By Amy Brady

This month I have the great pleasure of speaking with Colin Foord, a marine biologist and artist in Miami who, among other projects, installed a Coral City Camera that allows viewers to witness the day-to-day life of Miami’s living coral. As the co-founder of the art duo Coral Morphologic, he also developed the world’s first multimedia coral aquaculture studio. In the interview below, we discuss his artwork, what he sees as the commonalities between science and art, and what draws him to studying coral reefs. 

Your background is in marine biology. What inspired you to create art?

When I got to the University of Miami I was already into growing corals as a bedroom hobby. I naively expected my classmates and professors to share similar interests, but when asked why they study marine science the answer was usually along the lines of: “I like dolphins,” “I like sharks,” “I like sea turtles,” “I like whales.” No one said “I like corals and reef fish.” This was a couple years before Finding Nemo came out, so the coral reef hadn’t really reached into pop culture yet. It was a bit disappointing to not find classmates with similar interests, so instead I started hanging out with the music and art majors who were a lot more creative and fun. I had grown up listening to punk rock, so the DIY ethos that was behind a lot of that really spoke with me.

Seeing my friends’ bands play in small warehouse gallery spaces in the then nascent Wynwood district of Miami turned me on to a really exciting subculture that was evolving here. At some point I realized that the corals I was interested in studying were just as aesthetically pleasing to look at as the art I saw on gallery walls, and that there was a lack of coral representation in Miami’s iconography. People outside of Miami didn’t really seem to take the creativity coming out of Miami at that time very seriously, but I was finding all kinds of inspiration.

Coral Morphologic was an attempt to showcase a different facet of Miami that wasn’t being shown or even considered. It started with the fact that corals are like living alien art forms that I felt people needed to better appreciate. Because how can you be expected to try and save something that you don’t understand or have no personal connection with? Miami has long been seen as a neon, nightlife city whose fluorescent nature was considered completely artificial. By giving the corals a platform, we wanted to show that Miami has always been home to fluorescent life in the most natural way possible.  

What else do you hope viewers take away from your art?

More than anything I want people to be able to relate to the coral and marine life in a humanistic fashion. It is a lot easier to generate empathy between humans and a creature with a cuddly, adorable face like a panda. How do you generate empathy between humans and brainless, faceless creatures that many people aren’t even aware are animals? That has been our challenge. Fortunately coral can be beautifully geometric and vibrantly fluorescent. These aesthetic qualities can attract people on a superficial level of beauty and wonder. Once we have their attention, then we can start showcasing other metaphors that we share in common with them that will hopefully put our human lives in a more universal perspective.

By growing these corals in our laboratory we have become intimately familiar with just how delicate they are, and how interconnected everything is. When you step back from our planet and look at it from Carl Sagan’s pale-blue-dot perspective, you realize that Earth is but a tiny droplet of liquid water floating in space. We, and all living things, are protected by the thinnest layer of breathable gas. Just as it is possible to overstock and overfeed a goldfish bowl, we want people to recognize that humans, along with all other life on Earth, are all essentially living in the same aquarium together. If we poison the air and water for the birds and the fish, we also poison ourselves. So rather than assuming that we are somehow above nature, we try to convey through our art lessons the importance of symbiosis, adaptability, and long-term thinking. 

All of your artwork is in Miami. Why is this, and what might we learn about Miami’s marine life in particular through your artwork? 

While we could do a lot of our studio/lab work just about anywhere in the world, it really wouldn’t have the same impact. Everything is about time and space. Miami is the only major mainland US city on a coral reef, and it is literally built atop an ancient coral reef using marine-made limestone quarried out of the Everglades that was turned into cement. The buildings here are quite literally made of coral fossils, while also serving as colonies for humans to live and work in, much the way a coral colony provides homes for 25% of all marine species at some point in their lives. With sea-level rise an existential threat here, the idea of the city slowly submerging again and becoming recolonized by living corals is a very poetic concept of the ouroboros at play. This is why we have dubbed it the Coral City. Which is also an homage to the Emerald City of Oz, as well as Miami’s other pop cultural nicknames, the Magic City and Vice City. It is a good place to Be Here Now. Enjoy it for today, because who knows what tomorrow may bring. All it takes is one big hurricane to reset everything.

Your artwork is informed by your scientific background. Have you learned – or been surprised by – anything scientific as a result of your art? 

Absolutely! In 2009 I discovered an undescribed species of Zoanthus soft coral, living along manmade shorelines near the Port, that came in a whole palette of fluorescent color morphs. The most beautiful of these (in my opinion) is a blue and pink morph we dubbed the “Miami Vice” Zoanthus. As a licensed aquaculture facility, we’ve been growing these soft corals at our lab for almost a decade and selling clonal fragments to aquarists around the world. That was our primary business up until 2015 when we were finally able to pivot towards photography, videography, and multimedia projects as our main source of income. The “Miami Vice” Zoanthus enabled us to be vertically integrated in order to build Coral Morphologic into the independent platform it is today. You can see all the different color morphs of the “Miami Vice” Zoanthus vinyl wrapping the parking booths at PortMiami.

Speaking more broadly, coral reefs are – and have been – imperiled by global warming all over the world. Is there anything about coral reefs that you’d like my readers to know, especially something that might surprise them? 

I think that corals can be really useful in helping us understand our perspective in time and space. They are the original timekeepers of planet Earth. The first astronomers. They are literally cosmic organisms because their sex lives are dependent upon knowing the cosmic synchronicity of the movements of the Earth and Moon around the Sun. Because coral is cemented in place, the only way they can mate with each other is to follow the seasonal and lunar cycles in order to know when to release their gametes into the water column at the exact moment in time (most corals are simultaneous hermaphrodites that release bundles of both sperm and eggs). Most corals are asexual for 99% of the days of the year, but then engage in a reef-wide orgy under moonlight when they can best maximize their reproductive success by combining their genes with as many member of their species (and hybridize with related species) as possible.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is very intelligent behavior. Corals themselves have been on this planet for almost half a billion years. But because of the natural fluctuations in sea level over long periods of time, there aren’t any current coral reefs older than about 10,000 years. Thus, today’s reefs are on average about 5,000 years old – about the same amount of time that humans have been building cities. Therefore, Coral Morphologic takes the position that rather than treating corals like the poor helpless canaries in the coal mine in need of human heroes, humans should instead be paying closer attention to them, and asking ourselves, “what can we learn about life from a coral?” so that we might save ourselves (and the planet). Perhaps it is they who will save us! 

After years of studying and living symbiotically with coral, it turns out they have a lot of things to teach! If corals had a motto, I think it would be “adapt or die.” Recall that a coral is cemented in place; it cannot just swim away to someplace nicer if the going gets rough. Their survival skills are all based on having to adapt to their environment. We are now living in a time when not only is the environment changing, but so is technology and society. The world we are born into is significantly different than the one we die in. Unfortunately, humans have accelerated the rate of change on our planet so much so that it is becoming difficult for many ecosystems to remain stable and functional. But I remain hopeful that when paradigms shift, change can occur much faster than ever imagined.

In this age of COVID-19, I think we are seeing a lot of paradigms starting to change. Capitalism wasn’t designed to have any brakes, only to accelerate, and we are now being reminded that something as microscopic as a non-living bundle of proteins can totally reshape our society almost overnight. As inconvenient as this has all been, and as sad as it is to see people succumbing to illness, I think the pandemic might represent our best opportunity to reassess our human priorities to better align with those of the planet. At the end of the day, all life on Earth is comprised of the same types of protein and DNA. We are all part of the same tree of life, and we should be thinking of ourselves as not above nature, but a part of it. 

What’s next for you? 

I encourage everyone to spend some time each day with the Coral City Camera (CCC). It is simultaneously relaxing and engaging. We have a TV screen on the wall here at Coral Morphologic that is dedicated to streaming it all day long. It’s kind of like our “yule log” or a Windows95 screensaver that’s come to life. The CCC feels like a public aquarium of the future where the fish are free to come and go as they please, and there is always an element of surprise not knowing what might just swim into frame. From manatees, to sea turtles, sharks, and moray eels, along with the reef’s most colorful fish like angelfish, butterflyfish, parrotfish, and lots of charismatic pufferfish, you never know who might swim by next. Our favorite fish in Coral City is a tail-less surgeonfish we’ve dubbed “Oval” who is always swimming around the neighborhood.

We really hope the CCC can become a powerful tool for education, scientific research, and building civic pride through our appreciation for Miami’s underwater biodiversity. We are so appreciative of the support we have gotten from Bridge Initiative and BFI. They believe in the project and made this dream we first had in 2013 a reality. Eventually we’d love to see the Coral City Camera concept duplicated elsewhere, and help develop a global network of underwater livestreaming cameras from reefs across the globe. Be sure to follow both @coralcitycamera and @coralmorphologic on all social media channels to stay up to date on the day’s undersea highlights. 

(Top image: “Miami Vice”Zoanthus.)

This article is part of the Climate Art Interviews series. It was originally published in Amy Brady’s “Burning Worlds” newsletter. Subscribe to get Amy’s newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

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Amy Brady is the Deputy Publisher of Guernica magazine and Senior Editor of the Chicago Review of Books. Her writing about art, culture, and climate has appeared in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, the New Republic, and other places. She is also the editor of the monthly newsletter “Burning Worlds,” which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. She holds a PHD in English and is the recipient of a CLIR/Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship. Read more of her work at AmyBradyWrites.com at and follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x. 

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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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By Mary Woodbury

This month we travel to the Niger Delta, and I am thrilled to talk with Helon Habila, the mind behind the novels Oil on Water, Travelers, and other great reads.

ABOUT OIL ON WATER

Set in the Niger Delta, this story has journalists uncovering a kidnapping as well as exposing the two worlds of oil: rich barons taking what they want while contaminating waters, destroying villages, and killing animals and plants versus those who are on the other side of the equation, living in fear, without clean water and healthy fish and livestock. Arisen from the latter side is an animist cult with a militant leader. Habila’s novel seems to also look into the ability of journalism to effect change. The author’s descriptions bring the reader into the story. Reading from Canada, I felt I walked into the sad streets of Niger’s Delta region, and my heart broke.

ABOUT THE NIGER DELTA

The Niger Delta comprises nine states in southern Nigeria. It is fed by the Niger River and sits on the banks of the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Divided into three sub-regions (Western, Central, and Eastern Niger Delta), it is home to one of the highest-density populations in the world: around thirty million people. Nigeria is not only West Africa’s largest producer of petroleum but is sometimes called “Oil Rivers” due to the fact that it was once a major producer of palm oil.

According to Stakeholder Democracy, some of the largest problems in the area are energy poverty and access to energy, poor democratic practices, oil spills and gas flaring, poor governance and service, land clearances and displacements, and subjugation of women. It is a place where big oil revenues do not benefit residents. According to Commonwealth.org:

Before, the Niger-Delta ecosystem contained one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet in addition to supporting abundant flora and fauna, arable terrain that could sustain a wide variety of crops and trees, and more species of fresh water fish than any ecosystem in West Africa. But the adverse effect of oil exploration and exploitation has destroyed the glowing pride of nature in the region. The contaminated ecosystem has crippled the livelihood of the local people who take pride in fishing and depend on land for survival.

Fiction writers often write about what they’ve observed and are concerned about, sometimes not even on purpose. I’ve found that authors who tackle environmental subjects in fiction naturally write by impulse. Fiction speculates about and mirrors the world around us, and when ecological/social systems fail, writing about these things comes organically.

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

Thanks for the time, Helon. My first question is one you may have been asked before: What compelled you to write this novel, and how have you experienced the tragedy of “oil and water,” which, as they say, do not mix?

The novel came about not really by design. I had just moved to America from the UK in 2007 when I was approached by a film company to write a script for a movie about the Niger Delta uprisings. 2007 was the peak of the kidnappings and militant protests against oil companies’ pollution of the environment and the government’s collaboration in it. Ken Saro-Wiwa had been hanged because of his outspoken environmental activism about a decade prior. And so, I wrote the draft film script for them, but during my research I came to realize how important the subject of environmental pollution was, and I knew the script hadn’t done the subject justice. Besides, the novel is my primary medium and I felt I could say more with fiction than I could with my film script which, at the end of the day, wasn’t really under my control. The script was the director’s to change and modify as he wanted, and I knew that his primary focus was not the Niger Delta environment; it was more about the kidnappings and the conflict.

The novel is a page-turning mystery, but it’s also wild with descriptions of the natural landscape, both its beauty and horror, as so many aspects of the Niger Delta have been destroyed. I couldn’t get over the many references to death of fish, polluted rivers, and blood running into the water from death. Two questions really: Do you think it’s important for authors to consider our natural world, and do you often write about this, whether in fiction or nonfiction?

I had written about the environment in poems and in other less extended forms before, but Oil on Water was my first extended work on the subject. Of course, authors and all writers should write about the environment if they have the opportunity and also the inspiration. Right now we are engaged in a sort of attritional war with the fossil fuel industries, their propaganda machines, and their paid politicians. Climate change is all around us; the science is indisputable. The ice caps are melting, the glaciers are melting, and in ten to twenty years, some countries will become uninhabitable because of severe weather conditions. Most of these countries will be in the underdeveloped world, meaning in Africa and Asia. 

Most of the increase in migration and refugee movement is because of climate change and loss of livelihood resulting from that. In Nigeria, we are already experiencing severe floods and desertification at unprecedented levels. The incessant clashes between nomadic herdsmen, who are being pushed further and further south because of loss of grazing grounds for their cattle, is proof of this. Even the Boko Haram conflict in the northeast can be linked to the shrinking of Lake Chad, which used to be a source of fishing, irrigation, and transportation for people around the lake, but has shrunk by about 90 percent since the 1960s. And yet, the Nigerian government still doesn’t have any coherent policies in place to address these emergent crises. That’s why writers and anyone, really, with any sort of platform, should be talking about the imminent dangers of climate change. We must never let those who run the extractive industries and their propaganda machines tell us what to think.

Thank you for this. I totally agree with everything you said. Your novel seems to represent, in part, what is really going on in the oil industry in the Niger Delta, but also perhaps in many regions around the world. Has this area changed since the publication of the novel almost a decade ago, and are there any groups besides militants working on restoring the area?

The problems of environmental pollution and extraction are pretty much the same everywhere in the world: they are driven by the greed of a few at the expense of the majority. It is the same in America, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. The change I see in Nigeria is more incremental than dramatic – perhaps the biggest change is that there is less open violence and conflict like you had ten years ago. The government and the oil companies have managed to reach a sort of accommodation with the rebels and the communities, one of them being the government paying the militants – most of them unemployed youths – some sort of stipend so they can lay down their arms. I think activists are relying now more on the courts and the international legal system rather than on violence, and that is the way to go. The companies can now be sued in their home countries rather than in Nigerian courts, which cannot always be relied upon. The activists are learning how to engage the multinationals and to beat them at their own game.

Good to hear. Journalism plays a part in the story, as the main character Rufus (and his boss Zaq) are both not only reporting on the kidnapping of an oil baron’s wife but also investigating the crime in the sense that they are hired to ensure that she, Isabel, is still alive. Do you think that journalism can effect change? I would imagine that any sort of creative storytelling, especially investigative pieces, often inspires empathy in the reader.

Yes, structurally I was using the form of the detective novel. A kidnapping, a ransom demand, an investigation, and finally a release of the victim – or not. In this case, the journalist is my detective. But really the focus of the novel is more on the journey the journalists take in search of the kidnappers, and what they experience on the way. In that sense, this is more of a road novel, with a loose and deliberately episodic plot structure. My aim is to show the reader, through the eyes of Zaq, and especially Rufus, the devastation wreaked upon these communities by the activities of the extractive industries – the polluted rivers, the gas flares, but especially the violence and insecurity and the sheer injustice of it all. I want to reach the reader indirectly, to subtly work on his or her emotions and sympathies before they know what is happening.

Just a short note about dengue. I have both written and read about this disease as sort of a trope/indication of climate change literature. This is coming from me, in Canada, and what I’ve read about how vector-borne diseases may move north in future years due to warming climates and mosquitoes moving north. But in Niger, are you yet seeing more dengue or new strains of it?

I can’t say much about dengue – I am not an expert on disease. But take it as a metaphor, or a trope like you mentioned, for all the changes and catastrophes climate change will unleash on us in the near future. No community is safe. Even though the poorer countries will be first to be impacted, in the end, everywhere and everyone will be affected.

Finally, are you working on anything else right now?

Well, my fourth novel, Travelers, just came out. Interestingly, and I didn’t plan it that way, I think it is a sort of continuation of the theme in Oil on Water. Travelers is about African migrants leaving their countries for Europe. We all know some of the reasons driving these migrants out of their countries – wars and conflicts and loss of habitat, and most of it caused by the activities of multinational corporations who specialize in destabilizing governments and starting conflicts so they can more easily exploit local resources, just like in the Niger Delta.

Right now I am working on a novel I have been working on, on and off, for the past fifteen years. Some novels you have to wait till you are ready. I feel I am ready now.

Thanks so much sharing so much with our readers. I will read Travelers next! Looking forward to your next novel.

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 Nova Scotia 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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Maggie McAndrews, Robert Landy, Sandra Weintraub, Sherilyn Wolter

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

GOING OUT WHILST STAYING IN

Lockdown happened. Then going out whilst staying in became a new reality. I started work, started using public transport like never before whilst being careful, like everyone, not to catch the virus, ever vigilant not to touch anything, to clean and wash as the government said. The rules and regulations became the mantra and my norm. Going to work has given a new view, looking out of the window of the bus, the train, the taxis. Learning a new role, feeling out of my depth, nervous, scared, how can I do a job and keep COVID-19 at bay?

— Maggie McAndrews (Plymouth, Devon, UK)

(Top photo: Juggling whilst staying sane and safe.)

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NOTHING

Two years ago I retired after a fifty-year career as a pioneering drama therapist. I let go of most possessions, fears, and antipathies, settling into a small apartment with carefully chosen books and images. My girlfriend visited from China but could not return. A few paces behind, coronavirus appeared, compelling me to retreat to old fears and antipathies. And so, I give it shape in my imagination and interrogate it daily: ‘What more do I need to let go of? What do I need to retain?’ It is silent, but in my mind’s eye, I hear it saying: ‘Nothing.’

— Robert Landy (New York, New York)

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STILL ALIVE

The fear, the questions, no answers. Will I get it from the groceries delivered? Will I get it walking on the street wearing a mask? Will it come through an open window? Trapped in the invisible death trap.

I am old, elderly, over the hill sliding down on slick black ice. Just in case, I write letters to my children hoping they will keep the letters after I’m gone. I shall not send the letters. Not yet. After all, what if I don’t die? What then? What will I do with the letters?

— Sandra Weintraub (Newtonville, Massachusetts)

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WONDER

All of us connected in our not-knowing, in our common, drastically uncommon plight. Our questions are many, many more than our answers, our breaths more dearly counted. The bright lights of my friends and family are further off, yet closer to my heart. Nature is my most constant familiar, my salvation.

Will we emerge from these strange days of disease joyfully opening our wings of freedom or will they be bound tightly to our bodies by fear or ordinance? Many of us will be much older then and many of us will have grown much younger. Merlins and baby butterflies.

— Sherilyn Wolter (Princeville, Hawaiʻi)

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This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

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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

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Herman Melville

More than a whale tale, Moby-Dick is an epic allegory about survival in times of upheaval. Written 170 years ago, on the brink of the racially charged American Civil War, this murky multilayered masterpiece is uncannily relevant today.

I decided to re-read Moby-Dick in early 2020, pre-COVID, back when the news cycle was dominated by haunting images of Australia’s apocalyptic bushfires, blood-red skies, and more than a billion dead animals. Remember that? 

How quickly we lost interest in that existential climate catastrophe. As Australia’s rains finally arrived in late January, COVID-19 had already begun its inexorable tour du monde. From February to May, the pandemic and its consequent lockdown dominated global headlines and upended our lives and livelihoods. Starting late May, COVID-19 was superseded by massive and sustained global protests against police brutality and systemic racism. All three – climate catastrophe, pandemic and systemic racism – are inter-related.

The first six months of 2020 remind me of the violence and rioting of 1968, the year that both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. 1968 was also the year of the horrific My Lai massacre by US soldiers against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. I was 10 years old; the violence of 1968 marked me for life. I am sure that 2020 will do the same for many.

Growing up, I remember a paperback version of Moby-Dick in my parent’s library, with its distinctive linocut lettering on the front cover. I tried to binge read it in high school – not recommended! – but I never got past Chapter 32, where Melville switches abruptly to a non-narrative description of his unfounded, unscientific taxonomy of whales as fish, based upon size. Although I did not realize it at the time, several scholars have suggested that Melville was deliberately using pseudo-science as code for questioning the justification of race, class and slavery as the United States slipped ever-closer to civil war. One author hypothesized that Melville was questioning “the human need to rank and classify itself, and the false science that is often used in the service of base prejudice.” Another describes Moby-Dick as “a metaphor for a new republic falling apart, with the pursuit of the white whale as a bitter analogy for the slave-owning states.”

I tried to read Moby-Dick again in my 30s and managed to finish nearly two-thirds of the novel while on vacation. But it wasn’t until this year, in my 60s, that I fell in love with Moby-Dick and was totally engrossed, from cover to cover. I am indebted to Nathaniel Philbrick, who recommends in his excellent Why Read Moby-Dick to take it slow, one or two chapters at a time. This was fortuitous, because as the chaos of 2020 unfolded, I began looking forward to my daily fix of Ishmael’s quest for meaning – like an anchor that kept me afloat throughout the turbulent first six months of this year.

Novelist Amitav Ghosh has described Moby-Dick as “such a transcendent piece of writing […] perhaps the greatest novel of the 19th century, if not of all time.” In a 2017 interview, Ghosh suggests that “One reason why Moby-Dick really is such an extraordinary novel is because it doesn’t make the separation between the human and the nonhuman.” Ghosh also makes the link between Moby-Dick and climate change: “I would say climate change really dissolves this completely false distinction between the human and the natural.” 

“To Melville the whale is very much a creature with intention and perhaps with even greater agency than the human beings that it’s dealing with,” explains Ghosh. “For [Melville], every part of the world of man and nature was animated by forces that were divine.” And this, according to Ghosh, is where contemporary artists and writers have failed miserably. He is especially critical of fiction writers, including himself: “the nonhuman has no place within novels, a genre that really grew out of this whole process of separating the human from the nonhuman.” (NB: This interview with Ghosh took place one year before the publication of Richard Powers’ brilliant novel The Overstory, a paean to trees and a hymn to collective action that won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2019.)

And while we’re on the subject of trees as sentient beings… 

In her 2018 essay, “When It Comes to Climate Change We Are All Captain Ahab,” author Kirsten Ellen Johnsen is even more provocative than Ghosh. She goes straight for the jugular: 

Melville’s description of the whaling industry epitomizes the cannibalism of mankind upon nature. […] If we, as Ishmael, are to survive to tell the tale, we will all have to take a deep dive to confront the fearsome depth of what it means to destroy our very selves as we destroy nature, all for the ephemeral sense of power it may briefly afford.

In the paragraph copied below, Johnsen has written what I consider to be the most perfect and prescient summary of Moby-Dick, a cri de cÅ“ur for the Anthropocene: 

Ahab’s swift, silent disappearance into the deep, forever fastened to his foe, beckons a modern audience to ponder our own brink. As the fury of climate change begins to lash the waves, to ram the vessel of civilization with its “wrinkled brow,” humanity now stands poised before the foam with our own vengeful spear upraised. What of our topmost greatness do we glory in, as a civilization supremely proud of our “manhood and our godhood,” having transformed “raw natural energies” into power for our use and pleasure? Doing so requires cannibalization of “living acts and undoubted deeds” of the “unknown, still reasoning” thing that forever lies behind our pasteboard symbols of Divine Nature. Shall we stand like Ahab in the bow of our puny whaleboat, ready to harpoon the last extreme energy from the bowels of Earth, and so, still chasing and forever tied, be immolated into our topmost grief?

It goes without saying that Melville was more than a century ahead of his time – “a modernist before modernism was invented.” If mid-19th century readers were bewildered by Moby-Dick’s allusive style, 21st century readers should take heed. Moby-Dick is truly a novel for the Anthropocene, an allegory about a collective predicamentthat does not end well. 

“The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination,” Ghosh wrote in his 2016 nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Calling for radically new ways of thinking about how the climate crisis is already (not just in the distant future) transforming our lives, he asks “And who’s best equipped to show us this reimagined landscape? Artists, of course.”

One of these artists is the playwright Chantal Bilodeau, whose play Sila is about the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman lives in the Arctic. Of the eight characters in Sila, three are nonhuman: two polar bears and a wild-haired Inuit goddess of the ocean and underworld. As the story unfolds, the distance between these three worlds – human, nonhuman, gods – collapses and the very scientific worldview of the main character (a climate scientist) is fundamentally changed, now encompassing the same kind of complexity he encounters in his work.

My prayer for 2020 is that artists and writers of all types will find the courage and inspiration to ensure that 2020 will go down in history as a watershed moment, and not – like 1968 – as another year of senseless violence to both the human and nonhuman world.

(Top image, Trembling Aspens, by Joan Sullivan.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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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 Bebejabets Sophie Lapointe, Glenn Alterman, Molly McAndrews, Tianhai (Tony) Zhou

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

A FADING SOUL

The woods have always been a sacred place in my mind. But when I traverse the muddy trail, the faint reek covers the surroundings with an ominous veil. Taking a more brisk pace, I hope that the muddy ground won’t suck me into the earth. Would I go through the center of the globe and appear at the other side of the world? Life is an endless loop, with ups and downs. Indifferent people catch up from behind and fade away. The verdant May leaves shed their colors like dried up paint.

— Tianhai (Tony) Zhou (Haining, Zhejiang, China)

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THE TRUTH

So many people reevaluating, revisiting old memories, better times. But why? And why now? So many stories in the news of life and death every day. Suddenly it seems like the line separating life from death is getting closer and closer. What’s going on? It’s a pandemic, they say, a virus. But no, that’s not all that’s going on, that’s just what’s happening. Open your eyes. Keep your distance so you can get closer. Cover up, cover up – so that you can go inside! There… yeah, that’s what’s happening… see? Now… learn.

— Glenn Alterman (New York, New York)

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DEER PANDEMIC

In the past four months, global citizens have learned new habits: social distancing, washing hands, and wearing a mask. For me, this last protective habit turned out to be rewarding and exciting. During a pandemic, animals are sometimes abandoned or forgotten. Indeed, a local animal shelter needed money. Solution? The owner decided to make cute face masks for sale. So I bought one. By wearing this mask, a wounded deer is cared for and fed, making me proud to be part of something bigger. The mask was so successful, my whole family has one.

— Bebejabets Sophie Lapointe (Mascouche, Québec, Canada)

(Top photo: What pandemic? Acrylic paper, 10.5 cm x 13.5 cm. Bebejabets Sophie Lapointe, 2020.)

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BECOMING GRADUALLY “OTHER”

I’m depriving my skin of material correspondence and withdrawing the ability to contact other bodies. My skin feels the loss. I envy the machine who can survive without touch. I video-call constantly: uploading myself, my eyes present, moving mouth and megapixel skin. I see other bodies, but not like I know them. Flickering, stuttering, fading. I’m becoming gradually “other.” I’m getting to know my computational personality. I’m feeding my electronic body. It exists without feeling, without pain, grief, or humor. I’m living somewhere in the machine, both here and there, existing in between multiple borders, staring at the unknown.

— Molly McAndrews (Plymouth, Devon, UK)

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This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

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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 Thomas Peterson

A MODEL FOR LOCAL ACTION

I.

As of mid-April 2020 (when this piece was written), somewhere between two and three billion people will be staying in their homes for weeks to come. Non-essential travel has all but ceased as efforts are made to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the communal sharing of stories in live local gatherings has been shut down around the world; theatre is temporarily impossible. At the same time, digitized narrative forms continue to circulate globally at an extraordinary rate. We are experiencing an unprecedented pause in the progress of economic globalization – the process is driven primarily by fossil fuel-intensive manufacturing and shipping, and carbon emissions in China temporarily dipped by 25 percent in the month of February. Nevertheless, the globalization of storytelling continues apace.

In the total absence of live theatre, the vitality of our remarkable form is evident, and much missed. Theatre can tell stories of and in a specific place at a certain time to the people who inhabit that place and that time. As we use increasingly globalized media tools to describe an increasingly globalized world, this distinctive quality becomes all the more important, especially because the impacts and stories of the climate crisis will dramatically diverge from place to place. What lessons can the theatre draw from the isolation spurred by this pandemic, and how might we emerge prepared to tell the stories of the climate crisis on a local and global scale?

II.

We are experiencing a horrifying tragedy – the consequence of too little care for the most vulnerable, too little attention paid to science, too little action too late. These last few weeks have prompted an alarming outpouring of quasi-ecofascist rhetoric, which tends to repeat the toxic idea that “humans are the virus,” a phrase often meme-ified alongside images of empty highways, clear canals in Venice, or smog-free skies above Los Angeles. This rhetoric of blame implies that destruction is an inherent quality of the human species; that we collectively share responsibility for environmental degradation and the climate crisis. Worse, these accusations are sometimes paired with undercurrents of xenophobia and racism, suggesting that China is to blame for the climate crisis and the pandemic.

Humans are not the virus. Systems of extraction and exploitation are the source of the climate crisis, and while some of these have slowed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic has also made tangible some of the differential harm caused by environmental degradation. Carbon emissions may have temporarily fallen, but cumulative air pollution has already weakened the lungs of millions of people around the world, primarily poor people and people of color, increasing their vulnerability to COVID-19. Environmental racism and fossil-fuel capitalism are a deadly combination.

But while the pandemic itself is an unmitigated tragedy, there are valuable lessons to be gleaned from our collective response. It is heartening to know that we can extend empathy around the world, retaining a compassionate global outlook while caring for those in physical proximity to us. We can avoid carbon-intensive long distance transportation and limit the globalized exchange of commodities while reinvesting in our physical communities. In this time of crisis, Mutual Aid Groups have sprung up all over, a local model in which people care for those who are near them. But when this period of isolation ends, where are we to funnel this empathy? How will we maintain these local networks?

III.

In an essay entitled Où atterir? (literally “Where to land?” though translated into English as Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime), the philosopher Bruno Latour argues that, to be effective, any political response to the linked crises of climate and economic inequality requires reinvesting in local environmental stewardship and addressing local grievances, all while retaining open and globally minded ways of thinking and being.

As Naomi Klein has argued, the disastrous failure to respond to the climate crisis in the thirty years since it became widely understood is due in no small part to economic globalization. Trade agreements have consistently been prioritized over climate treaties, and though emissions growth slowed over the second half of the twentieth century, it intensified again after the creation of the World Trade Organization. While the globalized sharing of information, services, and stories should and will continue to expand, the production of commodities must localize in order to combat the climate crisis. These economic changes will necessitate political transformations that redistribute power to communities.

To achieve this redistribution, Latour calls for a re-description of the specific landscapes in which we live in the manner of the cahiers de doléances, the lists of grievances contributed by every community in France in 1789, which constituted a full accounting of the political and environmental conditions of the country. The cahiers offered communities an opportunity for critical evaluation of conditions of life under the government of Louis XVI. This opportunity for widespread, relatively democratic reflection catalyzed the revolution, which eventually led to many of the reforms called for in the cahiers.

When people were given the opportunity to consider the particular political and environmental grievances of the places they called home, they realized that changes could be made that would dramatically improve their lives. Latour argues that a similar political accounting by communities around the world would create the kind of local investment and stewardship that might render climate change a “backyard” issue for everyone, not just the frontline communities that are already fighting extraction operations, rising seas, deforestation, and other threats to their survival. The communal nature of theatre makes it the ideal form for telling the stories of these local accountings.

IV.

Over the past several centuries, colonial and imperial projects and technological developments have driven an unbelievable intensification of global homogeneity: places around the world are more similar than they have ever been. It is therefore unsurprising that in theatre we are continually called to tell stories with universal appeal – stories that bring us together or help us bridge our differences. Theatremakers are pressured to justify our sometimes culturally peripheral medium by insisting that the stories we tell speak to universal truths. The stories may have surfeits of specificity, but universal relatability is an all-too-common litmus test when an institution, be it a regional theatre or a multinational media company, is evaluating the quality of a narrative.

Leaving for another essay the unsettling question of what universality might mean, why should we restrict ourselves to stories that resonate with everyone when working in a medium that is strictly limited by time and space? Instead, we must create work for the people who share our local time and space, and who are therefore also sharing the same climate conditions.

Other than theatre, what means of sharing stories can exert a localizing influence in our increasingly globalized art and media landscape? Theatre could even be defined as the local reinterpretation of globally accessible texts. The form is perfectly suited to the telling of local stories: all of the participants in its creation and performance (save perhaps the playwright), along with its audience, must share a specific physical location. Theatres are the venues in which re-descriptions of the environment, local climate stories, cahiers de doléances of the climate crisis, might be assembled in communities all over.

Bringing Latour’s reasoning to the theatre, the climate crisis demands new, locally specific plays to respond to the unique challenges of the place in which they are created and performed. After all, climate change impacts different places in different ways and at different times, challenging the very possibility of universal climate stories.

Nevertheless, the American theatre ecosystem persistently devalues the local: regional theatres are judged successful when they transfer a production to New York, while commercially successful New York productions go on to tour the country. In theatre, we can afford to tell stories that are not “universal.” A Hollywood blockbuster may need to sell tickets in Beijing, New York, and Tulsa to make ends meet, but if you are making a play about the climate in a town of a thousand people, make the play for the residents of that climate, those who are reckoning with its impacts. Climatic forces do not reflect totalizing narratives, and acknowledging the agency and reactivity of non-human nature in many forms, from hurricanes to potent viruses, is of paramount importance in crafting the story of the Anthropocene. As COVID-19 has spread around the world, its impacts have wildly diverged in rich and poor communities, in suburban neighborhoods and refugee camps or prisons.

The climate crisis is no different; it is going to change everything, but it is also going to impact every place in unique and unpredictable ways. Disparate geographies will inevitably generate contrasting stories in the decades to come. Vladimir Putin has long championed the “positive” economic effects of the climate crisis, as Russia – or rather, some wealthy Russians – stands to benefit from increased arable land and newly accessible shipping lanes in the Arctic. From other parts of the globe, the view is very different: Marshall Islands foreign minister Tony de Brum famously described the avoidable inundation of island nations as “equivalent in our minds to genocide.” While these are extreme cases, the danger of universalist climate storytelling is clear.

V.

So how shall we tell specific, local climate stories in cities and towns across the country and around the world when climate-focused theatrical work is nearly absent from the stage, even in cultural capitals and at major regional theatres? As Marshall Botvinick has written in the pages of HowlRound, the model for this kind of community-based theatremaking can be found in the Federal Theatre Project and the work of Hallie Flanagan. The project, funded by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal in the 1930s, supported the creation of plays that specifically detailed the concerns of their communities, often with a focus on radical change, through current events-based forms like the Living Newspaper. Karen Malpede’s compelling call for a Green New Federal Theatre Project describes the integration of such an initiative into the Green New Deal, an ideal governmental structure for the support of local climate storytelling.

In the meantime, this form of locally adapted climate theatre is already emerging through initiatives like Climate Change Theatre Action, a project I help to organize, which was founded on the principle of local action paired with a coordinated global outlook. In 2019, a number of Climate Change Theatre Action events paired their performances with analyses or discussions of local environmental conditions: an event on a coastal bayou in southern Mississippi examined impacts on local marine-based communities and economies; another took place in kayaks on Miami, Florida’s rising Biscayne Bay; and an event in Calgary, Alberta offered an opportunity for locals, used to being shamed for expressing concern about climate, to support each other in taking action. Climate Change Theatre Action 2021 will aim to support locally focused climate storytelling in the communities that need it the most. Using the Yale Center for Climate Communications’ 2019 study of American attitudes on climate, which breaks down responses by county, efforts and resources will be focused on counties in which understanding of the climate crisis is low, and also on counties in which awareness and concern are high but where respondents indicate that they rarely talk about the issue, let alone act.

Knowledge of local climate impacts is limited in much of the country: the collapse of local news in the United States has eliminated most local environmental reporting. By putting local climate stories on stage in a community space, information about environmental conditions can be shared with those who might never seek out climate journalism. As Latour has argued, local climate storytelling is essential in explaining the import of environmental degradation to climate skeptics. Even then-Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson sued to prevent fracking near his property.

Right now, isolated in our homes, many of us are intensely missing the experience of congregating in a communal space with our neighbors, telling and watching local stories. We are missing the theatre. Once it is safe to do so, we must begin to gather in our communities and share our climate stories. In asking our neighbors to join us to stage our climate cahiers de doléances, we not only learn of local grievances and environmental impacts, but also begin an exercise in imagining: What are the challenges ahead? How will our communities combat solastalgia â€“ the feeling of distress caused by environmental change in a place we love? What is the future we envision for our hometown or city? On stage, we can begin to bring those futures to life, in every community, no matter how small.

(Top image: The Booth Theatre, closed for at least a month to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Photo by Gary Hershorn-Corbis via Getty Images.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on April 27, 2020.

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Thomas Peterson is a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis. He is an Artistic Associate with The Arctic Cycle, co-organizing Climate Change Theatre Action. He recently returned from a Harvard Williams-Lodge Scholarship in Paris, where he wrote a thesis on the aesthetic of the sublime in the theatrical representation of the Anthropocene. He created Roy Loves America, a multi-form performance piece about Roy Cohn, and is developing an original adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, set on a dying planet. His engagement in climate activism stretches back to high school, when he led a successful fossil fuel divestment campaign.

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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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