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.”
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care.
1,340 words: estimated reading time = approximately 5.5 minutes
It’s midsummer, and England has just experienced its hottest June since records began.1 Temperatures have been topping 40oC across Europe, while in the eastern Pacific Ocean a ‘monster’ El Nino is developing,2 with its effects already being felt in places like Papua New Guinea.3 London recently paid host to ‘London Climate Week’, at which the UN Secretary-General highlighted that London was not just ‘Calling’, but ‘Cooking’, perhaps starting to bear out at least some of the apocalyptic vision of The Clash’s post-/punk classic.4 But several Climate Week events couldn’t go ahead; most notably perhaps, a panel discussion at the London School of Economics on improving the management of extreme heat was called off due to — you guessed it — the extreme heat.5
Anthropocene ironies
‘The Anthropocene’ seems to be an age of irony. The term describes a period in Earth’s history when (some) humans have seemingly become a dominant, controlling, world-making force, and yet our knowledge of the future implications of that agency are shrouded in uncertainty. This is an age of melting polar ice giving access to more fossil fuels; of urgent defences against rising seas being wrapped around fossil fuel infrastructure;6 of the clear need for more global cooperation just at the moment that geopolitical worlds seem to be pulling apart.7 And meanwhile, experts on dealing with the heat can’t talk to each other because it’s too hot.
As the philosopher-poet Eugene Thacker put it in a 2021 interview:8
There is a tragic irony in the Anthropocene idea. We do matter after all. The evidence? We have created the conditions for our own extinction. I suppose that is an achievement, of sorts. So convinced are we as human beings that we matter that we are willing to sacrifice the planet for our own species-specific self-importance.
This year’s submissions to our evolving online Museum of the Anthropocene capture this sense of Anthropocene ironies. Like last year, some deal with collapsing boundaries,9 with things which are neither one thing nor the other, or which seem to be something but which are in reality something else.10 As we move through them, we move in many respects from identifying the problems and violences of the Anthropocene towards the moves we might make to undo them. But that spectrum of knowledge and action is implied in all of them, in different ways.
Katya Boinvoisin points us towards the ironies and contradictions of the clean energy transition, showing how the rare earth mining frontier — producing materials which are vital for ‘clean’ energy tech — is pushing into northern Scandinavia and repeating many of the political and environmental violences we tend to associate with fossil colonialism11 and fossil capitalism.12
This year’s collection features a range of shape-shifters; objects whose meanings and attachments seem to shift radically when viewed through the lens of the Anthropocene. Izzy Laws’ account of the rubber duck shows how a cute children’s toy can also contribute to marine plastic pollution; but in a further twist, how an accidental spillage of thousands of the things helped scientists piece together new knowledge of ocean circulation — crucial to helping us better understand future changes in the ocean-atmosphere system.
Maisie Royal offers us a cup of matcha, and places the latest coffee shop trend in a deeper historical and geographical context. Once used to aid meditative contemplation of the beauty of human-nature coexistence, now it is a fully-fledged global commodity and challenging coffee as the chemical enhancer of choice for exhausted minds labouring under late capitalism. Nonetheless, Maisie suggests that matcha still embodies a deep desire for (re)connection with nature, even as its cultivation in Japan is increasingly challenged by changing weather patterns.
Bethany Waite similarly explores the juxtapositions of beauty and industry through the lens of crochet. She traces the mechanisation of this craft skill and its increasing entanglement with ‘fast fashion’ and synthetic fibres, but points too to emerging craftivism movements by which crochet, as a form of “slow, handmade work” is interjected “into fast, industrialised spaces, disrupting the speed and disposability that define modern fashion systems”. In so doing, crochet promotes a new ethos of care, community and sustainability.
Lastly, Joanna Edwards also examines the tension between materiality and meaning. Their object is a handmade Pride flag, stitched together from fragments of industrially-produced cloth to produce something fundamentally different: a defence and a celebration of queerness. Drawing on notions of ‘queer ecology’, Joanna diagnoses the Anthropocene as an age defined by the rejection of the inherent queerness of both natural and human worlds, and by the enforcing of boundaries and hierarchies. By gathering around Joanna’s flag, we can see how fighting against the Anthropocene requires solidarities that cut across the categories industrial modernity has bequeathed to many of us.
Queer ecology — looking beyond categories
Oversimplifications abound in corporate and state environmentalism, from deeply performative nature-culture dualisms to the rendering of wild spaces in one corner of the world fungible and exchangeable with wildness elsewhere, through mechanisms of offsetting and substitution. Queer ecology reminds us of the inherent strangeness, intimacy and interdependencies of the world, which cut across the Western philosophical ‘operating systems’ that, since the 16th century or so, have dominated how the nonhuman world is comprehended and apprehended.
In this age of irony, it is plain to see how these categories contain their own contradictions within them; spotting and talking about those ironies, then, might be the key to undoing their violences.
Papua New Guinea at risk of food shortages as El Niño brings frost and drought, Rebecca Bush (The Guardian, 25/6/26)
London’s Calling, by The Clash: “…the sun’s zoomin’ in // meltdown expected // the wheat is growing thin” (Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, 1979). Some travellers on the Central Line this week might nonetheless welcome the idea that the “the ice age is coming”.
You can find all five new entries in Inside the Museum, along with Martin’s selections for 2022 to 2024 – a growing collection of objects and entities that shine new lights on the Anthropocene and ask important questions of us. And we bring together all of Martin’s introductory essays in the main Museum of the Anthropocene page. Do also check out our earlier project, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, where CimateCultures members discuss the objects — real or imagined — that illustrate the emerging planetary age for them.
To mark the first four years of our online Museum of then Anthropocene, we recently hosted a conversation between the Museum’s co-ordinator, UEA’s Dr Martin Mahony, and fellow ClimateCultures member, GroundWork Gallery’s director and curator, Valerie Sekules. Do read Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years for an exploration of how collections such as this enhance- our understanding of our planetary age.
This short piece by Ingrid Bååth for studio ClimateCulture (not related to ClimateCultures) discusses how Queer Ecology offers “a framework for seeing — and living — differently. It reminds us that the binaries we inherit are not inevitable. That nature is not static.”
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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.
For his recent post with Veronica Sekules, Martin said: “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!”
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.
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
Nettle-eater by Tom Hirons. Artwork by Rima Staines.
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
‘Sometimes a Wild God’ by Tom Hirons. Artwork by Rima Staines.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An independent researcher, project and programme manager on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses to our predicaments.
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White, in conversation with Veronica Strang about her new book, Water Beings, finds connections with his own work at a time when water is under threat and we need to rebalance our elemental relationship.
2,850 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes
“Water serpent beings’ abilities to be monstrous also traverse scales. They can lurk within the individual psyche and represent the seething inner sea of instincts and emotions, or they can reflect tensions and fluid capacities for disorder at a societal level, such as the chaos represented by war or revolution… At a cosmic level, they can represent apocalyptic events – the Flood, the volcanic eruption, the earthquake, the tsunami.”
— Veronica Strang, Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.
‘Water Beings’ by Veronica Strang (2023)
Water in crisis
Recently I’ve been sensing a disconnect between me and water. I live close to an iconic river, in which I learnt to swim and as a teenager had lucrative summer jobs punting tourists along it. However, the River Cam, like most if not all UK water systems, is heavily polluted, and I know of many local cases of humans and dogs who have been seriously unwell after a dip.
The data for the newly designated bathing status at Sheep’s Green in the Newnham area of Cambridge recenly showed high levels of e-coli and other nasties that have leached down from a sewage pumping station some miles away. In addition, the heavy winter, spring and now summer, rains we are getting in this normally drier part of the land often wash off concrete and create epic floods, with run-off washing into the rivers and through the soil.
I’ve just made a short film about one of East Anglia’s chalk streams, the Newmarket Brook, and I have been learning from geologists and hydrologists about chalk streams’ unique qualities and fragility. This one is in varying states of health. I also helped a friend, Tony Eva, make Pure Clean Water, a film about Hobson’s Conduit, which flows from the springs at Nine Wells, by the hospital, through various colleges and into Cambridge. It is in a perilous condition, continually abstracted and contaminated.
Away from just this one city, the human world is at war, and water gets scarce and used as a threat for those being persecuted and bombarded. We’re in a water crisis and if we are to survive as a species and remain equitable with our ecosystem, our relationship with all the elements must rebalance. Recognising this disconnect is the start, and framing our connection to the sacred and to older knowledges feels like an important way forward. A crucial way forward.
It’s timely then to discover Veronica Strang’s body of work, and engage with the growing movement towards river/nature rights. The vast body of human creativity around water and water beings comes to the fore in her book, which really resonates and brings joy to this jaded mind. If many of us unite around care for water and becoming water guardians, from a variety of faith beliefs, political and ecological opinions and none, our human power can make a real difference.
I’ve recently been a participant in two University of Cambridge conferences on water-human relationships where Veronica delivered keynote lectures. Her research straddles anthropology, archaeology, theology, philosophy and more — ranging across human history, our experience with and belief in beings that inhabit watery realms, and our cultural imaginations and psychological systems.
Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis is a very deep dive into watery worlds inhabited by a vast array of extraordinary more-than-human beings, and into our imaginative nature as an ancient species. Every society has developed complex and intricate beliefs and knowledges around water beings and their values, roles and responsibilities, including our projections on them as either benign or monstrous. Living alongside them, dreaming of them or even being devoured by them, has given humans a sense of fear, worship, adoration, and veneration. Perhaps now is the time to fully merge our substantive presence on the earth with water creatures?
Muisca tunjos, votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold.
A confluence of knowledge and imagination
While grounded in academic scholarship, Water Beings reads like a flowing chronology of connectivity, an important congregation of how the planet’s climate and delicate ecosystems and the human creative impetus to respond all come together. Ultimately, this work is about narrative, fact and fiction: stories and images of water beings are part of our human construct, and now is a time to acknowledge and honour them. What might they mean? What might they anticipate?
The book’s ten chapters categorise types of water entities — irrigating beings, supreme beings, demonised beings, reformed and transformational beings and more — and frame our ways into their study. A key final chapter then sharply focuses on the now, why we are in this condition of crisis and dis-connection, and ways we might return to a closer, healthier framing. I’ll return to that important chapter.
Unknown artist, Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928, watercolour on paper.
I was particularly delighted to discover in chapter 8, ‘Supreme Beings’ — as Strang moves forward with her story, societies become urbanised and with that comes monotheistic faith structures and practices — an image from William Blake, ‘Moses erecting the brazen serpent’.
This chimes with an ongoing absorption into Blake’s prophetic work I have through the Finding Blake project, a fascination with his fourfold vision. Here, in an underwater realm, serpents are coiling around humans, literally squeezing the life out of corrupt sinners, while Moses stands watching upwards to the head of the main water serpent. Here is an image of the entwining of watery beings which has become the symbol of medicine and healing: caduceus.
William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper.
Water is rare in Blake’s paintings, and where it does appear it often represents the subconscious, a metaphor for yearnings, regrets. Here it is a vessel, dominated by these beings of great power, human victims in their coils — and yet the interplay between them and Moses is highly significant: dominion and dominance. I’m not aware of Blake referencing the Thames in his work, despite living very close to it for most of his life, yet surely it played a role within his unconscious knowledge of the world. I wonder if he saw serpents and watery beings on his daily walks alongside it? I’m led to believe he and his wife Catherine could see the river from their last flat, where he died, which is now under a major London landmark hotel.
Chapter 10, ‘Reformed beings’, flows up to contemporary times, and the use of images of water beings in literature, films and more. This makes me think of the local town of Ely, once a town of eels, fished for and captured in plentiful supply and shipped off to London as a commodity. Now the eels are gone, with the last remaining eel catcher, into mythology of both creature and trade. Eels live on in artworks, sculptures by the river, and paintings aplenty in local galleries and markets — a symbol of this fenland town. Many tales of the fens are marked by the beings that once inhabited waterways since cut as agricultural drains: part of the industrialisation of land reclaimed from watery bog.
‘Turning The Tide’, the final chapter, forms a confluence, bringing together knowledges from countermovements — indigenous activists, campaigners for social and ecological justice, nature-worshipping religious groups, legal activists, and scholars — to include learnings and imaginings from all kinds of creative practitioners, strongly making the case for recognition of the rights of the more-than-human, and water itself: ultimately, the vessel and element that holds us all.
Here, the full power and resonance of the author’s research comes to the present day, and she offers the full weight of her learning and sharing:
“Today, in a world urgently in need of a change in direction, the stories that water serpent beings tell, and their capacities to represent alternate visions of human-non-human relations, may be the most crucial role that they have ever had.
“As our water serpent beings have shown, societies that have achieved long-term sustainability have done so by maintaining steady-state or circular economies, rather than embarking upon spirals of growth and expansion.”
Returning to my home city of Cambridge, plagued by the constant over-hanging clouds of development and the ‘growth agenda’, this message needs to ring loud — and just maybe the water beings may rise again from the Cam, or emerge in eel-like form to teach humans this lesson of steady state fluid dynamics. Human and watery other.
Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm.
Water Beings: a Q&A with Veronica Strang
JMW This is such an extraordinary work of rich, deep scholarship. I appreciate greatly the visual, literary and historical journey you take the audience on, and feel enriched by this book.
VS Thanks for this kind comment — this research has been a wonderful experience for me. Although water beings appear regularly in folklore, ethnography, history and theology, no one has previously researched aquatic deities systematically and comparatively, and venturing into this new research area has been an extraordinary adventure. Water beings have so much to tell us.
JMW Can you share how this study started, and tell us some of your journey following the waters and the watery beings?
VS My research as an anthropologist has always focused on human-environmental relationships, people’s beliefs and values, and particularly their engagements with water. I have explored a range of issues relating to water: ownership, governance and management; conflicts over water; religious beliefs about water; and rights to water, for humans and for non-human species and ecosystems. Much of this work has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and more briefly in Malawi. But the issues around water that interest me recur all around the world.
Water beings swam into my research very early on. In the early 1990s I worked with indigenous Australian communities in Queensland and learned about the Rainbow Serpent that is so central to their lives. A decade in New Zealand, during which I conducted research with Maori iwis on water ownership, rights and management, brought me into contact with their beliefs about rivers as living ancestors, and their taniwha and other water beings. Realising the vital importance of these aquatic deities caused me to pay attention to them elsewhere.
It soon became clear that — since all early human societies worshipped the non-human domain, which we call Nature — water beings (as well as other elemental and non-human ancestral figures) were ubiquitous in human history. And in all of these early societies water beings performed similarly vital connective roles: personifying the creative and potentially destructive powers of water; forming the world and populating with human and non-human beings; providing humans with consciousness and enlightenment; exerting religious authority and, above all, generating water and life in annual cycles of production and reproduction. So for several decades I collected images and narratives about water beings all over the world: feathered and water lily serpents in Central America; African python deities, Arctic undersea beings; Indian nāgas; Japanese cloud dragons and Chinese imperial dragons; North-American Pueblo horned serpents or, on the north-west coast, wolf or bear headed beings; Amazonian giant anacondas and celestial boas; Celtic deities in rivers and springs; Norse sea serpents, and Eastern European rain dragons.
What happened to these water beings over time in different cultural and historical contexts gives us an illuminating narrative about different societal trajectories and transformations in people’s relationships with water and the non-human domain. And so the project grew into the major comparative study that forms the basis of my book. The study shows how growing instrumental control over the environment altered the relations of power between human societies and their environments, and led changes in beliefs and practices in relation to water deities. As humans gained more technological power over water, and felt more ‘god-like’, a fascinating pattern of deity humanisation emerged. This led to the semi-humanisation of water beings, or their displacement by deities in human form, and culminated in the major monotheisms assigning authority to human, male gods and demonising the non-human beings of earlier religions.
JMW Would you explain a little about how you chose to structure the book, and make these categories of beings? And which of the world wide canon of water beings you have researched most captures you?
VSWater Beings follows the changing patterns in societies’ relationships with water through a comparative study of their water deities. Although these changes happened at different times in different places, the book is loosely chronological, starting with the water beings of the earliest human societies and those that remain central today in place-based indigenous communities. Such societies understood the co-creative role of the non-human domain, manifested in water beings, and sought to have reciprocal and respectful relationships with them. They also maintained relatively egalitarian relationships in their political arrangements, being led by both male and female elders.
The text then moves to examining the effects of greater human control over water, for example in ancient irrigation societies, and considers how their religious and political arrangements changed alongside their new infrastructures. With new hierarchies and centralised governments, power shifted from water deities into the hands of (usually male) priests and deified rulers who became the figures responsible for bringing the rain and maintaining social order.
The following chapters explore how, as societies became more technologically powerful, water beings were made subservient or subsumed by new deities in human form until, with the rise of monotheisms that separated Culture from Nature, and sought dominion over the latter, they were demonised and slain. It also shows how emerging scientific visions disenchanted the world and consigned many nature deities to ‘folklore’. In the final part of the book, however, we see how this alienation from the non-human domain, and the exploitation of other species and environments that it encouraged, has led to the current environmental crisis. There is now an increasing understanding that there is an urgent need for humankind to regain more convivial, and therefore more sustainable, relationships with water, ecosystems, and other living kinds.
The book therefore also examines new visions of water beings in recent and contemporary art, literature and film, in which they are recognised and respected as key manifestations of the co-creative powers of the non-human domain. These emerging images and narratives express people’s growing desire to reconnect more positively with other living kinds and ecosystems.
As for which water beings have captured me the most? I can never choose. My first love was the Australian Rainbow Serpent, but they are all extraordinary and wonderful, beautiful and terrible, and endlessly fascinating.
JMW Anthropological research gives us an opportunity to look back at historical evidence and to engage with local/cultural knowledges. In this case there is such a desperate need to apply all this knowledge to how we respond to water now, which you explore in some depth in the final chapter. How might we look back in 100 years, with your assessment of the current trajectory of human/water relations?
VS My research helps, I hope, by showing how, for many millennia, human societies maintained respectful relationships with water and the non-human domain, in which people sought to protect their needs and interests as well as those of human beings. It shows how and why many societies moved away from such egalitarian visions to seek power and dominion over ‘Nature’ and how this increasing inequality led to exploitative and unsustainable practices. Most large societies are still on this trajectory, led by ideologies of growth and expansion, and the belief that yet more technological control will solve the problem. Meanwhile, species and biodiverse habitats continue to disappear, human populations and their use of resources continue to increase, and it seems that humankind is dragging the world towards a painful and potentially critical collapse.
But in almost all societies there are also passionate counter-movements: social and ecological activists and indigenous communities striving to promote alternate ways forward. They share a transformational vision of human and non-human equality, circular economies, more sustainable lifeways, and beliefs and values that recognise the vital co-creative role of the non-human world. These movements are growing: more and more people are pushing their local and national governments and international bodies to make better choices. What the world looks like 100 years from now will depend on whether they can succeed in turning the tide. And in this battle — and it is indeed a battle for human and non-human survival — water beings, as compelling personifications of non-human power and creativity, are a vital narrative device for communicating ideas about how we might engage with water differently.
JMW Do you feel positive about us working with the more-than-human to assert the rights of nature and the rights of water within human law/psychology?
VS How could one feel other than positive about working to uphold the rights of all living kinds in what is fundamentally a shared interconnected world, in which human and non-human wellbeing cannot be separated? This is surely the only rational and ethical position from which it is possible to see a future in which all of us can flourish. So yes, I feel immensely positive, and indeed privileged, to be able to work with these amazing water beings and their wonderful capacities to communicate a more hopeful vision of the future.
Find more
Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis by Veronica Strang is published by Reaktion Books (2023). Veronica is a Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. You can explore her work — and watch a summary video of a planned TV series based on Water Beings — at her website.
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.
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