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
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.
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
Course units in the Search for New Stories to Live By
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 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.
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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
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.”
As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s Martin Mahony and GroundWork Gallery’s Veronica Sekulesdiscuss the collection through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.
3,380 words: estimated reading time = 13 minutes
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets the context for this conversational post from Martin and Veronica.
We launched our online Museum of the Anthropocene in 2022, drawing directly on Dr Martin Mahony‘s work since 2018 with 3rd-year undergraduate students on his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. Each year, the current cohort has submitted short essays on objects or entities that speak to some aspect of the nature of this new planetary age and our own species’ role in shaping it. Alongside each year’s selection for the ClimateCultures Museum of the Anthropocene, Martin has written an introductory post for us, reflecting on the ideas that emerge from the students’ pieces.
As we approach publication of our fifth set of contributions — coming soon to ClimateCultures — Martin and I discussed how we might draw out some of the themes and topics that have emerged so far from the series. We quickly settled on the notion of bringing in a professional curator’s voice and were delighted that Veronica Sekules generously took up the challenge. Not only is Veronica the founder and director of the GroundWork Gallery, where she has been responsible for showcasing the work of a great many artists and researchers who bring unique perspectives to the critical issues of the Anthropocene, but her background in education — and with the Sainsbury Centre in particular — brings significant experience to the notion of a collection such as this. And, of course, Veronica has contributed her own object-based insights into our planetary age for ClimateCultures, through her writing on three objects for our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. So it’s a great pleasure to host this conversation between Veronica as our ‘guest curator’ and Martin as instigator of the Museum of the Anthropocene.
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Seeing beyond the strata
Veronica: I have been thinking about the Museum of the Anthropocene for a few days now. I must at first say thank you — yes — it is wonderful and so rich in its approach and the range of its content. Congratulations on putting together such a very thought-provoking and original collection of ideas and discussions. Before I read it, I must say that I had been thinking about the Anthropocene — tutored, as it were, by Colin Waters who gave a talk about it at one of our GroundWork events — as a geological phenomenon. What stuck in my mind rather persistently after his talk was that we were creating a geological layer, including increasing quantities of giant chicken bones and tungsten from ball-point pen points, and of course, plastics. So it is utterly refreshing that you have opened up the subject so much, to be very much more cultural and, indeed, historical.
Martin: Thanks so much Veronica! It’s really lovely to hear such a positive response from a bona fide curator, arts practitioner and museum educator. And yes, that ‘geological’ version of the Anthropocene has become a dominant story which is told, and it is a striking and compelling one. Geologists like Colin have done amazing work in quantifying the sheer amount of stuff that we’re leaving behind and which will be our record in the rocks for millennia to come. But geologists as a whole have a tricky relationship to the notion of the Anthropocene, embodied most clearly perhaps in the recent decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy not to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. The reasons for that are many and interesting, but does it represent the death of the Anthropocene as a useful concept? I don’t think so. The term originated not in geology but in Earth System Science — not the people concerned with our record in the rocks, but the people concerned with how humanity is perturbing things like the climate and the biosphere. In recent years it’s become more common to think of the Anthropocene not as a geological age or epoch, but as an event, and a process. As process, it is something which is unfolding unevenly across space and time. As event, it is something which could, on geological timescales, be relatively fleeting. Which is quite a hopeful way to think about things! Either way, this new way of thinking scientifically about the Anthropocene sits much more comfortably with how social scientists, historians, artists and others like to think about it — as a set of processes with some coherence, perhaps with an identifiable beginning and hopefully an end, but which is highly geographically uneven. It’s not all ‘we’ and ‘us’, but some people, some systems, some ways of doing things which are powerful, but not unmovable.
Veronica: Indeed. As your defining terms in your very useful glossary, and several of the museum exhibit entries suggest, it is not just the Great Acceleration we need to concentrate on as the main culpable era, but that the beginning of the Anthropocene can arguably be traced back — as in the so-called Columbian Exchange — to the first expansionist, colonialist ventures, prospecting for more plants, land and resources. I think in fact it goes potentially much further, and your texts lead the way to thinking very much more broadly than previously, not only about the origins and conditioning factors for the Anthropocene, but about how it is defined. The medieval map and the Santa Maria replica ship both highlight those issues.
Martin: Absolutely, and that’s something we spend time talking quite a lot about. While the stratigraphers wanted an easily identifiable, globally synchronous ‘big bang’ moment they could point to as the start of the Anthropocene, historians, geographers and the like are more interested in tracing root causes of change, which might mean thinking about how the transformations of the Great Acceleration had their roots in early European colonial expansion or, as you suggest, perhaps even further back, in moments like the rise of settled agricultural communities, or in the emergence of particular attitudes to the natural world.
Veronica: Exactly — as the authors and you frequently suggest, there is also the whole persistent question about nature and humans’ attitude to it, and what role that is playing in, not so much the current concerns with mass extinctions, but exploitation and the wielding of power. There are moral nature-culture questions about the canary, the pigeon, the rat and the beaver, but also in different ways for plant species — the suburban lawn, the Christmas tree and Sweetgrass. There seems to be a persistent tension between the human desire for control as exploitation and the exertion of power, and for its more apparently benign purpose to create order. Time and again, while reading the museum entries, I was thrown back on thinking not only that everything is connected in complex ways, but that the earth is riddled with, as you put it Martin, ‘unequal geographies’.
Martin: I think that’s really key. And we can trace the origins of those unequal geographies both in material processes of transformation (e.g. in the economic contributions of the transatlantic slave trade to the rise of industrialism in Great Britain), and in moments of ‘geo-cultural’ change, as Jason W. Moore puts it. That’s what I think is so fascinating about the whole debate around the Anthropocene. Suddenly we’ve got historians and ethicists talking to earth system scientists and geologists about human-nonhuman relationships in a profoundly generative way, in a manner which didn’t really happen when we were ‘just’ talking about climate change, air pollution, or other environmental crises that have now been bracketed together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. That bracketing can be problematic as it leads to abstractions and blindspots. But it also draws attention to some big, consequential questions about our relationship to nature, the legacies of empire-building, about cultural change, and so on.
Our planetary age through objects and processes
Veronica: In fact, I think, the kinds of exhibits and concerns brought to light in the museum are leading me to think that we need a whole new definition of the idea of the Anthropocene, beyond geology and what we are physically laying down and altering on the globe. For much of what is being discussed is not so much about what the world is becoming physically, but by what moral, ethical and economic forces it is being, and has been influenced and shaped.
Take for example the Mirror — one of the artefacts of earliest origin — which highlights the problems of self-regard, vanity, narcissism and the confusion of nature-culture that we see or don’t see in our reflections. That author suggests that the Mirror-cene could be a relevant concept. That entry, and quite a few others touch on aspects of the original sins — pride, vanity, greed. Also, the Lawn, Fast Fashion, the Diamond Ring, Banana, the Pocahontas costume — but in each case, go much further to illuminate the subtleties of exploitation, appropriation of identity, commerce, corruption and consumerism, and the special poisons of corporate greed that have increased the scale of the problems these artefacts represent. But for all the evils of their proliferation, it also struck me forcibly when reading these, that the fact remains that humans are vulnerable to being exploited on a mass scale and to that end, culpable as consumers, not quite equally, but not without power as such, to change things — in either direction.
Martin: You’ve touched on a really tricky and fascinating point which is shot through all of this — how to talk about things like cultural values, norms, behaviours etc. in a way which prompts new forms of reflection, but which also doesn’t lay the blame for what’s going on at the feet of individuals? There have been a few occasions where students have chosen an object which connects to something they love — like a hobby or a sport they’re keen participants of — and then when they start to unpick all the ‘Anthropocene’ aspects of it, they’re left feeling their object is a Bad Thing. I warn them about the risks of that at the outset, but also try to emphasise that the world, our systems of production, our shared values and so on are determined to a large extent by forces outside of our control. We can change them, but not just by being better consumers, or by no longer taking joy from the plastic Christmas tree or enjoying a picnic on a manicured lawn. Again, history is powerful here, because it shows how contingent things are. Our rapacious version of consumer capitalism wasn’t inevitable — it was very deliberately engineered as a way of dealing with a crisis of overproduction following World War II. That’s what the archives show, and industries like marketing and PR developed precisely to get that new consumer economy going. Once one knows that, it’s possible to see how things could be otherwise. And that’s about collective action, political work, and imagination work. And on the latter is where the arts and museums can be so important.
Learning from the Anthropocene museum
Veronica: That leads me to think more about the state and status of the museum currently — it is a wonderful collection of stories as well as artefacts, and stories which manage at the same time to be quite depressing as a collection of observations about the harm we have done to the Earth, and enlightening in unpicking the forces and circumstances that led us there. There are plenty of positive statements too, about the desire for care for nature and nature as a refuge, and how this sometimes develops in surprising ways, as in the story of Pikachu, or more straightforwardly, Sweetgrass and the tribute to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous book. I also very much liked the positive reframing of the Witch as a bringer of ecological wisdom, as a counter to her conventional portrayal as a frightening practitioner in black magic and as a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchal and colonial creators of the Anthropocene’s problems. I also liked the ones that took us above and beyond Earth into space — as indeed that exploitation is going to be the next goal for the greedy prospectors — you just need to look at who the main ones are…
The museum educator in me began thinking about how the museum could be further activated educationally. Of course, it was created with an educational purpose, which in itself is extremely interesting. Conventionally the museum curator is the one who selects and essentialises the stories, whittling down to the uber-story that the display elucidates. When I worked as a museum educator, I always maintained that it was then our job to re-assemble the rich detail that lay at the heart of those distilled curated stories and then from there to explore the wider field that had provided the context — which embedded the story potentially much more deeply again and led to wider areas to discover. That in a sense is what your exhibitors have already done. However, I think there could be an interesting metacognitive exercise to re-dissect their themes, pick up on their keywords, to examine each aspect of their detail, and then to see where the further connections and alliances are between the different exhibits. Where, for example does ‘ecological wisdom’ occur — perhaps between the Witch, Sweetgrass and Pikachu? I am not entirely sure where this would lead, but it might be fun to do. And it might be a way to think about the cumulative effects of the phenomena you are faced with, and maybe come closer to thinking about how to address some of those thorny issues of inequality, resource exploitation, geographical power imbalance. For I do feel that you and the students are onto something in terms of reframing the debates around the Anthropocene and potentially coming up with some positive proposals to counter them.
I know you have frequently started your conversations with the Sainsbury Collection, and I used to have a whole repertoire of workshops whereby we would have a deck of words or phrases on card — which might have come from either a random source or a specific one and we would place them near an object with which we thought there might be some kind of connection. It wasn’t always enlightening in terms of being true to the cultures of origin of some of the artefacts, but always led somewhere interesting because of peoples’ desire to make new sense of things, and was a way to open up new questions… I always found the Sainsbury Collection tremendously valuable in encouraging questioning and I am sure that, plus its global range and variety of kinds of artefact, made it an ideal starting point for you and the students.
Martin: It’s really interesting that you say that. In Week 1 of the module we do an exercise with some ‘keywords’, to prompt some discussions of what the Anthropocene ‘means’ and what it ‘demands’. This always yields really interesting insights into how the students feel about environmental change and, essentially, what appetite for revolution they have! Revolution of various kinds — economic, cultural, technological… Bringing some of our previous museum entries into that conversation could be really generative too. I’ve learned so much from the education team at the Sainsbury Centre about how to do good object-based learning, and getting students thinking in those terms right from the get-go could have some interesting implications for the kinds of objects and entities they ultimately chose to focus on.
Veronica: I was wondering what difference it might have made had you begun with a more conventional museum, the kind that claims to provide answers and ‘factual’ information and a more taxonomic approach to its collecting. Perhaps you might have got a more conventional range of essays…
Martin: Quite possibly! Via the wonders of YouTube we engage with how other museums around the world have engaged with the Anthropocene, like the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In both cases I think the notion of the Anthropocene has challenged their curatorial practices, whether that’s poking the notion of natural history or challenging the boundaries of a museum focused on human technology — the type of museum that tended (until recently!) to tell a rather celebratory story of technological change. I think there’s something interesting about curating as a geographer rather than a historian too — I try to get them to think about difference, inequality, about what Anna Tsing calls the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. I think that leads to some differences of emphasis, as well as an always-fascinating range from the mundane and the everyday to the spectacular and the unique. But a perennial challenge is to find the grounds for hope in all of this — via these objects to identify historical contingency, to spot those spaces where different worlds are being built and ultimately, I hope, to help students discover their own agency in all this — not as self-flagellating, guilt-ridden consumers who must make better choices, but as agents of collective change equipped, I hope, with some useful knowledge and, more importantly, with persuasive stories to tell.
Museum of the Anthropocene entries – the first four years, 2022-25
Find more
You can explore all 24 student entries over our first four years of our Museum of the Anthropocene, Inside the Museum. And Martin’s essays accompanying each new cohort are:
The Museum also has a small Anthropocene Glossary, briefly exploring some of the terms introduced in the students’ essay, with links to further reading: Coloniality, The Columbian Exchange, Epistemic communities, The Great Acceleration, The Malthusian Hypothesis, Technofossil, The Technosphere, The Tragedy of the Commons.
GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, is all about art and environment. As well as a full programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, their site has an extensive collection of resources: “writing linked to, or inspired by our campaigns. All of them have been connected with exhibitions and/or with artists’ work. Everything that GroundWork Gallery displays or exhibits aims to connect with a particular environmental message and these resources are grouped into themes, which have emerged through our discussions.”
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.
Veronica — “I use AI sometimes almost inadvertently (in that Google offers it automatically) to gather information and make lists of issues to follow up for further investigation. I only use it purposefully to adapt and/or shorten the long texts I write for exhibitions, mostly to produce press releases — which AI does admirably and I hate to do, so for that function I am grateful. It produces very odd press contact lists, though! And it is completely hopeless at producing blurbs for events etc — it makes anything sound utterly cheesy and gushing.”
Martin — “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”
An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Poet and artist-book maker Sarah Hymas looks ahead to the Imaginarium ‘Worlds in Progress’ retreat she is running for a second year, an open, fluid, multi-layered spacetime for writers to sow and care for the seeds of imagination.
1,225 words: estimate reading time = 5 minutes
For fourteen years I ran a residential writing course, Write Like Nobody’s Watching, in South West France. After the pandemic, my enjoyment of it had changed. Even though I had, for the previous few years, been travelling down and back by train — a two day journey from Lancashire I loved — I found being part of a process that invited people to fly (no one else came overland) for five days of writing that had very little to do with the region where often people didn’t even leave the villa increasingly problematic.
The heat in the last couple of years compounded my unease. Some years it was too hot even at 10.00 am to cross the patio to reach our outdoor workshop. We had to set up under trees and I remember even having some of the one-to-ones in the swimming pool, it was hot. I needed more and more time to retreat from the retreat everyone else was taking. So I found someone else to run the week and stepped back.
Worlds in progress: creative building & building creativity
I didn’t want to stop facilitating the space for people (and often myself) to write and dream. I loved the process of building that spacetime. I just wanted to do it closer to home, in a place that was more accessible, less expensive. I wanted the place we were in to have more of an impact on those of us visiting it. I wanted more community, less alcohol (yes, my 40-year-old self, I’m looking at you), more stillness. So when I was on a residency with Settle Stories in January 2024 in an old mansion in Giggleswick, working on their Storyful Way, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to trial a new Imaginarium retreat. One that would be more collaborative in its approach, inviting a creative investment from those coming to help build the space more explicitly than simply participating in a week of writing workshops.
I also knew I didn’t want to run it solo. Increasingly, I want to work with others, to share the stresses and joys of any project. Someone to plan with. Someone to talk candidly to. I had already run an Ancestral Imaginarium with Katherine Zeserson and knew she had experience of running residential retreats so she was the obvious choice. As well as experienced, Katherine is joyful, intuitive, creatively curious and energetic. We came up with the name — Worlds in Progress — to capture our ambition for the week to be an open fluid space of multi-layered worlds: the worlds of our transient community; the worlds we were all writing; and the worlds we would return to after sharing the week — the worlds that were often so tricky for so many of us — the worlds we’d like to nudge into different directions.
Our first Worlds in Progress Retreat ran in January 2025 with ten other people who work, create and play with text somehow. We offered sitting, singing and flexing every morning, for those who wanted. We suggested loose mealtimes to suit however everyone liked to eat — sorting ourselves out for breakfast and lunch — and to fit around whatever was the occupation for people’s days. We invited people to share their creative practice during playshops later in some of the afternoons. These were attended by maybe two thirds of the group, those who wanted a break from their own head, or wanted to explore what they were writing in a different way, or who fancied some playtime. We offered one-to-ones to anyone who wanted to chat about anything they wanted. We had cooking teams for the evening veggie meal and lingered long over them with chat and laughter that often took someone (or two or three) out into the January nights for further exploration of our wider world in progess. We were blessed with an astonishing week of snow and ice (far, far from the temperatures of the last year I was working in France when it reached 55° in the sun).
We wrote and researched. Even I wrote for a couple of hours every afternoon, beginning a new long-form piece that had been cooking in the recesses of my imagination for a while. We made new friends. We found commonalities. We were given space, we gave space. We learnt new words, new ideas, and felt safe enough to share ignorances, unknowns, uncertainties and silly things. In short, we did — for those five days — construct a world we wanted to inhabit and nourish and sustain.
Nurturing the seeds of imagination
Some people came with a sense of fraudulence. The original call out was for ‘text-based artists’ — for anyone whose creative practice worked with text in any form — and the word ‘artist’ triggered people’s doubt they were one — who were they to call themselves such? But the artistry that was seeded and flowered and continues to be shared from that week is clear to me. The careful crafting of love and generosity, the sharing, the giving and receiving of intention, and the relishing of beauty and preciousness in life. That confidence was felt across the board, it seemed. It was such a delight that everything came together to make this new form of Imaginarium such a blissful retreat experience.
It takes time for seeds to germinate. The seeds of our imagination don’t come in packets that explain when or where to sow and how long they’ll take to flower. The seeds of our imagination need various soils and weather conditions to nourish them. Our intuition knows these conditions. And perhaps these seeds aren’t too particular or tender. Perhaps they are. Nothing can tell us how long until harvest. We need to water these seeds with faith (by which I mean the fertile mix of trust and confidence), and a selective choice of positive actions (with a sprinkle of learnings).
And perhaps most importantly we need not to over-tend, not insist on a timeframe. Nor over focus, but to encourage with a light touch, accepting other shoots may grow in the soil we’re feeding, that rogue seeds are already in there. All life begins in the dark. The unexpected is inevitable. As a creative spirit it’s easiest to welcome whatever appears and ask: Who are you? How can I help you grow? How can you help my growth? In what world can we thrive?
If you’d like to know about the next Worlds In Progress Retreat that’s happening in January 2026, then head over to this page. We ask for ‘Expressions of Interest’ (by the end of July) to be sure that what you’re wanting is what we’re offering.
In her previous ClimateCultures post, On a Writer’s Imaginarium, Sarah reflects on the various forms of imaginarium she has created over the years as online or offline cross-genre shared spaces to support creative writing.
A poet, performer and artistbook maker focusing on the sea, its ecosystems and its interdependence with people, and the impacts of climate change and pollution.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our new selection of student contributions to our Museum of the Anthropocene, asking important questions about the meaning of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, the politics of drawing boundaries and the relations that cut across them.
1,770 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes
It’s a great pleasure to open the loading dock again and install six more exhibits in our online Museum of the Anthropocene. These have been selected from the 30 or so which formed part of this year’s pop-up museum at UEA, as part of our ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ module.
This year we had many excellent submissions which dealt with the relations between human and nonhuman beings, perhaps inspired by our close engagement with Anna Tsing and colleagues’ Feral Atlas. While last year our subset of submissions dealt with questions of “who owns what”, “how has that changed over time?”, and “what even is ownership anyway?”, our six entries this year each in their own way explore vital questions about the meaning of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, and crucially about the politics of drawing boundaries between those two spheres.
Drawing boundaries, severing connections
The notion of naturecultures, developed by thinkers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, emphasises the primacy of “relatings over related beings”. As a theory of relationality, it holds that things are defined less by their individual essences and more by their relations with other entities. Nonetheless, across those relations, we are always drawing boundaries, putting things into categories, and severing connections – both materially and philosophically.
Enquiring into naturecultures involves both recognising the endurance of those relations, and attending to the process of “coming into being of bounded subjects, objects and domains such as the natural and the cultural”. How are these domains constructed, and how are different subjects and objects allocated to them? Iris van der Tuin prompts us to study “how, where and for whom boundaries are drawn”.[1]
We can read the history of the Anthropocene as being a process of drawing boundaries and severing connections — of declaring ‘nature’ to be fundamentally separate from humanity and human culture, and thereby positioning it not as a bundle of relations which holds and sustains us all, but as a pool of resources to be exploited and put to work. As historians and geographers like Jason W. Moore and Kathryn Yusoff have reminded us, this philosophical category of ‘nature’, as it emerged in Early Modern Europe, was made to include many parts of humanity as well, with hierarchies of race and gender constructed and used to justify institutions like chattel slavery and patriarchal capitalism.
Does the heralding of the ‘Anthropocene’ represent the final triumph of such boundary-making and hierarchy-constructing? Or does it represent the end of the illusion of such boundaries? That’s not just a philosophical question, but arguably also the crux of the collective choices ‘we’ need to make to steer a course through the Anthropocene.
For naturecultures thinkers, the heralding of the Anthropocene shows just how illusory any nature-culture boundary has always been. We can no longer ignore our entanglements and relations, and indeed the key to dealing with the fall-out of modernity’s pretensions of human separateness from nature is precisely to re-orient our politics and ethics towards care for those relations.
Navigating naturecultures
Our six contributions this year show a range of ways in which we can grapple with these indeterminate nature-culture distinctions, their troubled histories, and their yet-to-be-determined futures.
Kaya Lawes examines a critter with a long history of living closely with humans, of being a key part of some of our most cherished institutions (most notably science), but of also being despised by many of its human neighbours — the rat. She traces the history of the assumed relationships between rats and pestilence, between rats and urban change and inequality, and the more loving relationships that still flourish between some humans and some rats. The contradictions of the intertwined history of rats and people tell us a great deal, Kaya contends, about wider human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene.
Another member of the rodent family is equally evocative of shifting human-wildlife relations. Ciaran Shaffrey recounts the history of the beaver as a species almost lost in Europe to land drainage and enclosure, pursued across North America for its fur by early colonisers — often in the service of emerging fashion trend-setters — and now sitting at the heart of heated debates about ‘re-wilding’ and finding ‘natural solutions’ to habitat degradation and flood management. With both official and guerilla beaver re-introductions gathering pace, are we trying to turn back the clock to a primordial past, or are we seeing the emergence of a new kind of collaborative world-making which cuts across boundaries of species and nature/culture?
Jaz Evans takes us into the virtual sphere, where the slogan “Gotta catch ‘em all!” became synonymous with the cultural phenomenon of Pokémon. But while the slogan might evoke histories of exploration, hunting and accumulation, Jaz shows us how Pokémon was born of grief for the depleted ecologies of Japan, with the creator of the game keen to give children a new means of experiencing “the joy of searching, finding, and collecting”. New augmented-reality versions of the game have brought players back outside, and hopes have been expressed that it could be a new way to reconnect people with the outdoors and even, through its own fantastical naturecultures, to foster interest in conservation.
Amy Patterson traces another story of the natural and the synthetic through her recounting of the complex place of wool in systems of production and trade. Wool, we tend to forget, was central to the early stirrings of the industrial revolution, as well as being a key motivator for the privatisation and enclosure of huge swathes of agricultural land. Amy points to the paradoxical place of wool in contemporary economies — as a raw material it can be worth too little for farmers to bother transporting it to markets; at the same time, it is marketed as a luxury fabric, a cut above its synthetic pretenders. However, a revival of interest in wool is underway, uniting crofters and crafters in building a new kind of garment economy.
This story of shifting value and values has surprising resonances with Lauren Jacquemard’s piece on Taranaki Maunga, a mountain on the North Island of Aoteroa New Zealand. Sacred to Māori tribes of the region, the mountain was nonetheless claimed by the British crown in 1865. The slopes were stripped of many of their ‘natural resources’, eventually leading to efforts at conservation. Nonetheless, this was a form of conservation that enacted an abrupt “division between the human world and the natural world”, thus severing the cultural and spiritual connections of local Indigenous communities to the mountain. Nonetheless, Taranaki Maunga has recently been granted the legal rights of a person. The mountain is now legally considered a living being, and Māori have the authority to speak on its behalf. It has become iconic of a growing, global ‘rights of nature’ movement which seeks to undo the legal and philosophical structures that, for several hundred years now, have calved the ‘human’ off from the ‘natural’, with all the consequences we can now see before us.
All of which brings us, lastly, to the figure of the witch, and to Georgina Renny’s discussion of the history of gendered persecution and more recent revivals of witchcraft as an ecological practice. When early capitalism was busy dividing the world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and ‘productive men’ and ‘domestic women’, the figure of the witch straddled these boundaries in newly problematic ways. Cue the early modern witch-hunts which spread across Europe and North America as those regions were being re-made both by the social transformations of early capitalism and by the environmental trials of the ‘Little Ice Age’. Georgina points to the revival of interest in witchcraft as an example of new feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial environmentalisms, which seek to trouble modernity’s philosophical boundaries anew and to cultivate new means of relating across natural-cultural boundaries.
A better Anthropocene?
Together, we hope these pieces prompt reflection on the importance of paying attention to boundaries, boundary-drawings, and to the relations that cut across. Despite the best boundary-drawing efforts of various villains of the Anthropocene story, these contributions to the Museum of the Anthropocene show that boundaries are always porous, and are spaces of connection and movement as much as they are things that hold us in/back/apart.[2] Recognising and cultivating these entities and relations that cut across philosophical, political and material boundaries may be the very thing that can help us cultivate a better Anthropocene.
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[1] Iris van der Tuin, 2018, ‘Naturecultures’, in Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. eds. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, p. 269.
[2] Thanks to Mark Goldthorpe for this wonderful phrasing.
The Museum of the Anthropocene forms the centrepiece of Martin’s third-year undergraduate course ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’, which he’s been running at the University of East Anglia since 2018. The Museum is built collaboratively each year, with each student selecting an object that they think is particularly eloquent of the historical, political and cultural processes that have led us into the Anthropocene, or which helps us imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene. The Museum is staged around two-thirds of the way through the 12-week course, before students then complete a longer essay on their chosen object.
Step Inside the Museum to view all six of the new objects submitted to the Museum of the Anthropocene this year — as well as 18 contributions from previous students on the course. The main Museum of the Anthropocene page provides introductory reflections and is where we bring together Martin’s annual posts – see below. And there’s also our Anthropocene Glossary, where we offer brief explorations of some of the terms that appear in our Museum entries — such as Coloniality, the Columbian Exchange, the Great Acceleration, Technofossils, the Technosphere and the Tragedy of the Commons.
Martin mentions Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, a site curated by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects.
Martin’s previous posts in our Museum of the Anthropocene series are:
Object-based Learning in the Anthropocene: exploring the material and intellectual challenges of thinking about human-environment relationships in our new planetary era (our 2022 selection).
Centrifugal Stories in the Anthropocene: how our Museum of the Anthropocene stories resist casting all of humanity together as progenitors of our new planetary age (our 2023 selection).
Objects, Ownership and the Politics of the Anthropocene: objects that suggest ‘ownership’ as a theme in narratives of this age and expand this notion in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives (our 2024 selection).
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Writer Peter Reason explores the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways as participants in a kinship ecology.
1,890 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
How can those of us enculturated into a Western worldview engage with our world as sentient, as responsive, as kin? This is the question we address in Living Waters, our series of on-line co-operative inquiry workshops involving both human and River persons; the next workshops run online from 11th March to 29th April 2025 and usually attracts an international participation (see below for registration details).
In these inquiries we have been asking questions of the kind:
What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?
These questions focus our attention on whether we experience our world as something ‘out there’, which however wondrous and valuable is nevertheless separate from humans; this is the taken-for-granted perspective in Western society. Or is the world an animate presence, experienced as kin, as “all our relations”?[1] as do my Indigenous and Settler colleagues in Western Australia, who write in ‘Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world’:
… the ways we see, feel, and hear the world is associated with how we relate to and respond to our places. If we see the ground we walk on and the places we live in as animate, responsive, and relational, we are highly likely to care for Country with love, gentleness of spirit and fullness of heart. We are all able to hear and participate in the music, the soundscape of our places – to honour and celebrate the lyrics of life’. [2]
This way of seeing allows Indigenous people in their traditional cultures to experience the places they live – places their people have inhabited for tens of thousands of years – as living and responsive, with the whole community of beings as participants in a kinship ecology. These Indigenous elders draw on words that don’t translate easily, if at all, into English – pirlirr in Walmatjarri, liyan in Nyikina, and wirrin in Noongar – words that refer to a visceral way of knowing shared by people, all beings, and land itself. Through this way of seeing, feeling, and hearing Country, people know that “when you care for Country, Country will care for you”. [3]
When we use the terms Country (capital C), Land (capital L) or River (capital R) we refer to a broader, stronger, Indigenous use of the English language concepts of country, land, and river. These terms refer to places as relational, animate socio-ecosystems that are living and responsive. Country, Land and River include people as participants in a kin-centred ecology of being.
Those of us socialized into a Western way of being have been taught to think of humans and nature as separate and mutually exclusive opposites. In Western culture, although some of the ‘higher’ mammals are credited with intelligence, by and large the other–than–human is experienced as brute matter, only of value in so far as it serves human purposes. This perspective is clearly in error, as it has proved to be astoundingly destructive of the quality and complexity of the planetary ecology. Can we Westerners find this quality of relationship, can we learn to see our world in the way of kinship? Writer Amitav Ghosh entreats us to listen once more to the voices of the more-than-human world:
Voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. [4]
Living Waters inquiries are based not only on Indigenous perspectives but are rooted also in Western philosophy, specifically contemporary ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ which has its roots in the writings of Spinoza. We understand our world not as inanimate ‘stuff’ but as imbued from its origins with some kind of innerness – call it mind or sentience. Everything is integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. And from this we see that all beings form a communion of subjects, reaching out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return. If we invoke a world of brute stuff, as is normal in Western society, then that is what we will experience. If we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response – as the living world configures itself on poetic, metaphorical response to our invocation, a process Freya Mathews refers to as ontopoetics.
The point of our inquiries is to learn to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives and to explore ways of invoking the living presence of a sentient world. This is where Cooperative Inquiry comes in, a profoundly democratic approach to learning about and making sense of our world. This approach to living inquiry has three central characteristics that make it profoundly suitable for panpsychic inquiry because it treats all those involved – human and more-than-human – as subjective self-directing beings and therefore as equal participants in the inquiry process. It also emphasizes the experiential ground form of knowing, and it asserts the primacy of practice.
In orthodox scientific research the roles of subject and researcher are mutually exclusive, the researcher contributes the thinking that goes into the project, the subjects contribute the action to be studied. In co-operative inquiry these exclusive roles are replaced by mutual relationships. All involved work together both as co-researchers and co-subjects. Everyone is engaged in the design and management of the inquiry; everyone contributes to the questions to be asked and how to go about exploring them; everyone participates in the experience and action that’s being explored; everyone is involved in making sense and drawing conclusions; everyone draws on the learning from the inquiry in their future practice.
So how does this apply to the Living Waters workshops? We start with each participant identifying a River or waterway near where they live which they can engage with as a living, sentient being. They may sit with or walk by River, offering it quite simply attentive love. This can evolve into ceremony, gift-giving, song, prayer, always addressing River as a living being, always attentive to River’s response. We ask participants to compose accounts of their experiences and share these with an inquiry group of about six of their fellows; and periodically through the eight weeks of the workshops we work as a whole community of about twenty human persons to identify themes and shared questions. These cycles of inquiry are punctuated by seminar sessions at which the faculty offer perspectives on a view of the world as sentient – living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory – which may inform the inquiry process.
Personal encounters – towards a sentient world
About one hundred human and River persons have participated in this inquiry process over the past four years. Our encounters with Rivers drew forth a wide range of responses, both inner and outer.
For many co-inquirers the initial challenge was to get over the internal voices that questioned the whole activity – this even though they joined the inquiry sympathetic to its aims. We all needed to quieten our minds and hush our expectations sufficiently to give fuller attention to River. Many found themselves at first distracted and self-absorbed.
Once inner voices were somewhat quietened, it was still easy to drop into a traditional subject-object relationship, to look at the river as still ‘out there’.
However, with persistence, practice, and support from the human inquiry community, most were able to sustain a feeling of sentient presence, and then move into what one group called ‘getting in the zone’. This is the experience of a sentient, embodied world, and of one’s own animal body as part of it; usually accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and gratitude, maybe wonder and enchantment at the sheer beauty of it all.
Going deeper, there sometimes arose a curious juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary; and close to that a profound feeling that the ordinary is all extraordinary.
Some inquirers also developed a complex imaginative or psychic response, as if the world is somehow ‘speaking’ directly in words and images. In time, many participants found themselves ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’ or ‘lifting the veil’, with the illusion of separation slipping away.
Finally, there are on occasion active ontopoetic responses, ‘moments of grace’ when the world and its beings actively gesture back in response to invocation: animals and birds appear; there is a gust of wind or a shower of rain; leading to narratives of experience incontrovertibly linked to one’s invocation.
Offering to River Fowey. Photograph: David Peters
Many participants report experiences of a sentient and responsive world that are deeply felt, unassailably authentic. Such experiences have an authority of their own. They offer intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized. As an outcome, our metaphysical assumptions are radically re-arranged. It is evident that experiences of a sentient, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.
In Peter’s previous post for us, Bristol Climate Writers Presents … ‘Desert Island Books’ — a collaborative piece with fellow members of both ClimateCultures and BCW on fiction and non-fiction books they discussed at a public event — he talks about – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. He also contributed Lines Written While Reading Hunger Mountain to Day 4 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. And with his Songs for Earth, featured in our Creative Showcase, he asks: How does one sing in the face of the ecological crisis — the disruption of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being?”
A writer linking the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical and spiritual sources and participatory perspectives.
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.
As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s 
Poet and artist-book maker 
