Wednesday 30 May 2012

New on our news page

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

The Hay Festival kicks off today, with talks on architecture, food, art, social justice and fashion activism for starters.

We also feature summer celebrations of a place: the Jurassic Coast, Stonehenge, Wilderness and the Thames.

Thinking ahead, Nick Dear's new play, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, about the poet and nature writer Edward Thomas, opens at London's Almeida Theatre in the autumn.

image: iwantdesign

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Tuesday 29 May 2012

The right environment

from The Last Lunch
Wallace Heim writes:

The Best New Play Award, offered collaboratively by New Writing South and the Brighton Fringe, is an award that has nothing to do with ecology. But this year’s award was given to two productions that have something to do with ecology.

Playwright Jonathan Brown won for his play about meat-eating, The Last Lunch.

The company Feral Theatre won for Triptych, three productions on loss and extinction: Papusza, The Last of the Curlews and TreeStory. 

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Thursday 24 May 2012

New on our news page


The summer music festival season starts this weekend. We select the less-carboned, solar-powered, up-cycled, educational, chilled and frenzied green ones.

In Dorset, artists walk and talk with people who use their feet (26 bones) or their hands (27 bones) to work with or to investigate the Jurassic Coast.

In Bath, FAB, the Fringe Arts Bath Festival, starts this week-end, with themes of Sustainable Earth and Metamorphosis.

We've added the ecologist Wendell Berry's National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture, 'It All Turns on Affection', to our online essays.

In London, there's an alternative Rio+20 conference; an exhibition on the anthropocene; and an evening sharing food growing stories from Ljubljana, Havana, Chiapas in Mexico and Jaos in Palestine.

image above from the Isle of Wight festival
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Wednesday 23 May 2012

Tom Toles wedding cartoon

Copyright (c) The Washington Post
Kellie Gutman writes:


Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles' latest cartoon on climate change.

Toles has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning, winning in 1990.  He replaced the legendary cartoonist Herblock at the Washington Post in 2002. Toles' cartoons are syndicated in over 200 newspapers.  He is known for tackling complicated subjects such as environmental issues.  He often includes a small doodle, a caricature of himself, in the corner.
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Tuesday 22 May 2012

U.S. Energy Secretary Chu on The Avengers


Kellie Gutman writes:

Steven Chu, the 12th Secretary of Energy for the United States, has a post on his Facebook page about the new movie, The Avengers. Though his friends are not listed, he does have 18,963 'likes' on his page. Chu lists his job:

As Secretary of Energy, proudly carrying out President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in alternative and renewable energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create millions of new jobs. 

About The Avengers  he says:

'[It] focuses on a new, limitless clean energy source called 'The Tesseract."... While the "Tesseract" may be fictional, the real-life global competition over clean energy is growing increasingly intense, as countries around the world sense a huge economic opportunity AND the opportunity for cleaner air, water, and a healthier planet...'

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Monday 21 May 2012

Talking about climate change

Jason's story
Wallace Heim writes: 

One of the explanations offered for why climate change is not more prominent in people’s thinking is that it’s not physically seen. It doesn’t feel ‘real’ enough.

But a different view comes out in the stories people tell about how climate change is immediately altering their everyday lives. The climate is changing how they feel about the world and their decisions about what to do.

Project ASPECT, based at University College Falmouth, is gathering people’s stories about climate change from individuals and communities in Wales, northern England, London and Cornwall. Building a digital narrative archive, they are capturing on DVD how people talk about the climate in the context of their everyday lives.

There are those who watch. Heather continues the diary her mother started, recording every day what work is done on the family farm and the weather. Duncan and Matt are surfers in Cornwall, watching the storms. There are those who work with renewable energy, or, like Hanna, find green jobs for young people. Many are changing the way they grow food and eat: Mary from Incredible Edible; Owen with his backyard in Peckham; and masked night-time Ninja guerrilla gardeners. Singers, rappers, athletes tell their stories. Spontaneous acts of community kindness sit alongside the meticulous work of digitising the weather reports from World War I ship’s logs.

In these stories of everyday life, there is a cultural reality emerging, soft-voiced, but pressing. 
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Thursday 17 May 2012

A new chapter

Malcolm Bull on climate change ethics

"Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future development of humanity may depend on what, if anything, it can teach us."
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Wednesday 16 May 2012

New on our news page

Wasteland twinning: Nottingham and Yogyakarta

At the Brighton Fringe, The Ship's Log of songs marks the progress of the Boat Project by Lone Twin, and Feral Theatre perform three pieces on freedom, love and extinction.

OIL, photographs by Edward Burtynsky chronicling the oil industry, opens the new Photographers' Gallery.

A pop-up cinema at the edges of the Olympic Park hosts an evening of films on animals, cattle, herding and whaling.

Nottingham's wastelands are twinning with the wastelands of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Artists are making the connections.
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Tuesday 15 May 2012

Six films on culture and climate change

About Water - 2007 a film about our precarious relationship with water
Kellie Gutman writes:


Filmbase, in Dublin, is presenting climate.culture.change,  a series of films from six European countries, and discussions, through 12 June on culture and climate change. A collaboration between Cultivate and the EUNIC European cultural partners: Goethe Institut, British Council, Austrian Embassy, Alliance Française and the Italian Institute of Culture, with additional funding from the European Commission, this film and discussion series is a lead-up to Rio +20, the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Information on the program available here
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Monday 14 May 2012

Carbon-lite touring

The Last Polar Bears on tour
Wallace Heim writes: 

The carbon footprint of a production meets the content of the play in the National Theatre of Scotland’s tour of their climate change play The Last Polar Bears. For the 350-mile tour, everything needed for the show will be carried by the cast and crew on bicycles made from reclaimed bikes. The vinyl panniers are made from recycled National Theatre of Scotland banners.

As part of the production’s legacy, the National Theatre of Scotland will donate to the World Wildlife Fund's Adopt a polar bear project on behalf of the 18 primary schools on the tour.

Alongside the production, director Joe Douglas will use the tour to interview people, ‘taking the temperature of how people are feeling about climate change.'
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Friday 11 May 2012

Floating platforms

A new study shows that plastic in the Pacific Ocean has increased 100 times over the last 40 years.

The only beneficiary, reports The Economist, is Halobates sericeus, "a small insect that now has lots of nice little floating platforms on which to lay its eggs".
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Thursday 10 May 2012

Good topic

From the London Review of Books

In the next issue, which will be dated 24 May, Malcolm Bull on the intergenerational politics of climate change.

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