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Earth Living — Now, Facing the Storm

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

1,700 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

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

Earth Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is mystery

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

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

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

Find out more

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Leach

A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.
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Eco-social Art — Engaging Climate Literacy

Environmental artist Laura Donkers works with the embodied knowledge of communities, through a form of eco-social art engagement, to help develop climate literacy. Laura describes her approach and experience with local communities in Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

2,300 words: estimated reading time 9 minutes + 6 minutes video

This is the first part of two, and in her next post Laura discusses her move to Aotearoa New Zealand to expand her research as part of her final year of a practice-led PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at Dundee University.

***

For the last thirty years, I have lived on the southern island chain in the Outer Hebrides, known as the Uists, where I work as a horticulturalist, artist and researcher. The population of fewer than 5,000 people is largely indigenous and is widely spread across several islands, with between four and fifteen people per square kilometre inhabiting small, close-knit townships of all occupations needed to sustain a community. The archipelago’s economic activities are reliant on the primary industries of tourism, crofting, fishing and weaving and dependent on the environment for continued livelihoods.  

I feel I belong to this place; I both know and am known by my community. Without this social embeddedness, I could not have undertaken the sort of research I do, which relies on mutual trust and understanding, as well as a familiarity with the way that individuals and societies work at a local level. It’s a community that is interconnected across several planes of knowledge. Connected to the land, sea, seasons and with strong intergenerational and societal bonds, people exhibit a broad skills base extending across several identities; and, with shared spiritual connections and an interest in heritage and genealogy, people continue to pass knowledge on through generations.

It is natural then that I am interested in how eco-social art can be used strategically to promote sustainability in small island communities. Through the process of research for my PhD, I have come to understand that this is done best by working with the community’s own embodied knowledge, and I want to be able to show the importance of this.

My practice-led thesis aims to show that a specific set of knowledges accumulated through lived experience can help to improve ecological and social regeneration. My research reveals the role and value of this community embodied knowledge as a method for reengagement. Together with an eco-arts approach, this can bring local people, community organisations and national partners together into an open learning environment to develop ways of adapting to climate change.

Embodied knowledge, eco-social art

So what is community embodied knowledge?

I have found it to exist where people know each other through familial and experiential ties, are attached to their place/environment/land and utilise intergenerational knowledge to understand their own existence. It is also a practical form of wisdom, or practical reasoning, that is about individual ability to make good choices, based on understanding what is the right thing to do in the circumstances.

So, embodied knowledge helps us get to the deeper kinds of change that are needed at this time of climatic upheaval. When faced with challenges, practical rural-based people do not have it in their nature to just sit back and wait for others to act, but instead use their lived experience and inherited bank of knowledge to make decisions about what to do. However, in this new climatic regime, changes at a local level can be subtle (while still ultimately catastrophic) as they creep into everyday experience and become the new norm. While rural people are well placed to adapt to change, they share wider society’s lack of experience in understanding what irrevocable changes they will need to adapt to. In my opinion, it’s here that valuable reengagement opportunities lie, where ordinary practical people, local organisations and national bodies should come together and share knowledge and practices that may achieve solutions for local survivability. 

And socially engaged art practice?

This is anchored in community-led development and uses art to draw the community into talking about and acting on social, political or environmental issues. It involves people and communities in debate, collaboration or social interaction, and this is, at some level, where the art lies. It is led by artists who recognise that the community is the expert in their own lives, and works with them to cultivate that understanding more widely.

Reimagining place

So, place-making led by artists can revitalise communities: art and cultural activities involving local individuals and groups in collaborative activities with national organisations to develop meaningful public spaces where people can meet, celebrate and identify with each other. This kind of arts engagement can provide critical reflection and an alternative to the dominant social developmental discourse that can exclude the less vocal, less confident, less certain members of society, especially where historically these indigenous knowledges have been suppressed.

Many of the examples of this kind of ‘place-making’ are carried out by artists working in urban communities: Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s skills building projects develop the community’s capacity from ‘communication to construction’, to transform their roles into co-producers rather than merely consumers. However, I feel that the extensive productive capacities already present in rural communities require artists to take a different approach here.

A more rural approach begins with recognising the importance of the characteristics mentioned earlier regarding communities’ valuable interconnected knowledge and deep links to their places, and how they make use of their environments to sustain their livelihoods. So, finding a way to work that respects and upholds embodied knowledge is key to developing a good working relationship before even thinking of trying to shift mindsets for a changing climate. This is as much about showing the community the value of their own knowledge as it is about conveying how this form of knowledge can help other communities and wider society to re-think how to act locally elsewhere.

An example of my work is the Machair Art project. Machair is one of the rarest habitats in Europe: a fertile low lying grassy plain that only occurs on exposed western coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Machair Art was a collaboration between myself and artist Olwen Shone for the Conserving Scottish Machair LIFE+ project. It encompassed the year-long cycle of the machair in the form of four field trips to various crofting locations, exploring the themes of harvesting, seaweed, ploughing and wildlife. Students also attended drawing and photography sessions after school.

As part of my work combining embodied knowledge with eco-social art practice, therefore, I develop practical and theoretical engagements that rekindle old tacit knowledge and skills to help communities reimagine their places as ‘climate change prepared’. My eco-social arts activities centre on developing climate literacy through social, intergenerational activities and range from drawing and photography days-out, to long term strategies that establish community food growing sites. Planned actions, shared vision, co-intelligence and co-management strategies help build a deeper understanding and potential for assimilation into everyday life, with actions informed and underpinned by the local embodied knowledge of crofters and contractors, as well as local specialists and advisors.

Another short film I made, Tha Mi a Bruadair — I Have a Dream, shows the possibilities of rural education. In this case, through the Crofter Course run at the local high school, Sgoil Lionacleit, Isle of Benbecula, we engaged young people in land stewardship in their communities.

This video project was part of the ‘I Have a Dream’ Global Art, Farming and Peace project for Vancouver Biennale 2014-16, and was shown as part of Raising Farmers’ Voices for ArtCOP21 in Paris — an initiative by artist Shweta Bhattad, ‘Faith in Paris’.

Climate literacy: knowing and not knowing

A community’s embodied knowledge develops through its approach to change. While changes come about in all societies — alterations in population, climate, prices, policies, availability of healthcare, schools provision, and so on — tiny communities feel these much more acutely than larger populations. In places like Uist, they have learned that adaptation is always possible. There is no choice but to find a way to overcome challenges, and this produces resilient, adaptable people who can transform and sustain their lives as they need to.

The mindset of communities in places like Uist involves a very different experience of living than in the urban context. Understanding this means appreciating that these communities exist between knowing and not knowing. I will attempt to explain this and how I think my eco-social art abilities can work with these forms of knowledge to include climate literacy.

Rural knowledge is based on communities’ own capabilities to make and produce something to live from. Knowing the materials they require and how to access them calls on acute observational understanding and an ability to wait for the right signs. Counter to this runs not knowing whether they will achieve their goal this year. They cannot know for certain whether the materials (e.g. seaweed) will be available or sufficient, whether the right conditions (e.g. gales that bring the seaweed inshore) or signals (e.g. rainfall or lack) will appear, and finally whether these will enable the task (e.g. harvest) to be completed in time. Of course, they will achieve something of their aims, but they strive always with the hope that this year will be a good one that they can celebrate: that they can have some reserves, can feel a little satisfaction. This ability to live within these two states of knowing and not knowing comes through intergenerational knowledge, developing skills to source and make materials, and engaging deep durational and seasonal knowledge as well as acute capabilities to observe and to wait.

My eco-social arts process draws attention to wider issues of concern brought on by climate change and encourages reflexive reassessment via new thinking and doing that draw on the community’s existing materials, methods and processes. Our relationship develops through a collaborative process that respects existing knowledges and hierarchies, but introduces an alternative mindset that references climate change knowledge. While this is not at odds with a society dependent on the environment for its livelihoods, the way it is introduced needs sensitive handling in order for it to be considered rather than rejected. I occupy a different space, from another perspective, and can draw links to relevant information that can translate into local understanding.

Making space for climate conversations

I wish to activate and expand the potential of art as an agent of social intervention, community building, and cultural change. I have found the best way to do this is through an open-call process where participants self-nominate. What follows is built around close listening and dialogue and, importantly, showing this through projects that reference the participants’ experiences, concerns and ideas.

Essentially, what we create together is a space for the community to enter, influence and direct themselves. They start to have ‘climate conversations’ that make sense and lead on to transformative climate-aware actions that they take themselves. The artistic aspects help with visualisation and the creation of new spaces (e.g. Community Food Growing Hubs) to reconsider and reflect on recent local changes, whether increasing levels of social isolation, poor diet or mental health issues, as well as the potential climate change impacts of sea level rise, and increased food costs. The visualisations offer another view on the situation, enabling participants to see and hear themselves speaking and acting.

Eco-social art - Berneray Community Polycrub, 2016 — Berneray Community Polycrub
Photo: Laura Donkers © 2016

The creation of these spaces fits in with the community’s inherent qualities of knowing and not knowing. It feels true and believable, and sets parameters that are achievable and, in the end, self-determining.

Looking beyond the west

My work is about understanding mutuality through an artform that’s concerned with human interactions and social context acting in spaces of the everyday: negotiating the personal, social and political — in place. It’s about working with each other to gain new understandings of how to live in a changing world.

I contend that community embodied knowledge is a valuable resource that is not properly understood at present, and so cannot be truly valued. During my studies, I have come to appreciate something of the cultural disparities between the Western disregard for this knowledge and indigenous societies’ world views. These are based on interconnected environmental and spiritual values, and recognise human dependence on ecosystems and our influence on them through the use of land, water and air. As with the island community in Uist, this knowledge has come about through extended processes of observation and interpretation. But in non-western societies, the interconnected world view influences how they value their knowledge, affording a context for understanding from an embodied perspective that references the natural world, its materials, and conditions, in a natural state of co-existence.

To explore this point, I have been undertaking comparative research in Aotearoa New Zealand to gain perspective on the role indigenous communities with long-standing interconnected relationships with their natural environment can play in highlighting the importance of practical local knowledge. Māori see themselves as integral parts of ecosystems, and know that their basic necessities such as materials, health, good social relations, security, and freedom of choice and action are provided directly and indirectly by ecosystems. Knowledge of this interdependency supports their ability to care for their land and their people.

This part of my research — which I will turn to in my next post — focuses on learning how regenerative practices can influence the governance of resources and help to develop flourishing communities. And I am also looking at what maybe limits how we can transfer such a model to other places and contexts.

Find out more

You can watch Laura’s video from the Machair Art project and find out more on her website. The term ‘Eco-social Art’ was first coined by artist-researcher (and ClimateCultures Member) Cathy Fitzgerald as part of her PhD by practice The Ecological Turn: Living Well with forests to explain eco-social art practices.

The Rotterdam-based artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s work engages with the setting up of ‘collaborative production’ between people involved in processes of urban development.

Laura Donkers

An ecological artist and researcher connecting people with ecology through community projects and outdoor art workshops to inform more creative and sustainable ways to live.
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UNFIX Festival — Unfix the Situation

Artistic director and performer Paul Michael Henry, who has devised successive UNFIX festivals, discusses his motivation and ambitions for these international gatherings and explorations, ahead of UNFIX 2019 next month. UNFIX: a command form, a verb, an activity.

1,120 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes

UNFIX is a multi-art form festival based in Glasgow, New York and Tokyo. It starts from the proposition that the Anthropocene is happening inside your body, RIGHT NOW. The 2019 Edition is scheduled for 29th-31st March at CCA Glasgow.

I started UNFIX in 2015, looking to ‘Climate Change’ like a lightning rod for the vague and specific discomforts about this society that have plagued me all my life. People keep mis-labelling it ‘Unfixed’ or ‘The Unfix’ but it’s UNFIX: a command form. A verb and activity.

A loosening, disburdening, freeing-up. Anti-fatalistic, with the assumption that it doesn’t have to be like this. I experience climate change as a terrible affirmation: we cannot treat each other, ourselves and our surroundings this way. We can’t walk around with these egos functioning the way they do, and live.

UNFIX situation 2019 Image by Henrik Knudsen — UNFIX 2019
Image: Henrik Knudsen © 2019

Situation crisis

When the ‘Banking Crisis’ hit in 2008 it occurred to me (and others I’m sure) that it could just as well be called the Banking Opportunity. With the cracks briefly showing, it could be a moment of vulnerability for finance and late capitalism, a gap in the concrete where something new could spring up. The fact that it wasn’t speaks simply to the aggregate level of human consciousness at that time. We were not awake enough.

I’m a Glaswegian artist whose work tends to focus on the body — specifically, the body as an ecological reality traumatised by, and intimately connected to, wider currents of politics, patriarchy, capitalism and climate change. I’m also interested in the body’s ability to soften these by love, connection and embodied understanding. I’m uninterested in finger-pointing, and am probably some kind of mystic at heart.

Actually part of that is a lie. I’d love to finger point, and sometimes I do. Jump up and down and rail at the capitalists and the patriarchs and the selfish and the sleeping, righteously righteously. Weep publicly, perhaps on TV, cradling plastic smothered turtles in my too late saviour’s arms. But climate change really isn’t about me and a wiser part of me knows that. It swallows me and I need to reckon with it, I live inside it and it shames me and prompts me to act.

When I don’t live in alignment with my values (which is often), a rat gnaws my stomach. The rat is tamed when I take actions with my whole being, like starting a festival for misfit artists to say what’s burning in our gizzards and draw what attention we can to The Situation.

Paul Michael Henry in Shrimp Dance Image by Brian Hartley — Shrimp Dance, Paul Michael Henry. Platform, Glasgow October 2017.
Image: Brian Hartley © 2017

Situation opportunity

The first UNFIX happened because a wonderful venue (the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow) was foolish enough to give me the keys to the building for a weekend. I was living in a camper van at the time, completely skint and dreaming. We teamed up, dozens of artists and activists, nobody getting paid, and we staged performances and film screenings and debates and ate together at another great venue (the Project Cafe) who made us all food from ingredients foraged in Kelvingrove Park. It felt a bit explosive. People still tell me how it affected them, boosted their resilience. I dunno. I’d like to think so.

But I mean: it’s art. The Situation persists. I throw my tiny actions and those of the artists involved in UNFIX on the pile, to be added to the older generations who saw this coming (the Joanna Macys, the Alastair McIntoshes) and the younger just now exploding in beauty (the school-age climate strikers). Outcomes are unknowable so I align myself, not sure, opting — as Alastair is fond of saying — to “Dig where I stand.”

So what about the Climate Opportunity? I don’t think shouting at Trump is going to be enough, though it is surely a part of it. But when I project all my climate rage outwards I’m being dishonest. I think that all of us raising our levels of awareness, radically –individually, in small groups, in large groups, in continental blocks, in cross currents and collaborations, and in the owning of our own shadows — CHANGING OURSELVES from the inside out, might make a difference.

I don’t know what our chances of survival as something resembling the human species are, and I’m agnostic about whether we deserve it. I’m to blame and you’re to blame and everyone is confused and the most ignorant and ego-driven have the most power and will kill us all if we let them. OK OK. The Situation. Perhaps we should just get to work?

Minako Seki Image by Ulrich Heemann — Minako Seki
Image: Ulrich Heemann © 2019

UNFIX 2019

This year’s UNFIX Festival has some (a little) money behind it. For the first time I have a budget and producers and paperwork, and people to account to afterwards. And I can pay the artists taking part, more or less. All of which makes me nervous because it dilutes my standing as someone powerless and shouting on the sidelines (my strongest suit). It’s not much power, mind.

If I were king, I would outlaw the term Consumers. Swap in the word Organism, or System, or ConsumerDigesterExcreter. I would have mandatory shit cannons primed for every time someone says ‘Economic Growth’. All would bow down before my solutions. Righteously Righteously.

I am not king, thankfully, signing on instead each day as an average-extraordinary worker bee in the Anthropocene: of unique gifts and no special importance, grief-stricken and hopeful and sometimes sick and faltering and giving up and starting again.

Who looks out through your eyes when you think about climate change?

Find out more

Paul Michael Henry makes performances that, most of the time, end up on a stage, but he also makes recorded music and films and collaborates on other artists’ projects. He is artistic director of UNFIX Festival and teaches dance workshops called The Dreaming Body. His themes are political, social and spiritual, dealing with love, neglect of the body, destruction of the environment and atrophy of the soul in consumerist society.

UNFIX 2019 is scheduled for 29th-31st March at CCA Glasgow. It will feature contributions from local and international artists and organisations including Minako Seki, Alberta Whittle, Chistiana Bissett, The Workroom, Extinction Rebellion, Creative Carbon Scotland, Niya B, Ruaridh Law, Verónica Mota/Urban Arts Berlin, VID art|science, Yulia Kovanova, NIGHTPARADE, Katrine Turner, VIDIV, Adam Fish, Paul Michael Henry and The Dark Mountain Project. You can discover more at www.unfixfestival.com. Tickets are on a sliding scale and can be purchased from the CCA website.

Paul Michael Henry

A performance maker whose dance, music, ritual and writing deal with love, neglect of body, destruction of environment and atrophy of soul in consumerist society.
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“Summon the bravery!” Encounters at Small Earth

Filmmaker James Murray-White describes taking part in the Small Earth conference within the stunning beauty of Snape. At this special event, psychotherapists, ecologists, economists, philosophical and spiritual thinkers gathered to address hope for future living within the ecosphere.

1,490 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes

“Get the tools you need to understand where we’re currently living: in the belly of the beast.”

– Alastair McIntosh

The starting question for this powerful converging and sharing of minds in the wonderful location of Snape was “Can we return to living within the terms of Earth’s ecosphere?” And this question was minutely probed and dissected over an intense, sometimes gruelling, sometimes uplifting and ultimately rejuvenating four days. The choice of location was sublime: a place I know well and often regret I don’t spend enough time in — a place of water, reed beds, and the wonderful vast skies with multiple colour gradations to dream within; absolutely a setting to contemplate the miracle of our time on the blue dot of our earth.

Small Earth, big skies at Snape. Photograph by James Murray-White 2018 — Small Earth, big skies at Snape. Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

A miracle indeed, but a miracle that our human species has been bent on destroying — and this convergence was aimed at therapists and psychologists with a passion to serve the planet through their work.

Here was a chance to listen, to talk and share, and also to grieve for the pain of the world.

Reclaiming what gives life

To start each day, psychotherapist James Barratt offered us all the opportunity to share into a social dreaming matrix: a space to hear and reflect upon each others’ dreams. It feels particularly useful when a group has come together for a few days and is going through a process together, on any level. I found this powerful group process took us very deeply into our collective unconscious, and it was a strong learning to hear dreams and then have the chance to collectively unpick what they might be saying: finding threads and applying our experience to them.

As one of the few non-therapists attending, I dipped deeply in and needed some time to dip out. I found that it touched into lots of the work I’ve done since an MSc in Human Ecology at the (sadly now defunct) Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh some years back, and it was an honour to connect again with Gaelic shaman of the CHE and other institutions, Dr Alastair McIntosh — a keynote speaker.

McIntosh’s lecture on Saturday, Reclaiming what gives life, was full of his pain and passion for the human community: quoting psalms, Shakespeare, Gaelic poets; taking us with him on his journey across the island of Harris, and into the dark heart of the world of advertising, particularly the pernicious evil of the tobacco industry.

Drawing on his comments in the film Consumed, which opened the conference, he asked of us to call back the soul, by “looking at the nature of the belly of the beast”, that “the place of our calling is in the belly of the beast — don’t let it take us out of our natural joy.” The way forward is to “open up to that marginal realm where I suggest a healing will come.”

Small Earth, life abundant at Snape. Photograph by James Murray-White 2018 — Small earth, life abundant at Snape. Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

A highlight of the conference was meeting with naturalist Chris Packham, who shared ways to achieve a different way of thinking about our place within the ecosphere. Ultimately, he said, if we truly tap into our human capacity for altruism, restraint and care, we might survive: “once we recognise that we are just a keystone in our own ecological microsystems.”

Following on from this in a public lecture to four hundred of us, and accompanied by his dog Scratchy, Packham laid it on the line for humanity: “Summon the bravery. Look at it cold hard and in the face. It is an ecological apocalypse. We must act now.”

Other notable speakers included Jungian analyst Andrew Fellows; researcher, writer and transformational coach Mick Collins; novelist Melissa Harrison; and ecopsychologist Mary-Jayne Rust.

Making the Transformocene

Andrew Fellows started by playing us a song of the Earth from a Siberian shaman: calling us into the Earth and reminding us of our belonging. Combining hard fact — that human activity is adding heat to the atmosphere at the rate of four Hiroshima explosions every second, and that two years ago the global human call for air-conditioning overtook our call for heating — with an analyst’s perspective, he said: “We hang (in this ecosphere) by a thin thread, and that thread is man’s psyche”. Fellows spoke passionately to our failings and our human frailties — preparing us perhaps for McIntosh’s attempts to lift us spiritually.

Mick Collins spoke to what he names the Transformocene: that age which transforms and changes within the recent and the new. This draws upon the very necessary shadow work that humanity must undertake, which Collins calls us “to do with depth.” Naming himself a ‘wounded transformer’, speaking with great passion and, as described in conversations afterwards, coming from a rich discursive life of facing inner crises and awakenings, he is emerging as an important figure in our movement for change.

I relished coming back to creativity with writer Melissa Harrison, whose conviction she says comes from being part of “the last generation that was able to play and be outside.” That reminded me of David Bond’s 2013 documentary Project Wild Thing, which uses the diminishing statistic, from his mother’s 80% spent outdoors, his own 50% outdoors playtime, to his inner-City kids’ mere 3%, as the starting place to advertise the joys of being outdoors within the world. I looked after a friend’s kids the night after returning from Small Earth and was shocked that they were up at 6 am, devouring screen time and off in distant virtual lands of warfare and commodity.

Melissa Harrison inspired too: “I can hold both hope and pain at the loss of species and changing climate, but it’s painful. Why not try to hold hope?” She suggested that we all adopt our own home patches to protect and to closely observe, if we are not already in this act of service: “this sense of responsibility implies that we are the main players in this. Keep it cared for and vibrant.”

Small Earth - art, land and sky at Snape Photograph by James Murray-White 2018 — Art, land and sky at Snape Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

Gaining a calm presence on small Earth

Mary-Jane Rust gave an exemplary presentation that, for me, rounded off the few days and was grounded in doing, reflection and practice. With examples of eco-psychotherapy projects that re-engage folk with the earth, she spoke of “attending to our rage” at what we see and hear in terms of destruction and change and, with this, “becoming aware of our own emotional centre we gain a calm.” That presence, she suggests, “delivers us the present moment, and enables an attitude of reverence, humility, and an apology — to the Earth”.

These talks were followed by a range of follow-up afternoon workshops. I particularly loved the chance to forage for leaves, sticks and objects outside, and return to put them all together within an art-making workshop facilitated by Marion Green.

And I appreciated the buildings and cultural-creative environment of the Maltings, coming back to life after the end of their industrial use. The stunning beauty of Snape: the reeds, absorbing CO₂, the River Alde flowing up to the buildings, and the vast East Anglian sky, all reminded me that we live in a beautiful world. It’s up to each and every one of us to deeply engage, live a life in full service to the ecosphere, as well as to the human population and all other species that inhabit it too.

My thanks to the organisers, presenters, and fellow participants of Small Earth for this opportunity. May these few days enable us to continue to serve, and to quote Mick Collins, to live a life “in discipleship to nature, and to service.”

Find out more

The Small Earth conference took place at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, from 8th to 11th November 2018. It was organised by CONFER, an independent organisation established by psychotherapists in 1998 to provide innovative, challenging and inspiring continuing educational events for psychotherapists, psychologists and other mental health workers.

Mick Collins’ idea of the Transformocene is explored in his book, The Visionary Spirit. In the Spring 2018 Issue of Permaculture magazine, Mick explained: “We’re living in a time when we’re standing at the threshold of the Anthropocene – an era where humans have had an impact on the Earth’s eco-systems. In this way, the Anthropocene reflects the Spirit of the Times (zeitgeist), which highlights the degrading ways we’ve been treating the planet. In contrast, the idea for the Transformocene Age came to me after reading Carl Jung’s Red Book, which chronicles his meetings with the Spirit of the Depths. Therefore, the emergence of the Transformocene is cultivated via a deeper connection to the wisdom from the collective unconscious and through our encounters with the sacred.”

James Murray-White

A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.
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Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit
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Waiting for the Gift of Sound and Vision

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe launches a series exploring film and audio that open a space to reflect on change — choosing pieces on how human and non-human animals live, and how processes of time and tide shape our coasts.

1,530 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes + 15 minutes video

The challenge: Are there publicly available video or audio pieces that help us to explore the environmental or climate change issues that most interest us as artists, curators, researchers or activists? They might be documentary, abstract, fictional, natural soundscapes, spoken word, music or anything else which uses the power of film and sound recordings to reveal or create the experience of change, of movement or moment in time, space, place, consciousness, connection, emotion…

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On human-animal being

Mark Goldthorpe shares 73 Cows (15 mins)

In director Alex Lockwood’s beautifully thoughtful and moving film, 73 Cows (which I discovered via Aeon in October 2018), farmers Jay and Katja Wilde share their journey from raising beef cattle to animal-free farming — and the journey of the animals themselves. It’s an insightful encounter with the realities of one couple’s life on the land, living in close relationship with animals. I find it helpful because of its intensely personal focus cuts through some of the more familiar contest between opinions and the wielding of facts and figures in the debate on how we farm and feed ourselves and what ‘animal rights’ mean. It’s not trying to persuade me of anything, other than of our common ability to feel the weight of our own and others’ circumstances, and the tasks of questioning those circumstances and finding our own better way through them.

As the post at Aeon puts it: “Coming to recognise them as individuals with rich inner lives rather than just ‘units of production’, Wilde eventually found the emotional burden of sending his cattle to the abattoir too crushing to bear … Melancholic yet stirring and gently hopeful, this short documentary … deftly traces the complexities of Wilde’s decisionmaking process. In doing so, it reaches far beyond the English countryside, asking viewers to reckon with the moral intricacies of eating animals.”

Whatever your views on the topics before or after watching the film, I imagine you will find something moving in the experience it brings you.

On coastal change

Mark Goldthorpe shares Appledore Time & Tide Bell (2 mins 40 secs)

People explore the Time and Tide Bell at Appledore in Devon — Appledore Time and Tide Bell
Click image to listen to the audio file

Artist Marcus Vergette has created a series of Time and Tide Bells around the UK, each marking the local high tide. “The rise of the water at high tide moves the clapper to strike the bell. Played by the movement of the waves, the bell creates a varying pattern. As sea level rises the periods of bell strikes become more frequent, and as submerged in the rising water the pitch will vary.”

Five bells have been placed so far, at Appledore (Devon, England), Aberdyfi (Wales), Bosta (Isle of Lewis, Scotland), Trinity Buoy Wharf (London), and Cemaes (Anglesey, Wales). Marcus says of Appledore (where the first bell was installed in May 2009), “this estuary has some of the highest tides in Europe. Here they build ships, fish, trade to the Americas and to Russia. An important and historic port.” Each bell is inscribed with a text chosen by the local community. At Appledore, this is:

In thrall to the moon
rocked by her ebb and flow
I sing of swells beneath the stars
black waves at the storms height
new ships’ rhythmic passage west
seabirds in the dancing wake
all who set sail in sorrow or joy
and all who sleep below

So far, I’ve only visited the Trinity Wharf bell but I hope to experience each one. Trinity Wharf is where lighthouse keepers were trained and navigation buoys were made, so the resonance of its Time and Tide Bell with thoughts of future coastal hazards and adaptations is strong. But I chose the audio clip from Appledore instead because its soundtrack — the bell ringing against the waves — immediately said something to me of a place I’ve not yet been to (though I lived in Devon for a while) but which — like everywhere else — is undergoing change partly as a result of my actions, my existence. And the quiet, contrasting sounds of nature — the waves — and its cultural counterpart — the bell — captures a short moment within a changing relationship.

Time and tide in the more-than-human

Is there a connection between my two selections? Not at first sight maybe, and I certainly didn’t select them with any conscious link in mind. But the same mind chose them … so now I think of the slow-yet-rapid timescales of change on our coasts and of our experience of them, over our lifetimes and in those sudden, dramatic coastal shifts of storm and flood and collapse; and now I think of the ‘bigger picture’ and the longer story behind the Wildes’ story, the currents of change in how humans have understood other animals throughout our history, how each of us chooses to live with the domesticated ones and the wild ones now. And I remember that change is possible, natural, necessary: sometimes it comes one person at a time, sometimes in the movement of the herd. And, as we meet or make these changes, or as we don’t, still the bell chimes. What do we miss when we don’t hear its notes under the noise of everyday life?

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

– William Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar (1599)

“But dreaming builds what dreaming can disown.
Dead fingers stretch themselves to tear it down.
I hear those voices that will not be drowned
Calling, there is no stone
In earth’s thickness to make a home
That you can build with and remain alone.”

– Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes (1945, libretto by Montagu Slater).

***

And, then, after I’d written this post, reading a final BBC piece for the notes below, I discover that “Marcus came up with the Time and Tide idea following the foot-and-mouth outbreaks in 2001. Marcus and his wife Sally lost their stock of Angus cattle and Devon Closewool sheep in the epidemic and they were unable to leave their farm at Highampton because of the restrictions. Marcus’ permanent reminder to the awful events of 2001 is a bell, which hangs beside the village hall in Highampton.”

Time and tide: cows watch the coast in Ireland — Cows watching the coast, Ireland
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2007

Find out more

I discovered Alex Lockwood’s award-winning 73 Cows through Aeon (October 2018) and posted it to our Views from Elsewhere page (since discontinued) before I realised that my response to this film needed a different space — and then that this space might be useful for others to share their film and audio discoveries. Do check out our Gifts of Sound and Vision page as more offerings appear.

You can discover more of Lockwood’s films at … Lockwood Film. A review at film site Short of the Week says that 73 Cows “captures beautifully a crucible for Jay and Katja, and better than almost any documentary I’ve seen captures the moral weight of its action. Jay is torn by the logistical complexity of the farm’s change, and keenly feels the weight of obligation to his dead father from whom he inherited the farm. Yet, nobly, he is steadfast in his conviction. Agree or disagree with the ethics of animal husbandry, what else but courage do you call it when folks risk everything and defy societal norms to do what they feel is right?”

In an interview ahead of the Raindance Film Festival 2018 (where the film premiered), Alex said “I hope that when people watch 73 Cows that they really relate to Jay and the struggles that a lot of farmers must be secretly facing. Jay managed to completely turn his life around and do what he felt was right despite losing money, turning his back on his tradition and also going against the grain within his local community. So ultimately I see it as a hopeful film. Maybe people will watch it and feel like they can get over their own personal demons in the same way that Jay has gotten over his. That would be nice.” NB: This interview was for The New Current website, but is no longer available.

Sculptor Marcus Vergette discusses his project at Time and Tide Bell as “a permanent installation of bells around the UK rung by the sea at high tide. The Time and Tide Bell has been permanently sited at the high tide mark in five locations.” A new one is planned for Mablethorpe (Lincolnshire, England), with a description at the website of Transition Town Louth (which also has other coastal change related arts, Across the Seas).

In a short piece for the BBC website (3/9/10) for the creation of the Trinity Wharf bell, Marcus says “The Time and Tide Bell creates, celebrates and reinforces connections between our history and our environment … Here at Trinity Buoy Ward in Leamouth, it will serve as a powerful marker of sea level rise at the very heart of our maritime history.”

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.
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