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The Steep Climes Quartet: My Take on Climate Fiction

Writer David Guenette shares creative insights into his Steep Climes Quartet, a longitudinal study into climate futures unfolding across an American county. This post accompanies David’s essay for our Longer feature, where he asks “What is Climate Fiction?”

2,620 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

I’ve been at work on the Steep Climes Quartet, a literary climate fiction series. The series is a sort of longitudinal study over time across the consistent location of Berkshire County, in Massachusetts. The first book, Kill Well, takes place in 2026. The second book, Dear Josephine, takes place in 2029. The third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, occurs in 2035. The first three books are published. The final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047, and I’m aiming for a Spring 2027 publishing date.

As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for over two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis in climate fiction is realism. No apocalypse, no fantasy, no deus ex machina. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify climate change challenges and that climate fiction can offer alternative perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and approaches for dealing with climate change. I believe that climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar circumstances and provides a recognizable world will better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face and the solutions before us.

Of course, the novels better be enjoyable reading.

The changing world — a near-future climate timeline

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. Over the course of writing the series — I started in 2015 — other themes evolve and the series includes some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. But don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish — ongoing and important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil. I’m also not pollyannish about the rate of progress and take into consideration that political bodies and society at large typically move at snail’s pace. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowed progress on carbon emission reductions.

Showing the cover of 'Kill Well' - book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023) by David Guenette — ‘Kill Well’ – book one of The Steep Climes Quartet (2023)

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires — a pleasant bucolic place, by the way — don’t have a lot of direct experience with the terrible consequences of climate change and, like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but Davin, the Berkshire-based main character, is an economically pressed recent divorcee and mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and the income he’s struggling for. The worst thing that happens to him in the first book, climate-wise, is that a heavy rain damages his vegetable garden and a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, but who is now heading home to escape the heat and the slowing economy. The two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too, but the prevailing theme in Kill Well is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy progress.

Sholwing the cover of 'Dear Josephine', book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025) by David Guenette — ‘Dear Josephine’, book two of The Steep Climes Quartet (2025)

In Dear Josephine, set in 2029, the nation is post-Trump and politics is working better, but there remains evil intent of those who run fossil fuel empires. There’s Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, but the residents of the Berkshires are unaffected directly, mostly. And then there’s a guy running around the country trying to kill billionaires and there’s a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for assassinations in service to fossil fuel think tanks to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the playing board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities by a regular series character, Jeannie Louise Smith, who’s a climate tech and policy wonk living on Cottage Street, but I did follow a beta reader’s advice to cut a lot of character talk about externalities. This book also marks the appearance of a climate action terrorist group.

Showing the cover of 'Over Brooklyn Hills', book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026) by David Guenette — ‘Over Brooklyn Hills’, book three of The Steep Climes Quartet (2026)

Over Brooklyn Hills is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress, mainly by pushing the clean energy transition. There’s also a look at the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group introduced in Dear Josephine now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels who are battling the U.S.’s militarization of the southern border as climate drought blankets large parts of Mexico, Central America, and South America, driving illegal migration. Climate migration is writ small, too, as seen in a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area and the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer.

Showing the mockup cover to 'Farm to Me’, which will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. The cover may be different by publication, in Spring 2027. — ‘Farm to Me’ will be the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet. This cover is a simple mockup and may be different by publication, in Spring 2027.

Farm to Me, which is in draft and with a mess of notes, sees 2047 with reducing yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. due to chronic drought and aquifer collapse. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that would be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are all the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. Farm to Me sees human nature remaining a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company. There is the issue of aging in the time of climate change and the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on and tipping points are just the latest dread, and Davin’s granddaughter, not yet 18 years old, is of interest to a federal investigation into a climate activist group she’s part of.

One goal of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with solid scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels derive from the creative act of controlled illusion.

Creative challenges for The Steep Climes Quartet

I’d be happy enough to relax my long-running autodidact efforts on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. For instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see a rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have had to best guess about the global annual average temperature rise in 2047. Yet more speculative are the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because political and societal developments march on up and down and sideways.

CO2 emissions, global temperature rises and climate impact risks for SSP-based scenarios over the present century (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) “Climate Change 2023” Synthesis report (adopted longer report: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2023/03/Doc5_Adopted_AR6_SYR_Longer_Report.pdf)

Of course, presenting the changing world across the series can’t be simply info-dumped, but rather seen, experienced, and understood (or not) through the characters’ own perceptions. The series uses a third person-semi-omniscient point of view, with characters alternating among chapters and some know more, some far less. Like the rest of us, the most stunning stories of climate consequences are more often heard of, not experienced directly, although over the course of the series, more and more direct experience of climate change comes to all.

There are other challenges in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads. Human economies and technologies roll out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope and not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gibson!). By Over Brooklyn Hills and 2035, AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up. An AI bubble in 2030 causes a significant recession, especially in the U.S., but that industry evolves. By the last book, in 2047, AI has settled into a controlled progression, and in Farm to Me, I’m exploring the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, to explore what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, too.

This challenge of moderating readers’ expectations with tech grows harder the further one goes into the future, but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, no doubt to be aided by AI-based computations.

Still no flying cars.

The makings and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein, set up in Over Brooklyn Hills, are a well-established market by 2047. The failure of property insurance and the climate threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to finish the damn manuscript first.

The foundation of climate fiction

Projecting out two-dozen-plus years, prognostication becomes more fluid, but keeping up with the best climate science remains an important requirement in writing this series. No magic solutions need apply, but rather only informed extrapolation. For example, it may be that regenerative agriculture is among the best of carbon sequestration strategies, but carbon capture remains an unlikely silver bullet. There’s also opportunity to explore the issue of real costs, where externalities (there I go!) of all sorts of things, from hamburgers to fast fashion, will get a nod, because sustainability will only grow as an issue in the years ahead. The world won’t be ending in 2047, but the higher and persistent loading of greenhouse gases take their toll, with some tipping points threatening. But the main story — the foundation of climate fiction — remains the progress our society makes based on our understanding of climate change and the economic, political, and moral choices we face.

Will our society make sufficient progress?

Talk about a cliffhanger!

Find more

You can read David’s new essay for our Longer feature, Telling Stories about Climate Change.

David explores these ideas, and examples of climate fiction, at The Steep Clime on Substack. And you can find more of his writing — including the first three novels in the Steep Climes Quartet and other books — at his website, davidguenette.com.

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher, was published in 1973 and is available from Vintage (Penguin Books).

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, in Great Barrington, MA, USA, was founded in 1980 to envision the elements of a just and regenerative global economy, “undertakes to apply these elements in its home region of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts; and then develops the educational programs to share the results more broadly, thus encouraging replication.” They produced a new study guide to Small is Beautiful to mark its 50th anniversary in 2023.

In the UK, the work and example of E. F. Schumaker’s work inspired the creation of the Schumacher Society, the Schumacher Institute, and Schumacher College.

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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say something 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.

David – “AI and writing: a tool, not a partner:

“Serving as a research agent, AI can be an excellent tool for writers who need facts and figures and overviews on a topic. This applies to non-fiction, such as the climate change articles I write, but also as convenient quick research or confirmation (or pointer to errors) for fiction writing. This is how I’ll use AI. I don’t typically worry about hallucinations because I know the knowledge domain well enough to spot AI’s missteps or the results of a poorly put query.

“AI can be helpful, too, as a high-level copy-editor and proofreader, mainly to bring in fresh eyes to discover obvious issues that the writer—having written the work—often has trouble spotting. Having a good human copy-editor remains, in my opinion, an essential element of book production. The way I’ll use AI for copy-editing and proofreading makes for less drudgery and lets the real copy-editor and the proofreader better concentrate on improving the manuscript.

“I suppose AI can be helpful with emails and letters—the sort of business correspondence best delivered as clearly and briefly as possible—although I often don’t bother because emails and letters default to a common tone and style, which isn’t anything a writer should want. I often find that AI—I typically use Gemini—offers “improvements” that are lowest denominator style choices and I often enough conclude with a “Yeah, I don’t think so” response when checking out what AI thinks an email or letter should be. Although, apparently, AI likes em dashes nearly as much as I do.

“AI in the actual work of creative writing seems to me an uninteresting cheat aimed at writing as “content” for easy, quick, and undemanding consumption and thus misses the fun part of the whole process of creating a poem, short story, or novel. My conclusion about AI as a co-author (or, I suppose, even principal author): Why bother?

“Of course, I had to use AI to assess this short essay, didn’t I? It found one typo and offered a slight improvement in another sentence. It also suggested a stronger transition in the last paragraph to better distinguish creative writing from mere content.”

David Guenette

A writer and author of literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, who also writes about climate fiction and climate change science, technology and policies.

Between ‘The Valley’ and Dublin: ‘Narrative’ Deep Mappings?

Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.

1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.

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Where we live in the world
is never one place…

– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars

Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.

The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.

Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'Stammersong', a poem by Ursula le Guin from 'Always Coming Home' (1985); with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine. — ‘Stammersong’, a poem by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ (1985), with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine.

Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time

Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation, its final section.

Showing 'The Pale Ditch' a photograph by Eavan Boland © 2014. Printed alongside Boland's poem, 'The Mother Tongue' in 'A Poet's Dublin' — ‘The Pale Ditch’. Photograph: Eavan Boland © 2014. printed alongside Boland’s poem, ‘The Mother Tongue’ in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’.

Narrative deep mappings: Showing 'The Mother Tongue', a poem by Eavan Boland, in 'A Poet's Dublin' (2014). — ‘The Mother Tongue’, a poem by Eavan Boland, in ‘A Poet’s Dublin’ (2014).

Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:

Small things
Make the past.
Make the present seem out of place.

– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.

Alongside the need to

… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.

– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.

To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.

When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work — Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them have provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.

Why share this?

Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.

Find more

Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).

Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.

Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.

You can read Iain’s previous posts, Open Deep Mapping: Conversations-in-process, Places-in-time and Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place, and his essay Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction.

Artist James Aldridge reviewed Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book Iain co-authored with Mary Modeen, in Queer River and Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.

Iain Biggs

An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.

“Radical Noticing” – Adding to the Road Map

Poet and writer Joanna Guthrie introduces her essay for our Longer feature, on her experiences finding deeper connection with and through trees. Here, she reflects on writing and ‘radical noticing’, asking: how else to deal with the times?

870 words: estimated reading time = 3.5 minutes

Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.

***

Sitting and looking around and watching things get worse and waiting for them to get still worse, and wondering if we can smell burning: that, at best, is what life is like as we move through the extraordinary times of the Earth Crisis, and one of the ways I deal with it is to write.

My essay, We Run On – Connection, Grief, Trees, People, is taken from a collection of linked essays which share a theme: how else to deal with the times? What are some of the responses I’m finding interesting, useful or pattern-making? What are some of the conversations that are happening – on podcasts; among my friends who are working out their activism; around the table? The angle, broadly, is how the crisis — and thoughts of the crisis — can hit psychologically and what some of us might be trying to do about this; what some of the ways through might be.

So, the title of the collection is Trying Not to Lose It. The pieces are coming along in the form of lyric essays, exploded essays, poetic journalism, nature writing, diary pieces. All I know is, they’re not poems, which are my more usual medium.

“Radical noticing”

The process can feel much like Arthur C Clarke’s description of getting information from the internet: “like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.” The chatter about the crisis is everywhere, of course; omnipresent and with endless different angles. It’s almost ludicrously overwhelming. And the disciplines interweave. And a lot of the people conducting the chatter, and leading the ideas, are very stressed, understandably. And heartbroken. I keep blinkers on as I pick my way through, and trust my instinct regarding which strand to pick up — most strands lead somewhere interesting, and can form unlikely braids with other strands; this is writing, I suppose.

I just want my writing to be useful. And I believe in the act of paying witness to things. I think of Kathleen Jamie’s notion of how paying attention is potentially a political act in itself — radical noticing, as she calls it.

I also think of Mary Oliver’s famous lines in ‘The Summer’s Day’

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

What else should I be doing? Things being quite urgent, I don’t want to waste airspace or anyone’s time in reading. So there‘s a particular sense of responsibility: I’m doing this because I couldn’t care more about it, and wish to be an effective messenger. Or a sort of cartographer — to add to the road map we are constructing as we go on together, up the mountain, trying our hardest not to lose it.

I want to get the pieces I am writing out there in accessible ways so I can add to the map as quickly as possible. Thank you ClimateCultures for putting this one out there. I am looking for other places – and am open to ideas.

***

Joanna’s full essay, We Run On – Connection, Grief, Trees, People, is the fifth piece for our Longer feature, which provides space to explore in more depth creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis.

Find more

Joanna mentions poet Kathleen Jamie’s notion of ‘radical noticing’. You can find this in a 2021 interview with Jamie in The Guardian, Scotland’s new makar Kathleen Jamie: ‘Poetry is at the heart of our culture’: “We’re equipped with these senses that have come with us through millions of years of evolution, and to stop for a moment and use them to notice a blade of grass or a cobweb in the window, means we’re saying ‘Stop. Everybody shut up for a minute, including myself, stop telling me what to think, what to believe in.’ Maybe a radical noticing could be part of our solution. If you’re stopping to notice, you’re not actually trashing [the planet].”

You can find more of Joanna’s writing at her website, and work published by Dark Mountain, Trying Not to Lose It (2021) and The Guardian The Florida Keys are the canaries in the climate-change coalmine (2017).

In The Start of Something Going Wrong, fellow ClimateCultures member and ecopoet Helen Moore reviews Joanna’s 2023 collection, Her Whereabouts.

Joanna Guthrie

An ecopoet and a non-fiction writer who seeks deeper connections to nature and to bear witness to these Anthropocene times in a way that feels true.

Solarpunk Symphony: Where Are the Music Programmers Who Heed the Science?

Composer Lola Perrin introduces her special essay for our Longer feature on a recent Solarpunk Symphony residency in Norway, describing how her symphony responds to frustration with cultural venues’ lack of response to the climate risks we face.

2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes

Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog. Longer is for essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.

***

In my essay, Climate Music — From Hill to Hill, I describe my trip to Norway for a music-climate residency at Bergen’s Grieg Academy of Music to workshop and perform my new climate composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony, Music from the Erratocene for 4 pianos and citizen voices’. This was also an opportunity to debate publicly with artists and climate scientists.

11th January 2025, shows at the 130,000 square foot Pasadena Convention Center in LA should be opening. An exhibitor announces dates in March; “In light of the ongoing fires and the challenges many of us are facing, we’ve made the difficult decision to postpone the Pasadena Bead & Design Show.” A Washington Post video report¹ shows residents sheltering from the fires at the centre, whose website now has this; “We understand how deeply these events are affecting our community, and we are here for you. Your safety and well-being are our top priority, and we look forward to gathering again in March, when we can all come together, support one another, and celebrate the art and creativity that unites us.” In the video we see hundreds of America’s latest internal climate migrants streaming around, temporarily housed in the site’s 1,200 hotel rooms. I see the elegant lettering of the frontage, Exhibition Hall & Ballroom, and immediately grab a screenshot, thinking “it’s already happening”.

Showing: Screenshot from Washington Post video report Altadena evacuees lose family homes to Eaton Fire, 12/1/25 — Screenshot from Washington Post video report Altadena evacuees lose family homes to Eaton Fire, 12/1/25

I wrote about exactly this situation in the introduction to my 2024 climate composition, ‘Solarpunk Symphony’, describing how communities impacted during increasing climate events will seek shelter in our modern-day temples — those cultural institutions with their thousands of square feet of protection — transforming them into places of refuge.

“August 2024’s environmental news; within the next twenty-five years millions of Americans will be affected from sea level rise and coastal flooding. Many of the world’s leading classical concert venues are in regions threatened by sea level rise and flooding. To name a few; Boston Symphony Hall is in between the Charles River Basin and the coastline, both are around 3km away. Guangzhou Opera House is 3km from the Pearl River that flows into the South China Sea. Concert halls closer to the water’s edge include Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall roughly in between East River and Hudson River, both around 1.6km away. Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires is 1.5k from the coast. Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town is 1km from the coastline. Southbank Centre in London is 300m from the River Thames. Kanagawa Kenmin Hall in Yokohama and Harpa in Reykjavik are both on the coast with a 200m walk to the shoreline. Given what’s happening, venues on the waterfront may wish now to consider relocating. Venues three kilometres from the water’s edge could hypothetically be far enough away to avoid becoming flooded themselves this century, but, critically, being so close to flood zones, they’re in a good position to offer shelter and safety, just as some theatres in hurricane zones already do”.

– Introduction to the 2024 composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony’

Let’s start at the end

In the early twenty-tens I went to science-led events to learn more about climate change and where artists were encouraged to make creative responses. In one such response I decided to compose a climate work for two pianos but then became increasingly blocked with no ideas at all, except wanting to work from imagined visions of a flooded London, and these images by Phil Maxwell.

Showing: Banglacam. Photomontage by Phil Maxwell 2010 — Banglacam. Photomontage: Phil Maxwell © 2010 philmaxwell.org

Showing: Anti-Nazi Demo. Photo by Phil Maxwell, early 1990s — Anti-Nazi Demo. Photo: Phil Maxwell © early 1990s philmaxwell.org

I remember sitting for days on end trying to get some kind of musical idea, eventually shouting in frustration “if I can’t find the beginning let’s start at the end”, and there it was, the entire piece hit me in an instant.

“I flew over the piano and began playing an enormous climax as if a very long and dramatic piece was trying to end; it was loud, full of chords and kept trying to slow down,” Lola said. “This was my beginning, Let’s Start At The End would commence with a sense that something huge was ending.” The piece consists of six movements in which we travel backwards from the edge of destruction to an innocence“ full of promise”.

– Extract, interview with Abdul Hamid (2014)

The year before, Manhattan had flooded in Hurricane Sandy’s deadly demonstration of how the defences of a metropolis can be overcome by extreme weather. Up to forty-two people drowned, thousands of homes were destroyed, power was shut down. Climate events like hurricanes might have been getting stronger and more impactful, but talk of ‘global warming’ was still a taboo, conversations were hard to find and harder to have. My programme notes spelled out the work’s train of thought, aiming to increase audience engagement with the crisis. The world premiere was performed by Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble at Women of the World Festival 2013 at London’s Southbank Centre.²

Solarpunk Symphony: showing: Southbank Centre, London. Photo: Lola Perrin © 2024 — Southbank Centre, London. Photo: Lola Perrin © 2024

Planning for climate futures

That iconic cultural complex was established in 1951, ironically — for me — coinciding with the beginning of The Anthropocene. Its three concert halls, art gallery, ballroom, archive studio and library are situated on the banks of the River Thames, and are not far from the Thames Barrier, a feat of engineering to keep the waters from flooding London’s streets, one that is overwhelming when you see it close up.

Solarpunk Symphony: Showing theThames Barrier, London. Photo by Andy Roberts — Thames Barrier, London. Photo: Andy Roberts https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thames_Barrier_03.jpg#file

Planning for the Barrier began decades before its 1981 opening, “after 1953, when England experienced its worst flood of the twentieth century during a storm surge in the North Sea causing the collapse of a 300ft sea wall, over 300 deaths on land and two hundred people lost their homes in Canning Town.³

The Barrier was designed to be closed only around twice a year, mainly for maintenance checks. However, instead of the anticipated eighty-four or so closures, it’s already been closed a slightly embarrassing 221 times in 42 years, mainly to alleviate increased flooding from more intense rainfall.⁴

Is the Barrier designed to adapt to the changes we’re seeing as we proceed through this century’s forthcoming impacts, or might Southbank Centre one day be a bit like today’s Pasadena Convention Center, but with thousands of displaced Londoners whose homes have been inundated, seeking water-free safety in its compound? I reach out to members of Extinction Rebellion Scientists for answers. An engineer sees my message and creates a new WhatsApp group, ’Thames Barrier’, adding a handful of experts who have since been generously helping me with information.

For example, geologist Andrew Zolnai, from a blog he wrote; “A group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations. I made maps & handouts here 5 yrs. ago among a DIY series here to encourage citizen science: these help address Climate Change in a proactive way using freely available UK gov data on almost-free software”.⁵

Thames tidal defences are reviewed every ten years, and to avoid being worn out before its end-of-century lifespan the Environment Agency (EA) plans to stop using it to manage rainfall flooding by 2035, by installing ‘alternative flood management’.⁶ This seems of quite critical importance when you think of all the drainage systems in properties constructed before increased rainfall from global warming was factored in. Another message comes in; “in the case of the Southbank Centre, the drainage was probably installed when it was built in 1951, so would not be sized to cope with increases in rainfall due to climate change”.

The EA surface water flood map indicates that the Centre is generally at low to medium risk of flooding. Not much in life is ever certain, and that includes flood defences protecting London. According to the EA these defences “can fail or water could spill over the top if it is deep enough”. Not too comforting! You can find the flood risk of every postcode in the UK online.⁷ Back in 2013 civil engineer Dr Richard Bloore, part of the project management team completing the Barrier, said that a second barrier would be needed because of the effects of global warming. The Southbank Centre is in Flood Zone 3, meaning high risk from river and sea flooding. The risk does not take account of the protection offered by the Thames river defences — so, it probably won’t flood as long as the barrier doesn’t fail!

How does sea-level rise affect the Thames Barrier? The EA has said that environmental changes are unpredictable and the current infrastructure “may not be enough to hold back the flood”.⁸ The defences need reinforcing.

Showing: London River Thames Inundation Risk, sea level rise model (colour halftone), Risk of Flooding from River & from Sea. Contains OS data Crown Copyright and data from Environment Agency under Open Government Licence — London River Thames Inundation Risk, sea level rise model (colour halftone), Risk of Flooding from River & from Sea Populated Places @azolnai & blog.zolnai.ca Contains data from OS Zoomstack, Contains OS data ©️ Crown Copyright and database right 2025 Contains data from Environment Agency under Open Government Licence. For more information please visit blog.zolnai.ca/2025/02/london-thames-barrier-update.html

Unless the Barrier fails, Southbank Centre and its neighbourhood may well be spared from flooding in the next few decades. It’s a different story down the river in East London. In commemorations marking the 40th anniversary of the Thames Barrier, experts at The Institution of Civil Engineers discussed how the lower-lying riverside regions in East London from Poplar to Romford are at risk of flooding by 2050. Do the people living in places like Hackney Marshes know about this? I think there’s a case for an internationally recognised concert hall concerning itself with the fate of thousands of people vulnerable to flooding down the river. Something akin to this is already starting. Culture Declares Emergency’s brilliant work provoked Southbank Centre into declaring a Climate and Ecological Emergency in 2024. Resolutions include “the provision of space twice a year, free-of-charge, to artists, activists and community organisations”.

The disconnect between scientists working on climate risk and communities having little opportunity to organise around their research is disturbing. I can think of two American climate scientists who have been vocal in recent days about having left California because of increased fire risk. Citizens all over the world need clear information.

A chartered surveyor once told me he couldn’t believe how many homeowners knew next to nothing about the construction of their homes. We’re just not in the type of society where we connect with the most important things, are we?

In a fun-sounding biometric study concert goers were fitted with an “EEG wearable headband to measure brain-wave activity”. Results suggested “a sizeable increase in oxytocin, the hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain contributing to a number of warm-and-fuzzy human emotions.”⁹ Live music very helpfully causes an “overall positive shift in brain activity, including spikes in attention, engagement, and emotional intensity”.¹⁰ Another study looking at synchronised emotions found “live music creates a remarkable physiological bond among audience members”.¹¹

Come out, come out wherever you are!

Where are the music programmers who pull all of the above together? We’re in a (insert swearword) Emergency and it would be lovely if more venues would jump on board.

Sydney Opera House https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_Sydney_Opera_House_Concert_Hall_during_performance.jpg

Look at forthcoming concerts in say, Sydney, where five million people are vulnerable through sea level rise along the coast, flooding in river catchments, bushfires in forested areas and increased temperatures causing more heatwaves and urban heat islands.¹² Sydney’s Symphony Orchestra commence their 2025 season with “The eight horns opening Mahler’s Third Symphony set the tone for the monumental drama about to unfold … a riveting introduction to our 2025 Season”. Not to pick on this orchestra, (the Mahler is a miraculous work), but I can’t find a single concert in the season that builds community in audiences around our existential problem.

Imagine this beautiful concert hall, the orchestra on stage tuning up, the audience erupting as the conductor takes her place. But who is this at her side? She’s been joined by the director of programming who speaks about a new concert series to inform and plan resilience to Sydney’s anticipated 50cm of sea level rise and temperature increases of 1.8^oC by 2050 …

We might as well go a step further in this thought exercise. Someone somewhere has the bright idea that the great power of music to positively supercharge our emotions be put at the service of climate science internationally. Music to kickstart a new era of programming around the science is being sourced. In a flurry of activity (a WhatsApp group springs up, ‘Climate Music Programmers’?), a gentlewoman’s agreement has been made between programmers in venues across the world, Boston, Guangzhou, Manhattan, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, London, Yokohama, Reykjavik … to increase homegrown capacity around climate risks in their combined millions of square feet of audience space.

There could be a silver lining to this – excuse the pun because I’m talking about silver-haired concertgoers. As Dianna Skinner wrote in Violinist.com “There is an ever-growing concern as to how to get people, particularly younger people, into our concert halls and opera houses”.¹³ Not so long ago thousands of young people joined Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, because where else do they have but the street to express themselves? Catering for this climate generation, with their music and their musicians, would be a good step for them and also for the venues.

Long-term budgets in our institutions are obvious barriers to the imaginative thinking above. But is it too imaginative or can institutions shift to create the ‘war-like response’ that’s been called for by climate scientists for too long now? And what about the description ‘climate activist’? Shouldn’t we move away from the notion that doing something about the frightening future means you’re on the sidelines somehow, an ‘activist’? There are bound to be untold numbers of employees in the world’s cultural organisations who are also in the climate activist category.

Are You with Us in National Service? World War 1 poster public domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Are_You_with_Us_in_National_Service?_Art.IWMPST13964.jpg

Can a ‘war-like response’ to climate threats come into being in these cultural hubs, inspired by National Service in wartime? How about today’s workers having opportunities to volunteer in a ‘Climate International Service’ hosted by venues? Activists would come out of silos, repositioned within cultural centres joining up to make a tsunami of climate responses. Even more reason now with the growing suppression across today’s American society. The trustees of Washington’s Kennedy Centre have been dismissed by the American President for its progressive programming, apparently he is replacing the Chairman with none other than himself (and undoubtedly bringing in other climate deniers and rejectors of diversity, equity and inclusion).¹⁴ We should forcefully integrate climate science, mitigation and adaptation as part of our culture to increase the fight back — wherever we are in the world.

Heat deaths in Europe may triple by the end of the century, but do people in Europe know? This kind of information was talked about during audience conversation at the world premiere of Solarpunk Symphony in Bergen. As scores of musicians proved in their ClimateKeys concerts, my climate-engagement concert series, audiences welcome these formats. Venues just have to find more ways to let in projects like these.

Solarpunk Symphony: Showing ClimateKeys poster, 2017 — ClimateKeys poster, 2017

A buddy from Extinction Rebellion, playwright April de Angelis, told me about her forthcoming libretto for Jonathan Dove’s new community opera, ‘Uprising’.¹⁵ It’s the story of Greta Thunberg and the school strikers. This gives me goosebumps because Kristian Skår, one of the young pianists who performed Solarpunk Symphony in Bergen had been a school striker in Oslo. Something hopeful is happening; ‘Uprising’ is being snapped up and being programmed in more venues even before it’s had its world premiere at Glyndebourne. That’s a really positive indicator that should inspire my fantasy WhatsApp group of international climate music programmers to swing into action and get with the programme!¹⁶

***

Lola’s full essay, Climate Music — From Hill to Hill, is the fourth piece for our Longer feature, which provides space to explore in more depth creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis. Her residency at Grieg Academy was funded by Culture Moves Europe Mobility Fund.

Lisa’s references

Washington Post video report ‘Altadena evacuees lose family homes to Eaton Fire‘, 12/1/25
Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble
The Tide is High: the Thames Barrier Historic London Tours (9/2/22)
Thames Barrier Wikipedia
Andrew Zolnai blog, Thames barrier update (5/2/25)
What needs to be done across the estuary (outcomes): Thames Estuary 2100 (DEFRA, 2/5/24)
UK Long-term flood risk map, by postcode
Flood experts discuss the future of the Thames Barrier as water levels rise, Poplar London, 10/4/24
Biometric Study At St. Vincent Concert Shows Live Music Increases Emotional Brain Activity, Live For Live Music 25/6/18
Why Does Live Music Make Us Feel So Happy? Medium 25/8/23
Scientists observe a remarkable synchronization effect among classical music listeners, PsyPost 24/8/24
Climate change in Metropolitan Sydney, Adapt NSW
Classical Kids… Raising the Next Generation of Audience Members, Violinist.com 12/10/19
Trump says he is firing Kennedy Centre trustees and naming himself chairman, The National 8/2/25
Uprising! Director Sinéad O’Neill on Glyndebourne’s new community opera written by Jonathan Dove and April De Angelis, Planet Hugill 8/1/25
Severe Weather is Threatening the Future of Outdoor Concerts, Rolling Stone 12/8/24

Find more

You can read Lola’s artist statement for Solarpunk Symphony on her website. Her previous ClimateCultures posts include ClimateKeys — Moving Climate Conversations Centre Stage, where she describes her own and many others’ experiences of the major global ClimateKeys initiative she set up to bring together musicians, experts and audiences to engage in climate change conversations.

Lola Perrin

A composer and classically trained pianist focused on the disconnect between the climate emergency and programming in music venues and her ClimateKeys global no-fly concert series.

Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage

Curator and writer Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using GroundWork Gallery’s recent exhibition to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard, viewing our waste as art and heritage.

1,570 words: estimate reading time = 6 minutes

***

In my essay, The Art and Heritage of Waste, I hope to counter the prevailing culture of extractivism by looking at how mobilising the creativity of artists can help us to rehabilitate waste as a transformative resource.

From March to July 2023, GroundWork Gallery’s exhibition The Art of Waste] featured the work of eight artists, all of whom were in different ways [bringing creative responses to waste that point to solutions, albeit on a tiny scale.

GroundWork Gallery — which I opened in 2016 — is situated in King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, UK, on the confluence of the River Purfleet with the Great Ouse. It lives in a converted little 1930s warehouse, a building we saved from waste, as the planners and heritage officials at first wanted it demolished “for something more suitable”. The gallery is dedicated to the environment and to the role of art and artists in helping us to rethink aspects of it, and to understand and treat it better, vitally urgent now in our times of crisis. I believe art can carry a powerful message or ‘voice’ to a much wider world than the narrow confines of the conventional art world, if only its audiences respond actively to it and communicate its innovative messages to wider publics, other disciplines and contingent professions. That is how we begin to achieve change — through bursts of inspiration, sudden insights, and above all through widening influence.

Still from Henry/Bragg film, The Surrey Hills: a film about a landfill site incongruously situated in the Surrey Hills. © 2012

Environmentalists hate waste. This is the starting point for all the work I discuss in the essay, as artists hate waste too, and many of them are trying to find creative solutions to the way we think about it and literally view it. However, I’m proposing that we rethink the category of waste to include formally its relationship with art and with heritage, and think about the potential status of waste as both. The re-categorising and the status change involved will play a part in counteracting the extractivism which has contributed so significantly to the effects of climate change.

Artists working with waste for positive impact

Each of the artists in The Art of Waste used waste materials as creative resources, making use of surplus materials, implementing circular economies, being very economical in leaving nothing behind. As well as inventive practical strategies, the artists excelled in changing the status of waste, from that of detritus and ephemera, to be something precious and valued.

Jeremy Butler creates minutely detailed relief-assemblages which involve items that the artist has carefully crammed together to make complex formal architectures that hover somewhere between order and disorder.

Liz Elton makes large-scale draped fabric-like installations using compostable cornstarch, a material used in food waste recycling bags, which she colours with vegetable dyes made from her own kitchen waste, intercepted on its way to compost.

Caroline Hyde Brown makes work mainly in textile and paper, and is part of a bio-based collaborative group who are recreating textiles from Neolithic legumes, such as grass pea and more recently green manure crops such as Buckwheat and lentils.

Lizzie Kimbley works with woven textiles, natural dyes and basketry techniques, using principles of circular design to consider material sustainably in regard to its whole life cycle.

Kai Lossgott is a writer, filmmaker, visual and performance artist, and waste in his work has its own agency and is as much a metaphor as a physical phenomenon.

Eugene Macki is a sculptor whose work makes resourceful use of waste materials, often including food, and can be playful in making the most of the multiple meanings that result.

Jan Eric Visser creates sculptures from his inorganic household garbage, experimenting with new forms new materials, consistent with his own saying: ‘Form Follows Garbage’.

Rain Wu, whose conceptually driven work materialises in different forms and scales, works with waste and perishable materials to instigate discussions around our manifold relationships with nature.

The immediate impact of The Art of Waste was measurable to a degree from the visitor book comments. Responding to the exhibition, many visitors remarked that it was “inspiring, relevant and thought-provoking”. However, it was also “unsettling”, “bringing new perspectives on waste”. Some were moved to more action: “Interesting ideas, we need to reach out to everyone”, “WE NEED TO DO MORE”, “much needed”, “love being eco”, “we waste so much”, “educational and makes us aware of our industry and pollution”, “who knew waste could be so useful – makes you think”, “feels very dystopian”, “compulsory viewing for all politicians and their influencers”. One of the youngest visitors wrote: “Makes you think about waste. Awe inspiring”.

This positive impact was gratifying but just a beginning. It showed to an extent the desire of people to be receptive to new creative ideas and how these can stimulate our societal needs to change. However, beyond the specificity of the timescale and place of the exhibition, there needs to be a whole lot more thinking about how we can mobilise the creativity of artists and these kinds of responses to it. Where does it get us and where can it lead? What does that kind of power enable and what and whom can it both connect with and lead to?

Revaluing waste as heritage

As I explore in the essay, recent thought on waste has proposed various paradigm shifts that involve changes in consumer habits, moving away from a throw-away economy of short-term use and of things ‘becoming useless’, to one of waste as asset creation. Some argue that waste as an entity ought to be entirely avoidable, or even non-existent, providing that materials, foods and resources are used by people with greater economy and efficiency. Within the framework of Discard Studies, the entire concept of waste is open to interrogation from all points of view. In sympathy with that interrogative framework, I suggest that a paradigm shift in the way waste is categorised will help us all to prioritise what and how and why we save the stuff of the earth. Increasingly, students of waste, entrepreneurs repurposing it and artists creating with it are recognising that waste needs to be rehabilitated as a transformative resource, not stuck with the shifting values of random commerce or the vilification applied to detritus.

In setting the framework for further discussion, I hope my essay raises in outline some of the issues in the definition of heritage and of the potential for waste as heritage. It touches on some of the enormous complexities of the subject of waste, such as how and where is waste accumulated and what are the problems of distribution. I touch on the subject of who the various categories of ‘we’ are who are creating the problems. Then, taking a lead from a series of artists’ projects, I take a look at two specific contentious waste subjects in more detail: landfill sites and plastics, and how they might be faced afresh. The ways these subjects have been tackled by artists, writers and archaeologists hold the key to the category shifts we need, from dumps and surpluses to treasure, from waste and trash to art and heritage.

Waste Heritage: showing Jeremy Butler's Landskip 1 at GroundWork Gallery in 2023 — Jeremy Butler’s Landskip 1 at GroundWork Gallery © 2023

The innovative ways in which artists are using waste materials can lead the way to a shift in values, potentially turning what is currently a burden into a heritage asset. Categories of definition matter and both art and heritage are relevant. Waste’s role as heritage, specifically, needs to be brought into focus more, in order that we give greater value and the right kind of longevity to all the earth’s material and how we are using it. Shifting values affect attitudes. Applied at scale, that is one way the idea of waste as bulk mess and detritus can end. Instead, if surpluses, leftovers and spent materials are sorted not only by reuse potential, but as categories of art and heritage, this re-categorising can turn a negative into a positive asset and environmental benefits and economic consequences can follow.

Find out more

Veronica’s full essay, The Art and Heritage of Waste, is the third piece in our Longer feature, where members share original works, or ones that haven’t appeared online elsewhere, and which don’t fit easily into the regular ClimateCultures blog; Longer provides space to explore in more detail creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis.

GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, UK, is dedicated to art and environment. It shows the work of contemporary artists who care about how we see the world. Exhibitions and creative programmes explore how art can enable us to respond to the changing environment and imagine how we can shape its future. The Art of Waste ran from 18th March to 15th July 2023.

Veronica Sekules

An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.