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Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years

As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s Martin Mahony and GroundWork Gallery’s Veronica Sekules discuss the collection through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.

3,380 words: estimated reading time = 13 minutes

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets the context for this conversational post from Martin and Veronica.

We launched our online Museum of the Anthropocene in 2022, drawing directly on Dr Martin Mahony‘s work since 2018 with 3rd-year undergraduate students on his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. Each year, the current cohort has submitted short essays on objects or entities that speak to some aspect of the nature of this new planetary age and our own species’ role in shaping it. Alongside each year’s selection for the ClimateCultures Museum of the Anthropocene, Martin has written an introductory post for us, reflecting on the ideas that emerge from the students’ pieces.

As we approach publication of our fifth set of contributions — coming soon to ClimateCultures — Martin and I discussed how we might draw out some of the themes and topics that have emerged so far from the series. We quickly settled on the notion of bringing in a professional curator’s voice and were delighted that Veronica Sekules generously took up the challenge. Not only is Veronica the founder and director of the GroundWork Gallery, where she has been responsible for showcasing the work of a great many artists and researchers who bring unique perspectives to the critical issues of the Anthropocene, but her background in education — and with the Sainsbury Centre in particular — brings significant experience to the notion of a collection such as this. And, of course, Veronica has contributed her own object-based insights into our planetary age for ClimateCultures, through her writing on three objects for our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. So it’s a great pleasure to host this conversation between Veronica as our ‘guest curator’ and Martin as instigator of the Museum of the Anthropocene.

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Seeing beyond the strata

Veronica: I have been thinking about the Museum of the Anthropocene for a few days now. I must at first say thank you — yes — it is wonderful and so rich in its approach and the range of its content. Congratulations on putting together such a very thought-provoking and original collection of ideas and discussions. Before I read it, I must say that I had been thinking about the Anthropocene — tutored, as it were, by Colin Waters who gave a talk about it at one of our GroundWork events — as a geological phenomenon. What stuck in my mind rather persistently after his talk was that we were creating a geological layer, including increasing quantities of giant chicken bones and tungsten from ball-point pen points, and of course, plastics. So it is utterly refreshing that you have opened up the subject so much, to be very much more cultural and, indeed, historical.

Showing: 'Cloud of Thorns' by Chris Drury, shown in Nature's Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery — ‘Cloud of Thorns’ by Chris Drury, shown in Nature’s Mysterious Networks exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2021. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2021

Martin: Thanks so much Veronica! It’s really lovely to hear such a positive response from a bona fide curator, arts practitioner and museum educator. And yes, that ‘geological’ version of the Anthropocene has become a dominant story which is told, and it is a striking and compelling one. Geologists like Colin have done amazing work in quantifying the sheer amount of stuff that we’re leaving behind and which will be our record in the rocks for millennia to come. But geologists as a whole have a tricky relationship to the notion of the Anthropocene, embodied most clearly perhaps in the recent decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy not to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. The reasons for that are many and interesting, but does it represent the death of the Anthropocene as a useful concept? I don’t think so. The term originated not in geology but in Earth System Science — not the people concerned with our record in the rocks, but the people concerned with how humanity is perturbing things like the climate and the biosphere. In recent years it’s become more common to think of the Anthropocene not as a geological age or epoch, but as an event, and a process. As process, it is something which is unfolding unevenly across space and time. As event, it is something which could, on geological timescales, be relatively fleeting. Which is quite a hopeful way to think about things! Either way, this new way of thinking scientifically about the Anthropocene sits much more comfortably with how social scientists, historians, artists and others like to think about it — as a set of processes with some coherence, perhaps with an identifiable beginning and hopefully an end, but which is highly geographically uneven. It’s not all ‘we’ and ‘us’, but some people, some systems, some ways of doing things which are powerful, but not unmovable.

Veronica: Indeed. As your defining terms in your very useful glossary, and several of the museum exhibit entries suggest, it is not just the Great Acceleration we need to concentrate on as the main culpable era, but that the beginning of the Anthropocene can arguably be traced back — as in the so-called Columbian Exchange — to the first expansionist, colonialist ventures, prospecting for more plants, land and resources. I think in fact it goes potentially much further, and your texts lead the way to thinking very much more broadly than previously, not only about the origins and conditioning factors for the Anthropocene, but about how it is defined. The medieval map and the Santa Maria replica ship both highlight those issues.

Martin: Absolutely, and that’s something we spend time talking quite a lot about. While the stratigraphers wanted an easily identifiable, globally synchronous ‘big bang’ moment they could point to as the start of the Anthropocene, historians, geographers and the like are more interested in tracing root causes of change, which might mean thinking about how the transformations of the Great Acceleration had their roots in early European colonial expansion or, as you suggest, perhaps even further back, in moments like the rise of settled agricultural communities, or in the emergence of particular attitudes to the natural world.

Showing: UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo by Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) — UEA Museum of the Anthropocene exhibition 2024. Photo: Daniel Lightening (Lightening Photography) © 2024

Veronica: Exactly — as the authors and you frequently suggest, there is also the whole persistent question about nature and humans’ attitude to it, and what role that is playing in, not so much the current concerns with mass extinctions, but exploitation and the wielding of power. There are moral nature-culture questions about the canary, the pigeon, the rat and the beaver, but also in different ways for plant species — the suburban lawn, the Christmas tree and Sweetgrass. There seems to be a persistent tension between the human desire for control as exploitation and the exertion of power, and for its more apparently benign purpose to create order. Time and again, while reading the museum entries, I was thrown back on thinking not only that everything is connected in complex ways, but that the earth is riddled with, as you put it Martin, ‘unequal geographies’.

Showing: A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in 'On the Edge' at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019 — A film work by Jane Ivimey about eroding cliffs at Happisburgh (Norfolk, England), shown in ‘On the Edge’ at GroundWork Gallery, 2019. Jane Ivimey © 2019

Martin: I think that’s really key. And we can trace the origins of those unequal geographies both in material processes of transformation (e.g. in the economic contributions of the transatlantic slave trade to the rise of industrialism in Great Britain), and in moments of ‘geo-cultural’ change, as Jason W. Moore puts it. That’s what I think is so fascinating about the whole debate around the Anthropocene. Suddenly we’ve got historians and ethicists talking to earth system scientists and geologists about human-nonhuman relationships in a profoundly generative way, in a manner which didn’t really happen when we were ‘just’ talking about climate change, air pollution, or other environmental crises that have now been bracketed together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. That bracketing can be problematic as it leads to abstractions and blindspots. But it also draws attention to some big, consequential questions about our relationship to nature, the legacies of empire-building, about cultural change, and so on.

Our planetary age through objects and processes

Veronica: In fact, I think, the kinds of exhibits and concerns brought to light in the museum are leading me to think that we need a whole new definition of the idea of the Anthropocene, beyond geology and what we are physically laying down and altering on the globe. For much of what is being discussed is not so much about what the world is becoming physically, but by what moral, ethical and economic forces it is being, and has been influenced and shaped.

Take for example the Mirror — one of the artefacts of earliest origin — which highlights the problems of self-regard, vanity, narcissism and the confusion of nature-culture that we see or don’t see in our reflections. That author suggests that the Mirror-cene could be a relevant concept. That entry, and quite a few others touch on aspects of the original sins — pride, vanity, greed. Also, the Lawn, Fast Fashion, the Diamond Ring, Banana, the Pocahontas costume — but in each case, go much further to illuminate the subtleties of exploitation, appropriation of identity, commerce, corruption and consumerism, and the special poisons of corporate greed that have increased the scale of the problems these artefacts represent. But for all the evils of their proliferation, it also struck me forcibly when reading these, that the fact remains that humans are vulnerable to being exploited on a mass scale and to that end, culpable as consumers, not quite equally, but not without power as such, to change things — in either direction.

Showing: 'The Art of Waste' exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023, with works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton.jpg — ‘The Art of Waste’ exhibition at GroundWork Gallery, 2023 – showing works by Jeremy Butler, Jan Eric Visser, Liz Elton. Photo: GroundWork Gallery © 2023

Martin: You’ve touched on a really tricky and fascinating point which is shot through all of this — how to talk about things like cultural values, norms, behaviours etc. in a way which prompts new forms of reflection, but which also doesn’t lay the blame for what’s going on at the feet of individuals? There have been a few occasions where students have chosen an object which connects to something they love — like a hobby or a sport they’re keen participants of — and then when they start to unpick all the ‘Anthropocene’ aspects of it, they’re left feeling their object is a Bad Thing. I warn them about the risks of that at the outset, but also try to emphasise that the world, our systems of production, our shared values and so on are determined to a large extent by forces outside of our control. We can change them, but not just by being better consumers, or by no longer taking joy from the plastic Christmas tree or enjoying a picnic on a manicured lawn. Again, history is powerful here, because it shows how contingent things are. Our rapacious version of consumer capitalism wasn’t inevitable — it was very deliberately engineered as a way of dealing with a crisis of overproduction following World War II. That’s what the archives show, and industries like marketing and PR developed precisely to get that new consumer economy going. Once one knows that, it’s possible to see how things could be otherwise. And that’s about collective action, political work, and imagination work. And on the latter is where the arts and museums can be so important.

Learning from the Anthropocene museum

Veronica: That leads me to think more about the state and status of the museum currently — it is a wonderful collection of stories as well as artefacts, and stories which manage at the same time to be quite depressing as a collection of observations about the harm we have done to the Earth, and enlightening in unpicking the forces and circumstances that led us there. There are plenty of positive statements too, about the desire for care for nature and nature as a refuge, and how this sometimes develops in surprising ways, as in the story of Pikachu, or more straightforwardly, Sweetgrass and the tribute to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous book. I also very much liked the positive reframing of the Witch as a bringer of ecological wisdom, as a counter to her conventional portrayal as a frightening practitioner in black magic and as a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchal and colonial creators of the Anthropocene’s problems. I also liked the ones that took us above and beyond Earth into space — as indeed that exploitation is going to be the next goal for the greedy prospectors — you just need to look at who the main ones are…

The museum educator in me began thinking about how the museum could be further activated educationally. Of course, it was created with an educational purpose, which in itself is extremely interesting. Conventionally the museum curator is the one who selects and essentialises the stories, whittling down to the uber-story that the display elucidates. When I worked as a museum educator, I always maintained that it was then our job to re-assemble the rich detail that lay at the heart of those distilled curated stories and then from there to explore the wider field that had provided the context — which embedded the story potentially much more deeply again and led to wider areas to discover. That in a sense is what your exhibitors have already done. However, I think there could be an interesting metacognitive exercise to re-dissect their themes, pick up on their keywords, to examine each aspect of their detail, and then to see where the further connections and alliances are between the different exhibits. Where, for example does ‘ecological wisdom’ occur — perhaps between the Witch, Sweetgrass and Pikachu? I am not entirely sure where this would lead, but it might be fun to do. And it might be a way to think about the cumulative effects of the phenomena you are faced with, and maybe come closer to thinking about how to address some of those thorny issues of inequality, resource exploitation, geographical power imbalance. For I do feel that you and the students are onto something in terms of reframing the debates around the Anthropocene and potentially coming up with some positive proposals to counter them.

I know you have frequently started your conversations with the Sainsbury Collection, and I used to have a whole repertoire of workshops whereby we would have a deck of words or phrases on card — which might have come from either a random source or a specific one and we would place them near an object with which we thought there might be some kind of connection. It wasn’t always enlightening in terms of being true to the cultures of origin of some of the artefacts, but always led somewhere interesting because of peoples’ desire to make new sense of things, and was a way to open up new questions… I always found the Sainsbury Collection tremendously valuable in encouraging questioning and I am sure that, plus its global range and variety of kinds of artefact, made it an ideal starting point for you and the students.

Martin: It’s really interesting that you say that. In Week 1 of the module we do an exercise with some ‘keywords’, to prompt some discussions of what the Anthropocene ‘means’ and what it ‘demands’. This always yields really interesting insights into how the students feel about environmental change and, essentially, what appetite for revolution they have! Revolution of various kinds — economic, cultural, technological… Bringing some of our previous museum entries into that conversation could be really generative too. I’ve learned so much from the education team at the Sainsbury Centre about how to do good object-based learning, and getting students thinking in those terms right from the get-go could have some interesting implications for the kinds of objects and entities they ultimately chose to focus on.

Veronica: I was wondering what difference it might have made had you begun with a more conventional museum, the kind that claims to provide answers and ‘factual’ information and a more taxonomic approach to its collecting. Perhaps you might have got a more conventional range of essays…

Martin: Quite possibly! Via the wonders of YouTube we engage with how other museums around the world have engaged with the Anthropocene, like the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In both cases I think the notion of the Anthropocene has challenged their curatorial practices, whether that’s poking the notion of natural history or challenging the boundaries of a museum focused on human technology — the type of museum that tended (until recently!) to tell a rather celebratory story of technological change. I think there’s something interesting about curating as a geographer rather than a historian too — I try to get them to think about difference, inequality, about what Anna Tsing calls the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. I think that leads to some differences of emphasis, as well as an always-fascinating range from the mundane and the everyday to the spectacular and the unique. But a perennial challenge is to find the grounds for hope in all of this — via these objects to identify historical contingency, to spot those spaces where different worlds are being built and ultimately, I hope, to help students discover their own agency in all this — not as self-flagellating, guilt-ridden consumers who must make better choices, but as agents of collective change equipped, I hope, with some useful knowledge and, more importantly, with persuasive stories to tell.

Anthropocene Museum: Showing Museum of the Anthropocene entries - the first four years, 2022-25. — Museum of the Anthropocene entries – the first four years, 2022-25

Find more

You can explore all 24 student entries over our first four years of our Museum of the Anthropocene, Inside the Museum. And Martin’s essays accompanying each new cohort are:

The Museum also has a small Anthropocene Glossary, briefly exploring some of the terms introduced in the students’ essay, with links to further reading: Coloniality, The Columbian Exchange, Epistemic communities, The Great Acceleration, The Malthusian Hypothesis, Technofossil, The Technosphere, The Tragedy of the Commons.

GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, is all about art and environment. As well as a full programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, their site has an extensive collection of resources: “writing linked to, or inspired by our campaigns. All of them have been connected with exhibitions and/or with artists’ work. Everything that GroundWork Gallery displays or exhibits aims to connect with a particular environmental message and these resources are grouped into themes, which have emerged through our discussions.”

You can read Veronica’s previous ClimateCultures posts, including her three chosen objects for our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects: A Personal Anthropocene History #6: ‘Cosmic Man’, TE20 Tractor, Loch Hourn Stone, and her essay for our Longer feature: The Art and Heritage of Waste.

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

Veronica — “I use AI sometimes almost inadvertently (in that Google offers it automatically) to gather information and make lists of issues to follow up for further investigation. I only use it purposefully to adapt and/or shorten the long texts I write for exhibitions, mostly to produce press releases — which AI does admirably and I hate to do, so for that function I am grateful. It produces very odd press contact lists, though! And it is completely hopeless at producing blurbs for events etc — it makes anything sound utterly cheesy and gushing.”

Martin — “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”

Veronica Sekules

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

Martin Mahony

A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.

A Personal Anthropocene History #14: Bronze Bell, Sea-bed Oak, Wayang Kulit Shadow Puppet

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty presents objects with personal stories of resonance in the Anthropocene, where the common theme of ‘story’ itself is a powerful mark of individual and cultural agency for change and hope in uncertain times.

2,550 words: estimated reading time = 10 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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I present here three objects and three themes for the Anthropocene: traditional markets, and how they for thousands of years were places for storytelling; how traditions worldwide spoke of flood events, and how one was missed in the loss of lands and homes to sea level rise in the middle of the current North Sea; and how forms of story are embedded in culture, here the Wayang Kulit shadow puppets. These speak to a great contemporary hope: that story will help create the agency to address contemporary climate and nature crises. Story says this: go through the door.

Bronze bell of the Saharan story singer

Anthropocene object: showing a bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

This bronze bell from the 1950s was fired and fashioned by a blacksmith at one of the greatest markets of the Sahara desert, on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northern Nigeria.

It was a squarish hub, this market a mile in length along each side.

By the pale glow of dawn, the muezzin inside the city gates stirred sleepers from far and wide. Before long, laden donkeys were trotting on converging paths, bullocks carried men with plaited hair, the fields were high with ripening millet. Women balanced baskets on their heads, paused to share news beneath the many roadside baobab.

In the shaded avenues, on the paths and ways, hawker and seller already sat at stalls, each woodworker sharpened chisel, there was money-changer and basket-maker, all the smithy men of iron and bronze in one district, their bellows made from goat-skin, they were firing up the charcoal. There was brightly-patterned saddlecloth, and all kinds of rein and bridle ornament, carpenters busy with rough blocks, turning them to hoe and handle. Some carved holy plaques, spade-shaped and then inked sacred characters, by bamboo pen dipped in ash and gum.

There was the smell of the rotting fish and acrid woodsmoke, a calabash of rancid butter was all a greasy mess of flies, in the air a taste of pepper and perfume from clove and herb, and wholesome onions, and the sour smell of civet cat, and dung trodden in the sand.

In the west the avenues were crowded with women wearing heavy anklets, their teeth stained red. And in the east, herder women slender and tall were wrapped in fabric of blue; all over men in turbans wore flowing cotton robes of white.

In was a market, so of course you could buy or trade pink kola nuts, potash slabs from the great lake, much shrunken even then, dry dates and scarlet pepper, long gourds, polished and carved, each with ornamental stripes and snakes. There were boxes of matches, bangles from the east, paper money from the north.

To this market came a boy troubadour.

He sang in the north, he sang in the south.

The lad named Mid-e-Mid, he had green eyes and tangled hair, his songs hailed from far hills rising sharp and purple from the desert playa.

He was famed on the plains of camel grass, at the small oases where bright birds sang in the shade of palms, so each tune soared far, and after days alone he would ache at dusk for a campfire, to hum a little while millet boiled in soot-black cauldrons.

He was the one, he could charm a gift precisely from a person’s pocket.

He walked from the north, he walked to the south. He sang to the setting sun, to the velvet sand. He sang to the wild wind.

I am walking well, walking. I am walking, he sang.

This was one of the ancient trails, in those days carrying salt and gold, dried dates and books to the desert libraries. He walked past abandoned caravanserai, whale fossils and forty-foot crocodile engravings on wadi walls, painted rock art of long-horned cattle and their herders, leaping men with bows, giraffe and elephant, red and ochre figures in a cave of swimmers, women with the heads of birds and men as leopards. In remote canyons were tall figures and their war chariots, and running ostriches.

He walked to this market by the dry desert, where no rain had fallen for seven whole years. He rang his bronze bell.

The boy Mid-e-Mid sang a song, in his strongest voice, and a herder came forward, he passed sweet tea in a chipped glass. Mid-e-Mid sang of the cold desert, the night fire, people dancing in the warm light to drum and flute. He sang of the mud-brick military depot long abandoned, and how his home oasis was now hemmed by oval hills of piled and pounded sand. There had been a cool oasis garden, date palm over shaded tomato beds and beans, a grove of lemon trees. But these too were lost under sand.

Then he chanted of a dead camel on the trail, a vulture on one mimosa branch. How once there were ten thousand birds, duck and stork and ibis, crested crane and guinea fowl, all on the great green shimmering inland sea. And how these feathered birds had been forced away, as the world had dried and water fled.
He was just a boy, he said, yet he could only just remember what rain was like.
These are my songs, he said, which I have related, if they are sweet or not so sweet, take them elsewhere, let some come back to me one day.

Sea-bed oak of Doggerland tales

Doggerland story: Showing a piece of sea-ded oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Sea-Bed Oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

Between 7500-6200 BCE, the dry plains of Doggerland were drowned by rising waters, and the shallow North Sea was formed. By 5000 BCE, the 300 km by 100 km Dogger Isle remained in the new sea, with a host of smaller islands. It soon would sink, and we would forget there had ever been land there.

The item here is a piece of oak, dredged up in the 1960s off the Suffolk coast by a fisherman friend. In those days, the accepted truth was that wood and bones and amber must have been moved by sea current and tide. Now we know different.

Many a culture has a flood creation myth.

The oldest written saga was found on tablets of clay, the Epic of Gilgamesh telling of cities of dust, and of the discontent of gods. The prince Gilgamesh wished to tame the wilds, cut down cedar trees, so Enlil brought a flood. Perhaps his traders had learned how a wide dry land had been flooded by the sea; how ancient gods had been displeased, how so they wished we humans lived in different ways.

Not many people get to name a country, and archaeologist Bryony Coles had a brilliant insight. There had been erratic finds, so curious none could place them, moorlog and flint found in fishnets, sunken forests at the coast, called Noah’s Forests a century ago by geologist Clement Reid. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that thus originated source of stories of the deluge?”

By the end of the 1990s, the evidence was clear. The sea had risen after melting of the ice sheets, it drowned parkland and tunnel valley, took woods of birch and oak, displaced the grazers, turned freshwater marsh to salt and sea. Bryony called it Doggerland, after fish-famed Dogger Bank. That country had been dry, then drowned. People lived there, then were forced to leave.

For until eight thousand years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers roamed the prairies, searched for mammoth and giant elk, broad-browed auroch and great bison herds. On hunting hill and grassy plain, they camped at salty marsh and wide lagoon. At the still point of their world was Yggdrasil, the one tree that held up sky. Serpent circled the distant sea, guarded all their ground. They shaped their land, sowed fruit and seed harboured from the wild, fished and fixed to spear barbs of antler bone. You can imagine, they could not hope for any better place.

Yet as eagles planed serene, there was a creeping shift, icebergs severed free, the waters rising up. They sensed a warp of salt and sea. The air was life, as it is today for people of the plains, a wealth of sun and rain. And while gannets screamed, a storm was beating at their border.

Now the waves rose fast, the height of you or me in half a hundred years.

So in that distant time, the people carried in and up their camps, dug up a hundred holy graves, buried bones once more. Still the surge poured in, league on league not letting up. They would have called on gods, desist and stop the sea. But they could not tame the tempest, all their shamans tried. One watery dawn, came a shocking sight. The sun-star rose from sea, later dipped into their western waves.

Had they eaten fish forbidden, had a snake whispered from a tree, no one could recall. And so every hide of land and fire pit was drowned, each vale and fell seized by rising flood. They lashed boats of auroch-skin, flexed oars, lay their infants on the furs, and came upon the cliffs of higher land.

Did they meet a friendly king and queen; did these forest people rush down the beach and help the migrants from the brine?

What do you say when a whole landscape disappears, what words for sinking, when cultures go and sea village too? What hope is there, at all, when loved ones die?

This is the first verse from ‘The Drowning of Doggerland’, from my book, Sea Sagas of the North (2022):

It is said the Sky People, once were numerous,
But they had drowned, and every dark hide,
Of land and fire pit, each vale and fell had been seized,
By the rising flood, the swell of sea had beaten down defence,
So they launched their boats, lashed and loaded auroch-skin,
And flexed the oars, among the furs and flutes,
Were sobbing infants, fastened tight to strakes of birch,
At last ahead appeared a strip of land, they saw a hall upon the cliff.

Wayang Kulit shadow puppet of long story tradition

Story tradition: Showing a Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

The object here is a Wayang kulit leather puppet from Java. It was used in a night performance of shadow puppets in the mid-1980s close to Borobudur in southern Java. Performances are lit by candles, and accompanied by gamelan music. The whole audience was captivated as the tales were told. The night was hot, the tradition at least a couple of thousand years long.

Story is a device common to every human culture. It has some 50,000 years of history, yet has often come to be both misunderstood and misused in the modern era.

Put simply, the patterns of good story match the shapes of our lives.

Story was once tales told at every flickering fireside, the children’s faces upturned and wide-eyed. Now it is expressed in many forms of art and culture, in business and activism.

In cultures worldwide, storytellers acquired special status, for they had something to say about how the world worked. They took, in the telling, the audience temporarily away from the concerns and worries of their days.

The storytellers were called scald and poet, shaman and jester, enchanter and soothsayer, cunning women and men, cantor and conteuse, pied piper and every kind of trickster. You would find story being told by blind bard and bhat, barefoot friar and mendicant, the wayang kulit puppet master, snake-charmer with a rope and khöömei throat-singers from the steppe, dzikr trance-spinners all in white and the oak-leaved rhymer of the green lanes. And in recent times, pilgrim and ranger, barber-shop quartet, city busker and balladeer, podcaster and versemonger, novelist and stand-up comedian.

Their magic is always this: the more the storytellers talk, the more people want to listen. Their themes are simple: to bring people together, to tell them something new, to reveal patterns and emotions that we the audience recognise as our own.

Story is about the sequences of crossings to a new state, about transformation itself. This was once called alchemy. Ovid wrote 250 myths about transformations in the Metamorphoses poems 2,000 years ago. Children were transformed into trees and animals, people into spirits. You sprinkle your face with water, and sprout antlers.

The famed Navajo-Diné storyteller, Yellowman, said to Barre Toelken in the late 1960s:

“If children hear stories, they will grow up to be good people;
If adults hear stories, they will know what to do.”

Good story can lead to tipping points and phase transitions, where transformations can be as sudden as those we experience in life. A butterfly flaps its wings, and whole systems change.

A challenge, then: can we create stories so vivid, so astounding and so colourful, that they will be remembered for a thousand years?

There is sneaky logic in old tales, story being a form of medicine. Clarissa Estés, an estadora keeper of the stories, wrote, “When a fairy tale is told, it becomes right.”

The telling of tales, she said, causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep over the earth.

In Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, the supplicant sits by the door for days, for months, for years, waiting for the call, for the door to open. When old and dying, he whispers to the doorkeeper about the unfairness of it all. The doorkeeper says, “Oh, this was your door, you could have gone through it at any moment.”

Story says this: go through the door.

For in story, everything is at stake.

Find more

Jules Pretty‘s book Sea Sagas of the North (2022) is published by Hawthorn and you can find details of this and his other writing at his website.

You can read Jules’ previous ClimateCultures post The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures, where he reviews The Dawn of Everything, exploring stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

Do explore the other contributions to our A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects series; each features a set of three objects and their contexts whose personal stories speak to the universal through the unique. Artefact or artwork, utilitarian or iconic, real or imagined, the 42 objects we’ve gathered so far illuminate the relationships between people, place, period and planet and the legacy of our species’ manipulation of our material environment. Since the launch of our series, of course, we’ve also welcomed to ClimateCultures the Museum of the Anthropocene — an online home for 18 object-based essays from students on Martin Mahony‘s ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia.

Jules Pretty

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

On Being Water Beings — “A Return to Water, Rather Than Dust”

Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White, in conversation with Veronica Strang about her new book, Water Beings, finds connections with his own work at a time when water is under threat and we need to rebalance our elemental relationship.

2,850 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes

“Water serpent beings’ abilities to be monstrous also traverse scales. They can lurk within the individual psyche and represent the seething inner sea of instincts and emotions, or they can reflect tensions and fluid capacities for disorder at a societal level, such as the chaos represented by war or revolution… At a cosmic level, they can represent apocalyptic events – the Flood, the volcanic eruption, the earthquake, the tsunami.”

— Veronica Strang, Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.

Showing the cover of 'Water Beings, by Veronica Strang (published 2023) — ‘Water Beings’ by Veronica Strang (2023)

Water in crisis

Recently I’ve been sensing a disconnect between me and water. I live close to an iconic river, in which I learnt to swim and as a teenager had lucrative summer jobs punting tourists along it. However, the River Cam, like most if not all UK water systems, is heavily polluted, and I know of many local cases of humans and dogs who have been seriously unwell after a dip.

The data for the newly designated bathing status at Sheep’s Green in the Newnham area of Cambridge recenly showed high levels of e-coli and other nasties that have leached down from a sewage pumping station some miles away. In addition, the heavy winter, spring and now summer, rains we are getting in this normally drier part of the land often wash off concrete and create epic floods, with run-off washing into the rivers and through the soil.

I’ve just made a short film about one of East Anglia’s chalk streams, the Newmarket Brook, and I have been learning from geologists and hydrologists about chalk streams’ unique qualities and fragility. This one is in varying states of health. I also helped a friend, Tony Eva, make Pure Clean Water, a film about Hobson’s Conduit, which flows from the springs at Nine Wells, by the hospital, through various colleges and into Cambridge. It is in a perilous condition, continually abstracted and contaminated.

Away from just this one city, the human world is at war, and water gets scarce and used as a threat for those being persecuted and bombarded. We’re in a water crisis and if we are to survive as a species and remain equitable with our ecosystem, our relationship with all the elements must rebalance. Recognising this disconnect is the start, and framing our connection to the sacred and to older knowledges feels like an important way forward. A crucial way forward.

It’s timely then to discover Veronica Strang’s body of work, and engage with the growing movement towards river/nature rights. The vast body of human creativity around water and water beings comes to the fore in her book, which really resonates and brings joy to this jaded mind. If many of us unite around care for water and becoming water guardians, from a variety of faith beliefs, political and ecological opinions and none, our human power can make a real difference.

I’ve recently been a participant in two University of Cambridge conferences on water-human relationships where Veronica delivered keynote lectures. Her research straddles anthropology, archaeology, theology, philosophy and more — ranging across human history, our experience with and belief in beings that inhabit watery realms, and our cultural imaginations and psychological systems.

Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis is a very deep dive into watery worlds inhabited by a vast array of extraordinary more-than-human beings, and into our imaginative nature as an ancient species. Every society has developed complex and intricate beliefs and knowledges around water beings and their values, roles and responsibilities, including our projections on them as either benign or monstrous. Living alongside them, dreaming of them or even being devoured by them, has given humans a sense of fear, worship, adoration, and veneration. Perhaps now is the time to fully merge our substantive presence on the earth with water creatures?

Water Beings - showing 'Muisca tunjos', votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold. — Muisca tunjos, votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold.

A confluence of knowledge and imagination

While grounded in academic scholarship, Water Beings reads like a flowing chronology of connectivity, an important congregation of how the planet’s climate and delicate ecosystems and the human creative impetus to respond all come together. Ultimately, this work is about narrative, fact and fiction: stories and images of water beings are part of our human construct, and now is a time to acknowledge and honour them. What might they mean? What might they anticipate?

The book’s ten chapters categorise types of water entities — irrigating beings, supreme beings, demonised beings, reformed and transformational beings and more — and frame our ways into their study. A key final chapter then sharply focuses on the now, why we are in this condition of crisis and dis-connection, and ways we might return to a closer, healthier framing. I’ll return to that important chapter.

Water Beings - Showing Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928: Unknown artist, watercolour on paper. — Unknown artist, Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928, watercolour on paper.

I was particularly delighted to discover in chapter 8, ‘Supreme Beings’ — as Strang moves forward with her story, societies become urbanised and with that comes monotheistic faith structures and practices — an image from William Blake, ‘Moses erecting the brazen serpent’.

This chimes with an ongoing absorption into Blake’s prophetic work I have through the Finding Blake project, a fascination with his fourfold vision. Here, in an underwater realm, serpents are coiling around humans, literally squeezing the life out of corrupt sinners, while Moses stands watching upwards to the head of the main water serpent. Here is an image of the entwining of watery beings which has become the symbol of medicine and healing: caduceus.

Showing William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper. — William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper.

Water is rare in Blake’s paintings, and where it does appear it often represents the subconscious, a metaphor for yearnings, regrets. Here it is a vessel, dominated by these beings of great power, human victims in their coils — and yet the interplay between them and Moses is highly significant: dominion and dominance. I’m not aware of Blake referencing the Thames in his work, despite living very close to it for most of his life, yet surely it played a role within his unconscious knowledge of the world. I wonder if he saw serpents and watery beings on his daily walks alongside it? I’m led to believe he and his wife Catherine could see the river from their last flat, where he died, which is now under a major London landmark hotel.

Chapter 10, ‘Reformed beings’, flows up to contemporary times, and the use of images of water beings in literature, films and more. This makes me think of the local town of Ely, once a town of eels, fished for and captured in plentiful supply and shipped off to London as a commodity. Now the eels are gone, with the last remaining eel catcher, into mythology of both creature and trade. Eels live on in artworks, sculptures by the river, and paintings aplenty in local galleries and markets — a symbol of this fenland town. Many tales of the fens are marked by the beings that once inhabited waterways since cut as agricultural drains: part of the industrialisation of land reclaimed from watery bog.

‘Turning The Tide’, the final chapter, forms a confluence, bringing together knowledges from countermovements — indigenous activists, campaigners for social and ecological justice, nature-worshipping religious groups, legal activists, and scholars — to include learnings and imaginings from all kinds of creative practitioners, strongly making the case for recognition of the rights of the more-than-human, and water itself: ultimately, the vessel and element that holds us all.

Here, the full power and resonance of the author’s research comes to the present day, and she offers the full weight of her learning and sharing:

“Today, in a world urgently in need of a change in direction, the stories that water serpent beings tell, and their capacities to represent alternate visions of human-non-human relations, may be the most crucial role that they have ever had.

“As our water serpent beings have shown, societies that have achieved long-term sustainability have done so by maintaining steady-state or circular economies, rather than embarking upon spirals of growth and expansion.”

Returning to my home city of Cambridge, plagued by the constant over-hanging clouds of development and the ‘growth agenda’, this message needs to ring loud — and just maybe the water beings may rise again from the Cam, or emerge in eel-like form to teach humans this lesson of steady state fluid dynamics. Human and watery other.

Showing 28 Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm. — Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm.

Water Beings: a Q&A with Veronica Strang

JMW This is such an extraordinary work of rich, deep scholarship. I appreciate greatly the visual, literary and historical journey you take the audience on, and feel enriched by this book.

VS Thanks for this kind comment — this research has been a wonderful experience for me. Although water beings appear regularly in folklore, ethnography, history and theology, no one has previously researched aquatic deities systematically and comparatively, and venturing into this new research area has been an extraordinary adventure. Water beings have so much to tell us.

JMW Can you share how this study started, and tell us some of your journey following the waters and the watery beings?

VS My research as an anthropologist has always focused on human-environmental relationships, people’s beliefs and values, and particularly their engagements with water. I have explored a range of issues relating to water: ownership, governance and management; conflicts over water; religious beliefs about water; and rights to water, for humans and for non-human species and ecosystems. Much of this work has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and more briefly in Malawi. But the issues around water that interest me recur all around the world.

Water beings swam into my research very early on. In the early 1990s I worked with indigenous Australian communities in Queensland and learned about the Rainbow Serpent that is so central to their lives. A decade in New Zealand, during which I conducted research with Maori iwis on water ownership, rights and management, brought me into contact with their beliefs about rivers as living ancestors, and their taniwha and other water beings. Realising the vital importance of these aquatic deities caused me to pay attention to them elsewhere.

It soon became clear that — since all early human societies worshipped the non-human domain, which we call Nature — water beings (as well as other elemental and non-human ancestral figures) were ubiquitous in human history. And in all of these early societies water beings performed similarly vital connective roles: personifying the creative and potentially destructive powers of water; forming the world and populating with human and non-human beings; providing humans with consciousness and enlightenment; exerting religious authority and, above all, generating water and life in annual cycles of production and reproduction. So for several decades I collected images and narratives about water beings all over the world: feathered and water lily serpents in Central America; African python deities, Arctic undersea beings; Indian nāgas; Japanese cloud dragons and Chinese imperial dragons; North-American Pueblo horned serpents or, on the north-west coast, wolf or bear headed beings; Amazonian giant anacondas and celestial boas; Celtic deities in rivers and springs; Norse sea serpents, and Eastern European rain dragons.

What happened to these water beings over time in different cultural and historical contexts gives us an illuminating narrative about different societal trajectories and transformations in people’s relationships with water and the non-human domain. And so the project grew into the major comparative study that forms the basis of my book. The study shows how growing instrumental control over the environment altered the relations of power between human societies and their environments, and led changes in beliefs and practices in relation to water deities. As humans gained more technological power over water, and felt more ‘god-like’, a fascinating pattern of deity humanisation emerged. This led to the semi-humanisation of water beings, or their displacement by deities in human form, and culminated in the major monotheisms assigning authority to human, male gods and demonising the non-human beings of earlier religions.

JMW Would you explain a little about how you chose to structure the book, and make these categories of beings? And which of the world wide canon of water beings you have researched most captures you?

VS Water Beings follows the changing patterns in societies’ relationships with water through a comparative study of their water deities. Although these changes happened at different times in different places, the book is loosely chronological, starting with the water beings of the earliest human societies and those that remain central today in place-based indigenous communities. Such societies understood the co-creative role of the non-human domain, manifested in water beings, and sought to have reciprocal and respectful relationships with them. They also maintained relatively egalitarian relationships in their political arrangements, being led by both male and female elders.

The text then moves to examining the effects of greater human control over water, for example in ancient irrigation societies, and considers how their religious and political arrangements changed alongside their new infrastructures. With new hierarchies and centralised governments, power shifted from water deities into the hands of (usually male) priests and deified rulers who became the figures responsible for bringing the rain and maintaining social order.

The following chapters explore how, as societies became more technologically powerful, water beings were made subservient or subsumed by new deities in human form until, with the rise of monotheisms that separated Culture from Nature, and sought dominion over the latter, they were demonised and slain. It also shows how emerging scientific visions disenchanted the world and consigned many nature deities to ‘folklore’. In the final part of the book, however, we see how this alienation from the non-human domain, and the exploitation of other species and environments that it encouraged, has led to the current environmental crisis. There is now an increasing understanding that there is an urgent need for humankind to regain more convivial, and therefore more sustainable, relationships with water, ecosystems, and other living kinds.

The book therefore also examines new visions of water beings in recent and contemporary art, literature and film, in which they are recognised and respected as key manifestations of the co-creative powers of the non-human domain. These emerging images and narratives express people’s growing desire to reconnect more positively with other living kinds and ecosystems.

As for which water beings have captured me the most? I can never choose. My first love was the Australian Rainbow Serpent, but they are all extraordinary and wonderful, beautiful and terrible, and endlessly fascinating.

JMW Anthropological research gives us an opportunity to look back at historical evidence and to engage with local/cultural knowledges. In this case there is such a desperate need to apply all this knowledge to how we respond to water now, which you explore in some depth in the final chapter. How might we look back in 100 years, with your assessment of the current trajectory of human/water relations?

VS My research helps, I hope, by showing how, for many millennia, human societies maintained respectful relationships with water and the non-human domain, in which people sought to protect their needs and interests as well as those of human beings. It shows how and why many societies moved away from such egalitarian visions to seek power and dominion over ‘Nature’ and how this increasing inequality led to exploitative and unsustainable practices. Most large societies are still on this trajectory, led by ideologies of growth and expansion, and the belief that yet more technological control will solve the problem. Meanwhile, species and biodiverse habitats continue to disappear, human populations and their use of resources continue to increase, and it seems that humankind is dragging the world towards a painful and potentially critical collapse.

But in almost all societies there are also passionate counter-movements: social and ecological activists and indigenous communities striving to promote alternate ways forward. They share a transformational vision of human and non-human equality, circular economies, more sustainable lifeways, and beliefs and values that recognise the vital co-creative role of the non-human world. These movements are growing: more and more people are pushing their local and national governments and international bodies to make better choices. What the world looks like 100 years from now will depend on whether they can succeed in turning the tide. And in this battle — and it is indeed a battle for human and non-human survival — water beings, as compelling personifications of non-human power and creativity, are a vital narrative device for communicating ideas about how we might engage with water differently.

JMW Do you feel positive about us working with the more-than-human to assert the rights of nature and the rights of water within human law/psychology?

VS How could one feel other than positive about working to uphold the rights of all living kinds in what is fundamentally a shared interconnected world, in which human and non-human wellbeing cannot be separated? This is surely the only rational and ethical position from which it is possible to see a future in which all of us can flourish. So yes, I feel immensely positive, and indeed privileged, to be able to work with these amazing water beings and their wonderful capacities to communicate a more hopeful vision of the future.

Find more

Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis by Veronica Strang is published by Reaktion Books (2023). Veronica is a Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. You can explore her work — and watch a summary video of a planned TV series based on Water Beings — at her website.

James has made or collaborated on water-related films and projects, including The Waterlight Project, Pure Clean Water (2023), River Of Light (details to be published at The Newmarket Chalk Stream Trust). He took part in the recent Being With Water Otherwise conference, where Veronica was keynote speaker. You can read Un-tending the World – A Geopoetics of the Wild, his recent review of Two Lights by James Roberts. James is also creator of the Finding Blake film and project; Mark Goldthorpe, ClimateCultures editor, is editor of that website and the Waterlight site. In a recent Waterlight blog post, Religion and Climate Futures – Waterlight Screening & Cambridge Unseen ‘Chalk Walk’, James discusses a recent screening of the Waterlight film at a Cambridge University and LSE joint summer school and the interest in chalk streams and further film making that Waterlight has helped stimulate.

James will be in conversation with Veronica at the Into The Wild gathering in Sussex on 25th August. The festival itself runs 22nd-26th August.

Chalk-streams is a blog by Charles Rangeley-Wilson, a writer and conservationist with a lifelong passion for rivers.

James Murray-White

A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.

The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures

Writer and researcher Jules Pretty explores stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding in The Dawn of Everything rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

2,750 words: estimated reading time = 11 minutes

These days, we find ourselves in the midst of world-spanning crises of climate, nature and social inequality. All three have the same proximate causes: a type of economy that promotes too much material consumption and a dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. Something is about to change. Yet we have never been here before. We are in the dark forest, at our darkest hour, and we are not sure if we can choose a new path.

We often don’t know what to do when great moments of transformation in life appear: the rites of passage from small to big school, a first date, your first day in a new job, a baby in the family, a friend’s death, your own advancing mortality. We have no plan for what happens next. There is no rehearsal – apart from stories that tell how others have crossed their own thresholds. We are going to need ways to open up the world ahead, where fear could still be one of our greatest emotions.
Most of life is inconceivable. Living without fossil fuels seems so, for many people. Living without air pollution from cars, also seems inconceivable.

The Red Queen said to Alice, “Why sometimes I’ve believed, as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass (1872)

Should we think of a new diet, perhaps less meat and more oat milk; should we buy an electric car now or later, fly less and cycle more; insulate our home or install solar panels, listen to the birds, have coffee with a friend? Well, one of these, then maybe another one, soon after.

The point is this: we have choices. We just may not realise this yet.

There emerges a need for new forms of story-telling, combined with a language of kindness and generosity. Kindness is both our common state and best response to threat. It is selfishness that is the outlier.

What kinds of language and values might we use to find our ways out of these deep woods? Berthold Brecht wrote in 1939:

“In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”

We find ourselves now in need of stories with hope, and then to explore how to use these to create more effective agency to address the great crises of these times. Fast transitions, regime shifts and positive tipping points are beginning to occur, showing that new ways of living can be just and fair.

Calling time on ideas of linear evolution of human cultures

This is where a brilliant, clear, refreshing and fabulous synthesis of a book comes in. It is called The Dawn of Everything, and draws on recent archaeological evidence and anthropological insight to say highly salient things about human history.

The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, say: most accounts of pre-modern human history “simply aren’t true, they have dire political implications, and make the past dull.”

This is interesting, not least because this book is also about the future.

Storie of human cultures: Showing the cover of 'The New Dawn of Everything', by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The authors are willing to call out many contemporary commentators who believe in linear evolution of human ideas and cultures (the ecological determinists and evolutionary psychologists, for example), and who say that modern life must be superior to all that has gone before. Graeber and Wengrow call these “dismal conclusions”, and “prejudices dressed up as facts.”

For this book is about freedoms, not the “weird arguments” made by many in support of modern and high-consumption ways of living and organizing. We are neither at the top nor the end of a process of betterment. What has gone before was more diverse, egalitarian and astonishing than many would think.

Human cultures of the past have always diverged; they have not converged on one model perceived as more advanced or even perfect.

This book also overturns ideas about the assumed superiority of agriculture over foraging-hunting-gathering, and of city civilisations over agrarian. It also suggests that large-scale public engagement leads to innovative and diverse futures. People have always valued the things they do and places they live as extensions of identity, and so have often and explicitly refused to adopt practices and ideas from other people and places.

This cultural refusal is a key finding (it is not rejection on the grounds of being better; it is about something just being for other people and not for us).

Cultures can also get stuck, becoming less innovative. Many cultures and cities were abandoned after hundreds of years of continuity when people just walked away. They got stuck, and decided to seek something new. They sought the next dawn of everything.

Story-tellers for ‘stuck’ times

Stories of human cultures: showing Mayan masks from Guatemala — Mayan masks from Guatemala. Photograph © Jules Pretty

There are numerous valuable findings from this wonderful book.

First, humans are not inevitably nasty and selfish. More often than not, cultures and cities have been egalitarian.

Human cultures are projects of self- and co-creation. They emerge from engagement, participation, story and sense-making.

Human cultures do not converge on one model, and one model does not follow another (e.g. agriculture after foraging). All cultures diverge in space and over time. Wherever and whenever we look, there is endless human diversity. No single system is preferred, and evolutionary stages do not exist, where one model of life inevitably follows another.

Evidence from all the world over shows the enormous long-distance interactions between people and cultures. We have always lived in a small world politically and culturally connected. People travelled and journeyed to see and learn from other places. Recent DNA testing of skeletons shows much higher rates of interaction. Human cultures have never been isolated or biologically “pure.”

At times, cultures do get stuck, thinking they know or have it all. The modern era of neoliberalism and planetary nature and climate crises is an example of being stuck. We are living now in the latest of “stuck times.”

All human cultures engage in refusal. They know what others are doing, but in order to remain true to their own identities, they commonly refuse to adopt certain other technologies and ideas. Some foragers lived alongside agriculture for 3,000 years, and refused to adopt it. Some city states knew all about metal and the wheel, and again refused to use them.

Of course, non-conformists exist in every culture. What differs is how each culture reacts to them. Many cultures in history valued non-conformists (such as tricksters, jesters, story-tellers, shamans, and the physically and mentally diverse), seeing them contributing to diversity and divergence.

Agriculturalists and forager-hunter-gatherers lived side-by-side for thousands of years. In many places, cultures used different modes of living during different seasons; some foraged and took up agriculture; some farmed for hundreds of years and adopted foraging.

Foragers-hunters-gatherers established many cities and monumental cultures, and engaged in small-scale gardening and domestication of what we now call weedy species.

There was also oscillation within years and across seasons: within years some people foraged-hunted-gathered for certain seasons, and then farmed in others; some peoples developed different social structures and even personal names in different seasons of the year (a ruler in one season, people’s assemblies in another). Seasonality of values and identity is still with us – we behave differently during Christmas and Ramadan, during long holidays (the French grand vacances). People set aside work, for a bit, and affirm values in community, family, giving and resting.

Many city states and cultures had no kings, queens or rulers, no palaces or temples. People governed through assemblies, councils (as often women-led as by men). Some cities built public baths, others huge social housing projects. Many created co-housing units larger than for single families (long-houses). The traditions of long-houses for co-living continued to Norse-Icelandic culture, the Pacific North-West, and in rainforest forager cultures worldwide.

After a time, many cultures simply hit a wall. They stop. They are abandoned. It seems people in them choose to go and create something different. Most were not conquered or beaten by war.

Active choices and human futures

Showing wheat from Suffolk. — Wheat from Suffolk. Photograph © Jules Pretty

Catalhöyük was long thought of as one of the first agricultural sites and cities. But the people are now known to have preferred and celebrated wild aurochs over domesticated cattle. They knew about the latter for 1,000 years, yet never used them. Elsewhere in Mesopotamia, there are many examples of refusal: cities that knew about agriculture for 3,000 years, yet never adopted it. Such refusals were not irrational or silly: they were on the grounds of choices about practices that defined others who were not them. People want to stay as themselves.

The first organised city cultures in the world were not in Mesopotamia, but at the mega-sites and mammoth houses of current Ukraine-Moldova (4100-3300 BCE), each with huge central assembly places for exchange, sharing and decision-making. Individual cities were 300 hectares in size, contained co-living houses, and reached populations of 10,000 people.

In today’s California, the dozens of cultures and language groups centred on only foraging-hunting-gathering are sometimes described as existing because agriculture failed to reach them. Yet there was interaction with agricultural communities of the greater south-west. They also knew about agriculture, and refused to use it.

Poverty Point in Louisiana of today contains some of the largest mounds in the Americas. These cities were built around 1400 BCE by forager-hunter-gatherers. In Japan, the Jomon culture comprised 14,000 years of (pre-rice) forager culture, producing cycles of settlement, craft, storage, and traditions of building things and breaking them down again (traditions that continue to today in Shinto and Buddhist culture).

Teotihuacan in central America was a city culture on eight square miles of land. It had no central ruler, nor did it adopt the ball courts, kings and palaces of nearby Tikal and Calikmal. Teotihuacan was egalitarian, with stone social housing containing plumbing and sanitation, each finely decorated with art and images (much psychedelic). After 500 years, Teotihuacan was abandoned. Again, we today do not know exactly why.

The largest city culture in the Americas before modern times was Cahokia (in current Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi). The city had a population of 15,000, and flourished for 300 years between 1050-1350 CE. The people were forager-hunter-gatherers, supplemented with gardens with domesticated sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed and mayweed. Cahokia and all the surrounding river valleys were depopulated at the same time, creating a long-lasting “empty quarter” that no other peoples entered.

There was public engagement and assembly for culture-making, where individual and collective agency leads to divergence of choice.

There was refusal of what appear to be more efficient or productive options. Identity was more important.

There was explicit adoption of egalitarian structures and social support.

Showing prayer flags, Tuva. — Prayer flags, Tuva. Photograph © Jules Pretty

Cultures have lived alongside other differing cultures for thousands of years. They knew about other ways of living, and decided not to adopt. There was no perfect economic system of living waiting to be revealed.

There was long-distance travel, journeying and staying, leading to biological mixing inside stable cultures.

There was sudden abandonment of modes of living, when people decided they had become stuck and needed to do something different.

We know that fossil fuels will have to be almost entirely eliminated from all economies worldwide (excepting perhaps communities living at high latitudes that are dark and cold for long periods of the year), and thus the spread of adoption of renewable energy generation is central to preventing climate catastrophe. The overarching aim is to electrify everything, with a particular focus on wind, water, solar and battery storage.

Most countries are now committed to 100% renewables for their electricity supply at some time in the future. Some have made dramatic advances in implementation, others have been slow (see Table 1).

Many poorer countries are predicted to save money by these investments, as many spent up to half of national export earnings on importing oil, and now increasingly have the resources to invest in other social priorities. Countries highly dependent on the income from oil will find transitions hardest, even though some have large sovereign wealth funds. Qatar styles itself a “hydrocarbon-enabled economy.” It has the highest carbon emissions worldwide at 55 tonnes C per year per person, and to date has effectively zero contribution from renewables for its electricity supply.

Table 1. Proportion of domestic electricity supplied by renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass), 2022

Proportion of domestic electricity consumption supplied by renewables	Countries
98%-100%	Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, Paraguay, Uruguay
90%-95%	Ethiopia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan
60%-80%	Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden
40%-50%	Ireland, Spain, UK
20%	China, India, Japan, Morocco, USA
Less than 0.2%	Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

Note: World 28%; Europe 35%; Low-income countries 66%; Upper-income countries 30%. Some of these high percentages are in countries with low total energy consumption and low access to affordable electricity. They will need to consume more to escape poverty, and there will be a need to generate more renewable energy than today. Sources: International Energy Agency (2023) (www.iea.org); Our World in Data (www.ourworldindata.org).

Choices by governments matter. In the UK in 2023, the government chose to invest in a new nuclear plant (to produce 3 GW per year); in Denmark, the government has chosen wind power on two new energy islands in the North and Baltic Seas (total of 6 GW capacity). These islands will be the largest infrastructure in Denmark’s history, and will be generating electricity by 2030. Nuclear in the UK will take 10-15 years longer to be commissioned, costs will be twice as great, and there will still be a need to pay for costly nuclear waste disposal. Such nuclear developments will therefore be delivered too late to influence the meeting of 2050 net zero targets. China and South Korea are planning 1-6 GW of floating offshore wind parks for installation in 2025-2030.

Globally, the International Energy Agency believes strong growth in clean energy means the world can deliver fossil fuel emission cuts of 35% by 2030. The IEA also say we have the tools to go much faster, and that there is now a need for “a fierce urgency of the now.”

These advances towards 100% renewables are the start of a new dawn of everything. It is instructive to see which countries are taking the lead, and how cost benefits nationally will accrue.

Cultural connections for transformations

Showing plastic from Iceland Arctic Sea beach. — Plastic from Iceland Arctic Sea beach. Photograph © Jules Pretty

In my 2022 book, Sea Sagas of the North, I visited and wrote about 160 ports, villages and coastal places culturally facing inward to the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic (in Iceland, Norway, Finland, England, Scotland and the Faroe Isles). I talked to an 80-year-old famed skipper of the trawlers and drifters, and he said, “You know we were more tolerant and kind in the days of fishing, when we travelled to other places and came back with gifts and stories.” Fisher communities on the coast of the east of England felt greater closeness and affinity with people 1,100 miles away in Iceland and Norway than communities 10 miles inland.

The ecological collapse of fisheries led directly to social and cultural change on the coasts, and people lost their friendships with others across the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic.

For my 2014 book, The Edge of Extinction, I visited and stayed with place-based and indigenous cultures in Aotearoa, Australia, Tuva, Finland, Labrador, Louisiana and California. A Finish ice-fisherman friend stood up in the audience at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History, and demanded: “Where is the escape route for our culture and people to leave your modern world? Will you give us one?” The title’s play on words was intended to suggest it was modern societies and economies that were on the edge of extinction, not indigenous ones. The book should probably have been called ‘The Edge of Our Extinction’.

My 2023 book, The Low-Carbon Good Life, centres on the diverse ways of living and public engagement we need to create to solve the nature, climate and social inequality crises facing the planet. We will be needing divergence of practice, choice and behaviours rather than convergence.

Above all, we will need good stories that lead to agency and transformation.

Find out more

Jules Pretty’s new series The Climate Chronicles is posted at his website, where you can also find details of his books, including The Low-Carbon Good Life (2023) and Sea Sagas of the North (2022). Jules is part of the project team behind the Hope Tales events and chapbooks, with fellow ClimateCultures member Nicky Saunter. See Nicky’s post, Hope Tales — Stories for Change.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2022) is published by Penguin.

Jules Pretty

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

Talking to the Crisis

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.

2,660 words: estimated reading time 11 minutes + audio

In January, Julia Marques spoke with five fellow ClimateCultures members to explore what art and environmentalism bring to each other, and how they combine the two in their work.

We published Julia’s full-length interviews with Daniel Bye, Andrea Carr, Tessa Gordziejko, Matt Law and Jennifer Leach alongside her own reflections on the exchanges here. Her post also featured short clips from each interview, touching on topics such as: how art can galvanize environmental action or thinking, or simply help us to face the mounting sense of crisis; how collaboration with others in artistic practices can be part of our making sense of climate and ecological crisis, and how an appreciation of the ‘everyday ecology’ of our lives and surroundings — which art can celebrate — serves to shift our consciousness beyond simply the facts and news stories. And, as the interviews also revealed, an artistic mindset rewards attention to those usually very generalized words ‘collaboration’, ‘sustainability’, ‘optimism’ and even ‘creativity’ itself in ways that inform particular approaches to the processes, materials and practices of bringing environmental awareness into the heart of everything we do; and celebrating the small acts and experiences of creativity every bit as valuable as making and marking the large, public works.

Together, those five recordings offer rich insights into the work of different artists and researchers that — although the interviews draw mostly on theatre for their examples and ideas — have value for creative practices in all fields and across many disciplines. And, as Julia said, discussions such as these are part of the much bigger conversation that we’re engaged in and need to expand and develop further. If you haven’t already done so, do take a look at her post and the interviews.

Deepening the dialogue

It was therefore a natural development of those first one-to-one conversations — one that Julia and I discussed early on — that we try and bring together as many of the participants as possible, to see if they could develop some of those individual ideas further. So I was delighted when Tessa, Jennifer, Dan and Matt were able to join Julia in a Zoom call one evening and see where the conversation might take them. We’ve presented this here as three shorter audio clips.

In the first session, Julia, Tessa, Jennifer, Dan and Matt catch up with each other’s work since the initial interviews six months ago, and how these projects and new activities continue to explore the themes they discussed. We find out about recent work, much of which has a shared focus or experience of land: land access and edgelands in song and film; art on the land and creating green woods for future generations; moving into a new personal landscape, listening and waiting to see what comes as work that has to be real and not just noise; engaging with the end of our way of living; working with new artists.

ClimateCultures · ClimateCultures Conversation June 2021 Part 1

The second session then picks up on a couple of those themes, teasing out some convergences and divergences around ideas and language around darkness and light in our experiences of the world, and around useful distinctions between uncertainty and ambiguity.

ClimateCultures · ClimateCultures Conversation June 2021 Part 2

Finally, there’s a short discussion around whether we can see the climate and ecological crisis as an opportunity for creativity.

ClimateCultures · ClimateCultures Conversation June 2021 Part 3

As with all such dialogue — in these times especially — provocations and reflections such as these do not offer definitive responses or an end to the questioning and the circling back to previous ideas and exchanges. Instead, they are a process, feeding off and into all our explorations, sparking new connections and possibilities. In that spirit, we hope these will prompt further conversation, on these pages and beyond.

Conversation is creative

Although I was not part of any of the sessions, on listening to the recordings I certainly felt myself to be in conversation with the ideas and the examples flowing between the participants. One of the joys of sitting in the background of ClimateCultures is receiving the materials that members send in for our blog; whether I experience them initially as offers of ideas, or as first drafts for discussion or as complete pieces, there’s always a point early on where what’s coming to me as fresh perspectives from a creative mind spark off my own associations, questions and conversations — with myself and what I thought I knew beforehand, and with the contributor. Each post is a prompt for to me to think afresh on the issues we’re facing and the ways that I choose to perceive and to act on them. I hope that’s the way they’re received and responded to by others. Creativity is a conversation and conversation is creative, and both open up the world and our place within it.

Listening in on talk of the darkness, of the different ways of understanding what it is and what it offers and requires of us, I was struck by my sympathy both with Dan’s opening response to Julia’s prompt on how we respond to darkness and ending:

“It’s hard isn’t it? There is so much darkness, it’s hard to know which bit to try not to look at! Hard to know where to bring the light. And I think especially this past year, so much of it has been about getting through to the next day with the people nearest.”

and Jennifer’s plea, as “a great fan and protector of the darkness”, that we not always fall into its characterisation as supposedly negative:

“There’s something about that insistent light, that insistent need for the light that I think is part of the reason that we are really at this point of existential crisis. Because, the darkness … there’s great beauty in it, great restfulness in it, there’s a chance for restoration, there’s a chance for quietness, for peace. It’s the fundamental part of regeneration … Without the seeds going underground you wouldn’t get the harvest, and without death in life you wouldn’t have life.”

life in conversation: showing 'bud' by Jennifer Leach — Bud – mixed media on paper
Image: Jennifer Leach © 2021

Tessa reflected on the fact that Julia’s original interviews occurred in the middle of winter and now this conversation was unfolding as the longest day of the year approached, and on the different relationships with darkness that these two midpoints offer:

“I quite enjoy the winter darkness, and wintering as an idea …closing down a bit and being underground… Now we are nearly at the longest day of the year … and a different kind of darkness occurs then. It’s a very short darkness and quite a magical darkness, and it’s late coming … And there’s a different sense of the darkness we are facing as our human narrative, which is nonetheless there but — there can be something quite joyful about it.”

Conversation with the season: Showing a Solstice Firewalk, by Tess Gordziejko — Solstice Firewalk
Photograph: Tessa Gordziejko © 2021

To me, what lies between these personal responses to questions of what the darkness and endings mean, and what it means to live with them, is not so much a disagreement as a web of complementary insights into the complexity of human experience, and — as Matt picked up on from Jennifer’s point on life going underground — the shared cycles of nature that we’re part of and are part of us:

“There’s a really nice image of going from the biosphere, the world of the living, into the lithosphere, the world of the rock, and then back out — what springs out of that again. … If we are thinking about anxiety about an environmentally changed future, and we have this idea of participatory mourning or solastalgia, maybe focusing on these minutiae — well look at the regeneration that comes, the sense that nature finds a way.”

Tending our patch

While one reading of ‘darkness’ feeds into the sense of endings and of loss and of ‘end times’ — feelings that we’ve all experienced or witnessed with great force during these times of global pandemic as much as with the continuing slide into ecological catastrophes around the world — other readings can also bring an appreciation that we can sometimes choose to approach endings, even loss, in more positive ways. For one thing, there can be joy in the beauty that has been experienced and generated along the way, and that is still there or yet to be created. And there’s the opportunity to imagine, anticipate and therefore work to bring about the better ways of surviving the worst and thriving beyond that.

Sometimes the response to changes that can feel overwhelming is to focus on the nearby, the achievable — towards, as Dan puts it, a move where

“people have turned towards tending their own patch of grass … trying to make the practices in the areas over which they have control good practice … That feels to me like an understandable response to a perceived inability to be heard or to make a difference … and a good example to others who might have the wherewithal to do so.”

It’s a metaphor he returns to, suggesting that the arts, while often termed an ‘industry’ is not a monolith but “an ecology. It’s a lot of people’s separate patches of grass which happen to overlap and share root systems and share weather, and that actually tending your own patch well and in an exemplary fashion can be part of effecting systemic change.”

In convreation with the land: showing a still from the film These Hills Are Ours by Bevis Bowden — These Hills Are Ours, by Daniel Bye & Boff Whalley
Film by Bevis Bowden © 2020

The more such patches there are the better the ecology, as Tessa points out, and “art off grid” is part of the way forward. And Jennifer picks up this theme of personal patches of creativity and the possibilities of intimate connection as a place of feasibility, and embracing the home-made — meaning the creative work by the hearth rather than in the public arena — “without losing the sense of quality” may be needed now more than ever: “So, not to feel that what we are doing is a waste of time, not to feel that we need to lose it, but there are ways of making it very real in a very different way.”

This sense of nurturing a personal creativity and embracing that small-scale engagement is perhaps reflected at a larger scale in Tessa’s observation that the word humility has its roots in humus, the living soil, and that maybe seeking a more humble approach is a species-level response too. “We are going to be humbled anyway so maybe a conscious and deliberate humbling of ourselves in the way that we envisage the way we live and the way that we learn…”

The act of leaving that thought hanging in the air is perhaps in its own way a tentative bridge between the personal and the global dimensions, a recognition of the enormous scale of action and consciousness that’s being asked of all of us alongside the creative responses that any one of us might feel able to develop. As later discussion suggested, looking to all this for a creative ‘opportunity’ is perhaps off the mark. Climate change and ecological depletion are what we are immersed in, and while some might choose to continue to not hear the alarm bell — and it’s certainly not possible to listen to it at full volume all the time — the crisis is nevertheless “an insistence rather than an opportunity,” as Dan puts it.

“It’s present in everything I do,” Tessa admits, “whether it’s explicit or implicit. … It’s much more immersive for me. Although not everything I make is about the climate crisis, everything happens in that framework.”

Where the opportunity lies, Matt suggests, is for art

“to sculpt a vision of something to be hopeful about, and also to connect people with stories that when they read about them in the news they don’t relate to at all because it’s happening to people who live on the other side of the planet or who will live 50 years from now. And that’s a really important opportunity.”

in conversation with the past: showing Matthew Law coring for evidence of past environmental change — Matthew Law coring for evidence of past environmental change in Hertfordshire
Photograph: Alice Short

And that space of opportunity is also shaped by our grasp of ambiguity, which Dan identifies as “something being both the case and not the case at the same time” and as “the root of metaphor and faith in whatever, in anything.” As Tessa says, creativity works with ambiguity all the time, not seeking to pin everything down. For Matt, “within scientific process there is a world of uncertainty. A lot of my work is rooted in archaeology and there is so far you can take the evidence before you have to make an inferential leap…”

That sense of grasping both the ‘is’ and the ‘is not’ and not always striving to resolve that ambiguity is also a leap, an imaginative one. And it offers a creative resistance to the urgency that, although very real, can drown out the value of diversity in all we do in the face of existential crisis; a generosity towards diversity, even when it maybe looks like an unwelcome dilution of the singular effort, the struggle to get everyone on board with ‘the answer’. As Jennifer expresses it:

“All of these things are important, all of our ways are important, the fighting is really important, the resistance is really important, the refusal to lie down and just accept it — and the opposite is also true: the people who embrace it, accept it, who move through it in peace and centredness without resisting it, that’s also important. It’s going to be messy and there are no clear answers, there never are. There’s going to be tatters round the edges. That’s life and evolution and who are we to resist it, in a way?”

The interplay of light and dark, of ambiguity and understanding, of ambivalence and ideas of decline and regeneration, and of the small, patchwork acts and the large, singular ones — these make up part of the rich soil in which art, research and all creative work thrive and can inform our activism. There is this and much more in the conversations that Julia, Dan, Tessa, Matt and Jennifer have shared with us here. I hope you enjoy listening in and maybe exploring where their conversation sits with and talks with your own experiences, ideas and work. As Matt observes at one point, there’s an interesting thread through their conversation that’s not the one he thought they’d be talking about at all, and you might find your own threads there too and want to pick at the discussion in different ways…

It’s something we’d like to do more of. ClimateCultures — an initiative that, as Julia expresses it, “brings different worlds together” — welcomes your voice too. If you want to share your own reflections and responses to the conversations, do get leave a comment, and members can get in touch with their own post for the blog.

Find out more

Mark Goldthorpe

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

You can watch Julia’s earlier interviews with Dan, Tessa, Jennifer, Matt and Andrea in her post Conversations with Work That Connects.

In this new conversation, Tessa mentions that she’s been listening to the podcast The Great Humbling, where futurist Ed Gillespie and writer and co-founder of A School Called HOME Dougald Hine ask “How will they look in hindsight, these strange times we are living through? Is this a midlife crisis on humanity’s road to the Star Trek future – or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out?” In a series of conversations, they explore whether “our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling?”