Artists and Climate Change

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Caroline S. Roberts Artfully Fills a Space with Data

By Peterson Toscano

How can we help people embrace the science that reveals our climate has been changing dramatically and very quickly? And more than that, how do we invite them to feel and experience the data so profoundly that it causes them to respond?

These are the questions UK-born artist Caroline S. Roberts brought to her piece the present of my life looks different under trees, an immersive installation of cyanotypes that has been exhibited at BOX13 ArtSpace and HCC Southwest in Houston, TX.

Caroline moved to Houston 18 years ago. A story about a drowned forest from thousands of years ago along with recent flooding in her city, inspired and informed her work.

The installation consists of sixty 11-foot high panels, each one representing a year of Houston weather data and encircling the Back BOX like a grove of trees. Each varies in width based on the rainfall intensity, as measured by the number of days on which the total rainfall was greater than 3 inches: the point at which street flooding occurs. The panel color, from ice-blue to blue-black, represents the average nighttime temperature for that year.

At first glance the immersive nature of this cyanotype installation provides a cool environment as Houston temperatures fall into Fall. However, a closer look gives the bigger picture: more shocking than any graph, this forest-like environment shows the story of rising temperatures and intensifying rain events.

For more information on the data behind this installation please continue to the story and data page.

Next month: Krista Hiser is back with another installment of the Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club. This time, she looks at a book that hits very close to home. She dives into the pandemic and climate change in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Stations Eleven.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunesStitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloudPodbeanNorthern Spirit RadioGoogle PlayPlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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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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Wild Author: Erica Ferencik

By Mary Woodbury

This month we travel to the Arctic – Greenland, specifically – with author Erica Ferencik, via her novel Girl in Ice (March 2022, Scout Press/S&S). I’m absolutely floored after chatting with Erica about her firsthand experiences when writing.

Erica throws herself wholeheartedly into the dangerous environments where her novels are set. She ventured deep into the remote forests of the Allagash Territory in northern Maine for The River at Night, rafted the Amazon River in the jungles of Peru for Into the Jungle, and for her new book, Girl in Ice, out by Scout Press/S&S in March 2022, she spent several weeks exploring the desolate iceberg-packed fjords of Greenland.  

She recalls,

The thin metal skin of the helicopter was the only thing between me and a thousand-foot plummet into the mile-deep fjord. Around our encampment on the ice, a flimsy-looking electric fence was the sole discouragement to hungry, roving polar bears. I received casual instructions to ‘turn toward the noise’ while kayaking among stories-high bergs in case they were to split and roll, creating tsunami-sized waves.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Valerie “Val” Chesterfield is a linguist trained in the most esoteric of disciplines: dead Nordic languages. Despite her successful career, she leads a sheltered life and languishes in the shadow of her twin brother, Andy, an accomplished climate scientist stationed on a remote island off Greenland’s barren coast. But Andy is gone: a victim of suicide, who willfully ventured unprotected into 50-degree-below-zero weather. Val is inconsolable – and disbelieving. She suspects foul play.

When Wyatt, Andy’s fellow researcher in the Arctic, discovers a scientific impossibility­ – a young girl frozen in the ice who thaws out alive, speaking a language no one understands – Val is his first call. Will she travel to the frozen North to meet this girl, and try to comprehend what she is so passionately trying to communicate? Under the auspices of helping Wyatt interpret the girl’s speech, Val musters every ounce of her courage and journeys to the Arctic to solve the mystery of her brother’s death.

The moment she steps off the plane, her fear threatens to overwhelm her. The landscape is fierce, and Wyatt, brilliant but difficult, is an enigma. But the girl is special, and Val’s connection with her is profound. Only, something is terribly wrong; the child is sick, maybe dying, and the key to saving her lies in discovering the truth about Wyatt’s research. Can his data be trusted? And does it have anything to do with how and why Val’s brother died? With time running out, Val embarks on an incredible frozen odyssey – led by the unlikeliest of guides – to rescue the new family she has found in the most unexpected of places.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

I am amazed by the types of novels you’re writing. They take place in interesting places (a jungle, a remote forest, and now an icecap). Your research is hands-on, and you travel places ahead of time. What’s that like? What’s your favorite experience in the beautiful but isolated landscapes you have visited?

No matter how much I read or google, I can’t possibly bring these worlds alive for myself – never mind the reader – without going there first. I absolutely love every minute of these trips, no matter how cold, hot, scared, freaked out, and lost I may be. This is our world and, as troubled as it is, it is still full of wonders!

That said, I have a tendency to get mired – okay, lost â€“ in research. The way I see it, once you open one of these fascinating doors, in the case of Girl in Ice, animals that can thaw out alive, the Little Ice Age, ancient Arctic civilizations, Greenlandic wildlife, Nordic languages, glaciology, climate science, where do you stop? The answer for me is: know my story first. Otherwise, I will fall into the black hole of research and never emerge.

Before leaving for my trip to Greenland in August of 2019, I made sure to wrap up a comprehensive outline for Girl in Ice. As much as I intended to keep myself open to any and all experiences on the trip, I needed to keep a special eye out for any aspect of the place – people, culture, landscape, animals – that would figure heavily in the story. In addition to the trip, I read dozens of books on Arctic exploration, Greenlandic history, and linguistics.

This sort of preparation was true for all my books. I knew my story intimately before embarking on my research trip to the Allagash Territory in Northern Maine for The River at Night, and certainly for my one-month immersive trip to the Peruvian jungle for Into the Jungle.

One of my favorite experiences was camping near the ice sheet in Greenland near a bay packed with giant (think five-story building) icebergs. For whatever reason, we hadn’t seen much of the northern lights, but on our last night there, something amazing happened. An explosion woke us at three in the morning. We all stumbled out of our tents in our long johns, hoping that the world hadn’t come to end.

Not this time. A cruise-ship-sized iceberg had broken in two in the bay. Waves pounded the shore; seafoam glowed in the moonlight.

Seconds later, as if the two events were related, the northern lights flickered across the sky: mad swaths of purple, green, orange and yellow. We gathered sleeping bags and pillows to lie out on slabs of rock near the bay. Colors flashed and danced; speech failed us. My hands and feet were numb with cold, but escaping into my warm tent was out of the question. Never had I felt more like stardust, never more like part of this gorgeous world. I kept asking myself, how can this be more beautiful, and in the space of a breath, it was.

That’s amazing (and my dream to see). What got you on the road to thinking about and writing Girl in Ice, and what do you want readers to know about the background experience?

One bitterly cold morning in the winter of 2018, I was walking in the woods near my home, and came upon what looked like juvenile painted turtles frozen mid-stroke in the ice along the shallow edge of a pond. They didn’t look alive, but they didn’t look dead either.

It turns out there are some animals (and plants too!) that have this freezing-and-coming-back-to-life thing down. Painted turtle hatchlings, some species of beetle, wood frogs, certain alligators, even an adorable one-millimeter length creature called a Tardigrade or “water bear” that can be frozen to minus 359C and thaw out just fine. Most of these creatures possess a certain cryo-protein that protects their cells from bursting when they freeze.

A protein that… we don’t possess. Still, the image of a young girl frozen in a glacier in the Arctic popped into my head. From there, I asked myself: How did she get there? What was her story? 

That’s a cool start! You stated in an interview, “I’d say never stop learning your craft, whether that’s through reading what you admire or writing.” What have you learned from prior novels that shaped some of Girl in Ice?

Every time I write a book it’s as if I’ve never written one before. I have to learn all over again how in the world to construct something so daunting and overwhelming. It’s like climbing Everest with barely enough oxygen, without a sherpa, in business casual.

But this time I learned, or re-learned to love the research, but be careful! Don’t get mired in it. The story comes first. Concoct a small, knowable world. Create fewer characters, better fleshed out. Don’t shy away from painful situations or emotions. Love or at least have empathy for all of your characters. Embrace your weird. Keep the dread going. Vet every sentence, paragraph, scene. Make every word count. And it’s fine to make your reader laugh, cry, or cower in fear, but most of all, you’ve got to make them wait.

Your website states “My passion is to create unputdownable novels set in some of the most inhospitable regions on earth, places most of us don’t get a chance to experience in person in our lifetimes.” How did that passion originate?

I love any great story no matter where it’s set; however, I’ve got a real soft spot for any novel or film set in a forbidding place. I could speculate all kinds of deep psychological reasons for my love of survival stories. Let me put it this way: like so many others, I survived an extremely challenging childhood, and so I have ready access to dread, to feeling trapped, to planning creative ways to survive. In short, my fight or flight hormones are quite close to the surface.

How did you approach creating the language the girl in the ice uses?

I immersed myself in the sounds and cadences of the living Nordic languages, among them Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, and of course Greenlandic, in order to get a feel for inflection and tone. I also dove into recordings of Old Norse, the main language of the Vikings, in order to create morphemes, or units of meaning that sounded Nordic, but that were just slightly distinct from known languages, so I could create Sigrid’s unique tongue.

What I had to grapple with next was: How would Val be able to interpret Sigrid’s speech if there was no correlation to any living or even dead language? I consulted some linguist friends who said that without any remnants of written language or cultural clues from a society that spoke the language – with nothing to go on, basically – you’d have to start with simple nouns, verbs, and concepts, almost like a baby pieces together her language.

The plot touches upon deadly ice storms; are these a real current threat stemming from global warming?

There are such things as katabatic winds. In Greenland, they’re called piteraqs: brutally strong winds generated by radically different air temperatures, often barreling down the slopes of mountains or glaciers. I’m not a climate scientist or meteorologist. But climate change strengthens hurricanes, tornadoes, wind events in general, as well as prompting dramatic swings in temperature, so I thought it wasn’t too far of a reach – for story purposes – to say that deadly ice storms are in our future and might have been in our past.

What was the most challenging part of the field research you did for this book?

Leaving Greenland, just when I was getting a feel for the place, was the worst part of a mostly smooth trip. A profoundly melancholic feeling of when will I ever be here again? I could have stayed weeks longer kayaking the fjords, interviewing townspeople, trying to pick up at least some of the language, scouting for wildlife. I couldn’t get enough of city-block long icebergs, carved into incredibly bizarre shapes by sun and sea, the blow of fin whales in the bay, the northern lights, and our Greenlandic guide’s hair-raising tales of hunting and survival.

The most surprising thing you learned from that research?

This is going to sound silly, but the fact that Greenland is so big, just so vast, and yet so few people live there was hard to wrap my mind around. Only 57,000 people – one tenth the residents in all of Wyoming – call this island, the largest in the world at about a third the size of Canada, home. Most live in Nuuk, the capital; the rest live in towns often with fewer than 500 inhabitants along a three-thousand-mile coastline, mostly on the west side. The ice sheet measures fifteen hundred miles north to south, is two miles deep at its thickest, covers nearly 80% of Greenland, and has been frozen for three million years.

The second thing that shocked me was how close Greenland is to pre-history. As recently as 1950, people lived in sod huts: low, square dwellings built by digging a hole in the ground during the short summer season – plus or minus fifty days – then creating a supporting structure for a roof out of whale ribs or driftwood, finally sealing it with skins, peat and rocks.

And it’s one thing to read that the economy is mostly subsistence hunting and fishing; it’s another to witness it, read about quotas for narwhal and minke whale, learn what happens when a polar bear is spotted (it’s not gentle), understand that sled dogs are seen as possessions, not pets, that need to be fed. And, sad as it is to witness for someone unaccustomed to this life, it’s cheaper to hunt seal than cough up five dollars for a can of imported dog food.

Most shocking of all? There are no penguins.

How did it differ, apart from the climate, from your field research in Northern Maine, and Peru?

For a month in the winter of 2014, I was on my own in the Allagash Territory in Northern Maine conducting research for The River at Night. No guide, no touring company. By making dozens of someone-who-knows-someone phone calls, I cobbled together interviews with people who had disappeared themselves from society. It got dicey at times. One guy would only agree to an interview if I met him at a certain mile marker along a logging road where he arrived on horseback. I vetted everyone and always had my mace.

In the Peruvian jungle doing research for Into the Jungle, I had my own guide, a native and lifelong hunter armed with a machete and a masterful knowledge of the rainforest. I was frankly terrified to get on the plane. I’d prepared myself by reading everything I could about the jungle and didn’t think I would survive it; there is such a thing as knowing too much! But by the time I left Peru, four weeks later, I felt confident and calm, even with piranha I’d caught for dinner snapping at my toes and flipping around in the bottom of my dugout canoe.

In Greenland, my fellow explorers and myself had access to a native guide and hunter who also served as translator. We were able to interview a mayor of a Greenlandic town, as well as several residents, including other hunters. We explored by small plane, helicopter, kayak, small boat, and on foot, camping just a stone’s throw from the ice cap.

This series features authors who tackle environmental issues or include natural beauty as a strong element in their story. How does your novel fit into this thread?

Settings including natural beauty are wonderful, but the human story, and all the emotions we experience, are what we all crave and ultimately respond to. In constructing a novel, for me, story comes first, but for each novel I’ve written over the last decade (closing in on number four), the climate emergency looms larger and larger in my thoughts, emotions, and ultimately in my stories.

Climate- or eco-fiction, or any story involving the environment can be set anywhere, since climate change impacts us worldwide, in small and large ways. It could be a thriller set in the near future about water wars or mass emigration, or it could be a more intimate story set on a smaller canvas, perhaps something about someone who has to abandon a beloved family home along a coast due to the encroaching tide.

Readers want to think, but more than anything else they want to feel, they want a deeper understanding of life. This is best done through story. I believe that Girl in Ice is a solid story that deals with the impending ravages of climate change in both a speculative and realistic way, in broad strokes but also revealing the deep trauma that – unfortunately – we are all just beginning to understand and experience.

I believe so too. Are there ways in which your decade doing standup and sketch comedy has influenced your writing of fiction?

They say that comedy is the angry art. And it’s true. As long as you’re funny, you get to go up there and rail against what you perceive as unfair, wrong, absurd, and so on. There is a lot of darkness in comedy. In fact, I defy you to tell me an actually funny grownup joke without a dark, or tragic, or sad kernel. Jokes about happy things aren’t funny. This is why people love comedy: someone, up there onstage, is calling out things that have bothered them or pissed them off for decades, but they didn’t know how to put it into words.

When I was doing stand-up or sketch comedy, I was a frustrated writer with several terrible novels in my drawer, but with a hunger to be seen and heard. Getting up on stage and letting it rip was instant publication: immediate feedback. It taught me to think on my feet. It taught me discipline: you had to come up with new jokes all the time.

Comedy demands keen powers of observation. It you’re not paying attention, taking notes about what you see, hear, feel, then take the second step and ask yourself, why is this funny, how can you come up with material? Never mind asking yourself how can I process this through the lens of who am I as a comic? But the first step is always: observe.

Which is also a crucial skill for a novelist.

Bravery is a muscle we all exercise every day, especially these days, but doing stand-up was where I practiced bravery, night after night, for years. It took me a while to really grok that comedy isn’t one-way – you’re not just dumping jokes on people – it’s a conversation with the audience. After every joke, you must give your audience a chance to react. If you don’t, they will sense your fear and eat you alive.

So many people ask me these days: Weren’t you frightened, kayaking between massive icebergs, knowing if they calved or split, waves could hurl you into thirty-degree water? What about the giant anacondas coiled in the trees over your canoe as you threaded through the floating forest by moonlight? I would say that for all those scenarios you can lower your risk: you can find a great guide, wear the right gear, pack a machete of your own. But try standing in front of five hundred people waiting for them to laugh at a joke that seemed hilarious in the shower that morning. That has to be the scariest journey of all.

What won’t we find on any PR or publicity material?

I think this book has been lurking somewhere deep in my subconscious since the day I saw a film version of Frankenstein. In one of the final scenes, Frankenstein’s monster, hunted, beaten and bloodied, has given up on mankind and is heading north into the great Arctic wilderness. I will never forget that devastatingly sad and eerie image. Girl in Ice is not Frankenstein, but I think that’s where my fascination with Nordic stories began.

Are you working on anything else?

In the next novel, a thriller called The Intelligence, nature finally takes a stand and attempts to destroy us as we have been annihilating it, posing for us the impossible paradox, How do you defeat an enemy you desperately need for your own survival?

Well, I’m intrigued by your life, your research, your experience in beautiful but also dangerous areas. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me, and I’m looking forward to The Intelligence!

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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Solar Sisters

By Joan Sullivan

In the future, we may well look back on 2022 as a watershed year in the global energy transition. The year when we finally realized that “technological infrastructure alone does not an energy transition make.” The year when we finally understood that all previous energy transitions (yes, there have been several) overlapped with and were influenced by concurrent shifts in cultural and aesthetic values.

The 21st century’s version of an energy transition is no different. As we transition from extracting fossil fuels out of the ground to harvesting multiple sources of clean energy from the sun, wind, and water, our values are shifting from a “culture of consumption” to a “culture of stewardship.” As Barry Lord explains in his book Art & Energy: How Culture Changes:

When an energy source is incipient, the cultural values that it engenders are seen as innovative and open to dispute, just like cutting-edge art. Once the new energy source becomes dominant, the values that it brought with it become mainstream. With the renewable energy culture of stewardship, that process is happening in our own time. 

As in the past, it will be the artists, poets, architects, and designers who shine a light on the way forward.

Two revolutionary solar designers from The Netherlands are already doing so. Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen have spent the past decade – independently of each other – experimenting with harvesting solar energy from objects in our everyday lives: furniture, textiles, windows, clothing, and accessories.

As just one example from dozens of their innovative projects, van Aubel’s design for a table that generates electricity from diffused indoor lighting (see video below) provides a beautiful and concrete example of the important role that solar designers will play in the second Copernican revolution.

In a strange twist of fate, the two Dutch solar designers did not meet until quite recently. The infamous meeting took place in a Saint Petersburg bar, while drinking White Russians (true story). They immediately bonded and, ever since, have considered themselves Solar Sisters.

This is the power of collaboration. Within a year of their first meeting, van Aubel and van Dongen had laid the groundwork for the world’s first design biennale inspired by solar energy. As co-founders of this global event, they share a vision to create space for an alternative “solar movement” that shifts the conversation from the glorification of technology to a new perspective about the cultural, social, and aesthetic values of a post-fossil future powered by the infinite energy of our star.

The Solar Biënnale will be held in The Netherlands from September 9 to October 30, 2022. The host city of the inaugural biennale is Rotterdam, with tandem activities programmed for Eindhoven, Maastricht, and Amsterdam throughout the seven-week event. The main venue for The Solar Biënnale is Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Institute, which will host a central retrospective exhibition “about designing with, for and under the sun” curated by Matylda Krzykowski. Closing week of the biennale will take place in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week.

The organizers hope that future solar biennales will rotate between other countries and other continents. A detailed calendar of events will be released soon. You can sign up for email alerts here.

In the months leading up to the official launch of The Solar Biënnale 2022, I will update readers of this Renewable Energy series with occasional posts about the cultural importance of this global event as well as information about some of its warm-up activities such as a lecture series and side-programming at festivals. COVID-permitting, I hope to participate in person and to finally meet the two Solar Sisters.

Here comes the sun…

(Top image by Joan Sullivan)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer and writer focused on the energy transition. She is a new member of Women Photograph. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan explores the intersection of art and the energy transition. She is currently experimenting with abstract photography as a new language to express her eco-anxiety about climate breakdown and our collective silence. You can find Joan on 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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Todd Bartel: An Omni-Coupler

By Etty Yaniv

Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at Rhode Island School of Design: “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” That was his introduction to surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an omni-coupler,” he says.

It is quite evident in your work and in your texts that you are passionate about collage. You focus on the relationship between landscape, or as you coined – landview – and collage. How do you see that relationship?

I love working with paper, and I love working with wood. After two decades of exploring these materials, I awakened to their interrelation, which continues to raise questions that drive my studio practice. While not all collage is paper-based, paper as a collage material is the predominant idiom, which got me thinking: paper comes from woody plant fibers; wood comes from trees; both come from the landscape – cut and hacked from the land. I love history and have read extensively about both genres, and in 2004 I realized they were two separate histories that intersected, in the 1960s and 1970s, with environmental art. As a result, I now consider myself a collage-based eco-artist.

I coined the term “landview” in 1995 as a dissenting concept to the artist’s term “landscape” – a Dutch and Germanic technical word for “created and shaped” images of land. “Landscape,” to quote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “first meant a picture of a view; then the view itself.” I found that particular word evolution problematic because landscape’s etymology has connotations of “cutting, hacking and shaping,” which led me to wonder about “viewing” a tract of earth that is “untouched” by humans or otherwise protected from human activity. We also tend to separate ourselves from the definition of nature, and we often divide our actions from natural processes. Considering our place in nature and the dubious ways we sometimes use the term “landscape” inspired my Terra Reverentia series and all the work since.

In disagreement with the idea of humans removing themselves from the definition of nature, the Terra Reverentia is a series of oil paintings of appropriated medieval land backgrounds. I removed all the people and buildings and then boxed and framed them with various materials and imagery juxtapositions. While finishing up that series, I developed a want for a new word, which inspired a search for an alternate suffix. I should note, of course, now, during the third decade of the twenty-first century, we recognize that Earth has been shaped by human intervention during our short tenure on the planet. Everything has been touched by human activity, but when I coined “landview,” I had not heard of the term “Anthropocene” yet.

In contrast to land-shaping, the etymology of “landview” uses the Proto-Indo-European root, “weid” – to see, wise, wisdom, way of proceeding, manner, view – a view designed to encourage human mending strategies, especially when it comes to cutting timber. For me, collage, assemblage, and installation practices provide inexhaustible possibilities for creating work that raises questions about the seemingly unrelated histories of collage and landscape. I have been working to pull both histories into the same timeline for close to three decades now, and that idea has kept me busy with serial work.

Terra Reverentia: Recrudesce, 15.5 x 15.5 x 3.5 inches, constructed wood box, tempera, velvet, vines, oil on wood, gold leaf, branches, glass, mustard seeds, 1995

In the Landscape Vernacular series, you address the history of land depiction, specifically the changing attitudes about land use and ecology. This involves research, accumulating data, and editing. Tell me about your research process and how it is expressed throughout this series.

I collect books, dictionaries, engravings, antiques, and all things paper-related, which fuel all my series work. I also collect discarded books, specifically to harvest the end-pages. My resource materials are made up of analog and digital materials, which are filtered into dossiers, and which eventually get used in the collages, assemblages, Synterials, or whatever project is at hand. I often re-publish my resource materials; I make high-resolution scans and print them onto period paper end-pages to achieve contemporary facsimiles of the originals. Sometimes I use actual engravings or book pages in my Landscape Vernacular (LV) collages, and at other times I use re-published copies. Whenever I am able, I obtain multiple copies of my materials to keep an original out of circulation while others get used up in the work itself. As a result, I now have an extensive library of ephemera, books on collage and landscape, and a vast digital library that informs my work and research.

Terrain, Scream and Cede – Industrial Locomotion 1844, 27.5 x 16.5 inches, burnished interlocking collage, xerographic-transfers on 19th-century endpapers and rain-washed, weather-beaten bulletin board paper with staple rust, map graticules, dictionary definitions of “pastoral,” pencil, wax paper transfer, Yes glue, document repair tape, 2021
Terrain, Scream and Cede – Industrial Locomotion 1844, verso, 2021

In the past ten years, I have made a concerted effort to collect original texts and objects expressly acquired to establish a Wunderkammer or museum that examines these fields. I hope to show such materials one day in connection with a more in-depth examination of my work.

The LV collages always center upon definitions of selected words. I’m interested in the combination of text and image. For example, the word illustration originally meant “verbal description.” “Illustration” expanded to mean “a picture” due to Grangerization and the proliferation of the scrapbook. The LV series juxtaposes vintage ephemera from the 18th through the 21st centuries set within the limitations of a puzzle-piece-fit collage to extra-illustrate problems about land use throughout Western history.

In Witness, you create rule-based series of puzzle-piece-fit collages, aiming to achieve zero waste during the process of making these diptych collages. What is the idea behind this project and what drove you there?

In the early 2000s, I began to audit my studio practice. I realized that collage always produces waste, and I wondered how to forge a more mindful approach to waste management within my creative process. Pushing beyond my regularly using negative shape remnants, I started thinking about reducing, reusing, and recycling as a conceptual strategy. My entry point was a mental comparison between Herman Melville’s The Whiteness of the Whale (1851), Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique (1910), John Cage’s 4’33 (1952)Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1977). Each of these works offered insight into minimalism and reflection, and informed particular ways of working. I thought about these works for about two years before doing anything, and ultimately, I think I pulled from each in some way. I devised ways to incorporate all production parts in an end-product, ruminated on all aspects of an idea upfront – including materials and all processes involved – and became mindful of the beginning and the end before ever setting out to work.

Witness 15a, Frederick Judd Waugh’s Circa 1900 ‘Curling Waves,’ with A Circa 1770 Chippendale Tabletop, and Treetop Negative Space, 2.875 x 6.5 inches, burnished interlocking collage, auction house catalog cuttings, watercolor, document repair tape, 2021

Eventually, the idea of cutting on top of two pieces of different colored paper simultaneously came to me because I realized multiple-page, simultaneous-cutting yields identically shaped pieces that can be exchanged. Puzzle-piece-fit collage, or “interlocking collage” – to credit artist/curator Cathleen Daily with that distinction – was born out of that thought exercise. There is zero paper waste when the only cuts you make are identical for all pieces of paper used, and the resultant pieces are exchanged evenly. Interlocking collage technologies and using my waste materials have led me to many projects. Witness was the first series that came out of that inquiry. I call the series Witness because the onlooker can only see the unequivocal exchange between location and object when seeing these positive and negative spaces in tandem. I also can’t help but think about trees witnessing furniture made of their own wood and furniture witnessing the deforestation from whence it came.

The titles of the Witness series are obnoxiously long, but they too are rule-based, and they make a point about paying attention to where things come from. I use the actual titles of the objects, which come from auction house catalogs, and I couple them into a single title, however long they may be.

Witness 15b, A Circa 1770 Chippendale Carved and Figured Mahogany Serpentine-Front Five-leg Card Table with Shaped Fragment from Frederick Judd Waugh’s Circa 1900 ‘Curling Waves,’ 10 x 8.75 inches, burnished interlocking collage, auction house catalog cuttings, watercolor, document repair tape, 2021

What are you working on in your studio these days?

Currently, I’m working on several Landscape Vernacular collages in preparation for a solo show at Anna Maria College in 2024. I’m thinking about juxtaposing the definition of “no man’s land” with imagery of the moon or the planet Mars. I am also considering including the definition of my newest neologism: “unland” – the de-classification of land as a thing that can be owned; a change in the status of territory that was once thought to be owned but cannot be owned in actuality.

(All photos courtesy of Todd Bartel)

This interview is part of a content collaboration between Art Spiel and Artists & Climate Change. It was originally published on Art Spiel on December 2, 2019 as part of an ongoing interview series with contemporary artists.

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Marley Massey Parsons (b.1998, Berlin, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work advocates for acknowledging and unearthing the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds. Marley received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Salisbury University in 2019 and will earn an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2022. Her body of work ranges from landscape responses, recordings, and observations of humans interconnectivity with the environment using photography, painting, drawing, foraged materials from the earth, writing, and video. Marley’s work has been exhibited across Maryland and in Pennsylvania. In the Summer 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA. She is currently a Visiting Artist Coordinator and Student Life Assistant at PAFA.

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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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The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club: ‘A Rain of Night Birds’

By Peterson Toscano

Joining us in the Art House is Dr. Krista Hiser with The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club. The purpose of the book club is to look at climate-themed literature and consider how it can help us engage differently with interdisciplinary topics and existential threats related to the planetary predicament of climate change. 

In this episode, Krista reflects on Deena Metzger’s novel A Rain of Night Birds.

Dr. Krista Hiser is Professor at KapiÊ»olani Community College. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has published works on community engagement, service-learning, organizational change, and post-apocalyptic and cli-fi literature. 

In this episode, Krista tells us that the protagonist of A Rain of Night Birds is a scientist who relies on feeling to gauge the environmental phenomena around her. With themes of spiritualism and Indigenous culture, this “literature of restoration” focuses on the concept of doing no harm to protect the world around us.

You can read a written version of Krista’s essay at The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for Sustainability in Higher Education on Medium. 

Next month: Caroline Roberts and her art installation, the present of my life looks different under trees. This immersive installation of cyanotypes has been exhibited at BOX13 ArtSpace and HCC Southwest in Houston, Texas.

(Top image by Los Muertos Crew from Pexels)

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunesStitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloudPodbeanNorthern Spirit RadioGoogle PlayPlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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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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An Interview with Advocate Michele Roberts & Artist Quynh-Mai Nguyen

By Amy Brady

Happy new year! I don’t know about you, but I’m optimistic about what this year will bring. According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, 2021 witnessed the most climate change coverage ever! (h/t Mary Heglar in the outstanding “Hot Take” newsletter.)

And 2022 is already on its way to becoming another significant year for climate coverage and storytelling. Artists, journalists, advocates, writers, and other passionate folks are working hard to bring the public’s attention to the crisis. Here’s one example: The journal Triangulation is currently seeking writing inspired by the promise of sustainable energy. And here’s another: This month, I have an interview for you with two folks who are using art to inspire climate action.

Michele Roberts is an advocate with the Equitable and Just National Climate Forum, a group comprising some of the country’s largest and most influential climate organizations. The Forum just launched an art campaign to inspire people to think more deeply about racial, climate, and environmental justice. The artist behind the campaign is Quynh-Mai Nguyen, whose work seeks to inspire empathy and cultural awareness. The campaign brings Nguyen’s art to airports, kiosks, newspapers, and online news outlets.

For readers who have yet to discover the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform, please tell us what it is and how it came about!

Michele: In 2017, a group of environmental justice and national environmental group advocates knew they had to take collective action to ensure environmental justice was included in federal policy debates. To address the environmental and social injustices many communities across the country face, this group of advocates got together and outlined a vision and agenda for an equitable and just climate future: the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform (EJNCP). This group of co-authors became the Equitable and Just National Climate Forum (EJNCF), whose mission is to implement the Platform to advance economic, racial, climate, and environmental justice to improve the public health and wellbeing of all communities while tackling the climate crisis. Forum participants include the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy, Center for American Progress, Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, Natural Resources Defense Council, Midwest Environmental Justice Network, and the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, along with dozens of other environmental justice and national environmental organizations (see full list here). 

Michele Roberts

How does art play a role in EJNCP’s work?

Michele: While the EJNCP was founded as a bold national climate policy agenda, we are excited to embark on our journey to utilize different forms of expression like storytelling and visual art to distribute that agenda widely. These different forms of expression will allow us to share our priorities and the lives of communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis in a creative way that captures stories often missing in policy discourses. I have always been passionate about storytelling. I am the environmental justice producer of Pacifica 89.3 FM radio’s weekly “The On the Ground Show: Voices of Resistance”. The show elevates social justice activism in DC and across the country. Environmental justice issues and intersecting social justice issues are often a topic of discussion. Art is vital in allowing us to communicate with our constituents and share the on-the-ground stories of people doing the work. 

Quynh-Mai Nguyen

What message are you hoping people take away from this work?

Michele: For far too long, low-income households and communities of color have borne the brunt of economic and environmental injustices. Lawmakers have the opportunity to help change that by passing a budget reconciliation bill with “Build Back Better” measures – investments to support working families and mitigate the impacts of climate change – intact, and by ensuring the benefits of those investments are directed where they are needed most by implementing the Justice40 Initiative. The artwork depicts a hopeful future with community members enjoying the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment and economy powered by clean energy with the messages “Climate Justice for All” and “Build Back With Justice.” It’s time to ensure investments from legislation like the Build Back Better Act prioritize environmental justice communities. The Build Back Better Act includes $162.9 billion to advance environmental justice priorities supported by the EJNCP co-authors such as the cleanup of Superfund sites and building a Civilian Climate Corps to employ the next generation of workers to address climate change and protect public lands, prioritizing training in low-income and communities of color, and Tribal and environmental justice communities. Passing this bill with the important investments we identified will let our communities know they are supported, heard, and empowered to lead. All these issues matter, and we need to address them. Building back better means building back with justice.

Quynh-Mai: I want people to see that the arts have a role in communicating issues and bringing them to light, and for artists to feel and know that they have the power to effect change through their work. I also want people who see the art and engage with the campaign to know that these issues affect them and that they can live in a world that is a reflection of their thriving selves. 

Photo by Clear Channel

What role do you think art plays more generally in public discourse about the climate crisis?

Michele: Art is indispensable in allowing communities to share their stories of the climate crisis. It’s important to bring humanity into the policy discussions that affect so many of us, and these different forms of expression allow us to do this. Art hits you in your heart: with no words, one is able to clearly understand the political and personal significance of a particular issue. Art is more powerful if it comes from the communities being represented. For this ad campaign, we specifically wanted an individual grounded in the social and environmental issues we are trying to tackle. Quynh-Mai Nguyen was able to beautifully capture the better world for all we envision if we make intentional investments towards environmental justice through legislation like the Build Back Better Act. Like in this campaign, art can be a storytelling vessel for what a better future can look like, and can engage folks who have never pondered the question of “what does a truly equitable and just climate future look like?”

Quynh-Mai: Art and art experiences can take complex or overwhelming subjects and make them comprehensible in the simplest of ways. Visual storytelling combined with positive messaging helps change fear and evoke a sense of hope, helping people visualize and feel connected to the unimaginable, especially when they can see themselves reflected in it. We are constantly being bombarded with a stream of negative images and mixed messaging. The immediacy of how we are able to obtain news, if it’s credible, to the amount of false content that we are exposed to through social media, can leave people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, fearful, insecure, helpless, and even apathetic towards issues that directly affect them. So it’s not surprising to find people, especially communities of color and low-income communities, feeling removed when it comes to public discourse around the climate crisis or feel that access to a world where they can find themselves thriving in is unattainable. Imagine the type of messages that these communities are exposed to in the media as well as in their daily lived experiences in environments that are built on the foundation of systemic and racial inequity. Living in a world where systemic issues are part of daily lives depletes the thought of being civically engaged in one’s community. People might believe since they don’t see change that they can’t be a part of change. Art can be a catalyst for change. 

If my readers would like to get more involved in the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform, how might they do that?

Michele: We encourage anyone interested in our movement for an equitable and just climate future for all to check our website and sign up for e-mail updates. On our site, you can read the Platform, learn about our history, and explore the stories of our Forum and the work of our Forum members. If you are an organization, you can also become a signatory organization of the Platform here. Through this e-mail list, we will share more updates, calls to action, and resources to the wider public. We hope this can empower you to bring our message and resources to your local communities and local spaces doing the on-the-ground work. We also invite readers to join this important conversation and share their thoughts on what an equitable and just future would look like in their community on our social media channels on TwitterFacebook, and Instagram

What’s next for the both of you?

Michele: The EJNCP is excited to keep moving forward with the work to secure national climate and environmental policies that center justice and equity to advance economic, racial, climate, and environmental justice while tackling the climate crisis, recognizing the critical intersections of these issues. We have policy and outreach goals outlined to ensure we maintain our commitment to the Platform. One example of how we’ll do this in 2022 is by working to ensure President Biden’s Justice40 initiative is implemented and resources get to the communities most in need. The Justice40 Initiative was part of an Executive Order issued in the first few weeks of Biden’s presidency that directs Federal agencies to work with states and local communities to ensure that at least 40 percent of the overall benefits from Federal investments in climate and clean energy go to disadvantaged communities. We will also work to share information, engage policymakers and partners, and mobilize Platform co-signers to advance the work of not leaving any communities behind.

Quynh-Mai: I will be producing and showcasing art for the 5th installment of Lunar X, a lunar new year group art show. A collective group of emerging Asian American artists, local artists, and students will be showcasing our work celebrating the Year of the Tiger at both locations of Tea Lyfe, a small women-owned tea shop. There will also be a virtual gallery featuring our work that will be accessible online for those not from their area and for those who especially cannot leave their house due to the pandemic. The virtual link will be launched on February 1st and can be accessed here or through Instagram. Through the work that I do with Art Builds Community, we are working on a project called Womanhood with the County of Santa Clara in California to explore how we can recognize the contributions of women across all intersectional identities within the region through public art. Starting in March for women’s history month, we will be pushing out some temporary pilot public art projects through outdoor banners and storefront window projections/installations to commemorate the women who helped build downtown and the arts sector in San Jose, CA. These pilot projects will be used as a framework to explore other methods of commemoration in other cities across the county. 

(Top image: Poster art by Quynh-Mai Nguyen)

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 Executive Director of Orion Magazine, and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books. She is also the co-editor of The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate (Catapult) and author of Ice: An American Obsession (GP Putnam’s Sons). Every month she edits the newsletter “Burning Worlds,” which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. Amy 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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What Happens When an Artist Goes to Eden

By Susan Hoffman Fishman

In 2011, photographer and environmental artist Meridel Rubenstein envisioned creating a garden in southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers cross, near the supposed site of the biblical Garden of Eden. However, unlike its idyllic predecessor – a mythical paradise in a newly formed world – this new garden would help to heal what had become a fragile, desert wasteland by cleaning existing wastewater and establishing a culturally significant green space. 

To Rubenstein, her leap 11 years ago from artist/professor to socially engaged humanitarian and director of Eden in Iraq, an innovative wastewater garden project in a war-torn country, was both a natural extension of her artistic practice and the result of a serendipitous chain of events. 

Fatman with Edith and Tilano, 18” x 23”, Palladium print, 1993, from Critical Mass, 1989-1993 

For over four decades, Rubenstein’s photographs and installations have presented nature (and art) as a healing force, explored the intersection of nature and culture, and referenced areas of the world where “my country has been at war,” including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq. Her works are dense with meaning and derive from her genuine love of the Earth and all of its living beings. In 2017, William L. Fox, the director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, referred to Rubenstein as â€œa photographer whose domain includes sculpture, landscape, design, architecture, and earth science systems. She does not merely document the world, but seeks to save it.”

The brief descriptions below highlighting three of Rubenstein’s earlier bodies of work, which ultimately led to her Eden in Iraq project, are only a glimpse into her powerful and distinctive oeuvre. Extensive documentation on her numerous exhibitions, awards, and publications can be found on her website and in her two monographs, Eden Turned On Its Side and Belonging: From Los Alamos to Vietnam.

In Rubenstein’s photo/text/video installation Critical Mass (1989-1993), created in collaboration with performance and video artist Ellen Zweig, with technical assistance by the Vasulkas, she visualized interactions between scientists developing the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico and Pueblo Indians whose land bordered the site of the Manhattan Project. In many of the images, the stunning high desert landscape is starkly juxtaposed on and with imposing man-made missiles and portraits. (See photo above.) In others, portraits and related objects of the Pueblo Indians are paired with those of the Los Alamos scientists.

Millennial Forest installation with Trees at Sea at the Lewellen Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2001. Tree prints on tree bark paper with hand-coated gum arabic and mica powder, printed with vegetable inks. Trees at Sea: glass portraits from dye transfer film laminated in glass, on wood stands with steel base and placed in wooden boats; 12-minute video projection: above, below, drown, swim

In her installation, Millennial Forest (2000), Rubenstein used photographs of magnificent old growth trees from Vietnam and the United States with objects and video to emphasize the significant difference between the two cultures that had faced each other in war. Her work addressed the question: “Can the oldest trees from two countries once at war tell us anything about war and survival?” For Rubenstein it became clear that “in Vietnam the oldest trees endure because they are taken care of and protected,” while in America, “the oldest trees survive because they are too difficult to find.”

Part I: Photosynthesis: Respiration, 33 ¾” x 44”, pigment print on 100% rag watercolor paper, 2009-2011, from Eden Turned on Its Side

Rubenstein’s 10-year project Eden Turned on Its Side (2009-2019) consists of three distinct bodies of work: PhotosynthesisVolcano Cycle, and Eden in Iraq. All three explore human relationships with the environment, which have profoundly transformed the natural world. The three bodies of work also address time on three separate scales – human time, geological time, and mythical time. 

In Photosynthesis, human beings interact with nature over the course of a full year as they experience the spring and fall equinoxes, the summer and winter solstices, and as they pose with the products of the seasons. In one image (see photo above), a woman wearing a respirator receives oxygen directly from a tree, the source of oxygen on a polluted planet. Photosynthesis also includes photomontages placed within a circular framework, alluding to the cyclical nature of human life on Earth. 

Part 2: Volcano Cycle. Mt. Bromo, East Java: Lelani at Dawn, 18” x 27”, archival pigment on aluminum, 2010, from Eden Turned on Its Side

Volcano Cycle explores deep time – the evolution of Earth over tens of millions of years. Through dramatic large-scale photographic images printed on metal of volcanoes from Indonesia’s Ring of Fire, Rubenstein emphasizes the primal power and majesty of the Earth’s geological forces. 

In 2011, Rubenstein was a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. She was working on Photosynthesisand Volcano Cycle when she learned about a remarkable undertaking in Iraq. Against all odds, Iraq’s first and only environmental NGO, Nature Iraq, was attempting to restore the Ahwar, the immense Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq, which had been drained by Saddam Hussein’s forces in the 1990s in order to punish the Shi’a rebels who were hiding there. As a result of their actions, what had once been the third largest wetlands in the world was transformed into a desert wasteland. For thousands of years, these rich marshlands had been the home of Marsh Arabs who depended upon the resources of the marshes for their livelihoods and ultimate survival. During its rampage, Saddam’s army murdered thousands of Marsh Arabs and forced others to flee their ancestral homeland. 

Part 3: Eden in Iraq: Ehmad and his Boat, Central Marshes, 34” x 69.38,” ultra violet-cured pigments on linen, 2011-2012, from Eden Turned on Its Side

Since the regime’s overthrow in 2003, over 300,000 Marsh Arabs have returned to the region but face significant environmental hazards, including sewage in the highly polluted Euphrates River spilling into the marshland.  By the time Rubenstein learned of the cleaning effort in 2011, Nature Iraq had succeeded in restoring only 20% of the marshes.

Rubenstein’s desire to develop a wastewater garden in the Ahwar that would help to restore the marshland and the health of marsh communities, seemed only natural to her. She was fascinated with the story and culture of the Marsh Arabs – one of many populations of climate refugees around the world – who were able to come back to their homeland. She had previously photographed environmental remediation projects, and she was interested in wastewater gardens, especially the renowned Biosphere 2 in Tucson, Arizona. She had also seen the disastrous results on her family farm in Vermont after a neighbor drained the wetlands there. Finally, she sensed how the project would not only transform the area but her own artistic practice as well.  

A number of serendipitous pieces fell into place, helping to make the Eden in Iraq project a reality and setting Rubenstein on a journey that would consume her for the next 11 years. First, she convinced her neighbor, Dr. Mark Nelson, PhD, to accompany her on the first of her many trips to Iraq. He just happened to be an environmental engineer, chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, and pioneer of a new ecological approach to sewage treatment. Nelson’s engagement was instrumental in the design of the project and continues to this day. Second, as a member of the faculty of the Nanyang Technical University, which just happened to be focused on the kind of work she was proposing, she received a significant research grant that enabled her to put together a project team, which includes Jassim Al-Asadi, managing director of Nature Iraq; co-director David Tocchetto, PhD, lecturer in agronomy and sustainable agriculture; and Zahra Souhail, Iraqi native living in Amsterdam and project manager. And third, as an Associate Professor of Art and Ecology, Photography and Contemporary Landscape, she was able to initiate a design process with faculty colleague/industrial engineerPeer Sathikh, PhD, and student assistants.

Eden in Iraq: In the Marshes. 4-channel video installation that covered the four surfaces in a room at the National Design Center in Singapore so that the viewer feels as if s/he is literally in the marshes and in the boats with the Marsh Arabs. 

Between 2011 and today, Rubenstein and the Eden in Iraq team have continued to promote the creation of the garden as Iraq experienced a severe drought, an oil crisis, an unstable government that has changed its Ministers of Water Resources four times, the collapse of its economy, the presence of ISIS, and the “disappearance” of government funding allotted to the project. Eden in Iraq has yet to be realized but the team remains optimistic that it will happen in the near future.

Boat as a Garden, 65” x 35”, pigment inks on hanging canvas, 2021, from The Boat is a Circle, 2021

During this same time period, Rubenstein completed Eden in Iraq, the third body of work in the Eden on its Side trilogy, which focuses on “the eternal time of religious cosmologies.” The University of New Mexico Art Museum exhibited the entire trilogy in 2018 and published a monograph on the show. 

Her newest body of work, in collaboration with Joanne Grüne-YanoffThe Boat is a Circle, is based on a pre-Noah flood story recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from ancient Mesopotamia, written during the second millennium B.C. 

When Rubenstein conceived of a lush green space in the historic home of a marshland people, she also regarded it as a symbol of hope in a land devastated by conflict and environmental destruction. The garden design, drawn from the rich Marsh Arab culture, and Rubenstein’s photographs and videos created in conjunction with the garden project, serve as a powerful source of inspiration and compassion to us all in a world sorely in need of both. 

(Top image: Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden Project (2011-present), site drawing of El Chibaish, 26,250 square meters (6.4 acres, 2.6 hectares), rendering by Bernard Du, 2017)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption 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 and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and the climate crisis. Her most recent work, called In the Beginning There Was Only Water is a visual reframing of the biblical creation myth. In 39 panels, it speaks to the importance and beauty of all living beings and what we stand to lose as a result of climate change. She recently participated in an artist’s residency at Planet, an international company providing global satellite images, where she focused on the proliferation of sinkholes caused by climate change. 

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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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Wild Authors: Pola Oloixarac

By Mary Woodbury

There’s something about looking up at the night sky and trying to find some sort of meaning beyond the magic and beauty. We might become transfixed for hours at both the light and dark parts of the night sky. Astronomers continue, at an exponentially faster rate, to discover new facts about space. But fiction authors may also discover new things, like the kind of imaginaries that connect environment to experience, while intersecting art and science or humanity and nature. This world eco-fiction series looks at the ways writers make these connections, and this month I’m happy to talk with the author of Dark Constellations (Soho Press), Pola Oloixarac.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Translated by Roy Kesey, Dark Constellations is a slim science-fiction novel, set mostly in Argentina, that has its feet in biological exploration and its eyes on the future – on hacking and DNA research. Dark, mysterious, and surreal, the story has three main characters whose works connect with each other over the course of 150 years. Vivid images of the jungle as well as human-plant hybrids also fill the story. Dark Constellations rates in my top reads of 2021, and I am happy to be talking with the author. I think readers will agree with me that the cover is beautiful.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

I was drawn to Dark Constellations a couple of years ago and finally got a chance to read it recently. It’s intriguing and full of knowledge, which made me think that you are a wise author! How did you imagine and research this novel?

I’m glad you enjoyed it. I love playing with knowledge because I find it very playful in a way. Science and the things we take for granted, as when we “know something,” are a deep tissue made of stories. Many times, fortuitous factors determine which stories become more real than others, and are turned into validated science. Science and knowledge must be funneled through a lot of storytelling to actually make it into the books of the science genre. I find this process very inspiring. With Dark Constellations, I wanted to imagine a side story that didn’t make it into the big books, where species were organized differently, like an alternative dark history of the science of the South. I love working in libraries, which tend to be very helpful if you want to write in this vein; libraries become your vessel and the books find their way into your book.

You were born in Argentina, which made me wonder when I was reading the novel: Do you have great memories of viewing constellations, or the dark places between them, from when you were growing up? Can you briefly describe what dark constellations are?

Dark constellations were how the Incas named and organized their astronomic exploration of the night sky. In the southern hemisphere, unlike in the North, the dark spaces between the stars are much wider. Interestingly, the Incas built their characters and stories as written inside the dark spaces, and not around the lights dots of the stars like in the Western tradition. For the Incas, what others saw as noise (simple darkness) was in fact information. All their figures are constructed as shapes in the dark – a complete departure of how form and content, information and noise, are understood in the Western European tradition.

There are three timelines: starting in the 1800s, then forwarding to the 1980s, and then to 2084. Each story is intriguing. Can you tell our readers how they are connected?

One is the story of Cassio, a young hacker who lives in the South, between Brazil and Argentina. His story is a bit of a sentimental biography of the Internet, and the different moments of its development until the present day, which includes crypto. He begins making hacks to video games, then on the BBS (the precursor of chatrooms), and he discovers his power making viruses. He joins a company that is putting together banks of DNA and mining them. Niklas Bruun is an explorer working in the 19th century to define new species of orchids. He travels from the Famara crates of the Canary Islands to Brazil, where he joins a strange cult of men led by a rat who makes experiments cross-pollinating women and orchids. In the DNA mining company, Cassio meets a female engineer, Piera, and together they hark his hacking powers to break the surveillance state they live in. What unites these stories is the way they look at humankind as something in-between species; they’re all working on the edges of when human becomes inhuman, and vice-versa.

I’ve interviewed a lot of authors who deal with, in some way, ecology and fiction. It’s fascinating to see the different approaches. Being a fan of strong imagery of nature and how we connect to it made me appreciate your novel. So did the fact that the ecological aspects of our world are not always set apart as simply “nature” but are inherent in us all. It showed a lot of interconnectedness between humans and other objects we might call wild. What are your thoughts on this?

It’s interesting you mention that because what drove me to write this novel was a desire to show the intimacy between the realms of the humans and the orchids, insects, fungus, and the computer viruses that populate the novel. It’s a book about symbiosis. I wanted to write about humans who are becoming something else, and about plants and animals that are also undetermined in their capabilities – where possibilities of evolution are actually open and brimming with life. And the people who are witnessing this are feeling it too. All life is semiotic, and all life is making language, so I wanted to make a book sensitive to that.

It works so well. This intersection between information and biology, again, is fascinating. I recall the 80s clearly and might have met many similar characters (like Cassio), so there is comfort in reading about that time period – but of course, he is very different, a genius hacker who is interested in surveillance as well as control. What inspired you to create Cassio and his peers?

For a while, I fantasized about writing a book on the hackers I met in my youth in Buenos Aires. Most of the characters are inspired by my friends or real people I met. There was something about Cassio that attracted me particularly – his quest for knowledge is always haunted by darkness. I’ve met all of these people who “worked for the Evil side” or were white hats (the good side), and it intrigued me immensely. (White hats and black hats are common terminology in the hacker world.) There’s an aesthetic pleasure in hacking; it’s not only about the material outcome. If you’re just going after the material, that would make you a common thief with a computer. But Cassio is not that kind of hacker; he’s more interested in being hands-on with a kind of hacking closer to the sublime.

You recently published Mona. Can you tell us about that book as well?

Mona follows the eponymous character Mona, a young female writer from Peru, who travels to a resort in Sweden to participate in a literary festival. The book is both a comedy and a horror story set in the world lit scenario, or the contemporary international circuit of literature. Mona is running away from something horrifying, and the key to her secret lies in her body.

Thanks so much for your time, Pola. I am looking forward to learning more about your upcoming book. To the readers: Pola tells me that she is currently working on a book about the Amazon. I’m looking forward to it!

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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An Interview with Flourish Fiction Founders Blake Atkerson, Anya Lamb, and Ben Soltoff

By Amy Brady

This month, I have a fascinating interview for you with the founders of Flourish Fiction. Blake Atkerson, Anya Lamb, and Ben Soltoff launched the project earlier this month to give a platform to fictional stories about climate change that are optimistic, and solutions-oriented.  

In our interview below, we discuss what inspired this work, their interest in climate fiction more generally, and the kinds of stories they’re looking to publish. There’s also information below on where to submit your stories.

Tell us Flourishing Fiction’s origin story. How did it come about?
 
Anya: Blake, Ben, and I met through the On Deck Climate Tech Fellowship, a remote program bringing together climate tech entrepreneurs, investors, and professionals. We initially connected over a shared interest in writing and got a Slack channel going. The idea for Flourish came a little bit later, after a storytelling workshop led by Roope Mokka of Untitled. The workshop reminded us of the importance of storytelling for imagining and inspiring the kind of social transformation that climate change demands. We started chatting about our own storytelling aspirations and about our desire to see more inspiring climate fiction stories from diverse perspectives. At some point, we said, wait a minute – the fellowship is a diverse community with different perspectives on climate solutions. Why not encourage our cohort (and other climate professionals) to share their visions for the future? 
 
Blake: Going into the fellowship, I had this idea that developing a collection of climate fiction short stories would be a fantastic project. I first spoke to Anya about writing, and we felt like something that allowed people to write short stories and poetry would be a great way to promote innovation and imagination in the climate tech space. Once I posted in our fellowship Slack, I was overwhelmed by the interest in writing climate fiction. 
 
Ben: Like Anya and Blake have mentioned, it all goes back to the On Deck program. Given the nature of that fellowship, we knew that we had at least one thing in common: we had chosen to center our careers on solving the climate crisis. But we soon realized that we also shared something else: a passion for creative writing that wasn’t incorporated into our so-called day jobs. I think it’s fitting that we started this project in a program mainly about building startups, because entrepreneurship is an inherently creative endeavor, and with Flourish, we took that creative impulse in a different yet complementary direction.  

Tell us about yourselves, as well! How did you become interested in climate fiction?

Anya: I read fiction almost constantly when I was growing up, but with the exception of a fantasy series or two and a few sci-fi books my Dad recommended, I mostly stuck to historical fiction and classic literature. Questions of why the world is the way it is and what’s universal in the human experience have always fascinated me. I’ve always cared deeply about nature, and when I got to Stanford, I ended up studying climate change. Since then, I’ve tended to think of climate change (and the flawed economic systems, cultural assumptions, and incentives that underpin it) as the overarching challenge of our time. And yet, for most of my adulthood, climate fiction – and indeed the topic of climate change – has been more of a void than a presence. 

After a first job in environmental consulting, I got discouraged by my limited impact (and career prospects) and took a decade-long detour into startup land. In 2018, fires here in California gave me a visceral experience of the effects of climate change that I could not ignore, and I began pivoting my career back towards addressing climate change. Since then, climate has become a lens through which I view most things. I’ve seen climate themes in much of the contemporary fiction I’ve read recently, from NK Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy to Richard Powers’ The Overstory

I suppose I first began thinking seriously about writing climate fiction in the summer of 2020 when I felt the sudden urge to write a novel imagining how we return to a state of balance in our social and economic systems and with the natural world. Although I may still write that novel, I know that whatever I might write would be limited by my own perspective. And I believe that we all have a unique perspective and we all can play a role in imagining and creating a better future. That’s why I’m so excited about the idea of creating a fiction collective. 

Blake: I was writing a fantasy novel, still in progress, and was looking for a different project to give me a break. I saw a post for Grist’s climate fiction competition online. I started reading climate fiction anthologies, and it really clicked that I had stories to tell in this genre. I work in the climate tech space, and I am surrounded by exciting ideas everyday. I also wanted to write something that only I felt I could write. As a member of the Osage Nation, I wanted to bring awareness to the rich history the Native Americans have as stewards of the environment. 

Ben: I’ve loved creative writing since I was a teenager, and I’ve been drawn to good storytelling for much longer than that. I think that telling and listening to stories is a fundamental human need. However, for a long time, I saw these passions as parallel or even secondary to my professional and academic life, which has been focused on climate change for over a decade. I’ve worked at environmental organizations in India and Washington, DC, and I’ve also advised and supported a wide range of environmental startups. Fiction just seemed so removed from that work. I’ve written short stories, and I’ve also increasingly dabbled in climate tech journalism, but I had never figured out how to make creative writing more of a priority. That’s why I jumped at the chance to be part of Flourish Fiction. For the first time, I could see how these different interests might actually feed and strengthen one another.

What kind of fiction are you looking for? Given the wide range of climate fiction, are there particular types of stories, tropes, or characters that you want to see more of?
 

Anya: We’re looking for short stories (5,000 words or less), flash fiction (500 words or less), and poems that imagine ways we might address climate change, adapt, and thrive. We see creative writing as a way to begin exploring ideas that may seem too “out there” to put into practice today, but that might inspire problem solvers of the future. I think it’s also worth noting that despite our backgrounds in climate tech, we aren’t just interested in “technical” solutions. Many of the solutions that exist today to help us live in better harmony with the natural world aren’t especially new or technical at all, but they will require widespread cultural and economic transformation if they are to take root at scale. Although climate change is a global phenomenon, both the effects and solutions tend to be highly specific to place. If a writer wants to submit a story but isn’t sure where to start, I’d encourage them to think of a specific place they know intimately and project into the future the trends that they see or can imagine in that place and among the people who live there. Then ask, what would have to change along the way to make that projected future more positive?

Blake: We call the pieces that we publish “Flourishes,” and we’re looking for Flourishes with emotion, innovation, and hope on the horizon. We are familiar with dystopian futures, but Mad Max is just one view of the future. There is so much potential for humans to return respect to nature and heal the planet with both love and creative solutions.

Ben: Like Anya and Blake have said, we’re looking for Flourishes imbued with hope, drawing some of our inspiration from the Grist Imagine 2200 competition. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everything needs to be dripping with sunshine and rainbows. It’s possible to be hopeful while also being sad, satirical, or just downright bizarre. However, at the end of the day, we want to publish fiction that’s more about solutions than problems. Many members of our community work in the growing field of climate tech, which lies at the intersection of climate action and technology, so we’re enthusiastic about the role of technology but also wary of its limitations. And critically, we want to share stories from diverse perspectives. We’re seeking stories by, for, and about all the strange and wonderful people who live on this planet, especially if their stories have been largely ignored or excluded from other narratives.

What role do you think fiction can play in our wider discourse on climate change?

Anya: Stories are among the best tools we have for making abstract and unfathomable realities more human – more relatable and immediate. The bigger, scarier, and more insurmountable a challenge, the more we need stories to motivate us, inspire us, and show us that our tiny individual actions can (collectively) make a meaningful difference. And what challenge today is more intimidating and confounding than climate change? In the realm of fiction, we are less constrained by critical notions of what is, and can enter a more expansive realm where we have the freedom to imagine what we wish could be and what just might be possible, given an amount of time, vision, and effort that we often struggle to imagine in our day-to-day lives. Fiction can also give us the necessary distance to reflect on our own time, place, and culture with objectivity and more clearly discern possible paths forward. 

Blake: We need everyone for climate solutions to work. In a divided country like the U.S., it is a challenge to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Stories have the power to reach new audiences that either never thought about climate change, or were against taking action for whatever reason. Stories can touch an emotional chord and just might turn the tide in the adaptation to and mitigation of climate change’s negative impacts. 

Ben: I’m a film buff, and I once tried to make a list of climate change movies to recommend to friends. It ended up being a very short list. Climate change has massive consequences for humankind, but it’s often conspicuously absent from our fictional narratives. There are of course some wonderful examples of climate fiction out there, but there’s so much room for more. If you can reach people through their imaginations, that’s such a powerful thing. You know how a smell has a unique tie to memory and emotion? I think imagination works similarly. It shortcuts past our rational brain and right to our feelings. The nonfiction channels for information about climate change – stuff like research reports and policy papers – can be filled with technical jargon and grim prognostication, neither of which is particularly inspiring. Fiction cuts more to the core.

What do you hope readers take away from the stories you publish?

Anya: One thing I want readers to take away from the stories is that they can imagine and tell their own stories, too. I want readers to realize that it isn’t up to experts or elite visionaries to save the planet for future generations; it’s up to all of us. I’ll also add that I’m a firm believer in the power of hope, or faith, if you want to call it that. When we despair, we fail, because we fail to act. But when we have hope, when we believe we are capable, we make ourselves more likely to succeed because we are more willing to take the actions necessary for success. If we can imagine that a flourishing future is possible, then that will make it easier for us to act to make it possible. I’m reminded of a journal prompt I love – a day in the life of your dream – in which you write a journal entry as if you are writing in the past tense about the day you had in your imagined future dream life. It’s easier to imagine our dreams and the paths towards them if we begin writing as if they’ve already happened. 

Blake: I want readers to have hope for our future and the inspiration to be part of that better future.

Ben: We want readers to truly believe that a better world is possible. It’s so easy to feel pessimistic these days, with a seemingly endless pandemic, glaring inequality, systemic injustice, democracy in peril, and the specter of climate disaster looming over everything. All of that is very real, and none of it will be fixed within a given news cycle or election cycle. Some of it maybe won’t even be fixed within our lifetimes. Fiction can let us see ahead to a repaired world. I hope that readers will see something in our Flourishes that moves them and then find something they can do to make that imagined idea a reality.

Anything, in particular, you’d like my readers to watch for, beyond what you publish on the site? 

Ben: Flourish Fiction is not just a site that publishes creative writing. It’s a community of writers and readers. We aim to provide feedback on every submission, and we help our community members to improve their craft. We recently held a climate poetry workshop, and we’re developing other skill-building workshops as well. We’ve finished our events for this year, but keep an eye out for a new slate of activities in 2022! Subscribe on Substack or follow us on social media (TwitterLinkedInInstagram, and Facebook) to stay in the loop. And please submit your writing! We look forward to reading it.

(Top image: Photo that accompanies the story “A Land of Rivers and Stars” by Shilpi Kumar. Photo credit: “Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River, Montana” by Bureau of Land Management, via Flickr.)

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 Executive Director of Orion Magazine, and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books. She is also the co-editor of The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate (Catapult) and author of Ice: An American Obsession(GP Putnam’s Sons). Every month she edits the newsletter “Burning Worlds,” which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. Amy 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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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What Theatre Teaches Us About Preparing for Disaster

By David Finnigan

People have described COVID as a rehearsal for the oncoming crises of climate and global change. If it is, it’s a very particular kind of rehearsal that theatre-makers know as the “stumble through.”

To see a video version of this essay, head here.
You can listen to a podcast version on Spotify or in your browser.

* * *

In the process of rehearsing a new theatre show, one of the key moments is what’s called the “stumble through.”

Rehearsals start with script readings sitting around a table, or improvisations to create new scenes. From there you progress to “blocking” – determining how the performers move – and character work. At a point, when you’ve looked at all the individual pieces of the show, you’re ready for the stumble through.

This is the first full run of the show, from beginning to end. In a typical rehearsal, you isolate an element of the show and focus on that in detail. But in the stumble through, you include everything: lights, sound, choreography – all of it.

It is, without fail, an exhausting and humbling experience. The show you thought was coming along well turns out to be a total mess. The jokes aren’t funny, the story is incoherent, and the tech doesn’t work. The best you can say about the stumble through is that it’s the low point in the process, so at least things tend to improve from there.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many people have described COVID as a kind of rehearsal for the oncoming crises of climate and global change. But in my view as a theatre-maker, it’s not a typical rehearsal – it’s a stumble through.

* * *

The early phase of the pandemic was a perfect illustration of governments utterly failing to rise to the challenge before them. In London, the early weeks of March saw COVID cases rise on a steep exponential curve. You could see the wave coming towards you, knowing it was going to break right over your head, while the politicians insisted that we weren’t going into lockdown, no matter what.

I was due to perform at a UK festival in mid-March, and it was clear to everyone involved that it was going to be a disaster. And yet, no-one felt like they could walk away first. As an artist, if I cancelled my spot while the festival was still going ahead, I would breach my contract and waive my fee. If the festival canceled while the official health advice was still to proceed, it wouldn’t be covered by insurance for its losses. So everyone waited for the government to acknowledge the obvious, and the government… well.

Of course, when action finally came, it was drastic, it was extreme, it was far less effective than it could have been, and it was already too late for tens of thousands of people.

The feeling of dread in those early weeks of March was horrible, but also familiar. In some ways, we’ve lived our whole life in March 2020. The wave bearing down on us is clearly visible, but our governments and institutions can’t acknowledge it except in the most trivial ways. When the balance of power finally tilts towards real action, then we’ll see an abrupt transformation of our lives that will feel like the 2020 shutdowns on a grand scale. Our freedoms and rights will be suppressed in the name of climate action, aggressively policed by many of the same governments that have contributed to the crisis through their action and inaction. The chaos of the early months of 2020 is a perfect snapshot of the future ahead of us.

But it wasn’t a complete disaster. Reading Adam Tooze’s Shutdown, an in-media-res history of the pandemic so far, several examples of competent leadership shine through. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these emerged when we’ve had a chance to learn from similar crises in the past. In other words, when we’ve rehearsed, we perform better.

The example of China is an interesting one. After initially failing to control the virus in the first days of January (indeed, actively suppressing news about it), the government in Beijing abruptly switched to action.

In Western media at the time, China’s extreme measures were seen as a sort of natural offshoot of an authoritarian state. But in fact, Chinese authorities had never attempted anything like what they did in January 2020. No one had. In the space of a few days, the entire country was shut down – travel was banned, businesses and schools were closed, and millions of volunteers were recruited to turn each neighborhood into a contained zone. The 11 million inhabitants of Wuhan were locked down, while 40,000 construction workers built two huge emergency hospitals in a matter of days. In Poyang County in Jiangxi, local officials turned all traffic lights permanently to red.

At that time, the nature of the virus was still unclear, and there were no easily available tests. In Hangzhou, the authorities banned the sale of painkillers to prevent citizens from self-medicating and force them to seek hospital treatment.

The scale of the response was the result of China’s previous epidemic in 2003. Where many Western governments were comparing COVID to influenza, China treated it like SARS. The shock of the SARS epidemic had completely shaken the government back in 2003, and some of Xi Jinping’s entourage had risen to power as a result of the political fallout. Whatever the response to COVID, they knew that there was no such thing as too fast or too big.

The United States’ response to COVID was a spectacular failure on many fronts – but in one area at least, they succeeded admirably. In late March 2020, global markets were on the verge of a complete collapse. The fact that this didn’t happen is largely down to swift action by the US Federal Reserve. When bond markets began to falter, the Fed responded by pumping huge amounts of additional liquidity into the system. This kept governments all around the world from running out of money, enabling them to keep spending on their own crisis-fighting efforts. It’s hard to overstate how catastrophic the situation would have been if not for that intervention.

The fact that the Fed was ready and able to deliver this critical response is due to the lessons learned during the financial crisis in 2007-08. The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Lehman’s was the dry run for the seismic shock of the pandemic.

Playwright David Finnigan

Upheaval is now a given. The question is: what kind of upheaval? In the last two years, all of us have been in non-stop crisis management mode. But the crises are not going away. This is the beginning of a steep upward curve of crisis upon crisis, lasting for decades if not the rest of our lives. We are going to be improvising our way through new crises in the midst of responding to existing ones.

But for everything we’ve lost in the last two years, it’s possible to hope that we’ve learned some crisis management skills along the way.

So what might we learn from the COVID stumble through that we can take forward with us into future crises?

HOW LONG IT LASTS

It’s surprising to many people, but in the theatre, when you begin rehearsing a show, you don’t know how long it will be. A 50-page script could turn into 15 minutes or 3 hours on stage, depending on the rhythm of the language and the staging choices. The stumble through is the first time you get a real sense of how long the show will be (and how much cutting you need to do).

In the same way, COVID has provided a valuable benchmark for how long a global crisis really takes to unfold. In the early days of lockdown, my partner and I used China’s lockdown as a benchmark. Wuhan was locked down for 76 days, so we figured that our lockdown would last a similar amount of time. Around 250 days later, when London was in its third lockdown (and the nightclubs in Wuhan were packed), it hit home to us that this was a different order of experience.

Now two years after COVID’s appearance, it’s starting to sink in how long a global crisis really takes to unfold. And of course, it never really ends. COVID will never be “over,” we’ll never return to “normal.” Instead, we’re going to have to build our lives within crises, in whatever ways we can.

HOW IT FEELS

However you imagine a theatre show will look and feel when you begin rehearsals, the reality always turns out radically different. The stumble through is the first moment where you experience how the work feels, how it flows from beginning to end. Compared to the vision you’ve been carrying in your head, the reality is pretty disappointing. But it’s a good moment nevertheless, because this is where you start shaping and working with what’s really there, rather than dwelling on a imaginary future that doesn’t actually exist.

In a similar way, COVID has shown us what a global crisis really feels like. For people on the frontline, working in hospitals and care homes, it’s a visceral shock. For the rest of us, it’s a more muted experience of being stuck at home, our lives on indefinite hold.

In coming years, each of us will get our own close-up experience of crisis – fire, flood, storm, drought. We’ll all get a turn on the frontline. But more often, these crises will take place at a distance, and we’ll experience the secondary shocks. Which will play out as being stuck at home, unable to travel, unable to work, unable to see the people we love, watching the news, and waiting. We all know how that feels now.

Indoor quarantine is likely to become a regular feature of life for many of us in years to come. In the Middle East, India, Australia, frequent 50-degree weeks (in Celsius) will force us indoors for more and more of the year. The tactics we’ve developed to cope with lockdown will be deployed again before long.

HOW TO LIVE WITH UNCERTAINTY

One of the best things about live performance is that it’s inherently chaotic. When you gather people together in a room for an event, anything can happen. The early rehearsals for a show take place in a controlled environment where you focus on specific elements. The stumble through is often your first bruising encounter with the unpredictability of the live event. The sound doesn’t work, performers forget their lines, the venue won’t let you use the backstage door… it’s a humbling reminder of your lack of control over the event.

At some level, I always knew the world was unpredictable. But still, I came to expect a degree of certainty in my life. I could book a flight for six months in the future, or sign a contract to do a festival performance, and expect them to happen. The last two years have demonstrated how much of an illusion that was. Now we see what was really always there: predictability is the result of millions of invisible systems all working together, interlocking seamlessly. As those systems start to splinter and break, our ability to plan and predict our future dissolves. Our horizons shrink, and we realize that the plans we made for next year are little more than stories we hope will come true.

For a good proportion of the world’s population, living in constant uncertainty is nothing new. For the rest of us, COVID is giving us a chance to practice getting good at it. Which is helpful, because the future we grew up expecting has long since evaporated, and we don’t know what will take its place.

* * *

There’s one key difference between the COVID crisis and a stumble through for a new theatre show. Unlike in the theatre, this stumble through isn’t in preparation for an upcoming performance. There’s no opening night – or else it’s always opening night. And there’s no audience to applaud us if we get it right, or to laugh at us if we fumble it. The only people we’re performing for are each other.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying our best. In any stumble through, you’re trying your hardest to do a good job, not for your own sake, but for the sake of your fellow artists, the rest of the company – to hold up your end of the show so they can hold up theirs. And if you do a good job, you all get to knock off early and go get a drink together.

(Photos by Jordan Prosser)

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David Finnigan is a writer and theatre-maker from Ngunnawal country in Australia. He works with research scientists to produce theatre about climate and global change. David’s 2017 play Kill Climate Deniers was awarded the Griffin Playwrights Award, and has since been presented in 10 cities worldwide. His six-part performance series about planetary transformation, You’re Safe Til 2024, has been presented at the Sydney Opera House, ArtScience Museum Singapore and will appear at the Barbican in 2022. David is a Churchill Fellow, an associate of interactive theatre company Coney in the UK and Boho Interactive in Australia.

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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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