ashdenizen

First daffodil in Low Wood

2012-01-27T13:01:00.002Z

Wallace Heim writes:

Today, the first daffodil is blossoming here in Low Wood, Cumbria (latitude: 54 degrees North). There are two kinds of daffodil here, the garden cultivars and the small wild ones that fill the woods. This one, a cultivar protected by an old apple tree, will be in full, open blossom in a day or two, unless the forecasts are correct and the nights are cold and the snow is heavy.

The wild ones usually blossom earlier than the cultivars, but their leaves are only breaching the soil. Last year, the wild ones blossomed on 18 March. This one today is 7 weeks earlier that that.

Michael Pinsky LIFT unveiling 7 February

2012-01-20T15:14:00.000Z

To celebrate thirty years of groundbreaking international theatre across London, LIFT partnered with Arts Admin., as part of the IMAGINE 2020 network, to commission a new piece of public art work in central London. Michael Pinsky, a renowned British artist, who has created artworks in public spaces and galleries across Europe, won the commission. His work will respond to the issue of climate change. This secret project will be launched 7 February 2012. Stay tuned for more details.

Following spring's advance

2012-01-09T15:03:00.001Z

For several years we have been following the advance of spring on the East Coast of the United States by participating in the Paideia School's science project. Our editor, Kellie Gutman, writes:

The letter arrived on January 7th, the address printed in a 9 or 10 year-old's hand, with an accompanying postcard carrying this message:

I saw the first blooming daffodil on:__________, 2012
Kellie and Richard Gutman
West Roxbury, MA

The fourth and fifth grade classes track the speed of spring by documenting daffodil sightings along U. S. Route 1, from Florida to Maine. It will be interesting to see how quickly spring arrives this year. Here in Boston we have had only one snowstorm, and that one freakishly early before Halloween. Last year the school's letter arrived on a day that Boston got 8 inches of snow; this year it was a record 60 degrees fahrenheit.

In 2010, spring advanced at the speed of 1 mile an hour; in 2011 it was clocked at 1.3 miles an hour.

While waiting for the first bloom, you might want to re-read our 'flowers on stage' postings, to get into the springtime mode.

New metaphors for sustainability: include the craft of great design

2011-12-20T16:01:00.012Z

Following Solitaire Townsend's suggestions for metaphors - teen-aged sex, Shakespeare, and advice to the dude - Ed Gillespie, co-founder of Futerra, emailed us to add a crucial component to the art of sustainability. Ed writes:

To add to Soli's suggestions I would include: craft.

Sustainability is really all about craft - artful, considered, creative solutions that work for people and planet.

Sustainability is also the crucial third component of great design, building on William Morris's 'fit for purpose' (functionality) and 'beautiful to look at' (aesthetics). I add to these 'sustainably produced, reusable, durable, recyclable'. Sustainability turns good design into truly great design.

photo above of William Morris

New metaphors for sustainability: teenaged sex, Tatiana's 'Weather Speech' and advice to the dude

2011-12-15T18:56:00.013Z

Solitaire Townsend, co-founder and director of Futerra, the sustainability communications agency, draws on sex, Shakespeare and the party spirit for three new metaphors for sustainability.

I’ve heard hundreds of definitions and metaphors for sustainability. For a decade my company Futerra has been communicating this precious, complicated, simple idea in communities, through brands and across continents. So I’ve picked three favourite metaphors which sandwich the sublime between two moments of the ridiculous.

The first is courtesy of my co-founder at Futerra the guru, professional comic and activist Ed Gillespie. This one comes with humour warning...

“Sustainability is like teenage sex. Everybody says they are doing it, but very few actually are. And those which are doing it – are doing it wrong.”

Ed loves opening conference speeches with that one.

The second isn’t really a metaphor but rather a poetic description of climate change. It’s the famous ‘Weather Speech’ by Titania from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 2, Scene1):

The winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter cheer;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

That in the 1590’s Shakespeare wrote the most chilling description of climatic upheaval inspired Ed and I to shoot a short film of the speech. Called ‘The Season’s Alter’, it stars a young Keira Knightly.

The final example is my most often used. When asked to define or explain sustainable development I don’t call upon the great Bard, but rather upon Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan:

“Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes.”

New metaphors for sustainability: the Spanish Dehesa

2011-12-08T18:31:00.002Z

Our series on new metaphors for sustainability continues with Alison Turnbull's 'Spanish Dehesa', a sylvopastoral system that marries production and nature conservation. Alison was born in Bogotà, lives in London and exhibits her artwork there.

I first saw the Spanish dehesa on a trip to Extremadura some twenty years ago. We drove for over fifty miles without passing another car and the temperature soared to 53º C. It was difficult to believe we were in Western Europe and not in the plains of the American west or crossing an African savannah. I’ve been back every year since, walking and experiencing this unique eco-system in all kinds of weather, under all sorts of light.

Rather like the evocative Spanish term duende, used in the performing arts to mean ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, dehesa is a difficult word to translate. Meadow, wooded pastureland and grazing operation, it is a sylvo-pastoral system that covers 20,000 square kilometres, mostly in southwest Spain but also stretching into Portugal and Morocco. It is one of the oldest created landscapes in Europe – a cultural landscape if you like - just how ancient no one quite knows, but certainly several centuries, and it remains an outstanding example of intelligent husbandry. It is beneficial to the needs of human beings but also hospitable to a whole variety of other creatures, including many rare butterflies.

The grassed zones in between the oak trees are famously home to acorn-fed Iberian pigs that produce the most wonderful ham in the world. Honey, cheese, cork and charcoal are all products of the dehesa. It is an area of exceptional bio-diversity - for instance it is the wintering ground for most of Europe’s population of Grus grus, the common crane.

The dehesa is special in that it is an area where maximum exploitation sits side by side with maximum conservation. It’s man-made and it’s right here in Europe.

New metaphors for sustainability: a stranger's compass

2011-12-05T10:05:00.008Z

Our co-editor Wallace Heim continues our series of new metaphors for sustainability with a guidance system that changes hands.

Walking an unfamiliar Cumbrian fell with a compass, often without a map, links me to the land in a special way. The invisible, magnetic north that spins into place on the device is often perplexing and counter-intuitive. However reassuring it is to know there are vast forces of geology beyond any I can see, forces that co-ordinate my safe passage, I still have to negotiate the land right in front of me: that granite face, that swamped mire, that fast river. There is no picture in which to find myself, only wit, the land and the pull of a distant polar force.

A few times, I've come across a dropped compass. There's a moment when clearing the mud from its face when I wonder whether it was left behind because it was broken, or not believed. Is the north that was found in a stranger's hand the same as in mine?

I don't think sustainability can be likened directly to a compass, as if there was a pole of certainty to it. There are orientations that guide, but they fluctuate with a landscape that is continually shifting. The incremental decisions made in response to immediate conditions themselves change the situation, alter what is possible to do. I see sustainability as a response to change, one that keeps alive the capacity to respond to further change. What kind of compass would show this light-footed improvisation that makes sure those in the future can navigate their own way?

Walking with a stranger's compass comes closer as a metaphor. The compass is given, handed over, and it connects me to those I will never know, while helping me cross the land that I am in. The instruction is not reliable; maybe not safe. Or maybe it is, and the coordinates are sharper than on my own compass, signalling a clearer route. Is it pulling me in a direction I couldn't have imagined? This uncertain magnetism invigorates the walk. One day, I'll leave my compass behind.

New metaphors for sustainability: the surprises

2011-12-01T08:35:00.005Z

Wallace Heim writes:

When we’ve asked people to think of a metaphor, we tried to present the idea of ‘sustainability’ in neither a positive nor a negative light, but to leave it as open as possible for people to interpret it in their own way. Even for the DVD, we filmed the four people without knowing ahead of time what their metaphors would be. We didn’t want to promote any one idea of sustainability.

It’s been surprising how positive the metaphors have been, even from those people for whom sustainability is not a strong idea, or from those who acknowledge its ambiguities.

It's also been surprising to see how people have found something, maybe not the grand conceptual metaphor, but something in their lives that relates to their view of sustainability. This is as important as the encapsulating metaphor, like the 'iron curtain' or the 'glass ceiling'. The metaphors have not been about a concept imposed from the outside, but about a relation between the idea and something from one's life that makes sense.

We'll be presenting more metaphors in the next two weeks.

New on our news page

2011-11-28T16:45:00.008Z

In Nottingham, there's a three-day celebration of the apple.

In Edinburgh, David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, and Being Animal: An Earthy Cosmology, gives a public talk.

In London, Arcola's Green Sundays return with a focus on recycling and upcycling.

In the bookshops, David Rothenberg's Survival of the Beautiful investigates why nature is beautiful and how it has influenced science, Brendon Larson explores how metaphors entangle scientific facts with social values and Mojisola Adebayo's Plays One includes 'Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey'.

There's a new funding stream for public art by Creative Scotland, and a call for runners to participate in NVA's Speed of Light at the Edinburgh Festival.

On the international scene, Conversation between Trees uses sensors and mobile phones in the forest canopies in Brazil and the UK to communicate the light and colour of the trees and the changing climate around them.

Closer to home, Culture and Climate Change: Recordings is available as an online pdf and publication.

New metaphors for sustainability: the Fetch (of a wavelength; to collect)

2011-11-17T11:51:00.004Z

Our series of new metaphors for sustainability continues with Annie Cattrell's two meanings for 'Fetch'. A visual artist, born in Glasgow, living and working in London, Annie is a tutor at the Royal College of Art and a senior research fellow in Fine Art at DeMontfort University. She was on the 2011 Cape Farewell Scottish Islands Expedition.

I was first introduced to the oceanographic term the ‘Fetch’ while visiting I.C.I.T (International Centre for Island Technology) on Orkney during a residency I undertook hosted by the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness during 2010.

The Fetch (length) of a wave can be incredibly long. For example, it could stretch from the east coast of the United States, where it might originate, and travel uninterrupted by land mass across the Atlantic Ocean, arriving on the shores of the west coast of Scotland, in particular the Orkneys, where it would then be forced to break against the coastline.

The simple equation relating to this phenomena is that the length of a wave determines the power and energy of it.

As a consequence scientists and technologists based in Orkney are trying to harness the waves to create renewable energies for the future.

The uninterrupted ‘Fetch’ length of a wave seems like a strong natural metaphor for cause and effect. The behaviour of oceans, seas and weather generally would appear to override any political or territorial boundaries and constraints, reminding us of the larger rhythms of earth systems that can so easily be damaged and altered by different types of human made pollutants.

'Fetch' can also mean to go and collect and is to some extent predictive and about a future intention. Collecting and harnessing ideas and ways of living more sustainably would seem to be navigating in the right direction!

If not now, when?, Primo Levi

New metaphors for sustainability: the soil in my family's garden in Yorkshire

2011-11-14T09:19:00.007Z

David Harradine is an artist working across performance, installation, publication and film, and is Artistic Director of Fevered Sleep. His metaphor for sustainability conveys his love for the transformations of soil.

We don’t even know what to call it, whether it’s soil or earth or dirt. 'Earthy' seems nourishing, homely, but we generally don’t like things that are dirty or soiled. Dirty implies sex, which is getting to the heart of the matter: productiveness, creation, fecundity.

I keep an allotment in Hackney, inner London. For seven years I’ve been digging kitchen waste into the ground, applying horse shit gathered on Leyton Marsh, and bagging up leaves from the London Plane trees by the children’s playground, waiting for them to break down into humus (brown nectar, nourishment, life). This soil, heavy London clay, grey brown, full of pebbles: this is sustainability. It’s what sustains me.

Everything I know about gardening – a knowledge that resides in my fingernails, the callouses on my palms, the ache in the small of my back, the blunt edge of my spade, and the dirty Tupperware box in which I keep my seeds – I learned in a garden in Yorkshire when I was a child. My grandfather was a market gardener. We grew gladioli, tomatoes, chrysanthemums, dahlia, potatoes and the spring onions for the market in Leeds. I remember one afternoon, my fingers stinking of tomato plants, when I asked him if one day the garden would be mine. I could not imagine how the life could continue without it. The very idea of family took root in that garden, with our hands and spades in that dark, scented, sensual soil; knowledge sown like seeds from generation to generation.

Soil: mineral structure fleshed out with the detritus of life and death. Wondrous recycler. Transformer of things into other things. As a child, it was unfathomable and miraculous to see the yellow-white flower of a double-headed chrysanthemum be created from heavy black soil.

Working my allotment in Hackney, I pull on the rake I brought from my grandfather’s garden. I have started to plan what I will do when my parents die, when that garden may no longer be ours. I think I will sack up some soil and bring it to London, because it carries time in it, and memory in it, and it carries my family in it, and I was grown in it. And I am sustained, here in the city, by the memory of the texture of it and the smell of it. And by the life, the life, the life that turns on an infinite cycle in the hidden dark depths of it.

photo: David's hands, his grandfather's rake, Hackney soil

New metaphors for sustainability: why we started

2011-11-09T08:43:00.001Z

Wallace Heim writes:

We began thinking about metaphor and sustainability when we noticed that there weren't any strong or imaginative metaphors for the concept, or ones that we could easily use in conversation. Metaphors are pervasive in human thought and communication. 'Sustainability' stood out as an anomaly, a common concept with many definitions, but no metaphors.

So in April, we asked four people to suggest a metaphor and we filmed their responses. We weren't looking for 'the' metaphor. We were experimenting to see whether it was possible to think metaphorically about sustainability, in all its promise, its limitations and paradoxes.

Since then, we've added 14 more metaphors, (18 if you count everyone in the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home), and will add another 6 through November and December, here on Ashdenizen and collected on the Directory.

Too, we'll be posting comments on the project itself, which for some contributors was challenging; for others, playful; and for others, a delicate expression of meaning taken from their everyday life.

New metaphors for sustainability: the yew tree

2011-11-03T09:32:00.003Z

Our series of new metaphors for sustainability will continue through November. Today, Peter Harrison, writer, artist and co-founder of Propeller Arts Collective finds solace in the shade of the yew tree.

A simple definition of sustainability is the capacity to sustain. For me, this immediately poses a problem. I’m aware that everything comes to an end, nothing can go on forever. There’s something not quite real about the word, implying the possibility of being liberated from death. But also there are nurturing, practical, organic aspects to the word, implying maintenance and growth.

Trees are living processes. Yew trees live for centuries. Although it is difficult to accurately date yew trees, it is estimated that the Llangernyw Yew, in Conwy, Wales, is over four thousand years old. Yews are associated with immortality, renewal and transformation. Yews are living entities that sustain while the world around them changes. The yew in Conwy sheltered people from the early Bronze age. It is tempting to think that one of those people stood under the tree imagining life four thousand years in the future. As generations came and went, the tree continued. Yews represent the passage from life to death, and beyond, into the land of shadows.

The timeless quality of yew trees can also be personally experienced. Stepping into the low-hanging canopy of a yew, there is a marked change in temperature and volume. The air is cool and still. The world is quieter. A space under branches. Natural sanctuaries in which to reflect, to slow down and contemplate life beyond the moment.

This is an uncertain world. In past centuries, when death was a more present, daily occurrence than it is now, maybe yews gave people hope that the world will continue. Hope that although one day we will die, part of the world we knew and loved will sustain.

photo: the Llangernyw Yew, Conwy, Wales

New metaphors for sustainability: song

2011-11-01T09:05:00.010Z

Sue Palmer, an artist making live and digital work with people and place, and author of inquiline, a blog on botany and art, suggests song as a metaphor for sustainability.

the extraordinary song:
often straightforward, yet infinitely complex
the diversity (how many millions have been created)
the particularity (each one individual)
a structure enabling brilliant inventiveness
often a voice and an instrument
two kinds of sounds, working

my musician friend John talks about chords as metaphors
about how two ‘discordant’ tones are shifted
through the addition of a third note, bringing resolve

songs are free, and they can make someone a living
they help people make it through the day, and night
songs have changed peoples’ minds

a song can contain a lot of information, honed,
ideas packed in language,
rhythm, rhyme
there’s craft in it, and anyone can do it
there’s multiple ways to begin, and a sense when it’s complete

verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, chorus,
bridge
and key change, ‘ad lib to fade’
the pleasure of the repetition, letting the song free up, go

When I think of sustainability, I usually think of losing things, resources, capacity, and I find my materially-centred thought frustrating.

'If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library - everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right', Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2004.

photo: by Orelie Grimaldi of John Cartwright playing C#m7

Margaret Atwood is with the bears

2011-10-28T17:33:00.004+01:00

Margaret Atwood and Helen Simpson discuss I'm With The Bears, a new collection of short stories about climate change, with Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4's Open Book.

Helen Simpson says one problem of writing about climate change is the moralizing:

"That's about as popular as telling someone they need to lose weight. It's the nagging and being preached at element that is very hard to avoid around this subject”.

New metaphors for sustainability: 'A matter of time'

2011-10-20T09:53:00.005+01:00

Nick Robins’ metaphor suggests a profound shift in our perceptions of time. Nick works in the policy, operational and financial dimensions of corporate accountability and sustainability. He is author of The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (2006) and in 2011 was rated as the leading analyst for climate change research in the ThomsonExtel survey.

In the end, sustainability is all about the allocation of the scarcest resource: time. How much time do we devote to what in the present, and how do we balance the imperatives of time past, time present and time future?

The task, then, is to defeat the ravages of geological time and transfer those things of value from one civilisation to the next, particularly now that we have passed during our lifetimes from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

Nearly all of what we consider to be valuable in human society occupies a tiny fraction of our existence as a species (some 2 million years).

For me, Homer's Iliad is the archetype of human value across time. As the poet Christopher Logue discusses in the introduction to his recent interpretation, War Music, the Iliad is already a work that has survived the collapse of a number of civilisations through luck, persistence and care. But will it survive ours?

The Iliad was written perhaps in the 8th century BCE, some 2,800 years ago. For me, sustainability means enabling those in the future to have an equivalent chance to benefit from this fundamental text, constructing an arc into the future 2,800 years long. This means that my time horizon is (or should be) 4811 AD, far further out that the 2050 timelines of the climate negotiations or the 'seventh generation' thinking of the counter-culture.

The consequences of this shift in perspective are profound: we need to conceive sustainability as beyond culture and indeed language, as the transmission of value beyond time.

All the metaphors in our series so far are collected here.

New metaphors for sustainability: the Kelo

2011-10-17T11:07:00.009+01:00

We resume our series finding new metaphors for sustainability with the Kelo suggested by artist and researcher Amanda Thomson.

For a few years now I have been spending a lot of time in some of the remnant Caledonia pine forests of Scotland, learning about their ecology, and making an ongoing piece of work called Dead Amongst the Living, which is ostensibly about the dead trees of these woodlands. Scots pines can live to be up to 300 years old, and even after they die, can stand for years before falling. In the middle of these woods, they sometimes stand pale like spectres amongst the greens, reds and browns of the living forest, and sometimes on the hills and moorlands of the north an occasional single tree reminds us of forests now long gone or the tenaciousness it has often taken to have survived.

There’s a Finnish word a ranger told me, Kelo, which describes a standing tree which has died, dried out in the wind and yet remains standing, often for decades, only quietly and imperceptibly decaying. Like the shells of old croft houses in the far north west and on the islands, such trees stand to remind us of a different past, and are testament to earlier times.

Dead wood supports a huge amount of biodiversity when still standing, and once they have fallen they continue to form a crucial part of the living ecosystems of a pinewood; indeed, it is said they support more species when dead than they do when alive. These dead trees contain microhabitats for species which are not found elsewhere but which are vital to the ongoing health of the forest. They are havens for invertebrates, hold rare mosses, provide nutrients for lichens, fungi and liverworts. At each stage of their decay, they give something back to their surroundings and support different species at different stages of decomposition. When standing, they provide viewpoints for raptors and their holes and cavities provide nest sites for a range of woodland birds, including crested tits. Their rot holes are used by the larvae of rare hoverflies, green shield-moss grows on old stumps and capercaillie use the upturned root plates of the fallen for cover and for dust baths. Eventually, over a period of years, and by being broken down in a variety of ways, all of the nutrients which have been stored in the tree will make their way back in to the earth and replenish it.

For me, these dead trees contain an essential reminder about how in both physical and in psychic terms, things that seem no longer with us, things that might appear to be useless and redundant, and things that becomes invisible can continue to influence, support and nourish the present, and the living, in ways that we might not yet know, but will perhaps, in time, come to realise.

New fables for the woods

2011-10-11T12:01:00.003+01:00

Why does the ash tree have black buds? Why does the yew tree live so long? Why does the chestnut tree have white candles? In a series of new fables about woods, 19 writers started with a question of this sort and found their way to an answer by writing a short story.

The collection, Why Willows Weep is published by the Woodland Trust. According to the editors, some fables are like fairy tales, others like Greek myths, and some are completely off-the-wall.

The writers are William Fiennes, James Robertson, Richard Mabey, Tracy Chevalier (who edits the collection), Susan Elderkin, Rachel Billington, Blake Morrison, Maria McCann, Terence Blacker, Joanne Harris, Philippa Gregory, Catherine O'Flynn, Tahmima Anam, Maggie O'Farrell, Amanda Craig, Ali Smith, Philip Hensher, Salley Vickers and Kate Mosse.

My Last Car - final showings

2011-10-06T15:13:00.001+01:00

My Last Car, commissioned by Tipping Point, I Move, and the Warwick Arts Centre, has its final performances today through Saturday at the Warwick Arts Centre. Everyone remembers their first car; what if their present car were their last car? The show looks at the influences the motor car has had on people's lives, and issues of sustainability.

The star is a soft-top Rover 216 broken down to its component parts. My Last Car is both a gallery installation and a performance. Information and tickets here.

My Last Car - Alan Dix, the man behind the wheel from imove on Vimeo.

Ecocide's day in court

2011-09-30T12:09:00.007+01:00

Wallace Heim writes:

Today, the theatre of a mock trial plays out in the UK Supreme Court, live online (download the software at the top left of the panel).

The Ecocide Trial has Michael Mansfield QC as prosecuting barrister and Nigel Lickley QC as defence barrister leading a case for and against two fictional CEO’s, and is complete with expert witnesses, jury and judge.

The crimes chosen by the court this morning are the extraction of oil from Canada’s Tar Sands and the Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

There is no script. It is up to a jury to decide whether the case for Ecocide crime is made.

Follow the case on twitter and on Sky News/home/supreme-court.

Culture and Climate Change: Recordings

2011-09-28T10:41:00.004+01:00

A pdf of Culture and Climate Change: Recordings is now available.

See four podcasts on culture and climate change
Download the podcasts

A final posting from Cape Farewell expedition

2011-09-05T20:21:00.000+01:00

Shiants - watercolor by John Cumming

Kellie Gutman writes:

The artist, sculptor and writer John Cumming took part in the fourth and final week of Cape Farewell's expedition to the Shetland Islands this summer. John was born and raised in Burra Isle, Shetland. He writes:

What draws me to these places is hard to define. The journey is part of the magic. The sea is endlessly, and wonderfully alive; unlike concrete, unlike tarmacadam. No two sea journeys are ever the same. On the trip to North Rona, we met families of dolphin, Risso’s, basking sharks and minke whales. The sea was calm, the swell long and leaden. The night-time journey back was before a north-easterly gale, sailing only on the jib. Driving southwards at eight to ten knots, we listened to the clicking of a school of pilot whales some three miles away.

Next day the sheer sculptural magnificence of the Shiants was a revelation. I have a personal lexicography of island profiles; the Kame of Hoy; the Kame of Foula; the Drongs of Eshaness; each place uniquely powerful and awe inspiring, yet even now, weeks later the basalt columns and screes of the shiants are etched on the back of my eyelids.

For his complete posting, including additional sketches, as well as postings of others on the expedition, see the Cape Farewell blog here.

Sustainable production award: Allotment

2011-09-01T14:02:00.001+01:00

Kellie Gutman writes:

The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts has awarded their 2011 Sustainable Production Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The prize goes to Allotment, by Jules Horne and directed by Kate Nelson. The show is set in an actual allotment and follows two sisters, Dora and Maddy, who work out their rivalries among the plants. The show was chosen for successfully integrating its location into the drama. See here for the full story.

New version of 3rd Ring Out opens in Edinburgh

2011-08-20T21:27:00.002+01:00

One of the winners of the 2010 Tipping Point commissions, 3rd Ring Out (which we blogged here and here) has now opened at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. Its director Zoë Svendsen says:

We've now got a 'strategy' cell as well as a 'simulation' cell - we've split the use of the two containers into (1) short term crisis in a climate-changed future, under a business -as-usual scenario (which is the same format as last year but now about the Suffolk coastline); and (2) long term alternative futures about the city we are in, generated by ideas gathered from the public and others.

18-28 August, Edinburgh Fringe Festival
In the bright orange shipping containers. Grassmarket
Pleasance Courtyard
60 Pleasance
Phone 0131 556 6560

Other shows of interest at the Edinburgh Fringe blogged here
Zoë Svendsen's metaphor for sustainability on this blog and the Ashden DIrectory

Cape Farewell expedition reaches half-way point

2011-08-05T18:29:00.002+01:00

Sheep pens, St. Kilda. Photo: Ruth Little

Kellie Gutman writes: Cape Farewell's journey to the Outer Hebrides has reached its half-way point. The crews have changed each week, but the Associate Director, Ruth Little is onboard for the duration. Her latest post, filled with wonderful pictures and observations can be seen here.

For all of the expedition posts go here or follow it on our blogroll.

New metaphors for sustainability: coral reef

2011-08-04T10:38:00.007+01:00

Caspar Henderson, writer and journalist, suggests coral reef, its efficiency, vulnerability and beauty, as a metaphor for sustainability. Caspar's Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A Bestiary for the Anthropocene will be published by Granta in 2012.

As many people know, healthy tropical coral reef are among the the richest, most diverse and productive ecosystems on the planet, rivaled perhaps only by rainforests. It’s less widely appreciated, however, that this astonishing exuberance thrives in water that is very low in nutrients. The secret of the reef is that nutrients and materials are reused and recycled with great efficiency and rapidity in an almost closed loop.

Driving the cycle is sunlight, which is of course abundant in the tropics. Corals polyps, which are tiny animals, are able to build their layering and branching and skeletons (and thus over time the entire reef on which so much else depends) thanks to a partnership with photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae, which harness energy from the sun and ‘feed’ their coral hosts in return for lodging. Whether or not you believe in the claims made for next generation nuclear power (and, like Amory Lovins and others, I have doubts), an economy that is able to run on energy directly harvested from the sun, store it where necessary and turn almost 100% of its wastes into assets looks like a good way to go.

Another familiar fact about coral reefs is that they are among the ecosystems in the world most vulnerable to human meddling. Our assaults come in various forms including direct ones such as destructive fishing practices and nutrient overload from sewage and agricultural runoff, and indirect ones such as rising global temperatures and ocean acidification caused by a rate of change in greenhouse gas concentrations not seen in millions of years.

Coral reefs can, we now know, thrive within certain boundaries, and be remarkably resilient to some shocks so long as the boundaries are not crossed. Once they are, however, the whole system can very quickly tip over into a degraded state. The reef becomes choked with slime and the food web disintegrates into a rotting boneyard that supports a dwindling band of scavengers. Previous perturbations to the Earth system comparable to current human activity have resulted in mass extinction events from which it has taken reefs millions of years to recover. We’re not talking about a metaphor here so much as a 400lb gorilla already standing on our toes.

The good news, in a far as there is any, is that we have a pretty good feel for what must be done if the threats to reefs are to be sharply reduced. Some of the most important measures such as stabilization and then reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations may look unachievable in the near term, but while we continue to struggle with those there are many other things that will also be necessary and on which progress can (and is) being made now. One such is the creation, with local community involvement, of networks of Marine Protected Areas.

A final, and for me the most important point about coral reefs is that they are places of stupendous beauty and wonder. Chances are these are not qualities that spring to mind when you think of sustainability. A more likely association might be something like ‘sensible shoes.‘

But sustainability does not have to be boring. It can and must be highly dynamic, just as a coral reef is: an arena for competition and struggle, yes, but an arena with limits and where new kinds of flourishing and cooperation are forever unfolding. Cruelty, suffering and death are not eliminated, but the scope for doing your own thing or doing something new - whether it be to bake cakes with five year olds, develop greener energy technology, or dance flamenco while dressed as a flamboyant cuttlefish - is greatly increased.

photo: Gray Hardel/Corbis

New metaphors for sustainability: Le Tour

2011-08-03T08:52:00.011+01:00

Le Mans to Chateauroux, crossing the Montrichard Bridge

Le Tour de France is the metaphor Bradon Smith offers in our series of New metaphors for sustainability. Bradon is a research associate in the Geography department at the Open University, and is also the AHRC research fellow on climate change for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The bicycle is a wonderfully efficient and ecological mode of transport; and the dynamics of professional cycling are a model for the cooperation that real sustainability will require.

This week saw the climax of the Tour de France. Four hundred thousand people gathered on the mountain roads leading up to Alpe d'Huez to watch that one stage alone. Cycling works as a spectator sport partly because of the intense physical effort, but also because of the layers of tactics and teamwork: strength and stamina aren't enough to win the Tour.

No rider could win the Tour without their team. Teamwork, co-operation and the team's different skills are required to win even a stage. Many of the members of a team (the domestiques) ride not for their own chances of glory, but for the benefit of another member of their team: setting the pace for their leading rider, carrying water for them, sheltering them from headwinds, and so on. These sacrifices are central to a team's success.

Nor can any rider win any stage - some are more suited to mountains, others to flat stages. The rider who can achieve the fastest speeds (a sprinter) is unlikely to win the Tour, which requires a better all-round rider. Some teams are dedicated to the success of a single rider, others spread their efforts more widely. A team has to play to the strengths of its members.

Despite the intense competition, and personal rivalries, there is a fundamental trust within the peloton. Hurtling along the road at 40mph, wheels within inches of one another, each rider must trust that the others will hold their line.

And this trust has built a unique ethic: the peloton follows a set of unwritten rules. It is not done, for example, to profit from other riders' crashes - the peloton will wait instead. And the team of the leading rider is expected to do the most work, setting the pace for the whole peloton.

Technological developments have dramatically affected cycling: bikes are lighter and more aerodynamic, and the riders are all equipped with radios for constant communication with their teams. Fans are divided over whether these changes are detrimental. But these developments have not drastically altered the basic ethic of the peloton.

But there is another side to cycling. Teams are reliant on their corporate sponsors, and team tactics are also built around giving the most TV exposure to their sponsors' logos. Deals are done between riders of competing teams: 'you can have this win, if you help me tomorrow'. And - the big ones - doping blights the sport and fans speculate about deals and corruption at a high level. It isn't really clear how these problems will be eradicated; but in a sport shot through with the ethos of teamwork and cooperation, they strike right at its heart.

There is a temptation to 'cheat' with sustainability too: to greenwash and make tokenistic changes, but never integrate it fully into our lives and societies. But the cooperation that is central to professional cycling is also central to sustainability; as in a cycling team, one specialism will not be enough; and like in the peloton, we need to trust that others will also make the effort.

Photo: Denis Balibouse / Reuters

What is it that art could do for the environment?

2011-08-01T15:31:00.005+01:00

Photo: Green Alliance

Kellie Payne reports on the Green Alliance's summer debate about the arts and the environment.

For their summer reception, the environmental think tank Green Alliance hosted an evening of opera and debate at the Royal Opera House. In conjunction with The Opera Group, the evening began with a fifteen minute excerpt of Luke Bedford‘s new opera Seven Angels, is inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost and has environmental degradation as its theme.

Following the opera taster, there was a panel discussion entitled ‘What have the arts ever done for the environment? The panel included a mix of representatives from the worlds of policy, the arts and academia. It was chaired by Julie’s Bicycle’s Alison Tickell, and panellists included: The Southbank Centre artistic director, Jude Kelly, RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor, Arcola Theatre executive director Ben Todd, the sculptor Peter Randall-Page and David Frame, fellow of Oxford University. In her introduction, Tickell indicated that the Seven Angels was one among a crop of new work being made by British artists that addressed nature or the environment among those artists she listed were Antony Gormley, Ian McEwan, Jay Griffiths.

One of the main themes of the evening was an attempt in the discussion to answer the general question of what it is that art can do for the environment. It was generally agreed that one of the strengths of art was that it was well equipped to deal with the complexities that many environmental issues such as climate change raise. Matthew Taylor saying that art should be one of the many interventions required to tackle climate change.

One of the most eloquent responses came from the scholar, David Frame, who highlighted art’s ability to deal with complexity and tension. He felt that as climate change and environmental problems are so complex in nature, with for instance climate change knowledge dispersed amongst many specialists without a graspable whole. He said that the arts community has ‘a unique ability to convey complexity, delicacy, and beauty and among the things you can do is you don’t need to simplify...’

He pointed to the deficits in mediums such as Twitter or the 1,000 word Op Ed piece and contrasted this with the length of a novel or a film where he said ‘the possibilities for the ideas you can upload to people is phenomenal.’ This type of medium he said was also more able to cope with uncertainties. ‘You leave interpretation open which isn’t considered acceptable in other forms and I think that in doing so you can bring out tensions between these parallel values’.

Changing values seemed to be one of the key roles identified for art that emerged from the discussion. Alison said she has observed what she describes as a ‘palpable’ shift in values taking place rapidly and for her ‘the arts do have a role to play in reflecting and shaping and engaging with those values.’ While Matthew didn’t agree with Alison the extent to which values have already changed in the positive direction Alison described. In fact, he warned that during this current time of disturbance there is a clear dissatisfaction with current values but which way public opinion would turn was not decided. He said the dissatisfaction could lead in two ways, and not necessarily in a progressive direction he lamented that ‘it can go in a dangerous direction as well.’

The question of how politics should be addressed raised differing opinions. Jude Kelly began by announcing she ‘didn’t mind a bit of bad art’ provided that art had some sort of message. She went on to say, ‘I don’t think it’s a hanging offence to produce a message’ However if it’s not particularly interesting it might ‘bore me after awhile’. Further, ‘I don’t mind artists having a go. I really dislike the idea that artists shouldn’t be allowed to take centre stage to comment on things.

While Peter conceded that there was ‘nothing wrong with political art’, for him it was less the politics which art was best equipped to address. He was more of the mind that art’s quality was that it didn’t have a direct ‘purpose’ that it was its intrinsic values alone that made art great. He believes that ‘arts are not well placed to (do) issue based lobbying’ contrasting what he finds often to be the pragmatism of the environmental movement with the arts ability to nourish imagination and the spirit in the way the natural world does. ‘I think the role that I feel for the arts in environmentalism is that it... reminds us that we’re not all bad. If we only feel negative it’s impossible for us to move forward and remove this exclusively pragmatic approach to looking after the world.’

Matthew wanted to introduce a third way of thinking about the issue agreeing that art shouldn’t attempt to kick us around the head. However, he felt art could ‘challenge people to live differently and value things in slightly different ways.’ Providing a vision of how ‘a different, deeper kind of understanding about what makes life worth living and what it is society wants to be.’ This task he felt art was ‘incredibly well suited’. That is, ‘art is there to explicitly to get you to think about what the good life is.’ He concluded this thought saying ‘art shouldn’t be ashamed to say that art is here to help you rethink what our values are and I don’t think that requires you to revert to a kind of crude placard waving.’

In addition to the discussion about art and politics, the panel also touched on the controversial issue of artists lifestyles and the high carbon footprint of the arts. The general attitude on the panel was that this shouldn’t be paid as much attention as it has been. Jude Kelly saying that this arts requires face-to-face interactions and not allowing artists to fly amounts to a cultural boycott. But Matthew Taylor thought artists should be accountable, and if they want to have influence on others they have to take account of their own actions.
Increased collaboration amongst artists was encouraged, suggesting that the problem of the environment is one that artists should attempt to do together. Arts organisations such as Cape Farewell and Tipping Point were highlighted as doing exceptional work, helping to inform artists of climate change and bringing the topic to their consciousness.

It was edifying to see an organisation such as the Green Alliance, who normally deals with more policy related issues such as building a sustainable economy, investigating climate and energy futures, designing out waste and political leadership to host a conversation with the arts community. A cursory glance over badges of audience members saw representatives from business and policy, including the Department for Energy and Climate Change and The Environment Agency, so the wider these issues can be encountered and discussed the better. It’s time the arts community made it’s voice heard in the conversation about climate change. Peter concluded well, stating that it is artists who need to create metaphors and narratives which make it possible to go into the future.

Pic: The speakers (l-r): Jude Kelly, Matthew Taylor, Dr David Frame, Ben Todd, Peter Randall-Page and Alison Tickell (photo: Paul West)

New metaphors for sustainability: the timeless meal

2011-07-28T09:29:00.006+01:00

Carolyn Steel calls herself a 'food urbanist', and she brings a notion of the 'good life' to our series of New metaphors for sustainability.

What is it we’re trying to sustain? For me, the meal is the emblematic, wonderful situation that sums up the whole point of sustainability.

I think in metaphor all the time and food has become this way of seeing the world not just in terms of 'how are we going to feed ourselves in future?' - this kind of doom and gloom thing - but also in terms of asking 'what kind of society is it that we are trying to create as well as sustain?'.

When you talk about food, there’s a tendency to talk about ‘how much grain can you produce on that much land with that much water’. That’s very important, but you have to relate every conversation you have about food with the kind of life that you are talking about. It’s about a vision of society, an idea of the good life.

The table is a place where you don't just share food, but you share ideas, you share love, you share conversation.

It’s a beautiful metaphor of the kinds of things that we’re trying to sustain. It’s society. It’s ‘good life’ in every possible sense - not just good in terms of wonderful food - but also good in terms of the ethics of what you eat. If I am hungry I have a practical problem. If you are hungry, I have an ethical problem.

This business of sitting around a table with other people, the decorum of the table, and the sharing food - it brings the social relevance of sustainability into the conversation.

A timeless meal, a meal that is enjoyed through time that has a past that we all intuitively understand, but a future as well, sums up for me the idea that food is life on earth.

Carolyn is included in our film.

Photo: Feast on the Bridge, 2009, curated by Clare Patey. Photo by Tim Mitchell.

New metaphors for sustainability: an indigenous tribe of the Amazon

2011-07-26T10:16:00.004+01:00

Francesca Galeazzi is a sustainability engineer and artist, currently working for the design studio of Arup Associates in Shanghai, in pursuit of a greener and more sustainable model of urban development in China. Her art work focuses on issues of climate change, urbanisation and sustainable development. Here, she continues our series on New metaphors for sustainability.

I underestimated the amount of time and thinking that it would take me to come up with something that I am happy with. Sustainability not only is something that I care about, but it is also extremely difficult to pin down to something specific. It holds many facets and most are often equally important!

Having said this, I still believe that diversity is key to sustainability.

Ecosystems rely on a complex set of relationships and interdependence of diverse species and creatures to sustain themselves. This is the basis of all life on our planet and applies to flora and fauna, as well as society and culture. However, the current aggressive approach to global development that we have experienced in the last century is threatening diversity at all levels.

Visualising diversity is a difficult task. The first images that sprung to my mind were not too dissimilar to the United People of Benetton campaign in the 90’s, highlighting the beauty of multiculturalism. But how obvious it is! I also thought about cities, food, gardens, oceans, the coral reef - but none seemed really appropriate.

The metaphor that to me best evokes the idea of both ecological and social diversity is the Amazon, probably the most important biodiverse and rich ecosystem of our planet, under so much threat of irreversible change. But the image of that magnificent tropical rainforest is not sufficient to me to evoke the notion of sustainability; as a general metaphor I think it is too obvious and worn out.

I am instead choosing the image of an indigenous tribe of the Amazon. To me this conveys not only the ecological issues that rainforests around the world face today (deforestation, illegal logging, land exploitation, mining, etc) but also talks about that fundamental element that is societal diversity. Indigenous tribes, ethnic minorities and rural communities around the world represent a huge treasure of culture and unique heritage that is under increasing threat of disappearance.

The indigenous tribe of the Amazon is a metaphor for all those ethnicities in the world under physical and cultural threat, and indirectly for their endangered environment, too. It is also a metaphor for knowledge and strength, for cultural richness and social resilience, for strong community cohesion, for respect and adaptability to the natural environment, all of which to me are the pillars of sustainability.

Photo above is © Indigenous People's Cultural Support Trust

A metaphor from politics: 'Be a part of better'

2011-07-25T11:23:00.005+01:00

In response to our New metaphors for sustainability series, Chris Ballance wrote to us and agreed we could post his email. As a playwright, Chris was one of our earliest listings on the Directory. He was Green Party Member and Member of the Scottish Parliament from 2003 - 2007, and now works for Moffat CAN, (Carbon Approaching Neutral), a community-owned company and charity.

One of the ideas that's concerning some of us here is 'how do we tell the cultural story of how good it could be to go green'? It's inspired by the recent success of the SNP who - helped admittedly by dreadful campaigns by their opponents - based their huge election victory by selling independence as 'Be a part of better'; a direct reference to a literary quotation from the author Alasdair Grey 'Live each day as if you were in the first day of a better nation.'

A quotation doubtless unknown in London, but well enough known here in Scotland to be inscribed into the stone walls around the Scottish Parliament. The phrase has passed into commonplace so much that I've even seen 'Be a part of better' used to advertise merchandise in a shop. The SNP are using a cultural story and cultural references to achieve independence. (That's to say nothing about planning to hold their referendum shortly after the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.)

How do we create a cultural story which can then be used to make sustainability attractive? So often it is seen as 'sacrifice', doing without, enforced change. (I often remember being on an election hustings with a UKIP candidate who told me "Look, we all know your green world is coming. It's just that we don't want it, and we're going to do everything we can to put it off for as long as possible.") How do we conjure up images of something that people will actually want?

Your exploration of metaphors is definitely a step towards this. It's not just sustainability - the whole concept of environmentalism lacks it: the only metaphors to have attached themselves to environmentalism are those framed by our opponents; 'yoghurt knitters', etc. Thank you.

(And I love the Madagascan-based tapestry.)

New metaphors for sustainability: ten so far

2011-07-21T14:25:00.005+01:00

From the 'iron curtain' to the 'glass ceiling', metaphors are one of the most powerful ways in which we frame the way we think.

Yet one of the key concepts in environmentalism - sustainability - seems to be remarkably short of vivid metaphors.

So we asked some artists, writers, architects, cultural commentators, environmentalists, activists and scientists to come up with their own metaphors for sustainability.

We've published ten new metaphors so far. More to follow.

New metaphors for sustainability: mercury
New metaphors for sustainability: symbiosis
New metaphors for sustainability: "Come into my house" (DVD)
New metaphors for sustainability: 'art & grace'
New metaphors for sustainability: my sweet pea
New metaphors for sustainability: water on a fire - helping turn the page - a child asleep - the family - failing better
New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out

New metaphors for sustainability: the sailboat

New metaphors for sustainability: the Spiderweb Tapestry

New metaphors for sustainability: the act of breathing

Watch a film about four of the new metaphors.

Please suggest metaphors of your own. As @TheMuseDaily tweeted yesterday, "The drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive. - Nietzsche"

New metaphors for sustainability: mercury

2011-07-21T09:03:00.007+01:00

Mario Petrucci, poet, ecologist, physicist, essayist, continues our series of New metaphors for sustainability with shape-shifting mercury.

My chief reservation about sustainability is that it can mean so many things to different interest groups. For one protagonist, sustainability may demand a massive redistribution of resources and wealth, coupled with radical reassessments of consumer values and economic practice; for another, it involves no more than modest adjustments to what we already do in order to accommodate a few of the most urgent ecological imperatives.

As with Climate Change, then, there’s no overall consensus concerning the precise shape sustainability will take. ‘Sustainable forest’ can mean a rich and ancient woodland drawn upon occasionally but left mostly to its own devices, or it can be a perpetual pine plantation supplying wood pulp and with practically zero biodiversity in it.

That’s why I’ve chosen mercury as a metaphor for sustainability. It challenges any assumption we might have that sustainability takes a uniform or consistent form among those considering it.

The image of mercury scurrying across a surface is familiar to most people, and is apt here because it allows us to better grasp the current ungraspability of sustainability. Sustainability is a fraught and fugitive issue, beset by political and personal evasions and manoeuvrings.

What’s more, the way in which sustainability can be made to adapt shape is both weakness and strength. On the negative side, if mercury is mishandled it becomes a toxic nuisance; likewise, sustainability can be distorted, misrepresented or misapplied, either through ignorance or cynically, to allow damaging practices to continue beneath a veneer of acceptability.

On the positive side, if put to proper use in a careful and structured way, and if its complex nature is understood and worked with, sustainability also provides an extremely valuable, if not life-saving, tool.

Mercury can communicate what the weather’s doing outside, or signal the degree of fever in the human body; sustainability, too, could be harnessed to monitor and sustain the wellness of our species in relation to its environment. Either that, or we can let the concept mess with our brains and slip through our fingers.

New metaphors for sustainability: symbiosis

2011-07-20T07:47:00.005+01:00

Zoë Svendsen, theatre director and researcher, continues our series New metaphors for sustainability by turning to 'symbiosis' as a better term.

When I was given the challenge of thinking about a metaphor for sustainability, I realized I didn’t really know what it was, other than the idea that maybe you shouldn’t do quite so much of something so that you could do things again in the future. But then I got to thinking about the underlying questions. What do we need to sustain? What’s the idea of sustainability? It’s linked to current discourses against consumption and to ideas about austerity and about doing less.

What could you replace sustainability with as a metaphor that would allow you to do something as opposed to just not doing something? I was thinking about things like conversation and reciprocity and some kind of interaction with your environment that didn’t deny the pleasures of exchange and of use. I eventually arrived at the term ‘symbiosis’ and symbiotic thinking.

What’s interesting about the term 'symbiosis', is that as a metaphor it takes us away from the 'nature versus culture' idea or ‘human benefit versus benefit for nature or the environment', and rather asks us to think about how there might be certain kinds of human symbiotic interactions and at the same time benefits for the environment.

The symbol for this kind of activity are bees, and bee-keeping. There can be a human relationship to these kinds of symbiotic practices that happen in the environment already – such as the spreading of pollen and the creating of honey.

And around that word 'symbiosis', there’s a whole series of other underlying terms or thoughts that could be replaced. Instead of thinking about 'austerity' – which is a negative thinking towards the future - that we can always only do less and life isn’t going to be as good – you might replace that with 'ingenuity'. This celebrates invention and entrepreneurialism and thinks about what’s at hand and what possible in what may be limited circumstance but treats those circumstances as a pleasureable challenge.

Part of the problem with austerity is that it makes you want to rebel. I have occasional bouts of recycling rebellion – I go 'fuck it' and throw it away. 'I want to waste, I don’t want to be sensible'.

This is something to do with the moral imperative around the idea of austerity – it’s just not fun. Part of the idea about ‘symbiosis’, is that you don’t have that same kind of moral anxiety around all of your actions. You’re directed to a positive action instead of endlessly thinking about the negative – which just makes you want to be naughty and not do it.

Zoë is included in our film.

New metaphors for sustainability: "Come into my house" (DVD)

2011-07-18T08:24:00.004+01:00

When we asked Hester Reeve, artist and lecturer, to suggest a metaphor for our series New metaphors for sustainability, she offered to make this DVD, "Come into my house."

The term 'sustainability' is rightly used first and foremost in the contexts of both local and global policy changes. Whilst acknowledging the crucial role played by activist pressure in ensuring sustainability is on the agenda in the first place, I see its implementation chiefly as the responsibility of politicians (shame on them).

I made my metaphor in my house. The camera is out on the street and I open each door/window in turn and call out for various thinkers to "Come into my house."

As an artist, I am more interested in restoring richness to the 'cult' of everyday life and in incorporating the force of poetic imagination than in reflecting/interacting with culture at large. My metaphor therefore reflects this sensibility.

I suppose the only thing someone like me at this point in the environmental direness of 2011 can do is to come back to the doorstep, where the agency of the single being starts and to call for that paradigm shift in our thinking that might finally allow us to dwell as an act of loving the world.

New metaphors for sustainability: 'art & grace'

2011-07-15T09:14:00.009+01:00

Continuing our series of New metaphors for sustainability, the ecological artist David Haley looks to the etymologies of two words.

art
The Sanskrit origin of the word ‘art’ is 'rta'. Originally appearing in the Rig Vedas, rta is still used in contemporary Hindi to mean the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created, virtuously.

This noun/adjective also means the right-handedness, righteousness, and the right way of doing things. Here we find remnants of that meaning in modern English in terms like 'the art of gardening', 'the art of football, 'the art of archery' and 'the art of war'.

Rta conjugates into the verb 'ritu' (ritual) that refers to the correct order or sequence of rta (i.e. the cyclical pattern of the seasons, or the progression from seed to leaf and root to tree to blossom to seed). ‘Art’ may have lost much of its etymological meaning, but maybe it retains the potential to re-emerge as a metaphor for sustainability, like a flower waiting for rain in some future desert?

grace
This metaphor comes from my work with the artists The Harrisons, and is taken from their work 'The Lagoon Cycle': 'As the waters rise gracefully, how will we withdraw with equal grace?'

The difference between the Environment Agency's policy of 'managed retreat' in response to sea level rise and our proposals in the work 'Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground Gaining Wisdom' was the EA’s use of engineering and war metaphors to confront a problem, compared with an ethical and aesthetic repositioning of the situation.

‘Tide Turns, Waters Dance’ was one of my own ‘Writing on the Wall’ pieces, this one exhibited in Taiwan. The last of the 27 Haiku-style poems ended with the line, 'water, time and grace'. When a Taiwanese professor quizzed me over the use of the word, 'grace' to end the work, I explained that a meaning of grace was 'becomingness'. 'Aha', he replied, 'so you hope to evolve beyond climate change?'

New metaphors for sustainability: my sweet pea

2011-07-13T10:50:00.010+01:00

In a recent series of seminars on site-based performance and environmental change, our Ashden Directory co-editor Wallace Heim met Alison Parfitt, of the Wildland Research Institute, and writer on conservation. Here, Alison considers her sweet pea as a metaphor in our series New metaphors for sustainability.

Sustainability. After the Rio Earth Summit 1992, I was impassioned about this challenging aspiration, with head and heart. Many of us struggled over complicated diagrams, wanting to encompass everything. We talked about ecological systems and the need for the sacred and spiritual, the connectedness of all. We explored social and environmental justice and quality and equality – with diversity. Models and metaphors came and went, bees in a beehive.

Now I see this challenge of understanding the potential and power of sustainability in a more intimate way. And I suspect that the full and inspiring notion of sustainability (sometimes understood but often not) is showing a way, a direction for the human species to evolve, if we can.

As I write this there is a sweet pea, picked this morning, beside me. A soft fresh fragrance. This flower is creamy pale with a purple, or even nearing indigo, fine edging on the petals. It looks and feels precise, very clear yet fragile. It moves in the air coming through the door. The flower is here today but gone tomorrow, the plant goes on and I shall gather seed. It is everyday and uniquely precious.

I accept that my sweet pea is not really a helpful metaphor for sustainability but for today, now, it enlightens me and reminds me of my relationship within all else. And how I could be more human. And that’s where my quest to understand has got to. I suspect it will move on again, soon.

Cape Farewell and the Scottish "bellwether" islands

2011-07-12T01:49:00.001+01:00

Standing Stone, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides. Photo: Ruth Little

Kellie Gutman reports on Cape Farewell's latest voyage.

Cape Farewell known for its seafaring expeditions to the Arctic to study climate change, with scientists and artists aboard, is taking a journey closer to home.

For four weeks starting July 15, a rotating crew of thirty-two artists and nine scientists will sail around Scotland's coastal islands to investigate the effects of climate change on the island cultures and ecologies. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns about the 'severe impact' rising sea levels are likely to have on the coastline of the UK, and the Outer and Inner Hebrides are the 'bellwethers' for the coast. Each week will have a theme: Gaelic language; island musical tradition and story-telling; marine and environmental science; local resources and the built environment.

Cape Farewell associate director Ruth Little comments:

'One of the aims of the project is to challenge the widespread assumption that climate change impacts are only relevant to coastal communities in the global south. The environmental, social and economic situation in Scotland's island communities resonates strongly with that of other island and coastal cultures worldwide... [We] will seek to develop new forms of communication for the human experience of climate change, and new forums for collaboration and bold imaginative response to the profound changes we all face.'

The islands have a wide range of sustainability projects ongoing, and Cape Farewell will use these as a starting point for a four-year plan of artist residencies to document, disseminate and bring together
islanders around the issues of sustainability.

The expedition blog can be followed on the Ashdenizen blogroll in our left-hand column.

New metaphors for sustainability: water on a fire - helping turn the page - a child asleep - the family - failing better

2011-07-11T11:05:00.004+01:00

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is two adults and three children living in Everton, Liverpool. They talked together about sustainability, and here are their metaphors for our series.

Neal (aged 10): The world is big plank of wood and it's on fire. The only thing to save it is water. Sustainability is water - that's what it is.

Gabriel (aged 8): It's a big round book, the world is a big circular book, but it needs help to turn the next page, it can't do it by itself so we all have to help the big book turn its next page. That's sustainability – helping to turn the page.

Sid (aged 3): (Sid was asleep on the couch when we asked him. That struck a chord with us. Sustainability is Sid asleep, rapid eye movements, visceral dreaming, thoughts shooting round his brain, wiring and rewiring the connectors in his head, trying to sort out what happened today ready for some sort of tomorrow. But his body mass seems to rest, refuel. It digests its food, slowly, carefully, puts things in place biologically, mentally, spiritually even so that when he wakes up he'll have a good chance at getting what he needs and be in a good enough mood to share what he has with his mates at the nursery.)

Gary (aged 39): A family is the best metaphor I can think of for sustainability. Not the family that the Pope, in Croatia in June, said was in the midst of ruin under the new atheism of secularisation, but the queer family, the radical family, the family that depends - indirectly - upon the reproduction of itself with difference. That's what having kids has been for us. They are us, with difference. You don't need to be a biological parent for this to happen, though. It happens through friendships, encounters and love affairs.

It's the indirectness that is crucial. Indirectness is at the heart of all family-making, and sustainability has an element of indirectness about it. I won't actually suffer climate chaos in Bangladesh or the terrible local effects of the Alberta Tar Sands extraction, except indirectly. That's partly what makes it so tricky to get hold of. How can everyone act in all-powerful acts of solidarity with massive numbers of people? The indirectness is what stops us.

But we have to embrace the indirectness, like we embrace the difference that is produced in our own kids every day as they grow into and away from us. Embracing indirectness is the only way to be happy in the long-run.

The relationship between me and my kids is the best metaphor I have for sustainability. Maybe because it's not even a metaphor but a living, loving struggle.

Lena (aged 36): sustainability is allowing difference, allowing impossible encounters to take place and surprise you. sustainability is being naughty. sustainability is getting out of the box you are in, getting out of networks you belong to, seeing beyond your own group. sustainability is travelling the world, learning a new language, but a really new language, a new method, a new skill. sustainability is beyond the local. sustainability is the provocation that stops you being righteous.

fail. fail again. fail better. go for the impossible.

New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out

2011-07-08T10:21:00.004+01:00

Monik Gupta, environmental blogger and researcher has guest blogged for Ashdenizen. Here he suggests a metaphor in our series New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out.

For me, thinking about sustainability, the object in the picture comes to mind. We come across it so regularly, however there is no word readily available to us to describe it (google suggests it to be termed 'cashier divider' by retail experts). Evidently, just like with 'sustainability', it is something very well known but much less engaged with.

What's more important, both the shopping divider and sustainability mark the necessity for confinement of our own consumption and draw attention to others' needs.

Maybe those two points, shallow engagement despite omnipresence and a focus on limitations of our consumption, are related. We are reluctant to make explicit the distinction between our needs and those of others, even though we are acutely aware of its necessity.

However, this is exactly where the beauty of both the 'shopping divider' and 'sustainability' could lie: in marking the confines of our needs, they enable us to direct attention to our fellow human beings. We begin to acknowledge that we are 'in this together', urgently needing to demonstrate our 'ability to sUStain'.

New metaphors for sustainability: the sailboat

2011-07-06T10:08:00.003+01:00

We continue our series of New metaphors for sustainability with the sailboat, suggested by James Marriott, artist, activist, member of PLATFORM.

The boat for me is a very powerful metaphor. Sustainability is a rather grey and unclear term, but if it means anything, it means that we have to live with the finite resources of the earth. We have to deal with this in our generation and pass it on to future generations.

It is this sense of the finite capacity that I find interesting and comes to me through the experience of boats. I mean boats which are driven by sail and by oar – that use the motive power of the wind and the tide captured through wood and flax and hemp and use that to move from ‘a’ to ‘b’.

I’ve been learning to sail, and it’s been a wonderful experience. It makes you extremely aware of the forces of nature – it makes it very intimate. You’re at the mercy of the winds. You have to work with the tides – the skill comes from using whatever is there, that finite amount of power.

The finiteness, too, comes from the space of the boat itself. You have to pack everything in it that you might need or want. The boat frames my needs and desires about where I can go and how long it’s going to take me.

It concentrates the mind about the nature of the space in which I’m in, and about the wind and the water and the movement of the tide and the flow of the river.

The Southbank re-designed with the tides in mind

2011-07-05T17:17:00.005+01:00

Ella-Marie Fowler got in touch about her BA project on sustainability, and here she describes it.

I'm a graduating student from Design for Performance (BA Hons) at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. For my final project, I chose to focus on sustainability within theatre and how the arts can affect climate change awareness.

I designed a proposal for a Sustainable Arts Centre on the Southbank, London (pictured). The centre would provide space for visiting artists, performers and theatre companies to respond to climate change awareness. The building would be constructed from reclaimed materials and use green energy sources. Visitors to the centre would encounter different experiences throughout the day due to the changing tide of the Thames.

Last year, I visited the Jellyfish Theatre and researched art organisations such as TippingPoint through the Ashden Directory. This sparked ideas about my final year project. As a graduating student in theatre design, I wanted my work to reflect contemporary issues and consider how to develop a sustainable approach to my future work.

New metaphors for sustainability: the Spiderweb Tapestry

2011-07-04T12:52:00.006+01:00

Continuing in our series on New metaphors for sustainability, the dramaturg, writer and Associate Director of Cape Farewell, Ruth Little, chooses the Spiderweb Tapestry.

The interweaving

This is a tapestry woven from the webs of a million Golden Orb spiders in Madagascar. I read about it in Nature, and went to see it in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Made by local weavers over five years, it's an astonishingly beautiful - perhaps miraculous - work of art. Delicately held in tiny 'stalls', the spiders were milked by hand each day and released. Whose art, though, is responsible for the tapestry? Unsigned by either the spiders or the craftspeople who wove its intricate traditional patterns from a natural substance stronger than steel, it's my metaphor for integralism, resilience, and the cooperative values underlying sustainable living.

Universal nature/human nature: The woven web

The Spiderweb Tapestry begins with the web itself - that global symbol of complexity and interconnection - and adds to it the specifically human dimensions of culture, tradition, stewardship and imagination. Produced with a combination of curiosity, great care, local knowledge and local resources, it is at once organic and mysterious; fabricated and wild, particular and universally evocative. It literally glows: it contains the 'vital materialism' described by Jane Bennett in her account of the active participation of non-human forces in events. Like Bennett, my metaphor seeks to develop and transform our sense of care in relation to both the human and the non-human world, 'to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things.'

Virtually all of earth's natural systems have now been influenced and to some extent deranged by human modes of production and consumption. We have begun to cross the threshold of catastrophic loss, compelled by an appetite that has its origins in the relatively recent intellectual separation of human nature from the matter-energy continuum of which we have always been part.

We may have been expelled from Eden for mismanagement, but the whole earth is now our home, and we have nowhere else to go. Only active, attentive and responsible stewardship of earth's living systems and the natural capital on which we rely entirely for survival will make the fabric we're woven into resilient enough to survive the shocks it's now subject to.

The Madagascan tapestry is a work of ethical ingenuity: drawing on the self-organising tendencies of the non-human world, it combines the exceptional capacities of human hands and human minds to create something much more valuable - in cultural and ecological terms - than the sum of its parts.

New metaphors for sustainability: the act of breathing

2011-06-30T11:58:00.009+01:00

In the first in our series on New metaphors for sustainability, the artist Ansuman Biswas, whose work moves between music, dance, theatre, visual art and writing, chooses the act of breathing.

I can’t imagine something that sustains forever and the notion of an endpoint isn’t there in the idea of sustainability. We’re talking about something that’s eternal, and I don’t know anything that is eternal. I can’t imagine eternity.

The word itself, sustenir from the Latin, is to hold something up. It's as if there's some magical wish to hold up against gravity. The image I keep coming back to is the image of breath with its inherent balance, and the craziness of trying to breathe in forever. What if I could breathe in forever? What would happen if I just took in more and more and more oxygen, and just kept breathing? As if I wanted to keep growing, more and more - I would burst like a balloon. I would just die.

It's necessary also to let go, to recognise the limits of my ribcage, the limits of my diaphragm and my body to hold any more breath. To recognise at the level of my body where that limit is and to let go. And in letting go, in breathing out, I speak and I sing to the world, and make a contribution that is unique to this body.

That’s the important part of sustainability. What is sustained is the song, is the music. It’s not made just by me and can’t be made if I only grasp at it. It has to be let go of and given. It's that music, that note, which for me sustains.

Metaphors to continue to live by

2011-06-29T12:40:00.004+01:00

Last year, Ashden Directory co-editor, Wallace Heim, presented a series of blogs about a neglected topic in environment and performance: Flowers on Stage. Today, Wallace introduces her new series: New metaphors for sustainability.

Metaphors influence our lives in many subtle and often overlooked ways: from the idea of life as a journey to the rhetorical wars on drugs and terror, metaphors help shape the world in which we
live. Some conjure up, very effectively, a particular set of circumstances: the "iron curtain", the "green belt", and the "glass ceiling".

But some of the most pressing ideas and circumstances today are short of illuminating or imaginative metaphors. 'Sustainability’ is one, narrowed by the language defining it and lacking the surprising metaphors that would express its significance, encompass its contradictions, and evoke its potential.

To encourage a shift in this situation, I’ve asked people to suggest a metaphor for ‘sustainability’. Over the next weeks, I’ll be presenting the metaphors that performance and visual artists, writers, architects, cultural commentators, environmentalists, activists and scientists have suggested. Each person’s metaphor will appear here on Ashdenizen as a blog, and all of them will be compiled on the Ashden Directory.

The project is not about finding the metaphor, but about revitalising the discourse. I wanted people to approach sustainability from the perspective that had meaning for them, whether sceptical or supportive. The first metaphor appears tomorrow.

Physical theatre that works on many levels

2011-06-28T10:03:00.009+01:00

Bradon Smith visits the Greenwich and Docklands Festival to see Wired Aerial Theatre's latest production, one of this year's TippingPoint commissions

As the World Tipped is a spectacular piece, written and directed by Nigel Jamieson, lying somewhere on the joins between theatre, cinema and circus arts. It opens in a bureaucratic setting with a roll-call of extinct species. An official takes a sheet of paper, reads the name of the lost species, stamps it and transfers it to another pile. Around him others bring the pieces of paper, at first singly and then in boxes, until they tower around him. As the boxes obscure his desk, news comes through of the COP15 summit, and the scene moves to Copenhagen.

And with that, the narrative of the piece is pretty much done. Because as we listen to excerpts from speeches from COP15 by Brown, Obama, and representatives of the Alliance of Small Island States; and as the negotiators struggle to reach an agreement; and as the characters on stage become increasingly exasperated as successive drafts are rejected; as this happens, the stage begins to tip towards the audience.

First boxes and papers begin to slide, then desks, then performers, who struggle to scramble up the inclining stage. As the stage becomes steeper, climbing becomes more difficult – some of the actors have reached the top and are hanging precariously on to the edge, but others are having difficulty. And the audience reacts with a combination of pleasure at the spectacle, cheering the performers in the manner of a pantomime, but with also a suggestion of anxiety, a sort of vicarious vertigo.

Hoisted by a crane, the stage becomes a vertical stage-screen; and as images are projected on to it, the performers – now wired to harnesses – tumble down the face of it and, in the vignettes that follow, interact with the images in a way that is convincing and compelling. As the text of draft negotiations scrolls down the screen, for example, the performers run, leaping the paragraph breaks; or as we watch scenes of floods, the actors are bounced around by the roiling water.

The movement of the performers across the screen is achieved by attaching them via pullies to operators who scamper up and down two ladders running along the sides of the screen-stage. The hanging performers are deftly manipulated, so that they appear immersed in the scene projected behind them. In one nice moment we see a girl scampering up the inclines of a graph projected on the screen behind her (CO2? GDP?) and sliding down the declines, with her operator administering a jolt as she 'hits' the bottom of each downward trend.

One result of this mechanism is that the performers themselves have only limited control over their own movements, aiding the illusion. But it is also an important part of the piece's visual metaphor – the characters appear at the mercy of the environment staged or screened behind them: at first, the failure of the Copenhagen negotiations, and then the unstable climate we have created.

As the World Tipped is a spectacle, but it also reveals evidence of a depth to its thinking. In one scene, a character is consumed by fire in a rather clichéd post-apocalyptic landscape. As she hangs limply, this scene is in turn swallowed by a TV screen, leaving the performer suspended in the frame. The moment suggests, perhaps, an awareness of the inadequacy of this very form of dramatic representation.

Technically the performance is dramatic – but the piece achieves a range of tone, with moments of levity and real poignancy. It also hints at issues beyond that of climate change. If I have a criticism, it is of a few projected images of sad, subcontinental faces staring in to the camera – a couple of moments felt like they were performed against the backdrop of an Oxfam poster campaign. In line with this was the ending, in which the performers 'tear' away the “The End” screen to reveal a screen asking us to “Demand Change Now”, which felt more heavy-handed than the preceding piece.

Otherwise, this is a great piece of physical theatre: dramatic, entertaining and with a conceit that works on many levels and from many angles. Especially the vertical.

Bradon Smith is a research associate in the Geography department at the Open University and AHRC Climate Change Research Fellow at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

This year's Edinburgh Fringe takes green ideas into new areas

2011-06-23T12:31:00.003+01:00

Every year we comb through the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme, speculating on whether productions may have a connection with environmental themes or climate change. This year seems different to previous years.

There are half a dozen theatre shows that clearly have environmentalist themes: mountain-top removal mining; allotments; restrictions in response to climate change (a comedy about socks); and protests against nuclear energy (an adaptation of Lysistrata).

There are shows about human relations with animals, about bullfighting, vegetarianism, our fear of the wolf, and the return of a show taking place in the Edinburgh Zoo. There's also a return of The Man Who Planted Trees. Each year has a share of Frankensteins and Fausts, and shows about Darwin, Francis of Assisi and Galileo.

But there are more shows this year than previously that connect indirectly with environmental themes. Many shows are set in a post-catastrophe world (in previous years, the environmental catastrophe was usually still on its way), or set in the woods, or in dystopian cities.

Other shows relate an environmental situation to another aspect of life: the flooding of overwhelming human emotions is related to the flooding of rivers; a search for a longed-for grandfather is related to a search for a forest. And looking even more widely, we've included productions about capitalism, poverty and urbanisation. This dispersal of environmental ideas into new dramatic territories seems to be a notable change in what this year's Fringe offers.

The number of shows on at the Edinburgh Fringe that we list in the Ashden Directory is still a very small part of the Fringe overall, whose most popular themes remain World War II, the Holocaust, sex, relationships, and personal identity.

new on our newspage

2011-06-16T12:43:00.001+01:00

The Greening Design Forum, hosted by the Society for British Theatre Designers, will discuss sustainability in the theatre industry, at the Old Vic Tunnels, London, 22 June.

The morning after the solstice, 22 June, in Glasgow, a DIY chorus will sing to the sunrise.

A conference on the conflicts over goals and values arising in conservation and in the maintenance of biodiversity has sponsored four artists' residencies to explore conflicts and their contexts. The organisers are the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability, and the artists are Dalziel and Scullion, using film and sculpture; Helen Denerley, who re-uses scrap metal to create sculptures inspired by the animal world; Huw Warren, pianist and composer; and Esther Woolfson, writer.

New productions:
A Funeral for Lost Species by Feral Theatre, a TippingPoint commission, comes to the Green Man Festival in Wales, in August.

My Last Car, by 509 Theatre, again a TippingPoint commission, will be at the Warwick Arts Centre in October.

University College Falmouth is offering funded PhD's, some of which have an environment and arts connection. Interviews early July.

spring moved at 1.3 miles an hour

2011-06-08T03:17:00.001+01:00

For a couple of years, this blog has been reporting on a remarkable school project, at the Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia, which follows the arrivals of daffodils along the east coast of America. One of our editors, Kellie Gutman, participates in the project. The results for 2011 are now in.

"The southernmost daffodil arrived in Jacksonville, Florida March 4th, and the northernmost daffodil arrived in Ft. Kent, Maine, April 27, 2011. The distance was 1812 miles in 56 days, 32.4 miles per day, or about 1 1/3 mile an hour."

This is the 21st year of their daffodil project, and the previous five years posted speeds of 12, 16, 20, 23.4, and 23.5 miles per day. It seems that a late-starting spring, such as was experienced in Boston this year, makes spring race up the coast to catch up. When a blooming daffodil was finally spotted in Boston, on April 5, spring quickly followed with a sudden, intense flowery display, unrivaled for the last many years.

See also: spring's progress, school postcard, it's a mile an hour, as the snow melts, spring arrives at three times the speed

climate playwright tackles free schools

2011-06-03T17:49:00.001+01:00

As any regular reader of this blog knows, the playwright Steve Waters has written the best play about climate change. After The Contingency Plan, he went on to write Little Platoons, a play about free schools.

The radio version of Little Platoons is broadcast with the original cast tomorrow afternoon at 2.30pm.

new on our newspage

2011-06-01T13:10:00.004+01:00

Artsadmin’s Two Degrees 2011 Festival, Art & Activism, Climate & Cuts, runs from 12 – 18 June in London, with artist-led interventions and events on the themes of government cuts, global protest and activism, and the growth of alternative solutions to the climate crisis. There’s the chance to eat American Signal Crayfish caught from the River Thames, a trail of bicycling events between Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios and Arcola Theatre, and other events, films, excursions, including A Good Climate for Business, Future Editions, Potion, Haircut Before the Party, Paths Through Utopias.

Our Current Climate, 18 June, closes Two Degrees with a day of talks, workshops, performances, interventions and walks with artists from the festival and Encounters, UK Uncut and the Yes Men.
The event will be asking how exactly are the climate and the funding cuts linked, and how can we use art and activism to change our current climate?

Manchester International Festival has two different events touching on the environment, Björk’s Biophilia show, and the launch of a three-year project to construct a vertical farm in a disused tower block.

We list those summer music festivals that have environmental themes, or are working towards a low-carbon event.

New productions coming up in June include Harmonic Fields (Lakes Alive), As the World Tipped (Nigel Jamieson and Wired Aerial Theatre, a TippingPoint/Without Walls commission) and SEVEN ANGELS (The Opera Group, ROH2 and Tramway).

Other events: University of the Trees holds an Open Day on 5 June, and a public talk by Shelley Sacks on 11 June at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Devon.

makes you gulp, makes you think

2011-05-31T17:14:00.001+01:00

The Stage reviews As The World Tipped, one of the winners of this year's TippingPoint commissions. The reviewer, Mark Shenton, says the show is very timely indeed.

"Part very physical performance and part film, as aerial acrobats are suspended and crawl over a giant vertical screen that the stage becomes, and are dwarfed by the huge filmed images projected around them, this outdoor show is a lot more than mere spectacle. It does that rare thing - it makes you gulp with astonishment, but also think."

Five-minute YouTube clip here.

what type of French person isn't going green?

2011-05-25T10:08:00.003+01:00

The French paper Libération runs a piece today on les écolo-résistants who worry more about their car than the planet. Libération assesses the écolo-résistant type in terms of age, sex and income. The answers are: "50-65 ans environ ... Homme ... Hauts revenus."

bottom gear

2011-05-16T17:00:00.001+01:00

In a recent column Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson appears to be envying the life of the forager.

"If you do lose your job and you end up living in a barn, with just a fire to keep you warm and nothing to eat but what you can find in a hedge, be happy. Because you'll be having a much better life than me."

new metaphors for sustainability would need to range from "resilience" and "symbiosis" to "anxiety"

2011-05-11T11:27:00.005+01:00

In the second of her two reports from the Staging Sustainability conference in Canada, Wallace Heim reports on the reactions to our latest project: "New Metaphors for Sustainability"

Staging Sustainability also marked the launch of Ashdenizen’s and the Ashden Directory’s project to find new metaphors for sustainability, with the first showing to an audience of our online DVD ‘By Another Name’. The video is of four people suggesting four very different metaphors for sustainability and is the first stage of our project. Over the next weeks, we will be asking many more people, and presenting their responses here and on the Directory.

Clockwise from upper left: Carolyn Steele, Zoë Svendsen, Ansuman Biswas, James Marriott

At the conference, the video was looped for the duration of the first day and I showed it in a panel session on the second day. Fortuitously, there was a generous amount of time. I opted for a conversation with the people there rather than the paper I had prepared – and that was a much more interesting turn.

The prospect of finding a metaphor for sustainability was challenging. No impromptu metaphors were suggested, instead, there was discussion about what it meant to ask the question. Conceptualising it in that way goes against the habitual languages of accountancy, management and measurement. There was resistance from some to considering sustainability as anything other than a hollow idea bereft of novelty, motivation or consistency.

More people, though, enjoyed the problem and whether sustainability as a concept could be revitalised. The combination of metaphor and sustainability was intriguing, a chance to draw out buried emotional and psychological aspects. For one person, trying to live sustainably in rural Canada, the effort is one filled with anxiety, uncertainty as to his survival, and his metaphor would have to express that. For others, it made more sense to think of metaphors for ‘resilience’ or 'symbiosis'. Another contribution brought out the importance of ‘deep’ metaphors to one’s world view and sense of meaning, and the effects of not having, or losing those metaphors. Could a metaphor for sustainability be a 'deep' metaphor? There was talk of when ‘nature’ is a metaphor, and when it is not, on the stage, in the garden and in everyday life.

It was a good start. Special thanks to Barbara Sellers-Young, the conference co-organiser, who was generous in her support for the project and the video.

conference on 'staging sustainability' suggests another theatre database to complement this one

2011-05-04T15:31:00.011+01:00

In the first of two reports from the 'Staging Sustainability' conference at York University in Toronto, Wallace Heim finds herself sustained by some "intriguing new developments" and the discovery that one of the talks was highlighting the Ashden Directory.

One only hears a fraction of the papers and presentations at a conference, and the rest are a blur of abstracts left in a dark room. Unexpected intersections sometimes light up, and the most surprising of these was meeting Lesley Delmenico from Grinnell College, Iowa at breakfast.

Lesley Delmenico was giving a paper on ‘theatre ecology’ at the same time as I was presenting our DVD, and a paper on our project New Metaphors for Sustainability. We didn't discuss our papers, the table was busy with people. Only later when someone directed her to me did the bells start ringing. About a third of her paper was on the Ashden Directory itself, and what an excellent database and resource it is. More than that, somehow, she had connected through or to Steve Waters with Robert’s interview, and with students had produced as theatre his single-play radio version of The Contingency Plan.

As a further project, she's going to suggest that students start compiling a database similar to our Directory for theatre productions in the United States and Canada. All this was in the context of her ideas of how the internet and media networks make possible the rapid dissemination of ideas and images that the environmental situation requires.

The presentations in the conference were a good indication of what's happening in Canada. Having been to many of these events, and organised a few, it's the repetitions that become noticeable, (...of the: 'we made costumes out of recycled materials', or ‘the local community was deeply engaged’ sort....) with a few spikes of intriguing new directions - like those on disability and what that means for perceptions of self-and-environment by artist Alicia Grace from the UK; on queering ecology, a plenary presentation by York academic Catriona Sandilands and dancer Michael J. Morris; and on a project that worked with native peoples on the west coast of Canada that saved some territory from clear-cutting when conventional forms of activism failed, by Nancy Bleck from Canada.

exhibition of '10 climate stories' misses out on the big narrative

2011-04-27T13:35:00.007+01:00

In this guest post, Benjamin Morris reviews the Science Museum's latest exhibition Ten Climate Stories

Buried deep inside Ten Climate Stories, in a film detailing Sir Vivian Fuchs' 1955-58 Antarctic expedition, is a brief statement of profound, Zen-like wisdom. In describing the literal pitfalls of their travels, with a giant Sno-Cat (above) freshly fallen into a crevasse, Fuchs drily notes: “You have to see a tractor in a hole before you can decide how to get it out.”

The lesson is reflective of its context: so, too, must you understand an exhibition before you can decide to give it a name. Ten Climate Stories is worth the trip, but not for what it promises, ten different stories about the climate. Not so. The content of the exhibition can roughly be divided in half, between old 'stories' retold from existing collections in the gallery (such as the steam engines, the atom-splitter, and the rocket modules), and new stories based on artefacts which appear in the museum for the first time (such as Yao Lu's photographs and Thomas Thwaites' toaster). Overall, the exhibition is clearly laid out, with a variety of artefacts, media, and modes of presentation, and the path is linear enough to give a sense of coherence in time—no small order for an exhibition spanning nearly three hundred years in just ten fits.

But still, the title. More accurate would be a title reflecting the exhibition’s actual focus: Ten Consumption Stories, or Ten Energy Stories. Only a few of the ten exhibits address either the climate or climate change, which becomes in this drama a background player lurking in the wings, waiting for its entrance onstage—an entrance that, with everyone else already having played their part (the exploration and discovery of natural resources, the history of scientific pursuit, the surge of private, public, and corporate development, and the ongoing artistic and cultural response) scarcely suggests a happy ending. In some cases, such as the third 'story' (an early photograph of Earth from space), the reference is barely even implicit. It feels as though, trying to drum up additional interest for its brand-new climate change wing, the Science Museum has positioned the word 'climate' as the bait before the switch.

As disconcerting are the mixed political messages sprinkled throughout the exhibition. The opening text of the first panel lays it plain: “The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century demanded huge quantities of natural raw materials such as coal and iron ore,” the panel calmly notes, as though this were a bygone fact of an historical era. The curatorial attitude towards resource consumption, extraction, and exploitation over the centuries remains largely neutral, even as the stories of the exhibits they have selected—contributing to it, critiquing it, or inviting us to reimagine it—are anything but ambivalent to this process. Henry Ford's own distaste for the modern era is a perfect example, with the exhibit addressing the development of the motorcar noting that “Ford himself considered the repetitive production process 'terrifying,' yet it helped usher in a modern age of mass consumption.”

This studious neutrality is perhaps reflective of the exhibition's sponsorship, partly from Shell Oil, and the risks in curatorial tone the Museum may have had to limit. The sheer brevity of the panels, and their often yawning generality, leaves the question open. More disappointing than any possible sin of comission, however, are the sins of omission: the absence of any narrative of renewable or sustainable sources of energy anywhere in the hall. The closest the exhibition comes is the following non-statement before the atom splitter, a few feet away from Ford's motorcar: “[Burning] fossil fuels such as coal to generate electricity has long been under scrutiny and alternatives are being closely examined.” Not that any are named, especially those so obvious (and free) as sunlight, wind, or water, anything that might one day temper profit margins.

That said, certain elements are worth sustained attention. The digital models of the steam engines illustrating their action are excellent: clear and simple, building from the humble output of the atmospheric engine at the beginning of the hall into a powerful narrative of design innovation and efficiency by its end. And of the two categories, the 'new' stories are as a group effective, with Lu's subtle yet vivid photographs inviting a scrutiny that rewards, surprises, and ultimately provokes the viewer. Thwaites' celebrated toaster, moreover, built only from materials he mined and refined himself, earns its laurels: ambitious in its goals yet modest in tone and delightful in execution, it succeeds in playfully exposing the level of material dependency to which consumer society is now unwittingly yoked. (But still, here, a missed opportunity: “The tremendous worldwide mining and manufacturing industry required to create these products,” the panel tells us, “and the millions of years taken for the raw materials to form, aren't considered when we throw them away.” Nor, the point could have been made, when we choose to buy them in the first place.)

Jem Finer's Longplayer, a musical composition that is intended to play unbroken for a millennium—from 1999-2999—is perhaps the most compelling of the three. Sit with it long enough and the realisation dawns that the bright pings that penetrate its deep, sonorous bass rhythms resemble those infrequent yet urgent reminders pinpricking our environmental consciousness. Warnings of overconsumption, of tipping points, the onset of new disasters and the release of new, alarming indicators: each of these comes to mind amid the background hum of daily life and habits. But in our minds as in the hall, too easily they are dismissed or ignored, leaving us only with the rhythm of the bass coursing through our body as we sit, a rhythm that we continue to take for granted long after we have stood and walked away.

All told, Ten Climate Stories is worth seeing not for what the title promises but for what it delivers without broadcasting in advance: smaller moments that reveal much both about our relationship to the earth and its resources, and, crucially, about the way that museums and other institutions of knowledge tell those stories themselves. Like Edward Said's proverbial map, any narrative-based exhibition ultimately tells a story about itself as much as its objects. That the story this exhibition tells falls short of its own mark is to be lamented; that it manages to reward its audience despite its own intentions is a lesson from which museumgoers and museum alike could learn.

Benjamin Morris last reviewed Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Festival for Ashdenizen. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Horizon Review, and Dark Mountain vol. 2. Having recently completed a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, he is now a researcher at the OpenSpace Centre for Geographical and Environmental Research at the Open University.

the mythology of switching on a lightbulb

2011-04-19T22:03:00.000+01:00

The decision to switch on a lightbulb is deeply rooted in a mythology which most of us don't even know we have absorbed.

The theologian Martin Palmer (4 mins in) on Toby Jones' BBC Radio 4 programme The Light Switch Project, broadcast today.

james lovelock and john gray in conversation tonight

2011-04-18T14:38:00.001+01:00

An annual event, the Artangel Longplayer Conversation brings together two cultural thinkers to engage in a conversation that's inspired by Jem Finer's Longplayer, a musical composition playing in real time across the millenium.

Tonight's two speakers are climate scientist James Lovelock, author of The Revenge of Gaia, and philosopher John Gray, author of Straw Dogs. The event is sold out. But it's possible to follow the conversation on a live feed.

going green means noticing there's someone else in the room

2011-04-13T17:09:00.008+01:00

My latest "Going Green" column picks up on how Mary Wollstonecraft (left), author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, explained what thinking was to her young daughter: it was about noticing there was someone else in the room.

For this reason, going green isn’t left-wing or right-wing. It isn’t a threat. It isn’t a conspiracy by scientists or a means of introducing socialism by the back door. It isn’t even anti anything much, except boorishness. (Though boorishness has many manifestations.) Its real enemy is not-thinking. If you poison the well, people can’t drink from it. If you overfish the ocean, you end up with no fish. If you burn coal, you warm the planet.

what happens when you turn on a light switch?

2011-04-06T13:56:00.004+01:00

A 2009 Tipping Point winner, The Light Switch Project, will be broadcast on Tuesday, 19 April, on BBC Radio 4, at 11 am. The story follows the actor Toby Jones as he tries to figure out what happens when you flick that switch.

See also: what you are doing when you flick that switch
assessment of latest tipping point commissions
Tipping Point winners announced tonight

surest sign of spring in the US

2011-04-06T12:38:00.003+01:00

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom in Washington, DC. This is the nation's signature sign of spring, and the city celebrates their arrival with a festival. Up north in Boston, our editor, Kellie Gutman, spotted her first daffodil yesterday. Her postcard to the Padeia School, in Atlanta has been filled in with the date of April 5 and sent to them for their charting of the speed of spring's advance.

Meanwhile, in a recent comment, Robin Dally googles the number of people showing any interest in "the signs of winter".

See also:
Keeping an eye out for the first daffodil
Spring's progress

how much more interested are we in first signs of spring than first signs of winter? answer: 16 times

2011-03-25T17:16:00.002Z

How much more interested are we in the first signs of spring than the first signs of winter? Here are the stats when you search on Google for the following phrases:

"Signs of spring" 1,120,000
"Sign of spring" 6,540,000
"Signs of summer" 893,000
"Sign of summer" 183,000
"Signs of fall" 344,000
"Sign of fall" 386,000
"Signs of autumn" 221,000
"Sign of autumn" 219,000
"Signs of winter" 136,000
"Sign of winter" 328,000

Add the "sign" and "signs" for each season (and combine the totals for "autumn" and "fall") and you get:

Spring 7,660,000
Summer 1,076,000
Fall/Autumn 1,170,000
Winter 464,000

The result? There is seven times more interest in spring than in summer. There is six and a half times more interest in spring than in autumn and there is a whopping 16.5 times more interest in the arrival of spring than the arrival of winter.

not all the science in hollywood movies is bad

2011-03-24T18:27:00.001Z

In today's Material World, Quentin Cooper discusses Hollywood and science with David Kirby, Lecturer in Science Communication at Manchester University and author of Lab Coats in Hollywood (2011).

Their pick of the Hollywood movies where the science is actually quite good includes Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Beautiful Mind, Finding Nemo, Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff

what you're doing when you flick the switch

2011-03-22T13:32:00.001Z

At yesterday's TippingPoint Science Day, Professor Mark Maslin, director of the Environment Institute at UCL, used a vivid phrase to describe the action of switching on a lightbulb: "You are burning fossilised sunlight".

reading thoreau

2011-03-21T23:13:00.001Z

Much of Thoreau’s work can be read as a kind of apologia for attuned idleness.

happening events

2011-03-18T14:53:00.003Z

In her review of the TV series Sarah Palin's Alaska, Janet Malcolm, author of Reading Chekhov, makes this general remark about the surreal aspect of TV reality series.

Something always seems a little off in reality television. You don’t believe that what you are seeing happened in the way it is shown to have happened, any more than you think that the man in the Magritte was born with an apple attached to his face.

online survey on the way performing artists travel in europe

2011-03-17T16:07:00.000Z

On The Move is working with Julie’s Bicycle to create a guide to the environmentally sustainable movement of performing arts and artists in Europe. They have asked people to contribute to an online survey with ideas, experiences and contacts.

workshop on history and climate

2011-03-16T07:53:00.003Z

This blog is participating in a series of workshops entitled Cultural Spaces of Climate. The second workshop on "historising climate" takes place today at the Royal Geographical Society.

Topics range from "weather and climate in colonial Bombay" and "changing meanings of storm surges" to "the role of the Met Office in the coal shortages of 1947". More to follow.

what canute shares with lemmings, ostriches and luddites (they've been terribly misunderstood)

2011-03-15T21:23:00.004Z

King Canute (or Cnut) wasn't trying to show his followers that he had power over the waves, lemmings do not commit mass suicide, ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand - and Luddites weren't against new technology (they just wanted jobs).

economist wonders if hunter-gatherers got it right

2011-03-13T17:29:00.019Z

Monik Gupta has translated posts from ashdenizen for Oeko Fakt. In this guest post, Monik links our blog about Heart of Darkness with research at the Max Planck Institute.

The recent post about Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and its central theme of consumption of resources in the world, resonates strongly in the German broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Astrid Matthey, a scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Economics, questions the widely-held belief that increased wealth and prosperity is closely related to increased well-being, citing research which fails to show such a relationship both in industrial as well as currently developing countries.

"We can no longer afford to leave it to each individual whether to say 'no thanks' in a society focused on consumption; simply because saying 'no thanks' is so incredibly hard for the homo relativus as long as consumption is the measure of all things ... it doesn't allow for the degree to which our current lifestyle threatens the global provision of resources and world peace."

"National Geographic reports on a community of hunter-gatherers in Africa (pic), who happily spend a major part of the day with leisure time, instead of 'striving for more'. Concluding, the author asks: 'What do they know, which we have forgotten?'"

See German version of post about climate change jokes
The other post that's been translated into German is about two very different plays about climate change. There's no exact translation, Monik says, for the English expression "about bloody time", so he went for the politer Das wird aber auch langsam Zeit.

freedom of opinion as a farce

2011-03-13T14:04:00.000Z

In his article on Rwanda, Stephen W Smith writes:

‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence.

Not just with Rwanda, with climate change too.

a book that changed the world

2011-03-11T14:08:00.002Z

It's not always easy to find examples of works of art or literature that have actually changed the world. But here's a good one.

In the week of the Oscars, Ban Ki-moon went to Hollywood to encourage writers and directors to write about climate change. In an online discussion afterwards on Climate Progress, the screenwriter Richard Brenne quoted the remark Abraham Lincoln made to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Lincoln said: "Are you the little woman that started this great war?"

spring's progress: from chiffchaffs in cheddar gorge to snow on the shady side of the street in boston

2011-03-09T17:53:00.014Z

The view from Kellie's window on the sunny side of the street

The zoologist @lillashaw tweeted BBC Springwatch today to wonder when she would hear the first chiff-chaff of the year. Forget the frogs, the bees and the buds:

"for me that officially marks the arrival of #ukspring
This weekend, @lillashaw says in another tweet, she is off to Cheddar Gorge to listen out for any chiffchaffs:

"that's where I heard them first this time last yr :)"

Meanwhile, our America-based co-editor Kellie Gutman sends an update on spring's late arrival in Boston:

The Paideia School in Atlanta tracks the rate of spring's arrival all along the East Coast by plotting exactly when the first daffodil is seen all the way along the 2,377 miles Route 1. It has been getting postcards from spotters of the first daffodil since January. Last year my Boston postcard reported a daffodil on March 30th.

Spring is reaching us slowly. A Boston friend has seen a snowdrop in a neighbor's garden. The snowpack on my front lawn has now disappeared, although across the street, on the shady side, there are still large piles. Today the temperature is right where it should be; the buds on the apple trees along the fence are starting to form and the ground is beginning to thaw.

But students at Paideia should be warned: it will probably be April before the first daffodil appears on our street.

Last year we followed this project in the speed of spring, the melting snow and the results for 2010.

someone's doing nicely out of libya

2011-03-08T19:13:00.005Z

The Financial Times reports today, on its "Markets & Investing" page, that

"The growing political crisis in Libya and the Middle East is driving huge gains for some of the world's largest commodity hedge funds ... Commodities in general have performed well for the past nine months, since agricultural prices began to rise ..."

In the Guardian, the economist Jayati Ghosh reminds us how closely oil and food are linked:

"Oil prices directly and indirectly enter into all other prices through higher fuel costs in production and transport. Agriculture is directly affected, so food prices will rise further, worsening the resurgent food crisis."

Huge gains, then, for hedge funds when oil goes up and food goes up.

let's wait for the other facebook

2011-03-07T18:28:00.002Z

The Facebook that's revealed in The Social Network is a fairly sour story of people trying to cash in on a privileged education. The Facebook that's revealed in the revolutions in North Africa is about democracy, freedom, courage and self-determination. Maybe one day someone will make a movie about that. It might win best picture.

people get capitalism, they don't get sustainable development

2011-03-02T16:49:00.002Z

Futerra has a useful series of tweets from the Big Sustainability Summit. One of the quotes, from Jonathan Porritt, was about what people needed to know about sustainable development, or SD.

Porritt said: 'SD doesn't need a headline - how many people really know what capitalism means?'

But there's a difference. People know what capitalism means because they experience it every day. They don't experience sustainable development every day. SD could do with some headlines.

comedy doesn't have to float free

2011-03-02T15:28:00.005Z

Wallace Heim responds to Nicholas Lezard's suggestion in the Guardian that Ian McEwan's novel "Solar" is hampered because you can't have a comedy about climate change:

It's curious that Nicholas Lezard (pic) thinks comedy floats free of the world. Comedy, classically, is quotidian. It is all about the everyday, the bumbling, ridiculous, faltering, sometimes obscene manifestations of the everyday, ordinary world. It is classical tragedy that is freer of the ordinary world. That's not to say in the intervening centuries the comedic and the tragic haven't changed, intertwined and adapted to each other and new situations, as they might again now. Maybe it is that the dark laughs in Solar are out of place, an old type of comedy that can't grasp the situation.

the whoa-that-is-so-wow school of nature-writing

2011-03-01T22:30:00.004Z

The New York speech writer Clark Whelton has written a smart piece about the linguistic virus that he calls vagueness. It opens with a lovely example:

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!

Shelton writes, a little sternly, that the woman "never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel".

Meanwhile, for those who do like specifics in their nature-writing, Richard Mabey's new book is here and Robert Macfarlane's latest essay is here.

there's laugh-out-loud, but you can't float free

2011-02-28T17:37:00.002Z

Ian McEwan's most recent novel, Solar, which features climate change as a major theme, is now out in paperback. In his review at the weekend Nicholas Lezard suggests that a comedy on this subject isn't possible:

It has many laugh-out-loud moments and turns of phrase; it has a darkly comic thrust; but, because deep down it really is concerned about climate change, it can't float free of the world as comedy can.

See also are they reading the same book?

classics and headlines

2011-02-28T17:20:00.002Z

The Guardian theatre blog links to some recent posts we've done about Oedipus, Faust and Frankenstein.

the best art maintains its true relevance not by reacting quickly to the headlines, but by probing deeply into the fundamental things that make us human

why human rights activists are not like climate scientists

2011-02-26T14:11:00.002Z

In the last blog, would a play about climate scientists be the best way to write about climate science?, the point was made that a play about human rights didn't have to feature a human rights activist.

The analogy between human rights activists and climate scientists has prompted a couple of emails.

One email pointed to the difference in the way the professional and emotional lives interacted:

I think climate scientists and human rights activists are completely different in terms of the potential tension between their emotional and professional lives, the material they are working with and how they are viewed publicly.

The other suggested that the kinds of knowledge that each work with and represent are fundamentally different.

Science is so embedded in knowledge about climate change, that it is a different kind of thing to human rights. So I'm not sure the comparison really holds up. Does this matter? Maybe not in a general kind of way - if what this means is that the 'specialist' or 'expert' is not the only person who can speak. But it does matter in a more specific way - that in thinking about climate change on stage - it might be a relief to get rid of the scientists, but one may still have to come to grips with science - in much more complexity than just the 'facts' or 'predictions' or 'scepticism'.

would a play about climate scientists be the best way to write about climate science?

2011-02-25T10:56:00.008Z

In wanted: a portrait of the climate scientist as a real person, this blog argues that

the most interesting characters to put on stage right now are climate scientists ... simultaneously appalled and fascinated by what they are discovering.

The artist and theatre-maker Tim Nunn responds

My trouble is not wanting to use climate scientists at all. Is it the same as writing about human rights by portraying a human rights activist? (That isn't a rhetorical question by the way.) Your last paragraph makes it sound as if the climate scientists would do a pretty good [job] themselves if they were given the chance - why should we represent that on stage? (Again, not a rhetorical question.) I've been torn about this for ages and not finding a way through.

True, there's no reason why a play about climate science need feature any climate scientists. A good play is about more than its immediate subject matter. For instance, David Hare's The Permanent Way is about the privatisation of the railways. But its real theme is grief.

That said, there have been important plays that are fairly directly about scientists. In Science on Stage, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr lists "a wonderfully diverse" range of scientists who have (since Brecht's Galileo) peopled the stage.

Her list mentions Bohr, Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Ralph Alpher, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Rosalind Franklin, Thomas Huxley, Tycho Brahe, Johann Kepler, Stephen Hawking and P.A.M. Dirac.

Yes, climate scientists can do a good job representing themselves. But playwrights can do a good job representing them too.

Interestingly, Science on Stage makes no mention of climate scientists. (It was published in 2006.) But it's evident that James Lovelock has been the inspiration behind characters in The Contingency Plan - Steve Waters talks about this here - and Earthquakes in London.

But Tim Nunn is quite right: a play about human rights does not have to feature a human rights activist.

wanted: a portrait of the climate scientist as a real person

2011-02-24T18:27:00.018Z

In his preface to The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard makes the point that writers can have real political influence. His example is Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches, which Stoppard writes,

"were plausibly said to have done more than anything else to turn the 'Reforming Tsar' Alexander 11 towards abolishing serfdom."

But the writing has to be precise and observant. Earlier in the preface, when discussing Alexander Herzen, Stoppard writes,

"What he detested above all was the conceit that theoretical future bliss justified actual present sacrifice."

Twentieth-century history was on Herzen's side. It's easy to imagine, today, that many playwrights' resistance to climate change as a political subject comes from this idea that it deals with a "theoretical future" and that it is being used to justify "actual present sacrifice". Playwrights like to write about real situations, flesh and blood characters, the here and now. And they like jokes.

In some ways, then, the most interesting characters to put on stage right now are climate scientists: not a climate sceptic disguised as a climate scientist (as happens in The Heretic), but the climate scientists who are simultaneously appalled and fascinated by what they are discovering.

At last year's TippingPoint conference in Oxford, climate scientists spoke candidly and wittily about how their work had altered their lives and their world views. If caught accurately, that kind of portrait might have real political influence.

What are the first signs of spring - frogs, birds, bees or buds?

2011-02-22T20:51:00.009Z

From frogspawn.org.uk

The BBC’s Nature UK blog has asked,‘How do you define spring?’ The Daily Mirror thinks spring is coming early in the UK, but others disagree. Our American co-editor Kellie Gutman searches online for an answer.

It is not easy to answer, except to say, that if you follow Twitter there are many signs. The BBC's Springwatch has been receiving tweets from all over the UK on the topic.

On Feb 2, lakedistrictnpa tweeted from Kendal:

Saw loads of snowdrops on the walk into work. Spring’s a-coming! #ukspring

On Feb 4, Boudica_ tweeted from Devon:

Red-tailed bumblebee spotted yesterday in Herts; recorded @#naturescalendar.

On Feb 6, jerembybiggs tweeted:

Is this the UKs first frog spawn?: http:wp.me/pjz4j-1oe

On Feb 8, landguardranger tweeted from Felixstowe:

just seen first elder leaves breaking their buds on reserve, bliss #ukspring is on its way.

On Feb 10 Jemnick tweeted from Hampshire:

Chaffinch, song thrush, dunnock all in spring song mode! Great! #ukspring

On Feb 20 skylarksue commented on BBC’s Nature UK blog

Here in Essex garden, snowdrops have been out for 3 weeks. Bluetits are rearranging grass & straw in the nestbox. There are buds on my cherry tree.

Meanwhile, this blogger, writing from Boston, has just been cross-country skiing. The record-breaking snow is beginning to melt. Houses on the sunny side of the street have a foot still in their front yards; those on the shady side have two-to-three feet.

To record your own Spring sightings, sign up to nature's calendar

To follow Spring's advance in the US, look at Journey North 2011

To follow the way a school has followed the first signs of spring, year after year:
school postcard asks our snow-bound co-editor to keep an eye out for the first daffodil
flowers on stage: snake's head fritillaries
spring forward

what oedipus rex tells us about climate change

2011-02-18T13:33:00.007Z

In his column, 'Nature Notes' in the Independent, Michael McCarthy argues that the particular way in which we think about the major problems that confront us makes us incapable of grasping their size.

The principal fault of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, remember, was not that he murdered his father and married his mother; those were incidentals of his fate. His real fault was that he thought he knew everything, he had answered the riddle of the Sphinx, he was Mr Clever. The Gods showed him that he wasn't (and in the greatest of all tragic ironies, he puts out his eyes to punish himself for having been blind to his true situation, which now he can see).

In the modern consensus, in liberal secular humanism, this spiritual view of Man of having limits, of not being able to do everything he chooses, and of potentially being a problem creature, is missing entirely. There is no trace of it whatsoever.

pic: Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus and Clare Higgins as his mother/wife, Jocasta.

See also
What Frankenstein and Titania tell us about climate change
The Greek Divide
Leave it the way we got it
More hubris
Adrenaline on the cornflakes
The Greeks had a word for it

what frankenstein and titania tell us about climate change

2011-02-17T10:06:00.007Z

A few days ago, commenting on the themes in Greenland and The Heretic, this blog said:

At the moment it feels as if playwrights are reacting to the journalistic noise around climate change. When the deeper ideas do emerge in plays, and these ideas inform the actions of the characters, the immediate subject of the play may not even be climate change.

What that post might have added, is that many themes that relate to climate change already exist in other plays. In his new blog, Joe Smith, Senior Lecturer in Environment at The Open University, finds that the National's production of Frankenstein is more thought-provoking about climate change than Greenland.

there is a Romantic anti-industrialisation/anti-urbanisation strand which runs through environmentalism from day 1. But there are also strands in recent discourses of climate change ‘solutions’ that are in thrall to science and technology’s apparent invincibility and adaptability. Hence the arch modernists who were formed in the whiteheatoftechnology environment of the 1950s and 1960s are happy to contemplate immense geo-engineering experiments and massive expansion of nuclear power – Science discovered this problem and Science will solve it.

After this blog had tweeted that link, Susannah Clapp, the Observer's theatre critic and author of With Chatwin (highly recommended), replied by suggesting A Midsummer Night's Dream and Titania's "the seasons alter" speech.

In Act 11, Scene i, Titania describes how through "this distemperature" we see:

The seasons alter: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which

(In 2002 Futerra made a short film, The Seasons Alter, based on this speech.)

See also: Mark Rylance picks climate change lines from King Lear, All's Well That Ends Well, Two Gentleman of Verona and King Lear and Bill Moyers picks two lines from King Lear.

See also: George Monbiot finds Dr Faustus the key text.

pic: Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch in the NT's Frankenstein

commissions divide between those who have a track record in this area and those who don't

2011-02-16T12:18:00.006Z

Wallace Heim, co-editor of the Ashden Directory, assesses the latest TippingPoint commissions announced last night

In the mix of projects awarded TippingPoint commissions, it’s striking how most of the companies and artists do not have a history of working with environmental themes.

Some do: Feral Theatre; Vicky Long and Tim Sutton; and Craig Vear. But others seem to be coming to the challenges of this commission - to stimulate the imaginative thinking necessary to navigate a world shaped by climate change – for the first time.

This could be an argument for how, once funding is made available, productions will follow. This could also reflect how any artistic practice – aerial spectacles, intimate vigils, composed music, sound art, the crafting of objects, place-based performance – offers a particular way-in to understanding a changing climate.

The expectations for these projects is high. The example of Greenland at the National Theatre shows how a sudden education in climate change does not necessarily produce a viable play; the lessons of a decade of environmental performance weren't learned.

An ideal would be if these TippingPoint commissions can bring fresh and nuanced ideas about climate change to their own inventive practices.

Full details on the winning commissions on the Ashden Directory.

tipping point winners announced tonight

2011-02-15T11:25:00.008Z

The winners of the Tipping Point commissions will be announced this evening. (This blogger was one of this year's readers of the proposals.) Report to follow. Tweets from 6.30pm.

Update: the winners of Tipping Point commissions were

In the Beginning was the End by dreamthinkspeak (£20,000)
My Last Car by 509 Arts (£15,000)
A Beautiful Thing by Barnaby Stone (£15,000)
Found Voices by Joe Duddell and Craig Vear (£10,000)
Unplugged at The Eden Project (£9000)
The Funeral for Lost Species by Feral Theatre (£5,000)

and the Tipping Point/Without Walls commission went to

As The World Tipped by Wired Aerial Theatre (£30,000)

Full details on the winning commissions on the Ashden Directory.
See also commissions divide between those who have a track record in this area and those who don't
See also: reports on two of last year's winners: fingers on the button and giant day in Tooting.

Martin Luther King had a dream, but he had other phrases too

2011-02-15T00:00:00.004Z

Climate change activists like to quote Martin Luther King's "I have a dream ..." as an example of selling a positive message that will appeal easily to people.

But in the same speech this blog reminds us Dr King also spoke in grittier terms about the "fierce urgency of now" and "the tranquillizing drug of gradualism".

two very different plays about climate change share some things in common

2011-02-11T11:41:00.019Z

"Climate change drama is the new growth industry", writes Michael Billington in today's Guardian. Well, about bloody time.

Greenland opened at the National on 1 February, and Richard Bean's The Heretic opened at the Royal Court last night. They couldn't be more different.

Greenland has four authors, multiple storylines and an anxious desire to reflect the range of positions people have taken on the subject. The Heretic is the work of one author, its science is about as plausible as its plot-line, but it's got some great characters and some very funny jokes.

If the two plays are similar at all, it's in what they don't achieve.

Neither play catches the intensity of feeling that surrounds these issues in the developing world. They are Eurocentric, when understanding how one half of the world impacts on the other is central to the subject.

Nor does either play give a genuine sense that the news contained within the IPCC reports changes our view of the world, and our place in it. The reports do this, and they do it as profoundly as Galileo stating that the earth revolves around the sun or Darwin stating that all species of life have a common ancestry.

These are ideas that can't be speedily researched by playwrights. They raise large philosophical and ethical questions. (The first report was published in 1990, so we've had 20 years to think about it.) But the ideas have to be lived with, experienced and internalised.

At the moment it feels as if playwrights are reacting to the journalistic noise around climate change. When the deeper ideas do emerge in plays, and these ideas inform the actions of the characters, the immediate subject of the play may not even be climate change.

Pic: Johnny Flynn in rehearsals for The Heretic.

one planet discusses climate change plays

2011-02-10T17:46:00.003Z

This blogger is on the World Service's One Planet today discussing plays about climate change. There's also a contribution from Steve Waters, and an interview with Ben Power, Greenland's dramaturg, who says: "We're trying to find a different way to talk about this thing."

green words, but not green talk

2011-02-10T17:15:00.000Z

The lively twitterstream from the State of the Arts conference shows how popular green buzzwords are. There have been a lots of references to "ecology", "sustainable", "environment" and "resilience". But none of these words have been used in a green context.

"sustainable" in what sense of the word?

2011-02-10T12:00:00.004Z

The second State of the Arts conference opened with a speech from Liz Forgan, chair of Arts Council England. In the speech, Forgan outlines the "five clear goals". The third goal is:

We will make the arts sustainable in every sense of the word, from carbon reduction to marketing, from finance to fundraising and not least how the arts can seize the transformative opportunities offered by digital technology.

To put "carbon reduction" in the same sentence about sustainability as "marketing", "finance", "fund-raising" and "digital technology" is to blur the issue badly.

See also: Sustainable is not a metaphor

Update: In this week's TLS, the poet Hugo Williams writes: "The over-used 'organic' has given way to 'sustainable' to mean anything remotely decent."

david hare's documentary subjects

2011-02-08T09:30:00.002Z

David Hare on writing documentary dramas.

“I am never comfortable until I can understand a way of it being more than the subject matter.”

"When I go to see a film like The Social Network, then I feel a kinship, I feel they are doing exactly what I am trying to do, which is to make a modern myth out of quasi documentary theatre. But in the theatre, I feel incredibly lonely.”

views of greenland: "like frazer in dad's army"

2011-02-07T22:33:00.019Z

This is only the second time that the National Theatre has staged a play that addresses climate change. (The first time is here.)

The issue of climate change seems, almost invariably, to present theatre critics with an irreconcilable tension between the material and the form in which it is presented. Here's a selection from half-a-dozen first night reviews of Greenland.

"Like Frazer in Dad’s Army, Greenland repeatedly warns that we are doomed, and that unless we mend our ways, sharpish, it will serve us jolly well right."

"I care about the issues. But I couldn't give a damn about any of the multiply-authored characters."

"Greenland is not so much a play as a statement put out by a committee."

"The show starts with a big issue and then seeks ways to illustrate it. I suspect it would be more fruitful to take the more traditional route of beginning with characters and a situation and working outwards."

"The trouble with this sort of fact-into-fiction project is that the wholly commendable statements of the green movement wind up sounding gauche and laughable when transposed into drama."

"Thought-provoking debates will surely arise in the accompanying series of NT platform talks"

From Daily Telegraph, Independent, Observer, Guardian, London Evening Standard and Independent on Sunday

pic: John Laurie as Private James Frazer, the Scottish coffin maker, in "Dad's Army"

what the twitterverse thinks of greenland

2011-02-02T09:14:00.000Z

@Paul_Griffiths_ Feeling all green and depressed after @nationaltheatre #Greenland; on my way home to recycle, buy some wellies and write my will!

@ktlovestheatre National last night for #Greenland. Patronising claptrap! Script? Mali? Bamako? Eco-lesbians? UN? Rubbish! Like poor quality TIE. Miss it!

@miriamgillinson Is it bad that climate change feels like old news? Let's hope #Greenland @NationalTheatre changes my mind.

@pat_hobby @jackthorne did you write the toilet roll monologue in #greenland ? The first play to ever revolutionise the audience's wiping technique?

@peterlacy #Greenland new play at #National Theatre: strength/weakness doesn't tie story together in simple message. Frustrating but true of real event

@cathradojcin Went to see #Greenland at @NationalTheatre - v compelling & exciting look at climate change & all it's issues &complexities.Fully recommend

@shesaws Home from #greenland at the NT. Still making up my mind about how the climate change argument was made, but it certainly generates debate.

@tiina_hei Some excellent polar bear characterisation, rainfalls and snow storms at @NationalTheatre this evening. #Greenland

british playwrights have "blithely ignored" climate change

2011-02-02T08:52:00.003Z

British theatre prides itself on being contemporary, up-to-date - in a word, hot. So it’s odd that, over the past decade, there have been so few plays about climate change. While everybody, and I mean everybody, has been talking about global warming, while climate-change deniers have been branded the new fascists, and while well-publicised protesters have tried to stop electricity stations from functioning, British playwrights have - with only a couple of exceptions - blithely ignored the subject.

From first paragraph of Aleks Sierz's review of Greenland for The Arts Desk

Why theatres don't touch climate change
From no plays about climate change to three in a month
Finally a good play about climate change

ruth padel on our reactions to five wild animals

2011-01-31T12:38:00.002Z

This week on Radio 3 the poet Ruth Padel reads an essay each night exploring our reactions to wild animals in Britain. Tonight's is The Deer. The other four in the series are on the robin, the badger, the butterfly and the fox.

german version of the post about climate change jokes

2011-01-30T17:37:00.000Z

A post from a couple of years ago, the joke climate changes, has been translated into German by Monik Gupta and now appears on the website Öko-Fakt as Das Witze-Klima verändert sich.