Language Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Beyond Ecosystem Collapse: New Stories to Live By

Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by.

1,550 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

In January 2026, the UK government published a report entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, which linked the deleterious state of local and global ecosystems and biodiversity loss with the increasing risk of ecosystem collapse and threats to national security.¹ Despite its huge significance, the report received very limited media attention, and this goes for much of the scientific research that sounds the alarm about the climate and wider ecological emergency. Research led by Stockholm Resilience Centre has stated the importance of remaining within planetary boundaries and describes how “transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be […] catastrophic […] to human well-being”, and that of countless other species.²

Showing the cover of the Planetary Healthcheck 2025 report.

At current consumption levels, seven of the nine boundaries have been exceeded: Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, Novel Entities, and Ocean Acidification.³ Given the perilous situation we collectively face, effective forms of environmental communication are urgently needed to support community resilience, ecosystems regeneration and deep adaptation.

Econarratives for planetary life

Fundamental to human communication are the stories that influence how we interact with each other within the ecosystems that sustain us and that we influence. Pioneering work by my colleague (and fellow ClimateCultures member) Arran Stibbe, Professor of Narrative Ecology at the University of Gloucestershire, has shown how stories play an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world — some stories encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encouraging attention, care and protection of the natural world.

Showing the home page banner or The Search for New Stories to Live By — Home page for The Search for New Stories to Live By

Building on his 2024 book, Econarrative: ethics, ecology and the search for new stories to live by,⁴ Arran led a team of colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire and a wider international team as part of the CLADES project (Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme), to develop a free online 8-part course The Search for New Stories to Live By. In this course, which included my own contribution on ecopoetic activism in part 4, guiding themes are econarrative and ethical leadership.

Econarrative is defined as stories which see humans, more-than-human species and the physical environment in interaction with each other, while ethical leadership is defined as shaping how others perceive themselves and the society around them based on an ecological vision. As Arran Stibbe encourages, “We can all be ethical leaders, in our lives, our families, our communities, our companies, or our countries. All we need is a clear ethical vision, critical awareness of the stories that underpin our unsustainable society, the ability to seek out new stories to live by, and to communicate those stories in inspiring ways.”

The Search for New Stories to Live By examines the use of narratives by ethical leaders who are doing just that work. They include community elders, writers, poets, activists, campaigners, scientists and politicians, all of us storytellers in one way or another. The course also examines the stories we tell and how we tell them, seeking out ways of imagining a radically different society and bringing that society into being. My own contribution, which focuses on Ecopoetic Activism, looks at how ecopoets challenge the stories we live by and create new stories to transform social reality. There is a prevailing cultural narrative, maintained by literary gatekeepers, that ‘good’ poetry should not convey an apparent message. However, this is often a privileged position, arising from people who have high levels of material security and who occupy a part of the world (I’m writing here in the UK) which has yet to be severely impacted by the intersecting climate, ecological and social crises.

Acknowledging that all art is essentially political (being ‘apolitical’ is in itself a political position) and recognising the urgency of the challenges we collectively face, ecopoetry charts another course, a consciously activist stance, seeking to raise awareness, witness, mourn, commune, speak truth to power and vision new ways of living and being, among other approaches. Frequently, the work of ecopoets critiques extractivist Western attitudes and behaviours towards the ecosystems on which humans depend, along with the neocolonial exploitation of people in the Global South. Understanding that we humans are part of ‘nature’, ecopoetry may also seek to re-enchant our relationship with the more-than-human world. Or an ecopoem may narrate the restoration of a polluted river, such as the Merse in Tuscany, which the Italian ecopoet, Massimo D’Arcangelo describes, and which I explore on the course.

The search for new stories

Designed for anyone who is aware of the trajectory of society towards collapse under ever-growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who wants change at the only level that can make a difference, The Search for New Stories to Live By is a self-study course, where participants work their way through the eight parts — the introduction, Creation Stories, Identity, Ecopoetic Activism, Enchantment, Ethics, Emotions, Apocalypse – watching video talks, reading notes, completing exercises and looking through the detailed PowerPoint slides. Educators are also welcome to use the materials for their courses, and there is advice on teaching in the extra materials section, with stated course goals being for learners to develop critical awareness of the stories that underpin our current unsustainable civilisation, to develop skills in using language in inspiring ways to convey new stories to live by, and to contribute to bringing a new sustainable civilisation into being.

Finally, it is worth noting that this course builds on a previous course, The Stories We Live By, which explores the dominant stories that drive industrial civilisation and which have contributed to creating the destruction and far-reaching interconnected issues we currently face. Given sufficient time and interest, that first course could be explored before The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen’s references

DEFRA, 2026, Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, UK Government
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J. and Nykvist, B., 2009. Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and society, 14(2).
Kitzmann, N., Caesar, L., Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J., Andersen, L., Bechthold, M., Bergfeld, L., Beusen, A., Billing, M., Bodirsky, B.L. and Botsyun, S., 2025. Planetary Health Check 2025: A scientific assessment of the state of the planet.
Stibbe, Arran, 2024. Econarrative, Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Find more

You can access the new, free course at The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen mentions an earlier course, The Stories We Live By, which builds on an awareness that the issues the world faces are so severe they call into question the stories that our societies are based on. Through topics such as Ideologies and Discourses, Framing, Metaphor, Evaluations, Identities, Convictions, Erasure and Salience, it provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective. You can access that here — and read a ClimateCultures review of the early version of that course.

In a previous ClimateCultures post, Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point, Helen celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.

Helen’s latest ecopoetry collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas (Palewell Press, May 2026), explores ‘petronarcosis’ (fossil fuel addiction) and the links between forced migration and the climate crisis and has been celebrated as confirming her “as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time.” In this piece for our Creative Showcase — which includes one of the poems in full — Helen reflects on the book and the genesis of the poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward.

You can read a review of her 2024 collection, river / run, by fellow ClimateCultures member and poet Fiona Moore, here.

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Helen — “I am deeply suspicious of AI for multiple reasons, including the ecological and social impacts of data centres; the disproportionate power and influence wielded by the techbro oligarchs; growing evidence of biases within AI, which one study reveals only reinforce Islamophobia, sexism, racism etc; research also evidencing it as a form of technocolonialism; the impact it has on our critical thinking and writing skills; and, last but not least, because of its theft of creative work by often poorly remunerated artists and writers.

“I have not used AI in compiling this article, although some of the text is recycled from the online course blurb. The occasional use that I do make of AI is when researching a topic, and then only where it pops up freely as part of a Google search.”

Helen Moore

A pioneering British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, translator and academic based in Bristol.

River / Run – Waterbodies from Dorset to Findhorn Bay

Poet and campaigner Fiona Moore finds joy and celebration alongside loss in fellow ecopoet Helen Moore’s river / run, a collection of long-form poems exploring a living ecology, history and language shared with waterbodies and our fellow animals.

1,930 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

NB: If reading on a phone, you might want to allow it to rotate the page and read as landscape rather than portrait, to maintain the format for the excerpts from the poems.

If a river is long-form water, then a long poem can run like a river. Ecopoet Helen Moore has written a trilogy of long-form river poems, set in Dorset and north-east Scotland. They explore ecology, history and language, and the plight of Atlantic Salmon. (I’ll follow Moore’s practice of capitalising all living beings.)

But is river ever singular, or is that a superficial, simplistic human concept, foreshadowing exploitation? Here’s what the river networks say in the poem ‘Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / weal’:

Don’t call us ‘river’
            as if we were singular - 
                 a blue, serpentine line on a map,
                                    an ‘s’ from source to estuary;
                                                                  an abstraction                       
                                                  to be navigated, straightened. 
                                                                  fished, dredged.

Opening a book of ecopoetry, even the most ecologically minded reader may think: will I feel preached at? Moore deftly avoids this in the passage above by allowing the water to speak and question our assumptions. The reader may also ask: will dread overcome me, or will there be some joy? river / run contains joy in the energy and diversity of water, its inhabitants and landscapes, alongside the dread and the pain of loss.

Showing the cover of 'river / run' (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork by Animate Earth Collective — ‘river / run’ (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork: Animate Earth Collective

Findhorn – northern flow and flight

Joy also comes from the liveliness of the text – the varied, energising forms it takes, and the way description engages all the senses. Moore crafts her poems to embody riverine flow and eddy. The writing has a kinesthetic effect, if that’s the right way to say you feel it’s moving you along (often fast) and around. I found this most effective in the opening poem, ‘Findhorn Bay: Waves of Flow & Flight’. Even on a map this bay, east of Inverness, is an astonishing landscape. The poem begins “Tide pouring into the Bay as if through the neck/ of a wineskin -” and shows the impact:

Incoming waves flowing past boatsheds, The Captain’s Table, 
houses hunched against north-east winds -

           down past the Kirk, rippling over sand- & mudflats,
           brine filling the rough-stitched ‘Gut’ of salt-marsh,
           swelling it with the wine of Life.

It’s a largely benign flow, but hugely powerful; the poem doesn’t need to remind us explicitly how destructive water can be, as part of the forces we’re letting loose while we fail to address climate emergency.

Showing 'River Findhorn', photo by David Buckland 2024 — River Findhorn. Photo: David Buckland © 2024

The wineskin metaphor’s a rarity, all three poems being mostly deep in the ‘real’ world. As well as the movement of tide, rivers and burns, ‘Findhorn Bay’ describes two long journeys and a short one, first the ancient migration of Wild Salmon “sacred to Picts & Celts”, with “Miocene eyes”. Their route is extremely challenging, “from furthest Atlantic… through kelp forests, storms, gyres,” until the “leaps of faith” as they struggle upriver in Scotland. But

For every hundred Salmon that leave our rivers now,
less than five return.

river / run includes photos by David Buckland, one depicting Wild Salmon infested by Sea Lice, spread by fish-farm escapees. It’s painful to look at.

Pink-foot Geese take the second journey, and the poem shifts from the speaker’s viewpoint on ground

& the sky suddenly wrinkled, filled with tremulous lines
as if the weathermen had pencilled in the air-waves,
these marvellous patterns converging on the Bay.

Hairs on my skin rise spontaneously to meet them,
& in my chest, heart is a full crimson sail.

to imagining their summer in the far north and migration route back to Scotland, “following star-maps in their brains”. Apart from the “dragon flare of gas at Sullom Voe” these passages are exhilarating (heart as a sail, another rare, wonderful metaphor) until, arrived at Findhorn,

A dozen Pinkfeet stir, 
    beating hearts, 
  lifting, honking....

                                                  Pop! Pop! Pop!
                                                  Explosions of shots
                                                  ring out, shattering the calm -

a slaughter begins. The unexpectedness delivers a jolt. Loosely indented text is shocked into two columns, straight-justified: geese dying on the left, shooters opposite. The anger comes through, and we’ve been flying with the geese and share it.

  Most shooters travel
  long-distance for ‘action’
  they film & boast
  on YouTube channels - 

  600 miles to Findhorn Bay
  GREAT SPOT
  FOR SPORT - - - - - - -

The narrative turns to the human inhabitants’ perspective, from strongly against to appreciating the income the shooters bring, and the rights (or not) of Nature.

Showing Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024. — Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024.

All this is done in three pages with a lot of white space for the reader’s own thoughts. The whole poem is only 12 pages long: rich in descriptive language and packed full of references, yet concise. Its last, short journey is a farm-to-farm route that Findhorn fishwives used to take, trading herring from their creels for cheese, eggs etc. It’s written in short prose paragraphs – a walk, at human speed. “Who are the descendants of these tough women? What tenacity of character, what knowing in their blood?” This idea of instinctive, inherited knowing likens the women to Salmon or Geese. The speaker’s rucksack becomes a creel:

... will a future culture come to honour Nature’s teachers, incise Goose & Salmon in their hearts? In my creel I’m placing all the man-made rubbish. There is no place for it in this cauldron of Life.

Nature and culture – an ecopoetic palimpsest

‘Findhorn Bay’ was written for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival. The other two poems were commissions from Cape Farewell, centring on Dorset river systems, as part of the RiverRun project “that connects Cape Farewell’s scientific partners with local farmers and artists… [on] the poor state of freshwater”. All three poems are divided into sections with titles, to help the reader follow the structure.

Showing The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray. — The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray

In her introduction, as well as helpful context for each poem, Moore explains her method: an interdisciplinary, collaborative, intuitive approach, with “roots in animistic European traditions”, alongside “gleanings” while out in Nature, engagement with scientists and others, and research into the many aspects of a landscape from geology to social history. She describes how from all this “the writing ferments and emerges as a poetic palimpsest”. When you read the poems, this makes perfect sense – and so it does that, she says, they take a long time to write. Other writers can imagine what the work might involve: choosing which material to use and how, ordering it, editing down and down, touching on themes often just in a short phrase, trusting the reader to do the work and make connections.

‘Dorset Waterbodies’, the middle poem, takes varyingly indented forms, all across the page, to score the rhythm. I particularly liked the sections where other voices speak: the water (see opening quote) and its creatures. In ‘Nightmare slurry spill’, Fish and industrially farmed Cows speak in a loose pantoum, whose semi-repeated lines convey a powerful sense of claustrophobia: the Fish can’t breathe, and “Overcrowded Cows… feet in piss & shit” are unnaturally confined. As a whole, I wasn’t quite as swept along by this poem as by ‘Findhorn Bay’, but that’s by a very high standard. The introductory section, describing a visit to Durdle Door, captures a sense of post-lockdown relief, though empty cruise ships are “squatting the horizon… ticking over” (the filthy bunker fuel, the emissions, the waste!). It celebrates the new tourists’ diversity:

                & crowds of colour           break
                                                                the monotony
                                   of white, rural         m o n o c u l t u r e s.

Moore uses spaced-out letters to emphasise a few key words in this poem. I stumbled over these; maybe that’s the intention, but I’m not sure they add to what the form and language already do.

The poem ends with the river (“if you must make us ‘river’”) making the case for human respect and restoration, “the right to self-determine”. The descriptions of river life are beautiful, from Dippers and Dragonflies to Waterweeds to

                                       our single-celled beings
                                                 constellate    like s t a r s ...

The conclusion might have more impact in performance, perhaps less so on the page, however fervently we agree:

                                          let’s be communities of diverse voices
                                with a common future.

                                          A communion of subjects & one 
                                                             Commonweal

This kind of writing is so, so hard to do, even in a riverine voice – which, here, seems to shift a little from river towards human.

Dorset – southern spells and celebration

‘Edge of Wild River’, the third and shortest poem, begins with a dream of a Salmon. Moore explains in the introduction she dreamt it while living in difficult circumstances in Sydney, with the terrible 2019/20 bushfires raging. The Salmon collides with her, “like being struck by a waterlogged pillow”. “What has she to say?”

Apart from the dream, in prose sentences with breaks, this poem is all written in short-lined verses, left-justified. The tone is song-like, spell-like, as if to will a different future into being. In ‘Water Blessing’ voices ask for forgiveness for pollution:

We this grey wreckage 
dumped on the bend in spate;
we the old bones of trees,
the breeze, swimmer, floating leaf ...

Human healers are celebrated: the scientists, litter pickers and amateur water testers. Ecologists studying water samples and counting River Shrimps

                                            listen 
to sounds from underwater hydrophones - 
eerie bubbles, clicks, and echoes
bouncing off the sterile walls -

Showing 'Dart, 2018' - still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie — Showing ‘Dart, 2018’ – still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie.

In a 2022 interview Helen Moore gave to Kathryn Alderman, on the Ink Sweat & Tears website, she was asked if there’s a difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry:

“Ecopoetry for me is all about consciousness. Consciousness of our deep interconnection with our planetary home and of our humanimal nature. Awareness too of the paradigm that has created our disconnection in Western cultures, and the power structures that have a vested interest in maintaining our disempowered state.”

river / run puts these principles into action, but subtly, using the power of description, form and language. ‘Edge of Wild River’ ends with a couplet that sums up the book’s passionate message [poet’s ellipses]:

as we help wild river heal,
so we help and heal ourselves ...

Find more

Helen Moore’s river / run (2024) is published by Cape Farewell Books. Cape Farewell produces opportunities for artists, scientists and communities to work together: “by creating art founded in scientific fact, our projects highlight humanity’s destructive impact on the earth and inspire people to act towards a sustainable cultural shift.” As Fiona explains, two of the book’s poems form part of Cape Farewell’s RiverRun project, which interrogates the environmental impact of the way the Dorset land is farmed, and the impact on the rivers and waters that feed Poole Bay.

You can explore more of Helen’s work at her website — where you can also listen to her reading Findhorn Bay, Waves of Flow & Flight, the poem created for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival 2018, with a soundtrack by VisionSonic.

Helen Moore is also a member of ClimateCultures and has written posts for us, including The Start of Something Going Wrong, her review of fellow member Joanna Guthrie‘s collection, Her Whereabouts. In The Ghosts of Fleas, her post for the Finding Blake website, she shares and discusses her poem inspired by William Blake’s 1819 painting, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’.

Fiona mentions Helen’s Ink Sweat & Tears interview. You can read that here.

Fiona Moore’s collection, Okapi (2024) is available from Blue Diode Press, and you can find her on Instagram at fionamoore555.

All images from the book, river / run. The final image is a still from a film by ClimateCultures members, Hanien Conradie and Margaret LeJeune. You can read Writing on Water, Hanien’s post discussing the film of her performance in the River Dart and reading Afrikaner poet Eugene Marais’s Diep Rivier.

Fiona Moore

A poet, editor and environmental campaigner, whose second book, 'Okapi', is a book-length eco-poem. She has edited issues of Magma Poetry on climate change and islands.

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…

Regenerative Designs for the Planet

ClimateCultures editor — and UK Architects Declare Manager — Mark Goldthorpe looks at new initiatives for regenerative design, a paradigm shift embracing principles of being a good ancestor, coevolving with nature and creating a just space for people.

2,330 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

For the past few decades — certainly since before I began my career in environmental and climate issues — ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ has been the guiding principle behind local, national and global efforts to steer us away from greater destruction of our natural world. Language has changed over that time, not least in how we talk about ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘global heating’, ‘climate catastrophe’, the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environmental justice’, ‘ecocide’, and so much more. But ‘sustainability’ has stuck — perhaps partly because this short word covers a host of meanings and so has the potential to bring disparate communities together around common concerns, albeit often working to different priorities.

The phrase ‘sustainable development’ emerged from the UN Brundtland Commission in 1987. It proposed a goal of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainability here was conceived of as protecting a capacity for humanity to survive, even thrive, into a future that was no longer being undermined by our present acceleration of resource depletion, accumulation of waste and pollution and destruction of natural habitats and wildlife: sustainability as the ability to carry on. Part of the word’s appeal is to businesses’ powers of innovation and enterprise in ways that can sustain their profitability by diverting it to less damaging activities. At the same time, environmentalists could see it as a practical vehicle for delivering better nature conservation, greater recognition of the innate value of the world’s habitats, species and ecosystems, and an urgently needed move to ecoefficiency.

Although much debated at the time across a spectrum of opinions, from ‘deep green’ to ‘green capitalism’, the promise of sustainable development was that we could meet our needs both now and indefinitely into the future. A large banner under which to gather all our ambitions for a better world.

Has it worked? What have we been sustaining for the past 30 years? Our technological efficiency has improved, and movements to stimulate and accelerate popular and political action have flourished. But our waste and pollution, our energy demand and resource use, our habitat destruction and species extinction, and the concentration of greenhouse gases in our oceans and atmosphere have all continued to grow too, with all the impacts we imagined these would bring, and more. ‘Growth’ is still the dominant paradigm, even with sustainability as the supposed goal.

In 2023 the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported that we’ve now breached six of the nine planetary boundaries we rely on. Can we say that sustainability is succeeding? Should we say it has failed? Do we need an entirely new paradigm? What might that be?

Showing a graphic of how we are crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre. — Crossing our planetary boundaries. From Stockholm Resilience Centre.

From declaring an emergency…

Part of what that much-needed change might be is captured in the increasing presence of ‘regenerative’ in debates over the transition to a better, cleaner, more ecologically balanced and socially equitable future lived safely within planetary boundaries. And one part of that shift has been work that I’m excited to be associated with through UK Architects Declare.

That movement has been gaining momentum and reputation since long before I joined, part-time, as AD’s manager in 2021. The initiative’ was launched in May 2019 by Michael Pawlyn, founder of Exploration Architecture, and Steve Tompkins of architectural practice HaworthTompkins. As Michael put it at AD’s 5th birthday party last month, back in late 2018 he and Steve had a gloomy couple of pints together as they contemplated the latest and most depressing report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how little concern there seemed to be in the architectural profession. They engaged a small group to organise a declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency. Their website very quickly attracted its first few hundred signatories and caught the imagination of the profession — not least because of its insistence on the need for change in our systems, not just (but also) in our behaviours. The declaration promoted a theory of change drawing on the work of Donella Meadows, who showed how the most effective way to change a system is through its higher ‘leverage points’: the paradigm behind the system and the mindset that sustains it, and the goals the system drives all of us towards.

Showing UK Architects Declare - regenerative design

This interest rapidly accelerated and expanded, spawning many related declarations across the built environment sector, around the UK and the globe. Today, more than 8,000 organisations have signed declarations in 28 countries under the banner of Built Environment Declares, and many other sectors have made their own declarations — including, of course, Culture Declares.

‘When AD started, pretty much no one outside of Sweden had heard of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion had yet to hit the headlines, Doughnut Economics had only recently been published, the WellBeing Group of Governments had yet to form, China had yet to announce a date for decarbonisation, the idea of a Law of Ecocide, the Rights of Nature, or Future Generations legislation were all seen as distant dreams. And yet since then a lot of governments have actually implemented them.

‘And one area where I think all of us as signatories can enjoy some credit: five years ago hardly anyone was talking about regenerative design, and now everyone is. That’s something we’ve all created together — the potential for architects to reclaim our agency as shapers of the future, as integrators and systems thinkers, as people who want to be able to proudly look our children in the eye in ten years time and say “Yes, I saw this coming and this is what I did about it.”’

— Michael Pawlyn

UK Architects Declare works on a dual approach: providing practical support to its signatory practices so they can implement their 12-point declaration while operating in the current flawed economic and social system; and demonstrating how the system can be changed to one that works within our planetary boundaries and deliver social and environmental justice. The point, as Meadows demonstrated, is not to feed the paradigm that’s created our emergency by merely tinkering at its margins, but to build a new paradigm — in this case, based on regenerative rather than degenerative principles.

… to regenerative design for a better future

In its latest work, AD has developed a set of policies — Building Blocks — to transform the built environment, and guidance for architects and urban designers in a ‘work in progress’ Regenerative Design Primer. And, working with media partner Architecture Today, it has launched a new community initiative, the Regenerative Architecture Index. The Index will bring together, learn from and promote examples of regenerative activity at two levels: the practice and its projects. The Building Blocks address the need for government policies for resource efficiency, circular economy and social and natural infrastructure. These are based on foundations of climate literacy and climate leadership, alignment with well-being and planetary limits, and safeguarding future generations’ ability to act. Meanwhile, both the Primer and the Index promote clear principles for designers and businesses in the built environment sector: being a good ancestor, co-evolving with nature, and creating a just space for people.

Showing the Regenerative Design Primer, from UK Architects Declare 2024 — Regenerative Design Primer, UK Architects Declare 2024

Being a good ancestor is about a shift in mindsets to consider the truly long-term: thinking seven generations ahead and ensuring adaptability and flexibility for the future.

Co-evolving with nature is about recognising that we’re part of nature, within integral living systems, not separate from it: actively regenerating, learning from and working with natural systems.

Creating a just space for people is about providing social connection, economic opportunity and wellbeing for all: fostering a shared sense of stewardship where neighbourhoods can self-organise and build their resilience.

Together, these principles require innovative thought, designing for circularity and encouraging closed-loop energy, material and water cycles, and adopting ethical, inclusive and participative approaches.

The Primer makes a distinction between adopting these principles and continuing with the now conventional approach. Regenerative design transcends ‘sustainability’ in three key ways:

From being ‘less bad’ to being net positive.
From being just focused on humans to considering the whole web of life.
From a mechanistic approach that can focus too exclusively on carbon (‘carbon reductivism’) to a more holistic and systemic approach.

Regenerative design mimics natural ecosystem processes, which keep cycling and transforming materials and grow healthier and more diverse ecosystems. It uses a systems approach to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with those of nature. This means looking beyond the boundary of a project or a specific site. By doing so, it delivers positive environmental and social outcomes, ensuring both human and planetary health.

— Regenerative Design Primer (p8)

Just as the May 2019 AD declaration of planetary emergency quickly attracted more support than the founders initially anticipated, in May 2024 the first iteration of the Regenerative Architecture Index gained an encouraging number and diversity of entries. Architecture Today and UK Architects Declare will be announcing the scheme’s inaugural results next month, with a special celebratory event and issue of AT’s magazine. AD will then work with participants to take a deep dive into their experiences and ideas. That learning, with feedback on the Regenerative Design Primer, will cycle directly into the next iterations of both Primer and Index next year, and no doubt spark new policy work and other initiatives.

Creative agency for change

For me, witnessing and supporting the huge amount of voluntary work that dedicated professionals — across AD’s steering group and others in small groups working to support architectural practices and engage policymakers — is energising and motivating. And the mounting realisation that not only do we need a new, positive paradigm but that one is possible and is actually being demonstrated is empowering and generates practical hope.

Another key distinction between regenerative and sustainability-driven approaches to change is that it is inherently creative: it calls on us to expand and engage our imaginations and to help design the difference we want to see. It is also an exercise in humility, recognising the world beyond our own self-centred horizons and timescales and drawing inspiration from others — human and more-than-human, and an enhanced sense of what the future can be and how its inhabitants too can flourish.

When I set up ClimateCultures in 2017, after working with the charity TippingPoint on immersive events for artists and scientists to explore creative responses to the emergency, it was out of a sense that to create change that seems hard or impossible, we need at least two things above all: a sense of agency and a sense of community or association. As I wrote in an article on ClimateCultutes, agency for change and the environmental imagination:

“We need to feel we can do something meaningful and that others are on board. Of course, we also need action itself, and increasing awareness of the problems. And these things are all interrelated: action, association, agency, awareness. Sometimes it’s personal action that comes first, providing the spark to taking more action as part of a community; these experiences help to grow both our personal and shared awareness of the issues, leading to yet more action, and so our agency builds and builds. It can be a virtuous circle, rather than the vicious cycle of frustration, disappointment and despondency.

“If there’s one thing that helps drive this virtuous circle and motivates change, I think it’s imagination. A sense that things can be different, that there are other ways of acting and living than we now take for granted. Even if we don’t know how to enact these differences, imagination gives us a new picture, casts new light on the old picture, or helps us realise that other people who we’ve barely acknowledged until now have pictures to share with us. Imagination is both an exploration and expansion of our horizons.”

As Culture Declares says, “culture can help stir up human response as well as breaking old habits and creating new stories and visions for our world … culture is what humans – and other species – do to create conditions for life to thrive. We can think in a new way about Culture as organised activities, so that we can create a Regenerative culture.”

Many ClimateCultures members and readers will also be signatories to Culture Declares or other declarations — Heritage Declares, Design Declares, and so on. And ClimateCultures would love to share your stories, examples and experiences. How does your work as an artist, researcher or curator draw on or inspire regenerative paradigms or goals? What creative works inspire you? How do you respond to the emergency and the history of sustainability-led approaches to tackle it? Where next?

Find more

You can find the original definition of Sustainable Development and much else about how it’s being implemented at the United Nations Sustainable Development pages.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has produced several reports on its planetary boundaries work. This has also been adapted by Doughnut Economics Action Lab to promote the need for a social foundation that ensures no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, as well as an ecological ceiling to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries.

Donella Meadows published her highly influential paper Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System in 1999.

Michael Pawlyn has co-authored Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency with Sarah Ichioka, published by Triarchy Press (2021). They also host an excellent series of podcasts on the book’s themes.

You can find the Regenerative Design Primer and information on the Regenerative Architecture Index, as well as the Building Blocks manifesto and many other resources at UK Architects Declare. If you work for or with, or know people within architectural or other construction-related organisations, have they signed a shared declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency? You can find these at Built Environment Declares. Other declarations include Culture Declares, Heritage Declares, Design Declares and Business Declares.

You can read ClimateCultures, agency for change and the environmental imagination at my site. You might also like this 2017 post on a free ecololinguistics course that looks at the power of words such as ‘growth’ over our imaginations: The Stories We Live By.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and programme manager on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses to our predicaments.

Giving Voice to the Nonhuman

Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world.

2,300 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
— Dorothea Lange

Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure to collaborate with a sound artist, Robin Servant, to create an interactive climate change art installation in Quebec, Canada. The result of our collaboration was ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’), a multi-sensory installation that gives voice to the nonhuman: the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, to listen to the underwater 'ice voices' during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES, created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant for the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, Canada, from 24 Feb to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, Edwige Leblanc listens to the underwater ‘ice voices’ during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

This was the first time that I exhibited my photographs as tactile sculptures. I grouped 24 of my abstract photographs of the rapidly disappearing river ice into eight triangular triptychs suspended from the ceiling in the center of the gallery. Swaying in the natural air currents of the gallery, these ‘ice sculptures’ resembled floating blocks of ice in the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

Each photograph was embossed with braille text from recent IPCC reports. Visitors – both sighted and visually-impaired – were invited to touch the braille relief in a gesture symbolic of our collective blindness to climate change.

By touching my photographs, visitors triggered underwater audio recordings of the ice blocks as they shift and crack from friction, waves and tidal movements. Every time someone touched an image, the gallery filled with haunting, otherworldly ice voices. They destabilize us, pulling us into their evocative vortex, coaxing us to listen more intently. We find ourselves imagining what the ice is trying to tell us.

Sending the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023 — Close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023.

Bringing back the nonhuman voice

Giving voice to the nonhuman has, since 2019, transformed my photographic practice from documentary to abstraction. This shift was triggered by two events. The first (which will likely repeat itself in 2023) was Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer – the catastrophic, uncontrollable wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings. I was traumatized by the images of blood-red skies, charred kangaroos clinging to fences, and birds falling out of the sky. I suddenly realized that I could no longer participate in documenting climate change. I felt an overpowering sense of urgency to find a more fluid, non-linear, non-narrative language with which to express my ecoanxiety.

The second event that made me question the role of photography in the Anthropocene was a 2019 interview with the author Amitav Ghosh. Responding to a question from Amy Brady, Ghosh explains:

“I think, in literary terms, the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human (emphasis added). And not just in terms of natural disaster – in general. It’s such a challenge. One writer who has done this very well is Richard Powers. I thought his book, The Overstory, was a huge event because it expanded the boundaries of what writers can do. Now I am asking similar questions: How do we restore nonhuman voices? How do we trace the influence of the human among the nonhuman?”

I had previously read Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. But it was his 2019 quote above that inspired me — no, pushed me! — to completely change the way I used a camera. Instead of creating images from my perspective (while hiding behind a camera), I wanted to know how the nonhuman beings in front of my camera perceived climate change, from their perspective. What do they see when they look back at us? What do they feel about our destructive behavior and disregard for nonhuman life? What advice would they offer if given the chance? I was desperate to give voice to these nonhuman beings threatened in the age of man.

This shift in perspective, from the human to the nonhuman, has profoundly changed my art. Since 2020, I have been working on two series of abstract photos: ‘Je suis fleuve’ (in English: ‘Becoming River’) and ‘If I were a tree’. For both series, I have adopted a phenomenological approach in order to embody the nonhuman beings in front of my camera. It’s their story, not mine. If we humans are to survive the coming upheavals, we have no choice but to learn from our nonhuman relatives who were here millions of years before Homo sapiens sapiens first walked the earth. And many of them will likely still be here long after we have disappeared. So it would behove our self-described ‘wise’ species to absorb some of the wisdom from these ancient beings while there’s still time. But in order to do so, we must first slow down. We must learn to listen. We must learn to ‘see’ viscerally with our whole bodies, not just visually. This is embodiment.

A beauty filled with dread

Since Australia’s Black Summer, I have become obsessed with finding non-visual ways to enhance the photographic experience, both for myself (during the creative process) and for viewers (in the gallery setting). Instead of ‘photographing the river or the trees’, I ‘become the river or the trees’ through sustained contemplation and mimicry – moving my body in sync with the flowing water or the wind blowing through the branches. I do this using the technique ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). All of my ICM images are created in-camera; nothing is Photoshopped in post. To date, all my ICM images are single exposures, usually 1-2 seconds long. Through this experimental process, I have learned to embrace chance and mistakes. Most importantly, I have learned to stop trying to control every aspect (sharpness, composition, depth of field, etc.) as I did for 25+ years as a documentary photographer.

Untitled. From the series ‘Je suis fleuve’ by Joan Sullivan © 2023

I describe my new abstract photos as fluid and fleeting. My hope is that these ephemeral images provoke reflection on our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world. An article in a French-language art magazine here in Quebec described my new abstract photos as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (in English: “of a beauty filled with dread”). To me, that’s as close to a perfect description as possible, not just of my photos but also of my state of mind.

Yes, I am filled with dread. Things do not seem to be heading in the right direction; there’s no sense of urgency. But I also refuse to do nothing while we collectively watch the world burn on our cellphones. I counter this dread with a more powerful burning passion: to dedicate every second of my remaining years (15? max 20?) to helping shatter the absurd illusion that Homo sapiens sapiens is somehow separate from and superior to the one trillion other species with whom we share this planet and upon whom we depend for our own survival.

This is what prompted me, in part, to question the environmental impact of my own photographic practice. I started to think about all the toxic chemicals in the inks and photo papers that are used to create the photographic prints for my exhibits. Even for those photos that were never printed, a huge amount of electricity is required 24/7 to store them on my computer, in multiple external backup drives, and on my website. Social media, email, charging camera batteries, and driving to locations also require electricity and energy. Then there’s the undeniable problem of how to dispose of photographic prints (they are not recyclable), not to mention the layers of plastic and stryrofoam that protect them during shipping. I could go on and on…

But it wasn’t until November 2021, during a duo exhibit with the video artist Anna Woch, that I became aware of an even more existential dilemma for a photographer. As I looked at my photos on the wall, a wave of queasiness came over me: I felt strangely uninspired by my own work. Or, I should say, uninspired by the way they were presented: as static, two-dimensional objects hanging against a flat wall, protected behind glass to ensure that no one would damage them. After standing alone in the gallery trying to understand why I felt this way, it finally dawned on me: how absurd it was that these abstract images of the rapidly disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River were considered untouchable, yet we humans are constantly meddling with and disturbing nature. Photographs are ephemeral, just like the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence. Why was it so sacrosanct to protect ‘art’ for decades if the world around us was burning down? What’s the effing point? On the day that I took those photos down, I mentioned to the director of the artist-run center, Philippe Dumaine, that this would be the last time that I exhibited my photographs in the traditional manner, two-dimensionally. I had no idea what my next exhibit would look like, but I sensed that I was standing on the threshold of a new direction in my artistic practice.

A month later, I was sitting at the kitchen table of the sound artist Robin Servant, whom I had heard through the grapevine was collecting underwater recordings of the river ice with his hydrophones. In our early discussions, I had not yet developed a vision for the tactile three-dimensional photo sculptures; that would come much later thanks to the input of several artist friends. But when I first proposed this project to Robin, I already knew that I wanted to incorporate braille text into my photos in response to the rhetorical question “Are we not collectively blind to the impact of climate change?” After many iterations over the next 14 months and in collaboration with the local chapter of People Living with Visual Handicaps, we presented ‘La voix des glaces’ in February-March 2023 at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer in eastern Quebec. Funding for ‘La voix des glaces’ was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Images 10-13 from the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photographs: Joan Sullivan © 2023. 10 A partial view of the installation, made up of eight triangular abstract photo sculptures representing the disappearing ice on Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River. 11 A visitor touches the braille text on one of the eight photographic ice sculptures. 12 A group from the Gaspesie chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps visits the installation. 13 Gaëtan Banville, who is blind and a member of the Lower Saint Lawrence chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps, reads the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto the eight photographic ice sculptures. Click images for full size.

The response to this multisensory interactive installation, in which visitors were able to experience embodiment of the disappearing river ice by using three of their five senses — sight, touch and hearing — was phenomenal. According to the Centre’s director, attendance at our installation broke all recent records. Especially among the youth. The secondary school students in particular were most captivated by ‘La voix des glaces’. One of their art teachers showed me some of the artwork that her students created after visiting our installation — such incredible abstract paintings, full of energy, movement, and emotion. And yes, rage. It gave me goosebumps knowing that some part of my work resonated with and was internalized by these young people. This gives me hope. We can live with beauty and sadness at the same time.

Showing a publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec. — A publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec.

I’m currently working on the conception for a new exhibit in 2024 or 2025 — my most audacious to date — that incorporates elements of ‘La voix des glaces’ but goes one step further. I’ll write about this in a future post.

Hope you enjoyed reading.

P.S. If anyone out there knows Amitav Ghosh, please thank him for inspiring me to experiment using my camera in new ways that give voice to the nonhuman.

Find more

‘La voix des glaces’ — created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant — was exhibited at Vaste et Vague artists’ centre in Carleton-sur-Mer (Quebec) from 24th February to 31st March 2023. It was supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.

Les artistes remercient le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, et tous ses partneraires pour l’appui précieux : Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Centre VU, Engramme et La Chambre Blanche. / The artists thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, and all its partners for their valuable support: Center d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Center VU, Engramme and La Chambre Blanche.

Le Devoir, Quebec’s largest independent French-language newspaper, published Faire parler les glaces pour montrer que le climat s’effrite, a review of ‘La voix des glaces’, in February 2023. The Vie des arts magazine article that described Joan’s abstract images as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (“of a beauty filled with dread”) is Un vent du fleuve : expositions au Centre d’art de Kamouraska (A wind from the river: exhibitions at the Kamouraska Art Center: 19th September 2020).

You can see more of Joan’s series ‘Je suis fleuve’/’Becoming River’ and ‘If I were a tree’ at her website.

You can read Joan’s previous ClimateCultures post, Deconstructing our Dominion Stories in a Time of Unravelling, a joint review of After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time, by Charlotte Du Cann (2022) and Loss Soup and Other Stories, by Nick Hunt (2022).

The 2019-20 Black Summer in Australia was covered by Reuters in Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer (19th September 2023) and by the Guardian in The black summer bushfires killed 3 billion animals. They are our relatives; they deserve to be mourned (31st March 2023).

Amy Brady interviewed Amitav Ghosh for the Chicago Review of Books: The Uncanniness of Climate Change (18th September 2019). Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable was published by University of Chicago Books.

Joan Sullivan

A photographer, writer and farmer who focuses on climate change and whose abstract, phenomenological approach to photography expresses her ecoanxiety and gives voice to the nonhuman.