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

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

2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Introduction to the 2024 composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony’

Let’s start at the end

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

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

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

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

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

– Extract, interview with Abdul Hamid (2014)

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

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

Planning for climate futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come out, come out wherever you are!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa’s references

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

Find more

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

Lola Perrin

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

On Neuro/Queering Nature

Visual artist James Aldridge shares his art and research on neuro/queering nature, helping us all to explore how valuing different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences can expand our ways of seeing and being with the natural world.

2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

In Spring/Summer 2024 I carried out a residency with SPUD, a New Forest-based arts organisation. SPUD have been supporting residencies by artists who are exploring Queer Ecology in some way, for the last few years, funded through Arts Council England.

In my proposal I wrote:

“I believe that the sensory and systemising differences experienced by Autistic/ADHD people… can provide us with inspirational perspectives and awareness of ecological and social systems, which can be communicated to the wider community through art… I want to promote a valuing of different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences, deconstructing inherited ways of seeing and being with what we have come to call Nature, and developing new models built on dialogue and relationship.”

Titling the residency and the resulting installation Neuro/Queering Nature, I included a forward slash to allow Queer and Neuroqueer to sit together, drawing on both experiences/identities in my research, and in my work with LGBTQAI+ and autistic young people.

Showing the Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition at SPUD, New Forest, Summer 2024. Photograph by James Aldridge © 2024 — Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition at SPUD, New Forest, Summer 2024. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024

This work with SPUD forms part of my emerging Neuroqueer Ecologies research, which in turn grew out of the Queer River research project, set up in 2020, and about which I’ve written for ClimateCultures in the past.

Neuroqueer Ecologies is a term I coined and an area of research that I have continued to develop, starting with my own experience of places as a neuroqueer person, and drawing on the ways that I experience places and make sense of the resulting sensory information, using my arts practice to map and share my relationship with other beings. In this I draw on the writing of Nick Walker:

“I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. It was an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory; I was expanding the Queer Theory conceptualization of queering to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms…”

Neuroqueer: An Introduction – Nick Walker

Neuro/Queering nature to open up experiences of place

For the Neuro/Queering Nature residency, I wanted to take the trappings of Natural History study and layer them with neuroqueer experience, Neuroqueering the concept of Nature as something that we name, classify, collect, and experience as separate to ‘us’ (us being those humans viewing the world through a Eurocentric lens).

While at SPUD I walked with a river called Avon Water, including the bogs and mires that feed into it, and the marshes that it flows into as it reaches the coast. I drew and wrote with collected clays, recorded sound and video, and set up a camera trap for animals to record themselves.

“Unsurprisingly there are many different types of wetland in Britain. As with the apocryphal fifty words for snow, the lines of differentiation are considerably blurred. Marsh, bog, swamp, mire, fen, carr… The kind for which the New Forest is most famous are known as lowland acidic valley mires… Cranes Moor, Duck Hole and the wonderfully named Slap Bottom: there are hundreds.”

Goshawk Summer, James Aldred

Whilst following the passage of water through these wetlands, I also wrote, drew and applied collected materials onto natural history illustrations taken from books bought in charity shops, layering the ‘official’ images and descriptions with my own immediate response to water, heather, curlew, clay.

Working with the Together, Make Art group (the young people that I mentioned above), and artist Hannah Buckingham, I supported the young artists to explore their embodied experiences of the Forest, and their identities as human animals, through collage, mapping and wearable artwork.

Neuro/Queering Nature was about opening up space to facilitate and communicate different experiences of place, and of what we have come to call Nature, through playful and experimental processes. It definitely wasn’t about swapping one set of rules and classifications for another. I also wasn’t originally planning on working with another river, but water is such a good teacher when it comes to blurring boundaries and cutting across binaries. It refuses to be contained.

In between walking and making, I read a lot, and three books stand out as having informed my thinking and my experience of the New Forest:

1. Goshawk Summer by James Aldred – I was so inspired by James’s descriptions of time spent in the Forest, the exploration of language used to name its different parts, and the way he writes about the Forest as a place that is wild, protected and man-made all at the same time.
2. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Woelfle-Hazard – I kept returning to passages of this book that looked at rivers from both a queer and indigenous perspective, and from the perspective of beavers or salmon as well as humans.
3. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Champion – a brilliant book which makes so much sense, essentially (this my take on it) looking at the development of the concept of normality, in relationship to human difference, and the impact of models of work and education that prioritise productivity and profit, over wellbeing and creativity.

One paragraph in particular from Robert Champion’s book has stayed with me:

“A radical politics of neurodivergent conservation is also consistent with a radical politics of environmental conservation. After all, it has been the same logics, the same system, that has ravaged the biodiversity of the planet as has sought to eliminate the neurological diversity of humanity…”

Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman

What insights is our society missing from ignoring the voices of autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people?

What if we extend our sense of what is normal and desirable to include sensory and processing differences that might provide us with an expanded awareness of our relationship with non-humans?

Focusing on ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being with the world, that fit within what is understood to be acceptable human behaviour, whilst affirming the human/nature binary, and increasing economic growth no matter what the cost to both human and ecological wellbeing, hasn’t done us any favours so far. In fact I’d say that the inability to directly perceive ourselves as interconnected with the rest of the world is what prevents us from seeing the damage that we are doing until it’s too late.

Holotropism — an experience of oneness

So what can someone like me offer? I’m poking my head up above the parapet a bit here. I’m not claiming that autistic people are the saviour of humanity, or aligning myself with the idea of neurodivergence as a superpower, just that we might bring a different awareness of the place of human bodies and actions within the wider web of life.

Autistic people are often described as being disordered (i.e., not normal). Our differences are medicalised, our abilities pathologised. My experience is that I build up a sense of the world and the relationship of its parts, through being extremely sensitive to sensory information, and by focusing on particular areas in depth. I don’t tend to trust inherited models of understanding the world, and prefer to construct my own from the bottom up. I am also very sensitive to other people’s emotions and intentions, contrary to many people’s preconceptions of what autism looks like.

This ability to focus intently on one subject or one element of experience is sometimes called ‘monotropism’. In addition, artist Hendl Helen Mirra offers up the term ‘holotropism’ to describe an experience of oneness. A sensitivity to everything around you that can be a bit of a nightmare (for me) in a crowded room or shopping centre, but can offer a sense of belonging and a dissolution of boundaries in a less human-dominated environment (e.g., the bogs and marshes mentioned earlier).

“Synthesising monotropic theory with deep ecology and holistic anatomy, we feel we have found a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain under the monotropism map. We are calling it holotropism. This perspective may elucidate the high co-occurrences of synaesthesia, mirror-touch, dyspraxia, and hypermobility among us autistic people.

“To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through both of these processes — less consciously in hyper focus, more consciously in coherence.”

Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain, Hendl Helen Mirra

More-than-human collaborations for neuro/queering nature

Since my time at SPUD I’ve moved on to new places and opportunities, including a residency with Groundwork Gallery, as one of almost 20 artists taking part in the Ground Up extraction-themed programme this Summer, and now exhibiting at the Ground Up exhibition in Kings Lynn, Norfolk.

Neuro/Queering Nature - showing ‘The Beaver and the Whale' in the Ground Up exhibition. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024Photograph by James Aldridge © 2024 — ‘The Beaver and the Whale’ in the Ground Up exhibition. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024

In Norfolk I continued to focus on wetlands, this time looking at the impact of the extraction of animal bodies from wetland and marine environments (through whaling, the hunting of beavers for fur, meat and castoreum, and wetland birds for ‘sport’, feathers and taxidermy).

To make sense of the human impact on wetlands, and how we might collaborate with other animals to reverse some of the damage, I’m currently considering what Neuroqueer Ecologies can bring to inter-species collaboration, how it’s done and what might emerge out of it, in this time of climate breakdown. I’m taken by the term ‘collaborative survival’ used by Anna Tsing, and the potential within ‘passionate immersion’:

“Passionate immersion can take many forms. At its core it involves attentive interactions with diverse lifeways. Beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans…

“Artists have also become core participants in scholarly projects that question conventional approaches to speaking for Nature, exploring opportunities for immersion in the lives of others…”

Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness, Eben Kirksey

Through my Neuroqueer Ecologies research, and inspired by the work of other neuroqueer artists and researchers such as Kai Syng Tan, I’m starting to explore what happens when neurodivergence is decolonised and valued, and in turn impacts upon how we perceive and place ourselves within multi-species communities.

As Joris Lechêne writes in Decolonising Autism:

“The emergence of the conceptualisation of autism (and Aspergers) is ‘rooted in socially constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, disability and productivity, and those notions are connected to the colonial ideas of anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and capitalism’ (Lewis, 2021)…. Furthermore, Quijano (2007) specifies that decoloniality can be understood as the struggle for liberation from all forms of oppressive power that leads to inequality, discrimination, exploitation and domination.”

At the moment I’m exploring how human-beaver collaborations can enable humans to learn from the indigenous, pre-colonial knowledge of beavers, previously hunted to extinction and now being reintroduced to the UK, either unofficially through ‘beaver bombing’ or within enclosures, waiting for the government go-ahead to set them free.

Whilst in Norfolk we visited Wild Ken Hill’s beaver enclosure, and I followed that up with a visit to the Norfolk Rivers Trust beaver site at the headwaters of the River Glaven. I’ve since tracked down my own local Wiltshire beavers, living wild in and around the Bristol Avon, and have been looking at the intersection of human and beaver infrastructure, as beavers re-make places through dam and canal building and the incorporation of man-made structures and materials.

Dams and lodges in Norfolk included a brick and a Muntjac deer skull, and incorporated the ruins of a WW2 sewage treatment facility, whilst those in Wiltshire included a wooden pallet and a warning sign from a nearby construction site. Beavers don’t recognise the perceptual barriers and boundaries that humans often use to divide, order and classify, and as a neuroqueer maker, I feel a real kinship with, and a desire to learn from them.

My work in the Ground Up exhibition represents the beginning of this relationship with beavers. Titled ‘The Beaver and the Whale’, it documents my research into some of North Norfolk’s rivers, and their connection to animal extraction/local extinction and reintroduction.

Showing detail from 'The Beaver and the Whale' (collage and earth from a beaver dam). Groundwork Gallery, 2024. — Detail from ‘The Beaver and the Whale’ (collage and earth from a beaver dam). Groundwork Gallery, 2024. James Aldridge © 2024

It’s not the first time I’ve sought to collaborate with non-humans, and considered the threshold at which such work might appropriately be called collaboration. My photographic series ‘The Ash Looks Back’ for example, informed by research into Ash Die Back Disease, considered the tree’s perspective by strapping camera traps onto ash trees and allowing their community of life to document themselves.

Similarly, my installation at SPUD brought together photographs of animal footprints and camera trap footage of deer, ponies and foxes, with birdsong and river clays, to give a voice to the network of human and non-human inhabitants that makes up the Forest.

“Thinking with beavers and rivers and mountains and salmon, out in the watershed commons, I have sketched a way to transfigure what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘capitalist ruins’ into substrates for new models of life. Practices of world-making with beavers and salmon unveil the multi species commons that is always-already there, in the land, ready for human acknowledgement and recognition.”

Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, Cleo Woelfle Hazard

Find more

This short video shows James’s Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition from his SPUD residency in the New Forest:

And you can explore more at Queer River, James’s practice-led research project, and his website. His previous ClimateCultures posts include A Queer Path to Wellbeing, and he also reviewed for us Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book co-authored by fellow member Iain Biggs.

James is showing work as part of the ‘Ground Up’ exhibition until 14th December at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn, England. ‘Ground Up’ is the first of two exhibitions formed out of works of art made in response to a GroundWork residency with the underlying theme of Extraction. A second exhibition, ‘Ground Water’, will run from July to September 2025.

In this January 2024 post for The British Psychological Society, Decolonising Autism, Joris Lechêne offers advice for research and practice drawing on his experience as a trainer in anti-racism, bias, and decoloniality who has lived experience of autism and ADHD.

Hendl Helen Mirra’s July 2023 post Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain explores a holotropic experience and perspective of the world.

Nick Walker’s post (2015, updated 2021) Neuroqueer: an introduction describes how the concept of neuroqueering came to inform her thinking, embodiment, and approach to life.

Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness is a 2016 research paper by Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey & Ursula Münster (Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23) that explores “the cultivation of ‘arts of attentiveness’: modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.”

For more on the books that James mentions:

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman (2023, Pluto Press) – the publisher’s page also links to a podcast with the author.
Goshawk Summer: A Diary of an Extraordinary Season in the Forest by James Aldred (2021, Elliott and Thompson).
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wolfle Hazard (2022, University of Washington Press).

And James references the thinking of Anna Tsing, for example in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2021, Princeton University Press).

You can explore the work of SPUD, the arts and education charity where James undertook his New Forest Neuro/Queering Nature residency and which creates opportunities for people to engage with art, architecture, design and the environment; also, the Norfolk Rivers Trust’s The Beaver Project.

You can find more on Kai Syng Tan, the artist and researcher James mentions has inspired his exploration of decolonising of neurodivergence, at her website.

James Aldridge

A visual artist working with people and places, whose individual and participatory practices generate practice-led research into the value of artful, embodied and place-based learning ...

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.

***

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.

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.

Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart

Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White reviews fellow member Susan Holliday‘s creative guide, Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart, and finds ‘wise friends on the path’ of seeing deeply into connections, and a fellow traveller in the landscape of human nature.

1,600 words: estimate reading time = approximately 6.5 minutes

“It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.”
— Sioux medicine man Black Elk, quoted in Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart.

Lockdown, for me and many, once I’d got through the initial shock of the newness, became an opportunity to really look, listen. To see and to hear.

To hear the birds — in my case the red kites circling the Oxford streets where I spent a large chunk of lockdown time, and to see those birds close up for the first time. And the deer, emboldened by lack of traffic, explored the concrete and the human-inhabited world. It was a time to both see and hear inquisitively at first, and then more deeply, to enjoy the artfulness and insight, and to start to peer further into the nature of the physical, and the metaphysical.

A guide into the human heart

Of course, this is the first part of the process, to see and to hear, followed then by to feel, and to know. Finding guides, wise ones, therapists, gurus, seers — in Buddhism the term is sangha, ‘wise friends on the path’ — is crucial, otherwise we mainline on experience alone.

Showing the cover of Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart — Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart cover: ‘For the Love of Spring’, original artwork © Dee Nickerson

Therapist, photographer, and seer Susan Holliday has produced a clear, close, and wise guide to the process of deeply looking — a ‘when and how to, and what we might encounter’ book that should be alongside us as we navigate pandemics, liminal times, and all our explorations of this, the human journey. Natural insight is key to Holliday’s vision: it is what we all have, and have probably buried or veneered over with the hurly-burly of life. If we unpeel, and find ways back to it — through deep looking, creative expression, and seeing through the grief and the reasons we paper over our own cracks — this heartful insight enables a visionary life full of magic and wonder, connected to and part of the natural ecosystem of all life:

“Disconnected from the vital intelligence of our hearts we look to things, mountains of things, to replenish the void in our being. We plunder the natural world around us to fill the bottomless pit within. Our myopia, it seems, is costing us the earth.”

Holliday shares six client stories from her psychotherapy practice, which go deeply into how she can hold a client’s grief seemingly in her own soul:

“When the decisive moment came, I was able to ‘capture it immediately’ because my spirit was already full of him, full of his grief and pregnant with the shape of the beautiful carefree boy who once tumbled down the hills of his moorland home,” she writes of one client, named here as Jake. Of another, Cassy, Holliday says: “She has wandered into the heart of her own wilderness.”

Her professional beholding of clients, and leading them to a place of change, which she articulates so clearly and incisively, is matched throughout with her understanding of her own striving for seeing, and sensing the world through her own arts practice — through the lens. Although none of her images are found within the book, you can see her work shared on Twitter, and the book is full of references to the writers, artists, and activists who inform her journey.

The art of seeing deeply

Showing the coast and the North Sea, by James Murray-White — Photograph: James Murray-White © 2022

I was delighted when first opening the book to see so many quotes and nods to photographer Bill Brandt, whose black and white explorations of human forms on a beach, and wartime documentary stills, inspired me so much in my early studies in image-making, that has in turn informed the last 20 years as a filmmaker.

Holliday describes herself midway through Hidden Wonders as a “traveller in the landscape of human nature”, and this powerfully resonates with me. Equipped with an MSc in Human Ecology some years ago, I too set out to navigate that path through the hills of both articulated and mediated expression. Time and again, I need to return to that centred space of heartful hearing and insight from the natural worlds within — my own microfauna of emotional fungi and mycelial vessels of coursing blood.

A visual metaphor for the human heart — Photograph: James Murray-White © 2022

“At its best I believe that therapy is akin to painting, to playing an instrument, to speaking a poem or performing a play. Like those it has the potential to lift us, both seer and seen, towards a quality of vision which is equivalent to art, in that it opens us up to the richness, vitality and truth of our existence. So to explore the nature of insight, this book asks what painters, photographers, poets, sculptors and performers have to teach us about seeing deeply.”

There is a flow of both process and experience articulated with these particular clients and their often deeply painful and acutely alive stories, and in this expansive referencing of artists’ understanding of their creative practices, coupled with current advances in neuroscience, perception, and some religious philosophies. However, Hidden Wonders is to my mind a book that someway fills that space where retreating religions in the West have allowed our own creative expansiveness to fill, if we so wish it. It is a strong challenge, not to succumb to the industrial ‘achievement’ mindset, or be lashed by depression in response to systemic failures and collapse and all its latent traps that bind us to its synthetic portals.

I’ve been rereading this book while on a break in England’s North East, staying in a small coastal town ravaged by its mining past. Elemental materials were not long ago hauled out from deep bowels beneath the town, and now, as the pandemic opens into another era here, it is currently awash with regeneration funding, promoting mining museum culture and walking breaks across moors and stunning coastline. Instead of cracking the earth and removing its core, this locality now seems to be all about promoting looking, stretching, walking, seeing, planting, and engaging with a remediated landscape.

I’ve been fixated on walking past all that, nodding and chatting to locals, admiring the many huts of the local pigeon fancying group (some 30,000 birds kept here for racing and message carrying), and getting in some serious beach time along the coast: looking, and seeing past the material, soaking up the elements and seeking to understand myself within this process of stones and sand. Ebb and flow. Time and tide. Human industry and human leisure.

I sense that we, the human-sphere, are in what writer and eco-philosopher Mick Collins calls the ‘transformocene’, not the ‘anthropocene’ as some say, where we as a species rise to transform our reliance upon industrialisation, economic dependence, and the mechanical thinking that has grown from these mindsets. As Fritjof Capra describes ‘the systems view of life’: to finally fully understand our place within the ecology of all things, perhaps returning to the biblical Garden of Eden, or in the holistic sense of animal nature within the Gaian theory, as proposed by James Lovelock et al.

Choosing another path

While this is not a book dealing with climate grief per se, it does point us toward tools of awareness, which is the key to healing from the overload of trauma, and how we respond to and hold news of this climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Holliday acutely picks up on our possible human response of calcifying, or cracking, as “Our human ecology is becoming overheated. A sign that environmental stresses are overwhelming the inherent limits of our nature.”

She wisely returns with another choice: “We could hold the reciprocal qualities of strength and sensitivity in equal regard. We could understand that resilience depends on their intimate correlation.”

Social movements, uprisings, rebellions, protests — all are about change and resistance to old ways, changing seemingly dominant narratives of doing and exploiting that ultimately damage the earth’s resources and exploit ourselves as a species. These are vital community-building events; whether or not the object of rebellion or resistance is changed, a community has been formed around a ‘thing’, and now the energy exists — and change will come. Transformation will occur, and we will overcome. Transformation of our own selves and our stuck patterns, of subtle griefs and trauma, will happen, and in this vital book, Susan Holliday gives paths and examples to return to our natural insight, and live within ‘the vital ecology of the human heart.’

“Seeing through the heart of our sorrow, we discover a realm of human nature full of hidden wonders. Reconnected to our own source of replenishment and renewal, we might begin to cherish, rather than to plunder, the natural world around us.”

Find more

Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart: How to see through your sorrow – a creative guide to revelation and renewal by Susan Holliday (2021) is published by Troubador Publishing, where you can preview the book. You can find out more about Susan’s work as a psychotherapist and her writing and photography on Twitter @SusanHolliday0 and at susanholliday.co.uk.

James also mentions eco-philosopher Mick Collins and his proposal of the Transformocene in contrast to the concept of the Anthropocene. You can read more in Mark O’Connell’s 2018 Permaculture review of his book The Visionary Spirit. In April, Mick has a new book coming out, The Restorative Spirit, and James has recently been filming Mick for the launch.

James Murray-White

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