By Luap

HOW THE PINK BEAR CONNECTED THE INNER ME TO YOU, THE OUTSIDE WORLD, AND NATURE

I must have been five years old when my dad cut down the apple tree in the garden to make way for a swing. I cried and cried, my face pressed hard up against the glass as I looked out on the garden. I obviously felt a strong connection to the tree. When my dad came back in, I asked him if the rest of the trees could be mine – perhaps I could save them, I thought. The swing my dad put up was for me, but I felt no connection to it. 

I would never have described myself as a tree hugger, especially not back in the 1990s in Grimbsy, UK, where I grew up. That would have been decisively uncool, though I was called by that name when I barked at friends for snapping saplings for a laugh. But it was a simpler time – no internet, no cell phone, and nature was our escape, donning our explorer hats, far from parents and TV screens.

Then came adulthood. Then came loneliness. Then came a series of works titled Lone Soldiers (2008-2011): a piece began as a single tree photographed in diverse environments, then superimposed on wallpaper invoked from my childhood. It reflected me and my mood. Drifting, guarded, isolated, a solitary tree in a forest surrounded by trees. I have the feeling many of us feel like isolated trees in forests full of people. The pandemic has contributed to exposing this harsh truth ever more.

Some days I am the strong tree, nothing can move me. I am invincible.
Some days I am the old tree that has shed all its leaves. I am vulnerable.
Some days I am the lone tree standing in solitude. I am surviving.
Some days I have been overgrown by all that surrounds me. Overwhelmed I suffocate.
Most days I am never the tree that I want to be.
I am, however, a tree. 

MENTAL HEALTH

Disconnected from people around me, I struggled to really communicate. How could I? I was even disconnected from myself. It’s called dissociative disorder, they told me. And as life happened, love came and went, my depression deepened, and with it the vast disconnect. This is how I discovered Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). I was in need of a lifeline, desperate for a bridge to connection. 

With my therapist we explored trees, as I pictured them. But she turned on a different light when she asked me to draw a tree or three to represent my emotions or people in my life and how I felt about them. We then had another session where I visualized and drew the tree I wanted to be. The tree I am and the tree I would be were polar opposites. And so I shed my negativity and embraced positivity. As my branches spread and my leaves sprouted, I grew a bridge to connection, enabled by nature. 

A BEAR FOR CONNECTION

Enter The Pink Bear. Like the wallpaper before him, I invoked the carefree, tender childhood memory of a picture with Mum, Dad and my brother when we were kids, a giant stuffed 1980s neon pink bear stoically among us. The sheer memory of it brings a smile to my face and takes me to a place of love and safety. When I was uncomfortable in my own skin, I would go to the bear. The bear is that feeling of not accepting yourself in front of others, as you internalize it all and disconnect to be who you are not. The Pink Bear became the vehicle with which I crossed that bridge to the connection nature had gifted me. 

The Pink Bear begins his journey photographed in the very forests that created him, bravely exploring the confusing, solitary sense of loss. Much like many of us have begun to feel when thinking of real forests on our planet. The Pink Bear melts away fear and darkness with the warmth and joy of innocence lost by just being there, a hidden light in the darkness empowering me to be the star of my story. 

The Pink Bear’s first forages onto my canvas also took him through those dark forests, seeking love, coming across lonely, all too lost. It turns out he had to be lost first to be found, and so the figment of my childhood illuminated the darkness of my work with joy and warmth, cast as the protagonist of his story, and I of mine. 

DAWN

The epitome came when I set out (bear-less this time) with a varied group of people, a jumble of personalities and abilities, to climb the four highest peaks of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The journey was spread out over ten days and, much to my frustration, I kept struggling to remember names. But as we lent each other helping hands and shoulders and exchanged smiles, helping each other struggle up the mountains, as we trudged up the final steep slope, exhausted, dirty, weak, and haggard, I remember how we overcame the summit. The dawn’s first rays spilt over the horizon, washing over me and drenching me in warmth. With a smile spread across my face, I could not recall the last time I had felt such overwhelming freedom and joy. Nature, once again, lowered a drawbridge to connection, connection with my human companions, connection to myself. 

“I USED TO BE A POLAR BEAR”

Travel, nature, and camaraderie liberated me and inundated my being with positivity. I had reconnected to the natural world, which I had so bitterly mourned as a child. This time though, I couldn’t let that proverbial tree be chopped down; I deeply felt the desire and need to show our beautiful planet and home to others. The Pink Bear decided, thus, that “he used to be a polar bear,” a climate refugee seeking out beauty to inspire humans and encourage them to protect and value what he has lost, his home. For them, it may not be too late.

I used to be a polar bear. If we don’t do something to help save the natural world, one day it will be gone and become a myth, eliminated like an apple tree to make way for a plastic swing. We don’t need a swing; we have the trees. And if we need a swing, let’s hang it from the trees’ branches, and find balance among nature. 

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Multidisciplinary British artist Paul Robinson (aka LUAP) dynamically fuses adventure and art through his paintings and photography, drawing from his own experiences. His adult-size Pink Bear suit follows him up mountains, surreal landscapes, cities and remote spots in far-away places, juxtaposing them in stark contrast with his central figure The Pink Bear. Using different mediums and techniques, he tackles mental health, the climate and ecological emergency, and isolation head-on.

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

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By Amy Brady

I’m excited to share with you an interview with artist and John Jay College professor of art and environmental justice, Mary Ting, whose latest show, Our Hive is Sick, is currently on view at the Augusta Savage Gallery at University of Massachusetts Amherst. The show is an overview of more than three decades of work on trauma and the natural world. As Ting says in our interview below, the show is a “call to action.”

For years, your artwork has exuded themes about the environment, wildlife, and climate change. What draws you to these themes? 

My very first introduction to art and the natural world was my mother’s Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the classic woodblock printed set of books on Chinese brush painting of trees, rocks, birds and flowers, insects, and such. I was in awe of the images, it was a magical world unto itself. I grew up in a house of wonder with one hundred orchids, a botanical garden, cats, rescued animals, specimens, an abundance of art and handicrafts, and the creator/keeper of it all was my mother. It was also a house of sadness. My mother’s stories of Nanjing 1937 during the massacre, the bodies, and the later shooting of the nesting herons on her college campus. As a child these stories were my bedtime fairy tales and the bodies of the raped women and the birds with their dangling legs and beaks were one and the same – their bodies side by side. I was raised in the language of sorrow, the love of nature, and the violence of humans. I dreamed of being a forest protector and along the way became an artist.  

You have a new exhibition at University of Massachusetts Amherst opening in November entitled Our Hive is Sick. Please tell us about this show. What inspired it? And what do you hope viewers take away from it?

Our Hive is Sick, my second solo show at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Augusta Savage Gallery, is an overview of more than three decades of work on cultural history, trauma, and the ravaging of our bodies and the natural world. My first exhibition at the gallery, Memories and Wounds, also focused on personal history, the body, ecological loss, and mourning. In 2020, the year of a deadly virus leaping across species and oceans, record weather disasters, loss of cultural biodiversity, and the rise of hate and anti-science rhetoric – now, was the time for this exhibition. The title, Our Hive is Sick, stems from my work on bees, colony collapse, and unhealthy hives. In my prose poem, Our Hive is Sick, each stanza focuses on a different but related theme (COVID-19, extinction, hate, urgency).  I hope the viewers will understand that environmental destruction is not new nor is its relationships to our cultural histories, policies, and consumption. Ultimately Our Hive is Sick is a call to action.

In a recent article for Truthout.com you’re quoted as saying “My work is basically about turning grief into action.” Could you elaborate on what you mean?

I realized early on that art had the power to transform, to create meaning out of our loss and confusion. That internal shift is a game-changer for mental health as well as for facilitating external community building and actions. In this way, art-making is a tool and the process itself can be a unifier. I see this constantly in my community projects and classroom. Making and looking at art is a setting ripe for real discussions, programs, and strategizing. An example of this is my ongoing workshop series, Daffodil Ashes, on grief and art-making, where participants created paper replicas of gifts to their dearly beloved. They also shared stories and wrote letters with words that were never spoken, culminating in a community garden ceremony. It is an individualized creative contemporary rendition of a traditional Chinese folk ritual. 

With COVID-19, I am expanding Daffodil Ashes workshops to include pandemic related environmental group actions. “Doing” in the company of others is the best antidote to grief. Another example is the grief of elephant poaching for ivory which triggered related artworks and the organizing of two exhibitions and their public programming: COMPASSION for Creatures Great and Small on the endangered species market at the Chinese American Arts Council gallery and ENDANGERED! at John Jay College to raise awareness on campus.

Much of your work is created with paper. What draws you to this medium?

Every culture utilizes paper crafts in their rituals and folk traditions – it has a universality. Paper in its various forms is also very affordable, readily available, versatile, and practical to store and ship. I grew up with my mother’s brush paintings, her woodblock printed books, and the paper folk crafts she taught me as a child. My first cut paper art pieces in 1986, was a set of five 8-feet-tall scrolls for the performance piece Silent Years. The shadows created by the cutouts worked well with the lighting changes and the entire set was easily put in a tube when we toured the performance. I try to use what is suitable for the specific work. I have worked with a variety of other materials including wax, fabric, mixed media, wire, rubber, and clay. These days I try to use what is on hand and buy as little as possible.  

Something I so admire about your work is how it incorporates words and books. Could you also speak to why you work with these things?

I am an avid reader, and very inspired by literature, the history and tradition of books, language (verbal and non-verbal), and storytelling. I have numerous book-related artworks, some of which utilize early book formats (such as slabs, palm leaf manuscripts, accordion fold bindings) with contemporary content. I am interested in lost or dying languages and stories that are never written down, stories deemed too terrible to tell. When I combine words and books to an artwork, I am adding a context and visceral layer versus a literal illustration or representation of the words. My works are essentially narratives.

What role do you think art plays in our greater understanding and/or awareness of climate change?

Artists provide another way of looking at things. which is critical in this media-saturated world.  I think of myself as an artist, creative thinker, dot connector, researcher, and educator. My studio artworks often lead to community projects, exhibitions, public programs, and workshops. As an educator, I initially taught only in the studio art department. Now I also teach in the environmental justice program. My artwork has led me to doing research, lectures, and writing in areas outside of the art sector, such as wildlife conservation. To me, the very notion of art itself is changing, expanding in this time of the Anthropocene. We as artists are continually redefining ourselves and our role in supporting the social environmental justice issues of our day.

Finally, what’s next for you? Anything you’d like my readers to look for?

Working on the Our Hive is Sick retrospective catalog has made me want to revisit old themes. My work has always been circular, there is always more to say, a topic is never done, and tragically history is also circular.  I am also eager to work on more text-dominant work related to our exploitative histories, zoonotic diseases, and the pandemic. In 2021, I will be starting a new series, 21^st Century Tree of Life workshops on learning new skills while talking about serious issues and pursuing group actions. I hope to gather participants from various sectors to attend and teach the workshops. I am hoping one day to get to postponed travels such as the Kala Chaupal Uttarakhand India eco-art residency.  But until then, there is plenty to do with New York climate change issues and awareness raising.  In this time of continual loss and of urgent being and doing, there is so much to do, so much to love and protect.

(Top image: Shaanbei Ghost Diary, handmade paper, pigment, wax, soot. Photo courtesy of the artist.)

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

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

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury

It’s my pleasure to talk with Catherine Bush, fellow Canadian and author of the new novel Blaze Island. It’s just a coincidence that we moved to the Maritimes and experienced our first hurricane shortly after Catherine and I began talking. The hurricane had weakened to a tropical storm and headed north of us, so we did not feel the worst of it. The island depicted in the novel is inspired by Fogo Island, Catherine tells me, which is just off the northeastern coast of Newfoundland, northeast of my new home. Catherine spent a lot of time on the island, which you can read more about below.

Blaze Island opens in the midst of a terrifying hurricane that has torn up the coast of North America. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of Miranda Wells and her father, a climate scientist whose academic career was destroyed by climate change deniers. In the wake of this personal disaster, Milan Wells flees to a remote island in the North Atlantic where he is desperate to protect his daughter from the world’s worsening weather. There, they embrace an off-grid, self-sufficient life, walking the island’s rocky shores and keeping daily weather records. But the stranger’s arrival breaks open Miranda’s world, compelling her to wonder what her father is really up to with his mysterious weather experiments and a series of elusive visitors. How, she wonders as her life transforms, will she create a future in a world more unpredictable than she has ever imagined?

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

This is not your first novel based upon moral quandaries, as your website states. Can you tell us about some of your previous novels and the issues they explored?

I’m intrigued by moral dilemmas that expand beyond the personal, and I’ve long been drawn to write about ecological loss. I’m also attracted to intersections of science and literature. My first novel, Minus Time, has been getting some renewed readerly love and is going into reprint, gratifying because it feels eerily timely almost thirty years later. It’s about a young woman finding her identity amidst environmental cataclysm and a family that splits apart. Helen Urie gets involved with a group of animal-rights turned eco-activists while her mother, an astronaut, tries to set a record for space habitation. In The Rules of Engagement, a woman in the mid-90s navigates her relationship to risk, in the context of personal and military interventions, her field of study; she grapples with the psychic legacy of having had two university students fight a pistol duel over her as a teenager. Claire’s Head enters the consciousness of an extreme migraine sufferer. And Accusation, in which a female Canadian journalist pursues the truth of allegations of abuse in an Ethiopian children’s circus, explores how we come to believe accusations, even extreme ones, about each other.

In Blaze Island â€“ based on Fogo Island off the coast of Newfoundland – you built a story around a fictional community facing the disastrous results of climate change-based weather events, including a Category 5 hurricane. You spent many summers on the island writing this novel. What was that like?

Blaze Island takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I needed to find an island and I love cold and northern climates. I was also thinking hard about the problem of global ice loss and its effect on our planetary future. I stumbled upon Fogo Island online, discovered the artists’ residency program in Tilting, the farthest village on the island’s Atlantic side. The landscape on that side of the island is one of rocky promontories and barrens. Offshore, in summer, icebergs float past, carried south along the Labrador current. One of the residency houses, Reardon House, sits alone in a cove outside the village, and as soon as I set foot inside I knew this is where my characters, Milan and Miranda Wells, had to live. I returned over the course of eight years. I would walk the shore trails and listen to the characters’ voices coming up through the rocks into my body. I watched melting icebergs with utter awe and grief. Fogo Island is a place where “wind decides everything,” and I learned to live in intimate relationship to its force, its complexities, its shifts. I gathered stories from locals about how the weather is changing: more unpredictable winds, stranger storms, less winter sea ice.

When you were developing the story, how did you bring climate change into it without being too preachy? One of the characters insisted he could not use the word “climate” to describe his work based upon rampant denialism as well as the backlash for climate scientists from the fossil fuel industry. Do you also worry about this as a writer working with an artistic medium to heighten awareness of climate change?

When Milan Wells and his daughter arrive on Blaze Island, he tells her not to use the word climate or identify him as a climate scientist. He goes to ground, shucking off the remains of his career, wrecked after an email hacking very similar to what happened to actual climate scientists in the U.S. and UK in 2009. Back in 2013, writer Nathaniel Rich talked about not wanting to use the phrase “climate change” in a novel because it’s a cliché – tired language that invokes a predictable response. I was interested in the formal challenge of describing our swiftly altering climate without using the stock phrase. 

Anyway we don’t experience climate, we experience weather, ever more unpredictable weather, and we experience change, both internally and externally. A storm can be psychic as well as atmospheric. I wanted to write pressed up against the experience of micro and macro, incremental and cataclysmic change, weather penetrating all our relationships. I don’t worry about climate denial extremists in relation to my own work. I was keen to have a bit of fun with the characters in the novel who are the more rampant denialists while not making them ridiculous. What they morph into is men longing for a techno-fix to our climate catastrophe. I also challenged myself to dramatize more quotidian habits of denial. Miranda, the climate scientist’s daughter, is content to live in the beautiful bubble her father creates for her, until the arrival of Frank Hansen, a stranger who asks too many questions and presses her to ask her own.

We’re now realizing that apocalyptic, speculative fiction blurs more and more with realism. Author Richard Flanagan wrote in the New York Times, “The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.” What are your thoughts?

Just now, I opened Blaze Island to a random page and found a mention of California wildfires. The novel is not meant to be futuristic. It’s set in an alternate now of hurricanes and melting Arctic ice, minus a pandemic. This is the world I read about in newspapers daily. I didn’t need to be prescient to write about it. These events were already happening; they’re just amplified now to the point where they’re becoming un-ignorable. But how do we make stories out of the crisis or in response to the climate emergency? This is the question. 

I want Blaze Island to have the seductive air of an almost fairy tale yet to be highly realistic. Even the more fantastic climate engineering science in it is real. I didn’t want to depress people but invite them to consider how we might reimagine ourselves and our relationship with the natural world, our greater landscape of kinship, in order to create a livable world. It’s crucial that the climate crisis enter literary realism. Whether our stories admit it or not, we are writing in relation to this, the greatest existential condition of our time. How does the crisis enter our world experientially? Weather isn’t scenic backdrop. Part of a new literary realism is that we must de-center the human from our stories, let in the more-than-human as a realm of life and agency. We’re collectively discovering how our need for air to breathe is an intersectional issue, uniting Black Lives Matter, climate activists, Indigenous activists, not to mention all of us affected by a global pandemic. Atmosphere and breath are essential for all life on this planet.

What an insightful way to explain that! Your novel is inspired by Shakespeare. Can you explain that to our readers?

Blaze Island reimagines Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest in a contemporary setting, but you don’t need to know the play to enter the novel. Prospero, the play’s magician, controls wind and weather; he loves to be master of his world. This seems an apt metaphor for our own desire to control our environment. Prospero is driven by the desire to take care of his daughter, as is my climate scientist, Milan Wells. How far will an idealistic climate scientist, distraught at the human failure to take action to stop global heating, go to protect his child? This is one of the novel’s central questions. Will he be lured by the prospect of climate engineering, large-scale interventions in the world’s climate systems to counteract greenhouse gas warming? Or has he got another plan up his sleeve?

Blaze Island has young adult/teen main characters but will also be thoroughly enjoyable for adults. How important do you think it is to create young literary heroes fighting climate change? What inspired you to create Miranda and Caleb?

In re-imagining The Tempest, I wanted to create a strong female presence, in part by employing Miranda’s perspective. I also brought Caliban’s mother back from the dead in the form of Sylvia, a forager and herbalist. Miranda, a young woman who has lived an isolated island life, discovers her agency. Growing up means finding her own way forward, not her father’s – her way to take action and establish community, which feels essential to our path forward. Frank Hansen, the young man who lands on her doorstep in the midst of the storm, is an activist. Like Caleb, Sylvia’s biracial son who grows up on the island with her, Miranda is extremely sensitive to the natural world. She initiates Frank into this deeper landscape of kinship while he challenges her to broaden her horizons and fight for the world she believes in. 

We’re all islanders on this planet, Miranda comes to realize. How we respond to the climate crisis demands deep and even painful conversations across generations. I hadn’t seen the crisis dramatized as an intergenerational issue before, at least in literary fiction, and that was another impetus for the novel. We see this struggle playing out in the world in ways that have only grown since I began writing Blaze Island â€“ with the school strikes and youth climate action movement, Greta Thunberg calling out world leaders. We can’t depend on the young to save us but we need their forceful inspiration and galvanic energy and the novel gestures towards that.

Best of luck as you and your wonderful publisher, Goose Lane Editions, produce this novel during COVID-19. How is the pandemic affecting your book release?

All my book events, like those of every other writer I know, have moved online. Learning how much book promotion you can do from home is one silver lining of the pandemic cloud for a novelist writing about the climate crisis. It feels especially fitting because the climate scientist in Blaze Island refuses to fly. Collectively, we’re realizing how much book promotion can be done virtually, from your own living room. That’s not a bad thing.

Thanks so much for your time, Catherine!

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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By Peterson Toscano

How does an artist decide to do the work she does? How does that work evolve over time? What impact does it have on the audience and how can an artist deepen that impact? In my recent conversation with dancer and choreographer Lynn Neuman, I encountered an artist with boundless curiosity. This curiosity drives her work. 

As director of Artichoke Dance Company, Lynn recognizes the vital role art plays in addressing issues like climate change. But entertaining and educating are not enough for Lynn and her company. They always want to do more to get people to act. Through community engagement and direct outreach to lawmakers, they are training community members to change legislation. 

During the pandemic, Lynn and Artichoke Dance Company have been adjusting and adapting once again. See their Covid Creations. “It reflects our feelings of isolation and desires for connection during the coronavirus,” Lynn explains. “Filmed at various times of day, the series reflects the available bandwidth of the internet.”

Next month: When faced with an existential crisis, poet Walt Whitman allowed himself to be transformed for his times. Lessons Whitman learned are relevant for artists today as we face multiple crises.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, 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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By Clare Fisher

If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that most of us are pretty bad at dealing with uncertainty. Either we’re optimistically booking holidays and Airbnbs for “when all this is over” – if not next week, then certainly by Christmas – or we’re slumped on the sofa, convinced that slumping on the sofa and maybe watching other people slump on their sofas over Zoom is all we will ever do.

Both of these responses, however, as Nicole Seymour points out in Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (2020), are “different sides of the same coin, a coin that represents humans’ desire for certainty and neat narratives about the future.” Easier to say “things will be this way forever” than “we have no idea how things will be next week, next month or next year.” Worse: we have no control over how they might be. Digging into the middle space between the two is difficult and scary; yet it is also where reality happens, and where we might, if we stick with it long enough, start to change it. So how, given the anxious, control-hungry creatures we are, can we do that? 

This is a question that haunted almost all of my conversations with researchers and educators as part of our Arts & Climate in Higher Education series; indeed, conceptualizing interdisciplinarity as an “and” which allows us to pay attention to that which individual disciplines leave out, as I did in my first blog post, suggests that a willingness to engage with uncertainty is the (wobbly) foundation on which interdisciplinarity is built. Developing strategies for delving into the spaces between and beyond what each discipline is sure of is also crucial to the pedagogy and the theory of interdisciplinary arts and climate change education, as I have explored in my second and third posts. For this reason, my fourth and final blog post is asking: what is at stake in our struggle with hope and despair? And how might we move beyond it?

Seymour, who teaches the Literature and Environment course at California State University, Fullerton in the U.S., focuses on texts which illuminate how and why we are failing to deal with climate change. They are often funny, using irony and humor to satirize such failures and point towards different ways of creatively responding to the crisis. The assumption – which she effectively dismantles in Bad Environmentalism â€“ is that climate art can and should do one of two things: teach people about climate change and serve as a mode of catharsis. This leads to an overwhelming affect of earnestness which, paradoxically, makes people less likely to engage. A similar point is made by an activist character in Jenny Offill’s novel, Weather: “people are sick of being lectured to about glaciers.” The activist, however, is sick of having to add an “obligatory note of hope” to the end of every one of her talks, eventually concluding that “there is no hope, only witness.” Bearing witness, argues Seymour, is one of the many other things environmental art, when freed from the earnest tones of environmentalism, can do. Perhaps bearing witness to the affective difficulty of bearing witness is an important part of this, both in and out of the classroom.

Interdisciplinarity, with its acceptance of not-knowing, contradiction, and uncertainty, is perhaps best suited to bearing this sort of witness. Ingrid Horrocks and Laura-Jean McKay, who lead the Eco-Fictions and Non-Fictions undergraduate course at Massey University in New Zealand, choose texts which are capable of holding multiple and contradictory narrative threads; these texts slide between mundane and global scales while witnessing the specific environmental histories of the local region. Laura and Ingrid believe that giving students the opportunity to connect their lived experience with the material being studied helps prevent any collapse into despair. It is no wonder, then, that encouraging students to connect with their physical environments is a key feature of so many courses I’ve looked at so far, such as those in the Environmental Studies Department at Wofford College, South Carolina, and the Art and Place MA at Dartington College of the Arts in the UK, both of which emphasize experiential and field-based learning; and the Design for Performing Arts MFA Program at York University in Canada, where students generate specific change proposals for their campus. Here, as elsewhere, engaging with the complexity and the difficulty of the broader issues facilitates a focused and creatively constructive engagement with those that touch on students’ immediate surroundings.

Hope that is born of a recognition of how bad things are is very different, then, from the “things will be better by x,” “we’ll find some sort of tech to save us” escape-valve variety. It might point towards a better future; it might also spring from the past. It is to this end that John Willis’s – paradoxically named – environmental history course, Inviting Doomsday: US Environmental Problems in the Twentieth Century at the University of Kent, UK, is designed. Through studying specific examples of climate activism, students grapple with the complex ways in which socio-economic and cultural systems contribute to climate change, and the ways in which activists have historically tackled this. When he started teaching the course 15 years ago, British students saw its content as far away and only relevant to the U.S. Now, however, there is a greater sense of anxiety and urgency among the students. Through topic-based learning and interdisciplinary research, they are encouraged to draw out the multiple and conflicting stories around specific environmental issues. “It’s harder, now, to instill positivity,” he says. “Although examples of successful activism, and figures like Rachel Carson, can offer some sort of hope.” He is quiet for a moment. Then he adds: “though the general situation is quite dire.”

In her book Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman (2020), Rebecca Tamás argues that what is often represented as “climate grief” in popular culture is in fact “climate despair:” “a misery which shuts down our ability to think critically and to have any version of hope.” By contrast, “Grieving for the environment means … rejecting total despair, but it also means giving up on any romanticized visions one might have had of an unblemished, pure natural world, where the human can turn to the nonhuman for relief and easy comfort.”

Reading Tamás, I had an “a-ha” moment: this, I think, is what these interdisciplinary courses and programs are beginning to do. Leaning into the spaces between disciplines and categories means learning to let go of uncertainty; it can be difficult, scary, and confusing, yes, yet it can also be funny, surprising, and joyful. It might mean simply bearing witness to our failures to bear witness to the true complexity of it all. It might mean forming new horizontal connections with our classmates and our teachers in order to identify places and ways to make a positive difference. What I felt, as researchers described their experimental pedagogies and teaching practices, was that I was glimpsing a different future.

This article is part of our series on Arts & Climate in Higher Education.

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Clare Fisher is a novelist, short story writer, and researcher based in Leeds, UK. She is the author of All the Good Things (Viking, 2017) and How the Light Gets In (2018). Her work has won a Betty Trask Award and been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Edgehill Short Story Prize. She is studying for a practice-led PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds and teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary University of London. She can be found on Twitter at @claresitafisher.

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By GiGi Buddie

Welcome to another installment in my Indigenous Voices series, and happy Native American Heritage Month! 

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush declared the month of November as Native American Heritage Month, and since then it has been a month of celebration and remembrance for Indigenous peoples in the United States. To mark the occasion, I have decided to profile Indigenous artists I feel you should know, and up-and-coming student artists working to create waves of their own. 

Throughout this month, and beyond, I encourage you to research influential Indigenous figures in American history, explore the artists I introduce more deeply, find out whose land you’re on, and search for ways to celebrate the Native people of this land. November also includes the American tradition of “Thanksgiving.” Learn about the true history of this holiday and Native American Heritage Day, which is observed and celebrated the day after Thanksgiving. This nation was founded at great cost to the first peoples of this land, and I implore you to remember, recognize, support, and educate yourself on the past, present, and future cultures, struggles, and accomplishments of American Indians. 

To jumpstart that acknowledgment and education, here are profiles of influential Indigenous artists you should know! Each of these artists has made a name for themselves and used their platform to talk seriously about issues that pertain heavily to American Indian communities. While not all of these artists address climate change directly, much of the work they do is built from a foundation that challenges a white-dominated society. These artists have had to tirelessly work against the colonized world that brought about assimilation, genocide, racial injustice, and the building blocks of the climate crisis. 

XIUHTEZCATL MARTINEZ

Starting off our list is 20-year-old Indigenous climate activist, artist, and author Xiuhtezcatl (shoe-tez-caht) Martinez. Inspired by his mother’s activism, since the age of six Xiuhtezcatl has been working to create sustainable dialogue and change for our planet. Initially speaking at local rallies in his home state of Colorado, he has since been propelled to the international stage. He has stood before the representatives of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Summit in Rio de Janeiro and spoken boldly about the urgency of climate change, emphasizing that “this is a struggle of cultural survival for my people, for Indigenous folks specifically, who are on the frontlines everywhere.” He is the youth director of Earth Guardians where he “uses art, music, storytelling, and civic action to inspire and mobilize young people in the fight to protect our planet.” He has created a name for himself as an eco hip-hop artist, a powerful and influential young activist, a plaintiff in a climate crisis lawsuit against the Obama administration, and a voice of hope for both Indigenous communities and our planet.

To learn more about Xiuhtezcatl and his accomplishments, check out this article published by Cultural Survival. You can also listen to his music, and find all of his social media handles on his website.

RADMILLA CODY

Next up we have the Navajo award-winning singer, model, and anti-domestic violence activist Radmilla Cody. With her GRAMMY nomination and multiple wins at the Native American Music Awards, Radmilla’s musical talent is undeniable. But her accomplishments don’t stop there. She was named one of NPR’s 50 great voices, a Black History Maker Honoree, and uses her platform, and her personal experiences as a survivor, to advocate against domestic abuse and violence.* Her platform is one that is built off of her own experiences growing up in America as a biracial woman. She attempts to communicate positive messages about her dual identity to underrepresented minority groups in similar situations. Radmilla’s voice is one of power and resilience and her music, sung in her Native tongue, is reminiscent of the power of Native storytelling. Be sure to listen to her music and follow her on social media. 

*According to a study by the National Institute of Justice, more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women and men have experienced violence in their lifetime, and more than one in three experienced violence in the past year.

SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER

Third on my list of big-name artists you should know is actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather. Sacheen gained attention in 1973 when she was chosen by actor Marlon Brando to deny his Oscar for his portrayal of Don Corleone in The Godfather. Brando wanted to bring national attention to the treatment of American Indians following the siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. I was fortunate enough to learn about Sacheen’s life at the Native Women in Film Festival where One Bowl Productions was screening their documentary of her life, SACHEEN, Breaking the Silence. It was there that I learned about her career, activism, and extraordinary life recounted in a profound, artistic, and beautiful way. Sacheen has always been very active in the American Indian Bay Area community, even being one of the original occupiers on Alcatraz Island to protest civil rights violations against American Indians. 

In an interview with KQED, she voiced her views on our white-dominated society saying, “We [American Indians] have been oppressed so much from dominant society that we have internalized that oppression. The more that Native American Indian people like myself speak out, the more understanding that there becomes. The truth has got to win out above all the lies that have been told about us by the dominant society.” You can watch her speech at the 1973 Oscars.

KINSALE HUESTON (YALE UNIVERSITY)

On my list of up-and-coming artists you should know is artist, scholar, and activist Kinsale Hueston. At just 20-years-old, Kinsale’s list of accomplishments is impressive and inspiring. She has been recognized as a National Student Poet, is the recipient of the Yale Young Native Storytellers Award for Spoken Word, has been named one of Time Magazine’s “34 People Changing How We See the World,” and has published a collection of poetry titled Where I’m From: Poems from Sherman Indian School. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and a student at Yale University, Kinsale’s work centers around Diné stories, personal histories, and contemporary issues affecting her tribe. Much of her work focuses on issues relating to violence against Native women, settler-colonial violence, resource extraction, and land/body relationships. She is a powerful young activist in a time when such voices are desperately needed. You can read more about her on her website, shop for her merch, and even request to book her for readings or events. 

COCO PERCIVAL (POMONA COLLEGE)

A relatively unknown, up-and-coming artist you should know is 21-year-old Chickasaw Fox Clan and Pomona College student Coco Percival. Coco grew up in a small, conservative town in Missouri, and often felt like she lacked the space for her traditional Indigenous practices. After she left that restrictive environment for Pomona College in southern California, she realized that she now had the space she had been longing for and other Indigenous students to share it with. Going to college expanded her ideas of what being Indigenous means, and soon she was ready to get back in touch with her Indigeneity. 

“My beading and art is my resistance”

Coco Percival

When she was young, her aunt taught her to bead and she has worked off those foundational beading skills to teach herself traditional Loom beading. Another student at Pomona taught her to make earrings, and now she puts her talents and skills into creating her art. Percival takes commissions for her beadwork and you can find her beading on Instagram (@nakbatiipoli_oksop means rainbow beads in the Chickasaw language). You can reach out to her through direct messages or the contact on her Instagram profile to purchase her work.

If you would like to get to know more Indigenous artists, here are a few more names to research: Maria Tallchief, Irene Bedard, and Forrest Goodluck.

While you sit with your family this Thanksgiving and reflect on the parts of your life that bring you joy and gratitude, consider giving thanks for the land you reside on, and honoring those who lost their lives, culture, and stories under the colonization of North America and the expansion of “the New World.” Keeping these traditions and cultures alive requires us to deepen our knowledge of these people and land, and constantly challenge how American Indians are portrayed in entertainment and the media. History is written by the victors, but American Indians are still here, present, fighting, and proud. Our history deserves to be heard and our heritage deserves to be celebrated. Aheeiyeh, and Happy Native American Heritage Month. 

(Top image: Chief Sitting Bull by GiGi Buddie)

This article is part of the Indigenous Voices series.

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GiGi Buddie is an American Indian artist and student studying theatre, with an emphasis in acting, at Pomona College. Whether it be through acting or working in tech, GiGi has dedicated much of her life to the theatre. In the summer of 2019, her passion for art and environmental justice took her to the Baram River in Malaysian Borneo where she, alongside Pomona professors, researched the environmental crisis and how it has been affecting the Indigenous groups that live along the river. As a result of her experience researching and traveling, she student-produced the Pomona College event for Climate Change Theatre Action during the fall 2019 semester.

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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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