August 2018 - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Wildfire and Fox

Writer Brit Griffin lives in Cobalt, Canada — a town that was born during the 1903 mineral rush. She shares a powerful account of signals to be detected in Cobalt’s burning forests and the cry of a fox.

1,490 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes + 4 minutes video

Brit’s post is the second in our series Signals from the Edge, which sets the challenge: to create a small artistic expression of the more-than-human in the form of new signal for humanity. Is it a message — whether meant for our species or for another kind, which we overhear by chance? An artefact of some other consciousness? Or an abstraction of the material world? Something in any case that brings some meaning for us to discover or to make, here and now, as we begin to address the Anthropocene in all its noise. A small piece of sense — common or alien — amidst the confusion of human being.

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Wildfire and fox: dispatches from forests burning in Cobalt, Ontario

Summer 2018. Woken up by the smell of smoke. Summer night and the windows are thrown open, the wind sending traces of Temagami forest’s burning drifting into my room. The forests behind Elk Lake are on fire too. I don’t know it yet, not then in the night, but so is the faraway Arctic Circle. Does taiga smell the same as birch and jack pine when it’s burning?

Forests burning, Ontario
Photograph: Valerie Hosteller © 2018

It’s disorienting, the darkness, the smoke, at first I thought it was the stoked ashes from a dream, but then there is a shrieking and I am fully awake. Then I hear it again, riding these night breezes thick with carbon, insistent and piercing. It is, I think, fox.

I am used to her screams now — but still they are uncanny. She is calling through the darkness, and we all listen, me, dog, cat. At the window now listening. Is she far away or close to the house? Impossible to tell, the spooky cries passed from tree to tree. Just like a banshee’s wails along the valley. No wonder folks believed in such beings. The sounds tonight, stirred and mixed with the smoke, maybe belong biologically to fox, but are otherworldly too, spiritually something else.

But what? At one time, people might have recognized all of this with more ease. Folks had their nature spirits, saw forests teeming with magic. It would be standing room only on a night like this, what with the burnings and the keening.

Could be time to try and find those things again — the beings and the creatures that we have forgotten. That we can’t see anymore. That we cannot hear anymore. Cannot hear that sublime singing of the trees, each one with their own song, cannot hear either their ultrasonic distress signals when they are parched.

We used to listen to trees, talk to them even (and not in a ‘let’s put on Pachelbel and be nice to the jade plant’ kind of way). When nature was magic we would turn to its wisdom, seek solace from oak trees, leave tokens at deadfall for the spirits. The forest was not something to be managed, not a site of resource extraction, not a source of consumables. They gave us things, of course, the forest and the fields. Timber, firewood, plants, medicine, game and berries, but also wisdom, guidance in surviving, companionship. Everyone needed parts of everyone else.

Living so close, paying such attention, it changes the relationship. Like being in love.

But we can’t be close if we are on the outside looking in. As it is now, we are only visitors, not companions, equals, comrades in arms. Removing ourselves from nature, setting humans apart from that teeming forest of magic, was probably a mistake. Probably has landed us in this global fever.

Torpid waters. Coral reefs swooning with anaemia. Bring me my smelling salts.

Little creeks dry up, creeks for frogs and sprites. The sprites, of course, went extinct long ago. Many frogs are likely to follow. The triggers for frog mating are temperature and rainfall. All this dry, all this heat? Frog romance taking a beating.

So maybe the separation of the human from the non-human is a boundary or barrier we should try to dismantle. To see what seeps through. Because all those binaries — they are helpful in sorting objects and events into categories, organizing things. But we aren’t sorting our closets, we’re trying to salvage our world. None of them, human/non-human, life/death, magic/science, irrational/rational, can help me understand what fox is trying to say.

I can only hazard a guess:

fox says it is ultrasonic in the woods tonight,
wonders why can’t I hear it.

Note: Brit has also recorded a special video of her reading Wildfire and Fox, published simultaneously with ClimateCultures as The Summer the Planet Burned: Radio Free Cobalt:

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Wildfire and Fox — context

Brit Griffin lives in Cobalt, Ontario, a town that was born during Ontario’s last mineral rush in 1903 — a silver rush that was pretty much over by 1919. Current population: around 1100. http://cobalt.ca/visitors/history/

Temagami is a world-renowned tourist destination known for its wilderness lakes and old growth forests. It is also home, and always has been, of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai on Bear Island. Elk Lake, a town of around 500 people, survives mostly on its timber mill.

Many sources which have expanded our understanding of the science on trees over recent years. Two interesting articles are: Trees Make Noises, and Some of Those Sounds Are Cries for Help by Rachel Nuwer for The Smithsonian (16/4/13), and Trees Have Their Own Songs, by Ed Yong for The Atlantic (4/4/17). As the Smithsonian article points out, “knowing what kinds of noises trees in distress produce means researchers may be able to target those most in need of emergency waterings during droughts.”

The Atlantic article is a review of David George Haskell’s 2013 book The Forest Unseen.

You can find out more about the forests burning in northern Ontario in this article from CBC, Radio Canada (19/7/18) by Benjamin Aubé, Some provincial parks in Temagami area closed due to forest fires could re-open soon, which reports a quadrupling of forest fires in the region. The fire was called the North Bay 72 and a good part was on the traditional territory of Temagami First Nation. You can read and hear a disturbing report on forests burning across the Arctic in this piece from CBC, ‘We ain’t seen anything yet’: Even the Arctic is burning as wildfires rage around the world’; it features an excellent interview with Ed Struzik, author of Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future.

The lands manager (Robin Koistinen) from Temagami First Nation said of the recent fire, on Facebook, “Mother Nature did some major housecleaning! In recent memory, no one knows of a larger fire on nDaki Menan, almost 28,000 hectares, there are 10,000 hectares in a Township! A township is 6 miles by 6 miles or 10 km by 10 km! So figure out the size of this fire in Square Kim’s, or miles! Big big Fire.” Her Facebook post includes this video footage flying over the damage from the fires.

Sue Nielsen, who took the photograph of the fox, is reporter and photographer for the local newspaper, The Temiskaming Speaker. She takes wildlife photography around the area.

Brit Griffin

Author of three near-future cli-fi novels and a writer of poetic/story musings, whose interests lay in reconciling with non-humans and exploring the human/creature boundaries.
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Signals from the Edge

See Signals from the Edge for other contributions to this series.

Can you bring us a signal from a distant zone? ClimateCultures offers members a challenge: to create a small artistic expression of the more-than-human in the form of a new signal for humanity. Is it a message -- whether meant for our species or for another kind but we overhear by chance; an artefact of some other consciousness; or an abstraction of the material world? Something in any case that brings some meaning for us to discover, here and now, as we begin to address the Anthropocene in all its noise. A small piece of sense -- common or alien -- amidst the confusion of human being.

Whatever signal you create -- image, short text, sound, storyboard, dream sequence, or combination of any of these or something other – it will be something that we are likely to miss if you don’t draw our attention to it. 

Where does your signal come from? The source zone might be distant from us in time, in space, in scale (from the quantum to the cosmic), in sensory perception (in a different sensitivity or range to ours, or utterly new), or in any other aspect of experience or imagination. 

What edge does your signal represent? It might be a place; a boundary; a transition; an experience; a capability; a sensory range; a technology; a consciousness; a category; an uncertainty; an unknowing...

Naturalist

Poet Clare Crossman follows the first six of her illustrated poems on nature and climate change with the second of two selections from In the Blackthorn Time and other poems, her collaboration with artist Victor Ibanez, including Naturalist.

1,300 words: estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The first selection of Clare’s illustrated poems is included in her previous post, In the Blackthorn Time.

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Gold Finches

Naturalist

Cabbage White Butterfly

June at Docwra’s Manor

Solstice

Burlton’s Farm

Find out more

Clare’s first post for ClimateCultures, In the Blackthorn Time, featured the first six of her sequence poems: The Window, The Pear Tree, The Violets, A Triolet, Marmora Road in Summer, and In the Blackthorn Time. Gold Finches, Naturalist, Cabbage White Butterfly, June at Docwra’s Manor, Solstice and Burlton’s Farm complete the sequence, and all twelve collages are for sale. The collection is framed and available for exhibition display on request. You can contact Clare via her website.

Clare Crossman’s pamphlet Landscapes won the Redbeck competition in 1997 and since then she has published three collections of poetry, Going Back (Firewater Press, Cambridge), The Shape of Us and Vanishing Point (Shoestring Press, Nottingham). A third collection Common Ground is due in autumn 2018. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies. She performed and wrote Fen song: A Ballad on the Fen in 2006 with the singer-songwriter Penny Mclaren Walker.

Victor Ibanez trained in Fine Art at Art School in Kent. He has worked in graphic design, advertising and television. He is currently a member of Cambridge Art Salon and has facilitated many arts events during The Romsey Festival, in the Mill Road and Romsey areas of Cambridge, in collaboration with Ruthie Collins at Art Salon and Nick Hall at Vinopolis. Victor runs a regular life drawing class. You can see more of his work at his Facebook page.

A Triolet was included in a short film by Jonnie Howard about the first Pivotal Festival in Empty Common, Cambridge. Goldfinches was commended in The Barn Owl Competition, Devon. The Window was recorded for Fen Song A Ballad of the Fen. And Clare reads a number of these poems and others in The Pear Tree, a film by Victor Ibanez, which you can find at his YouTube channel.

Clare Crossman

A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.
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In the Blackthorn Time

Poet Clare Crossman created a sequence of illustrated poems on nature and climate change for an appearance at Pivotal Festival in 2016. Here, she offers a short introduction and the first half dozen, including In the Blackthorn Time.

1,400 words: estimated reading time: 5.5 minutes

In the Blackthorn Time and other poems is a collaboration with multi-media artist Victor Ibanez. The poems are concerned with the state of the land and the natural world in the South Cambridgeshire countryside close to where I live. Recently, through volunteering with Melwood Conservation Group, I became very interested in climate change through contact with Bruce Huett, a member of the Climate Histories Group at Cambridge University. These poems were first performed at a small Pivotal Festival concerned with climate change, run by James Murray-White over a weekend on the site of the Cambridge Museum of Technology. The poem A Triolet was recorded also at The Empty Common Community Garden Party run by Michelle Golder with Transition Cambridge, as part of the climate change movement in Cambridge.

The Window

The Pear Tree

The Violets

A Triolet

Marmora Road in Summer

In the Blackthorn Time

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The remaining six poems from Clare Crossman’s collaboration with Victor Ibanez feature in her second post, Naturalist.

Find out more

I first ‘met’ Clare through her post reflecting on William Blake’s poem, London, which she contributed to the Finding Blake site I set up with James Murray-White and Linda Richardson. Since then, I have developed Clare’s new website for her poetry and I’m working on a new site for Waterlight, a creative environmental project she’s launched with James Murray-White, Bruce Huett and others, exploring her local river, the Mel, in Cambridgeshire.

The Window, The Pear Tree, The Violets, A Triolet, Marmora Road in Summer, and In the Blackthorn Time are the first six in Clare’s sequence of collages with Victor. The sequence is completed with Gold Finches, Naturalist, Cabbage White Butterfly, June at Docwra’s Manor, Solstice and Burlton’s Farm (contained in Clare’s next post, Naturalist), and all twelve collages are for sale. The collection is framed and available for exhibition display on request. You can contact Clare via her website.

Clare Crossman

A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.
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Energetic – Exploring the past, present and future of energy

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Energetic: Exploring the past, present and future of energy, a book that weaves together different strands from the Stories of Change project, excursions into what energy means and work by the project’s artists.

2,010 words: estimated reading time 8 minutes

One of the benefits of attending the exhibition on Culture and Climate Change at the Royal Geographic Society at the end of June — even on one of those very hot and sticky summer days in London — was to meet up again with many of the project members and participants in the Stories of Change project. The project launched in Oxford in September 2014, at one of the TippingPoint events I was fortunate to help organise: an incredibly energetic and creative couple of days in the rooms, chapel and lawns of Exeter College; and here, in the RGS exhibition room, the results of that project’s creativity were on display, alongside two other projects from many of the same partners: Earth in Vision, and Provisional Cities.

Professor Joe Smith, Stories of Change Principal Investigator, speaking at Culture and Climate Change, June 2018
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2018

As we viewed the photographs and panels and recalled some of the project highlights, a soundtrack of voices played in the background, the results of a commission by artist Vicky Long, who had taken the submissions to the Stories of Change competition My Friend Jules and reworked these stories of personal relationships with energy into a play for voices. My Friend Jules had been devised by games designer Ken Eklund as a way of breaking down the barriers of abstraction which otherwise make it hard for us to visualise energy and just how extraordinary has been our development as a society dependent on the technologies, infrastructures and spatial relationships of industrial and post-industrial energy networks. Part of that story of stories is told in Ken’s post for ClimateCultures in May 2017, The Anthropocene Writ Small: My Friend Jules; and story is the underlying web of meaning through which this four-year project has worked to bring together an impressive range of practices, disciplines, places, people and objects.

Our travels with energy

That June event also marked the launch of Energetic, the book from the Stories of Change project, and I have enjoyed my slow and thoughtful path through its pages. Illustrated throughout with the bright, warm photographs of Tim Mitchell and Gorm Ashurst, the book weaves together the different strands and locations of the project in an accessible and informative guide to the questions and excursions into what energy means for us now, how we have travelled with it over the centuries of the industrial revolutions, and what shapes it might take in the 21st century in a world of changing climate and ecologies. As well as accounts by many of the team members and community participants, the book features work by a good number of the artists who took part in the project.

Nick Drake’s poem Chronicles of the Incandescent Lightbulb offers an effective frame for our reflections on our relationships with the immaterial essence of energy, embodied here in the material (but usually no-less invisible) convenience that is our instant gratification of holding back the dark:

You had nothing but the moon,
the guttering candle, and the dish of oil
to thread the eye of a needle, read,
or cast shadows on the walls, until
you created us, the first light
that was constant in the dark.

From a heartbeat twist of tungsten
and a single breath of gas to hold
our whole lives long, you sowed
one idea in our interchangeable glass skulls;
to shine at your command.

Energetic editors Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk explain how the book — effectively a catalogue for a conceptual exhibition that by happy chance then did become a physical exhibition for a few weeks — “gathers insights from across this work … a representative sample of the creative writing, songs, photos and portraits, interviews, short films, performances and museum and festival events that we co-produced in collaboration with our community, creative, and research partners.” And that broad programme of work was partly inspired by the mid-20th-century Mass Observation movement, which recorded stories of change through the voices of ordinary people and communities. “Their innovative approach to valuing and supporting lay social researchers; their ground-breaking application of arts, social sciences, and media to the goals of social change; and their novel use of documentary tools were touchstones for this project.”

Playing with energetic utopias

Among the strands of creative research, therefore, a Peer Outreach Team of young people who face “a range of barriers to participation in mainstream education, employment, and training” were commissioned to gather the opinions of others and use a range of creative participatory activities, with the aim of avoiding what can be a “‘dry’ interaction” between academics and participants. And, as team member Bradon Smith recalls, this was complemented by further creative interventions in the guise of an energy policy game devised by participatory theatre-makers fanSHEN:

“A variation on the game started from the aim of creating an energy utopia … the playful tone and physical modelling element promoted speculative, imaginative and sometimes absurd suggestions, opening up space to consider afresh the challenges that energy policy faces … The task is to imagine a desired future, and identify the narrative that leads us there. All these are forms of storytelling in a speculate mode… Narratives of the future allow readers or listeners to imagine the present as history, encouraging the possibility of thinking differently about things we do not normally question.”

Whether engaged in the speculative future or the grounded here-and-now, imagination is a strong force for engaging with the world and with change. Sandra, one of the young people involved in the research, makes the point that “When you make it creative, it allows us to really think what it [energy] is in our lives, and think more openly about it … I like oil spills in water and it does that weird rainbow thing. I saw that and it reminded me how we use oil for electricity and that, and how a lot of it does get wasted.”

Photo Booth story. Photograph: Tim Mitchell — Photo Booth story
Photograph: Tim Mitchell © 2018

And, as Bradon Smith and Joe Smith recall of the My Friend Jules game mentioned earlier, “creative writing can bring to the surface (or, coyly, hide in plain sight) our relationships with energy in novel and engaging ways. All shades of opinion, and a mad mix of literary genres, were offered up by the players” in ways that “could not have been revealed by a survey, a focus group, a diary, or historical research. They have different textures and emotional reach. They do different work.”

Connecting with place and community

Like the project, Energetic traces the stories of energy through places and the communities who have co-evolved with them. In some cases, these are captured at a distance, as in The Last Miners, a BBC documentary that Robert Butler discusses for its narrative of end days in the UK’s deep coal mining industries — represented here by the 2015 closure of the Kellingsley Colliery in north Yorkshire — and which he finds curiously silent on context. For “there’s a wider story too: the closure of the pit marks the end of a 250-year-old industry that can claim some responsibility for the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and anthropogenic climate change.” As he reminds us, “What had come to an end was quite specific, and it was certainly not coal.” The year the colliery closed, four billion tonnes of coal were consumed around the world.

And, of course, energy links every place where it is generated, distributed or consumed to the world-wide impacts of rising carbon levels in the air and oceans and to the spreading ecological and social damage that plays out in place and community elsewhere. David Llewellyn recalls the village of his Welsh Valleys childhood, where “the lower reaches of the small river, the Tyleri, that gives the valley and village its name was barely visible when I was young in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Its blackened, poisoned waters were hidden by mounds of shale and water as it dribbled pitifully towards another similarly decaying watercourse, the Ebbw Fach, which we called, perhaps somewhat affectionately, the River Stink.” Elsewhere in the valleys, and in the present day, Lisa Heledd Jones recalls her journey to a project workshop at the temporary Story Studio they set up in a closed community library:

“It’s an incredible journey. The view from the top is stunning … The view tells its own story — fields, water, trees, pit heads, and wind turbines. The impact of energy carved into the landscape in visible and invisible ways. … The mountains around Treherbert are in the process of another transformation – the Pen y Cymoedd wind energy project. This means 76 turbines dotted above the valley that will turn wind into power for over 200,000 homes and will be the largest of its kind in the UK mainland.”

Mel Rohse worked on the Story Studio project to engage and record local people’s stories and suggests that “it served different groups’ purposes without its message being diluted … although we are interested in the particular theme of energy, we engaged with people on their own terms”; echoing Lisa’s reminder “of something that is too easy to forget — communities don’t have one story. Communities are drawn from imagined lines we all draw around each other for myriad perfectly good reasons — but communities are actually made up of individual people with different experiences and backgrounds that form their opinions and stories … To really imagine what a community in Treherbert might or might not feel about 76 turbines, I would need all the hours left in my life and then some.”

Other places that feature in the multiple narratives of Stories of Change include the early industrial heartlands of Derbyshire, such as Richard Arkwright’s mills at Cromford, and Lea Mills in the Derwent valley. Filmmaker Bexie Bush has crafted an animated film, The Rumour Mill, from the stories told by local people. “Animation has its own unique and powerful way of revealing the soul of a subject” and her short film aims to “make a space for a wider range of views, times and places on the big topic of climate change and energy … But the film is not just about energy – it is also about community, living life to the full, British manufacturing, and most of all coming together to imagine change and bring it about.”

There is much well-grounded optimism — well-grounded because of the processes that brought it about, as much as the stories it contains — and one small word that emerges from the many words is the one picked out by Vicky Long in her account of the work she wove together from the voices in My Friend Jules: miracle. She picks it out of one contribution to that game — a story “about a moment on a tube train when a child learns about the miracle of energy” — and then again:

“‘Miracle’ was a word used by another contributor, and I wanted to hold onto this sense of the miraculous throughout the piece, suggesting that somehow, behind all the mistakes we make, something greater us at work, a miracle we are free to return to, work at, and reengage with in new and more successful ways.”

Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb - from: Energetic. Poem: Nick Drake — Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb – from: Energetic
Poem: Nick Drake © 2018

A large and complex multi-stranded project such as Stories of Change cannot be fully captured in a book, just as Energetic cannot be given full justice in a short and highly partial review. Fortunately, the project website is a major endeavour in its own right and offers a wealth of examples and information from across the range of places, issues and approaches.

Find out more

The Stories of Change website offers a map, a timeline and a network as ways into the rich content on offer, which you can also access as a range of media, narratives and frames. Plenty to explore, share and make use of!

The book Energetic is available to view online and download via Issuu.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.
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