By Quentin D. Young

For many years now, I’ve mulled over the question of how to write a fictional narrative about the climate crisis in order to successfully reach people’s hearts and minds, and inspire real action. On the one hand, the current state of the Earth demands urgent action from us, which means that the climate stories we tell need to help audiences consciously draw the links and join the dots. In my opinion, being subtle about climate change and featuring it merely as a background element or a subliminal theme is a luxury we don’t have anymore. On the other hand, being didactic and preachy is usually a huge turn-off. Striking the right balance is something of a puzzle – one that I find I must solve anew with each and every climate storytelling project I begin.

MEET THE AUDIENCE HALFWAY

Coming from a screenwriting background, I typically see my stories as visual narratives for the screen. Some years ago, I began work on a climate story in the form of a short film script. Instead of a live-action film though, I envisioned a charming animation with cute and colorful artwork worthy of a Pixar movie. If we’re going to challenge audiences and get them thinking about something as depressing and anxiety-inducing as global warming, we have to meet them halfway and make it easy for them to engage with the material. We need to make our stories entertaining and, yes, “fun.” In my view, this is where there remains plenty of space for storytelling innovation.

A second way I decided to meet the audience halfway was in loosely basing my story on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. My Oz re-imagining would be an affectionate parody of Baum’s work, and my climate story would function by, first and foremost, engaging audiences through the much-loved source material. But on discovering the prohibitive cost of making an animated short and the scarcity of producers willing to back such a project, I opted to adapt my story into a comic book. A comic book was something I could manage myself while remaining in the pop culture category, which includes popular mediums such as television shows and video games. This was a parameter I had set for the project because, given the scale of the climate problem, I wanted the story to have as much reach as possible. Below is the cover artwork that artist Jean Lins and I eventually created for our charming Oz-meets-climate comic.

Of course, not every climate story needs to riff off a pre-existing work. The draw of the familiar can be achieved in genre terms alone, which could result in some unexpected and fascinating mash-ups. Zombies and climate change? I haven’t tried it myself, but it already sounds interesting to me. In the case of our project, I found that the original Ozmaterial lent itself so well to an environmentalist’s reinterpretation that the satirical opportunities were too delightful to resist. For example, in our story Emerald City has been renamed “Green City.” Having adopted the optimistic philosophy and aesthetics of solarpunk, the Wizard’s society now runs on clean energy and coexists with abundant plant life, as shown in the splash page below.

FIND A NEW ANGLE

As many others have said, not all climate stories need to be apocalyptic dystopias filled with doom and gloom. There’s a place for such a perspective, but there’s also a place for whimsy, humor, and hope, even in the face of climate catastrophe. Taking the lighter approach can indeed help audiences engage with an otherwise dark and depressing subject. This is what we wanted to achieve with our comic, so we embraced comedy and eccentricity. As shown in the panel below, climate deniers are depicted as fat Munchkins in carbon(ara)-excreting robotic suits, which help them move around faster. Crucially, instead of being demonized, these beings are shown to be capable of redemption by the end of the story.

Despite our general aversion to doom and gloom, however, extreme weather does make an appearance, not only as a symbol of climate change but as the main antagonist in the story, shown anthropomorphized in the splash page below. But with a moniker like the “Wicked Weather of the West” and as an echo of Dorothy’s tornado from the original Oztale, climate change is reframed in a meta-fictional light and with enough self-referential humor that, hopefully, audiences won’t recoil from didacticism and, instead, will be more deeply engaged with the story’s satirical point-of-view.

MAKE IT PERSONAL

Hundreds of people perishing in a natural disaster is a statistic, but the needless suffering of one person is a tragedy. As individuals, we are hardwired to relate and empathize with other individuals. Because of this, a huge phenomenon like global warming tends to be hard to depict and grasp in a story. To engage our audiences, we need to bring everything back to the realm of personal human experiences and life lessons. In the case of our comic, the heart of the story isn’t climate change primarily, but the emotional journey of a girl named Dolores. Through her encounters with the fat Munchkins, the Wicked Weather of the West, and the Wizard of Green City, she eventually finds the courage to tell the truth and to apologize for her fibs. In our post-truth times, where the climate issue is itself obfuscated by lies and unscientific misinformation, the story of Dolores as an individual can speak to the larger cause.

THE FINISHED BOOK

It’s been a long journey from my short film script to the comic adaptation, but The Wizard of O₂ is finally a finished book. I must thank the many readers who read my drafts and provided feedback along the way, including the climate storytelling team behind the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Rewrite the Future initiative. They helped with script development early on, when the project only existed as a film script.

As a comic book, The Wizard of O₂ is now published under my imprint, Truth/Dare Media. We’re a publishing startup that focuses on telling important stories through pop culture mediums like comics and audiobooks. The Wizard of O₂ is our debut comic, and it’s currently available digitally through major online bookstores including Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play. It’s also been released on Comixology, an Amazon platform dedicated to digital comics, and the world’s largest comic readership. We’ll be donating a portion of the profits to Fridays For Future, the global youth movement begun by Greta Thunberg. Some of the kids involved with the movement have now read the book, and their feedback has been great!

As a climate storyteller, my mission is to share the story of the climate crisis with new audiences through the wide reach of popular entertainment because, yes, I believe that pop culture can help us save the world. So if you enjoy The Wizard of O₂ and agree that it contributes toward this cause, please help us spread the word!

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Quentin D. Young is an emerging comic creator and a represented script writer whose screenplays have been accepted for submission by leading Hollywood companies including Walt Disney Studios, 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox), and Participant Media. The Wizard of O₂ is his debut comic, and he is currently working on a graphic novel titled Dreamstormer. Formerly an environmental engineer, Quentin writes stories with the aim of entertaining mainstream audiences while also raising awareness and understanding of the unfolding climate crisis.

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

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By DM (Deanna) Witman

The world is experiencing a time of extraordinary loss: of species, habitat, ecological connectivity, and personal connection to the natural world. An increasing number of individuals and communities are struggling with grief and other health effects surrounding these losses.

As environmental degradation accelerates across the globe, so too do the emotional impacts on people, causing anxiety, stress, depression, as well as manifestations of violence and aggression. Environmental grief can be triggered by the loss of a favorite childhood swimming beach due to erosion, or an entire island community from rising waters. These losses may, in turn, result in a loss of identity, perhaps associated with declining income from an occupation, or the disappearance of that occupation altogether. What will a lobsterman call himself when there are no more lobsters to be trapped in the waters off the coast of Maine? Cultural distress results from a loss of place value or community identity.

With my Index series, I draw upon my past experiences as a field biologist to process grieving around the losses we are facing as the result of climate change. These photograms serve as a record for what once was: the flora in a small patch of intertidal marsh of the St. George River, where I live and work. Reminiscent of herbarium records, the flora are memorialized and serve as a baseline against the impending change caused by increasing temperatures and rising waters. My small area of intertidal marsh will not be spared; it will bear the impact of these changes.

Each piece is unique, printed on fine printmaking paper, with the trace of each individual plant fixed in perpetuity. These images are produced through gum bichromate, a photographic process dating to the mid-late 1800s, which uses gum arabic, watercolor pigment, and a sensitizer.

Memento mori is an artistic or symbolic reminder of death’s inevitability and the fragility of human life. Authors, artists, and philosophers have worked with it since the days of Plato. With Index, the reminder of life’s fragility and the idea that all life ends at some point is visible in the plant’s memorialized state as a photographic trace on the paper.

In an interview in Cabinet regarding memento mori, photo historian, curator, author, and teacher Geoffrey Batchen noted, “…Such objects seek to remember a loved one, not as someone now dead, but as someone who was once alive, young and vital, with a future before them. In this kind of object, they will always have that future, a comforting thought, perhaps, for those who have been left behind.” The plants that I collected were alive at the time I collected them, and were still alive as they became imprints on paper – an index of these beautiful lives. And while the photograph-objects remind me of their life and perhaps their future demise, I am comforted by their existence in this moment and even in the fact that they existed at all.

After completing Index, Dr. William Hafford, a then colleague of mine, and I began a series of conversations about our shared experience of loss and grief. We suspected that we were not the only people living with this experience. Surely others felt something similar – the loss, the sadness. Could we join forces to work with our communities in Maine?

Our conversations led to a few working sessions and to the idea of creating a resource for our Maine communities, which took the form of a zine titled A Guide to Loss & Grieving in the Anthropocene: a low-budget booklet, which could be mass-produced and shared widely. We received several grants for the project that we used for printing. The zine contains several psychological models of grief paired with images from Index, along with further resources for individuals who may want more information or need assistance.

In addition to the zine, we were curious to learn if others in our communities would be interested in talking about their own experiences surrounding climate change and related loss. We scheduled a number of events in public spaces, such as libraries, across the state. We had no idea if anyone would show up. And what we found was that people did want to talk about this. There is a common feeling, a common experience of mourning, guilt, helplessness, defeat, but also of hope and resiliency. Our aim was to reduce isolation, to bring people together in community so that they might continue to support each other, even after we left.

In 2020, it could not have been clearer that the world was grappling with loss related to climate disruption and its associated impacts from (un)natural disasters, pandemics, migration, and food insecurity. As the year unfolded and losses were felt so deeply on so many fronts, I started work on a video/performance piece to continue my exploration of the phenomena of grief. This two-channel piece is titled The Haircut… or Learning to Let Go. In my research about mourning and grief, I found a number of references to the cutting of hair; in many cultures, cutting one’s hair is an expression of grief. I had envisioned this piece prior to the pandemic, but as the early days of the pandemic wore on, it seemed an even more necessary act – cutting my hair as an expression, as a physical response to my psychological state and concerns regarding everything that was being lost, and that we continue to lose.

At some point, I hope to turn my attention to resiliency and hope. I continue to ask myself big questions such as: “How do we carry forth in our daily lives and stay hopeful?” “What can I do to help others connect more deeply to their surroundings?” Perhaps there aren’t any straightforward answers and what I am looking for in resiliency is more of a process than a desired outcome. I look forward to continuing my investigation and explorations to see where it all leads me.

(Top image: (left) Pontederia cordata, 2018, unique, 25.75 x 19.75 in.; (right) Sium suave, 2018, unique, 25.75 x 19.75 in.)

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DM Witman is a trandisciplinary artist working at the intersection of environmental disruption and the human relationship to place in the Age of the Anthropocene. Her creative practice is deeply rooted within the realm of the effects of humans on this world using photographic materials, video, and installation. DM is affiliated with Klompching Gallery, New York and Cove Street Arts, Portland. Recent interviews and publications include The Guardian, BBC Culture, WIRED, Boston Globe, and Art New England. She actively exhibits her work and has been recognized with grants from the Maine Arts Commission, The Kindling Fund, and the Puffin Foundation.

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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 Bill Russell

When I witnessed massive forest and home fires rampaging through my Northern California community and saw the devastation they wrought, I woke up to the reality of global warming. I wanted to respond in my own creative way. We are living through the Anthropocene, this era of geologic history in which humans are the primary environmental force. As a painter and a visual journalist, I feel an urgency to share these dire messages through my art.

In my new painting, The Deluge (detail above), I tackle the subject of sea level rise, which not only affects coastal cities but also presents an existential threat to our culture. Unlike with the California fires, I have no direct experience of rising seas, but I am no less moved to make art about this phenomenon.

The Deluge is an apocalyptic vision that builds upon my interest in human-influenced ecology, which is bringing discord to our planet. I show the white, hot sun bearing down through a depleted atmosphere and icebergs set adrift from our melting polar ice caps. While these ancient icebergs don’t cause sea levels to rise, they do provide an invaluable record of our planet’s climate history through the study of their ice cores. Iconic artifacts of our culture have come unmoored, like beach balls and sea mines, U-boats and polar bears. We see a freighter run aground, a sinking Titanic, and a half-submerged Chrysler Building. Container ships toss their containers. Plastic bottles float in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Kraken, a mythic peril of the sea, devours ships. Noah’s Ark offers a possible means of survival.

Two particular historic paintings inspired me during my work on The Deluge: Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. 

Impression, Sunrise, painted in the spring of 1873, depicts the urban-industrial landscape at the port of Le Havre, France, with small rowboats in the foreground, smokestacks and steamships in the middle ground, and a red sun in the far distance. Monet found beauty in the picturesque atmospheric effects in the commingling of mist, steam, fog, and smoke. I wanted to make a similarly sublime observation on the effects of the pollution that Monet saw.

Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa shows desperate yet romanticized figures adrift on turbulent seas. It was infamous for its brutal depiction of an actual event. It was also scandalous, given the political implications and ambiguity of whether the men on the raft were to be rescued or not. These sailors are unable to see their survival on the horizon. We are also confronted with an unknowable beyond. Can we be rescued from climate change? Will we take the actions necessary to change our own foreboding future?

While The Deluge is my latest reflection on human-induced climate change, back in 2015, my artwork reflected the sadness I felt seeing the Valley Fire destroy homes and displace members of the Lake County, California community. I drew on location among the detritus and made paintings of the devastation. It motivated me to produce art that captured that feeling. I wanted to understand how it happened. As it’s understood now, the origin of that fire was a human error, but fires have and will intensify – the result of warmer, drier conditions. These are, in large part, the product of global warming.

A warming planet means a warming ocean. Rising water temperatures can trigger coral reefs to expel the colorful algae living in their tissue, which turns them sickly white. In Coral Bleaching Diptych, I wanted to show the before-and-after views of this effect and to draw focus to this mostly unseen ruination.

Global climate change has become a substantive subject matter in my paintings. It brings a depth of meaning to my work. I educate myself in the research. Through my creative practice, I become more aware and engaged. But more importantly, these stories need to be told. Our planet faces serious, pressing challenges that are only getting worse. Look to the artists and their work to illuminate, educate, and activate.

(Top image: Bill Russell, The Deluge (detail), 36” x 36”, acrylic on canvas, 2020)

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Bill Russell is a painter, illustrator and designer based in Marin County, California. He earned his degree from Parsons School of Design in New York and was an Adjunct Professor of Illustration at the California School of the Arts in San Francisco, as well as a staff artist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He has completed artist residencies at Recology and the Kala Art Institute. You can see more of his paintings at Bill Russell Fine Art and see his reportage at Russell Reportage.

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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

This month I have for you an interview with Tory Stephens, the New England Network Weaver for Grist’s solutions lab, Fix, and the Director of Imagine 2200, Fix’s exciting new writing contest that’s currently seeking submissions. 

The contest seek stories inspired by Afrofuturism, solarpunk, and futuristic writing styles that embrace Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, disabled, feminist, and queer identities and communities. Judges are looking for stories that center climate solutions and the experiences of communities impacted first and hardest by climate change, with the aim of imagining a more just and sustainable future. 

The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second and third-place writers receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Imagine 2200’s judge line-up is super impressive: Adrienne Maree Brown, Morgan Jerkins, and Kiese Laymon will be choosing the winning stories. 

I spoke with Tory about why Grist launched this contest, the kinds of writers he hopes will submit work, and the role that climate storytelling plays in the wider discourse on climate change. 

Tell us about Grist’s solutions lab, Fix. What are its goals? What’s your role there?

Fix is a relatively new program at Grist. It grew in part out of the Grist 50, our annual list of “Fixers” – up-and-coming changemakers working toward a better world for all. A few years into producing the Grist 50 list, the team (led largely by Grist’s founder, Chip Giller) started convening each new cohort of Fixers, and making more of an effort to seed connections and stay in touch with the folks who had been featured. That gave rise to a new program called Fix, which combines solutions-focused storytelling with community building and events. Our goal is to accelerate equitable climate solutions, and lead the conversation on what’s possible in addressing the climate crisis. 

My job at Fix is a fun one – I’m the network weaver for New England, where Fix is piloting a regional approach to community building. And now I’m acting as the creative director for Imagine 2200, which was actually born in New England. 

Imagine 2200 is Fix’s new climate-fiction contest. What inspired this contest, and what do you hope it will motivate readers to do or think?

The first idea for a work of fiction set in the year 2200, modeling a just and sustainable future, came out of an event Fix hosted in the summer of 2019. That was just before I joined the team – I was actually at the event as a participant. But we were all really excited about the idea, and it seemed like something that wasn’t yet in Grist’s or Fix’s wheelhouse, but could be. In the spring of 2020, I helped plan and produce a second community event in New England (or rather, on Zoom) that centered around a visioning exercise to workshop the idea of 2200 – what would define a “clean, green, and just future” in a time that feels so far away, and how we might get there. The ideas generated by the folks from that event laid the foundation for Imagine 2200: Climate fiction for future ancestors. 

The year 2200 is so far away that it almost feels like a blank slate. (Note: Stories don’t have to be set in 2200 for our contest – they can be anywhere between now and then. But part of the idea is to remove the confines of our current predicament and let folks create a world they’d want their grandkids, or their great-great-great-grandkids to live in.) We’re hoping Imagine 2200 will inspire visions of the future that haven’t even been dreamt up yet – but that could inspire real action in the present day. And our goal with the final collection of stories is to show readers different views of the world we could have if we take decisive action against the climate crisis, again in a variety of ways. That’s part of our mission at Grist and especially at Fix: to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now. 

How do you see genres like Afrofuturism and Solarpunk relating to climate fiction? What do you hope that the submissions draw from these genres?

Afrofuturism (as well as Indigenous, Latinx, disabled, feminist, and queer futures, and others) speaks to the kind of hopeful, equitable fiction we’re going for. These genres – or really, these movements – depict a future where the world isn’t set up to oppress and exclude folks from marginalized communities, but instead places them at the center, as the heroes, the creators, the leaders. The technologically advanced and ecologically sustainable society of Wakanda is a famous example. 

We know that climate change doesn’t impact all people equally. The fossil fuel industry that we know today would not exist if it weren’t for society’s willingness to make some communities sacrifice zones. It’s widely accepted now that we can’t divorce the climate crisis from systemic racism – and so any serious, comprehensive solutions to climate change have to put equity at the center, and have to be informed and led by communities on the frontlines. With Imagine 2200, our goal is to show that in action, to show what happens when we value lived experience and put people first. And we’re adding a dash of hopepunk – compassion and perseverance, even in the face of what may seem like insurmountable challenges.

What role do you believe climate fiction in general, whether as part of this contest or elsewhere, can play in either the wider discourse on climate change or among “solutions” to the crisis? In other words, what power do you see as inherent in climate fiction?

I think art can be incredibly motivating. It’s society’s mirror. In some cases, that mirror is unflattering – think, like, a Black Mirror episode. Or an investigative journalism piece by Grist. That kind of work can push society or specific institutions to self-correct, or at least to question the direction we’re headed. And then in some cases, the mirror is aspirational, or creatively distorted. It inspires and changes our view of what the world could be. With climate change, there are so many variables and so much uncertainty about the future we’re going to have, and the world we’re going to leave our children’s children. That’s why I think it’s an especially rich area for fiction – both the scary kind and the hopeful kind. At Fix, obviously, we’re focusing on the latter. And the hope is that it leads to real behavior change in the present, real conversations about the way out of this crisis and the way to build a world that works for everyone. 

Whose voices, either in climate fiction or the climate movement more generally, are still underrepresented? Who would you like to hear more from?

We want stories that are by and for the communities we come from, are adjacent to, and care about. Representation matters, but surface representation ain’t it. Me, my friends, family, and my community have richly layered identities, and in many instances, it’s our social and political experiences that are the drivers of our story and actions. We want climate fiction that builds deeply intersectional systems, worlds and solutions, because what’s happening right now is erasure. This is why we’re asking folk to disrupt the genre. And this is why we’re creating a platform for all the voices. We’re loudly saying that we are the authors of our own future. And we will not be erased. We need and want everyone to see themselves in this hopeful vision so we can co-create the abundance we deserve, and so we and our home can heal from the violence and extraction. That’s what it means to be a future ancestor.

What’s next for you and Fix? 

Honest answer: everything! We’re a fast-growing team with a lot of big ideas. When the pandemic is fully behind us, we’re looking forward to resuming our in-person gatherings and continuously finding new ways to engage our community, and the public. We’re always experimenting on the storytelling side as well, and aiming to expand our content offerings with multimedia, interactives, fiction, and beyond. There are a million things we haven’t done – but just you wait!

(Top image by Carolina Rodríguez Fuenmayor)

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

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

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

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By Peterson Toscano

Marissa Slaven talks about her novel, Code Blue, an eco-mystery. Drawing on her love of the coast in New England and even her background as a palliative care physician, Marissa has created a near future world that is stressed by climate change in a society that has chosen to respond creatively to it. About the book, Marissa writes:

In my novel Code Blue, I imagine the future where climate change is worse than it is now, but people are at least trying. And no one is trying harder than the main characters, Tic, Phish, and Lee, a group of teens at a science academy who are trying to unravel mysteries both global and intensely personal.

She expertly weaves in various mysteries her main character, a high school student, must solve. These mysteries are both personal and scientific. Her book is one you cannot easily put down once you start reading it. My talk with her is followed by Marissa reading from the book.

And coming out later this year, look for Code Red, a sequel.

Follow Marissa Slaven on Twitter: @MarissaSlaven

Next month: Jennie Carlisle, curator and director of the Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University, and Laura England, a senior lecturer. They are two of three co-facilitators of ASU’s Climate Stories Collaborative. They consider the questions: How does an artist stay in a creative space? When producing climate art, what is more important – the process or the product? 

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.

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By Joan Sullivan

Human culture is and has always been inexorably connected to the ultimate source of light and warmth, the sun.

Maria Popova, 2016

Following up on my first post of 2021 – about an epic hand-embroidered tapestry that illustrates humanity’s 5,000-year relationship with fossil fuels – I want to broaden the focus of this ongoing Renewable Energy series (four years already!) by including occasional musings on the larger context in which we currently find ourselves: an energy transition.

There have been at least 12 energy transitions since the beginning of human civilization. To state the obvious: humanity has managed to survive and prosper through each of the previous energy transitions, and we will undoubtedly do so again as our energy mix shifts inexorably from fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) to renewable sources of energy (wind, water, solar, geothermal).

We are fortunate to be living witnesses to, and participants in, this historic shift to a post-carbon future. If history has taught us anything, it is this: what was once considered a dominant and irreplaceable energy source can suddenly find itself playing second fiddle to a disruptive new energy source or technology. 

A common feature of energy transitions throughout history, including the current one, is that multiple energy sources can and do co-exist for decades, sometimes even centuries – e.g., wood is still burned in all corners of the world for cooking and heating. But eventually, the disruptive energy source becomes mainstream and dominates all aspects of our lives and economies, ushering in a new era of cultural values and meanings uniquely associated with that energy source.

“New energy sources are very much like new art,” wrote Barry Lord in his extraordinary 2016 book, Art & Energy: How Culture Changes. Like avant-garde art, cutting-edge energy “introduces new values yet never invalidates the masterworks of the past.” He explains:

Because our sources of surplus energy are so basic to everything we are and do, the values and meanings associated with those that have been with us for a long time seem to be fundamental – the sense of collective identity or the values of domesticity and urbanism, for instance. Almost all of these old values stay with us, continuing to inspire and sustain meaningful works of art. But the new values and meanings that come with each energy transition in turn form a cutting edge, changing our perception of ourselves, of others and of what matters most in the world around us at that time.

When the energy source is new, cutting-edge artists work with a (mostly unuttered) awareness of it. As the source of energy becomes more dominant, all the rest of us come to share that awareness, whether we express it or not. It is the artists who help us see it (emphasis added).

Throughout 2021, I will return frequently to Lord’s book to muse about this reciprocal relationship between energy transitions and art. Let’s start by looking at a 19^th century British artist whose avant-garde, pre-impressionist landscapes captured the global transition from wind (for tall sailing ships) to coal (for steam-powered ships and trains) at the height of the industrial revolution. 

James Mallord William Turner, also known as JMW Turner, was practically alone among his Romantic contemporaries to treat industrial technology (including the energy transition) as a subject worthy of artistic consideration. According to the TATE Britain, Turner “lived and worked at the peak of the industrial revolution. Steam replaced sail; machine-power replaced manpower; political and social reforms transformed society. Many artists ignored these changes but Turner faced up to these.”

Accepted into the Royal Academy of Art at age 15, Turner had a long and prolific artistic career that lasted more than 60 years. In the last two decades of his life – which overlapped with many profound technological, social and political changes – Turner’s work became increasingly abstract. (As an aside, I find it interesting to note that half a century later, in the context of the disastrous first word war, the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky was quoted as saying : “The more frightening the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” The same would be true today…)

Two of Turner’s most famous paintings were created in the context of this rapidly changing world in the middle of the 19th century. Both of these paintings explore Turner’s fascination with technology, notably the transition from wind to coal-powered steam for “modern” transport.

The Fighting Temeraire (above), completed in 1839, is one of Turner’s most famous paintings. At first glance, we imagine a calm marine landscape on the river Thames in London. But the genius of Turner is that behind this placid scene, a dramatic historical event is unfolding as a metaphor of the global shift from wind to coal, an energy transition that ultimately would transform the world. Here, the aging hulk of the once mighty Temeraire, a veteran 98-gun warship (pale, ghostly, weak: stripped of its sails) is being pulled by a small steam-powered tugboat (modern, strong, polluting) on her last voyage – at sunset no less – as the age of sail gives way to the age of steam.

Turner’s retelling of the historic Temeraire being tugged to its last berth to be broken up for scrap is absolutely magnificent in its subtlety. And yet, art historians to this day are still debating whether Turner embraced the industrial revolution as a progressive path towards a new world, or whether he was expressing melancholy for the inevitable loss of a perceived golden age. Or perhaps both.

Five years after the Temeraire, Turner produced his masterpiece Rain, Steam and Speed(1844). While both paintings explore the tension between the pre-industrial and the modern, Rain, Steam and Speed vibrates with energy and excitement compared to the more placid Temeraire. Seven years before his death, Turner created the impression of dazzling speed as a modern coal-powered steam train hurtles towards the viewer diagonally across a rainy landscape.

Rain, Steam and Speed is considered an allegory of man against nature: it is impossible to distinguish which steam is produced by the train (man) and which is produced by the rain (nature). Turner is purposely ambiguous; he never divulges his opinion about the breathtaking speed, noise and pollution of coal-powered steam trains. He leaves that up to the viewer. But his metaphoric treatment of the energy transition, subsumed by light and color, suggests that Turner, in his last two decades, must have seen the writing on the wall and embraced the implacable march towards a coal-powered future. This was prescient: nearly 200 years later, coal may no longer be “king” but it still generates almost 40% of the world’s electricity.

Mapped: The world’s coal power plants

Barry Lord reminds us in Art & Energy: How Culture Changes that energy transitions are also engines of cultural change. For example, he explains how the age of coal created a culture of production; how the age of oil and gas created a culture of consumption; and how the age of renewables is presently creating a culture of stewardship. According to Lord, it is artists who help us “to see” and make sense of these overlapping and constantly evolving transitions, even though the historical pace of past energy transitions has been longer than the lives of the artists living through them.

So while Turner’s avant-garde abstract landscapes “were mockingly dismissed by his critics as ‘the fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand’” – and then later acclaimed to be masterpieces – the same volte-face awaits the frequently maligned renewable energy industry so despised by climate deniers. But history is on our side. Lord explains:

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. This movement from marginal to mainstream is directly duplicated in the arts. Performance art, for example, based on stewardship of the body, has moved from a marginal activity to a mainstream art form.

Artists and creatives of all stripes and colors, it’s time to choose your creative weapon! Over the next nine years, I challenge us all to stay razor focused on this beautiful concept of the age of stewardship – to will it into existence! No more fire-and-brimstone. Our goal, at the end of the second decade of the third millennium, is to look back and “see” how we have changed history by relentlessly drawing attention to the many positive, regenerative, and socially just cultural values associated with the current energy transition. Like JMW Turner.

ADDENDUM

Two major Turner gallery exhibitions planned for 2020 were postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the Tate Britain, Turner’s Modern World is on exhibition until March 7, 2021. On the other side of the big pond, Turner and the Sublime is on exhibition at the Musée national des beaux arts au Québec (MNBAQ) in Quebec City, Canada until May 2, 2021. Tickets are required for both exhibitions. Ã€ qui la chance!

For a fascinating gallery talk about Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, check out the UK’s National Gallery video. 

For a preview to Mike Leigh’s award-winning 2014 biographical drama based on the last 25 years of JMW Turner’s life, see this link.

(Top image: Close-up of JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, downloaded from the National Gallery, licensed for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons agreement.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer focused on the energy transition. 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 grief about climate breakdown. 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.

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

Since the 4^th century BC, explorers, geographers, archaeologists, cartographers, navigators, sealers, whalers, miners, scientists, artists, writers, and others have traveled to the Arctic to observe, document, research, explore, and exploit its beauty, its ecosystems, and its natural resources. They have described being awed by its grandeur, diminished by its scale, mesmerized by its stillness, and scared by its awesome power. Many have reported being changed in fundamental ways by the experience. 

In 2010, when British poet, screenwriter, and librettist Nick Drake was invited to join a three-week trip to the Norwegian Arctic by the international climate/arts nonprofit Cape Farewell in order to investigate the changes brought about by the climate crisis, his personal journey of exploration was added to the long list of others that had come before him.

Cape Farewell’s 2010 Art and Science expedition sailed around Svalbard, an archipelago 550 miles north of Norway, on the two-mast vessel Noorderlicht with five marine scientists and ten artists from around the world. Prior to embarking on the voyage, Drake had never thought deeply about the climate crisis nor addressed it in his work. When he first accepted the invitation from Cape Farewell, he thought he would be encountering a wild, pristine land that had not been spoiled by human intervention. With the help of the expedition’s scientists, he soon learned about the devastating acceleration of glacier melt, pollution, and human exploitation. In his first written piece documenting his impressions, Drake describes in poetic language the millennia-old memories embedded in the ice as well as the vestiges of industrial activity that were melting the glacier in front of his eyes: 

It’s good to know this vast frozen beast, born of the last Ice Age, is still here; suddenly it’s strangely comforting to think of it as a world library of snow – for it’s true if fanciful that the snow of the winters of all our lives is somewhere in here, crushed down to ice; so is that which fell during Shakespeare’s winter’s tale, on the ice-fairs on the Thames; and the snow that fell when Breughel’s hunters were returning home; and the snow that fell long before anything human was really here. And now, the warm breath of billions of lives, and the CO2 from the stacks of foundries and factories, and worldwide traffic jams, and the collected vapour trails of all the flights that have ever flown, is melting away the monster, little by little.

Drake also recorded himself reading a poem based on the blog entry above while he was still onboard the Noorderlicht.

Two particular incidents that occurred during the 2010 expedition impacted Drake in a visceral way and informed the content and format of The Farewell Glacier (2012), his book-length poem, which he wrote when he returned to the UK. The first event happened as the Noorderlicht was traveling down a passageway through pack ice in the northern part of the archipelago. Suddenly the ice closed around the ship, which became instantly trapped. After many tries by the ship’s pilot to disengage from the ice, the passengers were instructed to prepare for an evacuation by helicopter. Ultimately, the pilot was able to extract the ship without the need for a sea rescue. 

The dramatic experience left Drake with a very real understanding of how, within a split second, one’s life can become endangered in this harsh environment. He also developed a strong sense of connection to the young men who had come to the Arctic in previous centuries aboard whaling ships and on other expeditions without the advanced technology that provided the crew and passengers of the Noorderlicht with an immediate lifeline. Drake later incorporated the voices of these untrained and vulnerable young men in The Farewell Glacier. Over the following year, he used other human and non-human voices to tell the Western, and especially European, story of the Arctic. 

The second experience that impacted Drake was a real-time visual example of the climate crisis in action. Sailing towards a large glacier, the expedition scientists indicated the area in the water where the glacier had once been. It was a full 40 minutes before the ship reached the edge of where the glacier was currently located. From this and other “aha” moments, Drake felt an immense responsibility to write something about the extreme acceleration of climate change that would appeal to the hearts and minds of the general public. 

The Farewell Glacier is a chronological account of the Western, and especially European, experience in the Arctic told through the voices of the humans who encountered it, the chemical elements that have polluted it, (including methane, PCB, POP and DDT, etc.) and other non-human actors, such as a sea-shanty, the sun, pteropods, and an ice-core sample. He calls it “a story about wonder and consumption,” of “exploration and exploitation.” 

Drake wrote The Farewell Glacier in stages. The first section of the poem that he composed after he returned from the Arctic was the voice of “The Future,” which is both a tale of warning and a call to action. In 2019, Fleabag star, Andrew Scott, and his sister Hannah recorded “The Future,” which was then posted on the twitter page Culture Declares Emergency and can be found on Drake’s website. 

In 2012, the National Maritime Museum in London commissioned Drake to write a poem that would tell the story of the Western experience in the Arctic as part of a major installation developed by United Visual Artists, in collaboration with Cape Farewell. The result was the full text of The Farewell Glacier.

Drake describes the book as a “collection of monologues or arias” from “the deep past, and into the near future because as Inuit say,‘we are the people who have changed nature.’” The excerpts below are just two of the voices in The Farewell Glacier that are part of this powerful Arctic story. 

When I was twelve
To win a bet
I walked across the thin ice of the frozen Severn
And never looked back.
Later, I resolved to walk
From Alaska to Svalbard
Across the thin ice
Via the Pole of Inaccessibility
And the North Pole.
My Inuit friends left a map
Pinned to the hut door
Marked with the places they thought I would die.
It was 3,800 miles;
We left in February,
Four men and forty dogs. 
And in July we made camp
Because the ice was not drifting 
In our favour.

When the sun returned
We continued through the next summer
To reach 90 degrees North.
I telegraphed the Queen.
Trying to stand on the pole 
Was like trying to step
On the shadow of a bird
Circling overhead.
Two weeks later
A man took the first step on the Moon
And by the time we got home
We were forgotten.
You couldn’t walk it now,
Even if you wanted to –
Why not?
Because the sea is melting,
And no one can walk on water.

— Wally Hebert (1934 – 2007), British polar explorer, writer and artist

We were born in your dream of the future – 
Released by fire
We ascended the winding stairs of the smoke stacks
Until we reached the orange sunrise
And the blue sky.
No one waved goodbye.
No one saw us go;
We were uncountable
And invisible.
One way or another 
We were carried north
In the hands of the winds,
Through the stories of the rivers,
By the generosity of the oceans;
And when we arrived at the cold
Top of the world
It felt like home, sweet home;
And we waited in the long darkness
Until at last
The first light of the year transmuted us
Out of thin air and we came to rest
In ice and snow and black water.
Now we accumulate
And magnify
In the cells of fish, in the eggs of birds,
Inside the warm coats of seals and bears;
And in the wombs of mothers
We concentrate so the faces of the future
Take on our features,
And we sing our names into the ears
Of the unborn:
PCB; POP; DDT:
Cesium, technetium;
Mercury.

— Mercury, chemical element also known as quicksilver

Since his voyage to the Arctic, Drake has written other poetic works on the climate crisis. Most notably, he wrote the libretto for a choral work entitled, Earth Song, in collaboration with composer Rachel Portman. The piece premiered on September 27, 2019 at St. Paul’s Knightsbridge and was broadcast on the BBC in October of 2019. As Portman described it, Earth Song is an expression of how “humans are as one with the earth and inseparable.” Drake’s libretto incorporates lines from Greta Thunberg’s powerful speech at Davos in 2019. 

Additionally, in 2018 Drake created the libretto for The Cave, an opera on climate grief, in collaboration with composer Tansy Davies. The Cave follows “a grieving father’s quest for survival in a world devastated by climate change” and was produced in a cavernous warehouse space in London.

Ten years after his expedition, Drake still speaks passionately about the Arctic and its extraordinary light, stillness, silence, and ancient landscape, but mostly he is on a mission to expose his words about the climate crisis beyond the poetry world to create awareness and inspire change. He disagrees with Auden’s oft-quoted line, “poetry makes nothing happen” but sees his poetry as a signpost for the way forward. His commitment towards that end is what happens when you take a poet to the Arctic. 

(Top image: Poet Nick Drake in the High Arctic. Photo by Deborah Warner. Poetry excerpts by permission of Nick Drake, The Farewell Glacier, Bloodaxe Books, 2012.)

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 in widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and climate change. She co-created a national, participatory public art project, The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and which has inspired thousands of adults and children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to protect this vital resource. Her most recent body of work calls attention to the growing number of rampikes along our shores – trees that have been exposed to salt water and died as a result of rising tides.

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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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