by Susan Hoffman Fishman

Inuit are an Indigenous people who live mostly in the circumpolar regions of Canada, Alaska and Greenland. Although the various ethnic groups use different dialects, Inuit share the common language root of Inuktituk and call their homeland Inuit Nunangat. When Natan Obed, the President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization representing the interests of Canada’s Inuit population, recently addressed the Meeting of First Ministers and First Nations, Inuit and Metis Leaders, he explained how his people have been impacted by climate change:

Inuit Nunangat was one of the first areas in the world to experience the direct and local level impacts of a warming planet. Our relationship with our environment has already been profoundly altered…Unprecedented rates of summer sea ice loss, reduced sea ice in the winter, ocean acidification, temperature and sea level rise, melting permafrost, extreme weather events and severe coastal erosion undermine our ability to thrive in our environment…Rapid climate change is affecting our ability to access our traditional foods in a time when too many families are already struggling to put food on the table. Inuit hunters die each year from falling through thinning winter sea ice in our newly, rapidly warming environment. The consequences are overwhelming.

The Cerny Inuit Collection

Seeing what is happening to their homeland, a number of contemporary Inuit artists are reflecting these profound changes in their work. Some of the most striking examples of Inuit art on climate change can be found in a traveling exhibition, entitled LINKED: When Contemporary Art Creates Awareness About Climate Change, most recently installed at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway from January – February, 2019. Previous installations were held at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland (2018) and the Musée Océanographique de Monaco in Monaco, France (2015-2016), among other places.Linkedwas curated by Martha Cerny, the co-founder of the Cerny Inuit Collection in Bern, Switzerland. It contains pieces from the museum’s 1000+ collection of contemporary Inuit sculptures, lithographs, drawings and textiles.

I recently interviewed Martha Cerny via Skype. She explained that she and her Swiss husband, Peter, met working in a hospital on reserve land north of Vancouver as a nurse and radiologist. In the early 1990s, they became aware of a collection of 127 works by Inuit artists for sale in Switzerland. Having come to know and appreciate the culture, daily life and stories of the local Inuit population, they were fascinated with the artwork and ultimately purchased the collection. Now living in Switzerland, they have traveled extensively throughout the Arctic to expand their collection with artworks from the High North in Canada and Siberia, and other regions of the circumpolar Arctic. Today, the Cerny Inuit Collection is located in a renovated, former mechanic’s garage in Bern and is considered to be one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of contemporary art and culture from the High North and Arctic. The materials used by Inuit artists in the collection are mostly taken from what is at hand in their world, such as stone, antler, whalebone, musk ox horn, sealskin, and mammoth and walrus tusks.

Inuit Artists on Melting Ice and Rising Tides

Passionate about the work in the traveling exhibition and her collection, Cerny explained some of the traditional Inuit cultural references found in the pieces. She noted that the figure of Sedna, the respected and feared mother of all the sea animals, is a dominant presence in Inuit art. But instead of appearing as powerful and formidable as she traditionally has, she is transformed by artists addressing climate change. In Sedna Lamenting the Loss of Sea Ice by artist Floyd Kuptana, the Sedna figure has become a boat rescuing those affected by rising seas. With her propeller located in the bow of the boat, her normally beautiful hair reduced to a few strands and her arms rowing backwards, she is the expression of a “world in trouble.” Similarly, in Shared Migration by Abraham Anghik Ruben, Sedna is represented as a boat but in this case, she is supporting people, animals and spirits as the sea ice melts. Cerny pointed out that the sculpture signifies how “we are all in the same boat, in the same situation.” It also refers to the forced migration of people displaced by rising seas.

In addition to adapting the representation of Sedna, contemporary Inuit artists have transformed traditional figures of Inuit hunters, animals and sea life to call attention to climate change. Jesse Tungilik’s Manhole Hunterportrays a figure with the clothing and stance of an Inuit hunter in the process of hunting, but instead of standing on sea ice, which has supported the Inuit way of life for centuries, he is standing on concrete and staring at a manhole cover. Creature on the Floe Edge by David Ruben Piqtoukun is an animal figure guarding the floe edge where the open sea meets the frozen sea. Rather than having the normal two eyes and one mouth used to warn the hunters when it is safe to travel on the sea, this creature has three eyes and two mouths. The artist is indicating that the floe edge now needs much more vigilance in monitoring thin ice.

Inuit are the bellwether of climate change in the Arctic. As Natan Obed put it, Inuit “culture is inextricably linked to the environment with (traditional) knowledge of seasonal rhythms, weather predictions, animal migration routes, in addition to the quantity and quality of sea ice.” In response to what they have seen happen to this life-sustaining relationship, Inuit leaders have been working diligently to inform government officials about their existential challenges so that the government can develop policies and projects that will help them adapt to an environment transformed. Contemporary Inuit artists like Floyd Kuptana, Abraham Anghik Ruben, Jesse Tungilik and David Ruben Piqtoukun are using their powerful works of art to provide an important visual representation of these tragic changes.

(Top image: Jesse Tungilik, Manhole Hunter, 2012. Caribou antler, metal and asphalt, 7.5 x 25 x 19 cm. All images courtesy of the Cerny Inuit Collection. Photographs by Severin Nowacki.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides, our new plastic seas and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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I joined London-based charity Julie’s Bicycle in September 2013 to work with artists, organizations, policymakers, and funders on embedding environmental thinking and action across cultural activity. For over 10 years, Julie’s Bicycle has been supporting the creative community to reduce their impacts and advocate for action on climate change, delivering a rich program of events, training, tools, and freely available resources.

I believe culture is a tool for transformative change – and what better time to transform. Human’s impact on the natural environment – our life support system – has reached a critical stage, threatening to destabilize society and economy. The result: mass involuntary migration, biodiversity collapse, conflict, and famine. The challenge is not confined to climate. In a new report published by UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research, scientists are warning of a potentially deadly combination of factors including climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling, and acidifying oceans. And there’s a pretty pressing deadline: according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have just twelve years to limit climate catastrophe.

How do we stay resilient in such challenging times? Where do we draw our strength from and find hope? For me, the answer has been in the myriad exceptional creative communities I have worked with. It comes from the DJ who splices recordings of melting ice, the immersive protest performances of artist-activists, the cultural centers that open their doors to flood victims, and the festivals that allow you to experience a microcosm of sustainable society.

Julie’s Bicycle is building a movement at the intersection of arts and culture and environmental sustainability. We believe climate change is a manifestation of human values that are incommensurate with the finite resources of planet Earth. These values uphold the individual over the collective, the extractor over the regenerator, the consumer over the steward, and the present over the future. However, the opportunity is this: if climate change is driven by cultural values, logic suggests it can be tackled by shifting them. The climate change movement is, in fact, a cultural change movement. The good news is that this movement of cultural change is well underway across the world. It’s happening on theatre, concert hall, and festival stages; in museums, parks, and public libraries; at music labels and recording studios; and in the products and ideas of countless creatives, designers, artisans, experimentalists, and visionaries.

The first project Julie’s Bicycle undertook, back in 2007, was to calculate the carbon footprint of the music industry. The aim was to gain an evidenced-based understanding of climate impacts and to generate carbon targets based on data (which launched an enduring partnership with the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute). The project fronted a way of working – collaborations between the arts and science communities, with an ongoing commitment to scale what works – that has stood the test of time. This approach has informed our theory of change: to build, act, share, and lead. More specifically: to build environmental literacy and understanding; act on impacts to drive efficiencies and carbon reductions; share and catalyze change through networks and partnerships; and lead and advocate for and within the sector.

This theory of change is encapsulated in our first major support program – a partnership with Arts Council England, the first cultural funder anywhere to require all its national portfolio organizations and major museums partners to submit environmental impact data, policies, and action plans. This powerful partnership demonstrates how a light-touch policy intervention can galvanize a sector into sustained action. The momentum from this consistent policy priority enables cultural organizations to connect climate change and the environment to their work across all activities, including governance and finance, building management, programming and curation, audience engagement, and learning and outreach.

However, there was still an undercapitalized aspect: the deep internal shifts that, when nurtured, reinforced, and channeled, could shake the foundations of what we describe as “good governance.” In short, we needed a new leadership agenda centered on ethics and the environment. Our response to this was Creative Climate Leadership (CCL), an international, interdisciplinary program for cultural leaders.

Launched in 2016, CCL connects and enables a community of global cultural leaders to take an active leadership role in shaping a sustainable future for the sector. If there is a place to feel connected and uplifted it’s there; in my own experience, I have never felt more professionally and personally inspired as when I am collaborating with this community. CCL enables organizations and practitioners to share stories of creativity, optimism, and action, focusing on fostering a critical mass on the ground through capacity and community building. Our course – hosted in Wales, Greece, and Slovenia – has brought together leading cultural voices from across Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, covering topics such as authentic leadership, change management, climate science and policy, and environmental justice. The program includes ongoing support for course participants to use their learnings to develop new projects, helping them share and distribute their expertise across creative communities.

Amazing creative expressions have emerged. Creative Climate Leader Budi Agung Kuswara, from Bali, launched Kekasih Hati Sang Bumi (the Sweethearts of the Earth), a creative intervention that takes place at “tumpek uduh” – a ceremony devoted to Sanghyang Sangkara, Lord of all food. On this day, offerings and engagements are made for and with the trees, reminding people to express gratitude and establish a positive relationship with nature. The project uses art as a catalyst to convey traditional values and bridge the gap between ancient philosophy and the current generation; it aims to preserve traditional knowledge and respect its roots.

In Istanbul, Jessica Sim received a CCL in Action grant (support allocated to eleven CCL alumni to develop their local dissemination projects), which eventually led to her co-founding NADAS, a new creative co-working house dedicated to urban biodiversity. NADAS aims to support projects that value the diversity of urban life and the interconnection of people and environments. It hosts creative workshops, gatherings, gardening and planting, private art studios, and co-working spaces to build a community around living slowly, mindfully, and empathetically. As Jessica explains: “CCL is still a big part of my everyday life and work – it gave confidence to me and credibility to my work, and has given me the endurance to continue in a difficult context.”

By bringing together an international, supportive, and entrepreneurial community, we can create better conditions for innovation and develop appropriate solutions faster. Building this movement doesn’t just benefit the climate, but culture too. With it, we are seeing new jobs, goods, and services arise. And the Arts Council England program alone has provided momentous value to the sector. For the organizations involved, there have been savings of £16.5 million since 2012 due to reductions in energy use. On top of that, 65 percent of the organizations have produced creative work with an environmental theme, and 70 percent of them have reported annual improvements to staff well-being. Imagine if all the cultural funding bodies across the world followed suit.

All of these new partnerships, designs, systems, and investments are supporting the sustainability of our sector and prompting a new way to articulate cultural value. The creative climate movement is unveiling itself everywhere, though it can manifest in different ways. From the very beginning, Julie’s Bicycle’s methodology has been about focusing on actions relevant to local contexts – whether it’s improving energy efficiency, protecting local wildlife or heritage, fighting pollution, or supporting climate justice.

Culture is the answer to the climate challenge. It provokes and encourages us to think bigger and beyond ourselves, it strengthens community and empathy, and, most critically, it connects us to our common humanity. In all its diverse expressions, culture belongs to everyone, and it is a tool for social change. As Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

(Top image: Participants of the second Creative Climate Leadership course, Slovenia, October 2017. Creative Climate Leadership is led by Julie’s Bicycle and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Photo by Karim Shalaby.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on March 25, 2019.

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Lucy joined Julie’s Bicycle in September 2013 to work with the Environmental Sustainability Team on embedding operational sustainability and environmental management within artistic and cultural venues and activities in the UK and Europe. She works on a variety of programs, facilitating and delivering workshops and training, as well as offering consultancy. She holds a BSc in Environmental Science from Newcastle University. She has worked in a variety of paid and voluntary roles including two years as a Sustainability Officer, a Scientific Field Officer in the forests of Honduras and an Environmental Education Officer in Botswana.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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by Joan Sullivan

You’ve heard of the Anthropocene: the proposed name for the current geological epoch during which the collective activities of Homo sapiens have irrevocably and unwisely (man!) altered the Earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans and systems of nutrient recycling.

But have you heard of the Aerocene?

Brainchild of the prolific Argentinian interdisciplinary artist Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene is the proposed name for a future planetary epoch – post-Anthropocene, post-fossil fuels – during which Wise man turns increasingly to the Air, to the unlimited potential of the Sun, to the borderless highways of the Wind. In this enlightened future era of ecological awareness, Saraceno imagines our species evolving beyond the Anthropocene to achieve sustainable co-habitation of our shared planet, no longer governed by extractive geopolitics.

To date, the Aerocene is perhaps best known for its open-source aerosolar sculptures (some made of reused plastic bags). These emissions-free floating airborne sculptures are filled only with air, lifted only by the sun, and carried only by the wind. Aerosolar sculptures are kept afloat in Earth’s stratosphere by the heat of the sun (during the day) and infrared radiation from the surface of the Earth (at night). No solar panels, no helium, no batteries, no fossil fuels. Just the sun and wind doing their magic.

You can download free open-source do-it-together (DIT) instructions for making your own aerosolar sculptures here.

The Aerocene is also the name of an open-source participatory platform for global artistic and scientific collaboration to mobilize an urgent international and cross-disciplinary response to the Anthropocene. It has quickly evolved into a vibrant planetary movement of artists, meteorologists, engineers, architects, anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, historians, scientists, musicians, explorers, balloonists and several institutes (e.g. CNES, MIT, London’s Royal College of Art). An unsigned online manifesto calls for, among other things, “building a less anthropocentric relationship with our environment” and to “re/entangle ourselves with the surrounding milieu.”

While Studio Tomás Saraceno is located in Berlin, Saraceno “lives and works in and beyond the planet Earth”. He has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including, among others, the Venice Art Biennale (2009), Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart (2011), New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012), Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2015), COP21 (2015), London’s Royal College of Art (2016), Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv (2017), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), and Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018-2019).

In 2017, Saraceno was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as well as the TED2017 in Vancouver where he inspired audiences to “consider the impossible.”

By creating positive new narratives, Saraceno and his collaborators around the world challenge conventional thinking about climate change, architecture, the energy transition, mobility. The result is often a palpable sense of awe – a cosmic jam session – that inspires new ways of thinking about our relation to our only home, Earth.

In an interview posted on an MIT website, Saraceno explained his fascination with the Air: “We like to think of ourselves as living on the Earth’s surface, but we are living at the bottom of an ocean of air.” In a second interview, he added “There are highways in the sky; the jet stream moves at a speed of 300km per hour.” Saraceno’s aerosolar sculptures that glide on wind currents prompt us to “speculate on how mobility shapes the way we live on the earth.”

The Aerocene’s focus on nature as an endless source of inspiration is in stark contrast to many contemporary artistic interpretations of the Anthropocene’s planetary destruction as a fait accompli. For example, a recent major multimedia exhibition in Canada entitled Anthropocene at two simultaneous art museums featured hauntingly beautiful but emotionally numbing images of human-altered landscapes by the award-winning Canadian collaborators Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicolas de Pencier.

While reaction to this ambitious concurrent exhibition was generally positive, several reviewers astutely questioned “Do we need (more) images of the Anthropocene, and why?” and “It feels frankly preposterous, not to mention criminally self-indulgent, that we are still observing, documenting, recording – still bearing witness, though what we are mostly bearing witness to is our own profound denial. Is another artistic project, no matter how spectacular, really what we need at this stage?”

Jayne Wilkinson, independent curator and Managing Editor at Canadian Art, concluded her review of Canada’s recent Anthropocene exhibit with strong words: “It is dangerous to continue to uphold the aesthetics of destruction.”

An increasing number of scientific and arts/cultural organizations are calling on artists to help “change the narrative” about climate change and planetary destruction by creating positive stories that offer a compelling vision of a post-carbon world we want to live in. I am personally interested in forward-looking stories that focus on solutions. Stories that invite audiences to ask themselves “How do we get there from here?”

Tomás Saraceno shows us how to get there: by daring to imagine, by embracing the impossible.

No more looking backward. No more dystopic discourse. It is time to focus all our creative energy on collectively imagining a post-carbon, post-Anthropocene future of clean abundance and endless opportunity. We can not build that which we cannot imagine.

(Top image: Screenshot from ArtNet website)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian renewable energy photographer. Since 2009, Joan has found her artistic voice on the construction sites of utility-scale wind and solar projects. Her goal is to keep our eyes on the prize – a 100% clean energy economy in our lifetimes. Joan is currently working on a documentary film and book project about Canada’s energy transition. Her renewable energy photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in Canada, the UK and Italy. You can find Joan on Ello, Twitter and Visura.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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by Mary Woodbury 

After 15 months of writing this series about other authors tackling climate change in fiction, I’m going off the path this month by talking about my own novels, under pen name Clara Hume. Next month we’ll return to covering other authors, and I have two in the works that I’m excited about sharing with you. But, for now, I thought it might be interesting to give at least one personal perspective in this series of what it’s like to write a novel that covers this hyperobject – climate change.

Back to the Garden is my second completed book and first published novel. A few years ago I awoke from a dream in which I was on a very dry beach, so dry that my throat was parched. The wind was blowing my hair wildly around my face, stinging. I had a sense that I was a survivor far into the future after climate change and disease had ruined much of the population. Across the beach was a man who looked like a younger version of Leonardo DiCaprio, but only a little. He was way more rugged and not gentle or kindly as I would imagine. He was gruff toward me and very much inside himself. He had made a camp across the beach, though, so I had to put up with him. I can’t remember much happening in the dream other than a few rude words he said to me. At the same time, he still seemed to respect that I was there, that I was alive too.

The day after the dream I began to write the novel, which at first had no name, but had the filename “Fan and Leo.docx” for the longest time. The novel went through a few title iterations, including a name change of one of the main characters, “Fan” to “Fran.” I put this beach from my dream at a lake in Idaho and began to build up the characters’ home, pasts, family, and friends. About a quarter of the way through, I spent so much time going back to clean up the first chapter or two that I didn’t foresee ever really finishing the novel. My father-in-law Al said to me, “Don’t worry about editing everything. Just keep writing until you’re done. Revise it after you’re done.” His advice was helpful. Al was never a writer. He had raised his kids, including my husband, on a ranch when they were young. Ranch life back then was rough, and in the mountains of the interior of British Columbia, life was rewarding but cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He knew how to get things done. Just do it. So I did.

The story turned out to be one of character redemption, adaption to climate change, finding meaning beyond our current world’s – where massive resource consumption has caused environmental crises – and a look at simpler rewards, such as the bonds we have as humans, the goodness of people in crisis, and the richness of a simpler life.

The one thing I can say about writing is that it takes guts. You put a lot of words out in the world that make sense to you, a story that you want to tell, and if anyone notices at all, you open your story up to critique. Fortunately, for me, I didn’t receive any really negative reviews except for a couple who were climate change denialists, who didn’t say much. The novel was mentioned in Dissent Magazine, where Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow said:

Most of the authors seek, at least in part, to warn, translating graphs and scientific jargon into experience and emotion. In Back to the Garden, a small group of close friends – Fran, a short-haired beauty; Elena and her partner, Daniel; and the couple’s two children – live on a mountainside in Idaho. As in Far North, the characters have reverted to a primitive way of life; they hunt with bows and arrows and weave their own clothes. Soon Leo, a former movie star, drifts onto the mountain. The friends set out on a road trip to find family, in a journey that’s part standard post-apocalyptic narrative and part Wizard of Oz. Along the way, in the lawless country, they encounter armed thugs, but also kind strangers who join their growing entourage. Finally, they return to the mountain from which they’d departed. A sliver of hope is represented by Fran’s pregnancy.

The novel was also discussed in the following books:

• Gary Paul Nabhan (2016). Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity. University of Arizona Press, p. 278.
• Martin Bunzi (2014). Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change.Routledge, p. 175.

Back to the Garden was re-released in the fall of 2018 as the first volume in the new Wild Mountain series rather than a stand-alone novel, as it first was. This promises to help usher in the wilder world of modern eco-fiction just the same.

Why am I so excited about this? For one, as the New York Times recently posted, when reviewing Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, eco-fiction (which has been around since the 1970s) has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless, and more breathtaking than previously thought. While I am no VanderMeer, Back to the Garden was originally conceived of in this light. It is a novel portraying a world whose characters narrate a journey with the nostalgia of the world as we know it today, but who also have survived a tipping point and have been ushered into a new wilder world. Not that we could have foreseen the NYT’s take on this literature, but in a way, many authors are perceiving similar ideas because we aren’t just writing. We are imagining, we are researching, we are warning, we are hoping, we are kind of going a little crazy and wild. Fiction is a great place to do this in.

Part II, The Stolen Child, ends the duology. With flashes back to the mountain on Idaho and updates on the family since Part I, Fran and Leo’s youngest daughter Fae finds herself blindfolded, in pain, and on a boat. Her kidnappers take her to Ireland, where she has to piece together what happened. In the meantime, her family and friends follow the mystery trail. Editor’s note: This section has been updated due to changes in the new series.

Some influences

• Fragments of Nomad Days, by Allan Graubard: The author wrote the prose after being visually inspired by a triptych of a woman named Caroline. The writing represented the narrator in exile in the same sort of dry land I had dreamed of. The writing was haunting and full of transience and shadows. Graubard’s visual poem (illustrated by Ira Cohen) typified the type of thought process and imagery that I would summon for Back to the Garden.
• The song Back to the Garden, live version by Joni Mitchell. This is the only version that should be thought of as being inspirational to the book, due to her slow, pure voice. I didn’t really care about the reference to Woodstock, but did like her lyrics: We are stardust. Billion year old carbon. These two lines, like Graubard’s prose, drove me to write the characters as important but also ephemeral. There’s a little religious allusion there too, as the garden is introduced in the opening scenes – among these gardens are also apple groves, which show up in the end of the book.
• Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which gave the book its interim name The Leavers. Between the first and subsequent drafts of the novel, I termed it The Leavers,changing the name to Back to the Garden only a few months before publication. In Quinn’s novel, the leavers and takers are two types of humans (beginning with Australopithecus) having lived on planet Earth, with the leavers having lived for three million years, within the limits of their environment, and the takers having wiped out the leavers during the agricultural revolution, which set in motion the beginning to the end of ecological destruction on earth. Going back to the idea of the garden of Eden, Quinn also explains what he feels are perhaps the intended narratives behind the Tree of the Knowledge or Good and Evil as well as the Cain vs. Abel story. My novel also gives a nod to Quinn’s discussion of immutable laws. I left the original title and cover photo in the book’s front matter.
• The show Lost. I’m not a big TV fan, but that changed with the epic show “Lost.” I was pretty impressed with the way the creators of the show presented a multi-faceted narrative involving different characters. I haven’t seen too much of that in writing, and it is much harder to do when you don’t have a visual platform. When I wrote, I envisioned the landscape and the characters as if they were on screen, and wrote them from others’ perspectives. The book’s main characters are built upon, and soon there are ten characters who present perspectives about situations throughout the novel. While these narratives don’t contradict each other, they do add on to what others have perceived – which is really how we get as close to truth as possible: to lend credibility through peer review. But the book isn’t so much about seeking truth as it is redemption. Each character has something from their past that they are struggling with. These things are directly brought on by the changing world, and as one of the characters Elena points out while quoting Melville, it is only when humans redeem themselves that they can begin to redeem their natural environment.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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A few months ago, I came across an article by science journalist Ed Yong titled “I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories.” Inspired by a colleague who analyzed the gender ratio of sources in her own writing, Yong did some forensics work and discovered, to his surprise, that in 2016 only 24 percent of his quoted sources were women. And 35 percent of his stories featured no female voices at all.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be 50 percent, but I didn’t think it would be that low, either,” he wrote in the piece. “I knew that I care about equality, so I deluded myself into thinking that I wasn’t part of the problem. I assumed that my passive concern would be enough. Passive concern never is.”

After reading this, I decided to do a bit of investigating of my own. Every other year, I run an initiative called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA). First piloted in 2015, CCTA is a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented to coincide with the United Nations Conference of the Parties, the meetings that bring together world leaders to discuss strategies to reduce global carbon emissions.

Fifty playwrights from around the world are commissioned to write five-minute plays about an aspect of climate change based on a prompt. This collection of plays is then freely available to producing collaborators interested in presenting an event in the fall (this year’s events are scheduled for 15 September to 21 December). Events can range from readings to fully-produced performances, and from podcasts to film adaptations.

The plays are curated. Our 50 playwrights are carefully chosen to represent all continents and dozens of cultures, including several Indigenous nations. So on that front, I knew we were doing well. In fact, in 2017 we had a majority of female writers—32 women and 18 men—and almost 60 percent of the group (29 people) was comprised of writers of color and Indigenous writers. The same is true for this year. For CCTA 2019, the gender ratio is exactly 50/50 and the percentage of writers of color and Indigenous writers is 60 percent (30 people).

The real question, then, is what happens on the other end? Once the 50 plays are written, we make them available to anyone who expresses the desire to organize an event in their community. People get a link that gives them access to the plays and to a spreadsheet with the writers’ names, countries of residence/heritage, title of the plays, number of characters for each play, and keywords—for example, “comedy,” “melting ice caps,” or “water.” Equipped with this information, producing collaborators are free to choose which play(s) they want to present.

After reading Yong’s article, I enlisted the help of a friend whose math can be trusted and we crunched some numbers. Since 2015 was a pilot year, we focused on 2017. What I wanted to know was: What happens to gender parity and racial diversity when plays are picked by people other than artistic directors running major theatre companies? Do the same biases that favor white male playwrights manifest themselves or do things change when power is distributed and there is less money at stake?

A majority of events took place in the United States, so this is reflective of an American perspective. The exact breakdown for CCTA 2017 was 134 events presented across 23 countries, with 91 of those events taking place in 60 American cities. Together, the plays were shown a total of 747 times.

PEOPLE LIKE WOMEN’S PLAYS

Ten years ago, Emily Glassberg conducted a study titled “Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater.” A series of scripts were sent to different theatres, sometimes with a female pen name, sometimes with a male pen name, to assess whether the quality of the writing would be perceived differently based on the gender of the author. As you can probably guess, the results were appalling.

More recently, American Theatre Magazine reported that female playwrights who were produced off-Broadway in the last five seasons (2013–14 through 2017–18) represent between 28 and 41 percent of all produced playwrights. This is an improvement—from 1994 to 2001, that number hovered at 17 percent. However, we’re still far from parity. If I look at the 2018–19 season in New York City where I live, there is at least one major theatre that has programmed one lone female playwright and four (white) males.

But what happens if we take the decision-making process out of the hands of artistic directors and give it to artists? CCTA events are often curated by groups of individual artists who come together for the project or by students and faculty who put on an event at their university. As a result, the curation tends to be more democratic and, I assumed, more representative of our society. And lo and behold, when we ran the numbers, this assumption was validated: the gender ratio for the plays presented in CCTA 2017 was 42 percent male vs 58 percent female—almost a direct reversal of the American Theatre Magazine statistics.

Is it a fluke? A representation of a real difference in the expression of power? A sign that things are changing? It’s hard to tell, but this ratio reversal suggests that, contrary to what has long been a popular belief, and is still a persistent and almost always unacknowledged assumption, people are interested in women’s voices. They like women’s plays. When there’s no incentive to privilege men and uphold the status quo, when the decision-makers are more or less evenly distributed along gender lines, people are happy to read, study, and perform plays written by women just as they would plays written by men. The entrenched bias that Glassberg found a decade ago, both on the part of men and women who were reviewing the plays, did not show up in CCTA.

I took this analysis one step further and next reviewed the number of presentations that each CCTA play received: eight of the ten most-produced plays were written by women. This actually echoes American Theatre Magazine’s “Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2018–2019 Season” (which is actually eleven due to a tie), where nine of the plays were written by women. Maybe real progress is on the way.

DIVERSITY? YES, PLEASE!

Statistics about racial diversity are worse than statistics about gender. A 2015 studyanalyzing three years of data from productions in regional theatres in America found that nearly 90 percent of plays were written by white playwrights. In 2017, Anthony Byrnes and Christina Ramos dug through the 50-year production history of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and found that out of 298 productions, 250 were written by white playwrights. No matter where we look, we’re reminded that despite an increasingly more diverse American population, racial diversity in the theatre is far from being embraced.

Again, I wanted to see whether a change in power structure and decision-making context, as exemplified by CCTA, affected what plays got programmed. Was our offering of 29 plays by playwrights of color versus 21 plays by white playwrights enough to encourage diversity in CCTA presentations? Or was the supply side irrelevant because there’s still too much resistance to diversity on the demand side?

An intriguing aspect of this question is that I don’t know whether or not diversity was a factor in the curation of events. For better or for worse, in a professional context, the ethnic background of a playwright is always a determining factor. Efforts are made to either include diversity or to exclude it, but in our current political reality, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that the decision is ever neutral. In CCTA’s case, however, unless our producing collaborators knew or looked up the playwrights, or unless the playwrights had names that pointed to a specific culture or were based in an ethnically homogeneous country, it wasn’t immediately apparent in reading the plays who was a writer of color and who wasn’t.

Out of the 747 presentations that the CCTA plays received, 363 were of plays written by playwrights of color and 384 by white playwrights. That’s almost the same number of presentations for both groups. However, we had more playwrights of color (29) than white playwrights (21). So when we account for this difference, it means that 41 percent of presentations were of plays by playwrights of color and 59 percent were of plays by white playwrights.

I expected the racial bias in our field to be reflected in these numbers—if not exactly then at least in great part—so I was thrilled to find out this was not the case. In fact, CCTA did better than the theatre field by a factor of four. Or, put another way, for every artistic director out in the world who programs a play by a playwright of color, CCTA collaborators present four. That’s a huge difference.

In addition, out of the ten most-presented CCTA plays, each with more than 20 presentations and some with as many as 60, five were written by playwrights of color. (In the American Theatre Magazine top ten list, only two of the plays were written by playwrights of color.) CCTA artists and audiences embraced racial diversity when there was no outside pressure to do so, no “diversity” box to check. They chose stories that spoke to them, stories that showed them something new or unexpected. Maybe sometimes they made that choice because they were specifically interested in writers of color. Other times, I suspect they simply responded to what was there.

This suggests that racial bias, like gender bias, is less prevalent when power is distributed. Which begs the question: What needs to happen in theatres across the country to bring the same kind of diversity on our stages? What can artistic directors do? What can funders do? What can artists do? What can audiences do? We need to take to heart what Yong said: passive concern is never enough.

BACK TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Why does this matter in the context of climate change? Because discrimination, economic and environmental injustice, and resource depletion are all manifestations of the same system gone awry. And to change that system, we can’t just tinker with individual elements—we have to rethink the whole synergetic mess. I’ve written about this before, here and here: how we make theatre is just as important as what we put on stage. CCTA is a case in point: with one small structural change at one end of the process, where communities are given the power to decide which stories they want to hear as opposed to having that decision imposed on them by an artistic director, we’re able to have a significant impact on representation at the other end. Now just imagine what would happen if we applied this same principle everywhere.

I’m grateful to Yong for inspiring me to go through this exercise. I hope that, in turn, this article inspires others to do the same so that together we can continue to advocate for the kind of systemic change we so need. And as I enter another CCTA year, I look forward to collecting new data (something I never imagined I would hear myself say) to see what else we might be able to learn.

(Top image: Idea Moose by Kendra Fanconi, directed by Lorca Peress and choreographed by Jennifer Chin. Acting company: Gabrielle Lee, Gus Scharr, Kathryn Layng, Avondre E.D. Beverley, Tanya Perez, Joyce Griffen, Lorca Peress, Daniel Carlton, Cary Hite, and Maya Saroya. Multistages, New York. Photo by Hunter Peress.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on March 24, 2019.

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Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle â€“ which uses theatre to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis, create an empowering vision of the future, and inspire people to take action – and the founder of Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Smothered in soaking tropical heat, I’ve been chasing my two-year-old as he runs through fields of strange flowers, treads around frog-filled ponds, and attempts to climb the local banana trees. He’s having a ball, feeling adventurous and free, but his mum and I are drenched in sweat as one of us tries to film him and the other tries to keep him from jumping into the water with the frogs. The resulting footage has since transformed into this short environmental film:

We are here in South East Asia to study and teach urban ecology at a university in Thailand. As part of our research into the eco-challenged character of urban settings, I’ve come up with a certain technique to predict and plan for future cities. I call it the Literary Method of Urban Design and I use it to engage with students and professionals about what our urban futures might be like. As you can see from the short film, it involves lot of “envisioning” and, thusly, it calls for a lot of art.

Dragging up long idle skills from my high school years, both the visual arts and literary arts became research tools and expressive channels that we could use to foster public debate about the future.

As its name indicates, the Literary Method of Urban Design places literary art at the base of urban studies, exploring the complications and possibilities of our potentially catastrophic unfolding urban existence. Literary art might seem to some like an unwieldy pathway by which to plan a city but my argument is that literature usually does far more than just entertain; it narrates upon the complicated challenges of life – often from the point of view of individual characters as they engage with the wider social world.

The future, I contend, is not opened up by advancing technology alone. It also involves an array of personal responses to the changing patterns of society as this technology is taken-up, fought over, celebrated or rejected, and then also used by the powerful to control the powerless. Works of fiction have often explored just how complicated and varied these changing techno-influenced patterns can be – as they unfold their plots with unique characters, highly specific settings, peculiar moral quandaries and particular cultural conflicts.

Thus, anyone who contemplates the future of cities in any way could benefit from the Literary Method of Urban Design since it may very well prompt a broader outlook in the “making” of a city as it is pushed, gently or roughly, into a different form.

In pop media, and in the public mind, the future is a key cultural battleground. So far, the techno-warriors (not the eco-warriors) seem to be winning, as Silicon Valley and the big players of the military-industrial complex lobby both leaders and the public with seductive ideas of Smart Cities, super-fast transport links, and the supposed beneficence of omnipresent AI. Through my work with youth, I’ve discovered that if you ask an urban schoolkid to draw a picture of their city’s future they will most likely dot the canvas with futuristic techno images of flying cars, super-sized sports stadia, and rocket-trains, though there’s often a splash of sea-level rise here and there as well.

If the future is a battleground, my contribution – the Literary Method of Urban Design – might seem like a completely neutral party, since there’s plenty of literature out there promoting visions of hi-tech super-gadgetized utopias (especially within the science fiction genre). However, the way I’ve utilized the Literary Method till now might suggest otherwise, and the best way to explain this might be by looking at some case studies.

CASE STUDY 1: THE FUTURE OF LONDON AS INSPIRED BY THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA

In 1516, during the reign of King Henry VIII, a little novel called Utopia was published. It was about an idyllic island which suffered none of the ills of Henry VIII’s London. No corruption, no poverty, no plagues, no tyrants. Just happy people living free in an ideal land.

Henry celebrated Thomas More as a great scholar but they would soon have an almighty falling-out over who should lead the Church of England. Thomas More thought it should be the Pope and Henry VIII thought it should be Henry VIII. Therefore, King Henry charged More with treason and jailed him in the Tower of London before, finally, executing him.

London, nowadays, is maybe a little fairer. Except for all the homelessness and economic inequality and toxic air and dangerous traffic, that is.

Here though, inspired by Utopia, is an alternative future; a child-friendly, clean and green London with urban forests instead of paved roadways.

You might think this is only a dream but if London becomes a “UN child-friendly city,” children may claim a right to decide urban policies. Probably, they’ll vote for fewer cars and more green spaces to play in. Whilst in a homage to Thomas More, they may repurpose the Tower of London, to keep out the tyrants, and to keep out the air polluters.

CASE STUDY 2: THE FUTURE OF SINGAPORE AS INSPIRED BY JONATHAN SWIFT’S GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

Gulliver’s Travels follows an 18^th Century explorer to fantastic lands across the globe.

During one expedition, Gulliver discovers a city floating in the sky. Named Laputa, it hovers over an island in the Asia Pacific. Motivated by this setting, here’s a design for the future of the island city of Singapore.

Whereas Laputa floated via magnetic forces, Singapore is held aloft by hydrogen balloons. The hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of sea spray, a process taking place within the solar-cells painted upon the balloon’s membrane.

So, what’s the point of a floating city? Well, up here, Singapore can escape the rising sea levels cause by global warming.

Yet just as the tales within Gulliver’s Travels are often laced with satire, the same might be said of this design, for if this is how cities are to survive sea level rise, it might be easier just to slow down or stop climate change.

CASE STUDY 3: THE FUTURE OF INGOLSTADT AS INSPIRED BY MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

Most of us are familiar with the creation scene of the Frankenstein story: an ambitious scientist labors with strange technologies to invent a new human creature from dead body-parts. However, as soon as the creature flickers into life, the scientist is overcome with horror and runs away.

The original novel was set in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. When the monster wanders through the city, townsfolk beat him away with rocks. To escape this trouble, he leaves the city to live in a nearby forest where he joyously communes with the unbiased company of nature.

In his forest home, the monster becomes fond of a refugee French family. The family have been exiled from their homeland because of the French Revolution and are living in a little cottage in the forest. Though the monster doesn’t dare show his face to them, they nevertheless inspire him with hope. Socially outcast like himself, the family seem to be loving and happy. Perhaps,  the monster thinks to himself, love and happiness might some day visit upon him as well.

Every day, the monster wanders amongst the trees to collect food, laying the bounty secretly at the door of the family’s cottage. The family never discover who their kindly helper is. Maybe a “forest angel,” they conjecture.

Motivated by the creature’s elevation from “monster” to “angel,” we arrive at the following design for future Ingolstadt.

The main feature is a bat-faced noise barrier whose monstrous 3D faces, drawn from the structure of real-life bats, reflect traffic noise pollution back at the cars and trucks moving on the highway. In this way, the forest may remain peaceful.

CONCLUSION

These three case study cities of the Literary Method of Urban Design are not fantastic escapes from reality. They are explorations of alternative urban life. The Literary Method expands the toolbox to predict the future of cities and to plan for that future, all the while encouraging the use of wisdom held within the world’s literature.

If none of the stories above seem very relevant to you, you can instead draw inspiration from your own favorite novels or local literature. These works may then help you to creatively pre-vision a design for your own city’s future. And then to forge ahead anew with whatever project you might have to better fit into that future.

(Top image: The future of Birmingham, England set within a restored Forest of Arden, as inspired by William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It.)

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Alan Marshall is a scholar in the field of human ecology and he has explored the relationships between “Nature” and “Humanity” from myriad perspectives: philosophical, political and artistic. He’s now engaged with seeking out the potential future relationships between humans and their urban environments through a variety of projects, including The Ecotopia 2121 Project and the Frankencities Project. Dr. Marshall has a BSc (hons) from Wolverhampton University (England), a Masters degree from Massey University (New Zealand) and a doctorate from Wollongong University (Australia). Currently, Marshall is a full-time visiting professor at Mahidol University (Thailand).

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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