Festival Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

“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 out 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, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world.

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 - 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.

(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 out 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.

Rising Tide: A Weekend with Extinction Rebellion

Artist Linda Gordon was invited to lead a land art workshop using natural materials at Extinction Rebellion’s Rising Tide Festival in North Devon. She describes an experience of co-operation and natural harmony: “In other words, a sane community.”

1,940 words: estimated reading time 8 minutes

The Rebel Rising, Rising Tide weekend — organised and hosted by Extinction Rebellion Southwest, at Tapeley Park, North Devon — was characterised by fun and relaxation, underpinned by some important and serious talks: some covering aspects of the gathering climate and ecological crisis we are facing; others giving guidance on how best to bring about change, and on the role of XR.

There was some great music throughout, both live and recorded — and a huge range of relaxing activities: family yoga, meditation, massage… And a number of craft workshops and nature-related activities, for example, forest school bushcraft, permaculture and nature and forest therapy.

A range of authoritative speakers were on hand to give expert talks, including Jozette Kimba of Stop Ecocide — an organisation committed to getting the law changed, and making large-scale destruction of our natural environment a crime. MEP Molly Scott Cato spoke about the Green Party and Green economics, and how this aimed to address social and economic inequalities around the world. Other talks and workshops covered practical information and strategies that the audience could, if they wished, put into action: for instance, ‘How to speak with the Media and present yourself as a spokesperson’.

A gathering place

I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect, never having attended an XR event before, but as the weekend drew nearer, it slowly dawned on me that there was going to be A LOT of people, and A LOT would be going on.

I stepped out of the car high up in the grassy field of Tapeley Park and gazed out over the wide expanse of gentle green Devon fields, bordered with trees, and down to the quiet Torridge Estuary below. Soft blue sky, wisps of white cloud, warm breeze, sunshine.
 
Exploring and preparing for the workshop, pacing and fretting: ‘Where do I find more contrasting and varied materials? Shall I take people for a walk? How many will turn up? five or 55? What age groups? And does anybody really want to hear my memorised notes on ‘how trees support our lives’? Meanwhile, my friend and helper, Jann went off to a talk on fossil fuels and came back looking worried and concerned.

Of course, I knew perfectly well at the back of my mind that everything relating to the workshop would work out brilliantly, once I relinquished control — and of course, it did. Participants dived into making a beautiful mandala artwork and nobody needed to hear from the likes of me how to connect with the Earth!

Rising Tide - making the mandala. Photograph by Linda Gordon — Making the mandala
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Throughout the rest of the day, and all Sunday, people stopped by to take photos, or to add to the work with leaves, grasses, cones and flowers. The intention was to use the mandala as a gathering place for starting off the procession at the closing ceremony the next evening.

I relaxed in the peaceful atmosphere of congenial company, the spacious surroundings of Tapeley Park, and the mild, tranquil weather. At the Mandala art site faint scents of barbequed vegetables reached my nostrils. A few yards away, at the pop-up Green Library, a group of children sprawled on the grass under its awning, playing a board game. A few adults were relaxing in chairs, reading magazines, whilst another couple played at a small Subbuteo table.

A rising tide

On Sunday I took in a couple of talks. I listened to ‘Social Justice and the Green Movement’ by Dr Ed Atkins, from the University of Bristol, who spoke of the Green New Deal, with its aim of justice and fairness for all — that is, a complete restructuring and reform of our economic system, and urgent action to address the climate crisis we are all facing.

He gave some examples of appalling social and environmental abuses in other parts of the world, particularly relating to our society’s massive demand for sand in order to build our towns and cities — leading to very lucrative and often criminal sand extraction enterprises in faraway countries.

Closer to home, in the light of what we all know — that our economy is driven by the richest sector of society — he spoke of the need to keep social discussion going: to protect the vulnerable, to respect workers’ rights and the right to work. I very much liked that on inviting questions at the end of his talk, he was also able to give people helpful tips on their individual local or family concerns.

I must have been in a geological mood that day, for the second talk I chose was titled ‘Resource Exploitation and General Climate Q&A’ by Professor Jon Blundy, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. He talked of the role of earth scientists in addressing and resolving current climate and environmental problems.

Professor Blundy, an expert in the processes of magma beneath the earth’s crust, began by explaining the creation of minerals in the magma, then went on to discuss the unfettered extraction of copper, iron, coal and rare earths by unscrupulous mining companies in various countries. He gave examples of the environmental damage and human suffering caused by such activities.

He also explained the vital importance of copper as a conductor in electrical systems and how it has the potential for massively reducing carbon emissions. Unfortunately, when it comes to extracting materials of great value for whatever reason, an increase in scale can cause devastation to local populations around the mining areas and add to the already known global effects of climate change.

I must admit, I was previously fairly ignorant of much of what I heard from these two speakers, and the distressing implications of it all, but now I am glad that I am more aware of it.

Stop Ecocide Photograph by Linda Gordon — Stop Ecocide
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Their observations and information struck me of great importance to life as we know it, drawing our attention to social and environmental suffering and injustices around the world; in encouraging others to take action on some of these issues (for instance, speaking at XR events), and in pointing the way towards possible solutions to some of the problems. And certainly we are going to need to make radical changes in our economic structures and industrial practices if we are going to avert what looks like rapidly approaching disaster for many species, including our own.

However, I doubt that science alone, although a wonderful tool, will necessarily resolve all our social and ecological ills. It all depends upon how the science is used. My current personal view is that time is indeed running out. Unless we humans can wake up fast to the realisation that life is all one, and we are all interdependent — then things don’t look too good.

A sane community

Later, I had a good look around the area, at the many stalls and signs of earlier activity. I wandered among the people quietly relaxing on the grass in the Sunday afternoon sunshine. And I spent some time in the huge marquee enjoying music and singing by the Southwest based female trio, Boudicca’s Child.

Back at the Mandala, where my workshop had been held, and which by now had accumulated further additions of flowers and woodland materials, I met with the four people who would be leading the Closing Ceremony. They represented the elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Instead of gathering everyone together around the mandala as originally planned, they decided to prepare themselves around it, with a quiet ‘smudging’ ritual. Smudging is a method of purifying and cleansing one’s energy with smouldering sage smoke, practised by some North American Indian tribes and also by some other cultures. I believe sage smoke has been found by science to have beneficial effects on our stress levels. It certainly has a very pleasant scent!

Rising tide - gathering with the oak. Photograph by Linda Gordon — Gathering with the oak
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Shortly before 5pm people from all over the Park gathered together in the high open field, ready to walk in procession to an area of woodland — to an ancient oak tree, reputed to be 1,000 years old, where the ceremony was to be held.

Perhaps the most moving part of the festival for me, was walking with several hundred others through the trees, slowly and in silence (apart from a single repeating drumbeat) — with the late afternoon sunlight dancing off the leafy canopy and shining through the soft colours of the XR flags.

Rising Tide of XR flags. Photograph: Linda Gordon — Rising Tide of XR flags
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

An uninvited thought flitted through my mind: ‘All this is what we stand to lose’.

Then followed the solemn moment, around the ancient oak, when we all pledged to love and care for the Earth to the very best of our ability.

A slow quiet walk back to the place where we had started, and then I was back again to the mandala, to begin the process of clearing everything away. It was necessary to leave the site as we had found it, as Tapeley Park would be open to the general public the following morning. I returned the woodland material to the woods, and someone took the bunch of flowers she had contributed, and went to place them under the ancient oak tree.

People were beginning to leave now, to catch trains and buses or drive long distances home. But many stayed on to enjoy a Great Feast and music, which brought the Rising Tide Festival to a close.

Being tired and a little overwhelmed with new thoughts and experiences, I didn’t stay for this. However, I did take a large bag of tin cans home to recycle!

This was a successful and very well organised event, run on mutual goodwill, with volunteers working on everything from cooking, manning the carpark and the forest of tents, running the information post and the sound system, organising the clearing up and dismantling stuff at the end, the laying on of buses to meet trains from Barnstaple station, to the massive amount of background organisation that must have been needed beforehand.

I felt a comfortable and mutually supportive balance between the many relaxing, earth-related activities and the serious nature of the talks and educational workshops. Both are important, I think, in strengthening the XR movement in its purpose as a protest movement committed to compelling governments to act effectively on climate and ecological turmoil. Indeed, one of the workshops offered was on staying calm, centred and connected with oneself and others, at XR Actions.

Mandala XR Photograph by Linda Gordon — Mandala XR
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

I can’t speak for others, but it seemed to me the atmosphere throughout the weekend was one of co-operation and trust, and a natural harmony with the immediate surroundings — in other words, a sane community. I was pleased to be one of this large number of people, drawn together largely by sadness at the state of our world, and a willingness to put things right and act in whatever non-violent way required.

Find out more

The Rising Tide Festival was held from 6th to 8th September at Tapeley Park, North Devon, and was organised and hosted by Extinction Rebellion Southwest. You can find information on the local XR group at xrfrome.org

Stop Ecocide is run by Ecological Defence Integrity (EDI), a small UK non-profit founded by the late Polly Higgins with a team of international criminal lawyers, diplomats and evidence experts working to advance a law of ecocide at the International Criminal Court.

Linda Gordon

An environmental artist making temporary works in the landscape as a way of re-connecting with life’s endless processes and essential unity and sharing this with others.

Earth Living — Now, Facing the Storm

Writer and artist Jennifer Leach shared some of her stories at Reading’s Earth Living Festival. Here, she discusses these questioning tales for a world’s ending — and the relaunch of her Outrider Anthems enterprise as a sanctuary of creativity.

1,700 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

There is a profound sense of collective bewilderment in the air right now. A disbelief that we are alive at the very time the world as we know it is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, coming to an end. There are theories and queries as to what this actually means — will Life on Earth end, will Homo Sapiens survive in any form, will the elite few succeed in their bid to safeguard an AI-supported future for themselves, will we all have to endure unbearable suffering? We are about to journey as we have never journeyed before. Permanence is already a foreign concept; it always was a delusional one. Already, the status quo is no more. On our internal radar we have seen it, and know it; we are now awaiting the shock waves.

Earth Living

In this context, how does one live? As an artist, how does one engage? Do we simply carry on, for now, until ‘now’ brings with it the storm we are all awaiting? Or do we drop the rhythm of conventional society, and walk out to meet the storm? Is our role to stand our ground, asking the uncomfortable and unanswerable questions?

I do not know the answers. Like many of us, I hear many calls. There is a call to action, which for me is being answered largely through a firm commitment to my local XR group; there is a strong call leading me into both immersive art practice and community ventures; there is the call to live each moment with a light heart and a sense of fun, and there is the call to hold fast to all that is dear, and to spend focused time with those I love. And Time tells me I cannot, in truth, answer all of these calls. At some point, I must choose.

Striving to find the rightful path for my organisation, Outrider Anthems, has provided me with a strong clue as to how I might be moving forward into this time of unknowing. In a remarkable and unexpected branding opportunity offered me by the talented and insightful young graduate, Ed Hendry, we have understood that Outrider Anthems is to declare itself a ‘sanctuary of creativity in the inevitable turbulence of climate breakdown’. We are building a strong team for this work, and paying close attention to what, in practice, it will mean. Following impulse and instinct, we trust that knowing will come when knowing needs to.

As an aside, I wonder how many collective shudders issued forth from that insouciant use of the ‘branding’ word. Used wisely, understood well, I have learnt the value of embracing what the commercial world has to offer, and to teach me. For Outrider Anthems, we worked hard and rigorously to hone a clarity of concept, purpose, mission and values, and in doing so, finally gained an authority that was previously obscured. It is a process I recommend.

In my personal work, I have been exploring these issues through story, as story is one of the most portable, direct and accessible art forms we have. They create a space where fears can be unmasked, held, explored, and honoured. The soundings are the first step in the process, and practical solutions play no role here.

My most abstract exploration of the letting go of fear is Dancing in the Dark, a work that is just ready to make its way out into the larger world through another new venture for Outrider Anthems: a dedicated Kickstarter campaign to create this visual story poem as a limited print first edition. (You can explore Dancing in the Dark, and how to get involved, via the link at the end of this post.)

Jennifer Leach storytelling at the Earth Living Festival, Reading in May 2019 — Storytelling at the Earth Living Festival, Reading
Photograph: Alice McGuigan © 2019

Other questioning stories were written to share at the Earth Living Festival in Reading in May. This festival was a wonderful new venture established by Alice McGuigan to nurture, in Reading, a community learning to live in greater balance with the Earth. In the chill of a spring evening, by a quiet River Thames, and beneath a circle of listener-enclosing yew trees (all upshoots of one Mother Tree), I brought my tales. As the light waned and the day darkened, we explored greed, and need, and pain, and sorrow. Catastrophe and equanimity.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Eyeball — The Eyeball
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

The human being sees life from one pair of eyes. Everything from this one pair of eyes. The first story grows from one of these eyeballs, a nascent hairy eyeball whose voracious appetite proves to be insatiable:

After one great turning of time, the eyeball woke one day and its razor gaze fell, like a blade, upon a new land far beyond the known shale ridge, a vision of waving fronds and swaying bands. And the engorged eyeball swivelled impassively towards this new goal, setting its inscrutable sights upon a new paradise. Off it went, scuttling across rocks, and through foam, between boulders, and under stones. Unswerving, unerring, grotesquely unnerving. And from it all creatures cowered and hid.

The eyeball cannot see. The Patterners can. Have you heard of the Patterners?

They are rare beings born engraved with the interconnected patterning of all things. You understand this, it is not something they have chosen? They are carved so. Their skin, their eyes, their tongue, their ears, their hearts, all engraved with the patterning of all things. Each waking moment, each dreaming state, they see the web. They see each knot, each node, see each and all as sacred weights in the integral patterning of holding. Each unique, essential in itself. One knot carelessly broken, is the first small hole in the web. Two knots broken is the first bigger hole in the web. And so it goes. And so it goes.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Patterners — The Patterners
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

Who is to say what breaks the web? What ‘should’ we now do? How should we now act? In our daily lives, many of us will have noticed a growing sense of partition, as we judge not only our own actions, but those of others. Why is he saying yes to that plastic bag at the checkout? Why does she even ask if he needs one? Did you know X drove down to Y today to pick up a pair of party shoes from that designer outlet? So-and-So is flying again, off to Magaluf/Vietnam/Cuba, as if there’s no tomorrow. Judgement and separation set in.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Old Man and the Glacier — The Old Man and the Glacier
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

And from this space a tale unfolds of an old man who finally meets the majestic icelands of his lifelong yearning, in the twilight of his dwindling years.

I don’t normally use words like magnificent; I don’t feel comfortable with them. But sometimes there is only one word that will do. It was so grand and beautiful that it made me cry. I got frozen tears in my beard, and hanging from my nose as well. I probably looked a sight, but it didn’t matter. I could not stop looking at the, at the magnificence of this sight. I stood there until I was so cold I could take no more…

And in the very same landscape, amidst the rising oceans and the shrinking ice, a woman rows in her boat across the ocean, leaving behind the luxury cruise liners, the activists and the warriors, to arrive in the shadow of the melting glacier:

Quietly I haul in my sodden oars, lay them softly in the rowlocks. Gently I seat myself. I turn up my collar and release my hood. My white hair falls loose. And in my lap I slowly place my hands face up to her glistening face. I bow in her cloudbound shadow. Her diminishing body drip drip drips upon my uncovered head. Quietly I sing to her, a lullaby of passing.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, In the Shadow of the Melting Glacier — In the Shadow of the Melting Glacier
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

It is mystery

These are our viewpoints, those available to the limited frameworks of a human mind and imagination. However, there remains the word beyond. The final story offered the fragile thought that, shifting beyond our limited field of vision, all is as it is meant to be.

Upside out is inside down and here is neither there and thought is energy and matter is light and light is frozen as a waterfall that is placeless and ubiquitous and spaceless and timeless and infinite and eternal. And words that are vessels back down on Planet Earth, are mere echoes of energy, and each is an impartial resonance that holds, in itself, no power. Life and Death and Future and Past and Redemption and Ruin are all absorbed equally and mutually into the blue echo of dark Space. One hears nothing, for there is no means of carrying the words. It is mystery.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, Space — Space
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

Find out more

Jennifer performed her stories at the Earth Living Festival in Reading on 11th May 2019, under the title In the Shadow. The festival was organised by Alice McGuigan, Outrider Anthems’ project manager for the earlier, year-long Festival of the Dark, in Reading.

Jennifer at the Earth Living Festival, Reading
Photograph: Alice McGuigan © 2019

Jennifer produced Dancing in the Dark, combining her poem-story and art in a limited edition, high-quality artist’s book, on the Kickstarter platform.

You can find two more of Jennifer’s stories in full on ClimateCultures: What the Bee Sees, and The Gift of the Goddess Tree.

You can find Ed Hendry — the designer who worked with Jennifer to create the new Outrider Anthems logo, branding, website and identity — and other examples of his work on Facebook and Behance.

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe is pleased to have joined the relaunched Outrider Anthems as freelance creative administrator, organising publications such as Dancing in the Dark and a forthcoming series of Outrider Anthems events.

Jennifer Leach

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