one traveller’ in another sense: she is lonely, and soon also carrying a burden of responsibility to solve a difficult mystery. However through the course of the story she and a number of other characters become newly connected and collectively are then able to solve some difficult problems. Although the novel is set in a future where mobile phones and social media are no longer ubiquitous, because young people live in a world dominated by these forces now I feel they will recognise the strong impulse to connect and form community — including globally — that lies at the heart of the book.

Old Road, Yorkshire Dales<br /> Photograph: Salli Hipkiss — Old Road, Yorkshire Dales
Photograph: Salli Hipkiss © 2009
www.sallihipkiss.com

Perhaps the ethos of self-reliance and independence that Robert Frost was championing in his poem is no longer the prevailing ethos of the younger generation today. Reflecting on his famous ending line “… I took the one less travelled by / And that has made all the difference” it seems notable to me that the lines imply the difference made to one life only: the speaker’s own.

Instead, young people today, when asked what they want to achieve in life, will often answer: “I want to make a difference” meaning a difference in society, environmentally or in other altruistic ways. The millennial generation has been named the ‘We Generation’. They are much more aware than previous generations that in order to thrive as a species, as a whole planetary ecosystem, and also as individuals, we need to think in terms of interdependence rather than independence. This ‘We’ rather than just ‘Me’ way of thinking gives me hope for the future.

In Sharon Blackie’s thought-provoking 2016 book If Women Rose Rooted, Blackie comes to a similar conclusion about the need for a change from the prevailing myth of many generations, outlined clearly by mythologist Joseph Campbell in his 1990 book The Hero’s Journey. She writes:

“Campbell’s Hero’s Journey… is entirely focused on an individual’s spiritual growth and personal transformation – the process which Jung called ‘individuation’. But the journey we need to make today is one which rips us out of the confined spaces of our own heads and plants us firmly back in the world where we belong, rooted and ready to rise… We are not separate from this earth; we are a part of it, whether we feel it fully in our bodies yet or not… The Heroine’s Journey we need to make today is, above all, an Eco-Heroine’s Journey.”

In The Riddle of the Trees Jeanie and her various companions’ separate and collective journeys all lead to a common mission: to save the forest and restore harmony. To attempt this, all need to tap, like roots, into the groundwater of their own talents and passions and to offer them to the whole. Blackie continues:

“…And if we rise up rooted, like trees… well then, women might indeed not only save ourselves, but the world.”

In another wonderful book from 2015 The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy affirms:

“We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about [nature], which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.”

For my part, I would be delighted if The Riddle of the Trees helped inspire a stronger feeling of rootedness, of connection with the natural world, an appreciation of its awe-inspiring beauty and ability to bring joy, and of what we stand to lose if we don’t care for what we have, while also engaging young people in a deliciously complicated but very heartfelt adventure story along the way.

Find out more

Our first post from Salli Hipkiss, in which she wrote about the inspiration behind her writing The Riddle of the Trees, was My Voice in the Climate Change Crisis. And Salli’s recent poem, Modest Things — asking how English poet, artist and radical William Blake might have responded to climate change and what examples we might take — is published at Finding Blake.

Patrick Barkham’s quotation from Matthew Oates is in his review of three books on butterflies; Rainbow Dust; The Moth Snowstorm; and In Pursuit of Butterflies review – three tributes to the humble Lepidoptera, published in The Guardian (16/7/15).

You can find out more about Sharon Blackie’s work, including her 2016 book If Women Rose Rooted, at www.sharonblackie.net And you can download a sample chapter from her publisher, September Publishing.

Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004) is published by Bloomsbury, and Wikipedia has a brief summary.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey was first published in 1990, with a revised edition published by New World Library in 2003.

The full text of Robert Frost’s classic poem, The Road Not Taken, is available at Poem Hunter, where you can also hear a recording of the poem.

Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm – one of the three books reviewed in the Patrick Barkham article mentioned above – was published in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away was released by Studio Ghibli in 2001. In a 15th-anniversary review at Vice (20/7/16), Hannah Ewans discusses The Meaning of Studio Ghibli’s ‘Spirited Away’, the Best Animated Film of All Time.

Salli Hipkiss

A writer, artist and educator, producing picture books, a novel and songs, with a background teaching and facilitating arts and sustainability with schools and communities.
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Rock Pools in the Desert

Photographer Robynne Limoges shares a series of evocative abstract images that reflect her feelings on the critical issues of increasing water scarcity and expanding desert — imagining ‘the last bowl of water I will have at my disposal’.

800 words: estimated reading time 3 minutes + 1 minute gallery

The scientists, researchers and scholars who are part of ClimateCultures will be able to provide more up-to-date statistics than I am able to on the subject of the paucity of water around the world and the state of the world’s deserts.

But I will introduce my photographic series, called Rock Pools in the Desert, by sharing a few (most likely already out-of-date) statistics from Lifewater, for World Water Day 2018, elucidating a few of their 10 Facts About the Water Crisis:

844 million people live without access to clean water. This corresponds to approximately one in ten people on Earth, or approximately twice the population of the United States.
More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.
One in three people — 2.4 billion — lack access to a toilet.
Water-borne diseases kill more children under the age of five than malaria, measles and HIV/AIDS combined.
In developing countries, as much as 80% of illnesses are directly linked to poor water and sanitary conditions.
Women and girls spend up to six hours every day walking to get water for their families, water that can often make them sick (in Africa and Asia, the average walk to collect water is 3.7 miles, every day).
443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related diseases.
Time spent gathering water around the world translates to $24 billion in lost economic benefits, furthering the cycle of poverty.
The ever-increasing demand for water makes it a frontline issue for survival.

There are many more statistics available. The deterioration of our water supplies and the increasing deserts that will follow are also addressed by the University of Maryland. In their April 2018 report, they show that the Sahara Desert has become 10 per cent larger (10 per cent!) in the past century.

I sincerely hope that my deep concerns for the state of the physical world — and for the lack of productive leadership shown around the world to save our planet, its people, its wildlife and marine life — are shared by increasing numbers of organisations and individuals who possess the ability and funding to save our future. Thus far, I have only proof of the opposite.

And so, as I did in Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times, in this submission Rock Pools in the Desert, I am interpreting my own feelings through a series of metaphorical images. The series came about in a somewhat interesting way, to me at least. I found myself standing in front of a scratched, hammered stainless steel sink. To the right of me was a window onto the sea. As I looked at the dried droplets while I was washing my hands, I thought, ‘yes, this is it. This is the last bowl of water I will have at my disposal, the last source of water’. I stared at it so hard that I began to focus on the change in light from the out-of-doors and how it affected the surface, the water and the scratches. I returned to that sink many times, at different times of day and photographed it at different angles over time. I actually became a bit obsessed by its changing nature.

I offer you just six of the 70-plus images I took of one single object that became for me the entire subject of water.

Rock Pools in the Desert

NB: Click on the image to enter slideshow and view full size.

(All images are © Robynne Limoges 2018 and are not to be reproduced or used without her written permission. Please contact her via her website at www.RobynneLimoges.com )

Find out more

Robynne’s previous post for ClimateCultures was Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times.

Lifewater is a Christian clean water organisation that, for more than 40 years, has been bringing clean water, improved health, and hope to vulnerable women and children living in extreme poverty. Their Water Crisis factsheet – which includes 10 Facts About the Water Crisis and the sources of the statistics, can be downloaded here.

World Water Day – 22nd March every year – is about focusing attention on the importance of water. The theme for World Water Day 2018 was ‘Nature for Water’ – exploring nature-based solutions to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.

The University of Maryland research on the expansion of the Sahara desert was reported in Science Daily (29/3/18): “The researchers concluded that … natural climate cycles accounted for about two-thirds of the total observed expansion of the Sahara. The remaining one-third can be attributed to climate change, but the authors note that longer climate records that extend across several climate cycles are needed to reach more definitive conclusions.”

There is a useful and comprehensive guide, the Global Water Crisis by the Numbers, from Water Tech Advice.

Robynne Limoges

An artist who uses photography in a search for illumination, playing out the metaphysical question of just how little light is required to dispel darkness.
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If the Anthropocene is Violence, What is Nonviolence?

Writer and editor Sally Moss works with nonviolence education organisation Commonweal, and she suggested an interview for their blog. Sally’s questions were a great opportunity to touch on some of the deep connections between climate change and violence.

1,860 words: estimated reading time 7.5 minutes

We agreed that it would be a great idea to publish the interview simultaneously on ClimateCultures and on Commonweal, as part of this important conversation.

***

Mark Goldthorpe runs the ClimateCultures project, which showcases ‘contributions by artists, curators or researchers working on many aspects of environmental or climate change’.

Its strapline is ‘Creative conversations for the Anthropocene’ (the era when human influence dominates climate and environment), and we took the direct approach by starting a conversation with Mark himself about climate, culture, violence and imagination…

Mark Goldthorpe at the Hay Festival 2017
Photograph © Paul Musso 2017

In a nutshell, Mark, what do climate and culture (and activism) have to do with each other?

That’s a huge question, I think!

On a basic level, I guess, climate shapes culture: the ways societies live within their environments, accommodating regional patterns and seasons.

Much of that accommodation is to do with how humans try to understand, predict and protect themselves from climate norms and extremes wherever they live.

Those norms and extremes vary hugely around the world (and over time), so I imagine that differences in culture are also partly affected by this variation – though not in a simple, deterministic way.

Imperial geographers used to find some very handy climatic justifications for the supposed ‘superiority’ of their European cultures over the ones they encountered around the globe. This made the imperial project seem very natural.

This convenient ideology helped drive a lot of the environmental destruction and social oppression that still exists today, and which, of course, climate justice activism and other types of activism are trying to redress.

Perhaps it’s even more fundamental to say that culture also changes climate. In our modern globalised culture, unquestioned technological ‘progress’, unimpeded economic growth and accelerated individualism drive the resource depletion, habitat destruction and fossil fuel consumption that fuel climate change, and species extinction with it.

It’s awareness of these links, of the almost supernatural status we grant to what are actually quite recent assumptions about progress and growth – and to the mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ – that drives a lot of activism and attempts to decolonise our culture.

This activism asserts that, yes actually, there are alternatives, and we need them.

Nonviolence - Scallop, by Maggi Hambling, on Aldeburgh beach. "I hear those voices that will not be drowned." Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe — Scallop, by Maggi Hambling, on Aldeburgh beach.
“I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2014

What led you to undertake this project? Have you been involved in any forerunners?

Most of my earlier environmental career involved working with businesses, public bodies and NGOs in local, regional and national programmes to improve their use of energy and resources and reduce waste and pollution. More recently, it also focused on how they take into account what impacts climate change will have on society in two or three decades.

But the longer I focused on that, the more I felt something fundamental was missing in how we talk about climate change and we wouldn’t achieve much change without it: imagination.

Very few people really feel how extensive and rapid environmental destruction has been, what the acceleration looks like and how what lies ahead is far more perilous.

Trawling data. Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe — Trawling data
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2017

It’s called shifting baseline syndrome: essentially, we all get used to the conditions we inherit. The new, degraded environment becomes ‘normal’, and we fail to see that what looks natural, stable and manageable is in fact unbalanced, accelerating, in crisis.

Our imaginations have become insulated and we need greater creativity to help us see what’s happening, what the alternatives are, and to work on them.

I don’t mean it’s the job of art or artists to ‘explain’ the climate crisis. It’s not about using art to translate science so people ‘get it’, about creating better policies and laws or nudging behaviour change.

It’s simply about finding ways to pay attention to what’s going on, to the voices we don’t normally hear (human and non-human), to whatever creativity others are bringing to it, and the creativity we can bring ourselves.

It’s about possibility – having conversations and then finding better ways to do things, and better things to do, because of those conversations.

I was fortunate to be asked to help TippingPoint organise their last four events. That charity did great work bringing together artists of all kinds, at all stages of their development, with climate change experts from sciences, social sciences and humanities. It created space for conversation, inspiration and collaboration.

There are other organisations too, such as art.earth, whose work inspired me to set up ClimateCultures.

Partly, I wanted to take what those gatherings offer artists for a few days a year and complement it by opening up a space between those events. Scientists have their climate networks and forums – artists and curators less so. And I want it to be a space for original work by artists and others, not just circulating what already exists: to grow the content and the conversation.

What have been the most memorable artistic moments for you in the course of this work?

Every artist’s post I publish on ClimateCultures feels memorable to me!

A personal highlight is a series I launched called A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

Each contributor writes about three objects that speak to them about some aspect of the past, the present and a possible future, as we begin to realise how our species (led by the rich, industrialised nations and the well-off) has shifted the planetary systems all species depend on.

Each artist has brought something new to that conversation – not just their objects, but the meanings and emotional significance they hold.

Our focus at Commonweal is on nonviolence. How would you define violence and nonviolence in the context of climate disruption and climate activism?

That’s a great question.

I think the most fundamental shift in perception we can make – one we need right now – is that climate disruption is violence.

The Anthropocene is violence. It’s violence we do to ourselves, to people all over the planet, to the other species we live alongside or far removed from, and to the future.

And, of course, that violence and its causes and impacts are very unevenly distributed. Normal, everyday acts (travelling, shopping, surfing the web, this interview) only happen through the vast, complex infrastructures exploiting minerals, metals, fossil fuels, petrochemicals, habitats, animals and other humans.

These systems circulate the ‘goods’ in some directions and the ‘bads’ in others – including the violence of pollution, destruction and poverty. These circulations underpin the standard of living for the lucky few (me included).

Hence the activism and the need for activism.

Darkness Visible: H sapiens, entering the Long Barrow, West Kennet<br /> Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe — Darkness Visible: H sapiens, entering the Long Barrow, West Kennet
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2016

But I’d add that there are no blueprints. If we think we have a neat solution to the climate crisis (and everyone has a different solution), then we clearly haven’t understood the situation.

Climate change isn’t simply a ‘problem’ waiting for a solution. It’s a predicament we have to find ways of addressing, of caring about. Ways: plural, unfinished, messy. Coming back to art, imagination and creativity again…

Unfortunately, in this context, nonviolence is harder for me to define and I’d be interested in what your readers have to say. I’m not talking here about the very direct (though often hidden) violence done by corporations, governments, individuals to advance their interests; or of the direct nonviolence of communities, NGOs and individuals seeking to expose and oppose those.

What I’m asking is: if even our most innocent and altruistic actions imply some level of violence arising through the systems we rely on, then we certainly need more and better ways to reduce those flows of harm, oppose the causes, mitigate the suffering and care for our place in the system, but what is nonviolence at its core?

In that context, nonviolence seems a very tough thing to define – and I don’t have a good answer. Let me have yours!

You’re also involved with Finding Blake, a project that focuses on William Blake’s legacy and its relevance today. Please tell us more!

I love that project! It’s the brainchild of James Murray-White, a filmmaker I met through TippingPoint and an active supporter of ClimateCultures.

I’ve always been gripped by William Blake’s art and the way he influences our culture – although he was largely unrecognised at the time he died.

But I’ve never really understood exactly where he was coming from. He had some very interesting views, let’s say, but inevitably they’re not as easy (for me) to grasp as his art.

So when James said he was crowdfunding this project, I wanted to get involved – mainly through setting up the website and editing the blog contributions. Very crafty really, because this exposes me to lots of Blakean content that’s new to me, helping me get a fuller picture of this visionary, poet, artist!

There’s an important link for me to ClimateCultures, because Blake fought against what he called ‘singular vision’ and in favour of an expanded way of perceiving the world. For him, imagination was key.

Science has made wonderful advances in how we understand the world, giving us great tools to improve how we live within it. I’m no anti-science discontent – I spent four years studying to (not) become an astronomer, and many more re-employing that fascination with science in environmental work.

But the simplistic, singular vision of reductionism is a big part of the predicament we’ve backed ourselves into.

We need a radically expanded vision to help us find better ways forward.

And Finding Blake – although not about climate change, environment or any other single topic – aims to help us imagine ourselves through more Blakean eyes, and reimagine what this 18^th– and 19^th-century radical offers a 21^st-century culture.

Light into the Dark. Photographer: Mark Goldthorpe — Light into the Dark
Photographer: Mark Goldthorpe © 2017

Find out more

Commonweal is a nonviolence education organisation that aims to inspire, inform and connect ordinary people who have had enough of violence. Commonweal, founded by a single activist in the 1950s, focuses on the following areas and the connections between them: methods of nonviolent action; personal change; equalities; regenerative living; peace and peace-keeping; and political and economic alternatives. You can find out more at their site and on Facebook and Twitter.

TippingPoint, created in 2005, was a charity connecting the worlds of the arts and climate science. Its twelve-year programme of major events led to conversations, collaborations and new commissions in writing, performance and other arts. In 2017, TippingPoint became part of the wider programme of Julie’s Bicycle, where TippingPoint’s founder remains on the advisory group.

art.earth is a family of artists and organisations focusing on contemporary art and ecology, the environment and the natural world. art.earth produces events, conducts research and works with others to make new projects happen. ‘We’re here because we believe strongly that art has a role to play, and that artists have a responsibility to pose questions and to worry about the way we live in and on our world.

Sally Moss

A writer, editor and researcher exploring creative ways to encourage regenerative living.
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Placing the Sea

Researcher and writer Wallace Heim recently completed ‘the sea cannot be depleted’, her online project exploring the military exploitation of the Solway Firth. Wallace shares her reflections on the inspiration behind this powerful project and her creative process.

1,560 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes

Outrage is compelling. It moves you. It flares around an event, lining up adversaries as it draws temporary certainties from the flux of life.

The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) fired at least 30 tonnes of artillery shells containing Depleted Uranium into the Solway Estuary to test those munitions on behalf of an unnamed ‘customer’. The firings began in the 1980s, from the Scottish side, with the last firings in 2011 or 2013. The MOD justified this illegal dumping of radioactive waste into the sea as being ‘placements’. Attempts to retrieve the shells have failed. Their locations are unknown.

DUFERC Meeting 36, 17 June 2004
Photograph: Wallace Heim © 2018 theseacannotbedepleted.net

Responses to this news slide easily into anger for the injustice of these firings and shock at their stupidity, alongside a desire for accountability or reparations by the military, which will not and cannot be met. But what happens when the clarity of outrage, and its certainties, get mixed up with everyday life? When they somehow bind with a place, when they merge and dissolve into it, like the radiating materials drifting in the Irish seas?

“No brink of the end of humanity was gazed over. It barely made the news … Thousands of years pissing in the sea with everything we can’t digest, all the rancid debris that we could throw in there, all of it, and now this … The military got it the wrong way around. They didn’t place the uranium. No. They placed this estuary. They made it into their place. They made it into their military nuclear sea,” the Man says.

Sensing the insensible

‘the sea cannot be depleted’ is an online project, composed of three parts: a spoken word and sound piece for three voices, accompanied by essays and by documentation about the firings and the effects of Depleted Uranium. The sound piece is fictive, based on interviews and research. In it, a Man speaks from the Scottish side of the estuary, the firth, an area of cliffs, bays, granite and farms. A Woman speaks from the English side, flat lands of ancient peat, grasses and farms, around the headland from the civil-military nuclear industries of West Cumbria. And a Diver speaks as she enters the night sea:

“On the edge here, soft sand, bird tracks and worm casts and the plish of water on my bed-bare feet. More salt than fresh. Read the surface for danger. Go in, between heartbeats, mine and the sea’s … Tentacles brush my legs. Wrapping me in the softness of their sucking, jelly skins. They are curious about me. Me. Am I food? … Drifts of something cloud my eyes. Plankton wandering in from far seas. I swim in sex and food and sea talk.”

The form of the piece was shaped by my need to ‘hear’ the radiation, to have it enter somehow directly into the human ear. And by the negotiations of outrage and conflict that were needed in order to understand and express something of the turbulence of unknowable consequences and the transfiguration of uranium let loose in the continual, mixing tidal forces of an estuary.

Radiation cannot be heard, smelled or touched, but is known through the rattled clicks of the technologies that measure it and make it perceptible to humans. Those sounds are too familiar. I wanted to hear it and to represent it through the human voice, through its vibrations and resonances as well as through the articulations about the effects of knowing what has been buried. The music by Pippa Murphy, too, does not use conventional ‘nuclear’ sounds, but creates a melodic line, that holds, falls apart, dissolves, and reforms.

Nuclear issues are stark and divisive. My certainties are reasoned, ethical and emotive: I find these military actions unjustifiable, expressive of hubris and embedded in a global economy of harm. I had to relate those certainties to the government position which supports the use of Depleted Uranium, and to the scientific reports available, both by independent researchers and the military. The latest find that ‘uncertainty’ characterises what is possible to definitively measure; no one ‘knows’.

From a public road on the Kirkcudbright Training Area: the sea cannot be depleted. Photograph: Wallace Heim — From a public road on the Kirkcudbright Training Area
Photograph: Wallace Heim © 2018 theseacannotbedepleted.net

Against the against

I did not want to set out adversarial arguments between conflicting sides, as if that was a kind of balance or a reliable process towards truth. Nor did I want to hone the subject matter into something more solidly activist. Rather, for the Man and the Woman who reflect on their relation to the sea and the firings, I wanted to keep to the outrage, but as it is compromised and embedded in everyday life.

The action in theatre, by historical conventions, moves with the forces of adversarial human conflict; two sides, with variations. But theatre and performance have, for the past decades, developed other dramaturgical strategies, broadly categorised as the postdramatic, for creating flow, mood, character and vibrancy. The ‘two-sides’ device has seeped away from some performance practices as it doesn’t adequately allow for a genuine expression of a situation or condition. At the same time, in ecological thinking, the entwining of human conflicts with environments, waters, lands, other living beings, or perceptions of nature – are complicating the order offered by adversarial conflict and requiring other ways to comprehend and address what is a condition of life, one that is pervasive, intractable, characterised by uncertainty and a lack of lasting solutions.

The firings were a rehearsal for war and were hostile fire on a home sea. How can one understand the slow corrosion that endures? What does it mean for a place, a people, to cohere with the unseen objects of war? How do you make a life with, or disavow, the symptoms of the civil-military nuclear complex? How does the knowable coalesce with the not-knowable?

“How do you keep safe?

The Military devised tests to prove these firings were safe for humans. They measured seaweed and crabs and grit and urine. What they forgot was the sea. They forgot the turbulence, the planetary forces of gravity pulling oceans across a chiselled bed. They forgot the curiosity of the tender animal, too small for any net. They forgot that some humans are pregnant women.

It’s probably all right. It has to be. We have to live as if it was.

The swells of silences, they hold us tight … What adds up, what counts on this coast is what keeps the working public paying taxes. That’s what keeps things quiet … The sea will loosen and unravel all that we can’t talk about,” the Woman says.

Crossing the threshold

The Diver is a different kind of force, ambivalent between the imaginal and the real. She speaks of her sensed perceptions as she repeatedly dives below the sea surface. She sets out with promise and high delight but stays too long. She passes that threshold when coming back would be possible, making a loose association with the nuclear dream and the impossible scramble to return to a world without its waste.

“My body curls and tumbles. It joins the pock-marked hard things that roll along the bed. We’re a pulse of moving things. Another brush of something like dust. My skin starts to bleach with it. I’m burning, down here with no light, no air … I cool my body in a garden of soft-skinned creatures … Everything moves, the living with the dead. Lives within lives. Our cells are the lenses through which we see our futures. We are all transparent to the longer waters of the sea … ”

The uranium was pulled by brown hands from hot, dusty places, fabricated and made into rich pieces of tradeable merchandise. The military sent those high-priced shells out over the miles of waiting water. In the instant that they touched the sea surface they were waste. As they bedded into the soft sands, they began their dissolution into sea salts and the human imagination. ‘the sea cannot be depleted’ takes off from what seems like discrete events, but those events are only part of a long arc that has no end.

Sandyhills. Photograph: Wallace Heim — Sandyhills
Photograph: Wallace Heim © 2018 theseacannotbedepleted.net

Find out more

‘the sea cannot be depleted’ was written and produced by Wallace Heim, with music and sound composition by Pippa Murphy and the voices of Camille Marmié (Diver), Vincent Friell (Man) and Lisa Howard (Woman). The project was funded by Future’s Venture Foundation, Manchester.

You can hear the full dramatised audiopiece for ‘the sea cannot be depleted’, and view Wallace’s extensive research journal and other background documents about Depleted Uranium, the MOD’s firings into the Solway Firth and the area itself, at the sea cannot be depleted.

Wallace has also shared a number of references you might like to explore:

Heim, Wallace (2017). ‘Theatre, conflict and nature’ in Performance and Ecology. What Can Theatre Do? Ed. Carl Lavery. London: Routledge. also in: Green Letters. Studies in Ecocriticism. (2016) 20:3. The journal is behind an academic firewall, and the book is exorbitantly priced. Please email me if you would like a pdf of the article: home[at]wallaceheim[dot]com

On the ‘postdramatic’:

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge.

Jürs-Munby, Karen (ed). (2013). Postdramatic Theatre and the Political. International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance. London: Bloomsbury.

Wallace Heim

A researcher and writer on performance and ecology, investigating how one ‘hears’ enmeshed dimensions of the human and other-than-human and the sonic languages of place.
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