Artist Michael Gresalfi explores the history of protest posters and their use for International Mother Earth Day (22nd April) through his own protest painting, “Replenish The Earth”. Michael invites fellow ClimateCultures members to share their Earth Month creations.
820 words: estimated reading time = 3.5 minutes
While Earth Month (and Earth Day) originated in the United States, it has become a massive global phenomenon. Today, it is recognized in over 193 countries, with approximately one billion people participating in environmental actions each April. In 2009, the UN officially designated April 22nd as ‘International Mother Earth Day.’ This solidified the April date as the primary global standard.
Earth Month needs artists like you
Artists of all mediums have engaged in this annual event through many different ways, including designing and then displaying ‘protest posters.’ From the broadsheets of the Reformation to the neon-soaked digital projections of today, protest posters have been used as a visual megaphone, and to get the message out in public forums to the people.
Legend says Martin Luther kicked things off by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door. Whether he used nails or glue, he effectively used the first ‘protest poster’ to challenge the most powerful institution in Europe, the Catholic Church and its Pope.
The Suffragettes were the first to master protest branding. They realized that for a movement to be taken seriously, it needed a cohesive look. They used purple (dignity), white (purity), and green (hope) on banners and sashes.
A golden age of protest posters
Perhaps the 1960s and 1970s might be considered the golden age of protest posters. Both the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement maximized the use of bold, artistic, and visceral protest posters and other forms of imagery for mass media consumption.
Here is a sample of those vintage environmental protest posters:
Examples of environmental protest posters
The advent of the so called ‘digital revolution’ had a major impact on the universal growth of protest posters. This phenomenon was kick-started by the accessibility of personal computers, affordable color printers, and the Internet.
“Replenish The Earth” – a call to creative action
So, my fellow ClimateCultures members, what are you creating to share during Earth Month? For me, I enjoy creating environmental protest paintings. They tend to look more like posters and typically each one reflects upon a single environmental issue, although I have presented up to a dozen such paintings within a solo gallery show, under the title “Our Changing Planet.” If interested, you can view one of my science-subtitled slide shows on my website.
So, here we are, only a month away from April, and the start of Earth Month. I am busy creating new environmental protest paintings (my painted posters) and looking for opportunities to both share my work and hopefully stimulate others to draw on their own creative muse and engage in this fight for the very survival of our Blue Jewel, planet Earth!
Will you join me and others around the world and create and share your personal protest against one or more of the environmental wounds we humans have caused to our home in the stars?
Here is an Earth Day protest poster that I just completed, entitled “Replenish The Earth.”
This climate-focused protest painting frames the push by Elon Musk to populate Mars as an invasive distraction, arguing that our true mission is not to escape to a dead planet, but to honor and restore the interconnected, breathing cycle of life that flourishes on our home world.
Earth Month runs throughout April. You can read about International Mother Earth Day, 22nd April 2026 at earthday.org, which includes an Earth Hub of resources. The site also covers previous years’ themes and campaigns, including Artists for the Earth last year. The 2025 theme continues this year: “Our Power, Our Planet”.
An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.
Playwright Chantal Bilodeau shares Climate Change Theatre Action’s new anthology of short plays on the climate crisis, whose theme of ‘All good things must begin’ takes an imaginative leap through challenging times towards a just and regenerative world.
1,850 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
As the fifth Climate Change Theatre Action festival (CCTA) unfolded in the fall of 2023, the world broke an unfortunate series of records, with every month in that season becoming the warmest September, October, November, and December ever recorded. Furthermore, the year 2023 as a whole marked the first time global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for a twelve-month period. If we needed a reminder of why we were doing what we were doing, it came loud and clear.
At the same time, in December 2023, at the UN Climate Conference in Dubai, thanks to a global Call to Action spearheaded by the Climate Heritage Network and signed by hundreds of arts and cultural organizations worldwide, the United Arab Emirates (hosts of COP28) and Brazil (future hosts of COP30 in 2025) announced the launch of the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action. An international coalition of UN Member States, the Group of Friends’ stated goal is to build “political momentum for the recognition of culture as a uniquely powerful force in climate change policy.” It remains to be seen how much influence this group will have and how this influence will translate into meaningful policies, but, at the very least, it confirms what many artists and cultural workers have known for years: There can be no transition to a more just and regenerative world without culture as a key driver.
Countless arts and cultural organizations are already working to address climate challenges with and within their community, capitalizing on the strength of cultural networks and the power of creativity and imagination. But we need more. As we know all too well, if we wait for change to come from the top, we will be waiting for a long time. The more we organize within our communities and work to dream up and implement the changes we want to see, the better prepared we will be to face the challenges ahead of us. In storytelling terms, this means we, artists, must be modern Jules Vernes and imagine not just the technology but also the systems – economic, social, environmental, educational, moral, etc. – of tomorrow, the systems that will support the lives of nine billion people on a finite Earth.
‘All Good Things Must Begin,’ edited by Chantal Bilodeau and published by the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (2024), features 50 short plays and six essays by writers from around the world.
Climate Change Theatre Action
Inaugurated in 2015 and hosted biennially, CCTA is a worldwide festival of short plays about the climate crisis, presented to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conferences. It is spearheaded by the Arts & Climate Initiative in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, and aims to bring communities together and inspire them to take action on climate. It represents the busiest and most exciting part of our year, the one time when we get to feel, at least for a few months, that we do (maybe?) have a tangible impact.
For every festival, we commission fifty playwrights, representing every inhabited continent, to write a five-minute play about an aspect of the climate crisis based on a prompt. Then, we make this collection of plays available to anyone interested in presenting an event in their community during a three-month window in the fall. Events can range from readings to fully produced performances and from podcasts to film adaptations. Organizers are encouraged to design their event to reflect their own aesthetic and the needs of their community, and to include additional material by local artists.
Monica Sanborn in ‘Actors Ready’ by Ethan King. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri.
To emphasize the ‘Action’ part of Climate Change Theatre Action, we also invite organizers to think about an action – educational, social, or political – that can be incorporated into their event. These actions may involve collaborations with the scientific community or local environmental organizations, or they may take the form of donations or protests. In the past, organizers have pledged to reduce consumption and adopt plant-based diets, raised money for hurricane relief and tree-planting efforts, cleaned rivers, donated to food banks, and written letters to legislators to demand policy change.
The five-minute format of the CCTA plays is not accidental. We want the plays to be as user-friendly as possible so they can be presented in different contexts by people with varying levels of experience and accommodate a wide range of budgets, including no budget at all. And while the short format may sound innocuous, five minutes pack a surprising punch, reliably bringing audiences to tears, generating laughter, and providing serious fodder for reflection. The plays can be performed individually as part of larger events – such as conferences and festivals – or grouped together in any number to create an evening of theatre.
All Good Things Must Begin
CCTA 2023 took place from September 17 to December 23, 2023. Once we had selected our fifty playwrights, we offered the following prompt:
Our theme this year, ‘All Good Things Must Begin,’ is inspired by the journal entry of American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler was determined to be a best-selling author. By setting intentions and visualizing this positive outcome, she defied the odds and became the author of many celebrated novels, winning each of science fiction’s highest honors. She was also incredibly prescient, writing about extremism, racial justice, and climate change some thirty years ago. While the worlds of her novels depict the violent challenges of today’s interlocking crises, her protagonists remain devoted to thriving, to achieving survival beyond the destructive and oppressive societies they come from.
The climate crisis demands the same kind of imaginative leap: We will create a just and regenerative world only if we dare to imagine it first and use that vision to guide us through the difficulties. We invite you to be solarpunks and envision radical pluralistic futures where nature and community thrive, and where we reject the apocalypse and embrace counterculture, post-capitalism, and decolonization. This doesn’t necessarily translate into utopias but into worlds where successes and failures exist side by side, and where hope, courage, and grief overlap.
All Good Things Must Begin: Short Plays Imagining the Future is the response to this prompt. Playwrights share their vision of what the future may hold with humor, poetry, playfulness, hope, courage, and sometimes grief and pain. They tackle topics such as intolerance, civic action, cultural heritage, interspecies relationships, and Indigenous knowledge in a variety of styles and approaches that provide as many entry points into a complex conversation. The book was released this past October and is available on Lulu Press in paperback and ebook, or from your domestic online bookstore.
Scott Redmond in ‘The Polar Bears’ by Nicolas Billon. Presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative in September 2023 in New York City as part of ‘The Future Within Us,’ the kick-off event of CCTA 2023. Photo by Roshni Khatri.
Our goal with this publication is to make the fifty plays of CCTA 2023 available to as many people as possible so they can be studied, read, performed, and inspire the kinds of dreams that empower us to make bold changes. In addition to the plays, the book features six essays by members of the greater CCTA family: Himali Kothari, Elspeth Tilley, Mark Wallace, Clare Preuss, Ian Garrett, and GiGi Buddie. These essays provide insights on various aspects of the project, ranging from working with students to hosting events in areas dominated by the oil industry, and from exploring ecoscenography to understanding one’s role in protecting the planet. One of the essays also crunches down the numbers to evaluate the festival’s impact.
Climate anxiety and climate distress are on the rise, especially among the younger generation. While these feelings are healthy responses to the existential challenges we face, for any action to be possible, let alone sustainable, they must be addressed – and harnessed toward positive transformation. A way in which this can happen is through keeping a sense of possibility alive. By reminding ourselves that ‘good things’ don’t appear fully formed but must begin somewhere, and what we aspire to can be put in motion anytime, we can hopefully keep despair at bay. After all, beginnings are always acts of faith. So, whether you are an artist, an activist, an educator, or a student, we encourage you to get your own copy and use the plays to foster generative conversations and – hopefully – joyful action.
Find more
All Good Things Must Begin: Short Plays Imagining the Future, edited by Chantal Bilodeau (2024), is published by Lulu, and available in paperback or ebook.
In February 2024, European science agency Copernicus announced that, for the first time ever, global average heating exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, on average, for a 12-month period during 2023. Dr. Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a UCS statement “This data doesn’t mean the primary goal of the Paris climate agreement has been breached, as nations committed to limiting global average temperatures over the long-term—typically considered 20 to 30 years—rather than tying their efforts to a day, month, or year-long anomaly. That said, world leaders should take serious heed of Copernicus’ latest finding by quickening their current snail’s pace to slash heat-trapping emissions and helping to safeguard communities and ecosystems from unavoidable climate impacts. The latest IPCC report found that the planet will likely breach the 1.5-degree-Celsius mark within the next 11 years unless global heat-trapping emissions peak by 2025.”
A playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change, and co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action ...
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White visited the Planet Local Summit, finding in its examples of urgent work around the world to foster being and acting locally a cultural turning towards nature as antidote to climate and ecological breakdown.
1,800 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes
Once in a while I’m fortunate to attend a gathering — truly in this case an in-gathering of a community — that is so warm and focused that my intuitive heart knows that this is a real crystallisation of the worldwide urgent work going on, and that this will be a big impetus for it to flourish, broaden and deepen.
Helena Norberg-Hodge, inspirational founder of Local Futures, the organising NGO, spoke in her opening address of the Planet Local Summit of all attendees being part of the ‘bacterial mycelia’ seeding the crucialness of acknowledging our local belonging. This felt a deep truth and, as I write and reflect, still feels the best take-home gift. I left Bristol feeling energised to return home (currently Cambridge) with many gifts, new and old connections made and refreshed, and a strong motivation to keep working at a local level. I returned specifically to co-host a public engagement event called Dear River, of which more later.
Helena set the term ‘localisation’ as the antidote to the twin threats of climate and ecological breakdown, happening at speed now in every corner and continent of our planet, and the death march of the industrial/economic system that capitalism has wrought upon the human world. By acknowledging, being and acting locally — in terms of fostering community, emphasising well-being, local food growing, and community care — including finance staying within our local systems, Local Futures describes localisation through these actions as “a cultural turning towards nature” and “an expression of our need for connection — both to others and to all living beings.”
This was the first post-pandemic gathering for me that I felt called to, due to both the high-profile speakers in-person and the sessions sharing case studies of specific local actions and issues. From Helena, Bayo Akomolafe, Morag Gamble, Iain McGilchrist and Charles Eisenstein to many other brilliant engagers, thinkers and philosophers, pragmatists, growers and weavers, the hall at St George’s, associated spin-off rooms — including the cafe/bar, and various rooms at the nearby Folk House venue, and The Tobacco Factory arts centre to which the summit relocated on day three — were all humming with conversations and ideas brewing and being dissected and unpicked.
The big evening conversation on the Friday, a much-hyped conversation between XR co-founder Roger Hallam and ex-Government Minister Zac Goldsmith felt almost a dampening of the enthusiasm during the day: neither seemed to absorb the energy of the gathering, and while they found a kind of middle ground around failures of policy, and the potential of coming bloody revolutions (and the history of previous ones), neither could really offer any threads to hold hope upon.
The community-building that XR and Just Stop Oil has created is hugely commendable and needs anchors and deep seeding across all levels of our societies. I recently heard about an elderly couple who watched Chris Packham’s incisive and timely documentary struggling with his conscience about being arrested for activism and using his powerful voice; and they are now inspired to act, in whatever local way they are able.
On the other hand, Goldsmith’s tale of woe and pressure from lobbyists, including in one notable case the National Farmers Union, against plans for environmental support he was proposing is simply insane, and needs calling out. This is the industrial death machine of chemicals, vested interest, power; the insecurity of the human mind, tragically, that has created this huge schism in a world with so much staggering beauty, potential, and constant flux and change. The next day, Charles Eisenstein’s words — “The idea that the change can happen with the right person in charge is inherently wrong” — reminded me of Goldsmith and Hallam, and also the pedestals and stages we create for leaders to stand on (and fall or get kicked off, because we’re fallible humans!).
It was a joy to hear philosopher Iain McGilchrist reflect upon the theme, both alone and in conversation with Bayo Akomalafe and then Helena. I’m struck by his phrase:
“We are here to respond to the values of the universe, both in belonging ourselves and as part of the human community; to develop and expand our relationship to the natural world, and, partly as a result of these two practices, to live within divinity.”
A one-to-one conversation with Iain became a beautiful engagement around the theme of grace, which is an enduring talisman for me to hold. I recommend Iain’s The Master & His Emissary for an erudite scientific dissection of the schism in our body-brain and how this permeates across human history.
Food and farming, and the systems that support them, was a key theme of the Summit. With another hat on, I’m a member of the team making Six Inches Of Soil, a new documentary on regenerative agriculture and new entrant farmers, which will be premiered at the Oxford Real Farming Conference early in 2024, so I’ve an interest here, as I hope we all have. It’s increasingly clear that knowing our local farmers and buying direct or from local farmers’ markets, with local supply chains, is vital to planetary health and soil-human survival and potential thriving.
Chris Smaje, smallholder, writer and food activist, based outside Frome, and Jyoti Fernandez, farmer, activist, and co-founder of the Landworker’s Alliance, are tremendous forces for good in this sphere. Both are making change, standing strong against big farm companies and food/meat manipulation and galvanising opinion.
It was refreshing to hear from Nelson Mudzingwa, a Zimbabwean farmer who has struggled to gather seed sovereignty and organic certification across his land and the African continent. By open source seed saving, his collective is developing crop resilience to climate change in their region. Words of hope from a country known for bitter political struggle. Farmer, former head of the Soil Association and now founder of the Sustainable Food Trust, Patrick Holden chaired this session with passion and aplomb, though I found his constant allusions to connections across the CEO worlds, including Bill Gates, distracting and pretty irrelevant given the brilliance within this audience and panel.
Speaking from a new story
A day and a half in, however, I was chomping at the bit for news from really local actions, initiatives and community building from these isles. As a former Bristol resident, I know that this city is bursting with creative social enterprise and strong community efforts, particularly around peri-urban food growing and combatting poverty. It’s a gritty sprawl of communities, and I sadly heard there had been a stabbing that led to a fatality in a neighbourhood nearby on Friday.
I had expected to meet the Street Goat Project bringing their furry troupe up the steps of St George’s to engage with us all. However I found the answer in a brilliant presentation from three members of Frocal in the village of Forest Row, Sussex: in a nutshell, asking themselves “what it might be like if we all lived and acted more locally?” They gave examples of their success and failures and acknowledged that it was a work in progress, albeit a vital effort for these times. I will visit friends there and investigate shortly. Frocal feels like a really valuable and catalysing project.
Other takeaways for me include the theme of colonisation of the mind as well as land and countries and continents: Vandana Shiva in her pre-recorded video highlighted this, reminding us that just 600 men created the East India Company treaty (that our monarch signed and sealed) to sail off and colonise that part of the world. Anthropologist Darcia Narvaez picked up on this with her fascinating presentation on her work on Nestedness, agreeing “we are all colonised”, and how might we respond to that knowing? Her thesis continues in the knowledge of our connectedness to, and acceptance of, our heritage.
Keynote speaker Charles Eisenstein delivered a meandering wander through his response to the topic — “ I trust the deployment of the intelligence that my gifts will be useful for” — and concurred with the broader theme that we “need to speak to people from a new story”. He brings a wisdom to our human need to really acknowledge that “technology is reaching deeper and deeper into the core of what it means to be human” and that our “common goal is to rekindle our connections”.
Sadly, I had to leave after two days, and the third and final day of the summit relocated to another Bristol venue, and I suspect drilled down more into very local UK and Bristolian specifics.
What called me very strongly back to my locale was an event I co-hosted to celebrate water and river systems at this time of waking up to the sorry state most rivers are in, and specifically how they are being abstracted from, and our human sewage dumped within. Dear River was a locally-organised gift to our community, to meet the issue with creativity, grief, and space — space to gather, to listen, to respond, and to ask “what can we do?” After two days of deep stimulation at Planet Local and then this event, I suspect that asking this question is our fullest human response.
Find more
The Planet Local Summit took place from 29th September to 1st October 2023, in Bristol, UK. You can find the full programme, find about the speakers and watch the livestream recording on the Local Futures website.
James highlights Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master & His Emissary (2009). You can find out more at Channel McGilchrist, and James shares his experiences taking part in and filming a retreat with Iain in a post for James’s Finding Blake project on William Blake: Exploring the Divided Brain.
And Six Inches of Soil is the film James has been working on: “the inspiring story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food — to heal the soil, benefit our health and provide for local communities.”
And here on ClimateCultures, you will find many other pieces by James, including his review of fellow member Susan Holliday’s book, Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart.
Climate change communicator Julia Marques helped amplify COP26 reporting from the Blue Zone in Glasgow. Here she looks at the artworks she encountered at the COP and the value of creative activity alongside the activism and negotiations.
2,570 words: estimated reading time = approximately 10 minutes
As I entered the Blue Zone of COP26 in Glasgow last November, I was struck by how artificial the place was. It seemed strange to be discussing the environment within extremely unnatural surroundings, with just a few plants dotted around.
But my eye was looking for art. Any art. Just something to indicate that the organisers had thought about more than merely providing four walls and a roof for negotiators to agree on what each country would do to tackle climate change for the next year.
I was feeling fairly nervous and overwhelmed. This is one of the biggest summits of the year, and it’s about one of the biggest issues that we are currently facing as a species on Earth.
I was at the COP with the editorial team of Climate Home News — an independent news outlet specialising in the politics of climate change — as their community engagement manager. Although I have been thinking and working in the climate space for several years, I am fairly new to the media world and the specialism of working in the climate politics space. There’s a lot to learn, and COP is a big part of that world so I felt very privileged to be a part of it and wanted to experience it to the fullest.
As a community engagement manager, I am constantly learning what captures people’s attention and keeps them coming back for more. At Climate Home News, we report on a fairly niche topic and aim to appeal to climate specialists but also those who are more generally interested in what is going on in climate politics. Art can bridge the gaps between specialist knowledge and public understanding; unfeeling data and a myriad of emotions.
We know that data and science aren’t enough; we need good communication that speaks to people’s values and worldviews. I was hoping that the COP organisers had taken this into account. I certainly wanted to see more than just MDF and concrete. I was there to work, but also to be inspired by the spectacle of COP.
Did I find any art? Well, yes actually, I did.
Into the Action Zone
After the security area and initial entrance hall, there was the Action Zone, which, funnily enough, is where I saw most people napping due to the comfy seats available there.
But this was also where a huge globe slowly turned over their sleeping heads. It was beautiful, gently showcasing the wonderful place we live and what’s at stake in the discussions taking place below it. It gave an incredibly relaxing feel to an otherwise manic venue, with 20,000 people running around each day for two weeks, on their way to meetings, debates and other events.
I personally enjoyed going to this area to take a break from the madness of the negotiations and trying to capture them on social media as part of my role at Climate Home News.
After the Action Zone, I spotted this piece — Hurry Up Please It’s Time by Cornelia Parker. A very timely reminder to all those involved in the process, but especially the leaders. This COP included a leaders’ summit in the first two days (not all COPs do). So there would have been many world leaders walking by this piece of art. It was stark and direct, a counter to the convoluted and complex negotiations (unsurprising when you have 197 countries trying to agree on something).
Further down this main corridor, I reached the Pavilions. This is the part of COP that many people say reminds them of an oversized trade show. Seemingly anyone can have a pavilion, some were country pavilions, others were themed — such as the methane pavilion — and others were run by organisations such as Chatham House.
This area was a bit of a maze but there was a lot going on and it felt like quite an exciting part of the venue. Confusing — each pavilion had its own agenda of events, which were not available anywhere other than the pavilion itself — but buzzing!
I personally enjoyed this area as a place to meet others and explore what each country or organisation wanted to showcase. A lot of the leaders and some celebrities who attended could also be found walking around this area and it was very likely that you would bump into one or two just by being there! In my case, Justin Trudeau casually ambled by as I was waiting for Leonardo di Caprio to emerge from the meeting room of the UNFCCC pavilion. I also saw Nicola Sturgeon several times, walked past John Kerry by the country offices, and brushed shoulders with Alok Sharma more than once.
However, my personal favourite encounter was with Christiana Figueres in the Action Zone. She was sitting eating her lunch when I noticed her and stood nervously summoning up the courage to go over and talk to her. Eventually, I did, and she was very happy to meet me and revealed that she is a big fan of Climate Home News. We took a photo together before parting ways, and I was thrilled. She has been a big part of previous COPs as former head of the UNFCCC, and was influential in getting the Paris Agreement finalised.
Christiana Figueres (right) and Julia in the Action Zone at COP26
One aspect of the conference that I found pleasantly surprising was the accessibility to leaders and other people of note that you had in the venue. There were a lot of indigenous peoples attending COP and they could be seen harassing leaders over their lack of action on indigenous and environmental rights. This is something I don’t believe happens at any other conference of this scale. Kudos to COP for keeping this particular aspect alive and well.
Right at the back of the pavilion area, I came across a huge piece of art. Although it was quite hard to see fully due to space limitations, it still left an impression. This was the only piece of indigenous art that I saw in the entire Blue Zone. It turned out to be the Bamboo Ark Vela Mola, a sail sewn together by 37 Guna mola artists from the Gunayala islands off the coast of Panama.
It had symbolically travelled across the sea to Glasgow and they had managed to sneak it into the Blue Zone and display it near the Panama pavilion. A ‘mola’ is a colourful hand-sewn cloth which is unique to the Guna people. The organisation behind the sail’s appearance at COP was Geoversity, and two indigenous leaders formed part of the group bringing this piece of art and indigenous messaging to COP26.
I was glad to have found some form of indigenous art. There was also an Indigenous Peoples pavilion in the area, where various leaders could gather and share experiences. Indigenous representation is crucial to these negotiations, although much of the time these voices are not included in the main plenary meetings.
I think the fact that the sail was not an official piece of COP art says it all — indigenous people are not barred from attending but the barriers for them to do so are higher than for others. Many had long journeys to get to Scotland and return home, with various quarantines due to Covid19 along the way. The accreditation process is online and bureaucratic, and then of course there is also the cost of travel and accommodation (something which many people struggled with, including the Climate Home team – I’d like to thank the Human Hotel for their great initiative in sourcing homestays for many delegates and attendees).
Beautifully colourful and vibrant, this piece certainly stood out and was in stark contrast to the blue and white of the rest of the venue. It’s a shame it wasn’t in a more prominent position, but I think the fact it was there at all is testament to the resilience of indigenous peoples around the world.
As I made my way further into the venue, there was a long corridor between the pavilions, the country offices and the plenary and meeting rooms. Here I found another turning globe, but this one was not so exact and had UV writing on it which only appeared under the lights at the back of the installation. These words proudly proclaimed that “people live here” with arrows pointing to all the ‘four corners’ of this particular globe.
This was a piece by Oliver Jeffers and seemed to me to be raising awareness of the fact that we are talking not only about climate, but about people. People do live nearly everywhere on Earth, and it can be easy to forget this when following high-level negotiations with technical language. It is people causing rapid climate change and it is people (among other beings) who are being affected by it.
I thought the sentiment of this piece was nice, but I think the writing could have been more obvious — would it not have made more of an impression to have words squeezed into every bit of land to show the scale of human occupation?
Further down the corridor there were some satirical cartoons about climate change and also some children’s messages to the leaders (although I am unsure whether they would have had time to stop and read them). The Eden Project also had a hive-like structure situated at the border between where nearly everyone was allowed and where you had to have a media, observer or party pass to get through. Hexagonal shapes creating a dome emulated the biomes of the real Eden Project in Cornwall, UK. The idea was to bring a ‘cabinet of climate curiosities’ to COP26 that represent what change is needed to tackle the climate crisis.
I suppose this was quite a significant location for the pavilion; a physical area of transformation from a fairly accessible part of the Blue Zone to a more restricted area reserved for those who were more involved with the actual nitty-gritty negotiations. It prompted me to ask myself: Is this the transformation needed, or do we actually need to allow more people in?
This led to the pre-fab part of the conference, which noisily wobbled and leaked when Glaswegian wind and rain swept in towards the end of the first week. One of the plenary rooms also started leaking part way through week one, meaning they couldn’t let anyone in until they’d fixed it. I’m not sure if the people knee-deep in the process were too aware of the natural world outside making its presence felt inside, beyond being grateful not to be out in it!
Art — cause for contemplation
There was increasingly less art as you walked through; some photos of innovators in the e-waste space and a little display on nature-based solutions. By the time I got to the media centre (all the way through the entire venue, about a 20-minute walk) the organisers had obviously given up, with only white walls and blue signs left to adorn the hallways.
However, this was the concentration centre of the conference. Journalists need a place to gather their material and their thoughts, compose a piece of audio, visual or written work, and publish it to (often tight) deadlines. I witnessed many journalists miss family birthdays and children’s bedtimes so that they could report on the negotiations. I would like to acknowledge the dedication to the cause that many of them have. The media often gets vilified, but there are many reporters and editors who do care deeply about the climate crisis and diligently report on it. So perhaps in this instance, there is no need for any other art; the art is being created in a quietly studious way in this very practical place as the negotiators bustle around the rest of the venue with its more decorated areas.
There was, however, a beautiful view of the sunset from the media centre windows — Nature’s art, in all its shining glory. I was told by the more seasoned reporters that it was actually quite nice to even have windows in the media centre, as sometimes they are merely provided with walls, floor and a ceiling. In a way, this was the best art of all as the rest of the venue had little access to the outside.
Art is there to give us cause for contemplation, to give us the space we need to think about things. Art can also prompt us to think about them in a different way, and this is what we need when it comes to climate change. We need a mindset shift to figure out how to live differently. Perhaps the negotiators, technical experts and policy makers also need to be given some time to reflect and process things in an unconference-type way. Art can help with this, and I’d like to think that the little pieces of art dotted around the venue may have made a few of them stop for a minute and wander into another world before the pull of the negotiations brought them back to where they were. It certainly helped me.
This COP was the 26th Conference of the Parties on climate change. They’ve been going since 1995. That’s 26 years of talking. Now is the time for action, and perhaps art can spur that action through imagination and time for contemplation. Let’s have more of it in future climate negotiations.
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You can explore some of the artworks Julia has featured in her post:
Julia mentioned the Human Hotel: the COP26 Homestay Network supported people attending the COP by enabling people in Glasgow and surrounding areas to offer space in their private homes as overnight accommodation for visitors from the climate justice movement.
Julia is Community Engagement Manager for Climate Home News whose mission is to deliver original journalism that informs and inspires action to tackle the global climate crisis. You can follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
A climate change dramatist, activist and communicator specialising in social and cultural aspects of climate change who has worked in the nonprofit and media sector.
Composer Lola Perrin and curator Rob La Frenais invited three artists and organisers to talk about their creative work for COP26 and their feelings about the global conference’s failure to match the warm rhetoric of its first day.
2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes
For many, in the days and weeks after COP26, along came a new wave of grief. Friends privately confessed to fits of uncontrollable sobbing from pure rage at international politicians still ignoring the science, otherwise they’d be in full emergency mode. The conference began with pretty speeches with presenters including David Attenborough and the Prince of Wales repeating each other’s words; “the time has come to act”. But just over two weeks later when COP26 ended, scores of new fossil fuel licences were signed, sanctioning production well into at least the 2040s.
Compare those pretty speeches to the dignitaries and the world’s media with the actions by global citizens who do indeed act — in any way they can to put a stop to the killing machine, but who are increasingly criminalised and imprisoned for doing just that. Also what of other acts, for example, birth strikes among women and some men who withhold reproduction as protest in the face of extinction, and hunger strikes that regularly appear across the world in which people decide to act by withholding food in protest at genocidal government policies? These acts rarely make mainstream news but they are there. So turning back to those pretty words on the first day of COP26 when all and sundry appealed for action, what kind of action were they talking about when it’s so hugely controversial to even mention ending fossil fuels in any final COP agreement? No wonder we cry and rage in frustration.
For this ClimateCultures post we wanted to see what three artists/organisers who took part in COP26 with creative work felt about the failure of the COP and where they will go next.
Miranda Whall is a performance artist based in Wales who crawled through the pouring rain as delegates met indoors, eventually to no avail. She expresses her frustrations powerfully in her performance and here.
Warren Senders is a musician, member of the New England Conservatory faculty and activist, and part of Music for Climate Justice which organised music events during COP26, both live in Glasgow and virtually in nine online concerts featuring 350 global musicians. Warren and Music for Climate Justice were focused on using culture to bring an indigenous voice to COP26. The concerts repeatedly broadcast this message; “Planetary Climate Change threatens our civilisation and therefore, all human art and music, there is No Time to Waste”.
Mike Stubbs is the former Director of FACT, Liverpool and has now returned to his artistic practice as well as directing ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster. His early work was based on young people’s fascination with car culture. His latest work questions this early fascination, in ‘Climate Emergency Services’ — a van spray-painted in hot rod style with images from the Australian bush fires — which he took to Glasgow for COP26.
“On Saturday 6th November I crawled with a six-year-old potted Scots Pine on my back through the centre of Glasgow, from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and I silently and determinedly made our way through heavy rain and high winds to reach our destination. The intention of my heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism was an expression of my grief, my despair and my outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed, and an insistence that non–human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.
“My hope was that crawling to the COP26 United Nations climate change conference carrying a tree that was equal in size to my body might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. We all literally need to get down from our human-centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human-made catastrophe.”
Warren Senders
Music4ClimateJustice performance, November 6th 2021: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ Terje Isungset composer and musicians performing on instruments carved from ice.
“To be clear, I was not ‘at’ COP26. I stayed in my small house in Medford, MA. Other people from the M4CJ (Music for Climate Justice) organisation were in Glasgow. I organised and produced eight days of streamed video content: music, profiles, and interviews addressing the intersectionalities of climate activism and the performing arts. This worked out to 4.5 – 5 hours of music a day, from the 5th to the 12th of November (with a live opening event in Glasgow that I did not work on). The artists and activists we presented came from all over the world; the M4CJ ‘Festival’ was almost certainly the most diverse musical event in human history.
“Participating artists contributed a video performance and added a short spoken statement about climate change. Some of the performances were created for this event; others were archival. In several cases, the estate or trust for a major artist who was no longer alive agreed to contribute material. Interviews and panel discussions included profiles of artists, activists, musicians/composers working with climate data, ethnomusicologists & eco-musicologists, and artists & thinkers in related fields.”
“I presented Climate Emergency Services (CES) outside the Glasgow Transport Museum on the opening weekend of COP26 and then spent four days in Glasgow at the end. The artwork was hosted by the Coventry Biennale and Govan Project Space. Activities included the artwork appearing as a confounding, confused hot-rod/emergency vehicle to stimulate conversations on cars and climate emergency. I drove around Glasgow and managed to become part of a strange parade with other (police) emergency vehicles tagging along on the back of an organised pedestrian protest march. I was the only vehicle other than three cop cars.”
How has the failure of COP26 directed your intentions towards future actions?
Miranda Whall
“The failures of COP26 have enraged me and so empowered my determination and commitment to take this performative work much further. Up until the crawl in Glasgow I had crawled in isolated and rural locations, so my audience was mostly an infrequent passer-by. Crawling in a busy urban centre took the performance directly to a bigger and wider engaged and non-engaged public. Both on the streets of Glasgow and on the politically polarised and de-humanised highways of social media I felt simultaneously empowered and vulnerable. Down there on my hands and knees, I began to more fully realise the performance’s potential to aggravate and alleviate, to provoke and heal. And I more fully realised that this human/animal/vegetal/technological hybrid that I have created is a new ‘thing’; an alliance, a symbiotic union, a co-creating community, an interconnected future.”
“I don’t think terms like ‘success’ or ‘failure’ are applicable to COP26, or any such conference. Lacking the ability to set policy, the conference is not describable in those terms. It succeeded in conveying the current state of climate-change research to policy-makers. It succeeded in forcing climate change into the forefront of worldwide media coverage for a few days. It gave activists something to do, a way to connect … and gave the climate movement a lot to think about going forward (issues of intersectionality, of indigenous representation, of systemic discrimination, economic models, etc). It failed to generate hard policy outcomes … but to expect COP26 to result in systemic transformation was to expect that (in a hopefully soon-to-be-obsolete metaphor) the airport bus would grow wings and take off down the runway.
“Such expectations represent a popular (and entirely understandable) need for a deus ex machina which would magically solve our problems. I was not immune to that feeling; none of us were.
Music4ClimateJustice performance on 6th November: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ with Aparna Sindhoor’s Encounter, dance theatre Inspired by indigenous people’s fight for their forest.
Mike Stubbs
“It makes me want to want to continue to mingle and discuss these issues with members of the unconverted members of society, i.e. car nuts, pissed people, street dwellers, middle-class shoppers, kids and anyone not into COP26 or the environment. Climate Emergency Services is a hot rod with a gun on the roof playing extra loud birdsong, flashing lights and a sci-fi plant glowing/growing inside. It’s not a bad way of sparking up a conversation.”
What ideas do you have for your next climate-engaged work?
Miranda Whall
“I am now planning further solo urban tree crawls and collective urban tree crawls. I am also preparing to crawl in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt with a palm tree on my back for COP27 from the 7th – 18th November 2022. I will crawl for longer and further and hopefully up to, if not into, the conference and negotiation centre. In Glasgow, I reached the entrance of the Green Zone. This was ineffectual, next time I need to crawl to the entrance of the Blue Zone or its equivalent in Sharm El- Sheikh.”
Warren Senders
“I’ll go on doing what I’ve been doing all along. Daily vigils, a daily quota of political activity, intermittent public activism (marches, sit-ins, possible NVCD), and intermittent benefit concerts as part of an ongoing collaboration with M4CJ. I hope to present the first such event in May or June 2022 (I’ve organised 21 previous benefit concerts since 2009).”
Mike Stubbs
“I am trying to find a sustainable model with Creative Folkestone on how to continue the work of Climate Emergency Services and am planning to tour to festivals, motor shows and schools, integrating practical workshops on air quality monitoring and growing. Additionally, in Doncaster I am going to be announcing an open call for a new artists residency scheme on sustainability and water and a lab which will develop new critical work on climate for ArtBomb Festival 22 in August next year.”
Many people feel dismayed at business since COP26. What must happen so we’re happy in 2025?
Miranda Whall
“The wind is gusting its terrifying gusts outside my window as I write this. The wind terrified me as a child because it blew down walls and trees and shook my window, I would crawl into my parents’ bed and stick my fingers into my ears until it blew itself out. I remember loving the peace and quiet that followed. But now the wind terrifies me more than ever, because I know what it means and I know there is no peace and quiet to follow. What we must do could not be more clear — leaders must lead and businesses, corporations and citizens must follow. Simple. I am on my hands and knees pleading. I cannot articulate this better or differently.”
Warren Senders
“What would make us happy would be the governments of the world taking climate change seriously and engaging in concerted and robust collective action. Is there a mechanism to make this happen? No. The systemic inability of our governance to cope with climate change is a diagnostic indicator pointing to a structural problem in our governing mechanisms themselves. In geopolitics, hasty actions between nations are likely to be harbingers of war. The UN was developed specifically to reduce both the likelihood and the severity of such hasty actions — providing a place where disputes between nations can be discussed instead of leading to armed hostilities. That is to say: the UN was created in order to make international relations slower, more measured, more reflective. Which is a structural problem in light of the fact that what the climate crisis demands is that we all act very quickly. The UN isn’t equipped to direct concerted and robust collective international action any more than that airport bus is equipped to be an airplane.
“At this stage in the crisis, our happiness must come in the successful resolution of short-term problems. We live in ‘interesting times’, and our responsibility is to the future.”
Music4ClimateJustice performance 6/11/21: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ “Bhuka Tiende”, Dzapasi Mbira Group. Most musicians in Zimbabwe are subsistence farmers. They are already suffering from extreme climate change.
Mike Stubbs
“We will never be happy. Continue to engage the disenchanted, talk to your family, collaborate with like minds, write to MPs, become councillors, be artists, make art and protest when you can.”
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Lola Perrin adds: I was interviewed by Warren as part of M4CJ at COP26 and appeared in the concert on November 11th. I found I became gradually more and more addicted to the concerts once they started streaming on November 5th — they’re quite deeply emotional and the breadth of work gathered together from 350 engaged musicians across the world is really powerful. Here are links to the M4CJ COP26 streamed concerts on YouTube:
Miranda Whall is an interdisciplinary and performance artist based in Wales. She says of her crawling works, “My crawling projects are titled Crossed Paths. So far for Crossed Paths – Animals I have crawled as a sheep, badger, almost otter and I have carried out extensive research for mountain hare. For Crossed Paths – Trees I have crawled with an Oak tree, Birch tree and May tree. Other crawling projects are in development. Crossed Paths is a project about going deeply into the living landscape, ecosystems and interspecies dynamics to explore animal, plant, land and human narratives.” On Miranda’s Vimeo channel, you can watch her Showreel for COP26 Glasgow.
Mike Stubbs is an artist, curator and consultant, Director of ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster and former Director of FACT Liverpool. You can read more about Climate Emergency Services, which was commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021.
A composer and classically trained pianist focused on the disconnect between the climate emergency and programming in music venues and her ClimateKeys global no-fly concert series.
An independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions, directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible.
Artist Michael Gresalfi explores the history of protest posters and their use for International Mother Earth Day (22nd April) through his own protest painting, “Replenish The Earth”. Michael invites fellow ClimateCultures members to share their Earth Month creations.
