Festival Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Rise and Fall – A Short Film-Poem About Connection

Artist and writer James Roberts shares Rise and Fall, his short, award-winning film-poem, which gives us all space, an invitation to find calm, to experience our local rivers, to find a practice of connection and show some reverence.

1,300 words: estimated reading time = 5 minutes + 5 minutes video

Rise and Fall developed from a short visit to the Cambrian Mountains above the Elan Valley dams one spring afternoon. I was trying to film red kites with my drone, but the kites had other ideas, disappearing over the peaks at speed. So instead I decided to do a shot of the little River Elan, starting almost at its surface, then sending the drone as high as it would go.

Showing a clip from 'Rise and Fall', a film by James Roberts, 2025. — A clip from ‘Rise and Fall’, a film-poem by James Roberts, © 2025.

Rise and Fall — a film-poem

When I viewed the footage later, a poem began to write itself about the experience — about the high drift and growing distance, which seemed like a metaphor for where we are now in relation to the natural world. The further we rise, the more distant it gets. Rivers, it seems, show us where we are.

After that I began visiting other rivers whenever I was out and about, filming them handheld and up close, or floating the drone above them to record their contours: the Wye, the Lugg, the Cleddau, the Dart, and a few of their tributaries. I hadn’t set out to make a film, but that poem wanted to do more than just sit on a page. It wanted to be a film-poem.

Luckily I was told about the upcoming Rivers of Film Festival and encouraged to send in a film treatment. Even more luckily the film was accepted and then went on to win the inaugural Clare Crossman Prize. The process of making a film was a real adventure for me, for which I’m very grateful.

There’s so much in the news these days about the state of our rivers. They’re polluted, choked with sewage, nitrates, harmful bacteria. It’s the water companies’ fault, or privatisation, or chicken farms. But these are symptoms, not causes — indicators of a wider disconnection with the natural world which continues to widen. Rivers show us what we’re doing to the earth, our attitude towards it, our now-distant relationship with it. Everything flows into them: our poisons, but ultimately our ideas and ideologies.

It seems like there’s headway being made in the fight to save our rivers. Good souls are measuring nitrates, monitoring streams, building networks, litigating. They’re raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for this fight. Meanwhile, the great rollout of AI is being backed by every government and major investment company, estimated to cost tens of trillions in the next decade. As part of this, our children are being encouraged to develop relationships with companions that don’t exist. They’re being connected deeper and deeper into the wiring of machines. Machines that consume billions of litres of water. Will the rivers be spared?

What is the most important thing?

This is what I want to see: a farmer walking down to a nearby stream first thing in the morning, before they start their long workday. When they reach it, they spend a few minutes watching and listening. Then they bow. Or a group of children on their way to school going to the riverbank to drop flowers from their gardens into it, watched smiling by their investment banker parents. This is not part of some new-age religion — it’s simply a practice of connection. Start the day with something important. Show some reverence.

Showing a clip from 'Rise and Fall, a film-poem by James Roberts, 2025. — A clip from ‘Rise and Fall, a film-poem by James Roberts, © 2025.

I remember reading about a man who visited a reservation in the US hoping for some instruction on how to live better. Two elders led him out into the desert early one morning. They told him to bring nothing, just to sit until they told him he could return to the village with them. They left him there for two hours. When they returned they asked him one question: What is the most important thing in life?

He thought about what they might want to hear and said: family. They shook their heads and walked away.

Two hours later, with the sun now reaching its zenith, they returned and asked the same question.

“Friends,” he answered.

They walked away again.

After another two hours they asked the same question. Again, the wrong answer. And again.

By late afternoon it was 100 degrees in the shade, and the man wasn’t in the shade. Again he gave them the wrong answer.

The next time he could barely speak. His head was spinning, there were sparks in his eyes, and his throat was like a sand chute.

“What is the most important thing in life?” they asked again.

“Water,” he croaked. “Water!”

They smiled, picked him up, embraced him, and let him drink before returning to the village.

Practices to reconnect

Showing the title clip from 'Rise and Fall', a film by James Roberts 2025. — ‘Rise and Fall’, a film-poem by James Roberts, © 2025.

My little film-poem ends with the line: “If you want to, you can find your way back” (sorry for the spoiler). I’m not trying to preach, only to offer a viewpoint in the most simple way I can. For me, we have to find practices that reconnect us to the real, to move away from the virtual. Find our way back to what we are — animals, dependent on other animals, the soil, the rivers. That reality will return to us whether we like it or not.

The film is deliberately slow; you might find the pace frustrating. It’s shot in black and white, as simple as I could make it. This is to give us all a little space. Nick Sergent composed a beautiful cello soundtrack, which helps slow the piece down further. It’s an invitation to calm, and hopefully a way for you to reconnect with your local river.

Find more

You can view Rise and Fall here.

James Roberts is an artist and writer based in the Welsh Borders. For more of his writing, subscribe to intothedeepwoods.substack.com, where he writes about establishing practices of connection to the wild. His website is: seariverwood.com.

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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.

James – “I do use AI. It’s an efficient spellchecker, it’s good at helping me fix my old car, and it’s excellent at interpreting Tarot decks. I don’t use it for creative work: AI ideas are pretty useless to me. I do think, however, that it will replace most professional creatives in the near future. This is already happening in the design industry where I used to work. See above for how it impacts the environment. Therefore, like meat and plastic, it should be consumed sparingly. I’m already weaning myself off it despite only experimenting with it for a few months.”

You can read about the Clare Crossman Prize, which James was awarded at the Rivers of Film Festival in Cambridge, here at Clare Crossman’s website. A ClimateCultures member, Clare (1954-2021) was a poet with a deep connection with the natural world and with place, which this prize celebrates. Along with filmmaker James Murray-White and other local champions of the River Mel in Cambridgeshire, Clare created the Waterlight Project, a website and film inspired by the chalk stream.

You can read more about the Rivers of Film Festival that James Murray-White devised and curated in Cambridge (September to October 2025) in his recent piece for our Creative Showcase, our growing portfolio of new and recent works from ClimateCultures members. The festival was commissioned by Cambridge Past, Present & Future as part of the RiverCamCAN Project (Climate Action Through Nature), and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. Further screenings of the 10 films commissioned for the festival are planned around the UK — including at the Living Water exhibition in Cambridge (20th March – 5th December 2026) — the screenings on 28th May (University Library) and 25th June (Pembroke College) — and at the River Summit in Henley, September 2026 (date TBC).

James Roberts

A writer and artist who teaches practices of connection to the wild, author of 'Two Lights', and with artwork exhibited in several galleries in the UK.

Cloud Mountain, Thunder Dragon: Stories of Gross National Happiness

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty‘s climb to Bhutan’s Taktstang mountain temple reveals a nation’s story of hope and regeneration through its common focus on Gross National Happiness. “Difficult to reach, but not impossible. Like solving a world crisis…”

2,050 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is said, each person of Bhutan wishes to make a pilgrimage to Taktstang. Founded in 1692, centuries of reverent feet. A great magnitude of devotion, the build and the maintenance, here on thunder mountain.

Showing: Tiger's Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph byJules Pretty 2025. — Tiger’s Nest: Taktstang temple, Bhutan. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025.

Hello old friend, you say. I know you.

For this is who is waiting.

Taktstang temple calls quietly to the soul. Just welcoming, not demanding. Shall we take up where we left off? Up here hidden in mountains.

At this bird-perched temple and monastery built into the kilometre-high cliff. Half in cloud, spires golden, serenaded by forest birds in the thin air after rain. Hidden, not hidden, hidden again.

Difficult to reach, but not impossible.

Like solving a world crisis, say stopping the use of obsolete fossil fuels, preventing the scouring up of nature.

The climb to the Tiger’s Nest begins not long after dawn. Up there in the eastern hills above Paro, under the blue dome of sky. Up the trail, up steps and foot-worn paths. Through cool groves of seven-needled pine and oak, orchid and fern and old-man’s beard, rich epiphytes on every branch.

The climb’s stiff, at altitude. The sun leaps from the sheer granite cliff, lights the forest, swings around to shine on temple roofs and white walls of stone and clay. Beneath is the drop, the ascent. There’s a fluting bird, the yellow-billed magpie. There are bright prayer flags holding the land together.

Gross National Happiness — changing a country’s story

A pilgrimage of this kind is said to need right speech, body and mind. Speech is the story, body’s the hard work, mind’s the agency and effort. It’s a lesson for any kind of transformation.

The mind gradually empties as you climb. There’s the physical and mental test, then comes a muffled roar, a detachment from sky and land. The wind horses have stopped running. It’s the alchemy of change.

A single white cloud is fixed upon the azure sky.

The temple shimmers, across the ravine.

Far below is the valley, the contoured rice around the town.

Showing: Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Paro Valley and Himalayas. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Guides accompany each group of visitors. Jigme Chodup says, “One hundred and eighty-one.” The number of times he’s walked this upward pilgrimage. Here came Guru Rinpoche with his consort, she the flying tiger. Here they crushed the dark spirit, the mara of the mountain.

At some point it’s time to turn. To walk down the old trail that’s now a new trail, past herbs and orchids in the forest, past scars of landslips. Passing climbing pilgrims.

“Is there far to go?” A question about life itself.

“No, not far! Don’t stop. Transformation awaits.”

Such hope means taking risks. Precisely what the Fourth King does in the early 1970s. He takes a risk, and people give support.

At the age of 18, people say King Jigme Wingchuk seems mature for his years. He declares Bhutan’s primary aim should be Gross National Happiness. All else should serve this: economy, culture, society.

Some in other countries smirk at the idea of Gross National Happiness. Come on, what about growth? You can’t eat happiness.

What’s Bhutan now known for? Well, precisely this one big and beautiful story.

Gross National Happiness is described in Bhutanese as Gakid Palzon. Ga-happy, Kid-peaceful, Pel-prosperity, Zon-convergent. GNH means “happy-peaceful-prosperity-convergence for all.”

It’s completely changed the story of the country. The way that people talk, their identity, how they act.

A country with no litter, no plastic pollution, no person smoking in public. No pesticides or herbicides, so an abundant insect presence. Every tree filled by a noise-wall of crickets, every green space rich with flocks of butterfly. Nine hundred species of butterflies in the country, thousands more of moths. A country with no slaughterhouse, not one fast-food outlet. All the food organic, all agriculture regenerative.

Showing: Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Prayer flags and rice paddy. Photography: Jules Pretty © 2025

And this too: phone coverage everywhere, no dead signal zones. All electricity from hydropower, the surplus sold to India and now the primary source of national income. The next step: electrify transport.

Who’s the trickster now?

The king gives up his position, wants the next generation to bring new ideas. The Fifth King says, we’ll give away my power, create a voting democracy. As easy as that.

The country with a negative carbon footprint, it’s now one of a small group with the lowest internal social inequality in the world. And this: the 5th King’s vision for a new settlement in the south, Gelephu Mindfulness City. High tech, new jobs, integrated with wildlife, all the buildings made of wood.

What is it then? Are people elsewhere afraid of the idea of this sort of contentment? That they’ll have to give up things to find it?

What you’ve also not got. You’ll hear no one saying, we think selfishness is best, or friendliness is the enemy of economic growth. Or that growth is king.

The guide Jigme stops, says, “Just think of what we’d lose.”

That wider world of wonder. It’s still in a hole.

This small country never fell in. This hidden land, it’s not in the hole and it knows how to stay out.

The trickster’s wearing a mask. It’s rags to riches. Right enough, happiness riches.

People love that story. They never get enough of it.

The audience laughs. Too true.

The Masked Dance

One mountain day starts like this. Sunshine, hot for autumn. Clouds hide the hill-tops and snow-slopes of the great Himalayan peaks. It’s the first of three days of masked dance and celebration. The Tsechu festival, the best time of the year.

Gross National Happiness. Showing: Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Masked dance at Tsetchu. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

The first day of dance. The dzong amphitheatre’s brim-full, eight thousand people, dancers down on the stone performance square. To one side, the citadel, white-walls and golden roofs. Clowns in masks wander, prodding the serious dancers, leaning into their faces, engaging with the audience in a side-show of jest and laughter.

The tricksters mimic moves, exaggerate, play at slap-stick entertainment.

No one’s allowed to take themselves too seriously. Laughter is good.

The audience loves it.

The national TV station broadcasts all the action across the three days. Homes and restaurants have their TVs running all day. There’s no commentary. Everyone knows the stories.

Here’s the Black Hat dance, monks spinning as they fight the devils of desire, beating hand-held drums.

Here are masked animals. The mythical faces of gold and green and blue: the tiger, the snow-lion, garuda, dragon. The audience eats and chats and points.

Here’s the dance of couples, a tall woman and man, calm-faced masks, tested to the limit. Yet the marriage survives it all. Children laugh, play on phones.

Rain starts to fall, gently as moths at evening dusk. Five thousand umbrellas ping open, and families cluster underneath.

Nature’s an important healer too. Especially when it’s abundant. When it’s not being beaten half to death on the ropes.

Overlooking the capital, all perched on steep slopes, the river dashing far below, high on the hill is the fifty-metre golden Buddha. Often hidden in clouds. But present, all the same, in people’s lives.

Sunlight briefly falls upon the Buddha. On his shoulders, on his lap, on his smiling face. The mountain dances, the arching rainbow a scarf wound around the mountain’s wrist.

And in each temple, in each Dzong fort, there’s golden light on the Buddha and disciples, on Guru Rinpoche who brought Buddhism to the country. Energy flows in from the universe, streams out again. Butter lamps flutter in the endless draughts, wind channelled down wooden corridors, high windows open to the world.

Showing: Butter lamps. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Butter lamps. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

In the golden light of the sweet butter lamps, shadows dance on walls, murals are alive with tiger and snow-lion and elephant. The animals jump and blink, as it did for early humans when they stood right before the cliff face, the cave wall.

A monk pours saffron water on your hands.

For this is a place of story. How to care for places, keep them sacred.

By the banks of the river, two villages are engaged in archery competition. The men are mostly elders, burned by life in the fields. Like all team sports, there’s laughter, jesting, ribbing. They’re wearing sashes on their belts, one for each successful strike.

The target’s no more than a handspan wide. It’s 140 metres away.

Hitter and hit are not two opposing objects, they are the reality of the whole. The archer, the bamboo bow, the bamboo arrow. The arrow departs the eye of the archer, curves high in the sky. Time passes as it arches over the butts. There’s an acceleration at the end as the arrow at last is caught by the eye.

There’s an unzipping of the air, the arrow buries two feet deep, into the grassy mound, into the target.

The men simply sway aside. They call to the next archer, right a bit, up-up. Listen to the wind, to all the world around them. Another arrow pierces the sky.

A team breaks into dance and song when the arrow strikes the tiny target.

Jigme laughs, says, “Well, they are a bit drunk.”

All around, the contoured gold and green of paddy fields. Some drained and cut, hand threshing underway. The irrigation water travels from one field to the next below. Frogs are calling.

And so the monsoon rebounds, dashes in. A month after it should be over.

A growth story of the 21st century

Sixteen hours of torrential rain. Crashing thunder dragon, fire and lightning. Morning light comes late, dull and blue. The hills are hidden in mist. The river’s maddened, no longer blue and sweet, now a rushing, crashing venomous snake. Water strikes rocks, rises high in standing waves, whole trees spinning and leaping away.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. At this time of year,” says Jigme.

Never has such a storm come, so long after the old certainties of the monsoon.

On the drive over the Dorchu-la Pass, there are landslides every forty or fifty metres. Rocks ping off the road ahead, bounce away. The driver looks up, the guide looks ahead.

And what ugly devils stirred up this storm? Brought it to the people whose carbon footprint is less than zero?

All over the country, all across the north-east of the sub-continent, landslides and falling rock, bridges washed away. Snowstorms fall on the high mountains, strand climbers, a hydro dam is overtopping.

What else will come to the Himalaya with its forty thousand mountain glaciers? A billion people relying on a calm supply of meltwater for drink and irrigation.

Showing: Thimphu dzong. Photograph by Jules Pretty 2025 — Thimphu dzong. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2025

Bhutan’s the growth story of the twenty-first century. Growth of happiness, growth of economy working within strict boundaries, growth of equality. An economy that does not impose externalities on others. A marvellous thing.

People here, they’re earth-cherishing people, as Joan Halifax has put it. They know how to look after the future.

How to be happy, peaceful, convergent.

Your age of oil? It’ll soon be over.

Eight hundred summers ago, Dōgen Zenji slides open rice-paper doors in Japan. He’s in the temple he founded, Eihei-Ji, the temple of eternal peace.

He sees, mountain, cloud, patches of blue sky. He writes this in the Mountains and Waters Sutra:

“There are mountains hidden in sky.
There are mountains hidden in mountains.
There are mountains hidden in hiddenness.”

Find more

UPDATE February 2026: You can now watch National Happiness and Social Equality: This is How Bhutan Did It, a special companion video to this post, recorded by Jules as part of his Story for Climate & Nature Recovery YouTube Channel.

Jules’s guide, Jigme Chodup, works for the Thimphu company, Keys to Bhutan.

“Anything that exists is possible,” is the message of this short YouTube excerpt of a feature on Bhutan’s journey with Gross National Happiness (with a link to the full documentary).

You can find out more about Gross National Happiness and other measures for wellbeing at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

For more on the role of story, see Jules Pretty’s YouTube channel, Story for Climate and Nature Recovery — including this short video on the role of Tricksters in Story. We have featured Story for Climate and Nature Recovery in our Creative Showcase.

For more of his research and writing at Jules’s website.

Jules Pretty

A researcher and writer on environment and society, including ‘The Climate Chronicles’, and is author of several books on climate, nature and the stories we tell.

“Time to Act” — Failure & Success at COP26

Composer Lola Perrin and curator Rob La Frenais invited three artists and organisers to talk about their creative work for COP26 and their feelings about the global conference’s failure to match the warm rhetoric of its first day.

2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

For many, in the days and weeks after COP26, along came a new wave of grief. Friends privately confessed to fits of uncontrollable sobbing from pure rage at international politicians still ignoring the science, otherwise they’d be in full emergency mode. The conference began with pretty speeches with presenters including David Attenborough and the Prince of Wales repeating each other’s words; “the time has come to act”. But just over two weeks later when COP26 ended, scores of new fossil fuel licences were signed, sanctioning production well into at least the 2040s.

Compare those pretty speeches to the dignitaries and the world’s media with the actions by global citizens who do indeed act — in any way they can to put a stop to the killing machine, but who are increasingly criminalised and imprisoned for doing just that. Also what of other acts, for example, birth strikes among women and some men who withhold reproduction as protest in the face of extinction, and hunger strikes that regularly appear across the world in which people decide to act by withholding food in protest at genocidal government policies? These acts rarely make mainstream news but they are there. So turning back to those pretty words on the first day of COP26 when all and sundry appealed for action, what kind of action were they talking about when it’s so hugely controversial to even mention ending fossil fuels in any final COP agreement? No wonder we cry and rage in frustration.

For this ClimateCultures post we wanted to see what three artists/organisers who took part in COP26 with creative work felt about the failure of the COP and where they will go next.

Miranda Whall is a performance artist based in Wales who crawled through the pouring rain as delegates met indoors, eventually to no avail. She expresses her frustrations powerfully in her performance and here.

Warren Senders is a musician, member of the New England Conservatory faculty and activist, and part of Music for Climate Justice which organised music events during COP26, both live in Glasgow and virtually in nine online concerts featuring 350 global musicians. Warren and Music for Climate Justice were focused on using culture to bring an indigenous voice to COP26. The concerts repeatedly broadcast this message; “Planetary Climate Change threatens our civilisation and therefore, all human art and music, there is No Time to Waste”.

Mike Stubbs is the former Director of FACT, Liverpool and has now returned to his artistic practice as well as directing ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster. His early work was based on young people’s fascination with car culture. His latest work questions this early fascination, in ‘Climate Emergency Services’ — a van spray-painted in hot rod style with images from the Australian bush fires — which he took to Glasgow for COP26.

We asked each artist/organiser four questions.

What did you do at COP26?

Miranda Whall

“On Saturday 6th November I crawled with a six-year-old potted Scots Pine on my back through the centre of Glasgow, from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and I silently and determinedly made our way through heavy rain and high winds to reach our destination. The intention of my heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism was an expression of my grief, my despair and my outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed, and an insistence that non–human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.

“My hope was that crawling to the COP26 United Nations climate change conference carrying a tree that was equal in size to my body might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. We all literally need to get down from our human-centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human-made catastrophe.”

Warren Senders

Music4ClimateJustice performance, November 6th 2021: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ Terje Isungset composer and musicians performing on instruments carved from ice.

“To be clear, I was not ‘at’ COP26. I stayed in my small house in Medford, MA. Other people from the M4CJ (Music for Climate Justice) organisation were in Glasgow. I organised and produced eight days of streamed video content: music, profiles, and interviews addressing the intersectionalities of climate activism and the performing arts. This worked out to 4.5 – 5 hours of music a day, from the 5th to the 12th of November (with a live opening event in Glasgow that I did not work on). The artists and activists we presented came from all over the world; the M4CJ ‘Festival’ was almost certainly the most diverse musical event in human history.

“Participating artists contributed a video performance and added a short spoken statement about climate change. Some of the performances were created for this event; others were archival. In several cases, the estate or trust for a major artist who was no longer alive agreed to contribute material. Interviews and panel discussions included profiles of artists, activists, musicians/composers working with climate data, ethnomusicologists & eco-musicologists, and artists & thinkers in related fields.”

Mike Stubbs

Climate Emergency Services at COP26, Glasgow November 2021. Showing Climate Emergency Services engaging with young people — Climate Emergency Services engaging with young people. Photograph: Lou Johnson © 2021

“I presented Climate Emergency Services (CES) outside the Glasgow Transport Museum on the opening weekend of COP26 and then spent four days in Glasgow at the end. The artwork was hosted by the Coventry Biennale and Govan Project Space. Activities included the artwork appearing as a confounding, confused hot-rod/emergency vehicle to stimulate conversations on cars and climate emergency. I drove around Glasgow and managed to become part of a strange parade with other (police) emergency vehicles tagging along on the back of an organised pedestrian protest march. I was the only vehicle other than three cop cars.”

How has the failure of COP26 directed your intentions towards future actions?

Miranda Whall

“The failures of COP26 have enraged me and so empowered my determination and commitment to take this performative work much further. Up until the crawl in Glasgow I had crawled in isolated and rural locations, so my audience was mostly an infrequent passer-by. Crawling in a busy urban centre took the performance directly to a bigger and wider engaged and non-engaged public. Both on the streets of Glasgow and on the politically polarised and de-humanised highways of social media I felt simultaneously empowered and vulnerable. Down there on my hands and knees, I began to more fully realise the performance’s potential to aggravate and alleviate, to provoke and heal. And I more fully realised that this human/animal/vegetal/technological hybrid that I have created is a new ‘thing’; an alliance, a symbiotic union, a co-creating community, an interconnected future.”

Warren Senders

“I don’t think terms like ‘success’ or ‘failure’ are applicable to COP26, or any such conference. Lacking the ability to set policy, the conference is not describable in those terms. It succeeded in conveying the current state of climate-change research to policy-makers. It succeeded in forcing climate change into the forefront of worldwide media coverage for a few days. It gave activists something to do, a way to connect … and gave the climate movement a lot to think about going forward (issues of intersectionality, of indigenous representation, of systemic discrimination, economic models, etc). It failed to generate hard policy outcomes … but to expect COP26 to result in systemic transformation was to expect that (in a hopefully soon-to-be-obsolete metaphor) the airport bus would grow wings and take off down the runway.

“Such expectations represent a popular (and entirely understandable) need for a deus ex machina which would magically solve our problems. I was not immune to that feeling; none of us were.

Showing Music4ClimateJustice performance at COP26: 'Rhythms, Words, and ... Ice!' with Aparna Sindhoor Dance Company — Music4ClimateJustice performance on 6th November: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ with Aparna Sindhoor’s Encounter, dance theatre Inspired by indigenous people’s fight for their forest.

Mike Stubbs

“It makes me want to want to continue to mingle and discuss these issues with members of the unconverted members of society, i.e. car nuts, pissed people, street dwellers, middle-class shoppers, kids and anyone not into COP26 or the environment. Climate Emergency Services is a hot rod with a gun on the roof playing extra loud birdsong, flashing lights and a sci-fi plant glowing/growing inside. It’s not a bad way of sparking up a conversation.”

What ideas do you have for your next climate-engaged work?

Miranda Whall

“I am now planning further solo urban tree crawls and collective urban tree crawls. I am also preparing to crawl in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt with a palm tree on my back for COP27 from the 7th – 18th November 2022. I will crawl for longer and further and hopefully up to, if not into, the conference and negotiation centre. In Glasgow, I reached the entrance of the Green Zone. This was ineffectual, next time I need to crawl to the entrance of the Blue Zone or its equivalent in Sharm El- Sheikh.”

Warren Senders

“I’ll go on doing what I’ve been doing all along. Daily vigils, a daily quota of political activity, intermittent public activism (marches, sit-ins, possible NVCD), and intermittent benefit concerts as part of an ongoing collaboration with M4CJ. I hope to present the first such event in May or June 2022 (I’ve organised 21 previous benefit concerts since 2009).”

Mike Stubbs

“I am trying to find a sustainable model with Creative Folkestone on how to continue the work of Climate Emergency Services and am planning to tour to festivals, motor shows and schools, integrating practical workshops on air quality monitoring and growing. Additionally, in Doncaster I am going to be announcing an open call for a new artists residency scheme on sustainability and water and a lab which will develop new critical work on climate for ArtBomb Festival 22 in August next year.”

COP26: Showing Climate Emergency Services on the way to Glasgow. — Climate Emergency Services on the way to Glasgow. Photograph: Lou Johnson © 2021

Many people feel dismayed at business since COP26. What must happen so we’re happy in 2025?

Miranda Whall

“The wind is gusting its terrifying gusts outside my window as I write this. The wind terrified me as a child because it blew down walls and trees and shook my window, I would crawl into my parents’ bed and stick my fingers into my ears until it blew itself out. I remember loving the peace and quiet that followed. But now the wind terrifies me more than ever, because I know what it means and I know there is no peace and quiet to follow. What we must do could not be more clear — leaders must lead and businesses, corporations and citizens must follow. Simple. I am on my hands and knees pleading. I cannot articulate this better or differently.”

Warren Senders

“What would make us happy would be the governments of the world taking climate change seriously and engaging in concerted and robust collective action. Is there a mechanism to make this happen? No. The systemic inability of our governance to cope with climate change is a diagnostic indicator pointing to a structural problem in our governing mechanisms themselves. In geopolitics, hasty actions between nations are likely to be harbingers of war. The UN was developed specifically to reduce both the likelihood and the severity of such hasty actions — providing a place where disputes between nations can be discussed instead of leading to armed hostilities. That is to say: the UN was created in order to make international relations slower, more measured, more reflective. Which is a structural problem in light of the fact that what the climate crisis demands is that we all act very quickly. The UN isn’t equipped to direct concerted and robust collective international action any more than that airport bus is equipped to be an airplane.

“At this stage in the crisis, our happiness must come in the successful resolution of short-term problems. We live in ‘interesting times’, and our responsibility is to the future.”

Showing Music4ClimateJustice performance at COP26, 6th November 2021: 'Rhythms, Words, and ... Ice!' “Bhuka Tiende”, Dzapasi Mbira Group — Music4ClimateJustice performance 6/11/21: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ “Bhuka Tiende”, Dzapasi Mbira Group. Most musicians in Zimbabwe are subsistence farmers. They are already suffering from extreme climate change.

Mike Stubbs

“We will never be happy. Continue to engage the disenchanted, talk to your family, collaborate with like minds, write to MPs, become councillors, be artists, make art and protest when you can.”

Find more

Lola Perrin adds: I was interviewed by Warren as part of M4CJ at COP26 and appeared in the concert on November 11th. I found I became gradually more and more addicted to the concerts once they started streaming on November 5th — they’re quite deeply emotional and the breadth of work gathered together from 350 engaged musicians across the world is really powerful. Here are links to the M4CJ COP26 streamed concerts on YouTube:

5th November 2021 Journey Around the World in Space and Time
6th November Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!
7th November Strings and Threads That Tie Us Together
8th November Music Beyond Boundaries
8th November M4CJ Global Launch Show
9th November Our Island Home
10th November Turning Art Into Activism Part I
11th November Turning Art Into Activism Part II
12th November From the Ancient to the Future

Warren Senders is a musician, member of the New England Conservatory faculty and activist, and part of Music for Climate Justice. You can read about him in this 2018 piece at the Climate Disobedience Center, in a 2011 Arts Fuse feature Playing For the Planet, and a 2019 piece for The Indian Express, This Hindustani singer does his riyaz on streets and warns people about climate change. You can hear Warren in this Radio Boston interview and performance from 2010: Boston-Area Percussionists Drum For The Planet. “When Medford resident Warren Senders first learned about the effects of climate change, he felt helpless. ‘I’m no scientist,’ Senders thought. ‘What can I possibly do to help?'”

Miranda Whall is an interdisciplinary and performance artist based in Wales. She says of her crawling works, “My crawling projects are titled Crossed Paths. So far for Crossed Paths – Animals I have crawled as a sheep, badger, almost otter and I have carried out extensive research for mountain hare. For Crossed Paths – Trees I have crawled with an Oak tree, Birch tree and May tree. Other crawling projects are in development. Crossed Paths is a project about going deeply into the living landscape, ecosystems and interspecies dynamics to explore animal, plant, land and human narratives.” On Miranda’s Vimeo channel, you can watch her Showreel for COP26 Glasgow.

Mike Stubbs is an artist, curator and consultant, Director of ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster and former Director of FACT Liverpool. You can read more about Climate Emergency Services, which was commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021.

Lola Perrin

A composer and classically trained pianist focused on the disconnect between the climate emergency and programming in music venues and her ClimateKeys global no-fly concert series.

Rob La Frenais

An independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions, directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible.

Unseen, Seen: My Eco-art Travels the World

Experimental artist Veronica Worrall offers a story of shared hope in students’ reactions to her photographic series ‘Unseen’, and how young people’s actions and art in the USA, China and around the world provide examples ahead of COP26.

2,150 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes

“Advocacy by young climate activists such as Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi show that youth are anxious about their collective futures. … Youth might be more likely than adults to experience ill-effects associated with climate anxiety. … Young people are agents of change, our future leaders, and most likely to succeed in improving planetary health.”
— Climate anxiety in young people: a call to action – Judy Wu, Gaelen Snell, Hasina Samji (published online in The Lancet, September 2020).

Climate crisis, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, threatened ecologies, mass extinction, and tipping points — attention-grabbing, anxiety-raising phrases employed in ever-increasing numbers by news reporters, environmental activists and corporate marketeers. Climate change awareness levels rise as we approach 2021’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). As a prelude to the discussions more and more scientists — as in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6, 2021) — confirm the urgency for humanity to reduce its impact on our planetary systems. Global unsustainable drilling and destruction and 21st-century consumption and convenience all need urgent re-evaluation.

I shall follow the COP26 discussions and sincerely hope that wisdom and leadership are shown by those holding the power to recalibrate how we do business. Will they have the courage to make the right decisions? Decisions that may be unpopular; u-turn decisions that may be humiliating and power threatening. This is the time for world leaders to demonstrate they have understood the science and recognise their responsibilities to alleviate global environmental disasters and offer a future to our next geneation.

Nevertheless, we at home have our part to play. As artists, many of us harness our creativity to express our concerns and share our work with a hope to raise awareness and stimulate conversation.

Veronica Worrall - 'Unseen' series of photographs

Veronica Worrall - text for EnviroArt Gallery — A selection of images and the front piece from ‘The EnviroArt Gallery’, a virtual exhibition curated by Undergraduate Environmental Alliance – Duke University, USA (2021). https://www.enviroartgallery2021.com

My recent photographic series ‘Unseen’ focussed on the undervalued habitats and overlooked ecologies locally under threat in Suffolk. An edit of my images was featured in The Enviroart Gallery, the Undergraduate Environmental Alliance virtual gallery from Duke University, USA, in April 2021. The gallery takes visitors on a journey through a series of 600+ artworks created by practitioners, students, and children, sharing artistic inspiration and nature sentiments from across China, Australia, the UK, South Africa, Latin America, Canada and the USA.

Eco-art photography: ‘Unvalued No 1’

I was pleased to be one of the environmental artists selected. Each contributing artist had the opportunity to write an insight into their interpretations, to sit alongside their work. Beside my image ‘Unvalued No 1’ I cite Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, acknowledging her foresight and reflecting on our subsequent lack of understanding of where our western lifestyle was leading.

Unseen series - showing 'Unvalued No 1' by Veronica Worrall — ‘Unvalued No 1’., featured in ‘The EnviroArt Gallery’ (2021)
Artist: V.M. Worrall © 2021

Series: 'Elemental Expressionism'
by Veronica M Worrall, Art Photographer

'We stand now where two roads diverge...The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.' (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962)

For a year I journeyed over my own home landscape in Suffolk. I found threatened wild places, vestiges of salt marsh and pockets of woodland being squeezed out by human activity. As an artist I wanted to renew connection to these fragile places. I pondered how to portray their unseen, undervalued essential ecosystems.

I spent time reflecting on our living world. I became immersed in the natural flux and slower rhythms of a coastal biosphere. I buried my photographs back where they had been taken as an antidote to the acceleration of human power over nature. I learnt to slow my image making from 1/80th second to 80 days. Time, water, weather and creatures painted over my digital images leaving traces of elemental activity. The altered images were my dialogue with nature -- no longer representing a particular moment more an evolving enquiry. What is our relationship with ecosystems? How do we replace our anthropocentric ways of thinking, of valuing and of acting? Nature was my new partner in art. The photographs represented an aesthetic partnership of expressionism.

This series, emulating a famous expressionistic painter of the past, is simply one art photographer's reaction to overwhelming environmental reports of the global degradation and the socio-cultural challenges we now face as humans. I reflected on the losses within my lifetime and contemplated how much we are taking from the next generation? Will these children thank us for beautiful pictures of lost wilderness and creatures, which we could have saved?

However, it is not only as artists that we can respond to our global environmental crisis. Along with everyone on the planet, there are mitigating steps we can take. Together we can help the planet retreat from the brink.

I believe there are two significant ways. First, we can take time to understand the global implications of the crisis and support the leaders who take the necessary tough decisions. Secondly, we can realign our own lifestyles to be less environmentally costly. This may well mean life becomes a little less convenient and less comfortable but together our actions will accumulate and become significant. Our collective action can not only lead to a decrease in CO₂ emissions but will influence corporate policy and government decision-making. For instance, we can learn about the true cost of flying and eliminate unnecessary trips. We can move to non-plastic containers, tools and toys and to non-synthetic textiles. We can consider food miles and adapt to local seasonal foods. We can check whether our banks and search engines support a sustainable Earth and ensure our investments are moved out of damaging mining, petrochemicals and harmful pharmaceutical stocks into companies supporting green initiatives. We can encourage species-rich natural areas — gardens, window boxes and community parks.

These are a few of the ways. I personally know how difficult the changes can be. In our busy lives, these changes require time, effort and are often less convenient. In conversations I find I need to stay positive when the poor environmental records of large countries such as the USA and China are quoted back to me. Our global environmental problem can seem so huge and my colleagues’ counterarguments can suggest that it is not worth the effort for an individual to change their lifestyle. Hence, I share this one small story linking the young people of these two huge continents. I demonstrate how across the globe concerned undergraduates are determined to make a difference.

Unseen — from USA to China

When my ‘Unseen’ environmental photographic series was selected by students in the USA for their virtual exhibition, these pictures came to the attention of another group of students, this time in China. And out of the blue, I had an exceedingly polite email from a Chinese undergraduate asking my permission to show one or two of my art pieces in an exhibition his team were curating in Shanghai. The exhibition was to be called ‘Breathing’.

Unfortunately, a second wave of Covid meant the exhibition could not go ahead but they persevered and later I learned they were to have an outdoor show in Mixc City, Muse Mart, at an art festival. I sent a digital file and we discussed the best ways to print. They kept me informed throughout and eventually sent me photographs and a video of their stall, including my image, at the Shanghai Art Festival — a stall communicating their concern for the planet.

Showing Veronica Worrall's Unseen images as part of the 'Breathing' outdoor festival, Shanghai 2021 — ‘Breathing’ Outdoor Art Festival, Mixc City, Muse Mart, Shanghai (2021)

These environmentally aware Chinese students call themselves the ‘Beauty and Beast’ Team. They are dedicated to challenging environmental understanding and policies both locally and across the world. I am so proud they asked for my work to be displayed in China, the country which is frequently given as a reason that it is not worth making changes to our Western lifestyles. These youngsters tell us we are part of a global movement that recognises the importance of individual action. They believe we can join forces across the globe. Below I share an extract from their email thanking me for participating. These beautiful words demonstrate their deep reflection and determination to make a difference.

Dear Artist

With what gesture do we touch the muscle of the world? The hunter cuts the flesh with a sharp blade, the fisherman stops the struggle with his nets, the steel that comes from the soil is tearing it apart and the earth gushes black blood. Is it that the breath of man is a curse imposed on the land? Or is it time for us to take a few steps back and release the repressed and suffocated creatures into the wild?

In this special exhibition, artists from around the world focus on themes such as over-hunting, over-deforestation, resource depletion, excessive carbon emissions and ocean pollution through painting, poetry, and photography, demonstrating a cross-over awareness and care, and through this special exhibition, the B&B curatorial team hopes to evoke the world's thoughts on the environment and development, and how we should live with everything.

Beauty And Beast (Student Team) 24.9.21 
Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China | 昆山杜克大学

Altered images — an art photographic philosophy

“Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”
— Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005)

A few years ago I reflected upon my own environmental footprint both generally and specifically for my art. Photography can take a heavy environmental toll — flying to exotic places, continually updating equipment, and production costs. As a consequence, my art practice became local and my creativity focussed on threatened ecologies.

I learned about my local diminishing wild landscape and the threats to natural habitat by human activity. I took pictures of this terrain and its beautiful biodiversity but this was not the creative exploration nor the expression of my concerns which I was seeking. However, I did become immersed in nature’s wonder and felt its deep concern.

I contemplated the philosophy of ‘Deep Ecology’ — the interrelationships of life and time. I decided to give my prints back to the natural world in order to trace its struggling systems. I buried my photographs for 80 days back where they had been taken. I waited patiently.

Unseen - showing the process of burying photographic prints to reveal slow changes. — V M Worrall – retrieving prints after 80 days from salt marsh, Suffolk.
Artist: Veronica Worrall © 2019

Together, nature and I were demonstrating an ecological philosophy of partnering and we produced my original series ‘Project Unseen’. The resultant images were my dialogue with nature. They have since been printed on sustainable fabric and filmed as ‘banners for nature’ back in their original location. My photography no longer represents a particular moment but, I hope, asks questions.

And so, I write this reflecting how I had originally worked in partnership with natural processes in coastal Suffolk in the UK to produce my eco-art photographs — and now I find I am partnering across nations, helping to build awareness and instill an appetite for change. I believe as artists we can share our visions. We can contribute to the pressure for environmentally friendly decisions from our world leaders. I am encouraged by young artists across the globe, who care and are willing to work across cultures, and I find there is hope for our planet’s future.

Find out more

You can explore Veronica’s ‘Unseen’ series, and more, at her website — including a one-minute film of the images in experimentation, transformation and presentation. And you can read more about her approach to partnering with nature in her art in her previous ClimateCultures post, Art Photography — Emotional Response to Global Crisis.

The EnviroArt Gallery exhibition from the Undergraduate Environmental Alliance at Duke University, USA features over 600 images. Veronica’s featured ‘Unseen’ images are: Unvalued No 1, Unvalued No 2, Unvalued No 3, Unvalued No 4, and Unvalued No 5. The Beauty and The Beast team’s Breathing popup exhibition was held at Muse Mart in MixC, Shanghai in September 2021.

Climate anxiety in young people: a call to action, by Judy Wu, Gaelen Snell, and Hasina Samji, was published online in The Lancet on 9th September 2020.

The IPCC published The Physical Science Basis for the AR6 Climate Change Report in August 2021.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962, is published by Penguin.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported in March 2005: “The bottom line of the MA findings is that human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, the assessment shows that with appropriate actions it is possible to reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently underway.”

Veronica Worrall

An experimental artist using photography to capture movement, time and natural processes, working with nature and traditional alternative photography in attempts to reduce her artist footprint ...

Dead Kid’s Fingers & Living Soils

Multidisciplinary artist Anthony Bennett shares the inspiration behind sculptures on the crucial role of the usually disregarded fungus in returning life to soils following mass extinction events — and what this offers us in imagining possible human extinction.

840 words: estimated reading time = 3.5 minutes + 1 minute gallery

Dead Kids Fingers is a project I started some years ago now. I’ve always been a political animal. Over the years I’ve been involved in many kinds of political causes. Environmentalism, for the last ten years or so, has reinvigorated my passion for social justice.

Through the Festival of the Mind in Sheffield, which I co-conceived with Professor Vanessa Toulmin, I met a number of scientists at the University and through conversations with them, I started to learn about the tasks and the enormous issues which their research is focused upon, facing society now, and in the near future. Research concerning climate change, food security, all sorts of things, including depletion of global resources.

The fungus factor in our soils

I was particularly inspired by soil scientist/mycologist Professor Duncan Cameron. Our conversations have resulted in a number of artwork projects, and continue to do so. For one such project, I considered the worst-case scenario facing the human race; that if it doesn’t adapt and change its ways, then it could become extinct. The idea of human extinction really knocked me sideways. I suppose it fascinated me.

I learned that following the three last great Mass Extinctions on the planet, the organism that took a lead in restoring life on the planet was fungus. I learned that it originally created the soil itself, and that it has built the soil ever since by means of its mycelium rotting matter and repurposing it as soil. That we owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains. The concept of ‘The Wood Wide Web’, coined by Duncan’s teacher and colleague Professor Sir David Read, the revelation of the hidden but active connectivity of mycelium, reinvigorated my lifelong yearning for active and purposeful collaboration, creative and open, with no proclivity to compromise or to dumbing down.

Through my research I came across the fungus Dead Man’s Fingers. Considering a post-extinction planet, and the fact that fungus is the thing which will restore some sort of life-forms, I employed the idea to use the device of a child’s finger, emerging from the earth, as a metaphor for post extinction life re-emerging, human or otherwise.

Dead Kids Fingers

I started creating sculptures at my studio, and then created installations in woodland areas and forests nearby. I took photographs which I shared online, and exhibited some of them in group art shows, with the statement:

“Dead kids fingers address the fact that: With or without humans, fungus will revitalize the earth, as it has done following previous global extinctions. And that all life on earth is connected. In the hope that future generations will embrace the mycelial world, learn from it, and engage with it in mutualistic symbiosis.”

Maybe the lessons learned could then be put to use to actually fend off the next extinction? A purpose to life in the Anthropocene.

NB: click on image to enter slideshow and then view full size.

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”52″ gal_title=”Dead Kids Fingers”]

(All images are © Anthony Bennett 2020 and are not to be reproduced or used without his written permission. Please contact him via his website at www.anthonybennettsculpture.co.uk)

Find more

Check out Anthony’s Instagram feed @absculpts for up to date and ongoing artworks. Anthony contributed Ace of Wands to Week 3 of our Quarantine Connection series in 2020.

You can explore the most recent Festival of the Mind schedule, for 2020, which includes a series of podcasts on various climate change, extinction and health topics — among them, Anthony’s Bittersweet Air exhibition and podcast on his work on soil in collaboration with Professor Tim Daniell.

You can find out about Professor Duncan Cameron’s work on resource fluxes and chemical signals in plant-microbe symbioses in agricultural and natural systems at his website.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has a good introduction to the role of fungi in living soils. And How fungi’s knack for networking boosts ecological recovery after bushfires, published on The Conservation (19/3/20) discusses how fungal communities are impacted by forest fires such as the devastating ones that hit Australia in 2020 — and how the fungi help the land and its ecosystems recover.

This piece by Taylor Kubota of Stanford University (15/5/19) for Science X describes how scientists built on the pioneering work of Professor Sir David Read on fungal symbiosis to map the global Wood Wide Web.

The world of fungi is the topic of Martin Sheldrake’s recent book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Penguin, 2020). And in The secrets of the Wood Wide Web, (New Yorker, 7/8/16) Robert Macfarlane meets Merlin Sheldrake in London’s Epping Forest to discuss his work.

Finally, there is more at The Woodland Trust on the specific fungus that inspired Anthony’s work, Dead Man’s Fingers (Xylaria polymorpha).

Anthony Bennett

A multidisciplinary artist whose work, often collaborative, is inspired by difficult contemporary and future sociological concerns surrounding issues such as food security and migration.