from prometheus to home help

The British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor (left), ends his History of the World with a solar-powered lantern.

"solar energy is a dream of the future that echoes the oldest and most universal of human myths, that of the life-giving sun. You could see our solar-powered lamp as an echo of this myth - the heroic fire-stealing Prometheus reduced to the humble role of home help."

See after today's 99th object, one more to go and solar lantern brings enlightenment more ...

object one hundred

When we left Africa two million years ago, every person took with them the same dream.

You can now watch Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, describe the solar panel in terms of one of the 100 objects in the history of the world. (See myth becomes reality.) more ...

myth becomes reality

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, was one of the speakers at last night's Ashden Awards. He told the audience that the 100th object in his History of the World in A Hundred Objects had not yet been chosen. One of the strongest candidates for the 100th object was the photovoltaic panel.

Ever since humans migrated from Africa a million years ago, he said, they have dreamt of harnessing the energy of the sun for the moments when the sun isn't shining. It had become one of the central myths of mankind. With the photovoltaic panel, that idea - that societies could flourish by storing the energy of the sun - looks more than possible. It was an object that would change the world.

See Ashden Awards International Finalists and Ashden Awards UK winners and the Guardian's report Eigg Islanders win top prize for green living more ...

is climate change a zombie concept?

Kellie Payne reports on the Tipping Point event, held earlier this month, where Mike Hulme suggested climate change was a zombie concept:

as a metaphor it has done its work. As a concept, it connects a large swathe of issues combined through the scientific narrative and perhaps there are other ways to make progress.

Much less the as-billed scientific update, the Tipping Point event held on Wednesday 13th April at Kings College, London was a philosophical exploration of the status of our current conceptualisation of climate change.

Hosted by Tipping Point, the arts organisation that seeks to build bridges between artists and climate scientists, the afternoon featured Mike Hulme, UEA climate scientist and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, climate change adaptation specialist Emma Tompkins and Greenpeace’s Senior Climate Advisor Charlie Kronick . In attendance were past Tipping Point conference attendees, a mix of artists, academics and a few scientists.

Hulme is a veteran climate scientist whose career has included serving as the founder-director of the Tyndall centre and contributing scientist to UK climate change scenarios and reports for the IPCC. However, writing his recent book led Hulme to take a more philosophical perspective: his interest being more in the positioning of our larger conceptualisations of climate change and interrogating different epistemological constructions of climate change. Moving beyond the merely scientific understanding of climate change, he investigates how climate change is understood in disciplines varying from economics, ethics, politics and humanities. In particular, he argues that climate change is a value laden concept that reflects our views of the world, nature, the economy and ethical frameworks.

Hulme’s presentation was largely an explanation of the four myths he explores in his book: lamenting Eden which draws on a sense of nostalgia, presaging apocalypse based on a sense of fear, constructing Babel (hubris) and celebrating jubilee which builds upon our sense of justice. In essence, what Hulme argues is that every individual brings their own agenda, applying the challenge of climate change to their own problems, that is, climate change is the raw material that is used to work on our individual projects. Hulme suggested we ask ourselves whether stabilising the climate was indeed our ultimate goal or whether stabilising climate was instead a means to an end, and we were using climate change to achieve our other goals.

Emma Tomkins on the other hand bases her work on a belief that climate change is happening and asserts that the government is leading the way on adaptation. Based at Leeds and the Government’s Department for International Development, Tomkins outlined types of adaptation currently being implemented including risk management policies and attempts to build resilience. When Tomkins asked the audience how many were currently taking adaptive measures, it became clear that the line between what constitutes mitigation activities and adaption is often blurred in the minds of many. The government makes a clear distinction between mitigation measures (limiting ones emissions) and adaption (preparing for the impacts of climate change). For instance when asked about what types of adaptation individuals were taking, some audience members mentioned the work of the Transition Town movements, but from the government perspective Transition Town activities would constitute mitigation measures as their main focus is reducing emissions.

Tomkins conducted an exercise to see how we as an audience would allocate adaptation funds, whether we would base our decisions on: equitable distribution of resources, reward mitigators, help those facing the most exposure, help the most vulnerable, or offer developmental assistance. At the moment, current government policy (Adaptation Policy Framework) is based on risk mapping and awareness and therefore has its focus on those who face the most exposure to risk. Tomkins stressed the need to be aware that in any adaptation policy there are a number of decisions to be made about the type of losses we are willing to take and warned that there is a potential to make serious mistakes unless we seriously consider the issues.

Charlie Kronick weighed in with the activist viewpoint, reminding the audience that in the past adaptation wasn’t even considered because to do so would be to accept defeat. Further, he didn’t see the need to separate out adaptation and mitigation as he sees them as one and the same. For Charlie, climate change isn’t about science, or art, but about power politics, ‘the deal makers and takers’ and inequality is a major driver.

Hulme agreed that it’s about politics and our ambitions about what type of society we want to inherit. Hulme suggested that perhaps climate change was indeed a zombie concept, and as a metaphor it has done its work. As a concept, it connects a large swathe of issues combined through the scientific narrative and perhaps there are other ways to make progress.

Kellie Payne is a PhD student in the Geography department at the Open University researching culture and climate change more ...

true blue

This blog has written about the latest blockbuster Avatar as an anti-American, even anti-European, and certainly anti-colonial movie.

Alternatively, in New York, the Jungian analyst Heide Kolb sees Avatar as a 'constructive countervision to the catastrophe-mongering' of 2012.

One illustration is that the skin colour of the tribe, the Na'vi, which lives on the planet Pandora, is blue. Kolbe writes:

I have no doubt the makers of Avatar were aware of the blue god in Hindu mythology, Krishna. Krishna was the eighth reincarnation (avatar) of the Hindu God Vishnu. Significant similarities exist between Krishna and the Christ figure. Both were sent by a father god to challenge the tyranny of the ruling class. Both were considered divine and human.

Krishna is often depicted with a flute, which people found irresistible. Krishna was a rebel, a poet and a lover of many women in Hindu lore. This earthy behavior and the flute connect him to the Greek Pan and they are all aspects of the connection to the archetypal feminine that needed to be split off, denied and repressed ...

See: hit and myth more ...

hit and myth

On Friday this blog wondered if an anti-American film could also be a blockbuster hit. The answer is yes. The BBC reports that Avatar has topped the North American box office, taking $73m (£45.3m) on its opening weekend.

In this weekend's Observer Philip French highlighted the shift in James Cameron's work from pro-American to anti-American:

In Cameron's Terminator films, the central allegory derives from the story of Christ. In his brilliant Aliens, the Marines were the embattled heroes in a Vietnam-style war against vicious extraterrestrials.

Underlying Avatar is the story of the colonisation of the Americas and the destruction of the native population and their culture between the arrival of Columbus through the massacre at Wounded Knee up to the bulldozing of the Amazon rainforests. Coupled with this are more recent acts of neocolonialism like Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Marines are now the despoiling enemy and the aliens the good guys, and thrown into the mix are references to King Kong, Planet of the Apes and Bambi and echoes of H G Wells's The Time Machine.

(Though you could say that the people who colonised America and destroyed the native populations were Europeans, so the movie is also anti-European.) more ...

ho hum

The Journal of Consumer Research has investigated the attitudes of Hummer owners and discovers that they

employ the ideology of American foundational myths, such as the "rugged individual," and the "boundless frontier" to construct themselves as moral protagonists. They often believe they represent a bastion again anti-American discourses evoked by their critics. more ...

puppets on a theme

A book that's been a big influence on artists Heather and Ivan Morison is Russell Hoban's 1980 novel Riddley Walker, which takes place 2000 years after a nuclear war. Civilisation has collapsed and the governing ideas of the society are transmitted by travelling puppeteers.

The Morisons are now devising their own puppet shows about what life will be like in 100 or 200 years' time. Heather Morison says,

'a lot of information we are getting at the moment about what might happen to us in the future and things you ought to do, it is just information. It just goes in one ear and out the other a lot. Unless it is made easy for you to do things then you don’t really bother. But if you hear a story it can enchant you and you can also tell it to someone else as well.' more ...

it never happens

In Where I Was From, her book on California, Joan Didion debunks the Golden State's myth of rugged individualism and shows how greatly its economy has benefited from state subsidies from Washington.

In today's Independent Malcolm Gladwell goes further in unpicking the American Dream. He says America isn't the place to get rich. Not unless, that is, you're rich already.

'Once you are rich in America you stay rich... but if you are at the bottom it just never happens, statistically, it never happens that people make it. And that's very different from western European counties.' more ...

revelation

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discusses Oedipus with Ralph Fiennes,

'The process of revelation in the play is as interesting as what is revealed. ' more ...

climate-change characters

In the New York Times, liberal economist Paul Krugman complains that we live in an age of anti-Cassandras. Take the recent discussion about Iraq:

'just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on.'

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabbarok explains:

'The answer is media incentives. It wasn't just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq ... wrong ... So what does the American public want to hear now? The public wants to hear why they weren't idiots.'

But Krugman overstates it: every age is anti-Cassandra. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Cassandra says, 'You are lost to every word I've said.' She was never going to end up on a talkshow saying, ‘told you so’.¹

Cassandra's gift for prophecy makes her one of a handful of 'climate-change characters' we listed here. Others include Marlowe's Faust living 'in all voluptuousness' and Sally Bowles in Cabaret, not having a clue what's going on.

See also Creon in Antigone here, King Lear here, Galileo here, Astrov in Uncle Vanya here and Dr Stockmann in Enemy of the People here.

¹ In Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, the Cassandra character says: 'I see disaster. I see catastrophe. Worse, I see lawyers.'

pic: Lilo Baur as Cassandra (NT) more ...