exploring cultural responses to environmental change
Explore our posts by category
Here you can find all of our Members’ Posts arranged under the post categories. Click on the title to reveal the date and author, to read the introduction and to find the full post.
Interdisciplinary artist Andrew Howe shares three objects that chart material flows in time. Slipware pottery, an acorn and a bitumen spill offer fragmentary stories entwined with present experience and imaginings of past and future in the same moment.Read More
Writer Philip Webb Gregg explores being human in the Anthropocene, using three objects that offer to carry, fuel or guide our search for experience and meaning, but whose less subtle qualities have great power to lead us astray.Read More
Writer Kelvin Smith's three objects -- electric lighting, symbolically living money, once-and-future reefs -- question what is fundamental to human presence on Earth, what's been taken from the land and what new creations might arise in future seas.Read More
Citizen artist Yky offers three objects that explore Anthropocene themes of our relationship with time and the world and the responsibility that we hold in our own hands, using a common photographic presentation to help make these visible.Read More
Poet Nick Drake offers poems of three dark objects that illuminate our world-shifting ways: an emblem of inefficiency, a single-use convenience that will outlast us, and a nightmare taking shape beneath our feet, our streets, our notice, until...Read More
Science historian and writer Sarah Dry offers objects past, present and future that help us investigate clouds and the gap between seeing and feeling. 'What is not revealed often plays more powerfully in the imagination than what is.'Read More
Poet Nancy Campbell chooses a child's bone kayak, a wooden paddle, innovative metal islands: three objects that demonstrate how the past and present elide as our environment changes and how, whatever choices lie ahead, travel is always forward. Read More
Curator Veronica Sekules shares three Anthropocene objects that mark the movement from a visionary symbol of eternity, to the hubris of a transitory age and on to a time which will be witnessed by what endures after us.Read More
Writer Nick Hunt traces the years through present, future and past on a path that will not stay forever on any one course; and returns us to a longer view, honouring the power and beauty of natural forms.Read More
Curator Ruth Garde selects three Anthropocene objects: artworks that evoke a past, present and future, highlighting how Deep Time and 'human time' are implicated in each other, and the imbalances in our relationship with the rest of nature.Read More
Artist Jennifer Leach selects three objects that evoke a past, present and future Anthropocene, and highlights care and nurture as constants across humanity's ages and communities. Her words move from prose to poetry, suggesting a timeline of hope.Read More
Artist Julien Masson explores memory, material transience and meaning in his an intriguing response to our ClimateCultures challenge to share three objects with personal significance and illustrate the past, present and future of the emerging ‘Age of Human’.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe set Members a challenge: share your choice of three objects with personal significance for you and that say something of the past, present and future of the emerging Anthropocene. Here is his personal contribution.Read More
Climate change communicator Julia Marques helped amplify COP26 reporting from the Blue Zone in Glasgow. Here she looks at the artworks she encountered at the COP and the value of creative activity alongside the activism and negotiations.Read More
Experimental artist Veronica Worrall offers a story of shared hope in students' reactions to her photographic series 'Unseen', and how young people's actions and art in the USA, China and around the world provide examples ahead of COP26.Read More
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.Read More
Artist and writer Selva Ozelli marks Clean Air Day with a roundup of international art shows she has curated and participated in during this year of pandemic, spurred on by urgent connections between our environmental and health crises.Read More
Citizen Artist Yky explores urban resilience and the importance of building joint commitments by experts and artists to improve our understanding of this concept in 'citizen science' and other approaches to empower citizens in planning for the future.Read More
Artistic director and performer Paul Michael Henry, who has devised successive UNFIX festivals, discusses his motivation and ambitions for these international gatherings and explorations, ahead of UNFIX 2019 next month. UNFIX: a command form, a verb, an activity.Read More
Artist Ottavia Virzi describes a recent intervention by Art Rise Up, the creative collective bringing art and activism together for environmental protection, in support of the campaign to halt opencast coal mining, using art to engage cultural meaning.Read More
Film-maker James Murray-White captures the energy and inspiration of a busy summer learning, engaging others and sharing their stories, recalling four very different events: a climate visuals workshop, a regenerative activism retreat, a performance and a coastal encounter. Read More
Artist and game designer Ken Eklund shows how working with stories offers popular and accessible routes into the past and present of our life with energy, and imagining possible futures as part of the Stories of Change project. Read More
Artist Scarlet Hall debuts her poem You, familiar -- narrated over photos of clay sculptures used in a Coal Action Network action outside a government department in London, and accompanied by text from fellow CAN activist Isobel Tarr.Read More
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.Read More
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. Read More
Actor, director and cultural entrepreneur, Giovanni Enrico Morassutti shared case studies of creatives in residence, of climate theatre and community engagement with an international conference, exploring strategies for encouraging cross-disciplinary projects to address the biodiversity and climate crisis. Read More
Composer Stanley Grill shares his Music for the Earth project and how his feelings about climate change have a way of turning into music evoking connections with the natural world and our obligation to be caretakers, not destroyers.Read More
Artist Ivilina Kouneva draws on her seaside walks and art-making, on tales of indigenous story sharing and experiences of others' creativity to make imaginative links between our heritage as storytelling animals and remaking connections between past and future.Read More
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.Read More
Ecopoet Helen Moore shares the inspiration and creative process behind her wild writing and the embodied awareness and resilience it nurtures in a world that's become unconscious of humanity's interdependence with all beings through the web of life.Read More
Artist Hanien Conradie shares the impulse and process behind a Covid19-lockdown collaboration that brings together image and text; and how, in a period of human silence, her muse and the natural world seemed to work in similar ways.Read More
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs discusses Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, his new co-authored book about the possibilities of creative work, ensemble practices and disciplinary agnosticism in seeking alternative and inclusive ways of belonging to this world.Read More
Video artist Mirjamsvideos shares reflective artworks which subtly demonstrate our relationship with the world, using ugliness in trash and beauty in small things to overcome our lack of insight into systems we've made toxic to ourselves and others. Read More
Photographer Veronica Worrall explores how art can offer an important emotional response to global pandemic and climate crises, sharing her 'lockdown' project to generate images where photography partners with natural processes to produce a visual essay of optimism.Read More
Writer Julian Bishop, living on the very edge of the metropolis, found a fascination with local verges during Covid-19 lockdown -- and their previously unregarded nature took up residency in his imagination, leading him to a poetic challenge.Read More
Artist and writer Dave Hubble reflects on his creativity under lockdown: how novel conditions and wanting to avoid coronavirus-saturated art sparked new work, drawing out potential beauty in the materiality of pollution and prompting the question, what next?Read More
Artist Jo Dacombe shares an exercise she developed for students to respond creatively to the sensory nature of woods, and which she's adapted for online engagement with nature during Covid19 lockdown as part of her Imagining Woodlands project.Read More
Theatre-maker and arts academic Adam Ledger shares the thinking behind Gulp!, The Bone Ensemble's project on global water issues, and the challenges of creating an engaging and participatory family drama on environmental issues, inequalities and opportunities during Covid-19. 1,800 Read More
Artist Margin Zheng felt moved to perform Lola Perrin's work, Significantus, as part of their climate activism, and adapted the piano suite to new conditions when Covid-19 prevented public events, producing a unique online concert: Crisis, Care, Creation.Read More
Writer and historian Sarah Dry shares some of her thinking and the process for her new book, Waters of the World, a history of climate science through the individuals who unravelled the mysteries of seas, glaciers, and atmosphere.Read More
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs shares thoughts on the place of artists, and of creative ensemble practices, in a culture of possessive individualism that must urgently address its chronic failure of imagination in the face of eco-social crisis.Read More
Artist and writer Jennifer Leach recalls the journey from a sharing of darkness at a climate conference for artists and scientists, and the year-long festival she created in its honour, to her new book, Dancing in the Dark.Read More
Artist Rebecca Chesney describes her explorations creating With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea for exhibition in Newlyn this year -- taking inspiration from the town's tidal observatory and its unique role in revealing the UK's rising sea levels.Read More
Writer and artist Jennifer Leach shared some of her stories at Reading's Earth Living Festival. Here, she discusses these questioning tales for a world's ending -- and the relaunch of her Outrider Anthems enterprise as a sanctuary of Read More
Writer Deborah Tomkins chairs Bristol Climate Writers, who meet to critique their poetry, science or nature writing, short stories or novels. She shares their discussion on 'climate grief' and how psychological responses to climate change influence their writing.Read More
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.Read More
Poet and artist Salli Hipkiss, in the first of two posts, reflects on how she came to understand the urgent challenges of climate change, and decided to write The Riddle of the Trees, a novel supporting positive change.Read More
Artist Julien Masson describes a residency in the New Forest, an environment that juxtaposes natural and human worlds, and his choice of a physical paint medium to represent the digital realm that often distances us from the natural.Read More
Writer Justina Hart concludes her account of writing Doggerland Rising, researching the prehistory of the mesolithic peoples of these lowland plains before sea level rise created the North Sea, and reveals what she has learned from the process.Read More
Artistic Director Adam Ledger discusses the process of devising The Bone Ensemble's Where's My Igloo Gone? and the challenges of making participatory theatre about home and community that presents climate change as something that we can collectively address.Read More
Writer Justina Hart introduces her poem (commissioned following a Weatherfronts climate change conference) about prehistoric events that drowned Doggerland and made Britain an island, and how her research with the help of palaeo-scientists fed into the creative process.Read More
Composer and pianist Lola Perrin discusses isolation: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process. And yet, we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.Read More
Artist Kim V. Goldsmith shares her work with Regional Futures in NSW, Australia, exploring people's feelings for rural territories. We need to listen better to each other, ourselves, and more-than-human worlds for more collaborative approaches to the future.Read More
In their third collaborative post reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach,Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter explore the provocations this book offers for ecoart practices and discourse -- complementing their earlier discussions on the book's activities and case studies.Read More
In the second of three collaborative posts reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach,Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter find plenty to discuss in a sample of the book's rich collection of international ecoart case studies, complementing its earlier activities.Read More
Artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach, Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter have joined up to review Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities. This first of three collaborative posts samples the guide's ecoart activities.Read More
Composer Lola Perrin and curator Rob La Frenais invited three artists and organisers to talk about their creative work for COP26 and their feelings about the global conference's failure to match the warm rhetoric of its first day.Read More
Artist James Aldridge shares insights from Iain Biggs' book Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place and resonances with his own projects exploring the value of outsiders' viewpoints and voices not often heard in discussions on the Earth Crisis.Read More
Climate change dramatist and activist Julia Marques introduces a series of lively and engaging conversations she has recorded with fellow members. Artists and researchers explore their experiences with wide-ranging topics which inform the creative work that ClimateCultures celebrates.Read More
Curator and writer Rob La Frenais interviews scientist and fellow ClimateCultures member Bill McGuire about Skyseed. McGuire's novel explores geoengineering -- the ‘fix’ proposed by some as global heating's global solution. What on Earth could possibly go wrong?...Read More
In this piece -- commissioned by artists Hayley Harrison and Pamela Schilderman for their exhibition, Fool's Gold -- editor Mark Goldthorpe explores notions of value and care through our experience of objects as works of nature, culture and transformation.Read More
Independent curator and writer Rob La Frenais interviews fellow ClimateCultures member and ClimateKeys founder Lola Perrin about her ground-breaking global initiative to 'help groups of people tell the truth to each other' about the ecological and climate emergency.Read More
Artist Hanien Conradie discusses a collaborative film of her ritual encounter with Devon's River Dart and her work with places where nothing seemingly remains of their ancient knowledge. Work that seeks more reciprocal relationships with the natural world.Read More
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.Read More
In a three-way discussion, James Murray-White, Lola Perrin and Paul Allen explore Paul's experiences at the COP23 climate talks in Bonn. Their video interview is a valuable insight for those of us who couldn't be there in person.Read More
Queer creative, writer, artist, poet, witch and activist Indigo Moon shares 'Only Star' and other poems from a collection she created for her recent MA Environmental Humanities, showcasing the natural world and its changes over a human lifespan.Read More
Writer Philip Webb Gregg shares a new poem exploring rewilding as a sideways step into a stranger world, resisting simplifications of 'progress' and the gains and losses of our current model, even as we seek to change it.Read More
Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker uses an innovative take on the camera obscura to uncover visible and invisible networks and complex histories embedded in a Scottish peninsula whose water-and-landscape is home to nuclear arsenals, peace activists and pilgrims' spiritual traditions.Read More
Writer and photographer Mike Hembury read Deborah Tomkins’ post on how grief and hope feature in the work of fellow 'climate writers', and shares a poem in response to his own research into these experiences under climate change.Read More
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.Read More
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.Read More
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'.Read More
Artist Jennifer Leach shares another story she performed as part of Festival of the Dark's micro-festival Dazzle. It's a tale of transformation: stretching imagination, shifting vision as key to waking us up. What if the world were other?Read More
Artist Jennifer Leach shares a story about bees, honey, hexagons and robotics. What the Bee Sees is the first of two stories Jennifer performed at the Festival of the Dark's micro-festival Dazzle. What if the world were other?Read More
Writer and online community newspaper publisher, Rod Raglin shares the story of a local Vancouver, Canada, park pond reduced to a seasonal wetland -- and a neigbourhood's dispute with administrators on how to respond amid severe climate change.Read More
Farmer and author Paul Feather seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis, and names that can reflect its super wicked nature, in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.Read More
Anthropologist Lisa J. Lucero shares a talk she recorded specially for ClimateCultures, drawing on her extensive archaeological research into how ancient Maya culture adapted to environmental change, and whose non-anthropocentric cosmology can help us rethink our own worldview.Read More
Climate change dramatist Julia Marques looks to her recent experience directing a play about environmental crisis to ask how community and other positive features of amateur dramatics groups might offer us routes into addressing the climate emergency itself.Read More
Environmental artist Laura Donkers follows her initial post on eco-social art engagement with her experience as Visiting Doctoral Researcher, moving to Aotearoa New Zealand from July to November 2018 to expand her research by exploring Kaupapa Māori approaches.Read More
Environmental artist Laura Donkers works with the embodied knowledge of communities, through a form of eco-social art engagement, to help develop climate literacy. Laura describes her approach and experience with local communities in Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.Read More
Royal Court Executive Producer Lucy Davies -- a participant in Creative Climate Leadership training in 2017 -- explores Artists' Climate Lab, a special week of creative activities she and others devised for artists working in London's leading theatres.Read More
Anthropologist Lisa Lucero researches the emergence and demise of political power, ritual and water management among the Classic Maya. Her most recent project explores collapsed groundwater sinkholes for evidence of ancient Maya offerings and climate and landscape histories.1,210 Read More
Composer and pianist Lola Perrin offers this roundup of her own and many others' experiences of ClimateKeys -- the major, global initiative she set up to bring together musicians, experts and audiences to engage in climate change conversations.Read More
Paul Allen, Project Director of the Centre for Alternative Technology's Zero Carbon Britain programme, shares his reflections after taking part in the COP23 climate talks in Bonn, and looks ahead to the cultural challenges for COP24 next year.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe returns to Anticipatory history, looking at four entries in that book and at other illustrations of how language reveals and shapes the way we understand and respond to erosion and other examples of change.Read More
Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker shares a talk he gave at art.earth's In Other Tongues, encountering on a climb in a Welsh slate quarry a world beyond our normal modes of communication and a route away from modern separatist language.Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe explores an online ecolinguistics course, delving into how we structure and receive discourses -- texts, dialogues, advertising, news reports, stories -- in ways that shape our attitudes and beliefs on environmental, social and economic issues.Read More
Dramatist Julia Marques introduces her research on the increasing interest in climate change within new drama, using visual discourse analysis to chart how the topics are addressed explicitly or form a backdrop to the world of the performance.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores climate change through the lens of 'Wicked Problems' and what 'culture' -- a web of identities and practices that rub up against each other -- means for how we might think about it.Read More
Artists Andrew Howe and Kim V Goldsmith share the story of their collaborative Mosses and Marshes project, which investigates connections between fragile wetlands and their communities in England and Australia, seeking new interpretations, multiple perspectives and less-heard voices.Read More
Multidisciplinary artist Anthony Bennett shares the inspiration behind sculptures on the crucial role of the usually disregarded fungus in returning life to soils following mass extinction events -- and what this offers us in imagining possible human extinction.Read More
Writer and photographer Mike Hembury spent a week on an Inner Hebridean sailing trip as part of Sail Britain's multidisciplinary Coastline Project. He recalls this small group's ecological encounters and shares poems and photographs they inspired in him.Read More
Poet Nancy Campbell, whose experience in the Arctic was enriched by learning Kalaallisut, reports on the UK tour of The Polar Tombola, which aims to encourage awareness of endangered Arctic languages and the environment recorded in their vocabularies.Read More
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.Read More
Artist Jo Dacombe explores sense of place, layers of history and the power of objects. Jo describes her work with museums and researchers on visual art inspired by relationships between bones and landscapes, now and into the future.Read More
Visual artist Mary Eighteen updates us on work that imagines a world where the ocean is on the trajectory to extinction. Here, Mary focuses on concepts of 'framing' as a means to provide the visual encounter with abjection.1,290 Read More
Visual artist Rebecca Chesney, whose location-specific work is informed by her research and conversations with scientists, describes her experiences of drought and tree death in California while on a residency and shares some of the images she produced.Read More
Environmental artist Linda Gordon responds to Anticipatory history with reflections on personal memories, intimations of change -- 'places and objects within them become part of our personal inner world' -- and a recent example of her ephemeral art. Read More
Environmental artist Linda Gordon reflects on a recent exhibition she contributed work to, where artists responded to the documentary 'A Plastic Ocean', and the issues of plastics pollution of the oceans that produced such a diversity of art.Read More
Filmmakers Sarah Thomas and Jon Randall share a conversation about the ideas, stories and creative processes behind their film exploring Óshlið, an abandoned road in Iceland -- accompanied by a slideshow of their images from this changing place.Read More
Collage, sculpture and video artist Julien Masson collaborates with researchers in a dynamic dialogue between digital technology, science and arts to explore coccolithophores: tiny, photosynthetic marine lifeforms with an important role in our planet's oxygen and carbon cycles.800 Read More
Fine artist Mary Eighteen and multimedia artist Julien Masson collaborate in painting and video, to explore the space between seduction and defilement in a world where meaning has broken down in relation to ecological protection of our oceans.Read More
Fine artist Mary Eighteen introduces her ongoing collection of works on a theme of the Sullied Atlantic and ocean acidification, exploring her deep concern for how humanity is destroying the future of our oceans and, in turn, ourselves.Read More
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.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe shares participants’ reflections from a workshop exploring the word ‘Transitions’ - the final Environmental Keywords discussion from the University of Bristol - and the sense that we need better words to capture our imaginations.Read More
Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on ‘Resilience’, psychotherapist Susan Holliday uses a story from her book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart to seek a more resilient nature, finding signs that collective stresses need not overwhelm us.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ encounters and experiences at a workshop exploring the word ‘Resilience’, the second in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.Read More
Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on 'Justice', writer Brit Griffin shares reflections on permeability -- in the natural membranes of the living world, in our binary concepts and in our imaginations -- as reaching towards the more-than-human.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants' insights from a workshop exploring the word ‘Justice’. This was the first in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.Read More
Writer Mary Woodbury finds deep resonance in the music of Rising Appalachia, who draw on the rural landscapes of her family, and whose musical fusion offers ideas of resilience and community in the face of change and loss.Read More
For Gifts of Sound & Vision, Mark Goldthorpe chooses Earthrise -- a film about a moment a half-century ago that transformed our vision of the world and what might be possible in this short historic episode, modern human civilisation.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe launches a series exploring film and audio that open a space to reflect on change -- choosing pieces on how human and non-human animals live, and how processes of time and tide shape our coasts. Read More
Sapphic and neuroqueer artist Indigo Sapphire Moon shares her experience of nature as a source of creative whispers, which blossom into ideas like her new poetry collection, and a space for us to exist outside our human story.Read More
Artist Jo Dacombe explores the othering of woodlands through maps and language as bordering us off from the natural world -- a dichotomy enabled by the Enlightenment ideas in 18th-century Europe -- and looks to ways to reconnect.Read More
Writer Nick Hunt travelled to Scotland's Cairngorms in search of a once permanent presence that's becoming another marker of a new transience: enduring snows that serve as scraps of deep of time, now endangered on our warming island.710 Read More
Writer Philip Webb Gregg went looking for ways to let nature get to him, and found them on a bushcraft and survival course, with Extinction Rebellion on the streets of London, and in his garden in the city.Read More
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'.Read More
Photographer Robynne Limoges shares evocative images inspired by the haiku form, in her pursuit of the 'philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.'Read More
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. His final extract tracks France’s Mistral ('masterly', from the Latin magistralis), the ‘idiot wind’ that inspired and tormented Vincent Van Gogh.Read More
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. Here he pursues Switzerland's ‘snow-eating’ Foehn, which brings clear skies and wildfires -- as well as insomnia, nosebleeds, anxiety and depression.Read More
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. In his third extract, Nick follows the freezing Bora –named for Boreas, the ice-bearded Greek god of the north wind.510 Read More
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. Here, he's on the trail of the Helm, which blows from desolate Cross Fell to wreak havoc in the Eden Valley.Read More
Writer Nick Hunt has walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds, to discover how they affect landscapes, people and cultures through which they blow. Five extracts from Where the Wild Winds Are begin with the book's introduction.Read More
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces work with students using object-based learning to explore the material and intellectual challenges of thinking about human-environment relationships in our new planetary era -- and launches a new ClimateCultures feature: Museum of the Anthropocene ...
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces a second collection of objects from his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ students, and how our Museum of the Anthropocene's 'centrifugal' stories resist casting all of humanity together as progenitors of our new planetary age ...
Independent artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces a special new essay for our Longer section, reflecting on his practice of open deep mapping as an inclusive, creative approach to working with and in place, and moving beyond 'Business-as-Usual'. Read More
In our first accompaniment to Longer, a new ClimateCultures in-depth feature, arts researcher Jemma Jacobs introduces her recent study of the Flint Water Crisis and environmental racism as seen through one photographer's work to make visible hidden perspectives.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores the call for a creative symposium on 'how to love the postcarbon world', our new biosphere. Can art, creativity, imagination actually help us to break free of our seemingly unbreakable pattern of thought? Read More
Dramatist Julia Marques previews ClimateKeys, a visionary global initiative from fellow ClimateCultures Member Lola Perrin. Julia considers the space it offers for more relaxed, but still urgent, sharing of thought and dialogue on the predicament of our times.Read More
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.Read More
In their third collaborative post reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach,Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter explore the provocations this book offers for ecoart practices and discourse -- complementing their earlier discussions on the book's activities and case studies.Read More
In the second of three collaborative posts reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach,Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter find plenty to discuss in a sample of the book's rich collection of international ecoart case studies, complementing its earlier activities.Read More
Artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach, Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter have joined up to review Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities. This first of three collaborative posts samples the guide's ecoart activities.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Change, Mike Hulme's book exploring how the idea of climate change is shaped and used in different ways and how its meanings help us navigate climate change as predicament rather than problem.Read More
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. Read More
Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan reviews a pair of books - non-fiction, fiction - that embrace the unknown, helping us navigate our collective uncertainty and explore what it means to be human in a time of Anthropocene unravelling.Read More
Writer and curator Mary Woodbury shares eight novels about water where fact and fiction mingle, tied by imagination, to reveal important truths about our shifting relationships with this vital and lively agent in an era of climate crisis.Read More
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White reviews fellow member Susan Holliday's creative guide, Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart, and finds ‘wise friends on the path’ of seeing deeply into connections, and a fellow traveller in the landscape of human Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Gifts of Gravity and Light, an anthology of diverse writings on our seasons, and explores how, as we disrupt the living world, our relationship with it shifts, and with it ideas of 'nature'.Read More
Artist James Aldridge shares insights from Iain Biggs' book Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place and resonances with his own projects exploring the value of outsiders' viewpoints and voices not often heard in discussions on the Earth Crisis.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Dara McAnulty's Diary of Young Naturalist -- a remarkable testament to love for the natural world and a key to finding a greater sense of living in and caring for our shared home. Read More
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White reviews Neil Ansell's new book. The Circling Sky, an account of a year-long immersion in England's New Forest, is both a guidebook to close observation and a reflective elegy to place and belonging.Read More
Environmental researcher Matt Law reviews an online performance about climate conversations: an interactive journey inviting us to consider how different connections and storytelling could have led to a different world today, and help save the world for tomorrow.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews The Wood in Winter, an illustrated essay by John Lewis-Stempel, and finds an elegant exploration of life -- wild nature and human -- in the harshest season, and an Anthropocene question: who owns Read More
James Murray-White discovers in 'Winged', a new collection of words and images from fellow member James Roberts, a creative expression of the natural world's ‘being-ness’ and a way for us to deepen our own presence within the more-than-human.Read More
Poet Clare Crossman was inspired to respond to a public call for Letters to the Earth and her poem is included in the publication -- a book which offers "a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature."Read More
Artist Linda Gordon was invited to lead a land art workshop using natural materials at Extinction Rebellion's Rising Tide Festival in North Devon. She describes an experience of co-operation and natural harmony: "In other words, a sane community."Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk field kit's latest addition -- an attractive and engaging set of cards that explores our planet's 4.6 billion year timeline and offers us thoughtful paths into the living present.Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White reviews A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. In this scholarly work, Rupert Read advocates an ecological approach to film-philosophy analysis, arguing that film can re-shape the viewer’s relationship to the environment and other living beings.Read More
Mark Goldthorpe reviews Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore: a contemplation of transience, connection and the possibilities of resilience, demonstrating the power of story to highlight opportunities to attend and adapt to a changing world.Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White reviews Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky's Learning to Die: Wisdom in the age of climate crisis -- a book urging the cultivation of human virtues in a time of crisis and the rejection of lazy thinking.700 Read More
Poet Nancy Campbell reviews Nick Drake's new collection, Out of Range: poems celebrating proximity and distance (spatial, temporal, emotional) to remark on the state we’re in, taking us on a journey through known worlds into unknown ones.1,950 Read More
James Murray-White took a break from editing his Finding Blake film to review Cornerstones: subterranean writings. This new collection explores how all landscapes — from Dartmoor to the Arctic Circle — begin below the surface of the earth.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. This book's objects offer a mirror test for our 'Age of Human' -- and conceptual links to A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White describes taking part in the Small Earth conference within the stunning beauty of Snape. At this special event, psychotherapists, ecologists, economists, philosophical and spiritual thinkers gathered to address hope for future living within the ecosphere.Read More
Writer Sally Moss reviews Nancy Campbell's The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate. Rich in detail (microscope and dictionary, as much as library) its landscapes, eras, expeditions, personalities and planetary prognoses pile up like brash ice.Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White reviews a recent event with GroundWork Gallery and the British Ecological Society: a gathering of poets, academics, and ecological minds exploring our responses to environmental crisis through a day of ecopoetics, provocations and wild conversations.Read More
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 Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Jim Crace's imaginative 1988 novel, The Gift of Stones. Set on the cusp of change at the end of the Stone Age, a book could hardly be more relevant to the emerging Anthropocene.2,270 Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Wide Sargasso Sea, the classic novel by Jean Rhys: her prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and a story of blurred, alienation, displacement, colonialism and the 'othering' of difference in race and gender.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Annie Dillard's 1974 wonder-filled book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A classic, it nonetheless resists easy classification and explores, in equal measure, horror and beauty in nature: fixing both with Dillard's hallmark unblinking stare.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Geoffrey Household's outstanding 1939 thriller, Rogue Male: a brilliant piece of landscape writing and a novel of slowly revealed relationships, between individual and society; human and more-than-human; surface and subterranean; cunning and culture. Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White reviews Fire & Ice, an exhibition bringing together three artists who complement each others' practice in a way that points the audience 'to deeper connections with the base elements that underpin planetary life and consciousness'.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Peter Shaffer's 1973 play, Equus, which explores incomprehensible violence against animals as an indictment of society's dulling of the feeling of true passion, our relationship with the natural world a distortion of nature.Read More
Filmmaker James Murray-White returns, fresh from a trip to Hull, City of Culture 2017, to bring us his review of the remarkable and immersive performance of 'FLOOD', a production that's "exploring our humanity and responses to the world".Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Anticipatory history, a book that explores the possibilities for 'looking back' at histories of environmental change in places to help us 'look forward' to what futures might be in store, and we might shape.Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk app, taking its blend of geology and biology on a walk into local woods, guided by its Fool and Scientist, to explore 4.6 billion years of Earth's history towards Now.Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Symphony Lab. This lively and loud gathering of scientists, musicians, journalists, sound artists and social scientists was both fun and thought-provoking, and provided an overwhelm of data as raw material for creative thinking.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews William Golding's The Inheritors, an essential reimagining of a key transition for humanity, our place as inheritors of a world that lives around and inside us, and of separation of culture from nature.Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Into the Wind, a film excursion following naturalist, radio producer and writer Tim Dee as he walks off into the edgelands of East Anglia's Wash, in search of a pure unmediated, uninterrupted, thousand-mile wind.Read More
Mark Goldthorpe reviews John Gardner's Grendel, a novel that reimagines the monster of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and speaks to us about 'Othering' the natural world, and how our excluded monsters insist on coming back in.Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe joined the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Reading's year-long Festival of the Dark, and found three simple, unexpected ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – came inside the tent.Read More
Artist James Aldridge explores experiences of being 'other' as an ability to see beyond the boundaries of binary distinctions: offering us signs of a more inclusive queer nature, from a place that until now has been the edge.Read More
Writer Indigo Moon shares a short story exploring one person's sense of purpose. Evoking ideas of conversation with the universe to illuminate times of zoonotic pandemic and climate crisis, Indigo reflects on the presence of signals from within.Read More
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.Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets a new challenge: create small expressions of the more-than-human in the form of a signal for humanity. His inaugural signal appears as an alien encyclopedia entry cast adrift, backwards in time and space...Read More
Writer and artistbook maker Sarah Hymas reflects on an on- and offline cross-genre shared space she has created to support creative writing, and why this imaginarium is as much for her as for the other writers who join.Read More
Artist Scarlet Hall reflects on defensiveness as an embodied response to being implicated in patterns of oppression. Using movement improvisation to decentre habitual narratives and open space to attend to relationships, Scarlet is seeking ecological perspectives on defensiveness.Read More
Dramatist Julia Marques reflects on her research for an MA in Climate Change: Culture, History, Society, and the role that theatre can play in opening up space for us to take in what climate change means for us. Read More
Artist Mary Eighteen discusses powerful associations of hope she sees between the 20th-century art of Barnet Newman and a 21st-century technology that will protect Venice and its Renaissance heritage from some of the impacts of manmade climate change.Read More
Artist Jennifer Leach introduces Reading's year-long Festival of the Dark, whose purpose is to gently lead people into the darkness -- a place of stillness, mystery and contemplation, and a locus of the unknowing and the unknown. Read More
Mark Goldthorpe explores interstices -- a "space that intervenes between things, especially between closely spaced things; a gap or break in something generally continuous" -- and associations with birds that play off his fascination with two mythical ravens.Read More
Writer Laura Coleman explores the urgent need for spaces where we can engage the emotions of environmental change -- to hold onto our spaces, and create new ones -- and shares two spaces with deep meaning for her.Read More
Writer Mick Haining returns with tales from the Solarpunk storytelling showcase that was launched by XR Wordsmiths with the aim of imagining futures we want and need to create, and which has given both writers and readers hope.Read More
Four writers of fiction and nonfiction (all members of Bristol Climate Writers and ClimateCultures) share the 'Desert Island Books' they discussed at a recent library event on climate change: Nick Hunt, Caroline New, Peter Reason, and Deborah Tomkins.Read More
Author Mary Woodbury, who outlined some of the common ground that helps 'define' eco-fiction in Part 1, looks at how this super-genre has grown and diversified in recent years. Her story returns to a family trip to Ireland.Read More
Author Mary Woodbury opens a two-part series on the development of eco-fiction: a form with many roots, which is "not so much a genre as a way to intersect natural landscape, environmental issues, and wilderness into other genres."Read More
Author David Thorpe considers approaches that engage readers with human stories within the climate change one, and writers' responsibilities in climate fiction, given that "stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom as well as entertain themselves."Read More
Writer David Thorpe overviews the development of fictional works addressing climate change, and how the term 'Cli-fi' (which he discovered when he published his novel, Stormteller) reveals the tension between our twin fascinations with utopian and dystopian visions.Read More
David Thorpe -- one of the short story writers, poets and non-fiction writers commissioned from two Weatherfronts climate change conferences -- explores the thinking that went into his story, included in the free anthology of the winning pieces.Read More
Multi-disciplinary artist Deborah Mason outlines her collaboration with researchers, engaging people in counter-factual imagination. What if one historic event had been otherwise, giving us an alternative present to ours? What would be the possibilities in our altered 'Now'?Read More
Writer Hassaun Jones-Bey introduces a human Anthropocene as corollary for our planet's new geological era. The commodification of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the US shows human nature resisting the same commodification that's visited upon non-human nature. ... Read More
Filmmaker James-Murray-White shares his experience of some of the world's desert places, and what the book Desert Quartet - an Erotic Landscape offers as a way into explorations of these places, of our sense of connectedness and self. ... Read More
Illustrator and writer Mat Osmond explores shifting personifications of ‘animal mysteries’ in artist Meinrad Craighead's powerful paintings to look for an understanding of how we might approach art practice and our apprehension of landscape in terms of prayer. ... Read More
