Photographer Robynne Limoges shares evocative images inspired by the haiku form, in her pursuit of the ‘philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.’
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times is a series that I have been shooting for a long time. When I began the series I had been photographing nature only sporadically, but my increasing unease in the world led me to choose the natural world for tutoring. I tried to keep foremost in my mind the question of how I might distill the natural world’s organic profusion into minimal yet emotional imagery. Ultimately, I was looking for a means of relief from the constant grappling of humans against nature, an antidote to the high barometer of conflict, a specific visual approach that would suggest, not shout, that might lend a degree of quietude and a point of contemplation, a sotto voce conversation between ourselves and our world.
The concept for the title Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times originates from my reverence for Japanese haiku. Haiku is a minimal poetic form that does not rhyme. It does not always comfort. It does not conclude. But it does distill. It does invite meditation on the luminance within the ordinary. Most importantly to me, it dwells upon the beating heart of place.
My hope is that the viewer will find that these images possess an enigmatic and emotional quality; that they will decipher my pursuit of the philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.
In the slideshow below, the images appear in the following sequence:
Dialogue — The eternal contest: light against dark, chaos reigning, even under the glare of light, the solitude of reflection, the discourse, as in Plato’s Dialogues, on harmony of words and deeds.
The Wave — The light is passing out of my sight, the cliff turns toward darkness, the sand/land liquifies, the waves roil.
Constellation Haiku — A rain and lichen spattered pathway lit by storm, constructed beyond the limits of a tiny country graveyard no longer in use.
The Way of Water — The way of water: the most invincible force of all, finding the path of least resistance. Climate is the new Fury, wreaking havoc, water increasingly becoming a force of chaos. And the lack of it erasing wider and wider swaths of life.
Bird in Flight — I once wrote a poem whose first line was ‘In June on unfound lakes in Minnesota, there is a bird that flies below the water, so close to the surface it casts a shadow on the sky’. Manifested all those years later in breeze and sand, tide and the dance of light, I saw the shuddering wake of that bird’s path through a medium not its own.
The Light is Impenetrable — A metaphorical image of the interlacing of myriad night tracers, blinding the sightline of those on duty at the edge of dark Vietnam billets.
Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times (For full screen slideshow, click at the top of image, left or right of centre)
An artist who uses photography in a search for illumination, playing out the metaphysical question of just how little light is required to dispel darkness. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets a new challenge: create small expressions of the more-than-human in the form of a signal for humanity. His inaugural signal appears as an alien encyclopedia entry cast adrift, backwards in time and space…
1,840 words: reading time 7.5 minutes
The challenge: Can you bring us a signal from a distant zone? ClimateCultures offers Members a new challenge: to create a small artistic expression of the more-than-human in the form of new signal for humanity. Is it a message — whether meant for our species or for another kind, which we overhear by chance? An artefact of some other consciousness? Or an abstraction of the material world? Something in any case that brings some meaning for us to discover or to make, here and now, as we begin to address the Anthropocene in all its noise. A small piece of sense — common or alien — amidst the confusion of human being.
Whatever signal you create — whether it’s an image, a short text, a sound, a storyboard, a dream sequence, a combination of any of these or something other — it might be strong and unambiguous when we perceive it, or weak and barely detected within a background noise. But it will be something that we are likely to miss if you don’t draw our attention to it. (You might also want to play with the idea of the background noise in some way, or omit it entirely and offer us just the signal, filtered).
Where does your signal come from? The source zone might be distant from us in time or in space, in scale (from the quantum to the cosmic), in sensory perception (in a different sensitivity or range to ours, or utterly new), or in any other aspect of experience or imagination. If it carries a message, is it explicit or implicit, coded or clear, instantly familiar even if remote, or entirely alien?
What edge is your signal representing? It might be: a place; a boundary; a transition; an experience; a capability; a sensory range; a technology; a consciousness; a category; an uncertainty; an unknowing.
This is deliberately broad, even vague, to offer you as much room as possible for interpretation. The choice is yours. The key things are:
Offer a short creative piece (maybe 100 – 300 words, or one to five images, or up to three minutes of audio or video).
Ideally, provide a short context or commentary piece alongside it.
If you wish, provide some suggested links that people might follow to explore your inspiration for themselves.
This creative challenge is complementary to our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, and is not specifically object-oriented; make your signal as conceptual or as concrete as you like. Let your imagination go free range!
To start the series — and to see whether anyone bites — here is my personal signal from the edge.
***
Signal #1: Pale.Blue
Pale Blue Dot Syndrome (colloquial, ‘Blue‘; archaic, ‘Sagan’s Pixel‘): a malaise of Gaian-class consciousness, in legend derived from the ProtoGaian Terra before its first outwave. Though Terra’s existence is now doubted by most, the term’s origin is implied in that fabled aquatmosphere’s supposed chromatocharacteristics.
According to the legend, ‘Blue’ malaise arose initially among Terra’s self-extincted Homosagans, a biosubstrate component that developed protoawareness, dominance delusions and abortive fledgeflight. Their very first projectiletechnoproxysensorium view back to Terra from their solsystem’s margins (attributed to the preconscious emissary Voya, which records show may have actually existed, although it would have long ago subsumed into the AyEyeBrane) fed into mistaken notions of Terra’s solitary life-bearing status. Fabulists speculate that Homosagans sensed that this one dimensional image — their ‘dot’ — contained all that their species had ever known, done or been; achievements, failings, experiences and emotional states which they soon after recited into the Blue List Library (also now lost except to legend).
‘Blue’ then infected the Terran being itself when consciousness bootstrapped from its lively but transient biosubstrates up to the Gaian level and into the All Time, once the Homosagans had ceased and been reabsorbed. As such, myth accords with our understanding of ‘Blue’ as a persistent memeviroid that all Gaians carry from our zooriginal levels, and which is still capable of inducing disequilibrium regarding our truth claims for the Galactaian One —
Into Whose Consciousness We Raise Ourselves.
***
Pale.Blue — context
On 5th September 1977 (when I was 12 years old, the human population was just over 4 billion and CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere were about 335 ppm), NASA launched its Voyager I probe as part of a mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. That mission was completed in 1989 (24; 5.3 billion; about 350 ppm) and both Voyagers I and II later travelled on into the outer reaches of the solar system. On 25th August 2012 (47; over 7 billion; about 395 ppm), Voyager I flew beyond the heliopause, the outer extent of the Sun’s magnetic field and solar wind. At this point, it became humanity’s first physical artefact to reach interstellar space (radio and TV broadcasts first reached into this zone some 60 years earlier: humanity’s first emissaries to other suns…).
Voyager I is currently moving away from us at a speed of over 3.5 AUs per year (one rather anthropocentrically named Astronomical Unit being the average distance from Earth to the Sun: about 93 million miles, which sunlight covers in about 8 minutes); at that rate, it would take the probe about 80,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our nearest solar neighbour at 267,000 AUs away (although it isn’t even headed in that direction). Our TV broadcasts, travelling outwards at the speed of light, clock up 63,000 AUs per year, and reach Proxima Centauri in just over four years. On these scales, Voyager is very slow and still very very close to home.
Meanwhile, on 14th February 1990 (25; 5.3 billion; about 350 ppm), astrophysicist Carl Sagan revealed an image that Voyager I’s camera had recorded when NASA colleagues – at his request – turned the probe to point back to the Sun. Almost hidden in the frame, obscured by sunlight flaring off the spacecraft itself, was an image of Earth that had never been seen before, from a vantage point that had never previously been possible: 40 AUs out, or over 3.7 billion miles, our world as the now famous Pale Blue Dot.
Voyager’s camera was still close to home in cosmic terms, and moving at the pace of an Arcturan MegaSnail (had Douglas Adams ever invented one); but these were distances and velocities as far beyond human experience as we are ever likely to see from again in my lifetime (90 if I’m lucky? 9 billion? 600 ppm at the current rate of stupidity?) And it came just 18 years after another famous image of Earth — this time as a blue marble — when, in December 1972 (8; 3.9 billion, about 330 ppm), the Apollo 17 astronauts captured the whole Earth on their approach to the Moon. One of the most viewed — and transmitted — images of our planet will have reached our nearest neighbour at around the time Voyager I was launched.
The Earth as seen from Apollo 17, 1972 Image taken by either Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans, astronauts Photo: Public domain, NASA
Apollo 17 was the final mission to the Moon in the 20th century. Those last humans walking on an alien world — the most remote that any such beings have ever been from other members of their own species (or from any other we know of, other than the ones in their own guts) — were less than 0.003 AUs from home. So far, barring any microbes catching a ride on our space probes, no other terrestrial lifeform has made it further (except for in those TV adverts, of course).
As mentioned in my piece for A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, as well as their cameras and other instruments, the Voyager craft also took recordings of human and other Earthly voices and sounds. Incredibly, some of the instruments are still gathering data and sending them back home for NASA to detect, unpick and translate: ever-weakening signals from way beyond. But the camera that recorded us all as a pale blue dot will never see us again.
Someone might be looking down a long lens from a distant future, however. A future when they — alien intelligences, perhaps on the scale of whole worlds — might also have found solace in myths, arts and sciences of their own, and are maybe broadcasting them on faster-than-light entertainment shows and a Star Wide Web that spills out far beyond their star clusters, backwards in time and space towards us. What new technology will enable us to receive and read their dark spectrum?
*
Back on Earth, Carl Sagan spoke to his press conference audience as he presented the image for the first time. You can watch him on a 1990 TV broadcast that would have overtaken Voyager I about six hours later. He later developed his theme in his book, Pale Blue Dot:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses. Read More
Composer and pianist Lola Perrin offers this roundup of her own and many others’ experiences of ClimateKeys — the major, global initiative she set up to bring together musicians, experts and audiences to engage in climate change conversations.
3,100 words: estimated reading time 12.5 minutes
The latest ClimateKeys concert took place at the end of November in a candlelit art gallery under the arches in Waterloo as part of PowPowPower, a month-long series of arts events linked to climate change. Violin and cello duo, Fran & Flora, performed their virtuosic style of sonorous Eastern European folk music, at times bursting into truly beautiful acapella singing. Their set was followed with a talk by Nolan MacGregor whose premise was that the increasingly absurd system of commodity production is one of the chief factors in driving climate change. MacGregor then facilitated a conversation, with audience members sharing comments and ideas. Afterwards we were treated to a final piece of music before viewing the climate change art in the gallery and retiring to the bar where conversation about climate change, and the music, continued.
Performers Fran & Flora with ClimateKeys guest speaker, Social Theorist Nolan MacGregor at PowPowPower
ClimateKeys is an initiative I founded that pairs concert musicians with climate change experts across the world to provide new opportunities for conversations. At the October gala launch in London ten pianists performed to a full house, with the music being interspersed with talks by Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Truth about Zane campaign and Hannah van den Brul. During October and November thirty-three concerts took place in nine countries. The speakers were scientists, policy experts, physicians, economists, radio journalists, legal experts, ecologists, psychologists and other specialists, all giving talks within the setting of a concert performance. Comments, photos, videos have been coming in to give a snapshot view of the concerts, for example;
“The audience members really wanted to talk and learn, and the discussion lasted longer than I thought it would … for me personally, this was incredibly rewarding.” (Political Science Professor Matt Hoffmann, who collaborated with pianist Erika Crino in Toronto.)
“Helping spark discussion and lay the foundation for civic engagement among my peers tonight made me feel like I was making a tangible difference in the world.” (Caroline, performer and audience member at a Syracuse University London ClimateKeys concert.)
“It’s important to think, talk and do something for future generations. The unusual blend of music and ecology is a good environment to make the audience think about climate change, everyday local problems (plastic bags, biodiesel, heating …). Thanks to ClimateKeys we have this wonderful collaboration of our Music and Technical Schools.” (Speaker Jovanka Vicentic, Ecology teacher, who collaborated with young pianists in Serbia.)
“One audience question was on how prepared we should be to compromise. If we choose to be vegan, does that mean we can continue to fly around the world?” (Extract from description of the conversation at Cynefin’s concert in London with guest speaker Julia Marques, climate change dramatist.)
“The general manager from the venue was very happy too and was also interested in more projects with us.” (Pianist Neslihan Schmidt, who performed with Dr Andrzej Ancygier in Berlin.)
Pianist composer Marija Ligeti Balint’s ClimateKeys concert in Pancevo, Serbia made the pages of local newspaper Pancevac, 17th November 2017 www.pancevac-online.rs
Excitingly, musicians responded in ways I hadn’t anticipated; creating inspired programmes around what climate change means to them and choosing works reflecting nature, the chaos of climate change and the constancy of the Holocene. Composer Alexander Schwarzkopf was inspired to complete and perform his work Liquid Piano, which “investigates evaporation, drought, flood, frost, birdsong and imaginary radio waves from outer space. Repetition is an important element of these compositions as it is integral to the processes of the natural and manmade world.” Liquid Piano caught the imagination of local news media and triggered further climate change discussions.
New work is also emerging from the concerts. Florida ClimateKeys speaker, physician Dr John Strasswimmer, who collaborated with Duo Gastesi-Bezerra and artist Justin Guariglia, produced an imaginative video in response to both ClimateKeys and his research using spectroscopy.
Opportunities to imagine, to begin talking
The ClimateKeys concept grew out of my ninth suite, Significantus, for piano, a guest speaker (who gives a talk on positive response to climate change) and a conversation with the audience. Climate Outreach founder George Marshall kindly brainstormed with me and told me that “two thirds of people who are asked when they last had a conversation about climate change say they’ve never had a conversation about climate change.” This made me think that moving the conversation into the centre of whatever we do in life is vital, so I moved it into the centre of my concerts. I’ve been performing Significantus since September 2016 and have collaborated so far with nearly twenty speakers, reached around 600 audience members and possibly created over 1,500 conversations due to the ripple effect. Now that other musicians are using that same concert formula in ClimateKeys, many hundreds more climate conversations are taking place than I alone can achieve.
ClimateKeys talks are given without projections or PowerPoint presentations, leaving the imagination free to roam. The audience may get a surge of images running through their minds, perhaps the lobster with a Pepsi logo tattoo, or the plastic islands in the seas, or the recent fire in California that burned an area larger than the size of New York City, or the millions of homeless Bangladeshis wading through floodwaters, or shrinking, low lying coastlines in the global South, or oil spills in Dakota, or Black Friday over-consumption, or Chinese smog, or children in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining minerals for our smartphones … the list goes on. Such overwhelm can create a catatonia, but the job of the guest speaker is to negotiate around our potential stupor and suggest positive directions in which to engage; for example, revising our rate of meat consumption, or re-designing our economy so that we live within nature and not at its expense, or putting renewable energy into place in developing nations to fight poverty without increasing warming emissions, or the role of digital innovation in environmental justice, or lobbying politicians around carbon pricing … The speaker synopses on the ClimateKeys website give an overview of the talks.
In every corner of the global effort is a myriad of features, responses, ideas, solutions, proposals, foundations, experts, schemes, charities, activist groups. Each day, if we choose to seek it out, and especially by searching on social media, we see more analysis, more reports, more research papers, more conferences, more expertise, more comment. Navigating around increasing flows of information on climate change, choosing what to focus on, trying not to miss the glaringly important, attempting to marry big solutions with individual choices: it is complicated.
ClimateKeys concerts are opportunities to practise talking — or in some cases, to begin talking — about climate change. The first wave of concerts was timed to take place during COP23, to raise public engagement with Bonn. To some extent this was successful as several concerts got local newspaper, TV and radio features, including front page coverage in Trump’s local paper, Palm Beach Daily News (I understand that he does read this one!). It was noticeable that there was no coverage by the BBC and UK press, despite numerous efforts. Two ClimateKeys speakers were COP23 delegates; Banja Luka’s Professor Goran Trbic and Berlin’s Dr Andrzej Ancygier.
Local coverage by the Palm Beach Daily News, 4th November 2017 www.palmbeachdailynews.com
Necessary, desirable and achievable
Ancygier is a policy analyst and a contributor to a new report, 2020 The Climate Turning Point, which took centre stage at COP23. I watched the livestream from the session, 2020: The necessary, desirable and achievable turning point to safeguard our climate. Chaired by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, heavyweight panelists Christiana Figueres (former UNFCCC Executive Secretary), Johan Rockström (Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre), Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber (founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), and Kevin Anderson (Chair of Energy and Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre), made presentations on how, if global CO2 emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature commitments set in Paris and the Sustainable Development Goals the world agreed to in 2015 become unattainable. The speakers agreed on outcomes although there was some disagreement on methodology. Good questions came from the audience and online viewers.
I recommend watching this session in its entirety (see link below). But to briefly summarise the ten-minute presentations:
Figueres spoke of 2020 being a critical turning point in which we reach peak emissions and thereafter drive emissions into a steadily descending curve to avoid a much steeper rate of reductions later on. In this latter scenario, the curve will look more like a cliff edge and in such a speedy transition society would not be able to support citizens; numerous, sudden job losses would make for social upheaval and unrest. Although she actively engages with an increasing number of corporations, not enough businesses currently work from this perspective.
Anderson argued for mitigation (emissions reduction) to become a COP focus through the top 10% of individual emitters in the world (climatologists are in this 10%) reducing their emissions to the level of the average European and thereby lowering global carbon emissions by 33% straight away. He believes COP itself should “lead by example” and reduce its own footprint. Anderson suggested that the requirement of a zero carbon energy system is a lower total energy consumption (or ‘smart 21st Century energy use’ as Zero Carbon Britain describes this), and so fundamental systemic change is needed in which we all must start playing our part now.
Rockström detailed clear technological steps to keeping within the 1.5°C limit, and argued for the removal of fossil fuel subsidies as an immediate priority.
Schnellnhuber suggested new private-public partnerships to fund the transition away from employment in dirty energy, proposing that money in tax havens be put to better use and liberated into new investments in clean energy. Schnellnhuber is an adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel and so it’s revealing to think that this type of debate might be happening in the German government.
Repeated themes ran through the session; “it’s all about Time”, “don’t be late”, “we’ve known what it is we must do”, “we’re saying we must start doing this by 2020”, and “the procrastination must stop.” So, what will happen if, despite COP outcomes, the procrastination does not stop?
Taking on procrastination
Shortly after signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, in a gut-wrenching moment, British Prime Minister David Cameron slashed subsidies for solar panels. In the Budget right after this year’s COP and its focus on the year 2020, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond announced tax incentives prolonging North Sea oil and gas investment. A month earlier, Brazil announced it was proposing a bill to give subsidies worth $300 billion to oil companies to drill off its shores. Given that the clear message from Bonn is that emissions need to peak two years from now and then go into a steady decline of 6% per year to stay under the carbon budget and have the chance of meeting the 1.5°C limit by mid-century, we don’t have time to sit around just in case, miraculously, in the next twenty-four months, the required amount of political will somehow shows up.
When political processes fail, the next step is to turn to the law. Perhaps that next step has already arrived. More and more, we see litigation around the world: the UK government being sued for illegal pollution levels; the US government for stealing a stable climate from American teenagers; 47 countries for not protecting Portuguese schoolchildren from climate change. In a brand new case, Plan B (co-founded by a former government lawyer) is suing the UK government for climate inaction, in a move that has recently drawn support from leading doctors who published a letter in the British Medical Journal on 7th December 2017. Helpfully, Plan B has also made its website into a source of litigation information for the international community. And at the Cambridge Literary Festival in November, ClientEarth founder James Thornton spoke of how the Chinese government is currently training lawyers to sue the Chinese government (yes, you read that correctly!) if it doesn’t meet its own targets.
The day after the M2020 presentation in Bonn, climatologist and founder of the innovative televised Global Weirding series Katharine Hayhoe was in conversation with George Marshall at University Church of St Mary in Oxford. Hayhoe was there to talk about her work communicating climate change to ‘dismissers’ (her preferred term for deniers) in the heartland of Republican Texas. I attended and was glad to bump into fellow ClimateCultures member, author Deborah Tomkins, as well as Cardiff ClimateKeys speaker, environmental psychologist Dr Stuart Capstick. Deborah and I had a conversation a few days later. We discovered we’d both been inspired by Hayhoe’s account of having been invited to present a one-hour talk to an oil company in Texas; after two and a half hours they still didn’t want to let her go, asking what they should do to become part of the solution rather than remain part of the problem.
This Texan tale, along with the need to stop the political procrastination and immediately remove fossil fuel subsidies described by the panel at COP23, and the role of litigation are four guides to lead my development of ClimateKeys into 2018.
Moving out of the concert hall
After such a strong start, courtesy of the many musicians and speakers who gave concerts in October and November, ClimateKeys is set to carry on initiating more such collaborations in 2018. However it was always the plan, once ClimateKeys was established, to add new types of concerts. Inviting musicians with portable instruments means that concerts can be performed anywhere, not just in music spaces. This has started to happen quite naturally, for example with musicians such as Fran & Flora performing ClimateKeys in an art gallery. So, why not follow Hayhoe’s lead and aim for a concert in the Shell Building in collaboration with their Chief Climate Change Advisor, perhaps with a performance by a string quartet? Or in Tesco’s head office with their packaging planners? Or at the British Museum in partnership with board members to discuss fossil fuel subsidies, their own link with the industry, and climate change? Perhaps such cultural events are opportunities for new leaders to emerge within companies, and this will inspire new collaborations with ClimateKeys.
ClimateKeys at Syracuse University London, 14th November 2017
It’s widely recognised how the activities of the high carbon world cause climate change and how the impacts are greater on the low carbon world. Tragically, recent statistics suggest that around four environmental defenders in indigenous regions are killed each week. When Pope Francis states in his Encyclical that we “have to save Creation”, he is surely including those courageous activists standing up to the causes of climate change and being killed in the process. All who are standing up, from the indigenous defenders, to the Pope, to treehouse dwellers in Germany preventing an expansion of lignite mining, to Mary Robinson and the M2020 panelists, to school children taking governments to court, to authors of climate change novels, to climatologists speaking to communities, all are in the same wide mass movement I increasingly see as a form of international service (that I, for one, wish was compulsory). ClimateKeys hopes to play a part in bringing more corporations to this service. They are urgently needed.
Find out more
You can catch up with the speaker synopses and other news from the performances so far, and with new developments, at the ClimateKeys site.
There is a video from the ClimateKeys concert in Istanbul on 14th November, where guest speaker Ömer Madra, former lecturer of humanitarian law and co-founder of Açık Radyo” (Open Radio), said “As an academic, a writer, a broadcaster and a grandfather, I humbly feel that it is my utmost duty to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’ and fight with this ‘ultimate absurdity’ to the end. This is the demand which originates from the responsibility of the intellectual.” Pianist Birsen Ulucan said “The people who surround me in Istanbul, where I will perform ClimateKeys, are not actually aware of the consequences of climate change.”
You can read about the Truth about Zane campaign, which is calling for an Independent Panel Inquiry into the death of 7 year old Zane during the February 2014 floods in Surrey, UK, and to protect the public.
You can watch the video of the COP23 seminar, 2020: the necessary, desirable and achievable turning point to safeguard our climate, on the Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development website – and read about and download the 2020: The Climate Turning Point report at the M2020 site.
You can read about Plan B and their actions to sue the UK government, as well as other legal actions and resources, at the Plan B site. There is an article, Leading doctors back legal action to force UK government to cut carbon emission, at the website of the British Medical Journal.
Katharine Hayhoe’s TV series is available on the Global Weirding YouTube channel, and you can watch a film of Katharine talking with George Marshall at the ClimateOutreach site – where, of course, there is loads more about COP23 and communicating climate change.
Visit the Palm Beach Daily News site for their coverage of ClimateKeys – as possibly read by Donald Trump. The article states that “the concert ties in with Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene, an exhibition featuring works that evolved from artist Justin Brice Guariglia’s flights over Greenland with NASA scientists studying the effect of melting glaciers on sea level rise” and that local ClimateKeys presenter Dr John Strasswimmer “is a dermatologist who is researching a tool that could be used to detect skin cancer using spectroscopy, a technology employed by NASA to measure the contents of the Earth’s atmosphere.”
The Guardian reports on Environmental defenders being killed in record numbers globally and you can watch a film, “Keep It in the Ground”: As COP23 Ends, Activists Protest at Europe’s Largest Open-Pit Coal Mine, at the Democracy Now website.
The full text of Pope Francis’ Encyclical, Laudato ‘Si, is available at the Vatican site.
A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world. Read More
Questioning Venue? Space for creative thinking...Where would you take ClimateKeys to engage a new audience? Be specific -- choose your venue. Would it be at a company, a council, a call centre, a cultural hub, or a countryside location? And who would be your local expert, and your preferred musician?Share your thoughts - use the Contact Form, visit the ClimateCultures Facebook page or write a response on your own blog and send a link!
Dramatist Julia Marques previews ClimateKeys, a visionary global initiative from fellow ClimateCultures Member Lola Perrin. Julia considers the space it offers for more relaxed, but still urgent, sharing of thought and dialogue on the predicament of our times.
1,790 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes
ClimateKeys, as with climate change, has spread and become a world event. This can only be seen as a reflection of how connected we all are as humans on this beautiful planet. COP is coming, and so is ClimateKeys. In these keyboard conversations around the world people will be afforded the space to think about climate change, and the opportunity to talk about it with others. Thus is the combination of music and speech; using music as an introduction to the topic gives people the chance to think about this all-encompassing phenomenon as well as settling us down into a state of relaxed (rather than frantic) thought in order to have a more positive dialogue about climate change.
“I’m in ClimateKeys because the power of this format lies in the unique capability to attract both music lovers and environment enthusiasts, and then engage in a language that is less jargon ridden and more public.”
– Shruti Shiva (ClimateCultures Member), speaker in India
“Two years ago, my country was hit by catastrophic floods . . .”
The London launch of ClimateKeys — next Wednesday evening, 25th October — is a gala of music and speech. Ten pianists will perform, interspersed with three sections of the spoken word. Hannah van den Brul, who has herself written academically about music and climate change, will discuss ClimateKeys’ collaborative efforts with experts to spark conversations about climate change, as well as the “glocal” aim of local keyboard conversations happening across the globe. ClimateKeys is also honoured to have Kye Gbangbola and Nicole Lawler, the parents of Zane Gbangbola, as its special guests for the launch, who will speak about their campaign for the truth about the death of their son as the result of landfill poisons coming into their home during the 2014 floods in the UK (with suggested links to climate change). Guest Speaker Sir Jonathon Porritt will refer to the diversity of speeches, ranging from re-orienting communities and behaviour modification to inter-disciplinary solutions and climate change art – a real reflection of how climate change touches all aspects of society and human life. Porritt will also draw a connection between the London launch and a ClimateKeys concert taking place simultaneously in Bosnia where Professor of Climatology and COP delegate Goran Trbic will emphasise the importance of international common aims in order to build on the Paris Agreement. This not only highlights the significance of the event and the topic to that country, but also demonstrates the interconnectivity that climate change brings with it; our actions will affect others, including ourselves.
“I’m partof ClimateKeys because I know the arts and creativity are tools for positive global change.”
– Becca Farnum, speaker in the UK
“I tried to find pieces to perform that will stimulate the imagination of the audience and get them more aware of the UN climate change conference, COP23. Music has the power to enter mind, creating windows into the soul and the spirit.”
The fact that pianists have come forward to take part in ClimateKeys is, in itself, no small achievement. Concert pianist training can necessarily go hand in hand with a self-focussed approach which favours a concert being purely about a pianist’s mastery of the instrument. However, the power of climate change to bring people together and push them out of their comfort zones and normal routines is such that here we are with over 60 concert pianists to date ready and willing to give up the spotlight and share the stage with speakers and even audience members. This is to be applauded. But this also means that the road to ClimateKeys has not always been a smooth one. On average, only one in every fifty pianists contacted responds. As such, ClimateKeys is still missing a world-renowned concert pianist. An international piano star joining ClimateKeys would make the initiative more visible on the world stage (visibility itself being a barrier to awareness on climate change as it is arguably tricky for anyone to actually “see” the climate). If there are any climate change activist-musicians out there who know of such a pianist, then kindly connect them to Lola Perrin (lola@climatekeys.com).
“Part of the reason I am interested in this project is to be able to bring an informed discussion to the fore: it seems to me that many people form an opinion without exploring the topic and I welcome the opportunity to inform, myself first, on what I feel is an issue that affects every single person who shares this planet.”
– Eriko Crino, pianist in Canada
“I hope that together we can make the change, to leave our children a planet of hope and joy of life!”
– Marija Ligeti Balint, pianist composer in Serbia
In contrast to the pianists, speakers have been coming in thick and fast. It seems as though there are climate change experts across the disciplines who sense the potential of this forum for positive conversations about climate change and they embrace the invitation to give a talk without the use of projection or PowerPoint: a ClimateKeys principle, in order to avoid academic presentations. In the words of George Marshall, “The single most powerful thing an individual can do about climate change is to talk about it,” and this is what ClimateKeys proposes to instigate. Some of the best thinkers in the world are on board with the concept, and are keen not only to give talks in a cultural context, but also to facilitate genuine conversations (not Q&As) with the audience. This only serves to strengthen the resolve of all involved and heighten the excitement of this particular artistic response to COP23 and climate change.
“ClimateKeys brings together two of the interests closest to my heart: communication through music and care for the environment.”
– Sachit Ajmani, pianist in India
“Musicians havebeen given the gift of a platform and we can choose whether or not to use it.”
When I spoke with Lola about her project she said “It’s always brilliant when pianists come forward, they all say the same thing, they’re really concerned about the environment and it’s great to know they can do something about it through their piano work. Then the long road starts. Finding a venue, looking for a speaker (I do this for them in the majority of cases), sorting out the publicity.
“What I’m really, really concerned about is the distillation of the ClimateKeys format which is carefully designed to feature the audience participation. I worry I will alienate pianists if I’m too dogmatic about the concert format, but I’ve now decided that the dogma is really important. They must know that it’s only a ClimateKeys concert if it follows the core principles. So I’ve recently created a document to physically post (yes – using the postal system!) to each pianist to draw their attention once again to my principles. I’ve also included a specially written overview of how we get to zero carbon by around 2040 – principally guided by the work of Zero Carbon Britain and Sir David King. This is because I’ve had to put a lot of my music activities on hold in order to find the time to get my head around climate change solutions, and I can’t possibly expect the pianists to find time to do this. So I hope my document will be useful to them.
“I’m collecting a range of memorabilia from each concert and this includes summaries from the pianists to describe how the concerts went, I hope all this will go towards a future post which will be full of the different experiences the performers had.”
“I’m in ClimateKeys because I love nature and animals and it is great to express my concerns about nature issues through the language of music. For me the occupation with nature is essential. It is a bridge between music and spirituality.”
– Anna Sutyagina – pianist in Germany
“The tides are much higher in Florida than they used to be, especially in Miami. Even conservatives are talking about climate change . . .”
– Bezerra Gastesi – piano duo in the USA
With over thirty concerts in nine countries throughout October and November 2017, and over one hundred concert musicians and guest speakers in twenty countries currently signed up, ClimateKeys is a truly “glocal” affair. The appeal and the need for alternative ways of considering climate change are apparent from this response. We are all creative beings, and we all create in different ways. This is why scientific data appeals to some and art appeals to others, why numbers attract some and music attracts others. ClimateKeys is part of the new artistic collaboration with science that opens an alternative way to action on climate change, and the launch is the first step on our journey to increasing our environmental awareness and positive response to climate change.
You can read about the story of Zane Gbangbola at Truth About Zane.
For a UK perspective on the 2014 floods mentioned in the post, you can see a Met Office piece and report. And you can find out about the work of Zero Carbon Britain at their website.
A climate change dramatist, activist and communicator specialising in social and cultural aspects of climate change who has worked in the nonprofit and media sector. Read More
Questioning our conversations? Space for creative thinking...
Julia quotes George Marshall: "The single most powerful thing an individual can do about climate change is to talk about it," and this is the response that ClimateKeys inspires (and ClimateCultures invites). What was the most recent positive conversation you had about climate change, and the most negative? What made the difference? And what can you create with one other person - a story, an image, a sound or song or a setting - to make (both) your conversations more positive?"
Share your thoughts - use the Contact Form, visit the ClimateCultures Facebook page or write a response on your own blog and send a link!
Composer and pianist Lola Perrindiscusses isolation: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process. And yet, we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.
1,150 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes
Last September I started touring my latest piano suite; ‘Significantus’, a keyboard conversation about climate change. The idea was that I would perform specially composed solo piano music, a guest speaker would talk and then facilitate a conversation with the audience about positive response to climate change. My aim was to stimulate audience members to carry the conversation into their communities after the concert.
It was during a post-performance debrief, at the request of post-graduate composer Kate Honey who had invited me to perform the ninth date on this tour at Conservatorium van Amsterdam, that I admitted to a lack of satisfaction from performing this work. I wished none of it was necessary, that I wouldn’t have to look into the eyes of twenty-something year old research students studying Significantus and think how they, along with my sons of similar ages, would be facing unimaginable challenges in their later lives. During our debrief I realised how much I craved a return to my old simple ways where ambition lay in the same space as the notes, where satisfaction naturally followed from simply completing the work and the act of sharing my music was the point of my concerts.
For many of us, to create we need to be alone, if not physically, then at least mentally. We have to cut ourselves off and live in our heads. It’s generally an unpleasant process for me and may well be for you too; insecurity, doubt, lack of self-understanding, worry that it’s a repeat of your previous work or a copy of someone else’s, or just that it’s not very good …. the list goes on. Yet we carry on creating because we don’t know any other way of being, and suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant; without our work processes we’ve lost so much of our identity and meaning.
Whiteread in the Arctic
I found my real identity with my first piano suite. I’d been up all night at the window, watching a south London road gradually transform and as the dawn arrived, it began to morph into a favourite Hopper painting of an empty street at dawn. I decided to compose a set of pieces about the people behind the windows in that painting; people we can sense but not see. I made up their lives and dreams and found a compositional sound I hadn’t heard before. Inspired, I was soon onto my second suite, this time working from memories of how Ansel Adams photographs had made me feel. Later, after witnessing children set free at the piano, I copied their abandonment to write my third suite.
Then came an idea to follow Rachel Whiteread’s casting of physical spaces (such as in Untitled (Black Bed) 1991 where she captured the shape of the space beneath a bed). I wanted to see if I could do something similar in music. Whiteread was in the Arctic at the time on a trip with Cape Farewell, so I decided to imagine the changing shapes within icebergs and allow the peaks and troughs of those imagined shapes to dictate the musical lines.
Writing this fourth piano suite was difficult. The three beforehand weren’t easy but I hadn’t become stuck the way I was stuck writing this one. It was 2005 and I was not yet clued up on climate change. That I was composing directly from Whiteread while she was in the Arctic cast a shadow over me. I was uncomfortable and resistant to learning much about the terrible reason for her journey. The feelings of Whiteread visiting ice because the ice was melting had the effect of blocking me. I tried hard, but for six months I couldn’t make the music work and felt disturbed. Finally, I turned to photographic sources also preoccupied with the depiction of spaces; six light drawings by Nazarin Montag revealing a hidden world, and cloud stories travelling the world by Roberto Battista. During a few short days the ideas finally joined up and ‘Music from Fragile Light Spaces’ was rapidly completed.
A different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility
That first experience of engaging in climate change, albeit inadvertently, was like a warning for my subsequent climate-engaged compositions. There’s a different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility when you’re creating work in response to the climate emergency. Each time I’ve become greatly blocked during, and often after, the externalising process of giving artistic expression to the inner world of dealing with climate change.
While touring Significantus, I’m learning about the extent to which we are living the climate change story in our heads. During one performance, a close relative contributed to the audience conversation and this moved me in a way I didn’t recognise. How could it be that we had not ever spoken together about anything to do with climate change? Yet there he was, in the public space of a performance venue, sharing with the strangers around him his carefully thought-through ideas for how to how to make things better. But in our walks around Dovestone Reservoir and on trips to the Moors we had never thought to delve into the climate change story permeating our internal lives, no matter how much each of us might be swallowed up by it.
Two extremes in a story of extremes
For my forthcoming initiative, ClimateKeys, due to take place around COP23 (more about that in the next blog), I’m reaching out to people all over the world and encountering a myriad of responses; from a call centre worker in the Philippines who speaks of how the crops have recently and unseasonably frozen, to a Chinese geologist who speaks of his jaw-dropping invention to clean up toxic water by utilising carbon dioxide. Two extremes in a story of extremes which we cannot afford to see in any other way but as the Number One Global Emergency if we are to rescue our civilisation from the consequences of our dwindling carbon budget. That’s what needs much more talking about and of course, much more acting upon. And soon, I will be returning for another walk around Dovestone Reservoir with my relative and will try to remember to break my own silence and really talk with him about what matters.
A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world. Read More
Photographer Robynne Limoges shares evocative images inspired by the haiku form, in her pursuit of the ‘philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.’
ClimateCultures editor 
Composer and pianist 
Performers Fran & Flora with ClimateKeys guest speaker, Social Theorist Nolan MacGregor at PowPowPower
Pianist composer Marija Ligeti Balint’s ClimateKeys concert in Pancevo, Serbia made the pages of local newspaper Pancevac, 17th November 2017 www.pancevac-online.rs
“Fremd” (strange)
Local coverage by the Palm Beach Daily News, 4th November 2017 www.palmbeachdailynews.com
ClimateKeys at Syracuse University London, 14th November 2017
The London Gala performance of ClimateKeys, October 2017 
Poster for Bosnia ClimateKeys concert
Lola performing ClimateKeys in Oxford, with speakers Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth 
Composer and pianist 
Untitled (Black Bed), 1991
Inside of an iceberg: image from Brown Bluff, Antarctica