exploring cultural responses to environmental change
Mark Goldthorpe
I set up and curate ClimateCultures as an online space for creative conversations between artists, researchers and curators.
I am a freelance researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues. Since completing an MA Climate Change at Exeter University in 2011, my focus is on exploring, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses to environmental and climate change. I’ve managed a range of projects and events, working with Architects Declare, the National Trust, universities, climate change partnerships, the charity TippingPoint, and other freelance creatives.
With TippingPoint, I organised their final four creative summits for artists and researchers and helped to devise commissions for new creative work such as the Weatherfronts anthology of fiction, non-fiction and poetry on climate change. With Architects Declare, I work with their steering group to engage and support a growing network of UK architectural practices with their 12-point declaration of our planetary Climate Change Biodiversity Emergency.
Before going freelance, I worked on various environmental and climate change topics with Southampton Environment Centre, Climate South East, Exeter University and the UK Climate Impacts Programme.
Some of my recent projects include creating and now editing the website for the Finding Blake project – ‘reimagining William Blake for the 21st century’ – and the website of a community arts project in Cambridgeshire, the Waterlight Project.
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Change, Mike Hulme's book exploring how the idea of climate change is shaped and used in different ways and how its meanings help us navigate climate change as predicament rather than problem. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe shares participants’ reflections from a workshop exploring the word ‘Transitions’ - the final Environmental Keywords discussion from the University of Bristol - and the sense that we need better words to capture our imaginations. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ encounters and experiences at a workshop exploring the word ‘Resilience’, the second in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants' insights from a workshop exploring the word ‘Justice’. This was the first in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Gifts of Gravity and Light, an anthology of diverse writings on our seasons, and explores how, as we disrupt the living world, our relationship with it shifts, and with it ideas of 'nature'. Read More
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. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Dara McAnulty's Diary of Young Naturalist -- a remarkable testament to love for the natural world and a key to finding a greater sense of living in and caring for our shared home. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews The Wood in Winter, an illustrated essay by John Lewis-Stempel, and finds an elegant exploration of life -- wild nature and human -- in the harshest season, and an Anthropocene question: who owns Read More
In this piece -- commissioned by artists Hayley Harrison and Pamela Schilderman for their exhibition, Fool's Gold -- editor Mark Goldthorpe explores notions of value and care through our experience of objects as works of nature, culture and transformation. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk field kit's latest addition -- an attractive and engaging set of cards that explores our planet's 4.6 billion year timeline and offers us thoughtful paths into the living present. Read More
Mark Goldthorpe reviews Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore: a contemplation of transience, connection and the possibilities of resilience, demonstrating the power of story to highlight opportunities to attend and adapt to a changing world. Read More
For Gifts of Sound & Vision, Mark Goldthorpe chooses Earthrise -- a film about a moment a half-century ago that transformed our vision of the world and what might be possible in this short historic episode, modern human civilisation. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. This book's objects offer a mirror test for our 'Age of Human' -- and conceptual links to A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe launches a series exploring film and audio that open a space to reflect on change -- choosing pieces on how human and non-human animals live, and how processes of time and tide shape our coasts. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Energetic: Exploring the past, present and future of energy, a book that weaves together different strands from the Stories of Change project, excursions into what energy means and work by the project's artists. 2,010 Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Jim Crace's imaginative 1988 novel, The Gift of Stones. Set on the cusp of change at the end of the Stone Age, a book could hardly be more relevant to the emerging Anthropocene. 2,270 Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe explores the call for a creative symposium on 'how to love the postcarbon world', our new biosphere. Can art, creativity, imagination actually help us to break free of our seemingly unbreakable pattern of thought? Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Wide Sargasso Sea, the classic novel by Jean Rhys: her prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and a story of blurred, alienation, displacement, colonialism and the 'othering' of difference in race and gender. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Annie Dillard's 1974 wonder-filled book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A classic, it nonetheless resists easy classification and explores, in equal measure, horror and beauty in nature: fixing both with Dillard's hallmark unblinking stare. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets a new challenge: create small expressions of the more-than-human in the form of a signal for humanity. His inaugural signal appears as an alien encyclopedia entry cast adrift, backwards in time and space... Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Geoffrey Household's outstanding 1939 thriller, Rogue Male: a brilliant piece of landscape writing and a novel of slowly revealed relationships, between individual and society; human and more-than-human; surface and subterranean; cunning and culture. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Peter Shaffer's 1973 play, Equus, which explores incomprehensible violence against animals as an indictment of society's dulling of the feeling of true passion, our relationship with the natural world a distortion of nature. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe returns to Anticipatory history, looking at four entries in that book and at other illustrations of how language reveals and shapes the way we understand and respond to erosion and other examples of change. Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Anticipatory history, a book that explores the possibilities for 'looking back' at histories of environmental change in places to help us 'look forward' to what futures might be in store, and we might shape. Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe explores an online ecolinguistics course, delving into how we structure and receive discourses -- texts, dialogues, advertising, news reports, stories -- in ways that shape our attitudes and beliefs on environmental, social and economic issues. Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews the Deep Time Walk app, taking its blend of geology and biology on a walk into local woods, guided by its Fool and Scientist, to explore 4.6 billion years of Earth's history towards Now. Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Climate Symphony Lab. This lively and loud gathering of scientists, musicians, journalists, sound artists and social scientists was both fun and thought-provoking, and provided an overwhelm of data as raw material for creative thinking. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews William Golding's The Inheritors, an essential reimagining of a key transition for humanity, our place as inheritors of a world that lives around and inside us, and of separation of culture from nature. Read More
Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Into the Wind, a film excursion following naturalist, radio producer and writer Tim Dee as he walks off into the edgelands of East Anglia's Wash, in search of a pure unmediated, uninterrupted, thousand-mile wind. Read More
Mark Goldthorpe reviews John Gardner's Grendel, a novel that reimagines the monster of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and speaks to us about 'Othering' the natural world, and how our excluded monsters insist on coming back in. Read More
