Mike Hulme

ashdenizen: from no plays about climate change to three in a month

It was only a couple of years ago that this blog was writing about why theatres don’t touch climate change. It seemed, at the time, as if there was something about theatre, or the way people conceived of mainstream theatre, that made the subject almost impossible to treat. This was part of a more general avoidance of the environment as a subject for the performing arts. The Ashden Directory had been launched, back in 2000, as a way of following and encouraging those works which did engage with this subject.

But now things are changing. Eighteen months ago there was finally, a good play about climate change.  It was also possible to see in the works, for instance, of Wallace Shawn and Andrew Bovell the green shoots of climate change theatre.

Fast forward to January 2011, and this month alone three climate change plays will open in London - Greenland at the National, The Heretic at the Royal Court, and Water at the Tricycle.

Why is this important? Because climate change alters the way we think about our lives. The news contained within the various IPCC reports will be as influential, as paradigm-shifting, on the way we see ourselves as Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is, ultimately, a question of values and relationships. As such, it is a natural subject for theatre.

But new plays don’t open in a vacuum. For them to succeed, there needs to be a lively engaged audience that has some sense of what is at stake. That’s why we have also been involved with the Open University in producing a new series of podcasts that puts cultural work around climate change in perspective.

The podcasts bring together 17 artists, activists, writers, film-makers, scientists, entrepreneurs and academics, including comedian Marcus Brigstocke, choreographer Siobhan Davies, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, architect Carolyn Steele and Mike Hulme, author ofWhy We Disagree About Climate Change.

Radio 4’s Quentin Cooper chairs these four ‘Mediating Change’ discussions which cover the history, publics, anatomy and futures of cultural responses to climate change. The podcasts are now available to download from iTunesU.

via ashdenizen: from no plays about climate change to three in a month.

The literature of climate

@climateboom and @ashdenizen have started a thread on Twitter discussing the literature of climate change, using the hashtag #climelit. So far the reading list includes:

David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios
George Monbiot’s Heat
Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees
Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish
George Marshall’s Carbon Detox
David Archer’s The Long Thaw
anything by John Houghton
Mann and Kump’s Dire Predictions
Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change
Debi Glior’s The Trouble with Dragons
Alistair McIntosh’s Hell and High Water
William McDonough & Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle

Robert Butler (@ashdenizen) Christian Hunt (@climateboom) also suggests a second hashtag category, #climefiction, to classify the words of Nigel Lawson, Christopher Booker and presumably Ian Plimer.

EDIT
Also listed now:

Andrew Simm’s Ecological Debt
David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air
Elizabeth Kolbert Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology