Cultural Change Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Hey! Earthlings! A Field Guide to Connecting

Artist Andrew Howe shares a collaborative project with fellow artists and migrants to bring together creativity, community and heritage, building trust, reframing narratives in an era of climate crisis and showing we are all earthlings, connected with nature.

2,230 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

At a time when the ground beneath us is shifting — politically, ecologically, socially — what does it mean to belong?

Environmental crises are intensifying and so is human movement — quietly, unevenly, and often without recognition. Creative practice has a vital role to play in response: not simply to draw attention to change, but to hold space for connection, dignity, and shared experience.

Hey! Earthlings! emerged from this context as both a project and a provocation — an invitation to rethink how we connect across difference, and how art might help cultivate belonging in an age of displacement.

Beginnings — from idea to collective action

This project began as an idea some years ago to invite people who have moved across borders, or with connections to other places through family and heritage, to join with us and share stories, sounds, and creative responses through walks and making. A simple idea, but multi-layered and rich with potential to help participants build stronger connections to local nature and heritage and, perhaps, find a new sense of place and belonging in Shropshire.

As conversations developed, a core team formed: myself, as an artist working in sound, painting, printmaking, and other media; Jill Impey – an artist working in video, sound and printmaking; and Jean Atkin – a poet and writer. Together, under Participate Contemporary Artspace CIC (now Participate Co-labs), we shaped the project and secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund in Summer 2024. After a period of careful planning, our activities got underway during Spring/Summer 2025.

Hey! Earthlings! unfolded amid increasing social division in the UK and growing hostility toward migrants and refugees. Against this background, the project took on a deeper significance: to offer a counter-narrative grounded in generosity, creativity, and welcome.

“The project challenged the idea that we live in a world of ‘not enough’. In reality, the Earth is abundant, and people naturally want to contribute meaningfully to the places they live and without the negative narrative and fear-based leadership in the world, humans would naturally share without fear.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Climate Change and the movement of people

Practitioners engaging with climate themes cannot ignore migration.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complex, but the global effects of both phenomena are undeniable. Extreme weather events — floods, storms, droughts — are already forcing millions to move. Slower environmental changes, such as desertification or rising sea levels, impact on livelihoods too. The frequency and severity of these events are increasing.

UNHCR estimates indicate that tens of millions of people are displaced each year by sudden environmental events, while projections produced by the World Bank indicate that by 2050, hundreds of millions could be internally displaced due to long-term climate impacts.

These figures reduce human lives to statistics and do not capture the lived experience of losing home, identity, culture, agency, assets and dignity and the search for belonging.

This is where art has a humanising role to hold spaces where people can speak, create, and connect.

Walking as method: reconnecting through landscape

We held three Hey! Earthlings! creative events at each of two pairs of locations in Shropshire, offering important natural and historic heritage to explore by walking together:

Old Oswestry Iron Age Hill Fort and Oswestry Memorial Hall
Doctor’s Field countryside site and Darwin House, The Mount, Shrewsbury (Charles Darwin’s birthplace and childhood home).

These are all located within or very close to the towns of Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and so were relatively easily accessible, with the potential for participants to return again in future.

Each of the events comprised an artist-led walk followed by a creative workshop.

We were inspired by artist Henna Asikainen and her use of walks in projects with refugees and migrants. Walking offers a shared rhythm. It dissolves hierarchies. It allows for informal conversation, chance encounters, quiet reflection and freedom to explore the surrounding landscape.

The group bonded through creativity and shared experience, taking opportunities to translate for each other and share food and song whilst gathered around a fire.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants listening to the river. Photo: by Anna Martin 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! listening to the river. Photo: Anna Martin © 2025

Each walk started with a grounding meditation. We then listened to the river and trees, we foraged, shared stories and words about nature, and played parachute games. The group(s) learned about local history and nature, sharing oral histories, making films and co-creating art.

After scrambling over steep ramparts to the top of the Old Oswestry Hillfort, we used a compass at this 360-degree viewpoint to orient ourselves to local landmarks and distant homelands.

These multi-sensory walks enabled people to compare common or shared experiences from other places, and find meaning, empathy and compassion.

“Being in nature evokes a sense of home and belonging (the trees are not lost): the wind is the wind, the rain is the rain, the sun rises for all the stars and moon are the same ones their families see across the world. This reinforced the idea that humans are children of the Earth and of the stars. The Earth has no borders; birds and fish do not need passports.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Hey! Earthlings! Expressing belonging through creativity

Following the walks we returned to workshop venues to respond creatively.

The approach was intentionally open, flexible and welcoming. We offered printmaking, drawing, writing, small book-making, and other collaborative activities, allowing participants of all ages and abilities to engage in ways that felt comfortable, safe and meaningful.

The workshops were not set up as places of instruction, but as opportunities for exchange. Participants brought their own knowledge, skills, and creative traditions. It was a delight when two young Ukrainian participants asked if they could lead some creative sessions during the workshops — an offer we embraced and celebrated.

The shift from facilitator to co-creator crucially challenges the notion of participants as recipients and instead recognises them as contributors and artists with knowledge to share.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

The resulting artworks were vibrant, layered, and deeply personal. They spoke of journeys, memories, loss, resilience, and joy. They reflected not only the challenges of displacement, but also the richness that diverse communities bring to local contexts.

Building trust: the role of an ethical framework

Underpinning the whole of our project was an ethical framework devised by Jill Impey. This guided our delivery to ensure everyone involved felt safe and welcome, providing a reference or set of prompts to guide actions and relationships throughout from beginning to end.

The ethical framework aims to embed respect, honesty and understanding in working with participants, with our supporting organisations and with each other. When working with people who may have experienced trauma, displacement, or marginalisation, the stakes are high.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework. — Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework.

The framework emphasises:

Empathy and compassion as foundational values, cultivating a culture of care
Inclusion and accessibility to remove barriers to participation
Respect and honesty in all interactions
Agency and consent, ensuring participants retained control over their stories and contributions
Reciprocity, recognising that exchange must be mutual, not extractive.

This framework was not simply theoretical. It informed practical decisions — from how we structured workshops, to how we developed relationships with partner organisations, to how we shared outcomes.

It also provided a crucial anchor for the team, offering a shared language and set of principles to navigate complex situations.

Partnership and participation

The project was made possible through a network of partnerships, including community organisations, cultural institutions, and local authorities.

Participants came from a wide range of backgrounds: young people from Bulgarian schools, asylum seekers from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Sierra Leone and Vietnam, newly settled Ukrainians, and individuals connected through refugee support networks and community groups. Each event was tailored towards the particular group attending.

We were very fortunate to be able to appoint two experienced community co-ordinators, Anna Martin and Marina Churm. During project planning, we consulted with various community groups to gauge interest and shape the activities for the events.

Both Anna and Marian proved invaluable to the project as they engaged so positively with groups they had existing connections with and with other community leaders who could help link to a wider network and invite people to work with us. Building trust takes time, sensitivity, and existing relationships. Their work ensured that participants felt welcomed, informed, and supported throughout the process.

The team were supported by local artists, Jamila Walker Thomas and Niki Holmes, and project evaluator and mentor, Cerin Mills.

Meaningful engagement cannot be rushed or assumed. It requires investment in relationships, and often collaboration with those who already hold trust within communities.

Sharing responses: rethinking the ‘Cabinet’

We showed the work made at the events in a travelling cabinet at exhibitions in local libraries and museums. These took place at Oswestry Library; Gateway Arts and Education Centre, Shrewsbury Library and Shropshire Archives. The mobile cabinet is made with reclaimed furniture and is able to host and display a range of materials, sounds and video. Its many drawers, compartments and fold-out doors invite visitors to interact with the cabinet and explore for themselves.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

Cabinets like this one have long been used to collect and display objects deemed unfamiliar, unusual or exotic — often telling stories about people rather than with them. We aimed to do things differently by inviting the participants to have a stake in curating the exhibition and deciding how to present their work on their own terms.

Rather than turning lives into curiosities, this Cabinet asks us to be curious with empathy — and to reflect on how we might tell richer, more respectful stories in the future.

Shared responses also included a series of collaborative poems edited by Jean Atkin, a short film edited by Jill Impey and a series of soundscapes of stories, reflections and field recordings edited by me. The soundscapes were installed as audio trails at Old Oswestry Hillfort and at Doctor’s Field in Shrewsbury, and can also be streamed from the Participate website.

A Field Guide to Connecting

Towards the end of the project, we prepared a Field Guide to Connecting: a resource for sharing our experience to help other practitioners deliver multi-cultural community arts and heritage projects effectively.

The Guide is aimed towards:

Artist peers/creative practitioners
Community workers and organisations
Fundraisers seeking funding for similar projects

The Guide provides some key reference sheets, such as the Ethical Framework and Ingredients for Success, which include prompts and practical advice. This is supplemented by information from our Hey! Earthlings! project describing our approach, supported by sample documents.

The document is designed not as a fixed methodology, but as a flexible, adaptable resource — something that can be used, questioned, and reshaped. It moves beyond theory into practice, offering grounded insights into what works, what challenges arise, and how they might be navigated.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting — Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting

Reframing migration: from crisis to contribution

One of the most powerful shifts within Hey! Earthlings! is its reframing of migration.

“Many displaced people are treated as passive objects, moved like pieces on a chessboard. Used for political games and leverage and discarded when no more use. This results in adding to their deep grief, a sense of betrayal, and a loss of agency. It can feel as traumatising for them as the reason why they are here — just in a different way. Reframing migrants as contributors, creators, and community members is vital for their healing and for the communities that receive them.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Too often, migrants and displaced people are positioned as problems to be solved, burdens to be managed, or victims to be pitied. This narrative not only dehumanises individuals but also obscures their agency, creativity, and potential contributions.

By contrast, Hey! Earthlings! foregrounds participants as creators, collaborators, and community members, and aims to foster more inclusive communities. Our project offered alternative narratives to dominant, often divisive discourses and engaged with global issues through local, embodied experience.

Hey! Earthlings! offers an invitation to recognise ourselves as Earthlings – a condition we share with every living organism inhabiting and depending on a single, fragile planet.

Find more

The projections Andrew gives on displaced people due to long-term climate impacts are from Climate change-induced migration: UK collaboration with international partners by Thomas Weston (September 2023).

You can explore Hey! Earthlings! at the project pages on the Participate Co-labs website — including a download of A Field Guide to Connecting, an 8-minute video, a guided grounding meditation and two audio trails of Old Oswestry Hillfort and Doctor’s Field, consisting of collaborative poems performed by Jean Atkin, shared stories and reflections on the events at the Hillfort, and a soundscape of an imagined Iron Age village. This series of soundscapes was edited by Andrew Howe using field recordings made at the Hillfort, and poems created using words by participants at events and edited by Jean Atkin.

Participate Co-labs (formerly Participate Contemporary Artspace) is an artist-run community interest company, set up in 2015 by Jill Impey, Elizabeth Turner and Keith Ashford to create space for artists to work and exhibit in Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

Shropshire Supports Refugees was established in 2016 to bring relief and support to vulnerable families displaced by unrest in their home countries relocating to Shropshire.

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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Andrew – “I occasionally use AI for some functional, time-saving tasks like transcribing spoken word recordings or helping to reduce word count in written drafts before I re-edit into my own style. It can be useful to provide simple, clear summaries or comparisons between options when I have gathered and checked material myself, as I don’t fully trust AI with factual research. In my artist practice, I often move between analogue and digital processes, which I control, but I don’t like the aesthetics of AI-generated imagery and I don’t find it very effective in developing creative ideas.”

Andrew Howe

An interdisciplinary artist and project manager using walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, drawing attention to human entanglements within a multi-species environment.

Cloud Mountain, Thunder Dragon: Stories of Gross National Happiness

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty‘s climb to Bhutan’s Taktstang mountain temple reveals a nation’s story of hope and regeneration through its common focus on Gross National Happiness. “Difficult to reach, but not impossible. Like solving a world crisis…”

2,050 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is said, each person of Bhutan wishes to make a pilgrimage to Taktstang. Founded in 1692, centuries of reverent feet. A great magnitude of devotion, the build and the maintenance, here on thunder mountain.

Showing: Tiger's Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph byJules Pretty 2025. — Tiger’s Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025.

Hello old friend, you say. I know you.

For this is who is waiting.

Taktstang temple calls quietly to the soul. Just welcoming, not demanding. Shall we take up where we left off? Up here hidden in mountains.

At this bird-perched temple and monastery built into the kilometre-high cliff. Half in cloud, spires golden, serenaded by forest birds in the thin air after rain. Hidden, not hidden, hidden again.

Difficult to reach, but not impossible.

Like solving a world crisis, say stopping the use of obsolete fossil fuels, preventing the scouring up of nature.

The climb to the Tiger’s Nest begins not long after dawn. Up there in the eastern hills above Paro, under the blue dome of sky. Up the trail, up steps and foot-worn paths. Through cool groves of seven-needled pine and oak, orchid and fern and old-man’s beard, rich epiphytes on every branch.

The climb’s stiff, at altitude. The sun leaps from the sheer granite cliff, lights the forest, swings around to shine on temple roofs and white walls of stone and clay. Beneath is the drop, the ascent. There’s a fluting bird, the yellow-billed magpie. There are bright prayer flags holding the land together.

Gross National Happiness — changing a country’s story

A pilgrimage of this kind is said to need right speech, body and mind. Speech is the story, body’s the hard work, mind’s the agency and effort. It’s a lesson for any kind of transformation.

The mind gradually empties as you climb. There’s the physical and mental test, then comes a muffled roar, a detachment from sky and land. The wind horses have stopped running. It’s the alchemy of change.

A single white cloud is fixed upon the azure sky.

The temple shimmers, across the ravine.

Far below is the valley, the contoured rice around the town.

Showing: Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Guides accompany each group of visitors. Jigme Chodup says, “One hundred and eighty-one.” The number of times he’s walked this upward pilgrimage. Here came Guru Rinpoche with his consort, she the flying tiger. Here they crushed the dark spirit, the mara of the mountain.

At some point it’s time to turn. To walk down the old trail that’s now a new trail, past herbs and orchids in the forest, past scars of landslips. Passing climbing pilgrims.

“Is there far to go?” A question about life itself.

“No, not far! Don’t stop. Transformation awaits.”

Such hope means taking risks. Precisely what the Fourth King does in the early 1970s. He takes a risk, and people give support.

At the age of 18, people say King Jigme Wingchuk seems mature for his years. He declares Bhutan’s primary aim should be Gross National Happiness. All else should serve this: economy, culture, society.

Some in other countries smirk at the idea of Gross National Happiness. Come on, what about growth? You can’t eat happiness.

What’s Bhutan now known for? Well, precisely this one big and beautiful story.

Gross National Happiness is described in Bhutanese as Gakid Palzon. Ga-happy, Kid-peaceful, Pel-prosperity, Zon-convergent. GNH means “happy-peaceful-prosperity-convergence for all.”

It’s completely changed the story of the country. The way that people talk, their identity, how they act.

A country with no litter, no plastic pollution, no person smoking in public. No pesticides or herbicides, so an abundant insect presence. Every tree filled by a noise-wall of crickets, every green space rich with flocks of butterfly. Nine hundred species of butterflies in the country, thousands more of moths. A country with no slaughterhouse, not one fast-food outlet. All the food organic, all agriculture regenerative.

Showing: Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photography: Jules Pretty © 2025

And this too: phone coverage everywhere, no dead signal zones. All electricity from hydropower, the surplus sold to India and now the primary source of national income. The next step: electrify transport.

Who’s the trickster now?

The king gives up his position, wants the next generation to bring new ideas. The Fifth King says, we’ll give away my power, create a voting democracy. As easy as that.

The country with a negative carbon footprint, it’s now one of a small group with the lowest internal social inequality in the world. And this: the 5th King’s vision for a new settlement in the south, Gelephu Mindfulness City. High tech, new jobs, integrated with wildlife, all the buildings made of wood.

What is it then? Are people elsewhere afraid of the idea of this sort of contentment? That they’ll have to give up things to find it?

What you’ve also not got. You’ll hear no one saying, we think selfishness is best, or friendliness is the enemy of economic growth. Or that growth is king.

The guide Jigme stops, says, “Just think of what we’d lose.”

That wider world of wonder. It’s still in a hole.

This small country never fell in. This hidden land, it’s not in the hole and it knows how to stay out.

The trickster’s wearing a mask. It’s rags to riches. Right enough, happiness riches.

People love that story. They never get enough of it.

The audience laughs. Too true.

The Masked Dance

One mountain day starts like this. Sunshine, hot for autumn. Clouds hide the hill-tops and snow-slopes of the great Himalayan peaks. It’s the first of three days of masked dance and celebration. The Tsechu festival, the best time of the year.

Gross National Happiness. Showing: Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

The first day of dance. The dzong amphitheatre’s brim-full, eight thousand people, dancers down on the stone performance square. To one side, the citadel, white-walls and golden roofs. Clowns in masks wander, prodding the serious dancers, leaning into their faces, engaging with the audience in a side-show of jest and laughter.

The tricksters mimic moves, exaggerate, play at slap-stick entertainment.

No one’s allowed to take themselves too seriously. Laughter is good.

The audience loves it.

The national TV station broadcasts all the action across the three days. Homes and restaurants have their TVs running all day. There’s no commentary. Everyone knows the stories.

Here’s the Black Hat dance, monks spinning as they fight the devils of desire, beating hand-held drums.

Here are masked animals. The mythical faces of gold and green and blue: the tiger, the snow-lion, garuda, dragon. The audience eats and chats and points.

Here’s the dance of couples, a tall woman and man, calm-faced masks, tested to the limit. Yet the marriage survives it all. Children laugh, play on phones.

Rain starts to fall, gently as moths at evening dusk. Five thousand umbrellas ping open, and families cluster underneath.

Nature’s an important healer too. Especially when it’s abundant. When it’s not being beaten half to death on the ropes.

Overlooking the capital, all perched on steep slopes, the river dashing far below, high on the hill is the fifty-metre golden Buddha. Often hidden in clouds. But present, all the same, in people’s lives.

Sunlight briefly falls upon the Buddha. On his shoulders, on his lap, on his smiling face. The mountain dances, the arching rainbow a scarf wound around the mountain’s wrist.

And in each temple, in each Dzong fort, there’s golden light on the Buddha and disciples, on Guru Rinpoche who brought Buddhism to the country. Energy flows in from the universe, streams out again. Butter lamps flutter in the endless draughts, wind channelled down wooden corridors, high windows open to the world.

Showing: Butter lamps. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Butter lamps. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

In the golden light of the sweet butter lamps, shadows dance on walls, murals are alive with tiger and snow-lion and elephant. The animals jump and blink, as it did for early humans when they stood right before the cliff face, the cave wall.

A monk pours saffron water on your hands.

For this is a place of story. How to care for places, keep them sacred.

By the banks of the river, two villages are engaged in archery competition. The men are mostly elders, burned by life in the fields. Like all team sports, there’s laughter, jesting, ribbing. They’re wearing sashes on their belts, one for each successful strike.

The target’s no more than a handspan wide. It’s 140 metres away.

Hitter and hit are not two opposing objects, they are the reality of the whole. The archer, the bamboo bow, the bamboo arrow. The arrow departs the eye of the archer, curves high in the sky. Time passes as it arches over the butts. There’s an acceleration at the end as the arrow at last is caught by the eye.

There’s an unzipping of the air, the arrow buries two feet deep, into the grassy mound, into the target.

The men simply sway aside. They call to the next archer, right a bit, up-up. Listen to the wind, to all the world around them. Another arrow pierces the sky.

A team breaks into dance and song when the arrow strikes the tiny target.

Jigme laughs, says, “Well, they are a bit drunk.”

All around, the contoured gold and green of paddy fields. Some drained and cut, hand threshing underway. The irrigation water travels from one field to the next below. Frogs are calling.

And so the monsoon rebounds, dashes in. A month after it should be over.

A growth story of the 21st century

Sixteen hours of torrential rain. Crashing thunder dragon, fire and lightning. Morning light comes late, dull and blue. The hills are hidden in mist. The river’s maddened, no longer blue and sweet, now a rushing, crashing venomous snake. Water strikes rocks, rises high in standing waves, whole trees spinning and leaping away.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. At this time of year,” says Jigme.

Never has such a storm come, so long after the old certainties of the monsoon.

On the drive over the Dorchu-la Pass, there are landslides every forty or fifty metres. Rocks ping off the road ahead, bounce away. The driver looks up, the guide looks ahead.

And what ugly devils stirred up this storm? Brought it to the people whose carbon footprint is less than zero?

All over the country, all across the north-east of the sub-continent, landslides and falling rock, bridges washed away. Snowstorms fall on the high mountains, strand climbers, a hydro dam is overtopping.

What else will come to the Himalaya with its forty thousand mountain glaciers? A billion people relying on a calm supply of meltwater for drink and irrigation.

Showing: Thimphu dzong. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Thimphu dzong. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Bhutan’s the growth story of the twenty-first century. Growth of happiness, growth of economy working within strict boundaries, growth of equality. An economy that does not impose externalities on others. A marvellous thing.

People here, they’re earth-cherishing people, as Joan Halifax has put it. They know how to look after the future.

How to be happy, peaceful, convergent.

Your age of oil? It’ll soon be over.

Eight hundred summers ago, Dōgen Zenji slides open rice-paper doors in Japan. He’s in the temple he founded, Eihei-Ji, the temple of eternal peace.

He sees, mountain, cloud, patches of blue sky. He writes this in the Mountains and Waters Sutra:

“There are mountains hidden in sky.
There are mountains hidden in mountains.
There are mountains hidden in hiddenness.”

Find more

UPDATE February 2026: You can now watch National Happiness and Social Equality: This is How Bhutan Did It, a special companion video to this post, recorded by Jules as part of his Story for Climate & Nature Recovery YouTube Channel.

Jules’s guide, Jigme Chodup, works for the Thimphu company, Keys to Bhutan.

“Anything that exists is possible,” is the message of this short YouTube excerpt of a feature on Bhutan’s journey with Gross National Happiness (with a link to the full documentary).

You can find out more about Gross National Happiness and other measures for wellbeing at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

For more on the role of story, see Jules Pretty’s YouTube channel, Story for Climate and Nature Recovery — including this short video on the role of Tricksters in Story. We have featured Story for Climate and Nature Recovery in our Creative Showcase.

For more of his research and writing at Jules’s website.

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.

Regenerative Designs for the Planet

ClimateCultures editor — and UK Architects Declare Manager — Mark Goldthorpe looks at new initiatives for regenerative design, a paradigm shift embracing principles of being a good ancestor, coevolving with nature and creating a just space for people.

2,330 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

For the past few decades — certainly since before I began my career in environmental and climate issues — ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ has been the guiding principle behind local, national and global efforts to steer us away from greater destruction of our natural world. Language has changed over that time, not least in how we talk about ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘global heating’, ‘climate catastrophe’, the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environmental justice’, ‘ecocide’, and so much more. But ‘sustainability’ has stuck — perhaps partly because this short word covers a host of meanings and so has the potential to bring disparate communities together around common concerns, albeit often working to different priorities.

The phrase ‘sustainable development’ emerged from the UN Brundtland Commission in 1987. It proposed a goal of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainability here was conceived of as protecting a capacity for humanity to survive, even thrive, into a future that was no longer being undermined by our present acceleration of resource depletion, accumulation of waste and pollution and destruction of natural habitats and wildlife: sustainability as the ability to carry on. Part of the word’s appeal is to businesses’ powers of innovation and enterprise in ways that can sustain their profitability by diverting it to less damaging activities. At the same time, environmentalists could see it as a practical vehicle for delivering better nature conservation, greater recognition of the innate value of the world’s habitats, species and ecosystems, and an urgently needed move to ecoefficiency.

Although much debated at the time across a spectrum of opinions, from ‘deep green’ to ‘green capitalism’, the promise of sustainable development was that we could meet our needs both now and indefinitely into the future. A large banner under which to gather all our ambitions for a better world.

Has it worked? What have we been sustaining for the past 30 years? Our technological efficiency has improved, and movements to stimulate and accelerate popular and political action have flourished. But our waste and pollution, our energy demand and resource use, our habitat destruction and species extinction, and the concentration of greenhouse gases in our oceans and atmosphere have all continued to grow too, with all the impacts we imagined these would bring, and more. ‘Growth’ is still the dominant paradigm, even with sustainability as the supposed goal.

In 2023 the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported that we’ve now breached six of the nine planetary boundaries we rely on. Can we say that sustainability is succeeding? Should we say it has failed? Do we need an entirely new paradigm? What might that be?

Showing a graphic of how we are crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre. — Crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre.

From declaring an emergency…

Part of what that much-needed change might be is captured in the increasing presence of ‘regenerative’ in debates over the transition to a better, cleaner, more ecologically balanced and socially equitable future lived safely within planetary boundaries. And one part of that shift has been work that I’m excited to be associated with through UK Architects Declare.

That movement has been gaining momentum and reputation since long before I joined, part-time, as AD’s manager in 2021. The initiative’ was launched in May 2019 by Michael Pawlyn, founder of Exploration Architecture, and Steve Tompkins of architectural practice HaworthTompkins. As Michael put it at AD’s 5th birthday party last month, back in late 2018 he and Steve had a gloomy couple of pints together as they contemplated the latest and most depressing report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how little concern there seemed to be in the architectural profession. They engaged a small group to organise a declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency. Their website very quickly attracted its first few hundred signatories and caught the imagination of the profession — not least because of its insistence on the need for change in our systems, not just (but also) in our behaviours. The declaration promoted a theory of change drawing on the work of Donella Meadows, who showed how the most effective way to change a system is through its higher ‘leverage points’: the paradigm behind the system and the mindset that sustains it, and the goals the system drives all of us towards.

Showing UK Architects Declare - regenerative design

This interest rapidly accelerated and expanded, spawning many related declarations across the built environment sector, around the UK and the globe. Today, more than 8,000 organisations have signed declarations in 28 countries under the banner of Built Environment Declares, and many other sectors have made their own declarations — including, of course, Culture Declares.

‘When AD started, pretty much no one outside of Sweden had heard of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion had yet to hit the headlines, Doughnut Economics had only recently been published, the WellBeing Group of Governments had yet to form, China had yet to announce a date for decarbonisation, the idea of a Law of Ecocide, the Rights of Nature, or Future Generations legislation were all seen as distant dreams. And yet since then a lot of governments have actually implemented them.

‘And one area where I think all of us as signatories can enjoy some credit: five years ago hardly anyone was talking about regenerative design, and now everyone is. That’s something we’ve all created together — the potential for architects to reclaim our agency as shapers of the future, as integrators and systems thinkers, as people who want to be able to proudly look our children in the eye in ten years time and say “Yes, I saw this coming and this is what I did about it.”’

— Michael Pawlyn

UK Architects Declare works on a dual approach: providing practical support to its signatory practices so they can implement their 12-point declaration while operating in the current flawed economic and social system; and demonstrating how the system can be changed to one that works within our planetary boundaries and deliver social and environmental justice. The point, as Meadows demonstrated, is not to feed the paradigm that’s created our emergency by merely tinkering at its margins, but to build a new paradigm — in this case, based on regenerative rather than degenerative principles.

… to regenerative design for a better future

In its latest work, AD has developed a set of policies — Building Blocks — to transform the built environment, and guidance for architects and urban designers in a ‘work in progress’ Regenerative Design Primer. And, working with media partner Architecture Today, it has launched a new community initiative, the Regenerative Architecture Index. The Index will bring together, learn from and promote examples of regenerative activity at two levels: the practice and its projects. The Building Blocks address the need for government policies for resource efficiency, circular economy and social and natural infrastructure. These are based on foundations of climate literacy and climate leadership, alignment with well-being and planetary limits, and safeguarding future generations’ ability to act. Meanwhile, both the Primer and the Index promote clear principles for designers and businesses in the built environment sector: being a good ancestor, co-evolving with nature, and creating a just space for people.

Showing the Regenerative Design Primer, from UK Architects Declare 2024 — Regenerative Design Primer, UK Architects Declare 2024

Being a good ancestor is about a shift in mindsets to consider the truly long-term: thinking seven generations ahead and ensuring adaptability and flexibility for the future.

Co-evolving with nature is about recognising that we’re part of nature, within integral living systems, not separate from it: actively regenerating, learning from and working with natural systems.

Creating a just space for people is about providing social connection, economic opportunity and wellbeing for all: fostering a shared sense of stewardship where neighbourhoods can self-organise and build their resilience.

Together, these principles require innovative thought, designing for circularity and encouraging closed-loop energy, material and water cycles, and adopting ethical, inclusive and participative approaches.

The Primer makes a distinction between adopting these principles and continuing with the now conventional approach. Regenerative design transcends ‘sustainability’ in three key ways:

From being ‘less bad’ to being net positive.
From being just focused on humans to considering the whole web of life.
From a mechanistic approach that can focus too exclusively on carbon (‘carbon reductivism’) to a more holistic and systemic approach.

Regenerative design mimics natural ecosystem processes, which keep cycling and transforming materials and grow healthier and more diverse ecosystems. It uses a systems approach to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with those of nature. This means looking beyond the boundary of a project or a specific site. By doing so, it delivers positive environmental and social outcomes, ensuring both human and planetary health.

— Regenerative Design Primer (p8)

Just as the May 2019 AD declaration of planetary emergency quickly attracted more support than the founders initially anticipated, in May 2024 the first iteration of the Regenerative Architecture Index gained an encouraging number and diversity of entries. Architecture Today and UK Architects Declare will be announcing the scheme’s inaugural results next month, with a special celebratory event and issue of AT’s magazine. AD will then work with participants to take a deep dive into their experiences and ideas. That learning, with feedback on the Regenerative Design Primer, will cycle directly into the next iterations of both Primer and Index next year, and no doubt spark new policy work and other initiatives.

Creative agency for change

For me, witnessing and supporting the huge amount of voluntary work that dedicated professionals — across AD’s steering group and others in small groups working to support architectural practices and engage policymakers — is energising and motivating. And the mounting realisation that not only do we need a new, positive paradigm but that one is possible and is actually being demonstrated is empowering and generates practical hope.

Another key distinction between regenerative and sustainability-driven approaches to change is that it is inherently creative: it calls on us to expand and engage our imaginations and to help design the difference we want to see. It is also an exercise in humility, recognising the world beyond our own self-centred horizons and timescales and drawing inspiration from others — human and more-than-human, and an enhanced sense of what the future can be and how its inhabitants too can flourish.

When I set up ClimateCultures in 2017, after working with the charity TippingPoint on immersive events for artists and scientists to explore creative responses to the emergency, it was out of a sense that to create change that seems hard or impossible, we need at least two things above all: a sense of agency and a sense of community or association. As I wrote in an article on ClimateCultutes, agency for change and the environmental imagination:

“We need to feel we can do something meaningful and that others are on board. Of course, we also need action itself, and increasing awareness of the problems. And these things are all interrelated: action, association, agency, awareness. Sometimes it’s personal action that comes first, providing the spark to taking more action as part of a community; these experiences help to grow both our personal and shared awareness of the issues, leading to yet more action, and so our agency builds and builds. It can be a virtuous circle, rather than the vicious cycle of frustration, disappointment and despondency.

“If there’s one thing that helps drive this virtuous circle and motivates change, I think it’s imagination. A sense that things can be different, that there are other ways of acting and living than we now take for granted. Even if we don’t know how to enact these differences, imagination gives us a new picture, casts new light on the old picture, or helps us realise that other people who we’ve barely acknowledged until now have pictures to share with us. Imagination is both an exploration and expansion of our horizons.”

As Culture Declares says, “culture can help stir up human response as well as breaking old habits and creating new stories and visions for our world … culture is what humans – and other species – do to create conditions for life to thrive. We can think in a new way about Culture as organised activities, so that we can create a Regenerative culture.”

Many ClimateCultures members and readers will also be signatories to Culture Declares or other declarations — Heritage Declares, Design Declares, and so on. And ClimateCultures would love to share your stories, examples and experiences. How does your work as an artist, researcher or curator draw on or inspire regenerative paradigms or goals? What creative works inspire you? How do you respond to the emergency and the history of sustainability-led approaches to tackle it? Where next?

Find more

You can find the original definition of Sustainable Development and much else about how it’s being implemented at the United Nations Sustainable Development pages.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has produced several reports on its planetary boundaries work. This has also been adapted by Doughnut Economics Action Lab to promote the need for a social foundation that ensures no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, as well as an ecological ceiling to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries.

Donella Meadows published her highly influential paper Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System in 1999.

Michael Pawlyn has co-authored Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency with Sarah Ichioka, published by Triarchy Press (2021). They also host an excellent series of podcasts on the book’s themes.

You can find the Regenerative Design Primer and information on the Regenerative Architecture Index, as well as the Building Blocks manifesto and many other resources at UK Architects Declare. If you work for or with, or know people within architectural or other construction-related organisations, have they signed a shared declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency? You can find these at Built Environment Declares. Other declarations include Culture Declares, Heritage Declares, Design Declares and Business Declares.

You can read ClimateCultures, agency for change and the environmental imagination at my site. You might also like this 2017 post on a free ecololinguistics course that looks at the power of words such as ‘growth’ over our imaginations: The Stories We Live By.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and programme manager on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses to our predicaments.

Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point

Ecopoet Helen Moore celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.

1,410 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

Are we yet at a cultural tipping point, which makes conversations about climate change and environmental degradation “many, various, and unavoidable”? Doubtless this is the work of contributing artists to ClimateCultures, and it’s the vision of British ecopoet Caleb Parkin, who sees poetry “with its scalar shifts and ability to hold multiple perspectives and ambiguities” as being uniquely placed within the public imagination “to support the representation of massively distributed temporospatial (time/space) violences to the entire biosphere”.

Caleb’s insight is taken from a statement he wrote for Ecopoetikon, a new online showcase of global ecopoetries, which was launched in September 2023. It aims to provide a powerful poetic indicator of how ecological and intersecting social crises are affecting people across the world, and as such, adds significantly to these unavoidable conversations. Caleb is one of twenty ecopoets featured on the site, which I’ve been co-curating over the past year. His contribution includes his richly textural poem Almanac of Lunar Songs — a poem “inspired by human and more-than-human lunar behavioural influences – from microorganisms to ‘supermoon baby booms’ [, which] weaves through the various names given to the full moons each month” and written to be performed under Luke Jerram’s ‘Museum of the Moon’ in Bristol Cathedral. Almanac of Lunar Songs was a Bristol City Poet collaborative commission, with Miranda Lynn Barnes.

March

The plough moon brings on spring, softened soils. Equinox moon.
Longer days, last of winter, earth’s movement emerging. Worm moon.
Earthworms surface, converge on winter’s wastings, fertile, gleaming.
In like a lion, out like a lamb, March brings the wind moon, crow moon.
Sweetness seeps from the birch and the maple beneath the sugar moon,
sap moon. How it glows in the half-light. How we ache towards the solstice.

With each ecopoet nominated on the basis that they demonstrate commitment and creative innovation in their practice, the site is currently showcasing the work of poets from Australia, Botswana, Colombia, Estonia, India, Italy, Mauritius, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, the Philippines, the UK, and the US, and offers a rich tapestry of perspectives.

Global ecopoetries: a network of solidarity

Although the definitions of ecopoetry remain contested, at Ecopoetikon we define it as poetry written with engaged ecological and social consciousness. For us, ecopoetry should be informed by a level of ecoliteracy, an awareness that we live within ecosystems and in reciprocal interaction with the more-than-human world. We also see the intertwining social and ecological crises as having the same roots — i.e., globalised, industrial, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism, and materialism. And more deeply, as a crisis of perception and imagination, emerging from a paradigm of separation: human from Nature and Nature from culture.

Ecopoetikon was originally inspired by a student interview conducted by Kathryn Alderman with Craig Santos Perez, an acclaimed ecopoet from the Pacific Island of Guam. In late 2022, Perez called for poets from the Global North to read and support poets from the Global South, and to teach their work, and so the idea for a ‘world ecopoetry share’ was born. Categorising countries according to their economic and developmental status, as in the ‘Global North’/’South’ binary, is problematic; however, Ecopoetikon’s ethos is more broadly one of building a network of solidarity, and transcending Eurocentrism and the Western literary canon to highlight less privileged voices.

Rina Garcia Chua from the Philippines is another of our featured poets, and she writes of growing up in Metro Manila, where she experienced a typhoon that forced her to “swim and walk in flooded highways when it dumped a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours.” One of the three poems I selected for her webpage is titled 113 Submerged Reefs, and visually reveals contested territory in the South China Sea, with oil represented as an omnipresent but less visible text within the poem-collage.

Global ecopoetries: Showing Rina Garcia Chua's poem '113 Submerged Reefs' — ‘113 Submerged Reefs’ by Rina Garcia Chua, featured in Ecopoetikon, first published in g u e s t 17 (2019) and The Global South 19.1 (2023).

Tjawangwa Dema from Botswana touches on the fraught landscape of Elephant populations and expresses right relationship with the forest in their poem Commons:

Here we gather
blistered tongue to blistered tongue and say
no one owns the forest or its flycatchers
nor its trout lilies or lichen. No one

And Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poems are beautifully translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, finds her inspiration among the trees, plants, birds, and snakes of Mt. Baiyun, and from factory-work in Guangdong. In Time, wild Nature is contrasted with the factory, where she herself worked from the age of twenty-one, witnessing how “workers are inflicted with occupational illnesses such as pneumoconiosis, dermatitis, lung cancer …”

a lonely bird hides itself in the darkness of the lychee grove
the darkness overwhelms the red of the lychees, and the dark branches
turn even darker, the birdcalls have faded, and here
the roar of the hardware factory continues its banging unabated …

Decolonising canon and curriculum

Who should have the power to determine which poems are worth reading? Conscious of the literary gatekeepers who have often raised obstacles to more politically engaged work, including my own, Ecopoetikon’s editors are aware of the opportunity that this online platform offers to transcend political borders and to include more diverse voices.

We aim to avoid exclusivity by including ecopoets who have been nominated by others on the basis of their commitment and creative innovation in their practice, and the editorial team welcomes nominations of ecopoets whose work we’ve yet to discover. In featuring poets from across the globe, we’re also aware that some may not define themselves as ‘ecopoets’, because an ecological worldview is inherent in their culture, and evident in their traditional ecological knowledge.

Funded by the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts, and built by student web designer Ardeshir Shojaei, Ecopoetikon features three search tools, one of which is thematic. With poems grouped under ‘oceans’, ‘soil/agriculture’, ‘pollution/waste’, ‘indigeneity/roots’, ‘ecocide/extinctions’, ‘regeneration’, and ‘interspecies communication’, amongst other themes, this function readily provides material for research or learning across a range of disciplines. The site’s bespoke teaching resources, available to subscribers, offer writing prompts too. Over the coming years, the project team plans to evaluate Ecopoetikon’s impacts, and welcomes feedback from site users.

In September 2023, we launched our global ecopoetries project both at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment at Liverpool University and at the 2^nd Ecocultural Humanities Symposium at the University of Gloucestershire. In 2024, we aim to build awareness of the project through commissioned features, social media and in-person and online events – and again we welcome invitations to collaborate with other artists and networks. Look out for news of these, and why not book onto an evening with Ecopoetikon poets Helina Hookoomsing and Mario Petrucci, who will read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s online ecopoetry event on June 3^rd2024?

A restorative act

When I ask the growing community of featured poets how they feel about the project, Mario Petrucci, whose extraordinary poem Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl I selected for the site, emails me saying: “In the ten-minutes-to-midnight cacophony of ignored environmental wake-up calls, Ecopoetikon sings a sweet yet piercingly persistent note. Too often, ecopoetry is met with neglectful silence; it’s profoundly encouraging to join this lively conversation.”

Working together we hope to see ecopoetry serving not only as a cultural tipping point, but also as a restorative act. A signpost towards regenerative cultures, where we value the Earth, and particularly the land/bioregion we inhabit, as our community. A future where the prefix ‘eco’ is no longer needed because all humans inhabit ecocentric and socially just cultures.

Find more

In celebrating global ecopoetries, Ecopoetikon aims to offer equal voice and representation to established ecopoets from around the world. Based in the Creative Arts at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK, Ecopoetikon is a developing research project that showcases a diverse international network of ecopoets through an online mapping project. You can find poems from a growing network of ecopoets around the world, including those mentioned in Helen’s post: Caleb Parkin’s Almanac of Lunar Songs; Rina Garcia Chua’s 113 Submerged Reefs; Tjawangwa Dema’s Commons; Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Time (translated by Eleanor Goodman); Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.

Cheltenham Poetry Festival, launched in 2011, offers an annual 10-day programme of live literature events. The online ecopoetry event with Ecopoetikon is on June 3^rd2024.

Helen Moore

A pioneering British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, translator and academic based in Bristol.

Modernism in the Anthropocene

Researcher Peter Adkins explores how radical early 20th-century literary shifts reimagined the human within broader planetary processes, a ‘Modernist Anthropocene’ expanding understandings of our geological agency long before global environmental predicaments became the widespread crises of our times.

2,000 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

1922 is often considered a golden year when it comes to literature. James Joyce published his epic modernist novel Ulysses, a work that was almost immediately banned in Britain and America on account of its transgressive content. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land arrived as a fiery example of how verse might respond to the upheavals of post-World War One life. And Virginia Woolf’s experimental narrative of a young man who doesn’t return from the front, Jacob’s Room, established her as one of the foremost novelists of her generation.

Literature was reinventing itself, pushing at the boundaries of what could and couldn’t be said. Along with similar revolutions in the visual arts, music, and architecture, rapid transformations were sweeping cultural forms, breaking down the old ways of experiencing the world and offering new ways of conceptualising lived experience.

Less well-known is the degree to which 1922 was something of a threshold year in attempts to conceptualise what we now refer to as the Anthropocene. The Cambridge geographer, R. L. Sherlock published a book entitled Man as a Geological Agent, in which he argued that we have to think of the human species as both a biological and geological actor — predating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential argument about the human as a geological agent in the Anthropocene by almost 90 years. And perhaps even more remarkably, the Russian geologist Aleksey Pavlov actually used the word ‘Anthropocene’ in a 1922 paper, arriving at it as a term that might recognise the longstanding influence of human activity on the planet.

Human in the nonhuman world

When I began the research on what would become my book, The Modernist Anthropocene, I wanted to know if there were any links between these two spheres of activity: one revising how we understand literature and the other revising how we understand planetary life.

Certainly, it was the case that modernist writers were interested in how humans interact with and imagine the nonhuman world. In one of the moments of Jacob’s Room that moved me when I first read it during my PhD, Jacob Flanders is described as overcome with the urge to press himself against the ground and “feel the earth spin; to have–positively–a rush of friendship for stones and grasses”. Woolf’s writing is so often attuned to geology and ecology. The middle portion of her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), entitled ‘Time Passes’, is largely devoid of human characters and instead imagines the decay of a house on the Isle of Skye, left abandoned during World War One and slowly succumbing to the sea air. It is a vision of life after humans, of the world we might leave behind us. While in Orlando (1928), whose narrative covers over four hundred years, Woolf charts the vicissitudes of the English climate seeming, at moments, to appear to intuit the concept of anthropogenic climate change (possibly, as I discovered during my research, influenced by her reading of the early climatologist John Tyndall).

Modernist Anthropocene: Showing the cover for the first edition of Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' (1927) featuring a jacket design by Vanessa Bell — Cover for first edition of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) featuring a jacket design by Vanessa Bell

This cosmological orientation towards the earth and the air is shared by Joyce, albeit in starkly different ways. Leopold Bloom, one of the principal characters in Joyce’s Ulysses, frequently turns in his thoughts towards nonhuman life, from other animals to celestial bodies. Towards the end of Ulysses, the reader finds Bloom reflecting on the puniness of the human when placed within a planetary frame that runs from macroscopic to micro. In a tour de force sentence, Joyce presents Bloom meditating on:

the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

For Bloom, whose interest in science provides a worldview in which the human is itself a constellation of otherworldly processes, there is a clear continuity between the geological and the biological. As we find throughout Joyce’s writing, the human is divisible into flows and processes that firmly situates it within broader planetary processes. The human is, in an important sense, resolutely inhuman.

Modernist Anthropocene: Showing the first edition of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (1922), banned in Britain and USA. — First edition of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1922), banned in Britain and the USA.

Tipping points in the Modernist Anthropocene

As I wrote The Modernist Anthropocene, I discovered that there were clear points of confluence between the modernist writers shaking up the literary world and those in the sciences, both in terms of direct points of connection and indirect areas of resonance and overlap. The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, provided one such connection. Eliot had attended Bergson’s lectures while in Paris and his writing on evolution both inspired Joyce (who owned a copy of Creative Evolution while writing Ulysses) and Vladimir Vernadsky, whose work Geochemistry helped pave the way for the field of climatology. Indeed, Joyce and Vernadsky lived in Paris at the same time in the 1920s. Although I am yet to find any evidence of their having met, I like to think that they might have drank at the same cafés or attended the same operas, unaware that they were in the company of a fellow intellectual revolutionary.

Another question which presented itself as I wrote my book was: why then? Why was it during the 1910s, 20s and 30s that these developments took place in literature and science?

Part of the reason was that they were looking to dislodge ideas from the previous century that now appeared lacking in certain respects. In literature, modernist writers were looking to challenge (although not necessarily wholesale reject) Victorian literary conventions. For novelists, this meant utilising narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and interior monologue to break with what they saw as the artificiality of the realist novel and get closer to the subjective experience of life itself. A similar rationale could be found among figures such as Bergson and Vernadsky, who saw nineteenth-century ideas in evolutionary biology and physics as being too mechanistic, unable to account for what Bergson famously termed ‘élan vital’ – the vital spark which powers life onward.

Yet this was only half the story, as I discovered. The early twentieth century was also a period of environmental tipping points and thresholds. The period saw the development and use of liquid fuels, the nascence of motor and air travel, the invention of human-made nitrate fertiliser, as well as continued rapid growth in industrialism, urbanisation, fossil fuel extraction, and intensive agriculture, all of which were responding to, and fuelled by, ever-expanding population levels.

And although the figures I look at in my book cannot be said to be ‘environmental writers’ in the sense of writing with the explicit aim of ecological consciousness-raising, they were nonetheless alert to the poisoning of the world around them. In Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, we find repeated descriptions of Dublin’s polluted status. In one particularly memorable description, the River Poddle is described as a “tongue of liquid sewage” emptying out into the Liffey. Later in the book we discover that Bloom knows a family who, reliant on collecting mussels for food, have been poisoned by the sewage. In his attention to the unequally distributed consequences of pollution, Joyce might be seen as intuiting the notion of slow violence, or the way in which many of the effects of the Anthropocene materialise not through cataclysmic instances but gradual processes that unfold so slowly as to become near invisible to all those but most directly impacted.

Showing a postcard image of the River Liffey, Dublin, in 1900. The Liffey, and the tributaries that fed into it, were heavily polluted by the end of the nineteenth century. — Postcard image of the River Liffey, Dublin, in 1900. The Liffey, and the tributaries that fed into it, were heavily polluted by the end of the nineteenth century.

The concept of the ‘Modernist Anthropocene’ emerged as a synthesis of these observations and insights. The term, as I use it, denotes both a historical period, in which significant environmental change and scientific developments occurred that profoundly altered our relationship to the planet, and an identifiable set of aesthetic responses to that historical moment, represented in the works of innovative writers who were highly aware of the way in which humans were influencing nonhuman processes.

The finished book explores this idea by looking in detail at three modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Vita Sackville-West and others also make appearances at various points. As I write, I’ve just finished a follow-up book, an edited collection entitled Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene. Woolf, for me, might be the modernist writer who was most sensitive to developments in the physical world and the edited collection, which brings together essays from ten leading scholars, explores various facets of her writing as they relate to the Anthropocene. My own contribution to the volume is a chapter on Woolf, petroleum and colonial extractivism and reflects what, I hope, will be the subject of my next book: modernism, energy transition and oil.

Literary works are, as critics are increasingly recognising, uniquely poised to open up new ways of thinking about emergent planetary conditions. As Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor frame it in the introduction to their edited collection, Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), literature might be approached as offering a kind of stratigraphic record, providing us with snapshots of specific points in planetary history and thereby helping us understand how we have historically imagined the world. Yet this stratigraphic approach also insists that texts are not just historical artefacts but lively and vibrant materials which can enter into dialogue with the present and help us make sense of ongoing crises and challenges.
Reading and writing are, as the modernists showed us, activities that can help us see the world afresh and foster new ways of understanding what it means to live on a damaged planet.

Showing 'The Modernist Anthropocene' by Peter Adkins

Peter Adkins

A researcher and writer exploring how literature helps us imagine, understand and rethink environmental history, planetary change, resource use, and relationships between humans and other animals.

The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes by Peter Adkins (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) is published in a paperback edition and is also available for free as an open access e-book.

Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, due for publication in June 2024.

Peter mentions how the writings of key modernist authors such as Joyce prefigure or intuit ideas that have become established in 21st-century accounts of the Anthropocene. Among these are the works of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and literary scholar Rob Nixon.

In 2009, Dipesh Chakrabarty published The Climate of History: Four Theses (Critical Inquiry, Volume 35, Number 2) in which he suggested that: anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history; the idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/globalisation; the geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans; and the cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding.

In 2013, Rob Nixon published Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press), discussing how the violence wrought by climate change, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly: a “slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.”