joe romm has a dream

As today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, climate blogger Joe Romm,who knows a thing or two about rhetoric, looks at King's speeches about the civil rights and considers what climate campaigners might learn:

I think science has mostly told us what it can about the fiercely urgent need to act swiftly ... Our urgent need now is for much more persuasiveness more ...

what students are not protesting about

I didn't see one global warming placard in Parliament Square the other day. Protesting youth has other things on its mind.

Peter Preston more ...

from writer to activist

New York Times columnist David Brooks contrasts Tolstoy, the writer, with Tolstoy, the activist. What changed, Brooks argues, was Tolstoy's ability to see. more ...

how he saw war

When propaganda meets art: Picasso's biographer, the art critic John Richardson, describes some of Picasso's works on peace as sentimental, kitsch, crude, simplistic and out-of-date. But not all.

'Jeux de Pages' depicts medieval page boys - their absurdly helmeted leader in spiky armor on a comically caparisoned horse - trying to look warlike. That was how he saw war, Picasso told a group of friends in March 1959: medieval children playing nasty, medieval games. more ...

WWF and others say "culture" has "central importance"

This blog follows on from yesterday's one not bothering to argue with people who don't want to agree with you, better to get on with doing something you like.

Mark Twain understood this kind of persuasion when Tom Sawyer got Huck Finn to help him paint the fence. Aesop also understood it (see pic) with the fable of the wind and the sun, where the heat of the sun succeeds where the force of the wind fails.

In his Guardian column yesterday George Monbiot praises Tom Crompton's Common Cause (pdf) as 'the most interesting report I have read this year'. The report shows (he says) that progressives have been suckers for a myth of human cognition that Crompton "labels the enlightenment model".

Psychological experiments have shown that humans don't behave entirely rationally, they behave in relation to extrinsic or intrinsic values. We hang onto stuff that confirms who we are. We frame discussions in terms of values. And that - of course - is cultural.

For this report, WWF-UK partnered with Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Oxfam. None of these is primarily an arts organisation. And yet, the aim was:

to explore the central importance of cultural values in underpinning concern about the issues upon which we each work.

To put this in six simple words, climate change is a cultural issue. Or, to add one more word, the environmental crisis is an aesthetic crisis. more ...

trip to the edge

Cape Farewell’s ninth Art & Science Arctic expedition departs for Spitsbergen tomorrow.

A team of 20 artists and scientists from Russia, USA, UK, Australia, Spain and Canada embark on a three-week expedition, sailing north of the 80th parallel to the ice edge from Spitsbergen and east towards Russia.

The team includes the theatre director, Deborah Warner, the Moscow playwright, Mikhail Durnekov, a member of the New Drama movement of young Russian playwrights, and Ruth Little, former literary manager of the Royal Court. more ...

the ambiguity bomb

The author Tom McCarthy believes car parks should replace theatres because:

Car parks are really fascinating spaces, full of geometry, technology and menace; anything could happen in them.

He also explains the degree to which his work is political:

All art is political inasmuch as it takes place within the space of the polis, and involves language and social relations and the Symbolic Order in general. But I never make work that's polemic, or that has a message. That's not what art's there for. What's genuinely radical about good art is that it detonates a kind of ambiguity-bomb at the heart of the polis. That's true from Aeschylus to Joyce.

(See also Zadie Smith on Two Paths for the Novel.)  more ...

buzz buzz

500 performers from the National Youth Theatre are swarming across London today presenting a series of performances to raise awareness about the plight of the honeybee. This blogger saw 100 NYT actors with yellow umbrellas performing the Fibonacci Sequence. (Someone at the end of the line was explaining to passers-by what was happening.)  More. Plus S_warm on twitter or hashtag #swarm. more ...

look forward in anger

Bill McKibben responds to the U.S. Senate's inaction over climate change in an article for TomDispatch, 'We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it any more'. McKibben argues that says no-one comes out to fight for weak or watered-down legislation. He urges readers to raise their game:

It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn't been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in ... never. We may need to get arrested. We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger. more ...

beyond paintings

The story so far: On Monday night Tate Britain held a summer party to celebrate 20 years of sponsorship from BP. A letter to the Guardian, signed by 171 artists (including Caryl Churchill) expresses anger that the Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. On the Today programme former Arts Council chairman Sir Christopher Frayling and Greenpeace's Charlie Kronick come close to violent agreement on the issue. In the Daily Telegraph today however the composer James MacMillan describes the views of the 171 artists as 'luddite, eco-fascist utopianism'.

pic: Guardian graphic shows oil spill bigger than both Wales and Belgium more ...

top tens

An email from Franny Armstrong, director of The Age of Stupid, to

10:10-ers informs us that today is exactly six months from the 10:10

day on 10th October (10.10.10).

That's the day, a Sunday, when 10:10 joins with 350.org to organise

the biggest ever day of local climate action.

The date is also 10 weeks before world leaders meet in Mexico for

climate change talks.

more ...

they'll do the asking themselves

Over at the RSA's arts and ecology blog, William Shaw argues: we shouldn’t be asking artists to make art about climate.

I agree to some extent that the practice of artists and performers, and how sustainable that practice is, can be considered separately from the content of the work. But not entirely separately. I agree that's it's impossible to trace the causal links between works of art and political engagement. I agree, also, that you can't ask artists 'to do climate'.

But we are living in a period of transition which is changing the nature of our imagination as profoundly as the Renaissance. (See, for instance, our world is a science fiction.) I've written elsewhere that over the last 20 years the IPCC reports have changed the way we think about ourselves:

it has led us to rethink the parameters of cause and effect, and costs, and personal responsibilities, and the interdependence of countries, and the trade-off between our lives and future generations 

It would be hard to see how artists could fail to want to engage with that. more ...

new low carbon arts

Tomorrow this blog is attending a conference at the National Theatre - unimaginable five years ago - titled: A Low Carbon Future for the Arts?

The speakers are:

Dame Liz Forgan, Chair Arts Council England
Nick Starr, Executive Director National Theatre
Prof. Chris Rapley CBE, Director Science Museum
Alison Tickell, Director, Julie's Bicycle
Dr Jennifer Cleary, Head of Creative Learning, Manchester International Festival
Steve Tompkins, Howarth Tompkins Architects
Lucy Neal, OBE, Independent Arts Producer

Each participant has been asked to consider these questions:

1. Could your organisation commit to the principles of staff engagement, measurement, reduction and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions, as developed within the Industry Green Framework? What steps might be needed to gain your commitment and what, if any, support might you need?

2. Is there a meaningful collaborative position on climate change that the arts sector could share publicly? If so, what is it and who should be involved? more ...

the roar of the empty seats

Shortly before 5pm yesterday this blog got a retweet from @JohnPrescott saying he was going into the chamber to listen to Ed Miliband report on Copenhagen. The former Deputy Prime Minister said you could watch at BBC's Democracy Live.

Sure enough, there was the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change reporting on one of the most significant conferences that has ever taken place and one in which the Secretary of State had himself played an important role. Thanks to Twitter and the web, this blog watched Miliband's statement and the questions that followed from a laptop at home.

There were good intelligent questions from John Gummer, John Prescott, Colin Challen, Simon Hughes and others. There was also a really stupid question from John Redwood, who didn't appear to understand the difference between climate and weather.

But the most eloquent aspect of the live broadcast was the rows and rows of empty green seats. There must have been about 20 MPs dotted around the chamber. That means 626 other MPs thought they had something better to do than discuss Copenhagen and climate change. That spoke clearest. more ...

first time

Unlike most commentators, Joe Smith, Senior Lecturer in Environment at the Open University, returned from Copenhagen, holding a glass half full.

However feeble the statements the fact remains that COP15 saw all the key players sit down and take this topic seriously – collectively - for the first time. more ...

twitter as good as today

The Today programme has been famously sneering about the vacuities of Twitter. But that in itself is just another news story it has missed. Here are five things this blog has learnt on Twitter this morning:

1. A new phrase: 'sustainable prosperity'. (ht: @drgrist)

2. The rate at which our footprint is growing: in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, humanity’s footprint grew almost 2% from 2005, and 22% from a decade before. (ht: @EndOvershoot)

3. The rate of sea rise: a new study indicates sea rise rate tripled (ht: @tweetingdonal)

4. A new type of capitalism: a look into Monsanto's 'seed business' reveals what @stevesilberman calls 'DNA-based capitalism'. (ht: @Arch4HumanityND)

5. When it's darkest: tomorrow marks the earliest sunset for UK this year; although mornings get darker until January, it's now as dark as it gets pm. (ht: @AngusWillson @thegreatgar)

... and one great quote:

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. - Martin Luther King Jr. (ht: @robertiannone)

Would this blog have learnt as much listening to the Today programme? more ...

out of the window

Today 35 of the world’s leading climate research institutions gave a warning about sea level rises based on a report they've just completed called 'Antarctic Climate Change and Climate'.

Their warning is the front page story in today's Times. At the end of the story, The Times then asks Benny Peiser, director of the new Global Warming Policy Foundation, for a comment.

The GWPF website states that 'Our main purpose is to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.'

Peiser refutes the report by saying:

'The predictions come in thick and fast, but we take them all with a pinch of salt. We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it
doesn’t seem to be warming.'

So a report from 35 climate research institutions is rejected by a guy saying, hey, look out the window, it's cold today. Not sure where the integrity and balance lies there.

Update: the former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has noted that Lord Lawson, the chairman of the GWPF, is also chairman of CET, whose clients include Elf, Total, Shell, BP, Amoco, and Texaco.

As Prescott writes about GWPF, 'From what I can see it of, it is not so much a think tank as a petrol tank.' (Ht: Guardian.) more ...

poetry and protest

When Daniel Defoe visited the Lake District, he thought it was hideous, even more hideous than Wales. By the time William Wordsworth (pic) had written about the Lake District, everything had changed - including the property prices.

On R4's Start the Week, the environmental historian Harriet Ritvo explained how the changing perception of the Lake District led to the first green coalition of interests to oppose a major new development.

Her new book The Dawn of Green - reviewed in the THES here and the Independent here - details how Wordsworth was responsible for a set of associations that turned the Lake District into 'a national sacred space'.

Start The Week's host Tom Sutcliffe remarked on how

an artist, as it were, composing poems, can set in motion a cultural change which has huge consequences
more ...

beyond 1.0 thinking

David de Rothschild (left) is about to sail a 60ft catamaran across the Pacific Ocean to publicise the vast amount of plastic garbage that has collected in the sea. His boat is made out of 'upcyclable' plastic.

Unlike Shackleton and Scott, Fiennes and Branson, de Rothschild says he is not in it for glory or brand awareness; rather, he wants to redefine what adventures themselves might be about.

The purpose of the voyage, he says, is not just to point to problems ("1.0 thinking") but to come up with solutions that might be scalable in other areas. more ...

the 5% right

Flights are the fastest-growing polluter in transport, and 95% of the world’s population has never been on a plane.

My Going Green column asks: Do the rest of us have a right to fly? more ...