exploring cultural responses to environmental change
Susan Holliday
I am a psychotherapist committed to the rewilding of human nature and a poet in the broadest sense of the word. I was born in the high Altiplano of the Bolivian Andes, spent my childhood in rural Wiltshire and have ancestral roots in Cumbria and the north of England.
My book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart – How to See through your Sorrow was published in 2021. Weaving storytelling from my therapy practice with creative insight from artists, poets and musicians, the book is a personal testament to the power of creative conversation to unearth the deep nature of the human heart.
In my writing and in my therapy practice I am interested in exploring the equivalence and correlation between the despoiling of our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit. In both cases we are stripping away the potential for resonant encounter through language that labels objectifies and quantifies experience, rather than trusting in a poetic vision that is intimate and embodied. The language of psychopathology, rooted as it is in 19th-century notions of nature as a ‘heart of darkness’, has become instrumental in alienating human experience from its native roots. Increasingly blind to nature within, we are losing faith in the existence of a source of emotional nourishment, connection and intelligence in our depths. We plunder the natural world around us to fill the bottomless pit within. Our myopia is costing us the earth.
In confronting the grief, shame and anger as culpable humans in this Anthropocene age, I believe it is of paramount importance that we hold faith in our deep indigenous nature, in the common ground we share with the earth. We can be better than this. The time has come for us to explore the intimate ecology of the human heart with the same degree of wonder and imagination that we bring to our encounters with the natural world.
I look forward to creative conversations and collaborations which explore ways in which we can re-root human experience in the deep poetry of a shared nature.
Artist Michael Gresalfi shares an artwork that uses repurposed materials dating from before our mass communications 'information age' to witness the extensive decline of bird species and populations in his local area and the loss of natural spectacle.
Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world.
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.
Entrepreneurial thinker, practical activist and artist Nicky Saunter shares the Hope Tales project she's working on to find creative ways to make sustainable futures and talk about the role of hope, imagination and story in facing climate change.
Writer Rod Raglin discusses his novel The Triumvirate and how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future.
Ecopoet Helen Moore reviews Her Whereabouts, a new collection from fellow poet Joanna Guthrie, whose accumulated acts of noticing and subtle inferences weave her mother's debilitating strokes with ecological loss in the climate crisis into a poetic memoir.
Writer and online community newspaper publisher, Rod Raglin shares the story of a local Vancouver, Canada, park pond reduced to a seasonal wetland -- and a neigbourhood's dispute with administrators on how to respond amid severe climate change.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces a second collection of objects from his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ students, and how our Museum of the Anthropocene's 'centrifugal' stories resist casting all of humanity together as progenitors of our new planetary age.
Writer Hassaun Jones-Bey introduces a human Anthropocene as corollary for our planet's new geological era. The commodification of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the US shows human nature resisting the same commodification that's visited upon non-human nature.
Artist Kim V. Goldsmith shares her work with Regional Futures in NSW, Australia, exploring people's feelings for rural territories. We need to listen better to each other, ourselves, and more-than-human worlds for more collaborative approaches to the future.
In their third collaborative post reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach, Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter explore the provocations this book offers for ecoart practices and discourse -- complementing their earlier discussions on the book's activities and case studies.
Sapphic and neuroqueer artist Indigo Sapphire Moon shares her experience of nature as a source of creative whispers, which blossom into ideas like her new poetry collection, and a space for us to exist outside our human story.
Actor, director and cultural entrepreneur, Giovanni Enrico Morassutti shared case studies of creatives in residence, of climate theatre and community engagement with an international conference, exploring strategies for encouraging cross-disciplinary projects to address the biodiversity and climate crisis.
In the second of three collaborative posts reviewing Ecoart in Action, artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach, Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter find plenty to discuss in a sample of the book's rich collection of international ecoart case studies, complementing its earlier activities.
Farmer and author Paul Feather seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis, and names that can reflect its super wicked nature, in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.
Artists Claire Atherton, Beckie Leach, Genevieve Rudd and Nicky Saunter have joined up to review Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities. This first of three collaborative posts samples the guide's ecoart activities.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces work with students using object-based learning to explore the material and intellectual challenges of thinking about human-environment relationships in our new planetary era -- and launches a new ClimateCultures feature: Museum of the Anthropocene.
Composer Stanley Grill shares his Music for the Earth project and how his feelings about climate change have a way of turning into music evoking connections with the natural world and our obligation to be caretakers, not destroyers.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Change, Mike Hulme's book exploring how the idea of climate change is shaped and used in different ways and how its meanings help us navigate climate change as predicament rather than problem.
Legal researcher Niels Hoek explores the phenomenon of Shifting Baseline Syndrome in our experience of the ever-changing natural world, exemplifying a generational amnesia that conservation lawyers, environmentalists and creative practitioners can help combat as we navigate the Anthropocene.
Writer Philip Webb Gregg embraces our Environmental Keywords theme on Transitions with an urgent call to abandon our language of endings for one of beginnings, where we embrace the deepest change: a radical transition to more honest stories.
Researcher Chris Fremantle reviews The Raven's Nest. This ecological memoir by Sarah Thomas addresses love and loss and coming to belong in the Westfjords peninsular of Iceland, evoking human and more-than-human relationships to draw out stories of interdependence.
Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan reviews a pair of books - non-fiction, fiction - that embrace the unknown, helping us navigate our collective uncertainty and explore what it means to be human in a time of Anthropocene unravelling.
Writer and curator Mary Woodbury shares eight novels about water where fact and fiction mingle, tied by imagination, to reveal important truths about our shifting relationships with this vital and lively agent in an era of climate crisis.
Independent artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces a special new essay for our Longer section, reflecting on his practice of open deep mapping as an inclusive, creative approach to working with and in place, and moving beyond 'Business-as-Usual'.
Queer creative, writer, artist, poet, witch and activist Indigo Moon shares 'Only Star' and other poems from a collection she created for her recent MA Environmental Humanities, showcasing the natural world and its changes over a human lifespan.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe shares participants’ reflections from a workshop exploring the word ‘Transitions’ - the final Environmental Keywords discussion from the University of Bristol - and the sense that we need better words to capture our imaginations.
Writer Mick Haining returns with tales from the Solarpunk storytelling showcase that was launched by XR Wordsmiths with the aim of imagining futures we want and need to create, and which has given both writers and readers hope.
Artists Andrew Howe and Kim V Goldsmith share the story of their collaborative Mosses and Marshes project, which investigates connections between fragile wetlands and their communities in England and Australia, seeking new interpretations, multiple perspectives and less-heard voices.
Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on ‘Resilience’, psychotherapist Susan Holliday uses a story from her book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart to seek a more resilient nature, finding signs that collective stresses need not overwhelm us.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ encounters and experiences at a workshop exploring the word ‘Resilience’, the second in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.
Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on 'Justice', writer Brit Griffin shares reflections on permeability -- in the natural membranes of the living world, in our binary concepts and in our imaginations -- as reaching towards the more-than-human.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants' insights from a workshop exploring the word ‘Justice’. This was the first in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.
Climate change communicator Julia Marques helped amplify COP26 reporting from the Blue Zone in Glasgow. Here she looks at the artworks she encountered at the COP and the value of creative activity alongside the activism and negotiations. 2,570
Composer Lola Perrin and curator Rob La Frenais invited three artists and organisers to talk about their creative work for COP26 and their feelings about the global conference's failure to match the warm rhetoric of its first day.
Artist Ivilina Kouneva draws on her seaside walks and art-making, on tales of indigenous story sharing and experiences of others' creativity to make imaginative links between our heritage as storytelling animals and remaking connections between past and future.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Gifts of Gravity and Light, an anthology of diverse writings on our seasons, and explores how, as we disrupt the living world, our relationship with it shifts, and with it ideas of 'nature'.
Experimental artist Veronica Worrall offers a story of shared hope in students' reactions to her photographic series 'Unseen', and how young people's actions and art in the USA, China and around the world provide examples ahead of COP26.
Artist James Aldridge shares insights from Iain Biggs' book Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place and resonances with his own projects exploring the value of outsiders' viewpoints and voices not often heard in discussions on the Earth Crisis.
In our first accompaniment to Longer, a new ClimateCultures in-depth feature, arts researcher Jemma Jacobs introduces her recent study of the Flint Water Crisis and environmental racism as seen through one photographer's work to make visible hidden perspectives.
Artist Yky shares ideas and artworks he presented to an international conference addressing scientific, social, and governance issues around 'managed retreat' -- and how artists need to engage with pedagogy to contextualize and reimagine responses to climate change.
Writer Mick Haining discusses the role of stories in helping to bring about change to mobilise, not paralyse, the XR Wordsmiths group that he's part of, and their call out for new Solarpunk stories that give us hope.
Ecopoet Helen Moore shares the inspiration and creative process behind her wild writing and the embodied awareness and resilience it nurtures in a world that's become unconscious of humanity's interdependence with all beings through the web of life.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on a follow-up conversation between interviewer Julia Marques, performer Daniel Bye, creative producer Tessa Gordziejko, artist Jennifer Leach and geographer Matt Law on experiences of darkness, attitudes to uncertainty and opportunities for creativity.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Dara McAnulty's Diary of Young Naturalist -- a remarkable testament to love for the natural world and a key to finding a greater sense of living in and caring for our shared home.
Writer and artistbook maker Sarah Hymas reflects on an on- and offline cross-genre shared space she has created to support creative writing, and why this imaginarium is as much for her as for the other writers who join.
Artist Hanien Conradie shares the impulse and process behind a Covid19-lockdown collaboration that brings together image and text; and how, in a period of human silence, her muse and the natural world seemed to work in similar ways.
Interdisciplinary artist Andrew Howe shares three objects that chart material flows in time. Slipware pottery, an acorn and a bitumen spill offer fragmentary stories entwined with present experience and imaginings of past and future in the same moment.
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs discusses Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, his new co-authored book about the possibilities of creative work, ensemble practices and disciplinary agnosticism in seeking alternative and inclusive ways of belonging to this world.
Environmental researcher Matt Law reviews an online performance about climate conversations: an interactive journey inviting us to consider how different connections and storytelling could have led to a different world today, and help save the world for tomorrow.
Multidisciplinary artist Anthony Bennett shares the inspiration behind sculptures on the crucial role of the usually disregarded fungus in returning life to soils following mass extinction events -- and what this offers us in imagining possible human extinction.
Climate change dramatist and activist Julia Marques introduces a series of lively and engaging conversations she has recorded with fellow members. Artists and researchers explore their experiences with wide-ranging topics which inform the creative work that ClimateCultures celebrates.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews The Wood in Winter, an illustrated essay by John Lewis-Stempel, and finds an elegant exploration of life -- wild nature and human -- in the harshest season, and an Anthropocene question: who owns
Curator and writer Rob La Frenais interviews scientist and fellow ClimateCultures member Bill McGuire about Skyseed. McGuire's novel explores geoengineering -- the ‘fix’ proposed by some as global heating's global solution. What on Earth could possibly go wrong?...
Video artist Mirjamsvideos shares reflective artworks which subtly demonstrate our relationship with the world, using ugliness in trash and beauty in small things to overcome our lack of insight into systems we've made toxic to ourselves and others.
Photographer Veronica Worrall explores how art can offer an important emotional response to global pandemic and climate crises, sharing her 'lockdown' project to generate images where photography partners with natural processes to produce a visual essay of optimism.
Anthropologist Lisa J. Lucero shares a talk she recorded specially for ClimateCultures, drawing on her extensive archaeological research into how ancient Maya culture adapted to environmental change, and whose non-anthropocentric cosmology can help us rethink our own worldview.
Artist and writer Selva Ozelli marks Clean Air Day with a roundup of international art shows she has curated and participated in during this year of pandemic, spurred on by urgent connections between our environmental and health crises.
Writer Julian Bishop, living on the very edge of the metropolis, found a fascination with local verges during Covid-19 lockdown -- and their previously unregarded nature took up residency in his imagination, leading him to a poetic challenge.
Artist and writer Dave Hubble reflects on his creativity under lockdown: how novel conditions and wanting to avoid coronavirus-saturated art sparked new work, drawing out potential beauty in the materiality of pollution and prompting the question, what next?
Artist James Aldridge explores experiences of being 'other' as an ability to see beyond the boundaries of binary distinctions: offering us signs of a more inclusive queer nature, from a place that until now has been the edge.
Artist Jo Dacombe shares an exercise she developed for students to respond creatively to the sensory nature of woods, and which she's adapted for online engagement with nature during Covid19 lockdown as part of her Imagining Woodlands project.
Writer Philip Webb Gregg shares a new poem exploring rewilding as a sideways step into a stranger world, resisting simplifications of 'progress' and the gains and losses of our current model, even as we seek to change it.
Theatre-maker and arts academic Adam Ledger shares the thinking behind Gulp!, The Bone Ensemble's project on global water issues, and the challenges of creating an engaging and participatory family drama on environmental issues, inequalities and opportunities during Covid-19. 1,800
Artist Margin Zheng felt moved to perform Lola Perrin's work, Significantus, as part of their climate activism, and adapted the piano suite to new conditions when Covid-19 prevented public events, producing a unique online concert: Crisis, Care, Creation.
Writer Philip Webb Gregg explores being human in the Anthropocene, using three objects that offer to carry, fuel or guide our search for experience and meaning, but whose less subtle qualities have great power to lead us astray.
Writer Indigo Moon shares a short story exploring one person's sense of purpose. Evoking ideas of conversation with the universe to illuminate times of zoonotic pandemic and climate crisis, Indigo reflects on the presence of signals from within.
Writer Kelvin Smith's three objects -- electric lighting, symbolically living money, once-and-future reefs -- question what is fundamental to human presence on Earth, what's been taken from the land and what new creations might arise in future seas.
Four writers of fiction and nonfiction (all members of Bristol Climate Writers and ClimateCultures) share the 'Desert Island Books' they discussed at a recent library event on climate change: Nick Hunt, Caroline New, Peter Reason, and Deborah Tomkins.
In this piece -- commissioned by artists Hayley Harrison and Pamela Schilderman for their exhibition, Fool's Gold -- editor Mark Goldthorpe explores notions of value and care through our experience of objects as works of nature, culture and transformation.
Citizen artist Yky offers three objects that explore Anthropocene themes of our relationship with time and the world and the responsibility that we hold in our own hands, using a common photographic presentation to help make these visible.
Poet Clare Crossman was inspired to respond to a public call for Letters to the Earth and her poem is included in the publication -- a book which offers "a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature."
Independent curator and writer Rob La Frenais interviews fellow ClimateCultures member and ClimateKeys founder Lola Perrin about her ground-breaking global initiative to 'help groups of people tell the truth to each other' about the ecological and climate emergency.
Citizen Artist Yky explores urban resilience and the importance of building joint commitments by experts and artists to improve our understanding of this concept in 'citizen science' and other approaches to empower citizens in planning for the future.
Artist Jo Dacombe explores the othering of woodlands through maps and language as bordering us off from the natural world -- a dichotomy enabled by the Enlightenment ideas in 18th-century Europe -- and looks to ways to reconnect.
Writer Nick Hunt travelled to Scotland's Cairngorms in search of a once permanent presence that's becoming another marker of a new transience: enduring snows that serve as scraps of deep of time, now endangered on our warming island. 710
Writer and historian Sarah Dry shares some of her thinking and the process for her new book, Waters of the World, a history of climate science through the individuals who unravelled the mysteries of seas, glaciers, and atmosphere.
Artist Hanien Conradie discusses a collaborative film of her ritual encounter with Devon's River Dart and her work with places where nothing seemingly remains of their ancient knowledge. Work that seeks more reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
Artist Linda Gordon was invited to lead a land art workshop using natural materials at Extinction Rebellion's Rising Tide Festival in North Devon. She describes an experience of co-operation and natural harmony: "In other words, a sane community."
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs shares thoughts on the place of artists, and of creative ensemble practices, in a culture of possessive individualism that must urgently address its chronic failure of imagination in the face of eco-social crisis.
Artist Scarlet Hall reflects on defensiveness as an embodied response to being implicated in patterns of oppression. Using movement improvisation to decentre habitual narratives and open space to attend to relationships, Scarlet is seeking ecological perspectives on defensiveness.
Climate change dramatist Julia Marques looks to her recent experience directing a play about environmental crisis to ask how community and other positive features of amateur dramatics groups might offer us routes into addressing the climate emergency itself.
Artist and writer Jennifer Leach recalls the journey from a sharing of darkness at a climate conference for artists and scientists, and the year-long festival she created in its honour, to her new book, Dancing in the Dark.
Artist Rebecca Chesney describes her explorations creating With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea for exhibition in Newlyn this year -- taking inspiration from the town's tidal observatory and its unique role in revealing the UK's rising sea levels.
Writer Philip Webb Gregg went looking for ways to let nature get to him, and found them on a bushcraft and survival course, with Extinction Rebellion on the streets of London, and in his garden in the city.
Writer and artist Jennifer Leach shared some of her stories at Reading's Earth Living Festival. Here, she discusses these questioning tales for a world's ending -- and the relaunch of her Outrider Anthems enterprise as a sanctuary of
Writer and photographer Mike Hembury spent a week on an Inner Hebridean sailing trip as part of Sail Britain's multidisciplinary Coastline Project. He recalls this small group's ecological encounters and shares poems and photographs they inspired in him.
Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker uses an innovative take on the camera obscura to uncover visible and invisible networks and complex histories embedded in a Scottish peninsula whose water-and-landscape is home to nuclear arsenals, peace activists and pilgrims' spiritual traditions.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk field kit's latest addition -- an attractive and engaging set of cards that explores our planet's 4.6 billion year timeline and offers us thoughtful paths into the living present.
Environmental artist Laura Donkers follows her initial post on eco-social art engagement with her experience as Visiting Doctoral Researcher, moving to Aotearoa New Zealand from July to November 2018 to expand her research by exploring Kaupapa Māori approaches.
Mark Goldthorpe reviews Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore: a contemplation of transience, connection and the possibilities of resilience, demonstrating the power of story to highlight opportunities to attend and adapt to a changing world.
Writer Mary Woodbury finds deep resonance in the music of Rising Appalachia, who draw on the rural landscapes of her family, and whose musical fusion offers ideas of resilience and community in the face of change and loss.
Artist Jo Dacombe explores sense of place, layers of history and the power of objects. Jo describes her work with museums and researchers on visual art inspired by relationships between bones and landscapes, now and into the future.
Environmental artist Laura Donkers works with the embodied knowledge of communities, through a form of eco-social art engagement, to help develop climate literacy. Laura describes her approach and experience with local communities in Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.
Artistic director and performer Paul Michael Henry, who has devised successive UNFIX festivals, discusses his motivation and ambitions for these international gatherings and explorations, ahead of UNFIX 2019 next month. UNFIX: a command form, a verb, an activity.
Poet Nancy Campbell reviews Nick Drake's new collection, Out of Range: poems celebrating proximity and distance (spatial, temporal, emotional) to remark on the state we’re in, taking us on a journey through known worlds into unknown ones. 1,950
For Gifts of Sound & Vision, Mark Goldthorpe chooses Earthrise -- a film about a moment a half-century ago that transformed our vision of the world and what might be possible in this short historic episode, modern human civilisation.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. This book's objects offer a mirror test for our 'Age of Human' -- and conceptual links to A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.
Writer and photographer Mike Hembury read Deborah Tomkins’ post on how grief and hope feature in the work of fellow 'climate writers', and shares a poem in response to his own research into these experiences under climate change.
Poet Nick Drake offers poems of three dark objects that illuminate our world-shifting ways: an emblem of inefficiency, a single-use convenience that will outlast us, and a nightmare taking shape beneath our feet, our streets, our notice, until...
Writer Sally Moss reviews Nancy Campbell's The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate. Rich in detail (microscope and dictionary, as much as library) its landscapes, eras, expeditions, personalities and planetary prognoses pile up like brash ice.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe launches a series exploring film and audio that open a space to reflect on change -- choosing pieces on how human and non-human animals live, and how processes of time and tide shape our coasts.
Writer Deborah Tomkins chairs Bristol Climate Writers, who meet to critique their poetry, science or nature writing, short stories or novels. She shares their discussion on 'climate grief' and how psychological responses to climate change influence their writing.
Royal Court Executive Producer Lucy Davies -- a participant in Creative Climate Leadership training in 2017 -- explores Artists' Climate Lab, a special week of creative activities she and others devised for artists working in London's leading theatres.
Writer Brit Griffin lives in Cobalt, Canada -- a town that was born during the 1903 mineral rush. She shares a powerful account of signals to be detected in Cobalt's burning forests and the cry of a fox.
Poet Clare Crossman follows the first six of her illustrated poems on nature and climate change with the second of two selections from In the Blackthorn Time and other poems, her collaboration with artist Victor Ibanez, including Naturalist.
Poet Clare Crossman created a sequence of illustrated poems on nature and climate change for an appearance at Pivotal Festival in 2016. Here, she offers a short introduction and the first half dozen, including In the Blackthorn Time.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Energetic: Exploring the past, present and future of energy, a book that weaves together different strands from the Stories of Change project, excursions into what energy means and work by the project's artists. 2,010
Writer and artist Salli Hipkiss shares an extract from her novel's manuscript -- a glimpse into the heart of the story and its forest, and further into the development of character, meaning and writing for the 'We Generation'.
Photographer Robynne Limoges shares a series of evocative abstract images that reflect her feelings on the critical issues of increasing water scarcity and expanding desert -- imagining 'the last bowl of water I will have at my disposal'.
Writer and editor Sally Moss works with nonviolence education organisation Commonweal, and she suggested an interview for their blog. Sally's questions were a great opportunity to touch on some of the deep connections between climate change and violence.
Researcher and writer Wallace Heim recently completed 'the sea cannot be depleted', her online project exploring the military exploitation of the Solway Firth. Wallace shares her reflections on the inspiration behind this powerful project and her creative process.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Jim Crace's imaginative 1988 novel, The Gift of Stones. Set on the cusp of change at the end of the Stone Age, a book could hardly be more relevant to the emerging Anthropocene. 2,270
Poet and artist Salli Hipkiss, in the first of two posts, reflects on how she came to understand the urgent challenges of climate change, and decided to write The Riddle of the Trees, a novel supporting positive change.
Author Mary Woodbury, who outlined some of the common ground that helps 'define' eco-fiction in Part 1, looks at how this super-genre has grown and diversified in recent years. Her story returns to a family trip to Ireland.
Author Mary Woodbury opens a two-part series on the development of eco-fiction: a form with many roots, which is "not so much a genre as a way to intersect natural landscape, environmental issues, and wilderness into other genres."
Artist Julien Masson describes a residency in the New Forest, an environment that juxtaposes natural and human worlds, and his choice of a physical paint medium to represent the digital realm that often distances us from the natural.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores the call for a creative symposium on 'how to love the postcarbon world', our new biosphere. Can art, creativity, imagination actually help us to break free of our seemingly unbreakable pattern of thought?
Artist Ottavia Virzi describes a recent intervention by Art Rise Up, the creative collective bringing art and activism together for environmental protection, in support of the campaign to halt opencast coal mining, using art to engage cultural meaning.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Wide Sargasso Sea, the classic novel by Jean Rhys: her prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and a story of blurred, alienation, displacement, colonialism and the 'othering' of difference in race and gender.
Visual artist Mary Eighteen updates us on work that imagines a world where the ocean is on the trajectory to extinction. Here, Mary focuses on concepts of 'framing' as a means to provide the visual encounter with abjection. 1,290
Anthropologist Lisa Lucero researches the emergence and demise of political power, ritual and water management among the Classic Maya. Her most recent project explores collapsed groundwater sinkholes for evidence of ancient Maya offerings and climate and landscape histories. 1,210
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Annie Dillard's 1974 wonder-filled book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A classic, it nonetheless resists easy classification and explores, in equal measure, horror and beauty in nature: fixing both with Dillard's hallmark unblinking stare.
Photographer Robynne Limoges shares evocative images inspired by the haiku form, in her pursuit of the 'philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.'
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets a new challenge: create small expressions of the more-than-human in the form of a signal for humanity. His inaugural signal appears as an alien encyclopedia entry cast adrift, backwards in time and space...
Artist Jennifer Leach shares another story she performed as part of Festival of the Dark's micro-festival Dazzle. It's a tale of transformation: stretching imagination, shifting vision as key to waking us up. What if the world were other?
Artist Jennifer Leach shares a story about bees, honey, hexagons and robotics. What the Bee Sees is the first of two stories Jennifer performed at the Festival of the Dark's micro-festival Dazzle. What if the world were other?
Visual artist Rebecca Chesney, whose location-specific work is informed by her research and conversations with scientists, describes her experiences of drought and tree death in California while on a residency and shares some of the images she produced.
Science historian and writer Sarah Dry offers objects past, present and future that help us investigate clouds and the gap between seeing and feeling. 'What is not revealed often plays more powerfully in the imagination than what is.'
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Geoffrey Household's outstanding 1939 thriller, Rogue Male: a brilliant piece of landscape writing and a novel of slowly revealed relationships, between individual and society; human and more-than-human; surface and subterranean; cunning and culture.
Poet Nancy Campbell chooses a child's bone kayak, a wooden paddle, innovative metal islands: three objects that demonstrate how the past and present elide as our environment changes and how, whatever choices lie ahead, travel is always forward.
Curator Veronica Sekules shares three Anthropocene objects that mark the movement from a visionary symbol of eternity, to the hubris of a transitory age and on to a time which will be witnessed by what endures after us.
Composer and pianist Lola Perrin offers this roundup of her own and many others' experiences of ClimateKeys -- the major, global initiative she set up to bring together musicians, experts and audiences to engage in climate change conversations.
Paul Allen, Project Director of the Centre for Alternative Technology's Zero Carbon Britain programme, shares his reflections after taking part in the COP23 climate talks in Bonn, and looks ahead to the cultural challenges for COP24 next year.
Writer Nick Hunt traces the years through present, future and past on a path that will not stay forever on any one course; and returns us to a longer view, honouring the power and beauty of natural forms.
Writer Justina Hart concludes her account of writing Doggerland Rising, researching the prehistory of the mesolithic peoples of these lowland plains before sea level rise created the North Sea, and reveals what she has learned from the process.
Environmental artist Linda Gordon responds to Anticipatory history with reflections on personal memories, intimations of change -- 'places and objects within them become part of our personal inner world' -- and a recent example of her ephemeral art.
Author David Thorpe considers approaches that engage readers with human stories within the climate change one, and writers' responsibilities in climate fiction, given that "stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom as well as entertain themselves."
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Peter Shaffer's 1973 play, Equus, which explores incomprehensible violence against animals as an indictment of society's dulling of the feeling of true passion, our relationship with the natural world a distortion of nature.
Dramatist Julia Marques previews ClimateKeys, a visionary global initiative from fellow ClimateCultures Member Lola Perrin. Julia considers the space it offers for more relaxed, but still urgent, sharing of thought and dialogue on the predicament of our times.
Artistic Director Adam Ledger discusses the process of devising The Bone Ensemble's Where's My Igloo Gone? and the challenges of making participatory theatre about home and community that presents climate change as something that we can collectively address.
Writer David Thorpe overviews the development of fictional works addressing climate change, and how the term 'Cli-fi' (which he discovered when he published his novel, Stormteller) reveals the tension between our twin fascinations with utopian and dystopian visions.
Curator Ruth Garde selects three Anthropocene objects: artworks that evoke a past, present and future, highlighting how Deep Time and 'human time' are implicated in each other, and the imbalances in our relationship with the rest of nature.
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. His final extract tracks France’s Mistral ('masterly', from the Latin magistralis), the ‘idiot wind’ that inspired and tormented Vincent Van Gogh.
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. Here he pursues Switzerland's ‘snow-eating’ Foehn, which brings clear skies and wildfires -- as well as insomnia, nosebleeds, anxiety and depression.
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. In his third extract, Nick follows the freezing Bora –named for Boreas, the ice-bearded Greek god of the north wind. 510
Dramatist Julia Marques reflects on her research for an MA in Climate Change: Culture, History, Society, and the role that theatre can play in opening up space for us to take in what climate change means for us.
Writer Nick Hunt walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds for Where the Wild Winds Are. Here, he's on the trail of the Helm, which blows from desolate Cross Fell to wreak havoc in the Eden Valley.
Writer Nick Hunt has walked the invisible pathways of Europe’s named winds, to discover how they affect landscapes, people and cultures through which they blow. Five extracts from Where the Wild Winds Are begin with the book's introduction.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe returns to Anticipatory history, looking at four entries in that book and at other illustrations of how language reveals and shapes the way we understand and respond to erosion and other examples of change.
Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker shares a talk he gave at art.earth's In Other Tongues, encountering on a climb in a Welsh slate quarry a world beyond our normal modes of communication and a route away from modern separatist language.
Writer Justina Hart introduces her poem (commissioned following a Weatherfronts climate change conference) about prehistoric events that drowned Doggerland and made Britain an island, and how her research with the help of palaeo-scientists fed into the creative process.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Anticipatory history, a book that explores the possibilities for 'looking back' at histories of environmental change in places to help us 'look forward' to what futures might be in store, and we might shape.
Artist Mary Eighteen discusses powerful associations of hope she sees between the 20th-century art of Barnet Newman and a 21st-century technology that will protect Venice and its Renaissance heritage from some of the impacts of manmade climate change.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe explores an online ecolinguistics course, delving into how we structure and receive discourses -- texts, dialogues, advertising, news reports, stories -- in ways that shape our attitudes and beliefs on environmental, social and economic issues.
Illustrator and writer Mat Osmond explores shifting personifications of ‘animal mysteries’ in artist Meinrad Craighead's powerful paintings to look for an understanding of how we might approach art practice and our apprehension of landscape in terms of prayer.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk app, taking its blend of geology and biology on a walk into local woods, guided by its Fool and Scientist, to explore 4.6 billion years of Earth's history towards Now.
Environmental artist Linda Gordon reflects on a recent exhibition she contributed work to, where artists responded to the documentary 'A Plastic Ocean', and the issues of plastics pollution of the oceans that produced such a diversity of art.
Dramatist Julia Marques introduces her research on the increasing interest in climate change within new drama, using visual discourse analysis to chart how the topics are addressed explicitly or form a backdrop to the world of the performance.
Artist Jennifer Leach selects three objects that evoke a past, present and future Anthropocene, and highlights care and nurture as constants across humanity's ages and communities. Her words move from prose to poetry, suggesting a timeline of hope.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Symphony Lab. This lively and loud gathering of scientists, musicians, journalists, sound artists and social scientists was both fun and thought-provoking, and provided an overwhelm of data as raw material for creative thinking.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews William Golding's The Inheritors, an essential reimagining of a key transition for humanity, our place as inheritors of a world that lives around and inside us, and of separation of culture from nature.
Artist and game designer Ken Eklund shows how working with stories offers popular and accessible routes into the past and present of our life with energy, and imagining possible futures as part of the Stories of Change project.
Filmmakers Sarah Thomas and Jon Randall share a conversation about the ideas, stories and creative processes behind their film exploring Óshlið, an abandoned road in Iceland -- accompanied by a slideshow of their images from this changing place.
Artist Julien Masson explores memory, material transience and meaning in his an intriguing response to our ClimateCultures challenge to share three objects with personal significance and illustrate the past, present and future of the emerging ‘Age of Human’.
David Thorpe -- one of the short story writers, poets and non-fiction writers commissioned from two Weatherfronts climate change conferences -- explores the thinking that went into his story, included in the free anthology of the winning pieces.
Multi-disciplinary artist Deborah Mason outlines her collaboration with researchers, engaging people in counter-factual imagination. What if one historic event had been otherwise, giving us an alternative present to ours? What would be the possibilities in our altered 'Now'?
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Into the Wind, a film excursion following naturalist, radio producer and writer Tim Dee as he walks off into the edgelands of East Anglia's Wash, in search of a pure unmediated, uninterrupted, thousand-mile wind.
Poet Nancy Campbell, whose experience in the Arctic was enriched by learning Kalaallisut, reports on the UK tour of The Polar Tombola, which aims to encourage awareness of endangered Arctic languages and the environment recorded in their vocabularies.
Artist Scarlet Hall debuts her poem You, familiar -- narrated over photos of clay sculptures used in a Coal Action Network action outside a government department in London, and accompanied by text from fellow CAN activist Isobel Tarr.
Collage, sculpture and video artist Julien Masson collaborates with researchers in a dynamic dialogue between digital technology, science and arts to explore coccolithophores: tiny, photosynthetic marine lifeforms with an important role in our planet's oxygen and carbon cycles. 800
Fine artist Mary Eighteen and multimedia artist Julien Masson collaborate in painting and video, to explore the space between seduction and defilement in a world where meaning has broken down in relation to ecological protection of our oceans.
Mark Goldthorpe reviews John Gardner's Grendel, a novel that reimagines the monster of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and speaks to us about 'Othering' the natural world, and how our excluded monsters insist on coming back in.
Composer and pianist Lola Perrin discusses isolation: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process. And yet, we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe joined the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Reading's year-long Festival of the Dark, and found three simple, unexpected ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – came inside the tent.
Fine artist Mary Eighteen introduces her ongoing collection of works on a theme of the Sullied Atlantic and ocean acidification, exploring her deep concern for how humanity is destroying the future of our oceans and, in turn, ourselves.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe set Members a challenge: share your choice of three objects with personal significance for you and that say something of the past, present and future of the emerging Anthropocene. Here is his personal contribution.
Artist Jennifer Leach introduces Reading's year-long Festival of the Dark, whose purpose is to gently lead people into the darkness -- a place of stillness, mystery and contemplation, and a locus of the unknowing and the unknown. 790
Mark Goldthorpe explores interstices -- a "space that intervenes between things, especially between closely spaced things; a gap or break in something generally continuous" -- and associations with birds that play off his fascination with two mythical ravens.
Writer Laura Coleman explores the urgent need for spaces where we can engage the emotions of environmental change -- to hold onto our spaces, and create new ones -- and shares two spaces with deep meaning for her.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores climate change through the lens of 'Wicked Problems' and what 'culture' -- a web of identities and practices that rub up against each other -- means for how we might think about it.
