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Jason's story |
Wallace Heim writes:
One of the explanations offered for why climate change is
not more prominent in people’s thinking is that it’s not physically seen. It
doesn’t feel ‘real’ enough.
But a different view comes out in the stories people tell
about how climate change is immediately altering their everyday lives. The
climate is changing how they feel about the world and their decisions about
what to do.
Project ASPECT, based at University College Falmouth, is
gathering people’s stories about climate change from individuals and
communities in
Wales,
northern
England,
London and
Cornwall.
Building a digital narrative archive, they are capturing on DVD how people talk
about the climate in the context of their everyday lives.
There are those who watch. Heather continues the diary her
mother started, recording every day what work is done on the family farm and
the weather. Duncan and Matt are surfers in Cornwall, watching the storms. There are
those who work with renewable energy, or, like Hanna, find green jobs for young
people. Many are changing the way they grow food and eat: Mary from Incredible
Edible; Owen with his backyard in Peckham; and masked night-time Ninja
guerrilla gardeners. Singers, rappers, athletes tell their stories. Spontaneous
acts of community kindness sit alongside the meticulous work of digitising the
weather reports from World War I ship’s logs.
In these stories of everyday life, there is a cultural
reality emerging, soft-voiced, but pressing.
more ...