Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’
Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.
Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.
Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.
‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related
My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.
I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.
To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers.Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.
Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.
During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.
The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.
My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.
Reaching back to our roots in art
Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.
It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.
Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.
With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.
One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.
Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:
Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us
With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.
These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.
I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.
Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.
The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.
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 here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”
***
Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.
You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.
This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)
More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.
An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our new selection of student contributions to our Museum of the Anthropocene, asking important questions about the meaning of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, the politics of drawing boundaries and the relations that cut across them.
1,770 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes
It’s a great pleasure to open the loading dock again and install six more exhibits in our online Museum of the Anthropocene. These have been selected from the 30 or so which formed part of this year’s pop-up museum at UEA, as part of our ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ module.
This year we had many excellent submissions which dealt with the relations between human and nonhuman beings, perhaps inspired by our close engagement with Anna Tsing and colleagues’ Feral Atlas. While last year our subset of submissions dealt with questions of “who owns what”, “how has that changed over time?”, and “what even is ownership anyway?”, our six entries this year each in their own way explore vital questions about the meaning of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, and crucially about the politics of drawing boundaries between those two spheres.
Drawing boundaries, severing connections
The notion of naturecultures, developed by thinkers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, emphasises the primacy of “relatings over related beings”. As a theory of relationality, it holds that things are defined less by their individual essences and more by their relations with other entities. Nonetheless, across those relations, we are always drawing boundaries, putting things into categories, and severing connections – both materially and philosophically.
Enquiring into naturecultures involves both recognising the endurance of those relations, and attending to the process of “coming into being of bounded subjects, objects and domains such as the natural and the cultural”. How are these domains constructed, and how are different subjects and objects allocated to them? Iris van der Tuin prompts us to study “how, where and for whom boundaries are drawn”.[1]
We can read the history of the Anthropocene as being a process of drawing boundaries and severing connections — of declaring ‘nature’ to be fundamentally separate from humanity and human culture, and thereby positioning it not as a bundle of relations which holds and sustains us all, but as a pool of resources to be exploited and put to work. As historians and geographers like Jason W. Moore and Kathryn Yusoff have reminded us, this philosophical category of ‘nature’, as it emerged in Early Modern Europe, was made to include many parts of humanity as well, with hierarchies of race and gender constructed and used to justify institutions like chattel slavery and patriarchal capitalism.
Does the heralding of the ‘Anthropocene’ represent the final triumph of such boundary-making and hierarchy-constructing? Or does it represent the end of the illusion of such boundaries? That’s not just a philosophical question, but arguably also the crux of the collective choices ‘we’ need to make to steer a course through the Anthropocene.
For naturecultures thinkers, the heralding of the Anthropocene shows just how illusory any nature-culture boundary has always been. We can no longer ignore our entanglements and relations, and indeed the key to dealing with the fall-out of modernity’s pretensions of human separateness from nature is precisely to re-orient our politics and ethics towards care for those relations.
Navigating naturecultures
Our six contributions this year show a range of ways in which we can grapple with these indeterminate nature-culture distinctions, their troubled histories, and their yet-to-be-determined futures.
Kaya Lawes examines a critter with a long history of living closely with humans, of being a key part of some of our most cherished institutions (most notably science), but of also being despised by many of its human neighbours — the rat. She traces the history of the assumed relationships between rats and pestilence, between rats and urban change and inequality, and the more loving relationships that still flourish between some humans and some rats. The contradictions of the intertwined history of rats and people tell us a great deal, Kaya contends, about wider human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene.
Another member of the rodent family is equally evocative of shifting human-wildlife relations. Ciaran Shaffrey recounts the history of the beaver as a species almost lost in Europe to land drainage and enclosure, pursued across North America for its fur by early colonisers — often in the service of emerging fashion trend-setters — and now sitting at the heart of heated debates about ‘re-wilding’ and finding ‘natural solutions’ to habitat degradation and flood management. With both official and guerilla beaver re-introductions gathering pace, are we trying to turn back the clock to a primordial past, or are we seeing the emergence of a new kind of collaborative world-making which cuts across boundaries of species and nature/culture?
Jaz Evans takes us into the virtual sphere, where the slogan “Gotta catch ‘em all!” became synonymous with the cultural phenomenon of Pokémon. But while the slogan might evoke histories of exploration, hunting and accumulation, Jaz shows us how Pokémon was born of grief for the depleted ecologies of Japan, with the creator of the game keen to give children a new means of experiencing “the joy of searching, finding, and collecting”. New augmented-reality versions of the game have brought players back outside, and hopes have been expressed that it could be a new way to reconnect people with the outdoors and even, through its own fantastical naturecultures, to foster interest in conservation.
Amy Patterson traces another story of the natural and the synthetic through her recounting of the complex place of wool in systems of production and trade. Wool, we tend to forget, was central to the early stirrings of the industrial revolution, as well as being a key motivator for the privatisation and enclosure of huge swathes of agricultural land. Amy points to the paradoxical place of wool in contemporary economies — as a raw material it can be worth too little for farmers to bother transporting it to markets; at the same time, it is marketed as a luxury fabric, a cut above its synthetic pretenders. However, a revival of interest in wool is underway, uniting crofters and crafters in building a new kind of garment economy.
This story of shifting value and values has surprising resonances with Lauren Jacquemard’s piece on Taranaki Maunga, a mountain on the North Island of Aoteroa New Zealand. Sacred to Māori tribes of the region, the mountain was nonetheless claimed by the British crown in 1865. The slopes were stripped of many of their ‘natural resources’, eventually leading to efforts at conservation. Nonetheless, this was a form of conservation that enacted an abrupt “division between the human world and the natural world”, thus severing the cultural and spiritual connections of local Indigenous communities to the mountain. Nonetheless, Taranaki Maunga has recently been granted the legal rights of a person. The mountain is now legally considered a living being, and Māori have the authority to speak on its behalf. It has become iconic of a growing, global ‘rights of nature’ movement which seeks to undo the legal and philosophical structures that, for several hundred years now, have calved the ‘human’ off from the ‘natural’, with all the consequences we can now see before us.
All of which brings us, lastly, to the figure of the witch, and to Georgina Renny’s discussion of the history of gendered persecution and more recent revivals of witchcraft as an ecological practice. When early capitalism was busy dividing the world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and ‘productive men’ and ‘domestic women’, the figure of the witch straddled these boundaries in newly problematic ways. Cue the early modern witch-hunts which spread across Europe and North America as those regions were being re-made both by the social transformations of early capitalism and by the environmental trials of the ‘Little Ice Age’. Georgina points to the revival of interest in witchcraft as an example of new feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial environmentalisms, which seek to trouble modernity’s philosophical boundaries anew and to cultivate new means of relating across natural-cultural boundaries.
A better Anthropocene?
Together, we hope these pieces prompt reflection on the importance of paying attention to boundaries, boundary-drawings, and to the relations that cut across. Despite the best boundary-drawing efforts of various villains of the Anthropocene story, these contributions to the Museum of the Anthropocene show that boundaries are always porous, and are spaces of connection and movement as much as they are things that hold us in/back/apart.[2] Recognising and cultivating these entities and relations that cut across philosophical, political and material boundaries may be the very thing that can help us cultivate a better Anthropocene.
Find more
[1] Iris van der Tuin, 2018, ‘Naturecultures’, in Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. eds. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, p. 269.
[2] Thanks to Mark Goldthorpe for this wonderful phrasing.
The Museum of the Anthropocene forms the centrepiece of Martin’s third-year undergraduate course ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’, which he’s been running at the University of East Anglia since 2018. The Museum is built collaboratively each year, with each student selecting an object that they think is particularly eloquent of the historical, political and cultural processes that have led us into the Anthropocene, or which helps us imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene. The Museum is staged around two-thirds of the way through the 12-week course, before students then complete a longer essay on their chosen object.
Step Inside the Museum to view all six of the new objects submitted to the Museum of the Anthropocene this year — as well as 18 contributions from previous students on the course. The main Museum of the Anthropocene page provides introductory reflections and is where we bring together Martin’s annual posts – see below. And there’s also our Anthropocene Glossary, where we offer brief explorations of some of the terms that appear in our Museum entries — such as Coloniality, the Columbian Exchange, the Great Acceleration, Technofossils, the Technosphere and the Tragedy of the Commons.
Martin mentions Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, a site curated by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects.
Martin’s previous posts in our Museum of the Anthropocene series are:
Object-based Learning in the Anthropocene: exploring the material and intellectual challenges of thinking about human-environment relationships in our new planetary era (our 2022 selection).
Centrifugal Stories in the Anthropocene: how our Museum of the Anthropocene stories resist casting all of humanity together as progenitors of our new planetary age (our 2023 selection).
Objects, Ownership and the Politics of the Anthropocene: objects that suggest ‘ownership’ as a theme in narratives of this age and expand this notion in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives (our 2024 selection).
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Writer and researcher Jules Pretty explores stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding in The Dawn of Everything rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.
2,750 words: estimated reading time = 11 minutes
These days, we find ourselves in the midst of world-spanning crises of climate, nature and social inequality. All three have the same proximate causes: a type of economy that promotes too much material consumption and a dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. Something is about to change. Yet we have never been here before. We are in the dark forest, at our darkest hour, and we are not sure if we can choose a new path.
We often don’t know what to do when great moments of transformation in life appear: the rites of passage from small to big school, a first date, your first day in a new job, a baby in the family, a friend’s death, your own advancing mortality. We have no plan for what happens next. There is no rehearsal – apart from stories that tell how others have crossed their own thresholds. We are going to need ways to open up the world ahead, where fear could still be one of our greatest emotions. Most of life is inconceivable. Living without fossil fuels seems so, for many people. Living without air pollution from cars, also seems inconceivable.
The Red Queen said to Alice, “Why sometimes I’ve believed, as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass (1872)
Should we think of a new diet, perhaps less meat and more oat milk; should we buy an electric car now or later, fly less and cycle more; insulate our home or install solar panels, listen to the birds, have coffee with a friend? Well, one of these, then maybe another one, soon after.
The point is this: we have choices. We just may not realise this yet.
There emerges a need for new forms of story-telling, combined with a language of kindness and generosity. Kindness is both our common state and best response to threat. It is selfishness that is the outlier.
What kinds of language and values might we use to find our ways out of these deep woods? Berthold Brecht wrote in 1939:
“In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”
We find ourselves now in need of stories with hope, and then to explore how to use these to create more effective agency to address the great crises of these times. Fast transitions, regime shifts and positive tipping points are beginning to occur, showing that new ways of living can be just and fair.
Calling time on ideas of linear evolution of human cultures
This is where a brilliant, clear, refreshing and fabulous synthesis of a book comes in. It is called The Dawn of Everything, and draws on recent archaeological evidence and anthropological insight to say highly salient things about human history.
The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, say: most accounts of pre-modern human history “simply aren’t true, they have dire political implications, and make the past dull.”
This is interesting, not least because this book is also about the future.
The authors are willing to call out many contemporary commentators who believe in linear evolution of human ideas and cultures (the ecological determinists and evolutionary psychologists, for example), and who say that modern life must be superior to all that has gone before. Graeber and Wengrow call these “dismal conclusions”, and “prejudices dressed up as facts.”
For this book is about freedoms, not the “weird arguments” made by many in support of modern and high-consumption ways of living and organizing. We are neither at the top nor the end of a process of betterment. What has gone before was more diverse, egalitarian and astonishing than many would think.
Human cultures of the past have always diverged; they have not converged on one model perceived as more advanced or even perfect.
This book also overturns ideas about the assumed superiority of agriculture over foraging-hunting-gathering, and of city civilisations over agrarian. It also suggests that large-scale public engagement leads to innovative and diverse futures. People have always valued the things they do and places they live as extensions of identity, and so have often and explicitly refused to adopt practices and ideas from other people and places.
This cultural refusal is a key finding (it is not rejection on the grounds of being better; it is about something just being for other people and not for us).
Cultures can also get stuck, becoming less innovative. Many cultures and cities were abandoned after hundreds of years of continuity when people just walked away. They got stuck, and decided to seek something new. They sought the next dawn of everything.
There are numerous valuable findings from this wonderful book.
First, humans are not inevitably nasty and selfish. More often than not, cultures and cities have been egalitarian.
Human cultures are projects of self- and co-creation. They emerge from engagement, participation, story and sense-making.
Human cultures do not converge on one model, and one model does not follow another (e.g. agriculture after foraging). All cultures diverge in space and over time. Wherever and whenever we look, there is endless human diversity. No single system is preferred, and evolutionary stages do not exist, where one model of life inevitably follows another.
Evidence from all the world over shows the enormous long-distance interactions between people and cultures. We have always lived in a small world politically and culturally connected. People travelled and journeyed to see and learn from other places. Recent DNA testing of skeletons shows much higher rates of interaction. Human cultures have never been isolated or biologically “pure.”
At times, cultures do get stuck, thinking they know or have it all. The modern era of neoliberalism and planetary nature and climate crises is an example of being stuck. We are living now in the latest of “stuck times.”
All human cultures engage in refusal. They know what others are doing, but in order to remain true to their own identities, they commonly refuse to adopt certain other technologies and ideas. Some foragers lived alongside agriculture for 3,000 years, and refused to adopt it. Some city states knew all about metal and the wheel, and again refused to use them.
Of course, non-conformists exist in every culture. What differs is how each culture reacts to them. Many cultures in history valued non-conformists (such as tricksters, jesters, story-tellers, shamans, and the physically and mentally diverse), seeing them contributing to diversity and divergence.
Agriculturalists and forager-hunter-gatherers lived side-by-side for thousands of years. In many places, cultures used different modes of living during different seasons; some foraged and took up agriculture; some farmed for hundreds of years and adopted foraging.
Foragers-hunters-gatherers established many cities and monumental cultures, and engaged in small-scale gardening and domestication of what we now call weedy species.
There was also oscillation within years and across seasons: within years some people foraged-hunted-gathered for certain seasons, and then farmed in others; some peoples developed different social structures and even personal names in different seasons of the year (a ruler in one season, people’s assemblies in another). Seasonality of values and identity is still with us – we behave differently during Christmas and Ramadan, during long holidays (the French grand vacances). People set aside work, for a bit, and affirm values in community, family, giving and resting.
Many city states and cultures had no kings, queens or rulers, no palaces or temples. People governed through assemblies, councils (as often women-led as by men). Some cities built public baths, others huge social housing projects. Many created co-housing units larger than for single families (long-houses). The traditions of long-houses for co-living continued to Norse-Icelandic culture, the Pacific North-West, and in rainforest forager cultures worldwide.
After a time, many cultures simply hit a wall. They stop. They are abandoned. It seems people in them choose to go and create something different. Most were not conquered or beaten by war.
Catalhöyük was long thought of as one of the first agricultural sites and cities. But the people are now known to have preferred and celebrated wild aurochs over domesticated cattle. They knew about the latter for 1,000 years, yet never used them. Elsewhere in Mesopotamia, there are many examples of refusal: cities that knew about agriculture for 3,000 years, yet never adopted it. Such refusals were not irrational or silly: they were on the grounds of choices about practices that defined others who were not them. People want to stay as themselves.
The first organised city cultures in the world were not in Mesopotamia, but at the mega-sites and mammoth houses of current Ukraine-Moldova (4100-3300 BCE), each with huge central assembly places for exchange, sharing and decision-making. Individual cities were 300 hectares in size, contained co-living houses, and reached populations of 10,000 people.
In today’s California, the dozens of cultures and language groups centred on only foraging-hunting-gathering are sometimes described as existing because agriculture failed to reach them. Yet there was interaction with agricultural communities of the greater south-west. They also knew about agriculture, and refused to use it.
Poverty Point in Louisiana of today contains some of the largest mounds in the Americas. These cities were built around 1400 BCE by forager-hunter-gatherers. In Japan, the Jomon culture comprised 14,000 years of (pre-rice) forager culture, producing cycles of settlement, craft, storage, and traditions of building things and breaking them down again (traditions that continue to today in Shinto and Buddhist culture).
Teotihuacan in central America was a city culture on eight square miles of land. It had no central ruler, nor did it adopt the ball courts, kings and palaces of nearby Tikal and Calikmal. Teotihuacan was egalitarian, with stone social housing containing plumbing and sanitation, each finely decorated with art and images (much psychedelic). After 500 years, Teotihuacan was abandoned. Again, we today do not know exactly why.
The largest city culture in the Americas before modern times was Cahokia (in current Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi). The city had a population of 15,000, and flourished for 300 years between 1050-1350 CE. The people were forager-hunter-gatherers, supplemented with gardens with domesticated sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed and mayweed. Cahokia and all the surrounding river valleys were depopulated at the same time, creating a long-lasting “empty quarter” that no other peoples entered.
There was public engagement and assembly for culture-making, where individual and collective agency leads to divergence of choice.
There was refusal of what appear to be more efficient or productive options. Identity was more important.
There was explicit adoption of egalitarian structures and social support.
Cultures have lived alongside other differing cultures for thousands of years. They knew about other ways of living, and decided not to adopt. There was no perfect economic system of living waiting to be revealed.
There was long-distance travel, journeying and staying, leading to biological mixing inside stable cultures.
There was sudden abandonment of modes of living, when people decided they had become stuck and needed to do something different.
We know that fossil fuels will have to be almost entirely eliminated from all economies worldwide (excepting perhaps communities living at high latitudes that are dark and cold for long periods of the year), and thus the spread of adoption of renewable energy generation is central to preventing climate catastrophe. The overarching aim is to electrify everything, with a particular focus on wind, water, solar and battery storage.
Most countries are now committed to 100% renewables for their electricity supply at some time in the future. Some have made dramatic advances in implementation, others have been slow (see Table 1).
Many poorer countries are predicted to save money by these investments, as many spent up to half of national export earnings on importing oil, and now increasingly have the resources to invest in other social priorities. Countries highly dependent on the income from oil will find transitions hardest, even though some have large sovereign wealth funds. Qatar styles itself a “hydrocarbon-enabled economy.” It has the highest carbon emissions worldwide at 55 tonnes C per year per person, and to date has effectively zero contribution from renewables for its electricity supply.
Table 1. Proportion of domestic electricity supplied by renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass), 2022
Proportion of domestic electricity consumption supplied by renewables
Countries
98%-100%
Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, Paraguay, Uruguay
Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden
40%-50%
Ireland, Spain, UK
20%
China, India, Japan, Morocco, USA
Less than 0.2%
Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
Note: World 28%; Europe 35%; Low-income countries 66%; Upper-income countries 30%. Some of these high percentages are in countries with low total energy consumption and low access to affordable electricity. They will need to consume more to escape poverty, and there will be a need to generate more renewable energy than today. Sources: International Energy Agency (2023) (www.iea.org); Our World in Data (www.ourworldindata.org).
Choices by governments matter. In the UK in 2023, the government chose to invest in a new nuclear plant (to produce 3 GW per year); in Denmark, the government has chosen wind power on two new energy islands in the North and Baltic Seas (total of 6 GW capacity). These islands will be the largest infrastructure in Denmark’s history, and will be generating electricity by 2030. Nuclear in the UK will take 10-15 years longer to be commissioned, costs will be twice as great, and there will still be a need to pay for costly nuclear waste disposal. Such nuclear developments will therefore be delivered too late to influence the meeting of 2050 net zero targets. China and South Korea are planning 1-6 GW of floating offshore wind parks for installation in 2025-2030.
Globally, the International Energy Agency believes strong growth in clean energy means the world can deliver fossil fuel emission cuts of 35% by 2030. The IEA also say we have the tools to go much faster, and that there is now a need for “a fierce urgency of the now.”
These advances towards 100% renewables are the start of a new dawn of everything. It is instructive to see which countries are taking the lead, and how cost benefits nationally will accrue.
In my 2022 book, Sea Sagas of the North, I visited and wrote about 160 ports, villages and coastal places culturally facing inward to the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic (in Iceland, Norway, Finland, England, Scotland and the Faroe Isles). I talked to an 80-year-old famed skipper of the trawlers and drifters, and he said, “You know we were more tolerant and kind in the days of fishing, when we travelled to other places and came back with gifts and stories.” Fisher communities on the coast of the east of England felt greater closeness and affinity with people 1,100 miles away in Iceland and Norway than communities 10 miles inland.
The ecological collapse of fisheries led directly to social and cultural change on the coasts, and people lost their friendships with others across the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic.
For my 2014 book, The Edge of Extinction, I visited and stayed with place-based and indigenous cultures in Aotearoa, Australia, Tuva, Finland, Labrador, Louisiana and California. A Finish ice-fisherman friend stood up in the audience at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History, and demanded: “Where is the escape route for our culture and people to leave your modern world? Will you give us one?” The title’s play on words was intended to suggest it was modern societies and economies that were on the edge of extinction, not indigenous ones. The book should probably have been called ‘The Edge of Our Extinction’.
My 2023 book, The Low-Carbon Good Life, centres on the diverse ways of living and public engagement we need to create to solve the nature, climate and social inequality crises facing the planet. We will be needing divergence of practice, choice and behaviours rather than convergence.
Above all, we will need good stories that lead to agency and transformation.
Find out more
Jules Pretty’s new series The Climate Chronicles is posted at his website, where you can also find details of his books, includingThe Low-Carbon Good Life (2023) and Sea Sagas of the North (2022). Jules is part of the project team behind the Hope Tales events and chapbooks, with fellow ClimateCultures member Nicky Saunter. See Nicky’s post, Hope Tales — Stories for Change.
A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.
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.
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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.
Poet Julian Bishop uses his collection We Saw It All Happen to witness signs of the climate crisis with the immediacy of news coverage of war and conflict, and to find hope in nature’s ability to hang on.
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Back in the days when I was a cub reporter on the South Wales Echo I thought words could change the world. And to an extent they did. I’d write a piece about a family with a damp flat and as if by magic the landlord would quickly fix it, shamed by a Page Five lead.
Later I was made the BBC’s first environment reporter in Wales, at a time when climate change was barely on the news agenda. I seem to remember the position was prompted by a series of terrible floods in North and West Wales. And because they were “great pictures”, I often had the top story in bulletins. When the weather was ok, I used to cover any rural issue. Once I reported on a new pesto factory opening in Powys.
Ambition took me to ITN’s News At Ten in London where I switched to more of a production role, eventually being in charge of deciding the running order of news stories. I frequently elevated environmental stories only to have them knocked down to the bottom of the list. Those were the days of ‘climate change’ rather than ‘climate crisis’ but, even so, I’ve noticed that most TV news programmes only lead on it when there are “great pictures” — the recent US wildfires come to mind.
And here’s the problem — war and famine are huge human catastrophes with an immediacy that the climate crisis doesn’t have, except when it manifests itself (increasingly) in fire or flood.
Visualising five degrees
Which is where my idea for We Saw It All Happen came in. Is it enough to bear witness to such events and move on or do we have a greater responsibility than that? Is the media necessarily underplaying climate change because of huge unfolding disasters like the conflict in Gaza? There’s a separate blog to be written about the climate factor in this conflict, although probably for another day.
For me, the attack on our natural world is also a form of warfare but one that isn’t on our TV screens daily, if you discount Sir David Attenborough’s increasingly outspoken Planet series. Don’t forget such programmes fall under the general tag of ‘entertainment’ at the BBC.
That said, I wanted to create something engaging to read but that also made a forceful point. For inspiration, I reached back to some of the now hugely out-of-fashion Augustan poets of the 18th Century, for example Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Generally thought of as satirists, they were also masters of poetic form, another approach I was keento adopt. So my book contains many sonnets, a specular, sestina, Golden Shovel and riffs on other forms. It’s also very political. I learnt about many of these forms during a year-long poetry course at City Lit in London, an adult education centre just off Covent Garden.
I wrote the ‘anchor poem’ for the book, Five Degrees, after reading a report from scientists at Stanford University which looked at the impact of each extra degree of warming on the planet. I remember I was on the Eurostar going to Brussels for some media event and it made me wonder whether dull-sounding data might somehow be translated into poetry, especially given that many poetic forms depend on various numbers of lines or syllables. ‘Five’ immediately suggested a villanelle, a tricky form with five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. I knew instantly that the refrain had to be: “too late”. And then with not a little poetic licence I began to fill in the detail, tethering each degree to one of the scientific findings in the Stanford paper.
This is what it looked like:
Five DegreesTake one – another atoll gone, droughts, faster rateof ice melt. Sweltering taxis. A few mortuaries fail to cope in The Pyrenees. Chin up, it’s not too late.Two degrees - forget the Med. Instead, investigateAberystwyth for a tan. Gozo is a no-go. You can sailacross London in a skiff! Maybe Donald’s heart-rateskips a beat. Three degrees. Now the floodgatesopen. Holland (and the coral) gone. A large-scaleexodus from Africa. Geo-engineers arrive too late.Work hard for a degree at Oxford-by-the-Sea, wait for a Balliol boat. Bail out - Cambridge is a folktale.At four, methane leaks from the sea floor, the rateaccelerates. Mangrove swamps, sapodillas recreatethe tropics in Paris. Bananas on a boulevard; so shalehad an upside after all! Take the fifth – way too lateto keep the lid on oceanic gas explosions so great Hiroshima is but a flicker. Then the final coffin nail:supercharged fireballs banging into cities at a rate of knots. The lid lowers by degrees. Sorry: too late.
Five Degrees was eventually printed by Magma Poetry magazine in their Schools issue — after Trump lost the election, so “Donald” was changed to “the Earth” which was an extremely satisfying edit! Sadly the poem is proving horribly prophetic…
I say it was an anchor poem because I wanted a central section of the book to deal with current affairs, seen through a poetic eye. I divided the poems into Starters, Mains and Afters, not least because after trying to order the poems I noticed food was a pervasive presence (weird, because I’m skinny, although I do love cooking).
We Saw It All Happen – hope and trauma
My plan was to try and release the strongest poems in a pamphlet and then focus later on a full collection. I sent off a selection to a pamphlet competition run by a small press in Manchester called Fly On The Wall, who caught my eye as one of the few publishers to claim everything they do is with the environment in mind and actually mean it. To my shock, Isabelle Kenyon, who runs the press, asked if I’d like to go ahead with a full collection straight away. Of course the answer was yes!
Then began the terrible process of sifting through several years of poems to work out which ones fitted my chosen framework. I soon realised they were quite a gloomy bunch — and who wants to read a book of poems about the climate emergency without a few notes of hope?
This led to some research on efforts being made to save endangered species from extinction and the birth of poems such as Little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, one of a sequence of poems inspired by the Back From The Brink project, a collaboration between several different UK wildlife agencies to save some 20 species from extinction. The poem was also published in an issue of Magma Poetry:
Little Whirlpool Ramshorn SnailA name twenty times its length, curledon a page indexing threatened species -smaller even than a waterboatman's oarpushed out to the fringes of extinction.These water specks, scaled-down ammonites, translucent on the edge of a British ditch,crawl among the marginals, dodging carpto clamp onto reeds they still call home.Despite the incursion, the plucky Ramshornscling on, skim ditches for scraps of algae, flattened whorls spiralling ever further down through the ferny fringes of a marshy nook.Small coils that spin in a run-down clock,man's hands have been moving against them,conchologists wading in to their rescue,trying to wind the miniature cogs back.
And I needed a title poem for the book. I eventually decided to re-work a draft of a poem I’d called ‘That Scene With The Walruses’ which was about watching an episode of David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary series Our Planet where walruses appeared to be climbing cliffs in search of food only to throw themselves off. It now appears they may have been fleeing from polar bears but whatever the reason, I found the film extremely traumatic and wrote the poem straight after watching the programme.
So it seemed most fitting to re-title the poem We Saw It All Happen, given that an important function of the book was to examine the role of the media — for better or worse — in how we formulate perceptions about the climate emergency.
Rather gratifyingly, some poems have taken on a life beyond the book. One called Lobster was runner-up in the international Ginkgo Prize, a major international award for ecopoetry, in 2018, where the prize was a week’s residency at a retreat near Ballinskelligs in southern Ireland. I used the time to put together a first draft for the book and the residency inspired a few new poems as well. But the poem was picked up by several other publications, most recently an anthology of poetry and short stories from Guts Publishing called The Transformative Power Of Tattoo. In case you’re wondering what the connection is, here’s the poem:
Relating to the natural world
We Saw It All Happen has been out nearly a year now and I’ve been concentrating on promoting it. Most bizarrely, I was asked to give a talk to a group of City types with offices near The Gherkin in London. They’re a firm of environmental consultants and I tried to convince them that maybe there’s a place for poetry in corporate boardrooms or at least as part of a distinctive pitch. I’m not sure how the message landed but I managed to sell quite a few books.
Julian Bishop reading at a Magma launch, London 2023
And of course I’m planning a possible follow-up, this time with more of a focus on plants and trees and how humans relate to them. I’ve been greatly inspired by Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard and her book Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest, (Penguin, 2022). Her work explores the symbiosis between fungi and trees and how trees use fungi to communicate with one another.
Another mini project has been what I’m calling Shakespeare Shovels – using lines about the natural world from Shakespeare plays as the basis for climate-related poems. I’m convinced that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be a climate protester!
To finish with, here’s a sneak preview based on a quote from Macbeth Act II, Scene 3 (“some say the Earth was fev’rous and did shake”):
The Ginkgo Prize is a major international award for ecopoetry, funded by the Edward Goldsmith Foundation and organised by the Poetry School. You can download each year’s anthology of winners and runners up — including the 2018 anthology featuring Julian’s poem, Lobster.
Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
