This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

The first thing she cheekily asks me when I enter her stunningly light, stylish, modern house on the south-eastern coast of Ireland is whether I expected to see a traditional farm. Perhaps the expression on my face reveals that I associate sheep farming with dark stuffy barns, thatched roofs hiding swallow nests, and the smell of animal dung mixed with hay. But I should have known better: this sheep farmer doubles as a red-lipsticked artist, a feminist with a keen eye for beauty and style. Naturally, her sheep farm wasn’t going to be like any other sheep farm.

Orla Barry owns a flock of fifty pedigree Lleyn sheep, which can be seen grazing in the lush fields below her house in County Wexford. She’s addicted to her animals, she immediately admits with a loving smile, as they always provide her with a legitimate reason to be outside. “Whether it’s for lambing season (helping sheep to give birth) or to retrieve a chicken escaped from its pen, there’s always something urgent, some animal that needs to be saved,” she states. Being on the farm is in her DNA; Barry’s father was a tillage farmer and her grandmother was a feminist who wrote for the Farmer’s Journal. Barry very much identifies with her grandmother as she too was “learning by doing.” That it was never her career plan to become a shepherd is evident when Barry describes her shockingly small profits selling lambs that end up as meat on our plates: “Scale is the only way to earn money with farming, the market is dominated by big meat factories.” Rather then scaling up, she got hooked to pedigree breeding and proved a keen and curious learner; this “learning by doing” philosophy entails, among other things, learning from her peers, becoming invested in the agricultural community, paying close attention at pedigree sales, talking to a lot farmers about pedigree breeding, and visiting many flocks.

Ireland Lleyn Competition, Tullamore National Livestock show. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The world of sheep breeding has clearly informed her artistic practice. Recent art videos include two performers sitting in a big pile of wool performing a fictional story inspired by her experiences at the pedigree sales, but mixing the perspectives of the buyer, the seller, the breeder and the animal that is being sold. And she doesn’t only play with humans and animals – gender roles and stereotypes are also addressed. “Pedigree breeding is a male dominated world and I have fun reversing some of the roles. Humor is a very important element in my work.” Some of her other videos are rather fable-like: cats turn into women (The Fable Of The Man Who Fell In Love With the Cat Who Became a Woman (And Still Devoured Mice)), people into bees (Humming at the Hive), and sheep talk (Pedigree Sales: Technique, Emotion, Poetry). For Barry, storytelling is an important political tool; it can re-connect people to the land and the animals. “The fact that we have largely lost this connection is part of the ecological problem. We have to become non-consumers and reconnect to things that cost nothing.”

Orla Barry, Breaking Rainbows (still), 2016–17. Video. Photo by Jed Niezgoda

Barry underlines that she is not a “sheep artist” (smiling). Rather, she is someone interested in language and in the relationship between agriculture and culture as well as in the tension between being a farmer and an artist. It is apparent where she gets her inspiration. Overheard conversations and snippets of interviews about the sheep buying-and-selling process constantly re-appear in her videos, giving the viewer a curious insight into this niche world. According to Barry, the art world and the world of pedigree sheep breeding are not too dissimilar. She explains that by analyzing the methods the pedigree breeders use to sell a sheep, she was able to see the art world through another lens: “Both are about storytelling and a certain form of speech. Art is also shaped by storytelling, it’s always someone’s view that is being sold. It’s all about emotion and poetry.” Barry goes on, explaining how she sometimes just falls in love with a sheep and looks for its “aura”, reminding me how art can be a magical yet irrational purchase, indeed similar to falling in love.

Pedigree sales. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Like in the arts, aesthetics play an important role when purchasing a pedigree animal. Barry is always looking for certain criteria so that, through careful breeding, she can build her “perfect sheep.” When I ask her what a “perfect sheep” looks like, she takes me into the field and explains how to judge a sheep. Of course, the criteria are different for different types of sheep but generally it’s about “the back, the pasterns, testicles, udders, and teeth.” As we walk through the field, she lifts one of the rams’ tail to show me what the perfect distance between the butt and the mid-length of the leg should be.

While I ponder over the art equivalent of the ram’s butt, she has already moved on: the chickens need to be treated for lice.

(Top image: Orla Barry, Breaking Rainbows (still), 2016–17. Video. Photo by Jed Niezgoda.)

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Curator Yasmine Ostendorf (MA) has worked extensively on international cultural mobility programs and on the topic of art and environment for expert organizations such as Julie’s Bicycle (UK), Bamboo Curtain Studio (TW) Cape Farewell (UK) and Trans Artists (NL). She founded the Green Art Lab Alliance, a network of 35 cultural organizations in Europe and Asia that addresses our social and environmental responsibility, and is the author of the series of guides “Creative Responses to Sustainability.” She is the Head of Nature Research at the Van Eyck Academy (NL), a lab that enables artists to consider nature in relation to ecological and landscape development issues and the initiator of the Van Eyck Food Lab.

 

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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Popular author Margaret Atwood called climate change the “everything change.” Atwood’s novels are generally about the human experience, at times notably the female’s, but she also writes about this everything change. Her genre-busting books range from literary to speculative. Global warming occurs prominently in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (which she calls “speculative fiction”) – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – which describe a post-apocalyptic Earth set in the near future.¹

I think it’s interesting that, like Jeff VanderMeer, discussed earlier of this series, Atwood has many close relatives who are scientists. This certainly must have inspired her imagination when bringing the natural world into the intricate human environments about which she writes.

At the beginning of the trilogy, in Oryx and Crake, the reader can tell by the descriptions of the world that global warming is taking place due to rising seas, harshly pounding large waves, incredible heat, and so on. In a holistic way, it is not surprising that the world Atwood created in this trilogy reflects one of corporate greed, dystopian values, genetic cloning, and other human manipulations of nature – a mirror of the world we made ourselves, most particularly where we could be heading. The MaddAddam trilogy, according to Quill and Quire: ²

It’s a story about The End of Civilization As We Know It, but the event is coming up very soon – around the year 2050, it seems, from the hints Atwood provides. That’s close enough to the present for us to be able to recognize the seeds of catastrophe in our morning newspaper. Environmental degradation, global warming, and the resultant floods up the East Coast (Harvard has drowned) provide the backdrop, but the central action involves our most disturbing current headlines: cloning and genetic manipulation, toxic microbes and viruses, and a culture that has handed all the important decisions over to the “numbers people.”

The second book in the trilogy, The Year of the Flood, came six years after Oryx and Crake. Rather than being a true sequel, it is a retelling of the first part of the trilogy from the perspective of two new characters. Using flashbacks and fleshing out the original mythology and narrative, Year of the Flood, like I noted in the Jeff VanderMeer piece in this series, also reminded me – at least in structure somewhat – of the television show “Lost,” which filled in blanks later with new perspectives. Again, in the third part of the trilogy, MaddAddam, Atwood retells the story and builds it with the underlying idea of a “fresh start”. According to LitReactor:³

Even though Atwood gives us a new beginning in each of these novels, it is not until Maddaddam [sic], the final installment of the trilogy, that she truly explores the theme of starting over. And even then, she poses the questions but doesn’t give the answers. Questions about creation, the infallibility of “God,” and the evolution of religion. She does this once again by flashing to the characters’ pasts, focusing on backstory to expand the world’s mythology even further. At this point, the narratives of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood have converged. Jimmy and the Maddaddamites (the survivors introduced in The Year of the Flood) are united in the day to day struggles of dystopian life. The Crakers, however, those Adam and Eve’s of the new world, are more preoccupied with where they came from than where they are going (much like Atwood) and demand nightly stories of life before “the Great Rearrangement.” These remnants of the old world, knowledge of good and evil, taint the Crakers’ so-called fresh start.

“Lost” offered, indeed, one of my favorite mythologies ever, so I am very keen to the idea that in storytelling we can deepen the story by bringing in new characters and new truths later that examine the initial story. New perspectives give a sort of humanities type of peer review and offer the reader a fuller and clearer look into the world being created by the author – often reflecting upon our own world and speculating on what may happen if we continue going at our current rate. I like the “Lost” quotes below, where two of the oldest people on the island (therefore hopefully the keys for the audience to understand the cosmology and existence of the island) are talking about why characters are brought to the island.

MAN IN BLACK: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?
JACOB: You are wrong.
MAN IN BLACK: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.
JACOB:  It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

The final line above has some similarities to what happens in our world with climate change. “What happens next?” That’s what readers wanted to know from Margaret Atwood after Oryx and Crake. Well, in fact, the world only ends once. Anything that happens before is just progress. And we can look at this progress through different lenses, but I think Atwood’s treatment of climate change – or rather, everything change – is particularly clever.

Note that Atwood has included environmental themes in many of her books – it’s part of our human condition, after all. And global warming is not some tiny object within fiction that we can hold in our hands – rather it is indeed everything change, with up- and down-stream effects, many of which Atwood has explored in fiction, poetry, and even the graphic novel, whether about overpopulation, environmental degradation, or an assortment of issues that generally play into the reasons behind why our world is warming. And, for sure, those reasons have to do with the human species.

*  *  *

1. Kirkus Reviews. “Genre and Margaret Atwood,” by Andrew Liptak. August 4, 2015.
2. Quill and Quire. “Oryx and Crake,” by Bronwyn Drainie. 2003.
3. LitReactor. “Starting from Scratch: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdamm Trilogy,” by Joshua Chaplinsky. September 3, 2013.

This article was originally published on Eco-Fiction.com on October 9, 2016. It is part of our Wild Authors series.

(Photo by Liam Sharp.)

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

 

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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I have worked for most of my career as a medical and scientific illustrator, which means a lot of time spent in front of a computer screen. But early in 2016, I dusted off my much-neglected art materials to return to my first love: painting and drawing. I love my Adobe programs but though it was a bit unfocused, I shed my digital chains and felt I was back to where I had left off before Photoshop took over my life!

Then fate lent a hand. I began walking on Hampstead Heath early every morning with three friends. The Heath is an exquisite, ancient heathland only 400 yards from my house and just under four miles from the centre of London. By coincidence, the new walking regime started not only at the same time as my return to painting but coincided with the completion of the Hampstead Heath Ponds Project. All the large ponds on Hampstead Heath are man-made, built as reservoirs over 300 years ago to provide water for the rapidly expanding population of London. Three of the ponds – the Model Boating Pond, Men’s Bathing Pond, and Hampstead No. 1 Pond – are still classified as “large raised reservoirs” under the 1975 Reservoirs Act and the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act. In 2011, the City of London Corporation, which manages the Heath, was advised that should an extreme rainfall event occur, the ponds might overflow (or “overtop” to use the technical language) and flood residential communities south of the Heath. The Corporation was legally required to rebuild and reinforce the dams between the ponds.

Leaves on the pond.

Research has shown that although extreme rainfall events in the UK are not unprecedented, their frequency will increase as climate change raises global temperatures. The project involved a huge amount of work with much disruption to the peace and quiet of the Heath. Local organizations were consulted and there was some dissent and plenty of negative newspaper headlines. At that stage, I remained unconvinced that the work was necessary. But as time went on and I learned more about the Ponds Project and how it would protect and enhance the environment, I came to understand its value. The peace and quiet of the Heath was finally returning when my merry band of walkers and I began our route marches. I became fascinated with how the flora and fauna was recovering. This was my lightbulb moment…

Since my daughters Sara and Tor were little children, the Model Boating Pond has been one of our places. We have spent many hours, in all seasons, walking and watching the pond. Now the walks were fueling my mission to put my paints, pens, and pencils to work and record what I was seeing. This was to be where my creative journey would start.

It would have been easy to limit myself to these paintings and drawings, but I wanted to find out more about the work that had been carried out, the history, the geology, even the archaeology behind it all. After some research, the answers started pointing me in the direction of climate change. Again, I wanted to find out more. My painting project jumped to a different level.

Wildfire at Medicine Lake.

Another journey to another continent showed me the impacts of global climate change on another key place in my life. My younger daughter Tor lives in Jasper, Alberta in Canada. After I visited her, she urged me to go further north to the Canadian tundra. I packed up my paints and, in November 2016, travelled to the small town of Churchill on the Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba.

Churchill’s nickname is the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” Every year, after months of fasting inland, bears migrate to the bay – hence the nickname – to wait for sea ice to form, which will allow them to start hunting seal again. The vast flat tundra was awe-inspiring, but seeing that the frozen North is not so frozen anymore was disturbing. This was a seminal moment.

Waiting for the sea ice.

The climate issues in Canada brought to mind some friends, thousands of kilometers to the south, in Mandeville, Louisiana – a place where I worked in my early 20s. I still spend a lot of time on the Gulf Coast of America which, particularly over the last decade, has been increasingly threatened by intense hurricanes and resultant flooding. I realized Louisiana had to be part of the story.

I call London, Jasper, and Mandeville “My Places” because they are cities and regions where I have deep emotional connections. They are also intimately linked by climate change. I needed to pull it all together.

My painting projects and the book that accompanies them are the result. The book, It Started On Hampstead Heath… An Artist’s Journey Into The Science Of Global Climate Change, is an exploration of “My Places” and their connections. Of course, these three places are not the only ones linked by climate change, but they are the three closest to my heart.

Pages from It Started On Hampstead Heath… An Artist’s Journey Into The Science Of Global Climate Change.

I have always had an interest in environmental issues, but it has taken me until now to find the time to study them in more detail. I hope my paintings and drawings have captured the ephemeral nature of our ecosystems, and the words I have written will provide some insight into it all. I hope to remind us all of the beauty and precious qualities of the environment around us, wherever we live.

My projects focus on “My Places,” but we each have our own corners of the world that we love. We have a responsibility to protect them.

(Top image: Oaks & Cones.)

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Dee McLean studied Illustration at Harrow School of Art, London, and went on to a career in medical and scientific illustration. Taking a break, mid-career, she had an opportunity to return to painting and drawing, having several exhibitions and taking on private commissions. She then returned to medical illustration specializing in artwork for medical education. Dee is now bringing her love of science and art back into painting, drawing and writing. Journeying through the places that she is emotionally attached to and looking at how they are all intimately linked by the changing global climate, Dee hopes that through her art she can remind us all how beautiful and precious our environment is. All Dee’s projects have a local charity attached to them.

 

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

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

The Persistent Acts series continues its synthesis of Climate Week NYC, focusing on this recent week of events around solutions, optimism, and positive stories.

Last week, I recapped the Drawdown event presented as part of the tenth anniversary of Climate Week NYC. Drawdown kicked off a week of panels, concerts, exhibitions, and beyond, running concurrently to the UN General Assembly, all to encourage climate action across sectors. Another galvanizing event I attended was Women in Sustainability.

Organized by Women in Global Affairs (WIGA) and hosted at CUNY Graduate Center, Women in Sustainability brought together women from myriad disciplines to explore the challenges and opportunities within the field of sustainability. WIGA, whose mission is “to assist in bringing intelligent young women together both with their counterparts from across the country and with role models who wish to help mentor a generation of up and coming leaders,” curated panels about sustainability in academic and professional fields.

On the academic front, three women spoke to the institution of academia at large, and presented on their specific areas of research. Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Associate Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College, discussed how women have been kept out of leadership positions in traditional academic settings, in part because of the limited scope of the career ladder metaphor. She offered an alternative mode of thinking, replacing the ladder with a more nimble trellis, broadening institutional notions of how to build a career.

Sara Perl Egendorf, PhD Student, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, shared her process for mitigating lead exposure through soil, and her ongoing research with participating New York City Housing Authority residents. Sara outlined the scientific and social components of her research, indicating how community members can become more involved in their local green spaces after lead-free soil from other parts of the city has been mixed into the contaminated soil in an area.

Jennifer Cherrier, Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, also discussed science in action, through her expertise on waterways. In the age of climate change, as rain storms become more frequent and severe, Jennifer is researching how the city may better handle rainwater, especially when it surges during storms. She is working not only on how to better the gray infrastructure of New York City’s water system (the pipes and pumps), but also on how to incorporate green infrastructure into the way the city manages rain water (through existing and new green spaces).

WIGA hosted Women in Sustainability on September 27 as part of Climate Week NYC.

The second part of the evening focused on a panel of women in the field of sustainability, moderated by Laetitia De Marez, Director of the New York City branch of Climate Analytics. Laetitia posed questions about success and career trajectories to an all-star panel: Sarabeth Brockley, Partnerships Coordinator at Business for Social Responsibility; Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development; Vlada Kenniff, Director of Sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority; and Bhakti Mirchandani, Managing Director at FCLT Global.

The conversation covered instances of sustainability in both public and private sectors, and in the fields of business, agriculture, and public interest. The women spoke about their mentors and career paths – why women must continue to be more and more a part of scientific, political, and financial decisions locally and around the globe – and instances of positive change when women ascend to leadership roles within various companies.

The tone that resonated with me throughout the evening was realistic optimism. As an artist, I felt the power of positivity in the room, especially since there are so many negative forces in our country right now. These scientists, and business and public sector leaders, know the weight and urgency of the climate crisis, and they tackle systems of oppression in various ways through their jobs. In spite of this (and because of it), they continue to do their work toward a more sustainable existence for us all. I spend so much time in my own silo of theatre, I don’t often hear the sustainability accomplishments in other sectors. We need to hear more about these positive outcomes across disciplines. This evening was an instance of palpable collaboration and camaraderie, which I try to emanate in my own creative endeavors.

The evening was broad, covering topics related to each woman’s expertise, and also went deep in connecting the issues to the roots of our problems – namely, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and individualism. These systems of oppression will not self-destruct. With this Climate Week event as an example, when women come together, we proliferate alternative ways of being, and collectively pave more pathways for each other – that is a power which oppressive systems cannot take away.

Lift Eachother Up illustration by Libby VanderPloeg.

There’s More
Among many other change-making folks at the WIGA event, I met Jordana Vasquez, who runs the blog Urban On Site, for “exploring, exposing and experimenting with sustainability” – Check it out!
(Re)Visit the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Peruse the candidates for the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change’s 2018 Best Climate Solutions Award.
Visit Chantal’s post Exorcising Harveys about tackling gender equity onstage in the Arctic.

This article is part of the Persistent Acts series which looks at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? The series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre.

______________________________

Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative, The UPROOT Series, to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.

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

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This month, the Persistent Acts series focuses on Climate Week NYC, synthesizing a week of events around solutions, optimism, and positive stories.

There is plenty to be pessimistic about. It is easy to doubt, to spot alternative reasons and proofs at every turn. However, in these polarizing times, there’s Climate Week NYC. Organized by The Climate Group and in its tenth anniversary, “Climate Week NYC is the time and place where the world gathers to showcase amazing climate action and discusses how to do more.” Taking place in late September, “Climate Week NYC is one of the key summits in the international calendar and has been driving climate action forward since it was first launched by The Climate Group in 2009.” This global event is in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York, and happens annually during the UN General Assembly. The event series that comprises Climate Week involves panels, concerts, exhibitions, and beyond, all to encourage climate action across sectors. I participated in a slice of Climate Week, and during the handful of events that I attended, positivity, collaboration, and sustained action were the refrain.

My Climate Week kicked off with some powerhouses of today’s U.S. environmental movement. Held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Drawdown’s Climate Week event featured headliners Bill McKibben and members of Project Drawdown, as well as panelists to engage in the local and global climate conversation. Given the nature of the event, I didn’t expect much art, so I was pleasantly surprised when I entered the Ethical Culture’s large theatre to hear a choir singing “Here Comes the Sun!” This brief opening act set a high-spirited tone, as New Yorkers gathered for the highly-anticipated main event. As the house lights lowered, an introductory video glowed, with clips about each of the night’s speakers: Lynne Twist of Pachamama Alliance, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Chad Frischmann of Project Drawdown, food justice advocate Karen Washington, Chief Climate Policy Advisor at the Mayor’s Office Daniel Zarrilli, and Lauren Zullo of Jonathan Rose Companies. I realized I wasn’t simply at a lecture or panel, I was at a climate conversations concert.

The Street Tones Choir – DRAWDOWN: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, presented at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 24, 2018. Photo by Erik McGregor.

Our host, Bill McKibben, noted the “rapid disintegration” that he had witnessed in Greenland over the summer, and now in North Carolina. Then McKibben pivoted to the positive, the reason everyone was gathered: Drawdown, “a project without parallel.” In scientific terms, “Drawdown is that point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.” As the tagline of the Drawdown book states, this is “the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.” The entire evening was rich with inspiring messages – I won’t try to replay it in this post. I will share some of my takeaways on the potential of Drawdown in local and national contexts:

• For Lynne Twist of Pachamama Alliance, Drawdown was “like water to the desert.” Twist spoke passionately about flipping the narrative on climate change: climate change is not happening to us but for us, and is serious, urgent, comprehensive feedback for a species that has lost its way.
• Following suit, Katharine Wilkinson of Drawdown outlined the history of the project as a way to map the path forward on a different (positive) side of the climate change story. Based on extensive research, including rates of carbon emission, sequestration, and dollar cost, Drawdown ranks solutions to climate change that humans are already doing, to contribute to the reversal of climate change – so that we might take an evolutionary leap toward a more vibrant, equitable, and resilient living world.
• Karen Washington reminded us to keep pressure on institutions and to take responsibility for knowing our representatives, so that they know that they work for us. Dan Zarrilli and Lauren Zullo commented on some key transformations happening in New York City, including building retrofitting, sustainable design, and the city’s divestment from fossil fuels in favor of investments in climate solutions.
• McKibben slid in: to reverse climate change, jobs one, two, and three are to get rid of the Trump Administration. In the meantime, Twist suggested that we shift conversations, because when we share the positives, our ways of living shift.

DRAWDOWN: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, presented at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 24, 2018. Photo by Erik McGregor.

Throughout the panel discussion, I was playing out reasons for the arts to participate in the climate conversation, as is my habit as an artist. I can see a role for artists around Twist’s suggestion of shifting conversations – I am constantly investigating how a performance-based event might spark the types of positive discussions the panelists proffered. Zarrilli also spoke about the future of New York City with a focus on imagination, on how the city can reinvent itself. In the hands of artists, these imagined possibilities are endless. While the arts were not an explicit part of this Drawdown evening, I couldn’t help but pick up on how many different sectors, whether city planning, real estate, or climate science, share values of consideration, imagination, and positive transformation with the arts sector.

The concert concluded with a video from Pachamama Alliance. The word that resonated for me most throughout the evening was “love” – love for self, locality, human and non-human neighbors, and our planet itself. As we left, we took tangible action, signing postcards to urge the New York State Comptroller to follow the city’s lead and divest from fossil fuels. In the way that marches instill a buzz of collective power, I felt energized at the start of Climate Week because 1) we Americans have a lot of work to do, and 2) tools for just, equitable change are in each of us.

Take Action
Call on New York State to divest from fossil fuels
Learn more about a fossil fuel free world
Participate in the Live Stream of Drawdown Learn on Friday, October 19

This article is part of the Persistent Acts series which looks at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? The series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre.

______________________________

Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative, The UPROOT Series, to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.

 

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