Eco-artist and designer Ife Abhulimen‘s sculpture, Dark in Nature, explores persistence by holding an object in place long enough to be noticed. Emerging from the space between appearance and disappearance, it questions our notions of ‘waste’ and ‘away’.
960 words: estimated reading time = approximately 4 minutes
Often times, the moment something becomes ‘waste,’ it also becomes easy to forget.
And then, once it leaves our hands, we move on. We carry on with our day as usual and rarely stop to wonder where it ends up.
Every year, we discard hundreds of millions of tons of plastic. Most of it slips quietly out of view into landfills, oceans, into places we don’t have to look at. And once it’s gone from sight, it becomes easier to believe it’s gone altogether.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But some things don’t often follow that saying.
What we choose not to see
Most of what we throw away is designed to leave us quickly. A bottle is used for minutes. Packaging is torn open and discarded without a second thought. These objects pass through our hands so briefly; it almost feels like they were never really there to begin with.
And yet, they remain, just not where we can see them. That absence creates a kind of comfort. If it’s no longer in front of us, it no longer belongs to us. It becomes someone else’s problem. Somewhere else’s reality.
But that distance is thin. Almost imaginary.
It didn’t start as art
Dark in Nature, one of the pieces from my recent solo exhibition, Delicate Resilience, began in that space between presence and disappearance. It is made from reclaimed plastic bottles, wire, textile scraps. Materials that were once held, used, and then set aside. Things that had already reached what we might call their end but in my mind still had potential to become a conversation piece. At the centre, a darkened organic-looking structure holds fragments within it, bits of colour and texture held in another bottle that feel like remnants of something that hasn’t fully let go. Around it, the forms extend outward. Bottles bend and stretch, no longer functioning as they once did, but not erased either.
There’s a sense of movement in this piece of work. The wire reaches outward, almost searching, almost restless. The forms resist stillness. They push past the boundaries that try to contain them.
And then, unexpectedly, there are the yellow elements. They resemble flowers; small, delicate, almost hopeful. For a moment, they suggest something familiar. Something natural. Something alive.
But they are not what they seem.
They are constructed, like everything else in this piece. Placed there, not grown there. These ‘flowers’ hint at nature’s persistence, its quiet way of pushing against human interference, always trying to find a way to thrive.
The illusion of growth
That’s where the tension sits. Dark in Nature holds that contradiction quietly. It looks like growth, but it isn’t the kind we understand. These materials do not return to the earth. They do not follow the cycles we associate with life.
They stay, they break, they shift, they scatter but they remain part of the world, whether we see them or not.
So what we are looking at isn’t growth in the traditional sense. It’s persistence taking on the shape of something we recognise.
When we throw something away, we rarely imagine its future. We don’t picture where it settles. How long it stays. What it becomes over time. But that doesn’t mean it disappears. It simply moves beyond the edges of our attention. This piece brings it back from that distance. It gathers what was scattered. It places it in front of us again, not as it was, but as something we can’t ignore quite as easily.
Not gone, just repositioned
Nothing here is new.
Every part of it has existed before, used differently, for an original purpose. All that has changed is the context. The way it is seen after some artistic manipulation. The fact that it is being looked at again. And maybe that’s enough to unsettle something. Because if these materials were never truly gone, just relocated, reshaped, reassembled, then the idea of ‘away’ starts to feel uncertain.
Dark in Nature – a small shift
This work doesn’t offer answers.
It doesn’t tell you what to do or how to respond.
It simply holds something in place long enough for it to be noticed.
And sometimes, that’s where change begins, not in immediate action, but first in awareness.
Because once you begin to notice what doesn’t disappear, it becomes harder to believe in the idea of ‘away’. And maybe ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was never the full story.
Elsewhere on our blog, in Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage, curator Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using an exhibition at GroundWork Gallery to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard.
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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Ife – “I use AI to create mockups and nice backgrounds for my art pieces, which has been very helpful especially when I want to showcase work in a different setting. In addition, I use AI to do research as it helps me filter all the fluff, in contrast to Google search, and it gives relevant information. I also use it to search for opportunities in the sustainable art space. I try not to use it a lot because I think it’s robbing us of our capacity to think as intelligent humans. For this post, I have used AI to help with grammar corrections.”
A self-taught eco-artist and designer who explores themes of consumption, sustainability, and environmental responsibility, inviting audiences to discover beauty and value in what is often overlooked.
Researcher Anna Hartnell marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the human causes of New Orleans’ crisis (“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”) while questioning ‘Anthropocene’ labellings of human nature as hard-wired for destruction.
2,530 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes
The hurricane that hit the US Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005 was undoubtedly a ‘natural’ phenomenon — even if the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, that had whipped up what was initially a category 5 storm, were unusually warm as a result of changes in the climate engendered by human activity. But as the terrible toll of the storm and the subsequent collapse of the New Orleans levees became clear, so too did the role of human decision-making. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, a documentary directed by Traci A. Curry to mark the twentieth anniversary of the storm this August, repeatedly emphasizes that human error is what turned ‘disaster’ into ‘tragedy’ in New Orleans in 2005. Just minutes into the first episode of this mini-series, presented by National Geographic, Malik Rahim — a former Black Panther who founded the Common Ground Collective after Katrina and whose commentary constitutes one of the film’s moral touchstones — tells us that “the tragedy of Katrina was man-made”.
National Geographic’s documentary, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (2025)
This is a message that has now been sounding for twenty years. Almost as soon as the storm hit, the idea that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” became an important organizing slogan forcefully articulated in the face of those seeking to deny the facts around the criminally inept response to Katrina. When the floodwaters began to recede and analysis of the causes of the disaster began, it remained an important response to anybody unwilling to recognize the lurid portrait of America that Katrina painted: a toxic brew of racialized poverty, ever-widening social inequality, corporate irresponsibility and a rapidly retreating social safety net.
Katrina was a stark warning of the consequences of decades of neoliberal deregulation and neglect that allowed oil and gas infrastructure to destroy large parts of the Louisiana wetlands — that provided natural flood barriers and protection against hurricanes –- while the system of human-made levees surrounding the city was allowed to go into a state of managed decline. The spectacle of some of America’s poorest communities stranded in the flooded city with no food, sanitation or medical supplies was a sharp reminder of what ‘rugged individualism’ looks like in the context of an economic system that has privatized the commons and redistributed wealth upwards. This story unfolded as the grotesquely unjust ‘recovery’ that began in subsequent months revealed plans for a whiter, wealthier New Orleans. The crisis created by Katrina was used as an excuse to demolish public housing blocks that had withstood the storm remarkably well. The city’s Charity Hospital was shuttered in the midst of a public health emergency. A sizeable diaspora of displaced storm survivors, disproportionately and overwhelmingly African American, were not supported to return home.
I spent about ten years researching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and know well how the human costs of this catastrophe drown out other perspectives that might more fully account for a non-human ‘nature’. I met and interviewed people working at all levels of community organization, many of whom were justifiably angry about how badly New Orleans had been let down by the public officials who were meant to serve it. My own understanding of the storm’s unravelling was drawn inexorably towards the bad actors and corrupt systems that not only allowed this tragedy to happen, but which actively constructed the world that made it a likely occurrence.
I came to the topic with interests in the climate crisis but even that larger horizon — with its inarguably anthropogenic features — seemed too big and baggy and not respectful enough of the specific and extraordinary ways in which New Orleans’s geography and population were exposed to environmental harms quite literally engineered by human beings. Yes, it represented a flashpoint moment and seemed to be a sign of things to come in a warming world. But the human story and the facts on the ground felt far more urgent than the bigger environmental picture.
We have invented a host of terminological designations to ensure that we do not forget the human contribution to our own ecological predicaments. ‘Environmental racism’ is a long-standing and important concept that evolved in the context of US grassroots environmental justice campaigns to remind us that it is no accident that people of colour are routinely and systematically exposed to environmental harms at far higher rates than more privileged and generally whiter populations. That African Americans were far more likely to inhabit flood-prone neighbourhoods and live close to collapsed levees is an instance of environmental racism that Katrina vividly illuminated. The same insight about human agency, intentions and systems runs through the idea that “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster”, which was widely appropriated from its initial deployment by activists, becoming the title of an academic collection of the same name, published in 2006, and also claimed, if I remember correctly, by one of the Katrina bus tours that snaked through destroyed neighbourhoods very shortly after the storm — presumably to perform the tour company’s allegiance to social justice.
It turns out that #NoNaturalDisasters is an organized campaign that formed in the years since Katrina and which has been adopted by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, to reflect mounting climate awareness in the wake of the sobering and politically momentous 2021 IPCC report — which for the first time stated unequivocally that humans are warming the planet. As the UN campaign page explains:
“By shrugging off a catastrophic event as a ‘natural disaster’ one is refusing to take responsibility for the damage and destruction … Next time you hear that phrase – ‘natural disaster’ – step up to the mark and correct the speaker: ‘There is no such thing as a natural disaster.'”
But is this protesting too much? What does this insistence entail and what do we lose sight of by refusing to see anything but human causes, actions and consequences? I’ll return to the Katrina crisis — the terminology I have preferred in my work as a way of attempting to take in the myriad points of rupture introduced by the storm as well as its illuminating role and potential as a turning point. Now, I will briefly think about these issues through what is perhaps the ‘master’ term for emphasizing human agency when it comes to environmental change: Anthropocene.
When ‘Anthropocene’ was initially proposed in 2000 as the name for a new geological era in which human agency has become central, climate denial was ubiquitous. This denial was not aimed at climate change itself — which is usually broadly accepted as a real phenomenon — but rather the human role in the crisis was disputed. Mainstream media was complicit with this narrative by framing the very existence of human-induced climate change as a ‘debate’, despite widespread scientific consensus that it was an established fact. In this context, the idea that our current era might be named the Anthropocene was an important mobilization against this denial. It was a way of naming the larger nexus of environmental harms done to Earth by human hands, but the scale of climate change has dwarfed all other related issues. The insistence that Katrina was ‘man-made’ in 2005 echoes this claim about human centrality and derives from the same political context.
Twenty years on and these contexts are fundamentally different. As Michael Mann argued in The New Climate War published in 2021, the centre of gravity of climate denial has shifted, from directly disputing human contributions via carbon emissions, to the promotion of various forms of greenwashing as ‘solutions’ to distract from the crisis. And as Curry’s twentieth anniversary documentary on Katrina demonstrates, the idea that the disaster was largely ‘human-induced’ is now widely accepted, thanks principally to community organizers who have worked tirelessly to resist attempts to whitewash the tragedy as ‘natural’ and thus inevitable.
The International Union of Geological Sciences, a representative group of the world’s geologists, voted just over a year ago to reject ‘Anthropocene’ as the official name for a new era. The proposal they voted on did not reflect the original idea put forward by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to identify the Industrial Revolution and specifically the invention of the steam engine as the beginning of the Anthropocene. Instead, it brought the date even further forward, to 1952, to mark the first hydrogen bomb tests. Arguably it was this decision, to squeeze the timeframe of human impact, that led to the rejection of the term. While those who dissented from this decision did so vociferously and from an environmentalist standpoint — as The Guardian pithily summarises, “critics say it is a missed chance to recognise that the planet irrevocably left its natural state in the mid-20th century” — the possible reasons for not officially embracing the term are illuminating.
As one group of scientists from outside geology put it, quoted in a New York Times article, “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.” An obvious objection to the term Anthropocene which has been sounded by environmental justice campaigners for some time now is that the majority of humans on the planet are not the problem; it is those wielding enormous wealth and power who are responsible for climate and ecological breakdown and it is wrong and politically counter-productive to suggest that there is something inevitably destructive about human interaction with the planet. This objection to the term ‘Anthropocene’ thus refuses the suggestion that it is somehow ‘natural’ that humanity destroys the environment, that destructive environmental practices are a hard-wired part of ‘human nature’.
This objection is important for understanding post-Katrina New Orleans. The claim that ‘humans’ are to blame for the disaster — not ‘nature’ — overlooks the fact that humans were from the outset blamed for the tragedy, and this was a large part of the problem. The world’s media and political commentary were complicit in constructing the storm’s victims as somehow to blame for their own need, for their lack of transportation to heed the mandatory evacuation order, for their lack of food, medication, sanitation. The appalling humanitarian crisis that overtook the New Orleans Convention Center and the Louisiana Superdome — the so-called ‘places of last resort’ — were met with revulsion and disgust, with racist stereotypes about chaos and criminality abounding. ‘Nature’ was nowhere identified, and humans were certainly in the frame — just the wrong ones. This was a striking case of what Edward Said described years before as ‘blaming the victims’.
If we return to planetary time scales, human history is no more than the blink of an eye. It seems that the key reason that the world’s geologists declined to embrace ‘Anthropocene’ was that the period is just too short — perhaps even if it was backdated to the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of the Americas or even the beginnings of agriculture. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Lezak picks up on the paradoxical consequences of placing humans at the centre of geological time:
By placing Homo sapiens center stage, the Anthropocene also deepens a stark and inaccurate distinction between humanity and the planet that sustains us. The idea of ‘nature’ as something separate from humankind is a figment of the Western imagination. We should be wary of language that further separates us from the broader constellation of life to which we belong.
While the obvious rebuttal to this is that the very term Anthropocene signifies humanity’s entanglement with the planet, it does inevitably seem to put humans at the centre. It seems to usher in the very anthropocentrism it was meant to name and critique. In our rush to point the finger at ourselves we can only see ourselves. This seems unnecessarily pessimistic about human behaviour — which is not generalizable in this way — and blind to any agency which is not human.
Undoubtedly the term Anthropocene and the critique of the notion of ‘natural disasters’ have represented important stages in our conversations about environmental destruction, particularly the climate crisis, and responses to disasters. But what happens when we banish ‘nature’ as a meaningful force? What happens when we suggest, inadvertently perhaps, that humans are in full control of the ship?
Even within the context of human-made systems, this seems unrealistic. Naomi Klein’s otherwise excellent book The Shock Doctrine (2006), which explores various sites of disaster capitalism, including post-Katrina New Orlean, is sometimes limited by its reliance on ‘Chicago School’ and corporate villains. Gently pushing back on this tendency in relation to Katrina’s aftermath, my friend Cedric Johnson wrote in 2011, “inasmuch as she focuses primarily on the corporate skulduggery and White House patronage streams of the Bush era, Klein’s arguments neglect the more pervasive and equally consequential phenomenon of do-good capitalism where altruism, good will, and even social antagonisms are harnessed to the profit motive.” In our present age of conspiracy theories it is perhaps important to acknowledge and reject the seductive simplicity of the fully intending villain. The reality is more frightening.
The outcomes and long-term consequences of human choices and decisions are not fully knowable. Let alone when they are interacting with non-human ecosystems as dynamic as weather and climate. What strikes me as especially poignant on this twenty-year anniversary of one of America’s most destructive storms is not that anybody was conspiring against Katrina’s victims but rather the opposite: elites were indifferent, they did not care. There was no plan, and there certainly should have been — so much knowledge was already in place that might have averted some of the worst outcomes — but even the best laid plans can be defeated. We are not fully in control of our environments, and the fiction that we might be is surely part of the problem. New Orleans should not have been abandoned in 2005, and we should not underestimate the forces of nature that human activity has helped to unleash.
Find more
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, directed by Traci A. Curry, premiered on National Geographic in July 2025 and is available to watch on many streaming platforms.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s #NoNaturalDisasters campaign page explains that “Hazards may be natural. Disasters are not . … A natural hazard, such as a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, only becomes a disaster when it impacts a community that is not adequately protected, and whose population is vulnerable as a result of poverty, exclusion or socially-disadvantage.”
A senior lecturer in contemporary literature researching environmental justice and responses to the climate crisis, currently exploring the history of population narratives within the environmental movement ...
Writer David Thorpe introduces his forthcoming climate fiction collection, School Strike For Baby Hope, and explores how our imagined futures must include the costs and dilemmas of better pathways, even where we avoid the worst of climate change.
1,440 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
In November, just in time for Christmas, my new collection of climate fiction short stories will be published by Android Press. The ten stories have been published elsewhere, often in obscure places. For example, the title story, School Strike For Baby Hope, was published by Extinction Rebellion on one of their websites.
Cautionary tales and possible futures
If a citizen living in pre-20th century Britain were to be told that in the future they would be able to travel anywhere in the world in a few hours, to buy any food from anywhere in the world at a local shop throughout the year, have free healthcare, most likely live until their 90s, and hold a device in their hands which could give them any kind of knowledge they asked and permitted them to talk to anyone in the world, and to see their faces, they would think the future was some kind of paradise. Well, we live in that age and we know different. We have threatened ourselves with the end of life on Earth — including our own end — in order to have these unnatural luxuries. We know the cost.
It seems to me that in imagining a future free from climate change we must be careful to imagine what kind of costs that might have. Every decision presents a dilemma. The purpose of governance is damage limitation; minimising the negative consequences of any decision. Unintentional consequences must be thought through. Climate fiction consciously does this.
Some of these stories are about the unintended consequences of action on climate change, so they serve as cautionary tales. These stories – At the Crux and For the Greater Good – reflect my interest in ‘one planet’ thinking – the ecological footprint as a measure of sustainability. I asked myself: if the country set itself the same task as one planet development in Wales – of satisfying the needs of inhabitants within the confines of a global fair and equal distribution of environmental impact – what could be the implications for the population? Living like this would demand monitoring of the entire ecological impact of the country and dividing it by the population each year.
School Strike for Baby Hope and Beacon arose from my experience of being in my local Extinction Rebellion group. We had many successful actions in Swansea and joined the national demonstrations in London. School Strike For Baby Hope appeared in Teens Of Tomorrow: Stories of Near and Far-Flung Futures, which explored possible futures through the stories of twelve courageous teens.
What else is cli-fi? If you read the Wikipedia entry it cites Jules Verne’s 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole as an early harbinger, which imagines a climate change due to tilting of Earth’s axis. His Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1883 and set during the 1960s, has Paris have a sudden drop in temperature, which lasts for three years. Wikipiedia lists J. G. Ballard’s climate extremism novels from the early ’60s and then, as knowledge of climate change increased, says fiction about it really started coming out, one of the earliest being Susan M. Gaines’s Carbon Dreams.
Should we always go with our imagination?
Imaginative works can be used to reinforce people’s prejudices, too, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which was pounced upon by climate sceptics for reinforcing their view that climate change was some kind of conspiracy.
Then we encounter lots of dystopic films. From Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, through George Orwell’s 1948 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Lucas’ 1971 film THX 1138, Mega-City One from Judge Dredd, conceived in 1977, to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). They have all set the template for many other stories and films, such that in the popular imagination the sprawling mega-cities of the future will largely be over-populated, polluted, broken places, featuring dark towers, high levels of surveillance and crime, their citizens treated little better than battery-reared animals, and no room for nature.
But is the dystopic metropolis a self-fulfilling prophecy, subconsciously, if not consciously, reinforcing the mindsets of planners and architects? Does it soften up the public, preparing them to acquiesce in the face of grim and unimaginative design, polluted air, poor policing and service levels, corrupt or inefficient governance, long commute times, constant noise, high levels of personal danger?
Is this the reason why people do nothing despite being bombarded by the truth about the future and climate?
I think we need comedies about climate change and the future. For this reason, I have included The Chernobyl Effect and The Last Laugh in the collection. These are stories from my body of work about the character Doc Chaos, a darkly satirical character in the tradition of William Burrough’s Doctor Benway and Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll. This is dark comedy, exaggeration for comedic effect. Making people laugh is a way of slipping things under their radar.
The Chernobyl Effect & The Last Laugh – stories of David’s Doc Chaos character
The End
These days I spend all day in a wheelchair because of cervical myelopathy. I have become unable to feed myself or use both my phone and computer. The only way I can write this article is to dictate it, as a friend is kindly typing it for me. I have written elsewhere that my stroke in August 2021 was caused by high blood pressure and a result of climate change stress.
I now think that my present condition, and the fact that I see no hope in my future again, is a mirror of the present and the future of the planet as a whole. I wish it were not so, but I can’t believe anything else. For example, as the average temperature of the planet has risen, so has the myelopathy of my spine, and just as we find tipping points such as the melting of the ice caps in climate change, there are tipping points in my body when the nerves in my spine become trapped and suddenly I find I can no longer do something, like feed myself, that I could do yesterday. Then I think to myself “What will happen before it ends?”. And I’m glad I won’t be around to see the world shrivelling up as it gets too hot. Unfortunately, my sons will.
Look after yourselves and find something you love and stick with it.
Find more
School Strike For Baby Hope will be published by Android Press in November 2024. As well as other fiction — including novels Stormteller and Hybrids — David has written several books on sustainability, including One Planet Cities: Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits and The One Planet Life: A Blueprint for Low Impact Development. Find out more at his website. And you can read David’s blog on Substack.
The Fifth Estate published A personal story about climate anxiety and illness from our UK writer David Thorpe in August 2021: a “personal account of his illness and its connection to his absolute commitment to avoiding the worst of climate change. It’s a sobering and very worthwhile read”, where David talks about the link between climate stress and the stroke he had recently suffered. That article also links to his story Don’t Follow Leaders, which David wrote for the publication.
In previous posts for ClimateCultures, The Rise of Climate Fiction Part 1andPart 2, David explores how the term ‘Cli-fi’ reveals the tension between our twin fascinations with utopian and dystopian visions, how fiction engages readers with human stories within the climate change one, and writers’ responsibilities — given that “stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom as well as entertain themselves.” David also contributed a piece for our Environmental Keywords theme on Environmental Justice.
In 2017, David was one of our inaugural authors at ClimateCultures. He was one of the short story writers, poets and non-fiction writers commissioned to produce new writing at Weatherfronts climate change conferences for writers — two TippingPoint events that also inspired the creation of ClimateCultures. In Utopia and Its Discontents, he explores the thinking that went into his winning story, For the Greater Good, which was included in the free Weatherfonts ebook anthology published by Cambria Books.
Artist Kim V. Goldsmith shares her work with Regional Futures in NSW, Australia, exploring people’s feelings for rural territories. We need to listen better to each other, ourselves, and more-than-human worlds for more collaborative approaches to the future.
2,600 words: estimated reading time = approximately 10 minutes + option audio pieces
Few of us in the ClimateCultures network would dispute that rural and regional territories across the world are on the frontline of climate change. In the past six years, south-eastern Australia has experienced severe drought (2017- 2019), described by our national weather bureau as “a situation with no clear historical precedent” [1], followed by the unprecedented bushfires of 2019/20 that burnt 5.5 million hectares or seven percent of New South Wales (NSW) [2], and just last year, record rainfall events resulted in floods across south-east Queensland and NSW considered to be in our top three historical natural disasters. These are not records to take pride in.
Listening to regional futures in New South Wales
In early 2022, when I was given the opportunity to delve into how people in the regions of NSW feel about the future, it was knowing I’d be working in the heartland of politically conservative Australia [3], where farming and other primary industries are heavily reliant on fossil fuels. I have lived and worked in this part of Australia for most of my life. Despite the devastating impact of drought, fire and floods on these communities, the majority in rural Australia will unfailingly continue to vote for conservative parties. As happened in May 2022, when the Labor Party returned to power in Canberra but little changed in regional electorates. This pattern of voting behaviour continued to result in a similar outcome in the 2023 NSW State election — where the political battlefront was Western Sydney not Western NSW. The only real change has been more conservative Independent candidates in the race against the parties they were once part of.
In her book, How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference, Dr Rebecca Huntley writes: “There is clearly a disconnect between what people say they are worried about and want action on and who, when given the chance, they pick to lead their country.” Huntley references Per Espen Stoknes’ book, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, where he writes: “For those of us who find ourselves stuck in the moral conundrum of the climate doom story, passive denial offers an easy way out.” One might argue that voting actions are perhaps more active denial, as we’ve seen in regional electorates.
However, Huntley also talks about the constant repetition of climate change facts and figures as a familiar script that can leave us cold or, even worse, bored, creating a collective stupor. What the science tends not to recognise is our messy social realities — the rising cost of living, housing shortages, poor health services, personal safety, and mental health issues. The day-to-day chore of living tends to take priority over environmental concerns.
Artist, Kim V. Goldsmith listening to a solar inverter with an electromagnetic microphone.
As an artist, my interest over the past decade has largely been creative interpretations of acoustic and social ecologies — the intersection of human and more-than-human species in often fragile and vulnerable rural and regional territories. When the opportunity to be part of a project called Regional Futures came up through the NSW Regional Arts Network — funded by the State Government — I was keen to develop a series of works that would give a voice to the voiceless in our regional environments, and provide a platform for under-represented individuals in the regions to share their fears, anxieties, hopes and dreams of the future — things we are not often asked about. My project is called Vaticinor (The Augur), a reference to predicting the future by observing natural signs.
Over several months, I spoke with 18 residents of the Central West and the Mid North Coast regions of NSW, in an inland/coastal conversation about how the transition to renewable energy sources might shape net-zero regional futures.
Aged 15 to 70, the storytellers in this montage all believe Regional NSW is a wonderful place to live but their stories and concerns are genuine and their messages urgent.
My home region of the Central West was the first Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) to be declared in Australia because of its potential (and proximity) to contribute energy to the national electricity market through large-scale solar and wind developments. It’s being billed as a power station of the future. The NSW Government is overseeing the development of the zone, including transmission projects, and expects up to A$5 billion in private investment to the region by 2030. The intended network capacity of this zone is three gigawatts, enough to power 1.4 million homes [4].
What this looks like on the ground is kilometre after kilometre of rolling hills or cleared flat, red soil country covered in black solar panels — shiny sun-seeking faces dominating the landscape; and giant, white wind turbines, blades gracefully arcing against blue skies, spread across thousands of hectares of farmland. Some of these developments sit on farming land while other parcels of land are dedicated to the cause.
Wind turbines near Wellington NSW, part of the Bodangora Wind Farm. Photograph: Kim V. Goldsmith
Communities within the REZ are torn about the good these massive clean energy developments offer, despite the negotiation and distribution of community fund sweeteners. Some see solar panels and wind turbines as an eyesore — impacting the visual amenity some regions have come to rely on for attracting new residents and tourism; others believe it is poor use of productive agricultural land needed to feed and clothe us into the future.
The regions, particularly those inland, are doing much of the heavy lifting when it comes to energy supply in the form of food and power production. Cities and more densely populated coastal areas are facing critical land and housing shortages, with limited capacity to produce food or power for their growing populations; they will lean more heavily on the regions in years to come [5].
Investments into renewables is an opportunity for some who have fought to remain viable through droughts, floods and seasons of low productivity; solar or wind hosting arrangements are providing the financial security they need to remain on the land they love.
Karin Stark lives on a farm near Narromine — a particularly conservative rural community in the Central West, where she has driven the conversation around renewable energy in agriculture. With her credentials in environmental science and farming, she’s keen to see rural and regional communities empowered in the transition to renewables, particularly in areas where there’s large-scale development.
“It’s important that agriculture does continue to develop and adapt to different technologies, different weather events, to secure our food supplies. But I think really with energy and food we need to have a more interconnected or integrated way of thinking, so that we can do both in this region.
“There needs to be more focus on the distribution level of allowing farmers and regional communities to produce the energy themselves rather than (rely on) these massive solar and wind farms.”
Some are quietly fearful of what the future holds for rural communities despite the work being done to adapt. Fourth-generation Narromine farmer, Bruce Maynard won the prestigious National Landcare Award in 2022 for his agroecology work and advocacy, believing that broadening the on-farm biodiversity base also means broadening the productive capacity. He firmly believes people are the reason behind doing any of this.
Bruce Maynard, 2022 National Landcare Award winner and fourth-generation farmer at Narromine in Central West NSW. Photograph: Kim V. Goldsmith
“I do feel somewhat challenged and pessimistic about rural communities in Australia in particular, in that they continue to shrink. I put people first, landscape, and then business third as serving those other two main factors … for any of our efforts out here to be worthwhile, I believe it needs a thriving community.”
Conversations with discomfort and hope
Transitions to new ways of being and thinking don’t come without discomfort and a strong sense of inequity. For those not privileged enough to buy into the renewables revolution or who are simply more concerned about their personal safety and putting food on the table, the conversation about climate change and what that means is still abstract.
Having recently moved to the Central West for a job following tertiary study, 25-year-old Bageshri still has close ties to India.
“There are people I have grown up with that have way more complex issues to deal with, just regarding their safety or the place that they live.
“I definitely think people who can make change are people in positions of power, people with money, people with influence. We just need to really look at who we’re voting for, and elect people who actually think about the future.”
Stephen Callaghan moved to Dubbo in Central West NSW about six years ago, to an area of the city he describes as a low socio-economic area. To offset rising power costs, his family used a small inheritance to invest in a solar battery system. It’s something they felt they couldn’t afford not to do.
“I honestly don’t know, looking at our electricity bill, how some of our neighbours are coping.
“I can see a future where it’s not going to be survival of the fittest, but it’s definitely going to be the haves and have-nots, and it’s going to be related around power and energy.”
Net-zero targets by 2050 were described by 16-year-old high school student, Madelyn Leggett as being like a homework assignment. She has a very strong sense of her place in the world and is itching for the day she can exercise her vote.
“People procrastinate and procrastinate, and nothing gets done and then we reach December 2049, and we go ‘Oh! Nothing’s happened!’ We still haven’t changed enough, and there still hasn’t been enough policy or legislation passed to make an effective change or impact on the environment.
“I think the political push for a net zero world is there. And I think it does affect people’s outlook on how we see the future and I think it affects the way that people consider not just consumerism but voting and democracy, and how they consider their political actions.”
High school student, Madelyn Leggett, from Wellington NSW. Photograph: Kim V. Goldsmith
As parents of young children and living off-the-grid in a coastal forest on the Mid North Coast, Aliya Aamot and her partner are passionate about guiding their children through a more ‘self-efficient’ way of life.
“These children that grow up in the bush, with parents who are teaching them life skills, this is what the planet needs for the future.
“It’s very important for us, especially kids in cities to know this process of where the food comes from, how it’s been grown… There’s just so much nature will teach the children just by letting the children be in nature.”
Collaborative, more-than-human regional futures
It’s very easy to put humans at the centre of this conversation — we do it all the time. However, there’s a growing awareness that our future hinges on a more collaborative approach, where more-than-human species gain more rights [6] and a greater voice. This is what has really underpinned my interest in the Regional Futures project and the works I developed through Vaticinor.
I’ve observed the discord at the intersection of the human and more-than-human species across rural and regional territories, yet to be resolved. The multi-track soundscape composition, Humi, I created for the Regional Futures exhibition brings the sounds of the more-than-human together with the built structures and technologies we’ve created for our convenience, including renewables, weaving together a story around this uncertain period of transition between our past and our future. The work is accompanied by a haptic experience, reducing the soundscape to vibrations through 3D-printed hands, reminding us we are one with the sonic world whether we hear it or not.
Humi Haptic Hands co-designed by Kim V. Goldsmith and Brian McNamara, reduce the Humi soundscape to four frequencies experienced as vibrations through 3D printed hands. Photograph: Kim V. Goldsmith
The signs of what potentially lies ahead have been there for some time now, but as Stoknes suggests, ignoring them may have been a way of dealing with the discomfort. The cocoons we’ve woven around our lives in rural and regional Australia and beyond are unravelling in the face of extreme weather events, or as James Bridle puts it in Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence: “…tiny moments of turbulent activity through which we can barely grasp an unseen, unknowable totality.”
As we come to terms with that totality, the challenge will be creating equity for all in the transition to a fossil-fuel-free world at the same time as developing a more connected and entangled life with those other species we share the planet with — those who remain mostly voiceless. We need to listen better to each other, to ourselves, and to more-than-human worlds. In the meantime, we shall continue to sit with the discomfort of our choices.
The Humi soundscape composition is a story of the discordant interdependence of human and more-than-human species against a backdrop of pressing time. Weaving their way through the composition are sounds of species not often heard by the naked human ear or those given little thought to in our daily busyness — earthworms, bats, fish, individual birds in choruses of birdsong reverberating through remnant forests on the edges or urban development and cleared farmland. Meanwhile, manmade structures click and thrum, boom and hum — solar arrays, wind turbines, dam walls, motorboats, and fossil-fuelled vehicles — designed for our convenience and enjoyment, creating around-the-clock noise within worlds we do not hear or see.
Kim V. Goldsmith was commissioned by Dubbo Regional Council in partnership with Orana Arts to be part of the Regional Futures project. For more information about the Vaticinor project and resulting artwork, see Vaticinor.
The first Soundcloud audio piece in Kim’s post is a 39-minute montage of 18 storytellers sharing their thoughts about the future, presented for exhibition as part of the ‘Regional Futures’ series of exhibitions in NSW Australia, in a vintage suitcase, upholstered in custom-printed fabric, with postcards of links and invitations to audiences to share their story.
The second Soundcloud audio piece is ‘Humi’ (in/on/to the ground), a 15-minute composition of field recordings, transitional tones and chords melding sounds of the Mid North Coast, Manning Valley and Central West of NSW into one story; a story of the discordant interdependence of human and more-than-human species against a backdrop of pressing time.
The sound and text works of Vaticinor will be shown in Sydney from 24th June – 24th September 2023 in Regional Futures: Artists in a Volatile Landscape, at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Western Sydney.
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.
Eco-artist and designer Ife Abhulimen‘s sculpture, Dark in Nature, explores persistence by holding an object in place long enough to be noticed. Emerging from the space between appearance and disappearance, it questions our notions of ‘waste’ and ‘away’.
Researcher 
