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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 ...

Exploring Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence

Kim V. Goldsmith presents a collaborative essay with fellow artists whose new exhibition, Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence, explores Regional Australia through intersectional feminism, adding personal reflections on her creative approach to sparking conversations about being good ancestors.

3,000 words: estimated reading time = 12 minutes

The main body of this post is a collaborative essay that Kim V. Goldsmith has produced with fellow artists Joanne Stead, Anna Glynn, Tracy Luff, Jane Richens, Laura Baker and Tania Hartigan and Regional Futures creative producer, Narelle Vogel, for their joint exhibition Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence at the Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre in Moruya, NSW Australia, from 26th October to 23rd November 2024. And Kim has added a personal reflection at the end of this post, exclusively for ClimateCultures.

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Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence is a collection of artworks informed by an intimate knowledge of Regional New South Wales, created by seven female artists of different backgrounds and experiences who choose to live and work regionally. Through an intersectional feminist lens, the artworks creatively mine the provocations, contradictions and tensions underlying the issues and opportunities impacting the future of Regional Australia—a vast place of great complexity and diversity.

Installation photos of the Regional Futures exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Western Sydney, 2023

As a way of understanding, intersectional feminism recognises how different aspects of our social and political identity intersect to influence how we think about and experience the world—through race, gender, and/or sexuality or other identifiers. These are the voices that tend to fall between the cracks in the conversations about our future. Even within this collection of works, they’re not fully represented.

Regional is defined by Australian authorities as all the towns, small cities and areas beyond the major capital cities. For those who understand the regions, they aren’t just shaped by the lack of people and traffic, or the mountains, hills, plains, forests, rivers, lakes and oceans, but a way of thinking and understanding. Each artist in An Entangled Existence draws on a deep understanding of these landscapes infused with ancient First Nations traditions and culture and shaped by colonisation. They are deeply connected with the regional communities they live within—the rich socio-ecological fabric of those places, and the complex and nuanced issues that are so often fertile ground for creatives.

The parent project behind the exhibition is Regional Futures: Artists in a Volatile Landscape. It began in 2022 as an initiative of the Regional Arts Network of New South Wales, funded by Create NSW, with a brief to place artists at the centre of a dialogue examining a future vision for the place where they live and create. This was done via self-directed, creative development residencies, culminating in an exhibition and symposium at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Western Sydney in 2023.

The artists commissioned for the Regional Futures project live and work alongside neighbours, friends and businesses at different stages of considering what the future will look like. Creative Producer of the 2022-23 Regional Futures project, Narelle Vogel says this gives these creative practitioners a unique opportunity to use their artform to pose more questions, reveal hard truths, and perhaps suggest solutions:

“Their art becomes a safe space for challenging conversations. And as many of us feel a sense of urgency, these artists are being proactive, showing that now is the time to work together towards a more positive future.”

Of the 27 artists involved in the original Regional Futures project, seven have come together for An Entangled Existence. They are Anna Glynn (Jaspers Brush), Laura Baker (Blayney), Tracy Luff (Goulburn), Jane Richens (Dungog), Joanne Stead (Tamworth), Tania Hartigan (Wallabadah), and Kim V. Goldsmith (Dubbo).

An Entangled Existence is a selection of the works developed during the original project, and since then, that continue the conversations started in 2022-23. They’re designed to not only question our ideas and values but inspire hopeful actions. Suggestions about the way forward are often revealed in the artworks, like Anna Glynn’s richly coloured video projection work, DWELLING. It speaks of what home is for us as a community, for the environment and the creatures we share these spaces with.

Entangled existence - Showing Anna Glynn, DWELLING, 2023, video still from moving image projection (image supplied by artist) — Anna Glynn, DWELLING, 2023, video still from moving image projection (image supplied by artist)

Based in the Shoalhaven, multi-disciplinary artist Glynn says the character of the regions is constantly changing and being reshaped to reflect new populations and expectations:

“Small country towns become bustling tourist hotspots inundated with visitors. Perceptions of our regions are shaped by economics. Pressure on the environment increases. The global phenomenon of over-tourism is becoming apparent, and we all participate in this in our own ways.

“Is there a happy medium that embraces all of the wants of humans living within an ancient landscape? What does a successful regional location look like?”

Glynn believes creative thinking and expression have a unique ability to highlight and direct consideration towards the bigger questions of regional life:

“There may also be opportunities for regional artists to profit or prophet in the changing nature of the regions. Our creative practices may draw on and mirror our regional environment giving us the potential to have a positive impact on regional futures.

“Finding ways for these messages to gain traction will be crucial for creatives and their communities.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Places We Call Home, 2023, hand cut paper, acrylic blocks, 10 x 2 x 15cm (image supplied by artist, Laura Baker) — Laura Baker, Places We Call Home, 2023, hand cut paper, acrylic blocks, 10 x 2 x 15cm (image supplied by artist)

Laura Baker’s finely crafted hand-cut paper houses and acrylic block installation, Places We Call Home also examines the impact of the built environment on individual and collective experiences of community. Hers is on the Central Tablelands of the state. She centres the emotionally loaded word ‘home’ against a backdrop of housing availability and the affordability crises:

“Over the past few years regional areas have seen an influx of new residents ‘escaping’ metropolitan centres. Demand for housing and our streetscapes are changing with new developments, contemporary houses and shiny facilities. Town planners and a miscellany of builders will influence the aesthetic of the regional future, but it is the spirit of the people that must be preserved through this period of growth.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Marionette, 2023: cardboard, 140 x 66 x 50cm (image supplied by artist, Tracy Luff) — Tracy Luff, Marionette, 2023, cardboard, 140 x 66 x 50cm (image supplied by artist)

Behind the closed doors of home, Tracy Luff has used her delicately hand-crafted cardboard sculptures to progress the conversation about Domestic Family Violence (DFV) in regional communities—for some, a place of no escape. Goulburn-based Luff’s Marionette and Pillows on the Wall tap into the notion of home not being a safe place, particularly during times of great stress:

“My work plays an integral role in breaking the silence, fostering open discussions, and challenging the stigma surrounding DFV.

“Building strong networks among women and community leaders is essential to creating support systems and sharing resources. Education, especially for the younger generation, is vital to recognising early signs of abuse and promoting healthy relationships.

“Advocating for improved access to services in rural areas, including counselling and legal support, is critical. By empowering women to speak out and support each other, we can ensure our regions move beyond awareness to actively eradicate DFV, fostering safety and equality for all.”

Entangled existence – weaving the domestic and the global

The works in An Entangled Existence move fluidly between domestic perspectives to regional and global views, asking audiences to acknowledge we are all part of complex, connected systems, where disruptions, good or bad, have a ripple effect.

The heroes of the Upper Hunter captured on video in Jane Richens’ Performative Portraits—Change Makers for a Low Carbon Future are those in the community taking individual actions towards a more sustainable future. Some actions are rhythmic and upbeat, others slow, meditative and ponderous. These people are changemakers in their communities, like stones dropped in a pond—each creating a ripple effect.

Entangled existence - Showing Aunty Sharon, 2023: video still from video series (image supplied by artist, Jane Richens) — Jane Richens, Aunty Sharon, 2023, video still from video series (image supplied by artist)

Richens sees the arts as a powerful mechanism to rethink and reimagine stories from regional locations using unexpected mediums:

“Watch, listen, learn, research, consider, rethink, reflect or retell stories, create new stories. This approach or stream of actions is relevant to any location or environment. It is the care and concern we give to reinventing in response to understanding where we are. That understanding is for me never a ‘one-story-tells-all’. Rather, it is the effort of engaging, experiencing and translating that is a worthwhile, creative and at times playful endeavour.

“My practice embraces creating community engagement activities to learn, question, understand and present environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem awareness, as well as ideas around sustainability.”

While change is a constant in our lives, it is not always easy. Joanne Stead had conversations with local communities around her home base of Tamworth before creating works that reflect ideas of our unacknowledged vulnerability and fragility as humans:

“A future that returns to a level of sustainability or regenerative possibilities is necessarily going to involve sacrifice, not the least of which might be the accumulation of things that is so rampant as part of a capitalist, consumerist society.

“We will not be able to continue in the manner to which we have become accustomed. In moving to a new mind frame, people’s perspectives will be uncomfortable.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Embodiment III, 2023: Eucalyptus leaf mache, jacaranda sticks, jasmine vine, paper twine, newsend, flour paste, jeweller’s wire, 88 x 48 x 49cm (image supplied by artist Joanne Stead) — Joanne Stead, Embodiment III, 2023, Eucalyptus leaf mache, jacaranda sticks, jasmine vine, paper twine, newsend, flour paste, jeweller’s wire, 88 x 48 x 49cm (image supplied by artist)

Stead’s sculptural Embodiment series, representative of women’s forms, reimagines our place within the ecosystem, emphasising we are not separate or superior to it but an integral part. Each artwork underscores the need to adopt sustainable practices and live in harmony with Earth’s rhythms.

Entangled existence - Showing: Step Lightly, handmade paper, 2023, 200 x 60 x 5cm (image supplied by artist, Tania Hartigan) — Tania Hartigan, Step Lightly, handmade paper, 2023, 200 x 60 x 5cm (image supplied by artist)

During the creative development stage of the Regional Futures project, Stead worked alongside Wallabadah-based Gamilaraay Yinaar artist Tania Hartigan to create works looking at what sustainability might mean. In talking about the processes behind her handmade paper work, Step Lightly, Hartigan says using environmentally friendly materials and studio practices are central to her living and working sustainably:

“I hear the words of Elders sing through my journey, ‘Take only what we need’. These words are important for all of us to ponder in our lives as members of a consumer-based world.”

Showing: Vaticinor Stories, 2023: audio story montage in custom upholstered vintage suitcase, duration 39 minutes (image supplied by artist, Kim V. Goldsmith, ) — Kim V. Goldsmith, Vaticinor Stories, 2023, audio story montage in custom upholstered vintage suitcase, duration 39 minutes (image supplied by artist)

Working across the Western Plains and the Mid North Coast of New South Wales during her residency for Regional Futures, Kim V. Goldsmith’s gathered field recordings of more-than-human voices—bats, birds, fish and earthworms, and first-person audio stories, developing a body of work titled Vaticinor (The Augur). Goldsmith seeks to imagine what a world fuelled by zero-carbon renewables might sound like—where the opportunities lie, and how new ways of thinking, knowing and understanding might achieve a more entangled and abundant future for humans and more-than-humans:

“If we listen to each other and the natural world more attentively and deeply, we’ll not only start to understand how connected we are, but that the future we want relies heavily on these connections and the need for more diversity.

“It’s critical we include more voices in these discussions about the challenges facing us. It’s a privilege to even be able to have these conversations, but we need to acknowledge that our behaviours, values and viewpoints often exclude some from participating.”

The intersectional feminist lens applied to the works assembled for this iteration of Regional Futures highlights the paradoxes of some of the issues facing regional communities. Each artist’s intimate relationship with their home territories offers advantages and disadvantages, as entanglement often does. However, Narelle Vogel sees each one as an active connector and conversationalist, amplifying the voices of their respective communities”

“They know how to engage through their art, exploring topics that in many other settings are seen as taboo, too difficult, too political.

“Many say that solutions will only be found through creative thinking, through challenging the norms and finding new paths. Artists are well placed to lead this process, using their creativity to bring together disparate thoughts, offering their work as another entry point into this collective conversation.”

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Creative conversations – listening to unheard voices

Kim adds for ClimateCultures: In the eighteen months since I wrote a post for ClimateCultures about my work as a commissioned Regional Futures project artist, looking at the impact fast-tracked renewable energy developments were having on regional communities of inland New South Wales (NSW), conversations about our future remain caught up in the ‘climate wars’. There’s been little change in the position of those in power on the direction of a renewable energy-driven future¹, with a commitment (if not enough action) to achieve net zero by 2050². We’re far from reaching that target³ and renewables won’t be enough to get us there.

Behind the resistance to wind and solar developments in some communities are conservative politicians calling for the lights to be kept on by extending the life of coal-fired power stations and developing more gas fields, while they fiddle the figures on unviable nuclear options⁴ in time for next year’s Federal Government election. All this energy infrastructure is in rural and regional Australia.

Showing: Humi Haptic Hands, 2023, haptic sculpture developed by Brian McNamara and soundscape composition, duration 15 minutes, (images supplied by artist, Kim V. Goldsmith) — Kim V. Goldsmith, Humi Haptic Hands, 2023, haptic sculpture developed with Brian McNamara and soundscape composition, duration 15 minutes, (images supplied by artist)

In my May 2023 post, I wrote of the need to listen to unheard voices in our consideration of the future. My work as a storyteller and sound artist exploring social and environmental ecologies has continued to seek ways to amplify the unheard—human and more-than-human, listening attentively and asking questions about what we need to do to ensure not just a sustainable future, but a more connected and biodiverse one. This is now playing out in a new self-directed residency project called SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes⁵, focusing on a farm where things are already being done and thought about very differently, despite being in the midst of a conventional broadacre cropping area.

During the recent local government elections in my home region, in the Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), a NSW political party called the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers⁶ surprised many by securing enough votes to put two candidates on council. The party are very conservative and anti-renewables. This is significant in light of local governments in NSW pushing for a greater role in renewable energy development planning⁷.

As the climate becomes increasingly unstable, there’s a growing sense of marginalisation and disconnection within less populated rural communities—a case of too much change coming too quickly, and a lack of trust in our political leadership. Australian not-for-profit climate communications organisation, the Climate Council reports a clear rural-urban divide when it comes to the impact of extreme weather events. It’s also clear that thoughts on how we reduce the carbon load on our environment are also divisive⁸. The impact in question isn’t just extreme weather events. Large-scale renewables bring with them changing land use and aesthetics, environmental impacts from clearing, and the shock of a workforce suddenly arriving in a community already short of housing, health services and public amenities. It’s also cultural change. Governments and the multinational developers are now keen to smooth things over by injecting tens of millions of dollars into the REZ communities for projects and infrastructure.

For me, the Regional Futures project and the work that has evolved from it, such as the Entangled Existence exhibition, has been an opportunity to take more personal action by initiating rarely had conversations about what it means to be a good ancestor⁹—looking ahead 30, 50,100 years. Significant investment in adaptations for surviving a more hostile climate, driven by political will and systemic change, along with new technologies, will be critical to securing our future. But as individuals within the communities bearing the brunt of change, we can’t afford to wait any longer. We are running out of time. We must step up, making a considered effort to better connect with each other and the more-than-human world, attentively listening, respectfully sharing our stories, and thinking deeply about what actions we can implement collectively, big and small, that will create a meaningful legacy for those who don’t have agency—our descendants. In the recently published book, Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet¹⁰, Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfield note “we have the opportunity to make a nation in which the next generations can survive and thrive on a different kind of Earth.”

Providing the creative framework for these conversations is something I can do, encouraging others to walk and talk with me. The Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence group exhibition at Moruya is an opportunity to take the conversation to another community. The South Coast of NSW is dealing with its own complex and nuanced issues in the face of rapid change. As artists, we can have these important conversations during the exhibition, setting the scene for a more abundant, entangled and diverse future, one conversation at a time.

Find more

The artists in the exhibition, Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence, are:

The exhibition at the Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre ran to 23rd November 2024.

Update 25/11/24: Following the successful run of the Regional Futures exhibition and events (see 31/10/24 update), Kim has written on her blog about the experience of being an artist, the artist’s role today, the power of collaboration, and recent work on evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations – along with insights from the collaboration with her fellow artists in this project. You can also watch the second, online panel discussion from the exhibition in her blog post.

Update 31/10/24: Kim has posted some photos from the exhibition opening on her Facebook page, and has shared this recording of the opening day’s panel discussion:

ecoPULSE / Kim V. Goldsmith · Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence panel discussion, 26 October 2024

A pdf of the artists’ essay Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence is available here at Kim’s ecoPULSE.art website; we’re pleased to have published it on ClimateCultures first, along with Kim’s personal reflections.

You can read Kim’s May 2023 ClimateCultures post Regional Futures: Giving Voice to Human and More-Than-Human, about her involvement in Regional Futures; Volatile Landscapes project.

References

[1] New South Wales Government Energy Co: Renewable Energy Zones

[2] Climate Change Authority: Australia’s 2035 Emissions Reduction Targets

[3] Climate Analytics: Sleight of hand: Australia’s Net Zero target is being lost in accounting tricks, offsets and more gas

[4] Liberal Party: Australia’s Energy Future

[5] EcoPULSE.art: SOIL+AIR

[6] Shooters, Fishers and Farmers: Our party

[7] The Guardian: ‘No one understands local issues better’: rural councils call for greater role in renewable energy transition

[8] The Climate Council of Australia: Climate Trauma: The growing toll of climate change on the mental health of Australians

[9] EcoPULSE.art: SPACE Walk

[10] Living Hot: Project and book

Kim V. Goldsmith

An artist exploring layers of nuance, complexity and hidden elements to present rural, regional and remote landscapes and communities in ways that make the familiar, unfamiliar.

Regenerative Designs for the Planet

ClimateCultures editor — and UK Architects Declare Manager — Mark Goldthorpe looks at new initiatives for regenerative design, a paradigm shift embracing principles of being a good ancestor, coevolving with nature and creating a just space for people.

2,330 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

For the past few decades — certainly since before I began my career in environmental and climate issues — ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ has been the guiding principle behind local, national and global efforts to steer us away from greater destruction of our natural world. Language has changed over that time, not least in how we talk about ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘global heating’, ‘climate catastrophe’, the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environmental justice’, ‘ecocide’, and so much more. But ‘sustainability’ has stuck — perhaps partly because this short word covers a host of meanings and so has the potential to bring disparate communities together around common concerns, albeit often working to different priorities.

The phrase ‘sustainable development’ emerged from the UN Brundtland Commission in 1987. It proposed a goal of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainability here was conceived of as protecting a capacity for humanity to survive, even thrive, into a future that was no longer being undermined by our present acceleration of resource depletion, accumulation of waste and pollution and destruction of natural habitats and wildlife: sustainability as the ability to carry on. Part of the word’s appeal is to businesses’ powers of innovation and enterprise in ways that can sustain their profitability by diverting it to less damaging activities. At the same time, environmentalists could see it as a practical vehicle for delivering better nature conservation, greater recognition of the innate value of the world’s habitats, species and ecosystems, and an urgently needed move to ecoefficiency.

Although much debated at the time across a spectrum of opinions, from ‘deep green’ to ‘green capitalism’, the promise of sustainable development was that we could meet our needs both now and indefinitely into the future. A large banner under which to gather all our ambitions for a better world.

Has it worked? What have we been sustaining for the past 30 years? Our technological efficiency has improved, and movements to stimulate and accelerate popular and political action have flourished. But our waste and pollution, our energy demand and resource use, our habitat destruction and species extinction, and the concentration of greenhouse gases in our oceans and atmosphere have all continued to grow too, with all the impacts we imagined these would bring, and more. ‘Growth’ is still the dominant paradigm, even with sustainability as the supposed goal.

In 2023 the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported that we’ve now breached six of the nine planetary boundaries we rely on. Can we say that sustainability is succeeding? Should we say it has failed? Do we need an entirely new paradigm? What might that be?

Showing a graphic of how we are crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre. — Crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre.

From declaring an emergency…

Part of what that much-needed change might be is captured in the increasing presence of ‘regenerative’ in debates over the transition to a better, cleaner, more ecologically balanced and socially equitable future lived safely within planetary boundaries. And one part of that shift has been work that I’m excited to be associated with through UK Architects Declare.

That movement has been gaining momentum and reputation since long before I joined, part-time, as AD’s manager in 2021. The initiative’ was launched in May 2019 by Michael Pawlyn, founder of Exploration Architecture, and Steve Tompkins of architectural practice HaworthTompkins. As Michael put it at AD’s 5th birthday party last month, back in late 2018 he and Steve had a gloomy couple of pints together as they contemplated the latest and most depressing report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how little concern there seemed to be in the architectural profession. They engaged a small group to organise a declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency. Their website very quickly attracted its first few hundred signatories and caught the imagination of the profession — not least because of its insistence on the need for change in our systems, not just (but also) in our behaviours. The declaration promoted a theory of change drawing on the work of Donella Meadows, who showed how the most effective way to change a system is through its higher ‘leverage points’: the paradigm behind the system and the mindset that sustains it, and the goals the system drives all of us towards.

Showing UK Architects Declare - regenerative design

This interest rapidly accelerated and expanded, spawning many related declarations across the built environment sector, around the UK and the globe. Today, more than 8,000 organisations have signed declarations in 28 countries under the banner of Built Environment Declares, and many other sectors have made their own declarations — including, of course, Culture Declares.

‘When AD started, pretty much no one outside of Sweden had heard of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion had yet to hit the headlines, Doughnut Economics had only recently been published, the WellBeing Group of Governments had yet to form, China had yet to announce a date for decarbonisation, the idea of a Law of Ecocide, the Rights of Nature, or Future Generations legislation were all seen as distant dreams. And yet since then a lot of governments have actually implemented them.

‘And one area where I think all of us as signatories can enjoy some credit: five years ago hardly anyone was talking about regenerative design, and now everyone is. That’s something we’ve all created together — the potential for architects to reclaim our agency as shapers of the future, as integrators and systems thinkers, as people who want to be able to proudly look our children in the eye in ten years time and say “Yes, I saw this coming and this is what I did about it.”’

— Michael Pawlyn

UK Architects Declare works on a dual approach: providing practical support to its signatory practices so they can implement their 12-point declaration while operating in the current flawed economic and social system; and demonstrating how the system can be changed to one that works within our planetary boundaries and deliver social and environmental justice. The point, as Meadows demonstrated, is not to feed the paradigm that’s created our emergency by merely tinkering at its margins, but to build a new paradigm — in this case, based on regenerative rather than degenerative principles.

… to regenerative design for a better future

In its latest work, AD has developed a set of policies — Building Blocks — to transform the built environment, and guidance for architects and urban designers in a ‘work in progress’ Regenerative Design Primer. And, working with media partner Architecture Today, it has launched a new community initiative, the Regenerative Architecture Index. The Index will bring together, learn from and promote examples of regenerative activity at two levels: the practice and its projects. The Building Blocks address the need for government policies for resource efficiency, circular economy and social and natural infrastructure. These are based on foundations of climate literacy and climate leadership, alignment with well-being and planetary limits, and safeguarding future generations’ ability to act. Meanwhile, both the Primer and the Index promote clear principles for designers and businesses in the built environment sector: being a good ancestor, co-evolving with nature, and creating a just space for people.

Showing the Regenerative Design Primer, from UK Architects Declare 2024 — Regenerative Design Primer, UK Architects Declare 2024

Being a good ancestor is about a shift in mindsets to consider the truly long-term: thinking seven generations ahead and ensuring adaptability and flexibility for the future.

Co-evolving with nature is about recognising that we’re part of nature, within integral living systems, not separate from it: actively regenerating, learning from and working with natural systems.

Creating a just space for people is about providing social connection, economic opportunity and wellbeing for all: fostering a shared sense of stewardship where neighbourhoods can self-organise and build their resilience.

Together, these principles require innovative thought, designing for circularity and encouraging closed-loop energy, material and water cycles, and adopting ethical, inclusive and participative approaches.

The Primer makes a distinction between adopting these principles and continuing with the now conventional approach. Regenerative design transcends ‘sustainability’ in three key ways:

From being ‘less bad’ to being net positive.
From being just focused on humans to considering the whole web of life.
From a mechanistic approach that can focus too exclusively on carbon (‘carbon reductivism’) to a more holistic and systemic approach.

Regenerative design mimics natural ecosystem processes, which keep cycling and transforming materials and grow healthier and more diverse ecosystems. It uses a systems approach to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with those of nature. This means looking beyond the boundary of a project or a specific site. By doing so, it delivers positive environmental and social outcomes, ensuring both human and planetary health.

— Regenerative Design Primer (p8)

Just as the May 2019 AD declaration of planetary emergency quickly attracted more support than the founders initially anticipated, in May 2024 the first iteration of the Regenerative Architecture Index gained an encouraging number and diversity of entries. Architecture Today and UK Architects Declare will be announcing the scheme’s inaugural results next month, with a special celebratory event and issue of AT’s magazine. AD will then work with participants to take a deep dive into their experiences and ideas. That learning, with feedback on the Regenerative Design Primer, will cycle directly into the next iterations of both Primer and Index next year, and no doubt spark new policy work and other initiatives.

Creative agency for change

For me, witnessing and supporting the huge amount of voluntary work that dedicated professionals — across AD’s steering group and others in small groups working to support architectural practices and engage policymakers — is energising and motivating. And the mounting realisation that not only do we need a new, positive paradigm but that one is possible and is actually being demonstrated is empowering and generates practical hope.

Another key distinction between regenerative and sustainability-driven approaches to change is that it is inherently creative: it calls on us to expand and engage our imaginations and to help design the difference we want to see. It is also an exercise in humility, recognising the world beyond our own self-centred horizons and timescales and drawing inspiration from others — human and more-than-human, and an enhanced sense of what the future can be and how its inhabitants too can flourish.

When I set up ClimateCultures in 2017, after working with the charity TippingPoint on immersive events for artists and scientists to explore creative responses to the emergency, it was out of a sense that to create change that seems hard or impossible, we need at least two things above all: a sense of agency and a sense of community or association. As I wrote in an article on ClimateCultutes, agency for change and the environmental imagination:

“We need to feel we can do something meaningful and that others are on board. Of course, we also need action itself, and increasing awareness of the problems. And these things are all interrelated: action, association, agency, awareness. Sometimes it’s personal action that comes first, providing the spark to taking more action as part of a community; these experiences help to grow both our personal and shared awareness of the issues, leading to yet more action, and so our agency builds and builds. It can be a virtuous circle, rather than the vicious cycle of frustration, disappointment and despondency.

“If there’s one thing that helps drive this virtuous circle and motivates change, I think it’s imagination. A sense that things can be different, that there are other ways of acting and living than we now take for granted. Even if we don’t know how to enact these differences, imagination gives us a new picture, casts new light on the old picture, or helps us realise that other people who we’ve barely acknowledged until now have pictures to share with us. Imagination is both an exploration and expansion of our horizons.”

As Culture Declares says, “culture can help stir up human response as well as breaking old habits and creating new stories and visions for our world … culture is what humans – and other species – do to create conditions for life to thrive. We can think in a new way about Culture as organised activities, so that we can create a Regenerative culture.”

Many ClimateCultures members and readers will also be signatories to Culture Declares or other declarations — Heritage Declares, Design Declares, and so on. And ClimateCultures would love to share your stories, examples and experiences. How does your work as an artist, researcher or curator draw on or inspire regenerative paradigms or goals? What creative works inspire you? How do you respond to the emergency and the history of sustainability-led approaches to tackle it? Where next?

Find more

You can find the original definition of Sustainable Development and much else about how it’s being implemented at the United Nations Sustainable Development pages.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has produced several reports on its planetary boundaries work. This has also been adapted by Doughnut Economics Action Lab to promote the need for a social foundation that ensures no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, as well as an ecological ceiling to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries.

Donella Meadows published her highly influential paper Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System in 1999.

Michael Pawlyn has co-authored Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency with Sarah Ichioka, published by Triarchy Press (2021). They also host an excellent series of podcasts on the book’s themes.

You can find the Regenerative Design Primer and information on the Regenerative Architecture Index, as well as the Building Blocks manifesto and many other resources at UK Architects Declare. If you work for or with, or know people within architectural or other construction-related organisations, have they signed a shared declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency? You can find these at Built Environment Declares. Other declarations include Culture Declares, Heritage Declares, Design Declares and Business Declares.

You can read ClimateCultures, agency for change and the environmental imagination at my site. You might also like this 2017 post on a free ecololinguistics course that looks at the power of words such as ‘growth’ over our imaginations: The Stories We Live By.

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.

Sharing the Fire — Hope Tales Event & Chapbook

Practical activist and artist Nicky Saunter revisits the Hope Tales project, with its fourth event and chapbook exploring ‘Fire’ themes in the Celtic winter Samhain festival, shared learning from other cultures and creatures, live music, poems and stories.

1,010 words: estimated reading time = 4 minutes

When I first studied applied photography and monochrome printing under the eccentric, brilliant West Country teacher Ron Frampton, I was puzzled by his warning “beware the new” each time we gathered to view our work from the previous week. Wise words indeed; each new image laid on the table for viewing brought “ooh”s and “aahh”s, apparently better than what we had already done. Yet this happened each week and we weren’t improving that quickly! There was something in the very newness of each image being seen for the first time; it was exciting, thrilling — and faded quickly.

I always think it is strange that funders prefer to put their money into new, riskier initiatives rather than supporting things that already work well. Perhaps the draw of the new is inevitable for us humans; shiny new tech, something different to wear, a book still to read — we draw excitement from anticipation itself. Perhaps this is why our project Hope Tales still retains the thrill, excitement and ability to surprise. Even calling it a project seems falsely formal because this series of happenings has been remarkably organic, changing each time to reflect its location and participants, repeating a tried and tested pattern, and yet being new each time.

Hope Tales events — the magic of the mix

The concept is simple: gather a bunch of creative people in a room for a couple of hours and ask them to share something on a theme with the rest of the room. Supply some food and drink, some fairy lights and some music. Gather up the songs, poems, bits of writing and drawings afterwards and make them into a pocket book. Repeat. And it is never the same.

Hope Tales - showing chapbook 4: Fire

In my first piece about Hope Tales for ClimateCultures, I wrote about our first three events, which were held in London, Somerset and Essex on the themes of Air, Land and Water respectively. Last autumn on a drizzly dark Hallowe’en (or All Souls’ Night), we held Hope Tales event number four on the theme of Fire at the wonderful Margate School by the sea. The magic happened again, with pieces about learning from other cultures and creatures, the Celtic winter festival of Samhain, and live music from the Swedish folk band Tree Oh! We welcomed Henry Coleman and Eva Badola for the first time.

Hope Tales event: showing Eva Badola talking about sustainable tourism. — Eva Badola talking about sustainable tourism. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2023

Our hosts for the night was an independent not-for-profit postgraduate liberal arts school right in the heart of Margate, run by artist and educator Uwe Derksen, whose giant crow you can see below. What a presence to have looking over our shoulders as we performed!

Margate School with Uwe Derksen’s giant crow figure. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2023

The Margate School is based in a former Woolworths building that had stood empty since 2008 and has played an influential part in the story of Margate’s regeneration. We had help from local sound technicians to ensure the music worked, because Tree Oh! were performing songs specially written in collaboration with poet-economist, Andrew Simms, to celebrate London’s green spaces. They have since launched an EP.

Hope Tales event: showing Swedish folk bank Tree Oh! performing songs about London’s green spaces. — The Swedish folk bank Tree Oh! performing songs about London’s green spaces Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2023

Hope Tales chapbooks — a hopeful light

The Fire chapbook we made from the contributions on this night is now available to download, along with the previous chapbooks. And our next Hope Tales event — the last in this series — will be at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, London on 30th May from 7-9pm, so please do get in touch if you would like to be a contributor. The theme is Love (in a hopeful light), which seems apt as it feels like we could particularly do with some more love in the world at the moment.

Surely there is nothing new to say about love, I hear you say. And yet I know that once again people will gather, share what has come into and then out of their individual creative minds and by collaborating will make together something much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Excerpt from Hope Tales IV – Fire: Poem by Nicky Saunter © 2023

The Hope Tales project has been a joy to participate in, maybe because it has been so light touch and unconstrained. A perfectly timed piece of funding from the University of Essex provided the fuel for us to maintain our campfire, and our team of collaborators have come together each time with enthusiasm, creativity and laughter. It is of course endlessly expandable — and was designed to be so. A Hope Tales event could be put on in any place with any group of creative people. It could be done on a very small budget or none at all, so do get in touch if you are interested in doing one yourself.

Working in the field of sustainability can be a grim slog at times and this way of approaching the unknown through hope and fundamental themes has proven uplifting. The role of hope, imagination and story in facing climate change is a slim but strong lifeline into the future.

Find more

You can read Nicky’s previous post on the Hope Tales project from the Rapid Transition Alliance, the Centre for Public and Policy Engagement at the University of Essex and the New Weather Institute, Hope Tales – Stories for Change. And all four chapbooks are available to download from the Rapid Transition Alliance. To find out about the Hope Tales: Love event at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, London on 30th May, contact nicky@newweather.org

You can hear Tree Oh!‘s EP Our Urban Nature, songs with Andrew Simms here.

The Margate School, where the Hope Tales: Fire event took place, is an independent not-for-profit postgraduate liberal arts school and creative community hub inspired by making a positive difference to our communities and environment.

Nicky Saunter

A practical activist, campaigner, social entrepreneur and artist with a particular focus on communication, between people and between humans and the rest of the natural world.

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.