ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene - Page 36 of 39 - exploring cultural responses to environmental change

A Personal History of the Anthropocene – Three Objects #2

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’.

670 words: estimated reading time 2.5 minutes

The challenge: the Anthropocene – the suggested Age of Human that our species has initiated – has a complex past, present and future, and there are many versions. What three objects evoke the unfolding of human-caused environmental and climate change for you? View other contributions at A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

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When worlds collide…

Clash of two worlds
Photograph: Julien Masson © 2017
http://www.jfmmasson.com

The first object I selected is an amalgam of objects that were given to me in the past. This 3D collage of disparate elements that I would compare to a melange of old memories that have merged into a sort of mnemonic chimera. The use of contrasting material such as mineral and the manmade industrial metal alludes to the clash of the natural world and the manmade activity.

A disposable present

Voltaic throwaway
Photograph: Julien Masson © 2017
http://www.jfmmasson.com

The ubiquitous battery has a limited life span and in many ways symbolises the transience of our contemporary lives… the battery is a container, a vessel to convey energy to devices. In this case, a camera. When its power is spent, it is rendered useless and is disposed of in landfills or recycled. Its shape is simple and functional and I often wonder at the technical codes on these objects. Their meaning is lost to me and they might as well be some long lost cabalistic language.

Offered up to the future

Votive artefact
Photograph: Julien Masson © 2017
http://www.jfmmasson.com

The third object represents our future. My selection suggests a dystopian vision of the future, where virtual experiences replace our spirituality. What will future generation of archaeologists think of such a device in centuries to come? Out of meaning and out of network, maybe it is some sort of votive artefact? An empty shell for the virtual ghost of our times…

Find out more

You can see a short animation Julien has made, Funland: An Anthropocene amusement park, and more of his artworks at macuse.com and jfmasson.com

Each post that appears in the sequence of A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects earns its author a copy of a book that had an impact on my thinking about our topics here – whether fiction, poetry or non-fiction – and which I’ve recently rediscovered in a charity shop. (Delivery in the UK only, sadly!) For his post, Julien receives a copy of William Golding’s classic novel, The Inheritors, “a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals and a frightening vision of the beginnings of a new age.”

Julien Masson

An artist whose works are all, in some way, related to technology and our relation with it and wishes to expand notions of what is art.

Your personal Anthropocene? Space for creative thinking...

"What three objects illustrate a personal timeline for the Anthropocene for you? See the original 'guidelines' at ClimateCultures' A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, and share your objects and associations in your own post." 

At its heart, the Anthropocene idea seems simple (if staggering): that as a species (but far from equally as generations, countries or communities) humankind has become such a profligate consumer, reprocessor and trasher of planetary resources that we've now left (and will continue to leave) our mark on the ecological, hydrological and geological systems that other species and generations will have to live within. In reality though, the Anthropocene is a complex and highly contested concept. ClimateCultures will explore some of the ideas, tensions and possibilities that it involves - including the ways the idea resonates with (and maybe troubles) us, personally.

Your objects could be anything, from the mundane to the mystical, 'manmade', 'natural', 'hybrid', physical or digital, real or imaginary. What matters are the emotional significance each object has for you - whether positive, negative or a troubling mix of colours along that spectrum - and the story it suggests or hints at, again for you. Whether your three 'past', 'present' and 'future' objects are identifiably connected in some way or float in apparent isolation from each other is another open question.

Utopia and Its Discontents

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.

1,300 words: estimated reading time 5 minutes

I have a story, ‘For The Greater Good’, in the new collection, Weatherfronts. Here is a tracing of my thought processes that led to me writing it.

Originating with Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, the eponymous word literally means “no-place”, or any non-existent society ‘described in considerable detail’… as in his book. But over time it has come to mean an ideal sort of society in which everyone has what they need and there is peace and justice for all. Perhaps everyone has their own idea of what utopia would be like.

The Island – illustration from Utopia, 1516
Artist: Thomas More © British Library Board http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/21cc/utopia/large1678.html

Its opposite is dystopia, a term coined 352 years later in 1868 by the philosopher J.S. Mill, who used it to denounce the then government’s Irish land policy. Dystopian fictions became popular in the 20th century. Dystopian movies now seem to dominate our screens, all graphically and dramatically prophesying a dire future.

I fear that there is a danger that by populating our imaginations with pictures of a future of suffering by the masses, environmental despoliation, endless conflict and/or the dominance of machines, as in films like Metropolis and Blade Runner and novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four then we could end up creating the very world that we fear. In other words that these prophecies become self-fulfilling.

By contrast, what are the features of utopia? Should we instead be picturing this?

Are we living in Utopia but don’t realise it?

I started thinking that for people living 500 years ago, the way we live now would actually seem like a utopia.

Just think:

All year round we are able to eat an incredible variety and plenitude of food from all over the world.
If we get ill we are taken care of by doctors and nurses for free, and there is always a hospital nearby.
People increasingly live past 100 years of age. If no one can look after them they are looked after by carers in special homes.
There are no poor houses or workhouses, instead if you cannot work you are given money to make sure you have somewhere to live and can buy food.
If you are mentally handicapped or ill, you’re not shut away in an awful madhouse, you are given medicines or therapies to make you feel better or manage your illness.
People with disabilities are cared for and their special qualities understood and valued.
Human rights are recognised and protected in law.
We live in warm homes and can travel incredibly cheaply anywhere in the world in a few hours.
We can talk to people anywhere, watch movies, take photographs and videos, listen to music and find out almost anything we like using cheap gadgets that fit in our pockets.

This would all be considered incredible, even 100 years ago. Miraculous even. But do we think we are living in Utopia? No! We are only too aware of what is wrong with our society: injustice, environmental destruction, war, pollution, climate change, inequality….

Of the above list of benefits, the increase in life expectancy, the widespread availability of more than enough food, improved health, and the increase in wealth can all be attributed to the industrial revolution and to the widespread availability of fossil fuels. The downsides of this are climate change and pollution.

These downsides are what at the time were the unforeseen consequences of what was considered hugely beneficial.

Then what is it?

So I began to imagine: what if we created a ‘utopia’ in the UK, based upon the ideals expressed in Zero Carbon Britain and One Planet Living? What would be the unforeseen consequences?

In other words, what if we had a society which could feed everybody with food grown within the country and all energy was renewably generated? It would seem ideal to us, but what might be downsides?

First, how would it work? ‘Ecological Footprinting’ is the science of measuring the environmental impact of a society against its share of the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’. The idea of an ecological footprint is that it is linked to laws of supply and demand. I will explore this in a later post. For now, though, on the supply side there is the availability of natural resources and the ability of the Earth to absorb the waste products and other environmental consequences from our activities. And on the demand side there is the level of population and its corresponding consumption level.

For the world to be sustainable the demand must not exceed the supply, or we are burning up the future to satisfy the present – as we are now. If the entire population of the planet lived the same lifestyle that we have adopted in the Global North, then together we would need the equivalent of at least three Earths’ worth of resources. Which we don’t have.

We are beginning to get used to the idea that sensors, meters and other monitoring equipment can measure in real time all kinds of things from energy use to traffic levels, productivity, resource use and so on. At the same time algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated in the way that they analyse the results of all this monitoring and make use of the data processed, incorporating them in feedback loops.

If we extrapolate this tendency into the future we can imagine that a society which attempts to sustainably manage itself will use algorithms and monitoring extensively to model future supply and demand, and make corrections automatically along the way so that they’ll continue to be matched.

Where is this leading?

That was the premise for my story, ‘For The Greater Good’ in Weatherfronts. It’s all very well being able to cater for an existing population with existing productivity levels. But what if the models forecast that a population increase and a simultaneous decrease in productivity would mean that the population would suffer?

Would we want to live in this kind of world? You’ll have to read the story to find out if my heroine does!

Weatherfronts cover design
Photograph & design: Sarah Thomas © 2017
https://journeysinbetween.wordpress.com

Find out more

You can read more about David’s fiction and non-fiction at his website and download a free ebook of the new anthology Weatherfronts from Cambria Books, featuring stories, poems and essays from twelve writers who won commissions from the two events that TippingPoint and partners held at the Free Word Centre in 2014 and 2016.

In May 2017, ClimateCultures editor, Mark Goldthorpe, will be chairing a panel discussion between David Thorpe and three of the other 2016 authors – Justina Hart, Darragh Martin and Sarah Thomas – at the Hay Festival.

You can read about Zero Carbon Britain and download their new report. This article from the One Planet Council describes the work of the Welsh Government’s commitment to ecological footprinting. And The One Planet Life provides further information and resources.

For an interesting discussion of the history of Utopia and Dystopia, see this set of articles from the British Library. And this article from Encyclopaedia Britannica describes ten literary dystopias (somehow managing to bypass Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four).

David Thorpe

A novelist, scriptwriter and writer of comics and graphic novels, as well as a non-fiction writer on carbon-free energy and sustainable development.

Questioning Utopia? Space for creative thinking...

"What do you think are the best ways of reaching people who don't normally think about climate change? Does Utopian thinking help or hinder? How about humour, or other ways of bypassing the usual cognitive filters to touch our emotions? Share your ideas in the Comments box below, or use the Contact Form."

Generating Counter-Factual Worlds

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’?

1,140 words: estimated reading time 5 minutes

When Ann Light, professor of design at the University of Sussex, asked me to make her a Counter-Factual World Generator – an analogue Counter-Factual World Generator – I was immediately enthused and excited. I’d been watching The Man in the High Castle on TV and was also aware of other fictional counter-factual works (such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon) and my head immediately started buzzing with ideas. The generator would be used in a workshop that formed part of the University of Sussex and Wired Sussex ‘Philip K Dick season’. Ann had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve from the workshop. It was intended to address the theme of Ways of Being in a Digital Age, taking as inspiration a quote from Dick’s novel, The Man in the High Castle:

“On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives.” – Philip K Dick

How might innovation work differently if we thought about narratives of development that were made unfamiliar through counter-factuality? Ann’s introduction ran like this:

“Philip K Dick once said that, in good science fiction, the idea depicted sets ‘off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind’ unlocking the reader to create worlds alongside the author. Dick’s work (which includes the stories behind the Bladerunner and Total Recall films) often portrayed fantastical technologies, setting them in a 20th century future or counterfactual present, but the reason his ideas still haunt us is that he dwelt on the societal consequences of the technical developments he envisaged … We will use the Counter-Factual Worlds Generator to provide the stimulus for new perspectives and avenues of enquiry, asking what publics are, were and could be through a series of exercises that take us back to old worlds and forward to ones that we hope for or dread.” – Professor Ann Light

A fairground sideshow

Counter-Factual World Generator
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

During our initial conversations, I sketched out some ideas – inspired by the character of Childan, who sells Americana artefacts to the Japanese. I created the Counter-Factual World Generator to look like a fairground sideshow (with slight Americana styling). At the turn of a bird-shaped lever, it would roll out papier mache ‘worlds’. Inside each world were art-silk squares, each with a different counter-factual world represented. They also contained a scroll of paper with a little more detail on the counter-factual context and some ‘speculations’ to help discussions along.

The counter-factual contexts we chose were:

Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII’s children all survive to adulthood – no need for a divorce, no break from Rome;
the Brazillian rubber monopoly holds – rubber is a luxury;
the Russian Revolution fails — no communist bloc in Eastern Europe;
the San Andreas fault causes an earthquake that wipes out silicon valley (and Hollywood) at a critical moment;
and finally the classic – the Nazis win World War II.

CFWG Katherine of Aragon Silk
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

Only the ‘rubber world’ was designed specifically to trigger thoughts about the environment and how we might think differently about resources. But everyone was given a little set of knobs labelled ‘Cultural’, ‘Economic’, ‘Social’ and ‘Environmental’ as ways of thinking about the impact of any innovations.

As I worked on each context, creating the silk squares and the scrolls, I had my own ideas how these might affect the world we live in now, and what we might or might not design for it. The results from the workshop were far more interesting!

Where possibilities become more possible

Through a process of Worlding, Chronicling, Creating and Analyzing, participants used the idea of a world different to our own in one major historical detail to explore values and choices. When each group presented their worlds and their ideas at the end of the workshop, it was interesting to see that the idea of being present in that world – rather than speculating on a future one — created first-person narratives or presentations that were in the ‘now’ rather than in imagined futures. The idea of embedding oneself in a speculative present made ideas more real, more visceral, both less dystopian and less utopian. The possibilities became more possible. It also freed the proposed innovations from the constraints of current innovations and current trends, so it was not just a rehash or iteration of existing design ideas, trends or apps. This freedom also allowed for exploration of inventions, trends, and ideas that we might want to guard ourselves against rather than exploit, but in a way that still gave space for future exploration of possible positive applications (for example DNA modification; or the use of digital to create ‘wonder’).

Some of the ideas coming out of the exercise might have environmental or climate change implications and it occurred to me that this exercise of imagining a different present (and how we might operate in that different present) was as valid as, and possibly more powerful than, asking people to imagine alternative futures. The future is a place we never reach and cannot inhabit. The present is where we always are. A different future is optimistic and helps to promote long-term planning, but a different present highlights the actions we can take now, ourselves, to make the changes we imagine and the world we would like to be.

CFWG Dials
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

The Counter-Factual World Generator now lives at the University of Sussex, but other similar machines could be made, or other versions of this exercise trialled as a way of thinking about climate change and different presents leading to different futures. Ann and I are always interested in exploring the possible.

Find out more

The University of Sussex Creative Technology Research Group is concerned with the interfaces between humans and digital technology and how these are changing, and investigates interaction in the broadest sense, in relation to digital technologies, connected physical artefacts, and people’s experience and practices with mobile, immersive, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. You can see a selection of Professor Ann Light’s publications at her University of Sussex page.

There is an interesting New Statesman review by John Gray of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (although if you are reading the novel or watching the TV series, needless to say: ‘Spoiler alerts”).

Deborah Mason

A multi-disciplinary artist and cultural activist interested in equality, diversity, inclusion, environment, climate-change and society.

Counter-factual questions: Space for creative thinking?

"What historical event would you change, and what specific ways do you imagine this altering the present world that we know? Would the alternative 'Now' be unambiguously better, or might it bring new complications?" Share your thoughts and speculations in the Comments below or use the Contact Form.

A Questionable Shore

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.

1,430 words: estimated reading time 5.5 minutes

In every direction, washed greens, browns and orange-browns stretch into the distance, flattened beneath skies of grey becoming blue. The camera seems to spend half its time on that view and half on the man’s face watching the view: pink from the cold wind, rounded and soft where the land and sky are flat and severe, it’s a face alive with questions of a place that seems without obvious answers. Tim Dee, naturalist, radio producer and writer, has eyes that seem to pierce the distances beyond the wide horizon. He’s trying to see the thing he’s come to listen to: an unmediated, uninterrupted, thousand-mile wind.

Dee spots his destination, a long mound in the distance. The only thing of height for miles around, “it’s the place I imagine capturing a pure Wash wind”. He strides off, satchel of recording equipment at his hip, covered microphone held aloft; he refers to it as his equivalent of a pilgrim’s staff or dowser’s rod, but it more resembles a giant, furry grey caterpillar on a stick, or an outsize candyfloss gone badly wrong. The large headphones suggest that his ears must be the only part of his head that might even remember warmth. As he walks, the camera following a little shakily, we see he’s moving along a bank through the flatlands, passing above deep channels of water that cut through the grasses. The only trees are bare and strung out in thin lines, parceling off squares of naked brown soil: fields where there had been sea.

Tim Dee, Into the Wind: Photograph by Richard Alwyn — Tim Dee, Into the Wind
Photograph: Richard Alwyn / Wingspan Productions © 2017
http://www.wingspanproductions.co.uk

52.9167°N, 0.2500°E: The Wash, reclaimed sea-land between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. A “questionable shore,” as Dee names this place he first encountered as a teenager: “a great place to meet the sea, because the sea was permanently meeting the land and both seemed unresolved about the status of each.” It’s a constructed, “brokered edge, made by banks and reclamation.” The camera frames the curve of the bank and its watery ditch, the angle where it turns a sharp corner of yellowing grasses and heads off into the distance. On a mission to contain, to control.

Wild track

Walking in such a wide land, usually alone, he says that what draws him on “is a sort of oblivion … a kind of dissolve into a landscape. It takes the bigness of ‘self’ and dissolves it.” Now, he is silhouetted in the middle distance, facing down a soft slope into the emptiness, binoculars held up to his eyes, microphone slung behind him, pointing up to the sky.

Dee, used to striving for the near elimination of wind noise in the voice recordings he produces for radio – the “wild track” that distracts and subtracts from the desired audio focus – is now on a quest to capture the sound of the wind itself, on its own terms: “wind as wind might sound in its own ear.” But it’s hard to capture because, “in some ways, it doesn’t exist as a sound. What we think of as the wind is the sound that the wind is making as it rubs over the surface of the world”. We hear grasses, sea, trees, not the moving air itself.

He imagines a future life – his retirement life, but perhaps also one beyond that finite horizon? – of listening only to his tapes of the wind, the human voices all forgotten, when “it’s the turn of the really big voices to have their say.” Wild track is the thing.

Into the wind

Returning to the here and now and the visual, lying on the slope of the bank, he watches the infinite, uncontainable sky. “This is what the surface of the Earth sees. The wind is visible, the way the clouds are moving.”

And then, alarmingly, we’re into his memory of the time “when the wind first came to call on me.” Again, when he was a teenager, but this time cycling the Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Avon Gorge, delivering the evening newspapers. The only other person in sight, a stranger walking ahead of him through the dark November afternoon, looked back once to catch the approaching boy’s eye – and then stepped up onto the parapet and into the wind tunnel of the gorge, to be held up by nothing for just one instant. Dee catches our eye briefly too as he tells us this and, a moment later, we see a bird of prey hovering above the field behind him, hunting. “But because he wasn’t a bird, he didn’t stop.” We’re left to wonder what the approaching Earth saw then, looking up as a man proved to the air that he wasn’t a bird. It was a cruel sight to force onto a teenager on his afternoon paper round.

“But that was a wind story to me, because it proved to me in some ways that the air, as pushed through that gorge, was a place simply that we couldn’t go, that wasn’t ours for entering or mastering in any way. And yet the birds were falling and rising in that wind. It’s their place, not ours.”

There are deep furrows in the marsh as he progresses from the fresh to the salt, walking now beneath the level of the manmade bank, into mud and marshgrass and the footprints of geese. The mound is close, standing like an ancient long barrow, but Dee pierces the myth even as he makes it, revealing this as a failed freshwater reservoir. But perhaps, I think, that will stand just as long as our other relics have done – and then remember that the sea probably has other plans, even for a place that’s been taking land from it for centuries. A storm light hovers over the horizon.

Where everything is kept in motion

Now he is climbing at last onto the mound, the highest ground for as far as we can see. Coming up behind, the camera frames him against the reveal of a vast plain of mud. Brown and grey shoreland almost up to the horizon, broken by silver threads of water reaching out to a sea that is still impossibly far off. After the wind stories and the brokered edge, this is landscape from a Tarkovsky film: a zone of suspended reality, flickering back and forth between something clearly natural and something somehow other. A highly questionable shore.

“I feel closer to the wind than I’ve been before.” He’s holding his wind-dowser’s rod ahead of him. “You feel it coming straight at you, from who knows where, out to the north.”

Now we hear it too, what he came for: a pure wind, washed off the sea, fresh from its own creation and untouched by the vast distances it’s travelled already. “Like it hasn’t stopped for anything yet. I’m probably the first thing this wind has hit for about a thousand miles, and it’s telling me so.”

At this point he chuckles into the cold, fast air and I wonder what else he’s hearing in it. He looks like he’s left the ordinary world for a moment. “I don’t hear the sea and I don’t hear the grass, and the mud is quiet. It’s a bird wind; when you are in it and it’s blowing you around, but it’s not sounding like anything other than itself. Which is what you are, as well. I sometimes think if the dead go anywhere, they go into the wind. That’s where everything that was is kept in motion, blowing and going. All the birds and all the people.”

into the wind: Tim Dee, Beyond the Mound — Tim Dee, Beyond the Mound
Photograph: Richard Alwyn / Wingspan Productions © 2017
http://www.wingspanproductions.co.uk

The wind rumbles on. He stands there a moment longer, then descends to step a few footprints into the mud and kneel with his pilgrim’s staff before him. His clothes and headphone-headdress as dark as the mud, his hair as grey as the sky, he is an ancient seer, a discerner of wild track, reaching forward to hear beyond the horizons.

Find out more

Into the wind – a film by Richard Alwyn and Tim Dee, was originally shown on BBC Four on 12th April 2017 (and no doubt will become a staple repeat). It was made by Wingspan Productions.

Mark quoted from Tim Dee’s writing on a pair of mythical Norse ravens, Hugin and Munin, in his previous post: Interstices of Things Ajar.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.

The Polar Tombola

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.

1,130 words: estimated reading time 5 minutes

When we hear about change in the Arctic, it’s more often related to climate than culture. But globalized culture and business is causing rapid changes in the region. Since the 1800s, 21 indigenous Arctic languages have become extinct, and more are being added to the list year by year.

Arctic words - Kanungneq, letterpress-printed card from The Greenlandic-English Dictionary, photo by Nancy Campbell — Kanungneq, letterpress-printed card and definition from The Greenlandic-English Dictionary, Copenhagen, 1927
Nancy Campbell © 2017
http://www.nancycampbell.co.uk/

UNESCO’s Atlas of World Languages in Danger charts languages at different levels of concern: vulnerable, endangered, and then extinct. West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), the official national language of Greenland, is one of those vulnerable languages, with 50,000 speakers. North Greenlandic (Avanersuaq, 1,000 speakers) and East Greenlandic (Tunumiit oraasiat, 3,000 speakers) are definitely endangered. Other Greenlandic dialects, such as Qavak, have already slipped out of use.

The importance of these languages is recognized by people across the Arctic region and the wider world.

Once, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relied on information from peer-reviewed scientific studies, and has largely excluded traditional knowledge (TK) as a source of information for its reports. But now there’s a growing recognition from scientists that traditional knowledge can provide insights – and indeed that it’s particularly useful in ‘remote’ locations where there are no other means of observation. This knowledge, passed on down the generations, is enshrined in the language. As an environmentalist reading about these issues, I began to wonder how future scientists will study the Arctic ecosystem without access to specialist Arctic vocabularies. As a poet, I wondered what happens to an individual’s experience of words when their language begins to disappear.

My own experience in the Arctic was enriched by learning Kalaallisut, and many of my projects (books such as How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet) pay tribute to what the language has taught me.

A game of words

I decided to develop a way of spreading the word about endangered languages that took the issue outside the book into performance. Many Arctic nations have an oral rather than written tradition and the transmission of oral literature from one generation to the next lies at the heart of cultural practice. Performances of creative works of verbal art are increasingly endangered. It seemed an anomaly to address such issues on the printed page.

Hence The Polar Tombola –a game of chance, like the Italian Christmas raffle from which it draws its name. At events around the UK, from London’s Southbank Centre to the Polar Museum in Cambridge, from Liverpool’s World Museum to the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, I invited passers-by to pick a card from a vast snowball containing word-cards letterpress-printed with West Greenlandic terms. I had chosen words that related to the environment, such as ‘kagdleq’ (thunder), ‘karnalak’ (reindeer which is shedding its hairs), and “ikiarôrpoq” (the sun or moon shines through the clouds).

To learn the meaning of the word on their card, the player has to consult a Greenlandic-English dictionary from 1926. Browsing a printed dictionary is a relatively rare experience these days, and most players seem to enjoy it, so I encourage them to take their time, stopping to consider any words that intrigue them before reaching their goal. In the process, they acquire at least one word of Greenlandic, and an appreciation of the wider culture too.

Then comes the twist: each player is encouraged to leave a word behind. “If you had to lose a word from your own language,” I ask, “what would it be?” The question brings home a sense of empathy for language loss, one word at a time.

"I hereby abandon this word" by Nancy Campbell — “I hereby abandon this word”
Nancy Campbell © 2017
http://www.nancycampbell.co.uk/

It’s a big commitment to vow never to use a word again and some people decide not to play along. One issue has come up again and again in conversations with players: censorship. “I’m not giving away a word,” some people say. “I don’t have enough as it is.” Others are only too glad to give up words that have negative connotations – whether these are commonly understood (in the case of ‘war’ and ‘hate’) or distinctly personal (“compass”). Both reactions make it clear that the surrender of a word is a potent act. There is no going back: each renunciation is a binding contract, as the player’s signature on the card attests. One player, the artist Steve Perfect, receives the Greenlandic word ‘kaggsuk’ (bits of ice drifting in the sea) and decides to give up “ice cube”. He later tells me he’s been introducing bartenders around London to Greenlandic.

While such an interpretation might suggest a light-hearted approach to the linguistic challenges facing the polar regions, I was glad to see such enthusiastic public engagement. Since many people don’t even know where Greenland is before they play The Polar Tombola, it was necessarily a crash course in culture and language. I found that players were captivated by their brief interaction with the Greenlandic dictionary, astonished by the detailed and perceptive vocabulary for environmental conditions, and eager to learn more.

Back to books

At the end of the final performance at the Arnolfini in Bristol I carefully gathered up all the cards on which words had been written: Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Icelandic, Korean and Spanish words, as well as many English ones. There were political epithets, meaningless verbal ticks and Latin scientific names. A selection of these words have been published as an anthology The Polar Tombola: A Book of Banished Words, alongside new texts on language loss commissioned from contemporary writers including Vahni Capildeo, Will Eaves and Richard Price.

In A Book of Banished Words some writers use the commission to explore issues of linguistic politics closer to home: writer and musician Phil Owen chooses to ditch the word ‘dissever’, once used in an 1847 English report used to suppress the Welsh language in schools. Others take the commission into scientific territory: Nasim Marie Jafry eradicates the word ‘Coxsackie’, but not before exploring how this Algonquin term meaning “the hoot of an owl” mutated over time, becoming the name of a small US town, and then of a life-changing virus.

Language is important not only to the Arctic, but to all of us.

The Polar Tombola
Photograph: Caspar Evans © 2017
www.smallpublishersfair.co.uk

The Polar Tombola is funded by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts.

Find out more

At nancycampbell.co.uk, you can read more about The Polar Tombola project and you can order a copy of the book (print or digital), published by Bird Editions.

You can find out more about Nancy’s previous book, How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet, at the website of Miel, which was established in 2011 “to promote and publish difficult, innovative, intelligent, and deeply felt writing and visual art.”

This recent article at Alaska Dispatch News is a report by Laureli Ivanoff from Unalakleet, on “Inupiaq, the language I can write and speak, but don’t understand.”

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is an online edition, where you can browse through the languages, using combinations of search criteria and/or zooming in on the map.

The World Oral Literature Project documents and makes accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record.

Nancy Campbell

A writer and book artist interested in polar regions and water conservation: Royal Geographical Society's 2020 Ness Award for her books on culture and climate change.