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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.

All Good Things Must Begin

Playwright Chantal Bilodeau shares Climate Change Theatre Action’s new anthology of short plays on the climate crisis, whose theme of ‘All good things must begin’ takes an imaginative leap through challenging times towards a just and regenerative world.

1,850 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

As the fifth Climate Change Theatre Action festival (CCTA) unfolded in the fall of 2023, the world broke an unfortunate series of records, with every month in that season becoming the warmest September, October, November, and December ever recorded. Furthermore, the year 2023 as a whole marked the first time global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for a twelve-month period. If we needed a reminder of why we were doing what we were doing, it came loud and clear.

At the same time, in December 2023, at the UN Climate Conference in Dubai, thanks to a global Call to Action spearheaded by the Climate Heritage Network and signed by hundreds of arts and cultural organizations worldwide, the United Arab Emirates (hosts of COP28) and Brazil (future hosts of COP30 in 2025) announced the launch of the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action. An international coalition of UN Member States, the Group of Friends’ stated goal is to build “political momentum for the recognition of culture as a uniquely powerful force in climate change policy.” It remains to be seen how much influence this group will have and how this influence will translate into meaningful policies, but, at the very least, it confirms what many artists and cultural workers have known for years: There can be no transition to a more just and regenerative world without culture as a key driver.

Countless arts and cultural organizations are already working to address climate challenges with and within their community, capitalizing on the strength of cultural networks and the power of creativity and imagination. But we need more. As we know all too well, if we wait for change to come from the top, we will be waiting for a long time. The more we organize within our communities and work to dream up and implement the changes we want to see, the better prepared we will be to face the challenges ahead of us. In storytelling terms, this means we, artists, must be modern Jules Vernes and imagine not just the technology but also the systems – economic, social, environmental, educational, moral, etc. – of tomorrow, the systems that will support the lives of nine billion people on a finite Earth.

Showing the cover of ‘All Good Things Must Begin,’ edited by Chantal Bilodeau and published by the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. — ‘All Good Things Must Begin,’ edited by Chantal Bilodeau and published by the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (2024), features 50 short plays and six essays by writers from around the world.

Climate Change Theatre Action

Inaugurated in 2015 and hosted biennially, CCTA is a worldwide festival of short plays about the climate crisis, presented to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conferences. It is spearheaded by the Arts & Climate Initiative in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, and aims to bring communities together and inspire them to take action on climate. It represents the busiest and most exciting part of our year, the one time when we get to feel, at least for a few months, that we do (maybe?) have a tangible impact.

For every festival, we commission fifty playwrights, representing every inhabited continent, to write a five-minute play about an aspect of the climate crisis based on a prompt. Then, we make this collection of plays available to anyone interested in presenting an event in their community during a three-month window in the fall. Events can range from readings to fully produced performances and from podcasts to film adaptations. Organizers are encouraged to design their event to reflect their own aesthetic and the needs of their community, and to include additional material by local artists.

Showing Monica Sanborn in ‘Actors Ready’ by Ethan King. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri. — Monica Sanborn in ‘Actors Ready’ by Ethan King. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri.

To emphasize the ‘Action’ part of Climate Change Theatre Action, we also invite organizers to think about an action – educational, social, or political – that can be incorporated into their event. These actions may involve collaborations with the scientific community or local environmental organizations, or they may take the form of donations or protests. In the past, organizers have pledged to reduce consumption and adopt plant-based diets, raised money for hurricane relief and tree-planting efforts, cleaned rivers, donated to food banks, and written letters to legislators to demand policy change.

The five-minute format of the CCTA plays is not accidental. We want the plays to be as user-friendly as possible so they can be presented in different contexts by people with varying levels of experience and accommodate a wide range of budgets, including no budget at all. And while the short format may sound innocuous, five minutes pack a surprising punch, reliably bringing audiences to tears, generating laughter, and providing serious fodder for reflection. The plays can be performed individually as part of larger events – such as conferences and festivals – or grouped together in any number to create an evening of theatre.

All Good Things Must Begin

CCTA 2023 took place from September 17 to December 23, 2023. Once we had selected our fifty playwrights, we offered the following prompt:

Our theme this year, ‘All Good Things Must Begin,’ is inspired by the journal entry of American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler was determined to be a best-selling author. By setting intentions and visualizing this positive outcome, she defied the odds and became the author of many celebrated novels, winning each of science fiction’s highest honors. She was also incredibly prescient, writing about extremism, racial justice, and climate change some thirty years ago. While the worlds of her novels depict the violent challenges of today’s interlocking crises, her protagonists remain devoted to thriving, to achieving survival beyond the destructive and oppressive societies they come from.

The climate crisis demands the same kind of imaginative leap: We will create a just and regenerative world only if we dare to imagine it first and use that vision to guide us through the difficulties. We invite you to be solarpunks and envision radical pluralistic futures where nature and community thrive, and where we reject the apocalypse and embrace counterculture, post-capitalism, and decolonization. This doesn’t necessarily translate into utopias but into worlds where successes and failures exist side by side, and where hope, courage, and grief overlap.

All Good Things Must Begin: Short Plays Imagining the Future is the response to this prompt. Playwrights share their vision of what the future may hold with humor, poetry, playfulness, hope, courage, and sometimes grief and pain. They tackle topics such as intolerance, civic action, cultural heritage, interspecies relationships, and Indigenous knowledge in a variety of styles and approaches that provide as many entry points into a complex conversation. The book was released this past October and is available on Lulu Press in paperback and ebook, or from your domestic online bookstore.

Showing Scott Redmond in ‘The Polar Bears’ by Nicolas Billon. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri. — Scott Redmond in ‘The Polar Bears’ by Nicolas Billon. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri.

Our goal with this publication is to make the fifty plays of CCTA 2023 available to as many people as possible so they can be studied, read, performed, and inspire the kinds of dreams that empower us to make bold changes. In addition to the plays, the book features six essays by members of the greater CCTA family: Himali Kothari, Elspeth Tilley, Mark Wallace, Clare Preuss, Ian Garrett, and GiGi Buddie. These essays provide insights on various aspects of the project, ranging from working with students to hosting events in areas dominated by the oil industry, and from exploring ecoscenography to understanding one’s role in protecting the planet. One of the essays also crunches down the numbers to evaluate the festival’s impact.

Climate anxiety and climate distress are on the rise, especially among the younger generation. While these feelings are healthy responses to the existential challenges we face, for any action to be possible, let alone sustainable, they must be addressed – and harnessed toward positive transformation. A way in which this can happen is through keeping a sense of possibility alive. By reminding ourselves that ‘good things’ don’t appear fully formed but must begin somewhere, and what we aspire to can be put in motion anytime, we can hopefully keep despair at bay. After all, beginnings are always acts of faith. So, whether you are an artist, an activist, an educator, or a student, we encourage you to get your own copy and use the plays to foster generative conversations and – hopefully – joyful action.

Find more

All Good Things Must Begin: Short Plays Imagining the Future, edited by
Chantal Bilodeau (2024), is published by Lulu, and available in paperback or ebook.

Climate Change Theatre Action, launched in 2015, is a worldwide festival of short plays about the climate crisis presented biennially to coincide with the United Nations COP meetings. CCTA is a U.S.-Canada collaboration between the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. The creative prompts for the biennial CCTA commissions so far have been:

2017: Where Is The Hope?

2019: Lighting the Way

2021: Envisioning a Global Green New Deal

2023: All Good Things Must Begin

In 2023, the Climate Heritage Network issued its Call to Action to the UNFCCC to include cultural heritage, the arts and creative sectors in climate policy, resulting in the launch of the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action. In November that year, TIME reported that New Data Shows a Global Surge in Searches Related to ‘Climate Anxiety’.

To explore other ClimateCultures members’ experiences and ideas around using drama and theatre to explore climate themes, you could dip into Conversations with Work That Connects, discussions between Julia Marques and fellow members Daniel Bye, Tessa Gordziejko, Matt Law, Jennifer Leach and Andrea Carr; and in Gulp! Water Choices, Stories and Theatre, Adam Ledger shares the thinking behind the Bone Ensemble’s project on global water issues, creating an engaging and participatory family drama on environmental issues, inequalities and opportunities.

In February 2024, European science agency Copernicus announced that, for the first time ever, global average heating exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, on average, for a 12-month period during 2023. Dr. Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a UCS statement “This data doesn’t mean the primary goal of the Paris climate agreement has been breached, as nations committed to limiting global average temperatures over the long-term—typically considered 20 to 30 years—rather than tying their efforts to a day, month, or year-long anomaly. That said, world leaders should take serious heed of Copernicus’ latest finding by quickening their current snail’s pace to slash heat-trapping emissions and helping to safeguard communities and ecosystems from unavoidable climate impacts. The latest IPCC report found that the planet will likely breach the 1.5-degree-Celsius mark within the next 11 years unless global heat-trapping emissions peak by 2025.”

Chantal Bilodeau

A playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change, and co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action ...

Nettle-eater: On the Call of the Wild

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe finds in Tom Hirons’s Nettle-eater concise, expansive, poetic prose on peril, discovery, and instability in the wild experience of a soul going mad to become truly sane, breaking and remaking our understanding of existence.

1,070 words: estimated reading time = 4 minutes

Poet Tom Hirons’s short prose book, Nettle-eater, is an urgent voyage into our inner wilds. They lie buried but still in reach through those outer wilds that have likewise been banished, seemingly, to the margins and to memories of a none-otherness that underpins all. There is, of course, nothing truly, completely other in this world, although our civilisation has made it its business to manufacture and commodify separation. Even our language of ecology and mutuality is reduced to ‘systems’ and ‘services’ and ‘sustainability’.

This is a book of peril and discovery, of facing head-on an instability. Not as a teetering, precarious balancing act between fates of madness and sanity as we maybe feel our nettle-eating narrator is presenting to us — the story here is not of such a tipping point so much as a wilful lunge into wildness — but an instability within those words and the experiences they try to contain. The experience he relates is of a soul first breaking and then remaking its understanding of existence, of what sanity can possibly mean in an insane world. “Some sadnesses are too great to be borne in a life built upon sanity.”

“You know the call,” he begins. “All your books speak of it. If I differ from you, it is only in this: When the call came, I heeded it.”

Nettle-eater

Accepting the call, our narrator heads to the moor as commanded, to live wild on nettles. He weaves for us a short account to counter the long processes of our taming, of ourselves and all about us. That history has made a madness out of rationality, displacing us from where the unnamed beast still hides and calls, “beyond the edge and in the deep centre of things”. To find it, the nettle-eater unmoors himself on the moor, thankful for the spectral visions it affords him.

“There are folk both fair and foul abroad on the moor who are older than all my dreams, old as the jagged stones and those curious people who raised them; from them I learned a little humility, at times, although the lessons were mostly quickly forgotten.”

‘Rewilding’ is not a word you will find in this book, or in Sometimes a Wild God, Hirons’s poem that feels like a good walking companion to this feral story. (Both are very elegant small books, perfect for a pocket and a walk out into woods, waterways, hills or moors). This is not nature-archaeology as cure, taking us back to how things used to be. I suspect rewilding is not a word he uses much in conversation or interviews. For all the ancient, half-buried links to a feral world waiting to be discovered, attended to and lived anew, there is something much more forward-moving in these concise, expansive revelations in prose and poetry: for-wilding rather than re-wilding? Or, simply, wilding.

Wilding himself, self-willed, into the more-than-human — “waking in the night wearing fire-gloves” from the nettles, “hands … stung to red rags, pierced with pins”; bruising his naked body as he leaps, salmon-like, at the high waterfalls of the moor or forced “into impossible slivers of space between rocks”; being laughed at by wild horses “unimpressed by whatever wisdom or folly I was engaged in” — the nettle-eater seeks to turn humanity’s pale mimicry of nature with him, willing our planted world also to defect. Without much success: “I like to think, though, that a few straight larches twisted their trunks and kinked themselves towards the wild side beneath the silvery moon on nights of particular eloquence on my part.”

As the year moves on its cycles, and he moves through forgotten initiations, “enticed … from the skins of secret roots and the peculiar angles of the stars”, the nettle-eater’s spirit frees itself from his earth-bound body — but not in separation — soaring “as swift and strong as a buzzard. The land below me was as perfect as a wren, crisp as lichen or ice.”

“Do not sit there, wondering,” he ends. I have told you the truth.”

Sometimes a Wild God

Yes, Nettle-eater has heeded the call and urges to us too. “You were never more lost than you are now, if you cannot reach out, touch the wild earth and weep.” Yes, sometimes a wild god calls on you at home, perhaps disturbing your safe, quiet reading:

He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.

…

The Fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.

Dare we listen to that call? With the nettle-eater’s story and the wild god at our door, perhaps we take the first, faltering steps before we’ve even realised…

Nettle-eater (2018) and Sometimes a Wild God (2015) by Tom Hirons are published by Feral Angels Press (“poetry for a world on fire”), with artwork and illustrations by Rima Staines. Both are also available as audiobooks, read by Tom; Sometimes a Wild God is also available as an A3 poster. Tom and Rima are co-founders of Hedgespoken, an offgrid travelling storytelling theatre.

The suggestion of a new verb for-wild, in place of re-wild, was included in neologisms proposed by philosopher and writer Ginny Battson in her February 2020 Seasonalight blog post, Re to For: “Times are changing and, with Earth in crisis, we are needing to imagine our futures ~ preferably, good ones. With so many things re-quiring a very new approach (at least in living memory), I am beginning to dislike the prefix RE. re-wire, re-cover, re-weave, re-wild, re-store – ‘re’ as in to go back. … We need to look forward into newness that’s just. And that needs to be reflected in our language.”

On the dangers of forcefully excluding the wild, of making it monstrous by paying it too much ransom for the assumed security of civilisation, perhaps contrast a story like Nettle-eater with John Gardner’s short 1971 novel, Grendel, which I reviewed in Bringing Our Monsters Back Home. Better to take a home visit from the Wild God than from Beowulf’s monster, I think…

A Personal Anthropocene History #14: Bronze Bell, Sea-bed Oak, Wayang Kulit Shadow Puppet

Researcher and writer Jules Pretty presents objects with personal stories of resonance in the Anthropocene, where the common theme of ‘story’ itself is a powerful mark of individual and cultural agency for change and hope in uncertain times.

2,550 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

The challenge: the Anthropocene — the suggested Age of Human that our species has initiated — has a complex past, present and future, and there are many versions. What three objects evoke the unfolding of human-caused environmental and climate change for you? View other contributions at A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

***

I present here three objects and three themes for the Anthropocene: traditional markets, and how they for thousands of years were places for storytelling; how traditions worldwide spoke of flood events, and how one was missed in the loss of lands and homes to sea level rise in the middle of the current North Sea; and how forms of story are embedded in culture, here the Wayang Kulit shadow puppets. These speak to a great contemporary hope: that story will help create the agency to address contemporary climate and nature crises. Story says this: go through the door.

Bronze bell of the Saharan story singer

Anthropocene object: showing a bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Bronze bell, from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, made in the 1950s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

This bronze bell from the 1950s was fired and fashioned by a blacksmith at one of the greatest markets of the Sahara desert, on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northern Nigeria.

It was a squarish hub, this market a mile in length along each side.

By the pale glow of dawn, the muezzin inside the city gates stirred sleepers from far and wide. Before long, laden donkeys were trotting on converging paths, bullocks carried men with plaited hair, the fields were high with ripening millet. Women balanced baskets on their heads, paused to share news beneath the many roadside baobab.

In the shaded avenues, on the paths and ways, hawker and seller already sat at stalls, each woodworker sharpened chisel, there was money-changer and basket-maker, all the smithy men of iron and bronze in one district, their bellows made from goat-skin, they were firing up the charcoal. There was brightly-patterned saddlecloth, and all kinds of rein and bridle ornament, carpenters busy with rough blocks, turning them to hoe and handle. Some carved holy plaques, spade-shaped and then inked sacred characters, by bamboo pen dipped in ash and gum.

There was the smell of the rotting fish and acrid woodsmoke, a calabash of rancid butter was all a greasy mess of flies, in the air a taste of pepper and perfume from clove and herb, and wholesome onions, and the sour smell of civet cat, and dung trodden in the sand.

In the west the avenues were crowded with women wearing heavy anklets, their teeth stained red. And in the east, herder women slender and tall were wrapped in fabric of blue; all over men in turbans wore flowing cotton robes of white.

In was a market, so of course you could buy or trade pink kola nuts, potash slabs from the great lake, much shrunken even then, dry dates and scarlet pepper, long gourds, polished and carved, each with ornamental stripes and snakes. There were boxes of matches, bangles from the east, paper money from the north.

To this market came a boy troubadour.

He sang in the north, he sang in the south.

The lad named Mid-e-Mid, he had green eyes and tangled hair, his songs hailed from far hills rising sharp and purple from the desert playa.

He was famed on the plains of camel grass, at the small oases where bright birds sang in the shade of palms, so each tune soared far, and after days alone he would ache at dusk for a campfire, to hum a little while millet boiled in soot-black cauldrons.

He was the one, he could charm a gift precisely from a person’s pocket.

He walked from the north, he walked to the south. He sang to the setting sun, to the velvet sand. He sang to the wild wind.

I am walking well, walking. I am walking, he sang.

This was one of the ancient trails, in those days carrying salt and gold, dried dates and books to the desert libraries. He walked past abandoned caravanserai, whale fossils and forty-foot crocodile engravings on wadi walls, painted rock art of long-horned cattle and their herders, leaping men with bows, giraffe and elephant, red and ochre figures in a cave of swimmers, women with the heads of birds and men as leopards. In remote canyons were tall figures and their war chariots, and running ostriches.

He walked to this market by the dry desert, where no rain had fallen for seven whole years. He rang his bronze bell.

The boy Mid-e-Mid sang a song, in his strongest voice, and a herder came forward, he passed sweet tea in a chipped glass. Mid-e-Mid sang of the cold desert, the night fire, people dancing in the warm light to drum and flute. He sang of the mud-brick military depot long abandoned, and how his home oasis was now hemmed by oval hills of piled and pounded sand. There had been a cool oasis garden, date palm over shaded tomato beds and beans, a grove of lemon trees. But these too were lost under sand.

Then he chanted of a dead camel on the trail, a vulture on one mimosa branch. How once there were ten thousand birds, duck and stork and ibis, crested crane and guinea fowl, all on the great green shimmering inland sea. And how these feathered birds had been forced away, as the world had dried and water fled.
He was just a boy, he said, yet he could only just remember what rain was like.
These are my songs, he said, which I have related, if they are sweet or not so sweet, take them elsewhere, let some come back to me one day.

Sea-bed oak of Doggerland tales

Doggerland story: Showing a piece of sea-ded oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Sea-Bed Oak, dredged from the North Sea in the 1960s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

Between 7500-6200 BCE, the dry plains of Doggerland were drowned by rising waters, and the shallow North Sea was formed. By 5000 BCE, the 300 km by 100 km Dogger Isle remained in the new sea, with a host of smaller islands. It soon would sink, and we would forget there had ever been land there.

The item here is a piece of oak, dredged up in the 1960s off the Suffolk coast by a fisherman friend. In those days, the accepted truth was that wood and bones and amber must have been moved by sea current and tide. Now we know different.

Many a culture has a flood creation myth.

The oldest written saga was found on tablets of clay, the Epic of Gilgamesh telling of cities of dust, and of the discontent of gods. The prince Gilgamesh wished to tame the wilds, cut down cedar trees, so Enlil brought a flood. Perhaps his traders had learned how a wide dry land had been flooded by the sea; how ancient gods had been displeased, how so they wished we humans lived in different ways.

Not many people get to name a country, and archaeologist Bryony Coles had a brilliant insight. There had been erratic finds, so curious none could place them, moorlog and flint found in fishnets, sunken forests at the coast, called Noah’s Forests a century ago by geologist Clement Reid. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that thus originated source of stories of the deluge?”

By the end of the 1990s, the evidence was clear. The sea had risen after melting of the ice sheets, it drowned parkland and tunnel valley, took woods of birch and oak, displaced the grazers, turned freshwater marsh to salt and sea. Bryony called it Doggerland, after fish-famed Dogger Bank. That country had been dry, then drowned. People lived there, then were forced to leave.

For until eight thousand years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers roamed the prairies, searched for mammoth and giant elk, broad-browed auroch and great bison herds. On hunting hill and grassy plain, they camped at salty marsh and wide lagoon. At the still point of their world was Yggdrasil, the one tree that held up sky. Serpent circled the distant sea, guarded all their ground. They shaped their land, sowed fruit and seed harboured from the wild, fished and fixed to spear barbs of antler bone. You can imagine, they could not hope for any better place.

Yet as eagles planed serene, there was a creeping shift, icebergs severed free, the waters rising up. They sensed a warp of salt and sea. The air was life, as it is today for people of the plains, a wealth of sun and rain. And while gannets screamed, a storm was beating at their border.

Now the waves rose fast, the height of you or me in half a hundred years.

So in that distant time, the people carried in and up their camps, dug up a hundred holy graves, buried bones once more. Still the surge poured in, league on league not letting up. They would have called on gods, desist and stop the sea. But they could not tame the tempest, all their shamans tried. One watery dawn, came a shocking sight. The sun-star rose from sea, later dipped into their western waves.

Had they eaten fish forbidden, had a snake whispered from a tree, no one could recall. And so every hide of land and fire pit was drowned, each vale and fell seized by rising flood. They lashed boats of auroch-skin, flexed oars, lay their infants on the furs, and came upon the cliffs of higher land.

Did they meet a friendly king and queen; did these forest people rush down the beach and help the migrants from the brine?

What do you say when a whole landscape disappears, what words for sinking, when cultures go and sea village too? What hope is there, at all, when loved ones die?

This is the first verse from ‘The Drowning of Doggerland’, from my book, Sea Sagas of the North (2022):

It is said the Sky People, once were numerous,
But they had drowned, and every dark hide,
Of land and fire pit, each vale and fell had been seized,
By the rising flood, the swell of sea had beaten down defence,
So they launched their boats, lashed and loaded auroch-skin,
And flexed the oars, among the furs and flutes,
Were sobbing infants, fastened tight to strakes of birch,
At last ahead appeared a strip of land, they saw a hall upon the cliff.

Wayang Kulit shadow puppet of long story tradition

Story tradition: Showing a Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024 — Wayang Kulit shadow puppet, Java, used in the 1980s. Photograph: Jules Pretty © 2024

The object here is a Wayang kulit leather puppet from Java. It was used in a night performance of shadow puppets in the mid-1980s close to Borobudur in southern Java. Performances are lit by candles, and accompanied by gamelan music. The whole audience was captivated as the tales were told. The night was hot, the tradition at least a couple of thousand years long.

Story is a device common to every human culture. It has some 50,000 years of history, yet has often come to be both misunderstood and misused in the modern era.

Put simply, the patterns of good story match the shapes of our lives.

Story was once tales told at every flickering fireside, the children’s faces upturned and wide-eyed. Now it is expressed in many forms of art and culture, in business and activism.

In cultures worldwide, storytellers acquired special status, for they had something to say about how the world worked. They took, in the telling, the audience temporarily away from the concerns and worries of their days.

The storytellers were called scald and poet, shaman and jester, enchanter and soothsayer, cunning women and men, cantor and conteuse, pied piper and every kind of trickster. You would find story being told by blind bard and bhat, barefoot friar and mendicant, the wayang kulit puppet master, snake-charmer with a rope and khöömei throat-singers from the steppe, dzikr trance-spinners all in white and the oak-leaved rhymer of the green lanes. And in recent times, pilgrim and ranger, barber-shop quartet, city busker and balladeer, podcaster and versemonger, novelist and stand-up comedian.

Their magic is always this: the more the storytellers talk, the more people want to listen. Their themes are simple: to bring people together, to tell them something new, to reveal patterns and emotions that we the audience recognise as our own.

Story is about the sequences of crossings to a new state, about transformation itself. This was once called alchemy. Ovid wrote 250 myths about transformations in the Metamorphoses poems 2,000 years ago. Children were transformed into trees and animals, people into spirits. You sprinkle your face with water, and sprout antlers.

The famed Navajo-Diné storyteller, Yellowman, said to Barre Toelken in the late 1960s:

“If children hear stories, they will grow up to be good people;
If adults hear stories, they will know what to do.”

Good story can lead to tipping points and phase transitions, where transformations can be as sudden as those we experience in life. A butterfly flaps its wings, and whole systems change.

A challenge, then: can we create stories so vivid, so astounding and so colourful, that they will be remembered for a thousand years?

There is sneaky logic in old tales, story being a form of medicine. Clarissa Estés, an estadora keeper of the stories, wrote, “When a fairy tale is told, it becomes right.”

The telling of tales, she said, causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep over the earth.

In Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, the supplicant sits by the door for days, for months, for years, waiting for the call, for the door to open. When old and dying, he whispers to the doorkeeper about the unfairness of it all. The doorkeeper says, “Oh, this was your door, you could have gone through it at any moment.”

Story says this: go through the door.

For in story, everything is at stake.

Find more

Jules Pretty‘s book Sea Sagas of the North (2022) is published by Hawthorn and you can find details of this and his other writing at his website.

You can read Jules’ previous ClimateCultures post The Next Dawn of Everything — Stories of Human Cultures, where he reviews The Dawn of Everything, exploring stories that reveal how human cultures don’t converge on one ‘advanced’ model, as our current views of history assume, finding rich accounts of diversity, freedom and hope.

Do explore the other contributions to our A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects series; each features a set of three objects and their contexts whose personal stories speak to the universal through the unique. Artefact or artwork, utilitarian or iconic, real or imagined, the 42 objects we’ve gathered so far illuminate the relationships between people, place, period and planet and the legacy of our species’ manipulation of our material environment. Since the launch of our series, of course, we’ve also welcomed to ClimateCultures the Museum of the Anthropocene — an online home for 18 object-based essays from students on Martin Mahony‘s ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia.

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.

Exploring Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence

Kim V. Goldsmith presents a collaborative essay with fellow artists whose new exhibition, Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence, explores Regional Australia through intersectional feminism, adding personal reflections on her creative approach to sparking conversations about being good ancestors.

3,000 words: estimated reading time = 12 minutes

The main body of this post is a collaborative essay that Kim V. Goldsmith has produced with fellow artists Joanne Stead, Anna Glynn, Tracy Luff, Jane Richens, Laura Baker and Tania Hartigan and Regional Futures creative producer, Narelle Vogel, for their joint exhibition Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence at the Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre in Moruya, NSW Australia, from 26th October to 23rd November 2024. And Kim has added a personal reflection at the end of this post, exclusively for ClimateCultures.

***

Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence is a collection of artworks informed by an intimate knowledge of Regional New South Wales, created by seven female artists of different backgrounds and experiences who choose to live and work regionally. Through an intersectional feminist lens, the artworks creatively mine the provocations, contradictions and tensions underlying the issues and opportunities impacting the future of Regional Australia—a vast place of great complexity and diversity.

Installation photos of the Regional Futures exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Western Sydney, 2023

As a way of understanding, intersectional feminism recognises how different aspects of our social and political identity intersect to influence how we think about and experience the world—through race, gender, and/or sexuality or other identifiers. These are the voices that tend to fall between the cracks in the conversations about our future. Even within this collection of works, they’re not fully represented.

Regional is defined by Australian authorities as all the towns, small cities and areas beyond the major capital cities. For those who understand the regions, they aren’t just shaped by the lack of people and traffic, or the mountains, hills, plains, forests, rivers, lakes and oceans, but a way of thinking and understanding. Each artist in An Entangled Existence draws on a deep understanding of these landscapes infused with ancient First Nations traditions and culture and shaped by colonisation. They are deeply connected with the regional communities they live within—the rich socio-ecological fabric of those places, and the complex and nuanced issues that are so often fertile ground for creatives.

The parent project behind the exhibition is Regional Futures: Artists in a Volatile Landscape. It began in 2022 as an initiative of the Regional Arts Network of New South Wales, funded by Create NSW, with a brief to place artists at the centre of a dialogue examining a future vision for the place where they live and create. This was done via self-directed, creative development residencies, culminating in an exhibition and symposium at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Western Sydney in 2023.

The artists commissioned for the Regional Futures project live and work alongside neighbours, friends and businesses at different stages of considering what the future will look like. Creative Producer of the 2022-23 Regional Futures project, Narelle Vogel says this gives these creative practitioners a unique opportunity to use their artform to pose more questions, reveal hard truths, and perhaps suggest solutions:

“Their art becomes a safe space for challenging conversations. And as many of us feel a sense of urgency, these artists are being proactive, showing that now is the time to work together towards a more positive future.”

Of the 27 artists involved in the original Regional Futures project, seven have come together for An Entangled Existence. They are Anna Glynn (Jaspers Brush), Laura Baker (Blayney), Tracy Luff (Goulburn), Jane Richens (Dungog), Joanne Stead (Tamworth), Tania Hartigan (Wallabadah), and Kim V. Goldsmith (Dubbo).

An Entangled Existence is a selection of the works developed during the original project, and since then, that continue the conversations started in 2022-23. They’re designed to not only question our ideas and values but inspire hopeful actions. Suggestions about the way forward are often revealed in the artworks, like Anna Glynn’s richly coloured video projection work, DWELLING. It speaks of what home is for us as a community, for the environment and the creatures we share these spaces with.

Entangled existence - Showing Anna Glynn, DWELLING, 2023, video still from moving image projection (image supplied by artist) — Anna Glynn, DWELLING, 2023, video still from moving image projection (image supplied by artist)

Based in the Shoalhaven, multi-disciplinary artist Glynn says the character of the regions is constantly changing and being reshaped to reflect new populations and expectations:

“Small country towns become bustling tourist hotspots inundated with visitors. Perceptions of our regions are shaped by economics. Pressure on the environment increases. The global phenomenon of over-tourism is becoming apparent, and we all participate in this in our own ways.

“Is there a happy medium that embraces all of the wants of humans living within an ancient landscape? What does a successful regional location look like?”

Glynn believes creative thinking and expression have a unique ability to highlight and direct consideration towards the bigger questions of regional life:

“There may also be opportunities for regional artists to profit or prophet in the changing nature of the regions. Our creative practices may draw on and mirror our regional environment giving us the potential to have a positive impact on regional futures.

“Finding ways for these messages to gain traction will be crucial for creatives and their communities.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Places We Call Home, 2023, hand cut paper, acrylic blocks, 10 x 2 x 15cm (image supplied by artist, Laura Baker) — Laura Baker, Places We Call Home, 2023, hand cut paper, acrylic blocks, 10 x 2 x 15cm (image supplied by artist)

Laura Baker’s finely crafted hand-cut paper houses and acrylic block installation, Places We Call Home also examines the impact of the built environment on individual and collective experiences of community. Hers is on the Central Tablelands of the state. She centres the emotionally loaded word ‘home’ against a backdrop of housing availability and the affordability crises:

“Over the past few years regional areas have seen an influx of new residents ‘escaping’ metropolitan centres. Demand for housing and our streetscapes are changing with new developments, contemporary houses and shiny facilities. Town planners and a miscellany of builders will influence the aesthetic of the regional future, but it is the spirit of the people that must be preserved through this period of growth.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Marionette, 2023: cardboard, 140 x 66 x 50cm (image supplied by artist, Tracy Luff) — Tracy Luff, Marionette, 2023, cardboard, 140 x 66 x 50cm (image supplied by artist)

Behind the closed doors of home, Tracy Luff has used her delicately hand-crafted cardboard sculptures to progress the conversation about Domestic Family Violence (DFV) in regional communities—for some, a place of no escape. Goulburn-based Luff’s Marionette and Pillows on the Wall tap into the notion of home not being a safe place, particularly during times of great stress:

“My work plays an integral role in breaking the silence, fostering open discussions, and challenging the stigma surrounding DFV.

“Building strong networks among women and community leaders is essential to creating support systems and sharing resources. Education, especially for the younger generation, is vital to recognising early signs of abuse and promoting healthy relationships.

“Advocating for improved access to services in rural areas, including counselling and legal support, is critical. By empowering women to speak out and support each other, we can ensure our regions move beyond awareness to actively eradicate DFV, fostering safety and equality for all.”

Entangled existence – weaving the domestic and the global

The works in An Entangled Existence move fluidly between domestic perspectives to regional and global views, asking audiences to acknowledge we are all part of complex, connected systems, where disruptions, good or bad, have a ripple effect.

The heroes of the Upper Hunter captured on video in Jane Richens’ Performative Portraits—Change Makers for a Low Carbon Future are those in the community taking individual actions towards a more sustainable future. Some actions are rhythmic and upbeat, others slow, meditative and ponderous. These people are changemakers in their communities, like stones dropped in a pond—each creating a ripple effect.

Entangled existence - Showing Aunty Sharon, 2023: video still from video series (image supplied by artist, Jane Richens) — Jane Richens, Aunty Sharon, 2023, video still from video series (image supplied by artist)

Richens sees the arts as a powerful mechanism to rethink and reimagine stories from regional locations using unexpected mediums:

“Watch, listen, learn, research, consider, rethink, reflect or retell stories, create new stories. This approach or stream of actions is relevant to any location or environment. It is the care and concern we give to reinventing in response to understanding where we are. That understanding is for me never a ‘one-story-tells-all’. Rather, it is the effort of engaging, experiencing and translating that is a worthwhile, creative and at times playful endeavour.

“My practice embraces creating community engagement activities to learn, question, understand and present environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem awareness, as well as ideas around sustainability.”

While change is a constant in our lives, it is not always easy. Joanne Stead had conversations with local communities around her home base of Tamworth before creating works that reflect ideas of our unacknowledged vulnerability and fragility as humans:

“A future that returns to a level of sustainability or regenerative possibilities is necessarily going to involve sacrifice, not the least of which might be the accumulation of things that is so rampant as part of a capitalist, consumerist society.

“We will not be able to continue in the manner to which we have become accustomed. In moving to a new mind frame, people’s perspectives will be uncomfortable.”

Entangled existence - Showing: Embodiment III, 2023: Eucalyptus leaf mache, jacaranda sticks, jasmine vine, paper twine, newsend, flour paste, jeweller’s wire, 88 x 48 x 49cm (image supplied by artist Joanne Stead) — Joanne Stead, Embodiment III, 2023, Eucalyptus leaf mache, jacaranda sticks, jasmine vine, paper twine, newsend, flour paste, jeweller’s wire, 88 x 48 x 49cm (image supplied by artist)

Stead’s sculptural Embodiment series, representative of women’s forms, reimagines our place within the ecosystem, emphasising we are not separate or superior to it but an integral part. Each artwork underscores the need to adopt sustainable practices and live in harmony with Earth’s rhythms.

Entangled existence - Showing: Step Lightly, handmade paper, 2023, 200 x 60 x 5cm (image supplied by artist, Tania Hartigan) — Tania Hartigan, Step Lightly, handmade paper, 2023, 200 x 60 x 5cm (image supplied by artist)

During the creative development stage of the Regional Futures project, Stead worked alongside Wallabadah-based Gamilaraay Yinaar artist Tania Hartigan to create works looking at what sustainability might mean. In talking about the processes behind her handmade paper work, Step Lightly, Hartigan says using environmentally friendly materials and studio practices are central to her living and working sustainably:

“I hear the words of Elders sing through my journey, ‘Take only what we need’. These words are important for all of us to ponder in our lives as members of a consumer-based world.”

Showing: Vaticinor Stories, 2023: audio story montage in custom upholstered vintage suitcase, duration 39 minutes (image supplied by artist, Kim V. Goldsmith, ) — Kim V. Goldsmith, Vaticinor Stories, 2023, audio story montage in custom upholstered vintage suitcase, duration 39 minutes (image supplied by artist)

Working across the Western Plains and the Mid North Coast of New South Wales during her residency for Regional Futures, Kim V. Goldsmith’s gathered field recordings of more-than-human voices—bats, birds, fish and earthworms, and first-person audio stories, developing a body of work titled Vaticinor (The Augur). Goldsmith seeks to imagine what a world fuelled by zero-carbon renewables might sound like—where the opportunities lie, and how new ways of thinking, knowing and understanding might achieve a more entangled and abundant future for humans and more-than-humans:

“If we listen to each other and the natural world more attentively and deeply, we’ll not only start to understand how connected we are, but that the future we want relies heavily on these connections and the need for more diversity.

“It’s critical we include more voices in these discussions about the challenges facing us. It’s a privilege to even be able to have these conversations, but we need to acknowledge that our behaviours, values and viewpoints often exclude some from participating.”

The intersectional feminist lens applied to the works assembled for this iteration of Regional Futures highlights the paradoxes of some of the issues facing regional communities. Each artist’s intimate relationship with their home territories offers advantages and disadvantages, as entanglement often does. However, Narelle Vogel sees each one as an active connector and conversationalist, amplifying the voices of their respective communities”

“They know how to engage through their art, exploring topics that in many other settings are seen as taboo, too difficult, too political.

“Many say that solutions will only be found through creative thinking, through challenging the norms and finding new paths. Artists are well placed to lead this process, using their creativity to bring together disparate thoughts, offering their work as another entry point into this collective conversation.”

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Creative conversations – listening to unheard voices

Kim adds for ClimateCultures: In the eighteen months since I wrote a post for ClimateCultures about my work as a commissioned Regional Futures project artist, looking at the impact fast-tracked renewable energy developments were having on regional communities of inland New South Wales (NSW), conversations about our future remain caught up in the ‘climate wars’. There’s been little change in the position of those in power on the direction of a renewable energy-driven future¹, with a commitment (if not enough action) to achieve net zero by 2050². We’re far from reaching that target³ and renewables won’t be enough to get us there.

Behind the resistance to wind and solar developments in some communities are conservative politicians calling for the lights to be kept on by extending the life of coal-fired power stations and developing more gas fields, while they fiddle the figures on unviable nuclear options⁴ in time for next year’s Federal Government election. All this energy infrastructure is in rural and regional Australia.

Showing: Humi Haptic Hands, 2023, haptic sculpture developed by Brian McNamara and soundscape composition, duration 15 minutes, (images supplied by artist, Kim V. Goldsmith) — Kim V. Goldsmith, Humi Haptic Hands, 2023, haptic sculpture developed with Brian McNamara and soundscape composition, duration 15 minutes, (images supplied by artist)

In my May 2023 post, I wrote of the need to listen to unheard voices in our consideration of the future. My work as a storyteller and sound artist exploring social and environmental ecologies has continued to seek ways to amplify the unheard—human and more-than-human, listening attentively and asking questions about what we need to do to ensure not just a sustainable future, but a more connected and biodiverse one. This is now playing out in a new self-directed residency project called SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes⁵, focusing on a farm where things are already being done and thought about very differently, despite being in the midst of a conventional broadacre cropping area.

During the recent local government elections in my home region, in the Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), a NSW political party called the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers⁶ surprised many by securing enough votes to put two candidates on council. The party are very conservative and anti-renewables. This is significant in light of local governments in NSW pushing for a greater role in renewable energy development planning⁷.

As the climate becomes increasingly unstable, there’s a growing sense of marginalisation and disconnection within less populated rural communities—a case of too much change coming too quickly, and a lack of trust in our political leadership. Australian not-for-profit climate communications organisation, the Climate Council reports a clear rural-urban divide when it comes to the impact of extreme weather events. It’s also clear that thoughts on how we reduce the carbon load on our environment are also divisive⁸. The impact in question isn’t just extreme weather events. Large-scale renewables bring with them changing land use and aesthetics, environmental impacts from clearing, and the shock of a workforce suddenly arriving in a community already short of housing, health services and public amenities. It’s also cultural change. Governments and the multinational developers are now keen to smooth things over by injecting tens of millions of dollars into the REZ communities for projects and infrastructure.

For me, the Regional Futures project and the work that has evolved from it, such as the Entangled Existence exhibition, has been an opportunity to take more personal action by initiating rarely had conversations about what it means to be a good ancestor⁹—looking ahead 30, 50,100 years. Significant investment in adaptations for surviving a more hostile climate, driven by political will and systemic change, along with new technologies, will be critical to securing our future. But as individuals within the communities bearing the brunt of change, we can’t afford to wait any longer. We are running out of time. We must step up, making a considered effort to better connect with each other and the more-than-human world, attentively listening, respectfully sharing our stories, and thinking deeply about what actions we can implement collectively, big and small, that will create a meaningful legacy for those who don’t have agency—our descendants. In the recently published book, Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet¹⁰, Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfield note “we have the opportunity to make a nation in which the next generations can survive and thrive on a different kind of Earth.”

Providing the creative framework for these conversations is something I can do, encouraging others to walk and talk with me. The Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence group exhibition at Moruya is an opportunity to take the conversation to another community. The South Coast of NSW is dealing with its own complex and nuanced issues in the face of rapid change. As artists, we can have these important conversations during the exhibition, setting the scene for a more abundant, entangled and diverse future, one conversation at a time.

Find more

The artists in the exhibition, Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence, are:

The exhibition at the Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre ran to 23rd November 2024.

Update 25/11/24: Following the successful run of the Regional Futures exhibition and events (see 31/10/24 update), Kim has written on her blog about the experience of being an artist, the artist’s role today, the power of collaboration, and recent work on evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations – along with insights from the collaboration with her fellow artists in this project. You can also watch the second, online panel discussion from the exhibition in her blog post.

Update 31/10/24: Kim has posted some photos from the exhibition opening on her Facebook page, and has shared this recording of the opening day’s panel discussion:

ecoPULSE / Kim V. Goldsmith · Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence panel discussion, 26 October 2024

A pdf of the artists’ essay Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence is available here at Kim’s ecoPULSE.art website; we’re pleased to have published it on ClimateCultures first, along with Kim’s personal reflections.

You can read Kim’s May 2023 ClimateCultures post Regional Futures: Giving Voice to Human and More-Than-Human, about her involvement in Regional Futures; Volatile Landscapes project.

References

[1] New South Wales Government Energy Co: Renewable Energy Zones

[2] Climate Change Authority: Australia’s 2035 Emissions Reduction Targets

[3] Climate Analytics: Sleight of hand: Australia’s Net Zero target is being lost in accounting tricks, offsets and more gas

[4] Liberal Party: Australia’s Energy Future

[5] EcoPULSE.art: SOIL+AIR

[6] Shooters, Fishers and Farmers: Our party

[7] The Guardian: ‘No one understands local issues better’: rural councils call for greater role in renewable energy transition

[8] The Climate Council of Australia: Climate Trauma: The growing toll of climate change on the mental health of Australians

[9] EcoPULSE.art: SPACE Walk

[10] Living Hot: Project and book

Kim V. Goldsmith

An artist exploring layers of nuance, complexity and hidden elements to present rural, regional and remote landscapes and communities in ways that make the familiar, unfamiliar.