Direct Action Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Standing in Relationship with Land

Artist Jennifer Leach offers a ‘case study with no answers’; how (and whether) to engage with issues of right land relationship with resistance but not aggression: pausing, listening, acting with integrity, and being at peace with our choices.

2,270 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

How to be in this world right now, how to act, how best to use our creative gifts, and what voice to speak out with – a case study with no answers.

There is a strong argument growing right now, that engaging oppositionally with systemic injustice only serves to fuel polarities and division within a system that is heading for collapse. The advocates of this argument, many of them community leaders engaged in stunning endeavours of nurture and growth, are encouraging us to transfer our energies into laying fresh foundations for a more loving, more equitable world. I, like many activists, artists, and people with heart, find myself caught deep in this place of ‘no longer and not yet’. And I personally have been deeply impacted by the Walk for Peace monks in the USA, who have so visibly demonstrated radical change through embodied non-engagement with any political landscape. I find myself arriving in an internal place of peace beyond conflict, whose rules of reflection in the outer world I do not yet understand. I am unsure whether there remains any useful place, for me, for protest and challenge. Others of you may feel the same, and I share here a case study that illustrates this dilemma.

Standing tall with the more-than-human

In 2023, our community fought hard to prevent a local golf course, a major green lung of Reading, from being swallowed up by naked greed in the form of a large deluxe housing estate. In the history of planning in the UK, there had never been any application with a greater number of objections, over 4,000. Planning was denied twice, but on the third time of asking (like a bad fairytale), the Council voted in favour of the scheme. We, the community, gasped, we shouted, we cried, we were reprimanded for bad behaviour in the Council chamber. The scheme rolled inexorably ahead.

It felt important to bear witness to this swallowing of the land, in particular to the 112 trees that were to be felled. With Andrea Carr, friend and fellow ClimateCultures member, we came together with the community to do just this. We bound each doomed tree with a white band of muslin, photographed and honoured it. I had already spent months with the trees, photographing and recording each one of them, and I believe they reciprocated by revealing to me their unique energies in the photographs I took. Our project, Standing Tall, can be seen on the Outrider Anthems website.

Land relationship: Showing trees destined to be felled bound with white muslin to honour them. Photograph by Jennifer Leach. — Honouring the trees to be felled. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022

The trees were felled, the deluxe detached houses are being built, with a token number of ‘affordable’ terraced houses (costing £500,000+) available through shared ownership with housing associations. And with the cement mixers still churning, the developers moved on to Phase II.

How then to participate in this second phase of landgrab within my community? By the time it raised its head, I was shifting further away from resistance, to focus more on the resolution of inner conflict and division, learning to be more humble in my judgement of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Concentrating on becoming the peace I wish to see in the world. And yet, the land, the beautiful land! How could I not help defend it?

I felt that using my creativity to reflect a changed dialogue might be the most helpful course of action, and so I made two small physical books, one called Standing Tall, the other The Land in Relationship. These small books are things of beauty, and in their own quiet way, radical. Standing Tall is a portrait of the land and the trees, a record of the art intervention led by Andrea and myself, and a pictorial record of the land during and after building. The loss of habitat is quietly evidenced. When the huge ‘protected’ oak sheds a limb through stress, it reads like a climactic moment in a story of loss. The book concludes with the words: “Fairfax Ltd is now submitting applications to build on the remaining golf course land. We dream that they may not succeed. We dream of a world where housing is no longer built for excessive profit and gain. Where housing is not seen as an investment. Where people own only the one home they live in. We dream of a time when, in the making of all decisions, the land, the community, and the more-than-human will, at last, be honoured again.”

Land relationship: Showing trees where only houses now stand. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022 — Houses now, where these trees stood. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2022

The second book, The Land in Relationship, maps out the reality of inappropriate, insensitive planning actions, by placing the proposed site (always so prettily coloured in the application paperwork) within its landscape, naming all that is bound in relationship to it – the land surrounding it, the fauna and flora, the community, the ecosystem, the planet. It ends with the text: “It is time – long past time – to move back into right relationship with the land. There is no greater priority.”

Showing a Trapped tree, isolated in the new development. Photograph byJennifer Leach 2026 — Trapped tree: isolated in the new development. Photograph: Jennifer Leach © 2026

These books are intended to re-establish contact with a truth nearly always crushed by the language and aggression of planning.

Creativity and witnessing for land relationship

Having completed the books, and not sure how best to share them, I was invited to speak at the government inquiry that was set up to decide on the Phase II planning application once South Oxfordshire District Council had turned it down and the planners had put in their inevitable appeal. And in this forum came the greatest ethical and spiritual rub for me. I did not know what I should say, nor what voice to use. I did not know how to use my creativity in the best interests of the land and the community, in a system that is inherently undemocratic and whose language is strident and disassociated. Should I be poetic, sharp, gentle, visionary, forceful?

After much thought, I wrote a story, The Oligopoly, using the language of my profession as artist and storyteller. I took three small oak trees up to the stand with me, and I shared my story. It was a tale that took no prisoners, and which, according to my own truth, laid bare the underlying narrative of bullying, greed and systematic aggression that underpins the highway to societal and environmental collapse. It ended with a provocation: “Change must start here, now, in rooms such as these. With acts of principled wisdom and clear thinking, based on necessity. If not for [the people] themselves, then for their children, and the children of all species.”

Showing: Stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus, Tallinn (removed by the authorities) — Stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus, Tallinn (removed by the authorities)

You can listen to my recording of The Oligopoly here:

Throughout my delivery, I could see the developers squirming. What was worse, I could feel the whole room squirming. At the end of my tale, I gave the inspector, and the developers, a copy each of the government’s 2026 Joint Committee of Intelligence National Security Report, and a copy of my two small books; they were filed under evidence.

I returned to my seat, feeling the intense discomfort not only of the developers, but of ‘my side’ too. I felt deeply uncomfortable. Exposed. I felt confrontational. Had I overstepped the mark? Had I alienated the inspector? Had I imposed my own act of hostility, and furthered rigidity and conflict, with a horrible sense of moral superiority, through the telling of my story? Could I have told a different story or used a different voice? Reader, I do not know.

What I do know is that local naturalists spoke knowledgably and movingly about the bats and the wildlife and the ancient wonder of the local Cucumber Wood, and conscientious volunteers and low-paid councillors from local neighbourhood groups and parish councils, who had spent months preparing a case to save the land, committed to five full days of the excruciating minutiae and scrutiny of planning-speak. And what I also know is that the inspector, when visiting the site itself, spent longer there, and walked further, than in any other site visit the lawyers could recall.

A few days ago, against all the odds, against all the predictions, the planning application was turned down. The inspector’s report was attentive and balanced; he had recognised the beyond-monetary value of the land, he had recognised the land in relationship, and he had honoured it.

I wonder still about my role, and inner conflict remains. Did I ‘grab the burning rope’ of resistance, and fight against a development that may indeed need to happen, before something better is born? Am I guilty of delaying the inevitable death of a system, I who believe so strongly in allowing the natural arrival of endings? Are acerbic acts of truthtelling helpful, or are they simply aggressive? Do they belong to the old adversarial system, or can they be supportive because they are ultimately rooted in acceptance rather than in conflict and anger? Perhaps in this instance the creative shake up was necessary, so that the inspector could see and listen differently. Perhaps it allowed the pleas of the community to be heard, and the quieter voice of the books to seed better. Perhaps it had no impact whatever. Who knows?

As a codicil to the story, Fairfax Housing and Reading Golf Club have just put in an appeal to the High Court, citing injustice and unfairness in the inspector’s report. Should the High Court accept their appeal, a different inspector will be appointed and the inquiry will begin all over again. The unremitting process continues. In light of this, I feel happier that I named and framed the developers’ merciless persistence within the context of a process that masquerades as democratic.

And so, for now, the case study ends. What is my conclusion? All I can really say, after much consideration, is this: in an extremely difficult time of shift, flux and changing systems, as we are compelled to face with renewed honesty our own individual approaches, pausing long, listening deeply and acting authentically are the best yardsticks, perhaps the only yardsticks, we have. And if we act so, we should then accept that we have then done our best, made the best decisions we could, and have acted with integrity. And that we should be at peace with our choices.

Find more

You can find more on Outrider Anthems’ Standing Tall project — along with digital flipbooks of the two books Jennifer presented to the council meeting — here on the OA website, and in Jennifer’s piece for our Creative Showcase: Standing Tall, 2022.

Jennifer has shared the text of her story, The Oligopoly, on her new Substack: “This substack space is going to be a mixture of myself and the organisation I founded in 2011 – Outrider Anthems. I am an artist, writer, advocate for the Earth, and a fan of life cycles and endings rather than exponential growth curves. I believe we as a global society have entered the ragged space between ‘the no longer and the not yet’, and we will need to work hard and listen well to find a new way forward in community. This is what I will be exploring here, hopefully in conversation with others.”

As reported by the CIEEM (Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management) and The Guardian, the UK’s Joint Committee of Intelligence report, National security assessment on global ecosystems, was published in January 2026 “with no press briefing, headlines or apparent ministerial comment, the report has landed amid a news cycle dominated by the World Economic Forum in Davos. Yet its conclusions are stark and far-reaching, with profound implications for environmental policy, planning and public investment in nature.” The CIIEM continues: “Of particular concern is the report’s conclusion that, if current trends continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse, and that ecosystem collapse is highly likely to drive national security risk.”

The Walk for Peace, led by Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, is a journey dedicated to raising awareness of peace, loving-kindness, compassion, and unity. This historic journey began at the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and travelled over 2,300 miles to reach its destination in Washington, D.C.

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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.

Jennifer – “The question of AI? Intrinsically I do not like it. I do not like who has inputted the data, how the data has been sourced, its internal biases, and who is seeking to make money, and gain power, from its use. I do not like how it has become our path, without debate and without consensus. I do not like how it replaces human effort and makes it easy to relieve ourselves of critical thinking. I do not like the cheesy, saccharine images that are its representation of spirituality, nor the ‘wonders of nature’ that it seeks to fabricate and enhance, as if they are not naturally wonderful enough. To the new parameters of ‘perfection’ it sets, I find myself responding with more mess, more spontaneity, more deliberate ‘imperfection’. This I like. I do confess to using it to cheat at Wordle, and my Spanish and elementary Zulu have been made possible through the AI owl service that is Duolingo.”

Jennifer Leach

A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.

We are Creatures – a Story of Mayhem with Masks

Artist and writer Nicky Saunter shares her recent photographic exhibition and the artist-activist collaboration that brought the wild into our city streets, revealing humans as creatures in a world that allows less space than ever for the natural.

1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

Back in the mists of time during the first pandemic lockdown, I became involved with a bunch of local creative people who were also into drumming and protesting about climate change with Extinction Rebellion. As a small group of enthusiastic activists based in a small west Somerset rural town, we were conscious that if we were to invest the time, energy and money in travelling to London to join other protesters, we should make it worthwhile by making as big an impact as possible. Hence the idea to make big animal masks that would transform us into creatures other than humans. We wanted to take nature into the protest and chose to become native animals that we saw in our countryside.

We are creatures: supported in a web of life

Sadly, today there is often more wildlife in cities and towns than in our increasingly sterile and denuded landscape. We rarely see large mammals such as foxes, insects are few around sprayed crop fields and amphibians are struggling with a lack of ponds. A study published by Buglife in 2020 showed that insects are in steep decline worldwide – with an average loss of over 8% per decade. Studies using other methods have produced even higher figures for insect population decline of over 2% per year. And we cannot survive without insects, for they form a critical part of the global food chain and maintain the soils we need to grow our food. There are some long words in the pyramid chart below, but you get the message: we need a lot of insect life at the bottom in order to support our food system at the top. For example, three-quarters of our food crops depend on insects for pollination. Without them we won’t survive for long.

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
– Rachel Carson (Scientist and author of Silent Spring, the book that brought the dangers of pesticides to the general public in the 1960s.

Source: Buglife, ‘We are losing 9% of insects per decade’ https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/we-are-losing-9-of-insects-per-decade/

Here is a BBC Ideas film that explains it really well too – and with beautiful animation and a voiceover by the brilliant bee man Dave Goulson: Why insects are so crucial to life on Earth | BBC Ideas.

With the help of a fellow local artist, Jenni Dutton, who is extremely skilled in both creating and teaching, we made a range of masks that went on parades, demonstrations and protests around the country. It is amazing what can be made from corrugated cardboard boxes, newspaper, glue and paint. From the fox to the frog, the owl to the dragonfly, these creatures came alive and danced and drummed alongside the humans. They brought a little of the wild into our city streets. It felt like a reminder of our ecological crisis, which was often forgotten in the headlines of carbon, energy and climate. After all, humans are just one of the many creatures affected by climate change, although we are the only ones to have caused it.

Protestors draw attention to falling biodiversity. Photo: Nicky Saunter © 2021

When people disappeared

There is less space than ever for wildlife in our world today. More concrete and less earth, more chemicals and fewer insects. In the pandemic, without the endless noise of machinery and traffic, many of us heard the birds again and some experienced the dawn chorus for the first time. People saw some strange and wonderful sights as animals wandered fearlessly into spaces usually occupied by humans, like car parks and city streets. Security cameras caught bemused-looking deer wondering where the humans had all gone. It was surprising how quickly the wildlife found its feet and began to use paths and places long abandoned to people.

We talk endlessly about our need for connection with nature, but it feels as if this is always on our own terms. The wild is fabulous in the right place at the right time, leaving no mess and creating no inconvenience for humans. Mud must stay in the field — although of course it runs down the road as the rate of rainfall increases and blocks our drains. Weeds must stay out of gardens so that plants we choose to call flowers can flourish, since they might be weak and easily overcome if left to fend for themselves. Animals that are potentially dangerous, from the snake to the wolf, are banished, hunted, slaughtered in a range of grisly ways and treated as unworthy of life in comparison with humans. Creatures that we find unappealing or are too good at surviving alongside us and our mess are designated as ‘vermin’. I wonder if — according to the data of who is a real danger to who and how much filth they each create — if we aren’t perhaps the ultimate vermin. Superrats even. After all, we are also creatures.

Wearing an animal mask for a street protest was an interesting experience, as from inside we could see the reactions of people around us. Some laughed, lots took photos, many smiled and children often waved or held out their hands. Recognition was immediate and response warm — something animals help us to do is to connect with each other, perhaps? I think of the ease with which dog walkers start conversations and even become friends with someone they would otherwise just pass in a park or street.

Black and white

There is something about monochrome photography that gets to the very essence of a thing. I don’t know why this is, but time and again, I see the impact of black and white images cut through the constant colour and clatter of today’s busy world and strike at the heart of the matter. This is particularly true of portraits, and therefore my choice to make a series of monochrome photographic prints of people wearing animal masks at night going about their business in our local small town.

The very first image was a take on the Beatles album cover on the zebra crossing at Abbey Road. It was a cold winter night and we had fun arranging ourselves artfully across the road, only to have to scuttle out of the way when cars came along — just like real animals. The final image was both funny and poignant too — people-creatures trying to claim back some space in our world.

We are creatures: Showing 'Crossing the zebra' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Crossing the zebra. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

I went on to take a series of ten images, imagining what might happen at night in a town as creatures show their faces in our human spaces. They are strong, confident and do not seem frightened of us. Have they come to take over? Or are they our almost forgotten selves walking the streets as we lie sleeping in our beds? Some are funny, and others are creepy or disturbing.

These images became part of an exhibition in a studio at East Quay in Watchet, an amazing art venue created by a local group of people called The Onion Collective. The main building houses national exhibitions, often with a local connection or collaboration, while several containers outside house artists’ studios. My exhibition was in one of these, loaned by the Somerset conceptual artist Jenni Dutton.

We are creatures: Showing 'Barn owl and ivy wall' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Barn owl and ivy wall. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

We are creatures: Showing 'Frog in the launderette' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Frog in the launderette. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

One of the things that visitors commented on most was how the combination of my statement and photos challenged their view of their own connection to nature. As we are in a rural area, many people recalled the pandemic quiet and how they took walks and saw wildlife differently — and how that had disappeared again so quickly once ‘normal’ life resumed. I had written about how my images intend to ask us to think differently about ourselves as animals and about the rest of the natural world that surrounds us and yet remains invisible in our daily lives. We see a beautiful vista, the blossom on a tree or enjoy the sound of birdsong, but rarely notice an ancient lichen, a pondskater on a forgotten pool or the perfection of a dandelion seed head. Our filters are set by our culture, which values some things randomly over others. Most of them need challenging.

Nicky Saunter is a writer and artist who uses mostly monochrome photography as part of her practice. She focuses on emotional connection to issues of the day, from women’s rights and colonialism to water pollution. She often features nature and in particular the wildlife of Somerset. More of her work — including the We Are Creatures series — can be seen at Through the Window.

You can read the Buglife report Nicky mentions in this April 2020 post at their site: We are losing 9% of insects per decade.

Nicky mentions multimedia artist Jenni Dutton and you can explore her work here. And you can find out more about the work of the Onion Collective, a place-based social enterprise in the small coastal town of Watchet in Somerset, “working to reconfigure economics from the perspective of our attachments to community, culture, nature and the future we hope for.”

Nicky Saunter

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

Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate

Farmer and author Paul Feather seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis, and names that can reflect its super wicked nature, in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.

2,000 words: approx reading time = 8 minutes

When we name our planetary crisis, it’s something like a birth. The problem is born into our dialogue and its umbilical cord is cut off from the organism that created it in the first place. When we name it the Climate Crisis, our dialogue is constrained by that name, and we respond to that crisis differently from a crisis named Runaway Capitalism or Mass Extinction. Even if we acknowledge that these other framings are relevant, naming the problem centers a particular way of thinking.

People have thrown names at the planetary crisis like it’s an indecisive couple’s new baby. We could call it the Anthropocene. And then there’s Patriarchy. How about Settler Colonialism, or maybe something with Justice in it? — so we sound woke. Sometimes I prefer broad, sweeping names like Polycrisis or Ontological Failure, but at the end of the day, we should probably admit we don’t really know what’s going on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a science person. There’s a lot of carbon in the atmosphere; and while we can debate about where exactly to put the lines between species — there are about to be a lot fewer of them. These are things we can measure. But in between and all around the measurements there’s this thing that we’re all going through, and it’s hard to say exactly what it is.

So what shall we call this thing we have made together?

Super wicked

In social planning, a wicked problem is one that defies solution because it is closely intertwined with other problems, and solutions are constrained by different stakeholders with different worldviews and values.¹ Beginning in about 2007, people began to talk about the climate crisis as a ‘super wicked’ problem, because it had all these wicked traits of complexity and social divisiveness, and also additional difficulties presented by an urgent timeframe and by social injustice wherein the nations who have the most responsibility for climate change and the most power to affect it also have the least incentive to do so.²

There’s actually an added bit of complexity that this framework leaves out, because while it acknowledges that the legacies of colonialism and slavery have shaped the power structures that now make climate change ‘super wicked’, these scholars typically don’t question whether these power structures are the most useful tool for addressing the crisis.³ This is a social planning and social engineering approach: it’s easy to assume that something so big as climate change would have to be addressed by the multinational corporations and governments who hold the levers of power in our society.

In this respect, the wicked problem framework fails to address added epistemological and ontological legacies of colonialism (i.e. colonization of the mind) that have been explored by at least forty years of Western scholarship⁴— and a far longer Indigenous awareness of that legacy — that implicate this rational, engineering-centered onto-epistemology with the origins and development of the global crisis.⁵ This added level of complexity questions the whole framing of the crisis as a problem in need of solutions, but fortunately rather than leaving us with ultra-wicked problems, it’s more like some of the variables cancel out, and things actually get simpler.

Baby gets a new name

If we acknowledge that social engineering is not really a viable approach — that not only do the complexity of the problem and unjust power relations (i.e. its super wicked nature) doom that strategy to failure, but that the whole engineering paradigm is built on colonial notions of power and control that further implicate us with the crisis — then the framing of the crisis changes. We are no longer invested in designing complex international legal interventions to bring down CO₂ emissions, nor even controlling the power structures that would presumably do this. It’s not even clear that we’re still centering CO₂, because coloniality of power and knowledge are now part of the dialogue. This new framing follows the umbilical cord of the climate crisis to better integrate the origins of that crisis: the baby gets a new name.

When we stop trying to engineer our way out of wicked problems, and when we frame the crisis to include coloniality of power and knowledge, we become participants in the crisis rather than the detached observers that engineers must always be. We are no longer debating how to optimize the behavior of billions of (other) people to soften ecological collapse; but rather asking, how do I personally respond to a crisis formerly known as climate change that increasingly defines the human experience?

This does not mean that our response is a solo act unconstrained by social norms and arising purely from personal experience. On the contrary, there is a great deal of meaning to be found by interacting with communities that are already establishing social norms that oppose the systems of power that continually enact the ongoing crisis.

Communities of resistance

Showing a sign in Atlanta forest, Georgia: "You are now leaving the USA." — Atlanta forest, Georgia – “You are now leaving the USA.” Photograph: Public domain

My personal experience is that communities who actively challenge the dominant systems of power and knowledge arise from local resistance movements. In my own search for meaning, I have found the most clarity of purpose when participating in defense of specific places and people from equally specific governments and corporations. I believe that these spaces of resistance are the wombs from which a deeper understanding — even potentially a name — for our crisis will be born.

I have most recently spent time in the Atlanta forest, where a community of forest defenders has been enacting an abolitionist society without police for over a year. This community implicitly rejects a socially engineered response to the more-than-climate crisis, because individual autonomy is a central value. This is both a strategy to ensure group security in a community that is consistently under attack, but also an anarchist conflation of ends and means wherein the resistance community is structured to reflect the values of the society we aspire to create.⁶ Nonetheless, even in such a community there are obvious social norms and expectations that constrain individual action — and, for me, development and understanding of those norms is arguably as important as defending the forest: they are one and the same. This experiment in abolitionist society has been consistently attacked: at this writing about twenty people have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, and one forest defender has been killed by police. The violent suppression of this movement is an unfortunate testament to its success and potential.

Previous conflicts have illuminated connections between power, policing, and climate: as for instance in the brutally repressed resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline,⁷ or Enbridge Line Three.⁸ In the Atlanta forest, these connections between hegemonic power and the more-than-climate crisis are particularly transparent. The forest is a key safeguard against climate instability for local communities, and the underlying conflict threatening the forest is the city’s agenda to expand policing with an immense new training center. This unique pairing of threats (climate and policing) explicitly connects climate agendas with abolitionist narratives that some scholars are already integrating into mainstream environmental justice dialogues.⁹ Finally, the movement’s centering of the site’s history and removal of the Creek/Muskogee Nation in the 1800s followed by forced labor on the Old Atlanta Prison Farm explicitly synthesizes decolonial, abolitionist, and mainstream environmental justice narratives. This ‘perfect storm’ of issues, place, and history situates Defend Atlanta Forest to make unique and lasting contributions to our mutual understanding of power, coloniality, and crisis.

Showing Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who was killed while opposing the Atlanta forest police training facility. — Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was killed while opposing the Atlanta forest police training facility. Photograph: public domain.

The climate crisis is real, but it is exceedingly abstract. It does not feel easy for individual humans to find a meaningful response to this super wicked global problem. It lives in the atmosphere or in tiny molecules of CO₂. It does not have a place. It is not a useful concept for orienting ourselves or making individual decisions — and in that sense it is almost meaningless.

Places like the Atlanta forest are the crucibles where people and movements spill over into each other and where new movements and new meanings are born.¹⁰ We participate in this process — and to some extent we do shape it — but our understanding and language is equally shaped by the places themselves as they are uniquely situated in history and space. If we will find our way through these confusing times, we will need simple answers to wicked problems; and we will find them in the trees, in the deserts, on city streets. We will find them where other seekers have gathered to fight for something meaningful together and in doing so to create a community bound by something that no amount of policing can destroy.

References

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2007) Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the ‘‘super wicked’’ problem of global climate change. Paper presented at International studies association convention, Chicago, Il, February 28th–March 3.
For example, see Lazarus, R. J. (2008) Super wicked problems and climate change: Restraining the present to liberate the future. Cornell L. Rev., 94, 1153. Although Sun, J., & Yang, K. (2016) The wicked problem of climate change: A new approach based on social mess and fragmentation. Sustainability, 8(12), 1312 does make some gestures toward less engineering-oriented approaches.
e.g. counting from Wa Thiong’o, N. (1986) Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature (republished 1991 East African Publishers). See also a decent literature review in Clement, V. (2019), Beyond the sham of the emancipatory Enlightenment: Rethinking the relationship of Indigenous epistemologies, knowledges, and geography through decolonizing paths. Progress in Human Geography, 43(2), 276-294.
Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017) On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017, 16(4): 761-780.
Land C and King D (2014) Organizing otherwise: translating anarchism in a voluntary sector organization. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation 14 (4): 923-950.
Burrell M, Grosse C and Mark B (2022), Resistance to petro-hegemony: A three terrains of power analysis of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota. Energy Research & Social Science 91
Mittal P (2021) Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance. The Arbutus Review 12(1): 121-141.
Pellow D N (2017) What is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity, and also Menton M, Larrea C, Latorre S, Martinez-Alier J, Peck M, Temper L, and Walter M (2020) Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions. Sustainability Science 15: 1621–1636
Perkins T (2021) The multiple people of color origins of the US environmental justice movement: social movement spillover and regional racial projects in California. Environmental Sociology 7(2):147-59.

Find out more

Defend Atlanta Forest, or Stop Cop City, is a decentralised social movement in Atlanta, Georgia, United States — where people occupying trees are being charged with terrorism. In Property ≠ Life, a recent piece he wrote for Resilience.org, Paul discusses the nature of violence and non-violence; “Stop Cop City is explicitly contesting the nature of violence, and this is profound for a society that is based on the violent exploitation of others: a society that doesn’t seem to know who it is without that violence, and whose customary language doesn’t differentiate destruction of life from destruction of property (or when it does seems to value the latter).”

In January 2023, The Guardian’s report, ‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’, covered the killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who opposed the police training facility, while The Intercept reported that The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement’s Success. Atlanta Community Press Collective provides A brief history of the Atlanta City Prison Farm.

In thinking about spaces of resistance, you could explore the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, which documents and catalogues social conflict around environmental issues.

You can explore wicked problems in some previous content here on ClimateCultures, for example our About page on Ecological & Climate Predicaments, and Culturing Climate Change. For a discussion on super wicked problems, you can download the paper by Richard Lazarus that Paul cites above: Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.

A Queer Path to Wellbeing

Artist James Aldridge explores experiences of being ‘other’ as an ability to see beyond the boundaries of binary distinctions: offering us signs of a more inclusive queer nature, from a place that until now has been the edge.

2,670 words: estimated reading time = 10.5 minutes

When I was growing up I experienced my own queerness as not belonging, not being ‘normal’. When I came out as a young man I took the only label I felt was available to me and defined myself as gay, as other. Now at this time in my life I see my queerness as a gift, an ability to see beyond the boundaries between straight and gay, masculine and feminine, human and nature.

Not fitting in can be hard, being excluded when you want to belong. But when you realise that what you are excluded from are the very structures that are denying people the opportunity to experience the reality of the world of which they are a part, it can become a privileged position, a bird’s eye view of the divided terrain.

When I first came out as gay I tried to live in a city. I tried to find somewhere that I belonged by being with other gay people, but it wasn’t me. In the end we chose to live in a rural area, somewhere I feel I have more room to be myself, more opportunity to be with animals and plants and experience connection with the more than human world.

Queer Nature: showing 'The Ash Looks Back' by artist James Aldridge — The Ash Looks Back
Image: James Aldridge © 2020 jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk

I’ve taken a long time to get here, and it’s not been an easy journey. At the point of writing this piece I am 47, married to my husband, Dad to our little boy and living in a Wiltshire village. I am at the start of a relatively new path in learning about climate justice, triggered by discussions with fellow team members at Climate Museum UK. This writing is based on my own experiences and beliefs. I can’t talk for people of colour, or others disproportionately affected by the climate and ecological crises, but I can share the perspective offered by my Queerness.

Paying attention to queer nature

So, at this time of ecological and social collapse, of climate breakdown, with the falling away of old structures, what role do Queer people and perspectives have to play?

“We need guides to help us move through this liminality (and) we have a right to bring our gifts to the world.”

— For the Wild podcast: Queer Nature

My practice as an artist who works with people and places focuses on enabling a sense of identity to emerge through embodied experience of, and artful response to, my/your immediate environment. The Queer Nature podcast talks about the skills and awareness that Queer people have developed as a result of the threat of violence, and the consequent need for hyper-awareness of and sensitivity to our environment. This ability to pay close attention to our sensory experiences, and the possibility of translating that into a practice of paying attention to non-human voices, is a by-product of the trauma that we have experienced as a community.

Queer Nature: showing 'Walking Bundle (Wrestler)' by artist James Aldridge — Walking Bundle (Wrestler)
Image: James Aldridge © 2020 jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk

As Queer people have experienced the trauma of being disconnected from and endangered by mainstream society, so Western society as a whole has experienced the trauma of disconnection from what we have come to call Nature. These binary distinctions divide and separate us through words and perceptions in a way that doesn’t fit the underlying reality. There is no human/nature split, apart from in our thoughts. Colonialism has taught us that we can act independently of Nature, that we are both separate and in control, but as anthropologist Anna Tsing reminds us “We can’t do anything at all, can’t be us, without so many other species.”

Being well with change and uncertainty

The Queer Nature podcast describes Queerness “as a becoming… that arises from destabilisation”. My experiences of exclusion from mainstream society was traumatic, and has left me hyper-aware of other’s actions, of the danger of being open about my sexuality in certain situations. Yet these experiences have also given me a chance to experience kinship with the more than human world, in ways that I might not otherwise have accessed, should I have slotted more easily into the role set out for me.

My arts practice, and the time that I have spent exploring and defining my identity through interaction with non-human beings, has provided me with a means of becoming-with the land. As my good friend the artist Kathy Mead-Skerritt reminds me, it is about “a realisation of our indivisibility”.

Colonisation has taught us that Nature is other, Blackness is other, Queerness is other. Inclusion may invite us in to give us a place at the table sometimes, a place within the city walls, but I value my access to the rich wild life beyond those walls, and the opportunity to live side-by-side with non-human others. Talk of collapse is scary, the ‘end of normal’ can be scary too, but for those of us that have lived outside of normal for much of our lives there is a certain familiarity to it.

“The ecological view to come… is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definitive centre or edge. The ecological thought is intrinsically Queer.”

— Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

Queer Nature: showing a film still from Water Body, by artist James Aldridge — Water Body (film still)
Image: James Aldridge © 2020 jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk

When I was younger I worked to support the development of a sustainable future. More recently I have shifted towards learning to be well with change and uncertainty. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, or have given up, but that I believe we need to be more humble, more outward-facing, and that art can help us with that. Art that is grounded in listening and witnessing, that allows us to slow down, open up and accept our place within vast interconnected systems, can change our way of seeing the world, even if only for a moment. As Nora Bateson writes, through the experience of making art “…we are pulled from our illusion that we can watch life from our safe place at the window. We are participants in the process.”

We can use art to unpick inherited ways of thinking and perceiving, that have led us to act without empathy for others, or awareness of our place within wider systems. As Jonathan Rowson has written, it is this lack of awareness that is the ultimate cause of the crises that we find ourselves in, “Our inability to see how we see, our unwillingness to understand how we understand; our failure to perceive how we perceive, or to know what we know.”

If we want to move on from what Donna Haraway has called the Capitalocene, to the Cthulucene, from the end of one world to the beginning of another, then we need to develop a culture that values ‘multi-species stories and practices’, or what Haraway calls sympoiesis (making with) rather than autopoiesis (self making). Harraway chooses Capitalocene rather than Anthropocene to make clear that it is the system that is at fault, not us as a species. As Queer Nature describe it in the For the Wild podcast, the word Anthropocene relies on a “colonial idea that all humans are inherently bad rather seeing who has had power and enacted ecocide.”

Walking with others

When I first started out on a journey to explore what Queering and Queerness meant to me as an artist, it was as research for a proposal that I was writing. I’m yet to hear if my proposal was successful, but what I have ended up with is a language with which to make sense of my practice, and the world in which I find myself.

As some of us champion a move towards valuing difference, redistributing power and the right for people to live beyond binaries, others are responding with fear to the end of familiar ways of living, and the loss of colonial power. They react by building walls and promoting forms of politics that widen divisions. In such times it can seem too small an action to walk, talk and make, but that is my form of activism, researching how to be well with change by ‘walking with’ others.

Queer Nature: showing 'Decay is the Deep Heart of Spring' by artist James Aldridge — Decay is the Deep Dark Heart of Spring
Image: James Aldridge © 2020 jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk

“Walking-with is a deliberate strategy of unlearning, unsettling and queering how walking methods are framed and used…”

— Walking Lab, Why Walking the Common is More Than a Walk In The Park

What I have come to realise is that being Queer is not about being defined by others as Other, but refusing to be colonised or domesticated. It is about being yourself in spite of the restrictions you may face, a self that you discover through relationship with others. In this way I see it as closely related to (Re)wilding, whereby if the right conditions are put in place, the land begins to heal itself, bringing health to it and to us.

“Since colonisation is a two-way street, working on the colonised and those who stand to benefit… decolonisation, breaking apart the myths and binaries of civilisation will benefit everyone, including… the land and non-human animals.”

— Jesus Radicals, A Holy Queering

We need to work together to support each other through these challenging times, and to develop ways of thinking, seeing and being that are based on relationship. We need to (Re)wild ourselves and the land through letting go of pre-conceived ideas of what is normal or right and pay attention to what the land itself has to teach us. (I put the Re of Rewilding in brackets because I’m not sure that Rewilding isn’t itself based on the idea of a return to a romantic past that never existed. Wilding for now feels less weighed down with baggage.)

‘Ecological restoration…should no longer be the anthropocentric revival of a pastoral utopia that may have been.’

— Rachel Weaver, About Place Journal

showing 'Listening' by artist James Aldridge — Listening
Image: James Aldridge © 2020 jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk

Part of this journey that I am on is about growing more comfortable with not knowing where I’m going. I am learning that there is no neat and tidy endpoint at which everything is picked apart and understood. That the world isn’t ‘out there’ to be saved, it is in us and we in it. And that nothing is fixed, because everything is connected, and every action, however small, can and does have an effect.

At one point I lost all hope of a future, as my knowledge of the climate crisis increased things looked more and more bleak, and I grieved for the future that my family had lost. Now I feel a sense of reassurance that being in the here and now, and acting from a position of being fully myself, as part of a supportive system, is the best and perhaps the only way that I can do good in the world.

Find more

As a freelance artist, James works with a range of organisations, including Climate Museum UK which was created by fellow ClimateCultures member Bridget McKenzie as a mobile and digital museum creatively stirring and collecting responses to the Climate and Ecological Emergency. Climate Museum UK produces and collects creative activities, games, artworks and books, and uses these in events to engage people.

For The Wild — an anthology of the Anthropocene focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift from human supremacy towards deep ecology — includes an extensive podcast series. The episode Queer Nature on Reclaiming Wild Safe Space features Pinar and So, founders of Queer Nature, an education and ancestral skills programme which recognises that “many people, including LGBTQ2+ people, have for various reasons not had easy cultural access to outdoors pursuits, and envisions and implements ecological literacy and wilderness self-reliance skills as vital and often overlooked parts of the healing and wholing of populations who have been silenced, marginalized, and even represented as ‘unnatural.'”

In The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2012), Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, nor does ‘Nature’ exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realising this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought. ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene is a profile of Morton by Alex Blasdel in The Guardian (15/6/17).

Jonathan Rowson’s post discussing our inability to see how we see, How to think about the meta-crisis without getting too excited, is published at Medium (14/2/20).

Why Walking the Common is more than a Walk in the Park by Nike Romano, Veronica Mitchell & Vivienne Bozalek is published in a special issue of Journal of Public Pedagogies (Number 4, 2019), guest-edited by WalkingLab, an international research project with a goal to create a collaborative network and partnership between artists, arts organisations, activists, scholars and educators.

A Holy Queering: Rewilding Civilized Sexualities (27/4/11) is part of a series for the Jesus Radicals collaborative site, which focuses on “undoing oppressions from a framework of anarchist politics and liberative Christianity”, explaining anarchist stances on a range of issues: “And, since our place within creation is largely ignored within Christian theology and classical anarchist politics, we explore our relationship with the environment, as well as human relationships with non-human animals.”

You can read Donna Haraway’s 2015 paper Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, online at the Environmental Humanities journal.

Rachel Weaver’s article, Soundscape Ecology and Uncivilized Philosophy in the Quarry, is published in About Place Journal (May 2018).

Finally, Randall Amster has published a recent essay in The Ecologist (3/2/20). Beyond the Anthropocene includes a very brief account of some of the alternatives suggested for the Anthropocene label, in a wider discussion of what this new age means for us and what our legacy might be and the agency with which we can shape that. “What might follow? The abject urgency of an eponymous Anthropocene makes us all futurists, practically and poetically, and suggests that the promulgation of any human future isn’t merely a spectator sport. … Dreamers and pragmatists alike can unite in the view that another world, a just future with bold vision, is both desired and required.”

James Aldridge

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

Signals from the Edge

This is the fourth post in our series Signals from the Edge, which sets the challenge of expressing something of the more-than-human in the form of a signal for humanity. James himself says of this piece that "'Signals from the Edge' was my starting point but perhaps it has evolved into something slightly different. I’m sending a signal from where I find myself, which has up to now been at the edge."

Unlike our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, which has a fairly fixed shape, Signals from the Edge develops as it grows. Each contribution stimulates the series to be more than it was up to that point. The edge shifts in shape and in scope and in what a signal might consist of, what it shows of us. Previous offerings have been a flash fiction, an essay/video, a short story -- each with a separate reflective piece to accompany it. Here, they are joined by James's personal essay, with his visual art embedded.

Future pieces will take the form further still -- and notions of 'signal' and of 'edge'. In creating the idea for this series, I speculated whether a signal might be a message from elsewhere -- whether one meant for our species or one intended for another kind entirely, and which we overhear by chance. Or it might be an artefact of some other consciousness, or an abstraction of our 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 amidst the confusion of human being. What would be your signal, and what edge might it speak from?

An Invitation to Act: Letters to the Earth

Poet Clare Crossman was inspired to respond to a public call for Letters to the Earth and her poem is included in the publication — a book which offers “a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature.”

1,700 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

Early in 2019 a call went out on social media, I think I saw it on Facebook. Culture was also proclaiming an emergency. They were looking for ‘letters to the Earth’ from writers all over the country, to be read out loud during an event linking the Globe Theatre to the streets, the protests — anywhere people were gathering during a one-day event in April, when it was planned that everything they had been sent would be read out loud by someone, somewhere for the Earth.

Letters to the Earth book design, showing swallow illustrations by Jackie Morris — Letters to the Earth
Swallow illustrations: Jackie Morris © 2019

I had recently written a poem in the form of a monologue about climate change. It had arisen on a dark winter’s night in 2018 when I found myself in deep discussion with a science journalist, a theatre director and filmmaker at an arts get-together. We were looking at the stars and wondering. It turned out we all had entirely different perspectives. Someone said they believed we were just part of a geological arc of years and that we were facing extinction. The Anthropocene was the Sixth Mass Extinction and it was as predictable as the cycles that had brought the Ice Age. It was a point in history, we as human beings had ruined the natural world and there wasn’t much that could be done about it.

The act of naming

It was such a starry night and we were outside in the dark looking up. This conversation stayed with me in the way certain experiences do if you are a poet. I think it lingered because the landscape of Cumbria and other, southern, landscapes formed my writing. I grew up in a profoundly rural place, close to a farm that still had a field called The Meadow that was left to go wild and filled with buttercups, clover, speedwell and eyebright in what I see now as a deeply held tradition for the dairy farmer who lived opposite us and spoke in Cumbrian dialect.

Earlier, I also was brought up by a countrywoman whose father had been a carter in the depths of undeveloped Kent where she lived on a farm. She knew the names of all the wildflowers I asked about. The rare, the common, the folk, alternative names and some of their herbal properties. I was always walking into stinging nettles, she always supplied a dock leaf. When hot, we sucked the honey out of the bottom of clover petals.

So I have a sense that the natural world was part of me and it is to my great advantage and by luck that I have a connection and can name these things. In the north, an occupation on a summer’s afternoon was to walk or go and swim in the wash pools of the beck at Mungrisdale. So, this is why I wrote the poem, The Night Toby Denied Climate Change, which found its way into Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis. I was delighted and surprised when I received an e-mail asking for permission to publish it. I thought it would become part of the wind, which was good enough for me.

As Simon McBurney writes in his piece included in the book, The Act of Naming: “To be unable to name is to be cut off because we cannot read. If we cannot read, we cannot connect or orientate ourselves or know that story you, our earth is telling”. I am not going to write on this now but, needless to say, if you want to know the recent statistics on the numbers of children who never go into nature and don’t see it as part of them, look no further than Fiona Reynolds’ The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future.

Firepit conversation

The Night Toby Denied Climate Change wasn’t the kind of poem I usually write. I wanted what I had to say to be carried on someone’s voice, so I wrote it as a monologue in the voice of someone who I imagine was sitting around a fire pit with Toby and others. I started my working life in theatre and still love its democratic openness of forms.

The book of a hundred poems and prose pieces selected from all the letters they received is broad and lovely in scope. As it says on the flyleaf, “The book you are holding contains letters from all of us: parents and children; politicians and poets; actors and activists; songwriters and scientists. They are letters of Love, Loss, Hope and Action to a planet in crisis. They are the beginning of a new story. They are an invitation to act.”

There are some very august writers and thinkers in this book, as well as many young people. In Katie Skiffington’s letter, Procrastination, she begins every paragraph with the word ‘Sorry’, after beginning ‘Dear Future Generations’. Her whole letter is an apology describing all the things we did not do:

Sorry. We didn’t get there in time. We were late. Except we had time.
...
Sorry that instead of seeing trees as graceful homes for now extinct species, we view them as nothing but paper; money. Great big money-making machines.

There are also pieces which create new metaphors and stories for Earth. Peter Owen Jones redefines his relationship with the earth as milk which was given him. Mark Rylance creates a fairy story based on a canoeing excursion he has just made down the Colorado River where he sees cities and skyscrapers fall. There is Yoko Ono’s writing and of course Mary Oliver, Jay Griffiths, and Caroline Lucas. The poet Nick Drake and the novelist Lyndsay Clarke.

Letters to provoke

Even though they are many established famous names, these are all pieces of new writing balanced with each other in tone and ideas from many others and so Letters to the Earth should not be seen as a coffee table book. Oh no. It is a book full of a hundred very different thoughtful pieces which may be of use in teaching or inspiring writing and, of course, thought. The range of all reactions to climate change is there to provoke the reader and all emotions — despair, hope, loss as it says on the flyleaf. In his piece An Apology/A Prayer the playwright Steve Waters says:

OK, In our defence
By way of
Justification
The prospects for the
FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The prospects for
POSTCAPITALISM
The prospects for
FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM
Looked, and on one of the good days still look 
Exciting

And perhaps we found ourselves so gripped by the narrative Of
GLOBALLY ACCELERATED GROWTH
Or the
INTEGRATION OF THE SOUTHERN ECONOMIES
Or the advent of
NANO-TECHNOLOGY

(I mean you have to realise some of us were born in a period when we could use the words
‘the future’
Say them:
‘the future’ 
Entirely without irony or dread)

There is wit, delight and sorrow in every page of this book. It forms a beginning to show what is happening in the world: a response, perhaps even a first base, or a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature. In a world where temperatures are rising, the ice is melting and mass extinction of many species has already happened.

Find more

Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis, with an introduction by Emma Thompson and edited by Anna Hope, Jo McInnes, Kay Michael and Grace Pengelly, is published by Harper Collins UK (2019). All royalties go towards ongoing creative campaigning for environmental justice.

The wider initiative which led to the book came about in the spring of 2019, when a small group of women came together around a kitchen table to talk. “We’d not even met before. But we had been profoundly shaken by the increasingly dire news of climate and ecological collapse, and inspired by the work of Extinction Rebellion and the Global Youth Strike in bringing that news to the forefront of the public conversation. In our working lives we are theatre makers and writers and we felt strongly that we wanted to find a way to facilitate a creative response to these times of emergency.” As well as Extinction Rebellion, and Global Climate Strike, Letters to the Earth was inspired by and works in sympathy with Culture Declares Emergency.

On the Letters to the Earth website you will find a range of resources, including short videos of readings of some of the letters, an open call to write your own letter, suggestions for local events, and further reading. As well as Clare’s poem, The Night Toby Denied Climate Change, the book also includes contributions from two other ClimateCultures members: social scientist Dr Stuart Capstick (Finding Dory) and poet Nick Drake (The Future).

You can read The Night Toby Denied Climate Change and other poems of Clare’s at her website. And do also explore the Waterlight Project, her collaboration with fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White and others on the natural and social history of the River Mel in Cambridgeshire. Clare recently wrote some poems for the jazz trio Red Stone about another river, the River Gelt in Cumbria. Entitled Green Shelter, it was premiered at Tullie House in Carlisle on November 30th 2019, with the poems, Red Stone’s music and an accompanying film. You can see a promo for the film, including one of Clare’s poems, Green Shelter.

The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future by Fiona Reynolds is published by Bloomsbury (2017).

Artist and illustrator Jackie Morris — creator with Robert Macfarlane of The Lost Words: A Spell Book (published by Hamish Hamilton at Penguin UK, 2017) created the swallow logo for Letters to the Earth and Culture Declares Emergency. She has written about her experience with the book on her blog: About time: or, Letters to the Earth.

Clare Crossman

A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.