By Biborka Beres

DANCE AND SCIENCE

This is the third part of a three-part interview with Rulan Tangen, founder of Dancing Earth. You can read Part I and II here and here.

Many dancers and choreographers emphasize that dance does what science cannot do when it comes to the climate crisis: it fosters a deeply intimate, emotional connection to the issue. How do you see the role of dance in fighting climate change?

Dance can definitely translate scientific facts into a visceral way of knowing. It can even uncover facts that science hasn’t identified yet. This has been reiterated by Elders and culture-carriers, and by farmers who won the Food Sovereignty Prize a while back. They asked artists to help be a part of shifting hearts, because that’s when there’s cultural change. I’ve seen it happen. The arts help a cause be something that makes us feel good in our bodies. And we lean towards what feels good. For a long time, we’ve leaned towards different types of comfort. I definitely want warm water in my house. It’s nice to have a bed. Then, at a certain point there’s the question: how much comfort do we need? Can we experience joy and beauty and relationships instead of a thousand jewels – even though there’s beauty there, and joy, and an appreciation of that aesthetic? Can there be an appreciation of aesthetics when seeing dance that’s zero waste? It’s not something that we own and we have to store, and then dust off. The experience is temporal. 

Constant growth and constant decay, and the ability to harbor that.

Regenerate, yes…

This might be a very stereotypical thought, but if we are unable to find beauty in our existing surroundings, then how are we to hoard things and get pleasure from them? I think there’s a lot of dissatisfaction in consumerism and the whole practice of accumulating goods.

Dancing Earth is often invited into theatres but we can’t afford to rent a theatre or even a studio – so we dance outside. And at times people go: “Oh, where’s your permit?” A permit is required even in a public park. You’d be surprised how “public” doesn’t mean that you can do what you want. When we place our dances in a theatre or beyond a theatre, we activate the space. We have animated some spaces with our dances – for example, outdoors –where people now say they can’t walk by that area without seeing the life force of the dancers there. They’re literally remembering an active space of ritual and transformation.

We use recycled industrial materials, or remake old fabrics into costumes. There have been times when we were given spaces but we weren’t allowed to use the lights. The owners didn’t want to pay for electricity. We started calling that passive solar. We’ve been blessed twice in the Bay area: one time with a bike-powered sound system, and another time with a biodiesel tour bus. Those were great. We’re always carpooling and using bicycles or public transport for commuting. A lot about how we make a dance production is in sync with our vision of not needing a lot, including how and what we eat. We often prioritize local farms. Honestly, there was a summer when we had no money, and that’s when we ate the best food because of the generosity of farmers. That’s when we understood true wealth. We always remember the importance of reciprocity with the people who have supported us when nobody else would. And we feel good. Our bodies feel stronger; we’re more energetic. One of our dancers, who is a farmer, asked us to make sure we always had reusable water bottles and our own reusable spoons and bowls and our carry bags. This all started to shift how we travel. 

Ballet had been the love of my life. That training was about discipline, about the ritual of returning and deepening my commitment to the craft so that form got more and more precise. I remember a summer when I had left New York. I was involved in more of a social justice thing, living in a van, outdoors. After that, coming back into the studio and seeing a bunch of people propped up on one leg, balanced, seeing what I would have called beautiful and transcendent before, I felt a great disconnect. I spent the rest of my life trying to bring these two worlds together. At this point in my life, I’m remembering my deep appreciation for ballet – anything someone spends so much time on, whether it’s work or graffiti art or ballet, anything someone dedicates so many hours to is worth appreciating. The question is how one can bring that into the world of change, justice, and eco-consciousness. 

The role of dance in fighting climate change… We spent years with this inspiration and there were many moments of awakening in the process. We noticed we can amplify our message when we partner with another organization or entity. We’ve been blessed to dance at the Bioneers Conference, which was attended by thousands of people. We’ve also created work that centered Californian Native voices and stories, and was presented on Alcatraz Island, just after the Sunrise Ceremony.

The point is to use platforms to center unheard voices. Three generations of my family lived in the Bay area. That’s my way of giving back to this community and being a respectful and reciprocal guest in the Bay. I’ve been really proud to dance for a fundraiser in New Mexico, for the new energy economy that’s doing hard, legislative work. The fundraiser allowed solar panels to be installed in one of the pueblos. We danced, money was raised, and spirits were refreshed and rejuvenated. Then that money became solar panels. Our Navajo collaborator and advisor, Denae, had brought solar panels to one of our performances and they had the capacity to power the performance. The system could not be plugged in because of the rules, yet he brought the panels to show that the performance could have been powered by the solar panels. 

We’re looking at other partnerships as well – with global environmental organizations. We’re incredibly excited about Dancing Earth uplifting its ecological roots, and looking at pathways for those roots to become more publicly acknowledged – understanding that ecologically focused work is about how we work with humans so we can be part of the larger ecosystem. We want to claim the words “intercultural” and “ecological” as the most welcoming and inclusive ways to describe our work. 

I really appreciate your words and hearing your vision. 

One of the great things about global Indigenous cultural exchange has been to work on a remote Apache reservation, and then to host a Māori from New Zealand. This has been such a relation-building awakening. We got invited back to New Zealand, where people have been siloed and separated and are suffering on their own. We got to understand these relationships from the other side of the world. In this, we feel less isolated. There’s of course a cost to this, which is our carbon footprint. That’s one of the reasons why I’m doing my best to embrace new media and apply all of these principles of creativity to online performance-making. With the dancers, we are becoming filmmakers and finding ways to bring those worlds together through technology. We have used our period of isolation to devise ways to bring these global relations together. I see this as a challenge: How close can we get in a virtual space? How can we find ways where dance can be deliciously tangible instead of being just another Zoom invite? 

Actually, I wanted to ask you about how you dance during the pandemic. Again, a huge question but I think one of the great things about this is the opportunity for greater accessibility and the opening up of relationships. I try to remind myself of this when I feel negative about our situation.

The fact that we have a computer and wi-fi is yet another expression of privilege that we have to acknowledge. But now friends in wheelchairs will have an easier time accessing our work. Or people who aren’t feeling too well can lie in bed, and if they want to take my class, they can watch it on their computer.

We were blessed to have been invited to a dance festival outside of New York. They did a promo film with all the dance companies. Our part happened to be a glimpse of prophetic words from an Elder from the Grand Canyon. The dancers were seen from overhead, from an Eagle’s view. It was short but it was very memorable, and this clip has been seen by 749,000 viewers from 29 countries. We believe that this image alone has changed those people.

From April to November 2020, we were in the process of creating two different performances, with two different casts, and two different technologies. One was using Skype and different backgrounds. It brought the viewer into a relationship with six different ecosystems where dancers were dancing in their homeland. In some cases, there was an urban ghetto where our home was and what we want to do was project ourselves on a sacred mountain. With technology, we were able to create our movement and transpose it to where we were in our imagination – let’s say a snowy mountain next to a beautiful tropical jungle. It brought us to a different sense of place, which is central to our work. 

The other one was more virtual reality-based. It involved building a story about surviving the apocalypse, which is the theme we had been working on right before COVID. It revolved around what our dream for the future is – what we want the future to be – and how we want to embody that in the here and now. “Portals” is the word we were using a lot for how we can maximize the virtual reality part, which was almost like a video game. I loved that. We were working with humble instruments, like little broken phones, and the brilliance of the collaborators.

This reminds me that most of the things I’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic are very dreamlike and about imagination. People really started questioning what they want and need – bodily in our dreams. It seems like there’s this space of desire, and energetically it feels good. 

This is a time when everyone around the world is in a pause or alteration of habits. What I’m offering in my dance classes is often about shifting out of habits. We might be hunched over because of sitting a lot, and we want to shift out of that habit. Or my habit as someone who’s got a lot of dance training is to move my limbs in a certain way. But we can move like a tree branch instead, more gnarled. We can always find what I call the liminal space, the space in-between established patterns, the unknown that might need to be recognized at this time. It is also about recognizing which patterns are worth keeping and which need changing just a little bit. 

Most of us are going through shifts, as large numbers of people are suffering. Whenever we’re in a shift, there’s an opportunity for change and we can decide what we are actually creating. Sometimes these decisions are made for us but we, as a global community, can work together towards a more balanced way of being. When the moment comes for us to move from the restrictions of ritual isolation – which many cultures have been doing in formalized ways – we should have a vision for what we want. It’s about being conscious of the choices we make when we leave that ritual isolation, whether that is seven years or seven days from now. This is a time to measure the impact of our choices and make movements that not only benefit ourselves, but benefit others; the entire human realm and even beyond the human realm. 

This makes me think of wintering and hibernation. Like the animals’ habit of getting more reclusive, spending time in one enclosed space, recharging, so that when spring comes or when nature shifts into a new season, they can go out again and live.

(Top image: Rulan Tangen. Photo by Paulo T. Photography.)

______________________________

Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA, studying dance, drama and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for the Artists & Climate Change blog, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

———-

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 Biborka Beres

CLIMATE VISION

This is the second part of a three-part interview with Rulan Tangen, founder of Dancing Earth. You can read Part I here.

Do you have a climate vision? Is there an overall message you would like to convey with your dances?

I started with a creative, intercultural vision. Now I listen for what wants and needs to be spoken at this time. Right now, we’re understanding this through the lens of the climate crisis. People of color across the globe, most particularly Indigenous Peoples, have already seen the destruction of their way of life and suffered cultural devastation. 1492 is a pretty good starting date for that. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to adapt and be resilient. That includes people of the Pacific archipelago, the archipelago known colonially as the Pacific Islands – my mother’s people and ancestors. 

People who are surrounded by water are incredibly vulnerable. On my father’s side, the lineage goes to Norway and Ireland. One could say that in Europe, oppression – in the form of witch trials that silenced women and crushed their intuition – started  even before 1492. What is now the climate crisis comes from these attacks on all these different ways of knowing and being in relation to the natural world. 

So, when you ask about my vision, it’s a huge question. What is the overall message? It is pluralistic, adaptive, resilient, and I can see three principles that have come through since we began working.

These principles will continue to move us, even though Dancing Earth is transforming right now due to COVID and the recent calls for social justice that ask who gets to use the term “Indigenous.” We’re transforming to meet these questions in the most responsible way, while honoring the gifts that we all have to give, including my own. Certain things might fall away, but what I believe will continue is the origins of me laying in a hospital bed, hoping there would be three principles.

One of these principles is that all of life is connected. We’re all part of this life force, this ecosystem. We can see it in the first 10 years of our dances, when we were dancing more often in the form of plants or the four elements than in the form of  human beings. This was to deepen our understanding of the life force that is in all. We often get caught in our human stories and our personal stories, which are important, but I was drawn to how we can embody the wind as a force of change, for example, and how that manifests in a human way. I thought I understood that all forms of art and life are connected when I was 20 – and then a year later, 10 years later, 15 years later, that understanding gets deeper and deeper. What you do and why, who’s involved, how you’re involving them…. Understanding that is a life’s journey.

The second principle for making our work is that beauty should be created out of whatever we have. I went into dancing looking for what I had experienced in my career being a full-time, paid dancer, in a grid studio, touring the world. I wanted these opportunities for everyone. With Dancing Earth, it was more like: okay, we don’t have a dance studio, we’re dancing in the parking lot. Or: we don’t have money for costumes, so I’m going to cut up little t-shirts and we’re going to look at forms and designs that come from the dancers, from pre-colonial, pre-Colombian ancestors, and cut up these little t-shirts and paint them in those forms, reclaiming those designs. 

The idea that what we have is enough is huge. It means thinking, “Oh, if only we could have real costumes”, and then starting to understand this lack as being eco-conscious. It was through the water theme, which was initially given to me by Oddish Navi grandmothers, that I found out about the toxicity of the fashion world. I’d been wearing secondhand clothes all my life. I love beauty. I love lines. I love colors. Yet, I aspired for something better. Then I realized that there was nothing better than not producing waste and not being greedy.

The interesting thing about dance is that it’s the one thing you can always do; I was dancing in the hospital bed with just my fingers. Because it’s with your body, it is the most basic, but also the most collaborative art form. It can involve music and poetry, costuming and architecture in the form of set design and lighting. Our dances can include food offerings and interactivity: people make little balls out of clay filled with wildflower seeds that get thrown. These seeds grow into wildflowers that attract butterflies and bees, which bring pollen the next season to create food.

The third very important principle, which is related to the first two, is that diversity is how we can thrive. Diversity and inclusion. They’re big buzzwords right now, and that’s good. Many creatives working at the grassroots level, who were under-recognized before, have now received some recognition. But for years, we didn’t even have food or funds to pay dancers. We met farmers who gave us food and showed us how plants grow together, and these became choreographies we honored the farmers with. The ways that marginalized artist groups create and adapt might become models. I’m interested in what brings us together, what the rhythm is. Whether it’s the rhythm of the moon or the heartbeat. And I am just as interested in what makes us different. The version that I as a choreographer often enjoy of what’s called unison movement is very different from what it is in my trained dance background, which, at its peak, is people of the same height, with the same body type moving at the same moment in the same gesture. That’s incredible and wonderful to see on a big scale. But I’m also interested in seeing the way grass moves with the wind, where it’s a little different with each blade of grass. Sometimes that might look a little messy to someone who is looking for something very precise. 

In fact, we’ll be shifting how we describe Dancing Earth to call it intercultural. This is to include native, global Indigenous, and mixed cultures that aren’t recognized as Indigenous by any federal institution. It is to acknowledge self-definition of peoples with relationships and creation stories connected to land and waters, whether they’re called Indigenous or not, and people who are disconnected from those stories. 

You mentioned life force and that everything is life. Is climate change, in that sense, this life force turning on itself? Since there is so much destruction…

Some of it is overproduction. That’s greed-based. How we counter greed is by understanding that what we have is enough. How do we counter overproduction? That’s at the expense of diversity. We want a certain kind of thing. We get rid of all of these trees because we want that thing only. How can we do that if we respect each form of life? There’s scarcity and suffering from some because others have too much. That is a basic imbalance. 

I think there’s power in telling the truths of what has happened to our communities. I remember hearing about fracking, but then a Canadian dancer came in to say, this is what’s happened in our community because of it. Wealth comes, but suddenly people are sick and we don’t have water from the tap anymore. To hear that  moves us from the intellectual sphere, from knowing that this seems wrong, to the heart and the spirit and the body, towards a visceral response. 

Interestingly, that’s not the part Elders want me to share through dance. They’re like, yeah, if the young people need to tell that. But we know that part. We’re living it, we’re suffering from it. What is needed is hope and remembering the beauty, the balance, the way of diversity and respect, the way of kindness and welcoming. We have so much energy for what we are against. But when it’s time to articulate what we are for, it’s harder. That’s where dance can be very, very powerful. 

There are so many different strategies of artistic creation, whether or not we use words. And if we do, what languages are they in? I actually love dance because of what it says in our minds. We work in imagery and feeling and sensation. Abstractions and approximations. The minute you use words, it all becomes very precise. In a way, dance is the transmission of energy in everything that’s missing. When you receive through certain kinds of witnessing of dance, it’s like an energy wave goes through you. You search for words. It’s beautiful. 

Then, there’s the power of visual imagery. It sticks with me. I dream about it. It’s imprinting. And when you need something specific, when a very specific theme has been given to you, then you have to use words to translate it. And if you’re with a primarily English speaking audience, you might choose English. Or, with our Southwest group, there were multiple languages. Those languages were integrated into the soundscape, and our bodies became interpreters. We were literally a large embodied sign language moving those images into specific forms for a more focused message.

That resonates a lot with me, with how I found dance. I’ve been moving a lot from words and theory to embodiment, and it’s an ongoing process for sure. I don’t think it’s about losing either words or body, but about their coexistence and incorporating them into each other.

I seem to always think in binary: “I’m in the head too much”, “I’m only in the body, I don’t do this intellectually”… We can pull all those together. This integration, this weaving together is actually a really potent area for new ways of understanding the world.

Even then I feel like I’m only understanding the theory I learned in the beginning of my studies through embodiment. 

There are times when the overall message you want to convey comes from the vision, intellectual concept, or stories that have been shared. Then, there’s this other entity that is hard to describe because it’s beyond words. It is a way of knowing and understanding that actually comes in through the physical process. Sometimes we don’t know what to do with that. We ask ourselves, “How is this even relevant?” What I keep saying is to trust our intuition and to trust our bodies, and we’ll find ways to bring it forth. It often finds its way into a ritual. And a week later in a dream, or a month later, or 10 years later, we find out what that thing was.

Many people around the world have origin stories that trace back to the stars. In recent years, science has caught up to this way of knowing that has been transmitted through beautiful stories – stories that were easy to remember because they were so compelling. All of life on earth comes from the heart of dying stars. We’re literally made from the carbon of stars. That’s another manifestation of how we are all related – through stardust. So, the stories, right? The stories were actually true; they were not mythology. They’re a way of knowing. Now we can say: here’s the science behind them. The stories do not just have to do with the past, but with allowing our bodies and imaginations to be conduits for intuition. Because they may be a way of conveying knowledge that we can’t get from any other source.

In the third part of this interview, we discuss the relationship between dance and science. 

(Top image: Rulan Tangen, Photo by Joe McNally.)

______________________________

Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA, studying dance, drama and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for the Artists & Climate Change blog, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

———-

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 Biborka Beres

RITUAL

Rulan Tangen is the founding artistic director of Dancing Earth, a company that creates contemporary dance and related arts through Indigenous and intra-cultural relationships centered in ecological and cultural diversity. Dancing Earth collaborates with artists, farmers, cultural advisors, and activists. They create eco-dance productions under the guidance of Elders who suggest appropriate themes – such as diversity or sacred land and water – that support the health and wellness of all people and the planet.

This is Part I or a three-part interview.

The word ritual came up a lot when I was discovering your work. Are rituals important to you? How do they relate to the mission of protecting the climate and the Earth?

I want to thank you for the opportunity to bring another texture to the story of myself and Dancing Earth. The origin story does have a lot to do with ritual. Any roots and seeds lead to a particular moment in time.

You can say that the origins of dancing go back to when I was born, or before that. At a fairly young age, I went through a stage 4 battle with cancer. It was quite likely due to living in poor environmental conditions, which are part of the legacy for marginalized people of color. I wasn’t aware of all of that; I was just trying to live. In a sense, Dancing Earth was a vision of a ritual of everyday gratitude for my life.

Who I wanted to have as the first circle of beneficiaries were people who had incredible talent and vision and ways of knowing, but who did not have opportunity or access to the performing arts. These were people I had met in my career dancing and teaching in many places, including in rural reservations. They were Native Americans and global Indigenous people, including mixed people with these heritages. The performing arts can be a conduit for visibility, but I hadn’t stepped forward to do that fully because of so many protections around what can be shared. 

A few years before the cancer journey, a woman from the Lakota Nation who had adopted me – my adopted grandmother – gave me permission to move forward with certain things. We had conversations about what would be relevant to share, so it’s almost like the cancer journey became an incubation period. Then, some of the young kids who had been students were ready to make this their full-time vocation. 

As far as ritual goes, what I was bringing in was the idea of taking responsibility as contemporary, modern-day people, to create rituals relevant to this moment. There have always been ceremonial songs and dances, visual imagery and oratory that would come together to form rituals of transformation – these are the origins of theatre in all cultures. Some of the participants in the group were part of cultures that had retained this direct connection, and others were revitalizing it. But when we come together as an inter-tribal or intercultural group, there are many ceremonies which are not appropriate to share; they are made for a particular group that share a language and a geography or season.

For example, one of the first dancers in the company is also an accomplished violinist. We had to think about evolving a form that didn’t necessarily have a European influence, since that had been so heavily prioritized. I myself was blessed to have a career in ballet and modern dance, but I wanted to consider whether it was these forms that needed to be on stage. Should they be in a circle? With a violin, we were looking at references to ancient string instruments and found that they represent the wind. The violinist first portrayed a whirlwind, which was circular, and it brought out his Capoeira proficiency; his mother comes from a line of Brazilian Indigenous people from the Amazons. Capoeira is part of his cultural and creative heritage. The sound of the violin was considered a representation of this whirlwind, which is a conduit for change. Like this, we went deeper into why and how we were bringing certain things into the creative process.

In every dance I ever made, where artists come together, is what I call sacred space. That space of creation and visioning brings in something that doesn’t exist yet, even if it’s a known art form or a story being retold. It also brings in a plurality of perspectives where everybody is valued and respected. 

I want to be conscious of the fact that there are ceremonies which still exist and have existed for thousands of years – and often what they need is protection. On the other hand, things come up that need a statement. We brought our water dances to various protests. Very different thinkers and performance artists have applied the word ritual to things like brushing your teeth every day. It carries a sense of openness towards the idea of a ritual, but we certainly invest in our rituals with the intention of transformation, including of the people who witness or participate. 

The word ritual is quite open-ended, and could be considered an invitation.

Yes, invitation and openness are very centered in my work. I wanted Dancing Earth to be respectful, cautious, and protective – waiting for permissions or taking gentle steps. I was a successful dancer working in New York and around the world. I was happy being a conduit for other’s visions. If anything, I was too intimidated to create choreography or to be a director. Then, when I went through that life-changing battle, I couldn’t dance. I could barely move. I was no longer able to be a conduit, but I definitely had dreams. When I share those with others, they become choreography and direction. Yet, I am still being a conduit for something greater than myself – there’s definitely something coming through me. It is shaped by me because it’s choosing my body to flow through. When we come in the circle, we always have a sense of what is in the middle and wants to be birthed through our process.

Is this a different source than someone else? Maybe a collective thing, or something non-human?

That’s a great question. We’ve been creating for 17 years, so there are many variations to this.

For me, it was coming through an intangible way of relating to the tangible. It’s about understanding life on Earth. It’s not about some other realm, but about the spirit and force that is in all of life. Variations – particular images or glimpses of that – would come through me and I’d bring them into the circle for other people to respond. 

When we started, we didn’t have a shared movement language. No school told us, here’s how to move. I had received 10,000 hours of training with a particular group to get to that perfect, refined choreographic language. There was a bit of an urgency – I had been given life for who knows how long. 

After a few years, there were a surprising and continued number of instances when Native Elders, specifically grandmothers from the Anishinaabe nation,  or a man who had a group from inter-tribal Southwestern nations, would come to us and say, “What you’re doing is important because it’s a way to transmit messages. Here’s a message we have. It is really important. Could you take that and make dances?” In one case, it was about water; in another, about seeds and plants, and how we make food. Each one of those dances has lasted and continues to impact our work. These aren’t projects that are ever done. It feels very different when someone gifts me with a story. They are not always stories that I need to tell, but themes that are given for which I hold respect. Often, they are given because they need to reach far and wide. In other cases I am asked to present them there, in the community, with the youth and Elders, with a particular language group. Afterwards, I can let them go to other places and each of those places and peoples can receive those themes and respond in their own ways. At Dancing Earth, we have a responsibility when we’ve been trusted to carry these stories. 

What you’re saying reminds me of movement, not only movement itself as a dance in some form, but also how the form moves, shifts, and changes.

You have just scratched upon a theme that came out of our work, which I call MOMB, like womb: the movement of movement building. Our first workshops when we recognized this notion were in the Bay area. Sometimes you do things for years and then you realize there’s a pattern and you give the pattern a name. We got the movement of movement building from the different practices and processes that we as artists, humans, and humanists come up with: ways to bring our message forward and adapt that message so it is relevant to every place, time, and people. It shifts like water. Our choreographic motifs come from very specific stories or socio-political intentions. There’s a relationship between what we present on stage in full ritual, and the qualities of light and timing and music. Then we take some of that same material and it morphs and changes for an action against pipelines on the steps of the Capitol, for example. They’re all different tactics towards an energy shift.

Thank you, Rulan.

In the second part of this interview, we discuss Rulan’s climate vision.

(Top image: Rulan Tangen, founder of Dancing Earth.)

______________________________

Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA, studying dance, drama and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for the Artists & Climate Change blog, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

———-

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 

This month we travel to a fictional island in Jamaica – Bajacu – to talk with author Diana McCaulay, whose novel Daylight Come was published in September 2020.

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a grueling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach 40 are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital.

Sorrel can take no more, and she persuades her mother, Bibi, to flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals, bitter enemies of the Domins, who have found ways of surviving in the hills, but she also knows they will have to evade the packs of ferals, animals with a taste for human flesh. Not least, she knows that the sun will kill them if they can’t find shelter.

Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love, and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

Thanks so much for talking with me! How did you get started in writing?

I’m a Jamaican writer, resident on the island, and I’ve written all my life, but mostly in secret. Reading is what got me writing. I loved books and stories as a child, and I wanted to move people I would never meet with my words, as I had been moved. I’ve always had stories in my head. My father encouraged my writing as a teenager, gave me books, and talked to me seriously about them but when I declared I wanted to be a writer, he told me women could not write literature because the only suitable subject was war – and women did not go to war. I believed him, so until I was past 50, I didn’t send out my work, often didn’t even finish it. Then I had a health scare and realized that if I were to hear I was terminally ill, the only big thing I would regret about my life was not publishing a novel. 

I completed my first, Dog-Heart, sent it out and it was rejected 12 times. Peepal Tree Press, still one of my publishers, said yes, and Dog-Heart came out in 2010. I’ve written five novels in all. My second was Hurcan, also published by Peepal Tree Press; Gone to Drift, published by Papillote Press and Harper Collins US; White Liver Gal, which I self-published as an experiment – not, I would say, a successful experiment. Everyone needs an editor! My most recent novel is Daylight Come, published by Peepal Tree Press in September 2020. I also have a day job as an environmental activist. I’m the founder and director of the Jamaica Environment Trust, which is 30 years old this year. I’ve been an opinion columnist for our main daily newspaper, The Gleaner, and have also written and published many short stories and articles.

What’s going on in Daylight Come?

Daylight Come is set in 2084 on the fictional Caribbean island of Bajacu, where it has become too hot to go outside in the day due to the climate crisis. Everyone works at night and sleeps in the day, but my protagonist, a 14-year-old girl named Sorrel, can’t sleep. She convinces her mother, Bibi, to leave the known difficulties of the capital city of Bana to travel to the mountains, where Sorrel believes that temperatures must be cooler, and it’s rumored that tribes of people live together in old and more satisfying ways. Daylight Come is a fast-paced, threat-filled adventure story, as well as a story about the changing relationship between a mother and a daughter as they face many dangers together and must consider what each of them is willing to sacrifice. As for the audience, I’m convinced that the climate crisis needs stories, because talking about the science has not had sufficient impact. And although I’ve read quite a bit of climate fiction set in large countries, I wanted to write about how this could play out on a small tropical island. So Daylight Come is for Caribbean residents, visitors, and the Caribbean diaspora, adults, and young adults, as well as everyone interested in and concerned about what the climate emergency might do to our societies. It’s not a polemic, though; hopefully it’s a powerful narrative of interest to anyone who likes a good story.

Can you describe the ecological themes in your novel and how you were inspired to write about them?

Three years ago now, when I first started thinking about Daylight Come, I was in the UK and read a story about construction workers in the Middle East falling from scaffolding due to the heat. When I came home, I started noticing how many people worked outside – farmers, security guards, policemen, traffic wardens, people selling in markets and on the streets, construction and road workers – and I thought, huh, suppose all of this wasn’t possible for most of the year? What would life be like in a place like Jamaica? My premise is that human civilization evolved in a stable and nurturing climate, and without that, everything we take for granted is under threat. I’m also interested in the human impulse to acquire materials things – Daylight Come explores that a little bit – and how easily we get used to comfort and plenty and seek more and more and more.

What has been the reaction to your book, and have you been able to do many book fairs or talks during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I’ve done quite a few online events – talks, panel discussions, a launch, book clubs, readings, interviews and so on. Daylight Come was released last September and due to the pandemic, travel and in-person events were impossible. It’s never been easy for someone like me, writing outside a major literary market, to promote my books, but the current situation is really daunting. The most common thing I hear from readers is that they couldn’t put the book down. They like how fast paced it is. A few people have asked me if it was depressing to write and my answer is no, it wasn’t. As Rebecca Solnit says, the future is not yet written, and the outcomes I describe in Daylight Come are not inevitable. We humans can, if we decide to, build different and better societies. I also get asked if the things I describe in my book could really happen, and all of them have already happened – not everywhere, but somewhere. It is very hard to market a book in the pandemic. There are so many online events now that it’s hard to get attention. Distribution is also a challenge: you might market, and then apart from e-books, your book is just not available.

Are you working on anything else right now?

Yes, I’m working on a nonfiction memoir called That Woman, which is about the intersection of my environmental journey and my ancestry. I’m the descendant of a Portuguese Sephardic Jew who came to Jamaica in the late 1700s and had nine children on the island with an enslaved (and therefore raped) West African women. But I have light skin so I’ve been racialized as white. My male ancestor was born a slave but went on to enslave others. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever tried to write.

Thanks so much for sharing your story, Diana.

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 Elizabeth Ellenwood

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of coral reefs. In 1992, my family sailed from Florida to the Bahamas. I still remember my five-year-old self mesmerized by the crystal-clear water and the world of creatures living beneath its surface. My “class time” consisted of snorkeling and observing the reefs: fish of all sizes darting in and out of vibrant coral structures, conch shells glistening and nurse sharks gently resting on the sandy sea floor, jellyfish camouflaging with the water, and, on the lucky days, spiny lobsters emerging from their caves. I was witnessing a thriving ecosystem. This formative childhood experience cultivated in me a lifelong love of the ocean. Less than 30 years later, the coral reef ecosystems are collapsing or have fully collapsed as a result of climate change. Now, as a practicing artist, I feel an urgency to help protect and bring attention to the vital reef systems that sparked my interest in the ocean.

Climate change means ocean change. The ocean’s temperature is warming, it is becoming more acidic, sea level is rising, and storm patterns and precipitation are changing. All of these factors individually create stress for corals. Combined, they have demolished the reef systems that have flourished for centuries. The coral reefs of my childhood memories are bleaching, and entire ocean ecosystems are vanishing due to the loss of their habitats.

The term “coral bleaching” has bounced around news headlines for years, but it took documentaries like Chasing Coral and Mission Blue to inspire me to dig deeper into the science. Corals get their colors from pigment-rich algae that live within their tissues. The coral-algae partnership is symbiotic, each supporting one another. When stressed from the ocean changes, the algae are expelled from the coral, revealing the white coral skeleton underneath. This bleaching triggers a domino effect: all living organisms that relied on the reef habitat either vacate or die, from the smallest plankton to the largest predator. The reef system is rapidly turning into a wasteland; no corals, no fish. This devastation is taking place on a massive scale and at a rapid rate, with nearly half of the world’s coral reefs bleached or severely damaged.

This devastation has swept through coral reefs in the Bahamas – the very ones that brought me so much childhood joy. I feel a loss for the diverse ecosystems that depended on the corals. Caught in a vortex of pollution, rising temperatures, acidification, and overfishing, thinking about humanity’s destruction of our waterways can be paralyzing. But to improve our relationship with the ocean and bring about positive change, we must fully understand the effects of our actions.

My research on coral reef bleaching led to the creation of my series, Fading Reefs. I am inspired by the biology of corals, driven by sadness for the loss of the reefs from my childhood, and compelled to shed light on this destructive cycle. It is important to me to create based on science and in a sustainable way, using environmentally friendly processes and as few materials as possible. One of the oldest photographic processes, the anthotype, uses the light sensitivity of plants and sunlight to create an image. Because these prints fade over time, it is difficult to research historical images, though documents and research track its emergence from 1816 to 1844.

I see the process of coral bleaching and the anthotype process as linked together. Making anthotypes requires time and patience. This process begins with crushing or juicing a plant to create the light-sensitive emulsion. A piece of paper is then soaked in the liquid and dried, absorbing the pigment of the plant. An image on transparency film is placed on top of the color-stained paper and then placed in direct sunlight. The image develops and appears on the page as the sunlight bleaches the pigment in the exposed areas of the plant emulsion. This is a very slow process; depending on the plant used and the strength of the sun, the printing can take days, weeks, or even months. Once developed, anthotype images will fade over time, especially if they are exposed to UV light. There is no way to make them permanent, which I see as a beautiful quality to embrace. 

In the 1800s, anthotypes were stored in what they called “night albums” and only viewed by candlelight to help preserve the images. Some artists build boxes or use black fabric over their framed piece to protect the prints while they are on display. When Fading Reefsis exhibited, I embrace the impermanence of the process and leave my prints uncovered to speak to the vulnerability of the corals. The anthotype process is a perfect way to tell the reefs’ stories, the bleaching pigment in the prints refers to the devastating loss of pigment-rich algae that not only give corals their colors, but most importantly keep them alive. The prints in Fading Reefs are delicate, time sensitive, and beautiful – just like our ocean’s coral reefs.

Just as the algae is crucial to the corals’ survival, the corals are vital to the oceans, and the oceans are integral to human life. It is possible many of us will go our entire lives without actually seeing a living coral reef, but we must work urgently to save these necessary ecosystems. Corals not only support an underwater ecosystem, they also provide for life above the water’s surface. Reef structures provide crucial protection from storms for coastal areas and offer an abundance of food that we consume. Studying individual corals and organisms living within the reefs even helps advance medical technology and treatments. No corals means an unhealthy and unbalanced ocean, which affects the entirety of the world. 

We all have skills and abilities that can help our coral reefs and waterways. Small actions have the potential to contribute to global impacts. Paying attention to what we consume, where we shop, and what organizations we support can support a thriving ecosystem. While half the world’s coral reefs have been negatively impacted, the remaining fifty percent desperately need our help. We need to get creative in our conversations and solutions, ultimately bringing awareness to and helping to protect these very special underwater worlds.

While Fading Reefs started with my memories and my call to action, it is ultimately about our shared world, our oceans, and our shared responsibility. It is my hope that my anthotype prints will not only act as a reminder of the rare and precious life that exists in our oceans, but also provide insight and perspective on coral reefs, inspiring viewers to become involved in ocean conservation and compelling individuals to acknowledge that the fate of the oceans and of humanity are woven tightly together.

(Top Image: Fading Reefs 4, Anthotype made with red cabbage.)

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Elizabeth Ellenwood uses photography to visually explore and bring attention to critical environmental issues. She is a recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Student Research Grant and an American Scandinavian Grant. Her recent solo exhibition at The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery was supported by a Connecticut Sea Grant Art Support Award. Elizabeth’s work was recently exhibited at The Newport Art Museum, Panopticon Gallery and The Vermont Center of Photography. Elizabeth received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from The New Hampshire Institute of Art and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Connecticut.

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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 Amy Brady

This month I have for you an interview with Tamiko Beyer, a writer whose latest poetry collection, Last Days, is out now on Alice James Books. Tamiko writes passionately about the climate crisis and how it’s driven by systemic forces like capitalism and racism. She’s also a social justice communications writer and strategist.

I spoke with Tamiko about what inspired her most recent collection, how she thinks about climate change beyond her writing, and the role she sees poetry playing in our larger discourse on climate change.

The poems in your recent collection, Last Days, are rife with images of plants, animals, and humans living and moving together. Is it fair to say that you’re encouraging readers to think about interconnectedness between life forms? Or perhaps that the boundaries between humans and other living things might be more porous than many folks believe?
 
Yes, that’s exactly right. I wrote Last Days as a poetic practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. I believe that one of the root causes of these crises is how disconnected so many of us feel to each other and the world around us. This vast disconnection makes it possible to internalize and enforce white supremacist structures. And, the exploitation of people and the natural world required by capitalist systems is made far easier when CEOs, workers, and consumers (that is, all of us) can disconnect from the harm we are causing to other people, other beings, and the Earth by our participation in this system.
 
I wanted to explore what it might look, feel, and sound like to live into the truth that we are all completely interdependent. How do I understand the ways in which I am more connected to than separate from the warbler singing in the laurel tree next to the tidal river? In what ways are we both dependent on the tree and the river, and the algae and the bacteria? What does it mean to move through the world as if we are all connected not just in the present moment, but also across time and space – connected to our ancestors and the generations that will come after us?
 
Your poems also speak to environmental crises. What else do you hope readers take away from this collection?
 
I hope that these poems encourage readers to follow their own threads of interdependence, and see how that might shift their relationships to the people and beings around them.
 
But of course, the climate crisis cannot be solved only by individual changes. I hope that some of these poems also encourage readers to think about the larger systems that are fueling the crisis, like racialized capitalism.
 
The central poem of the collection follows a small group of revolutionaries who are taking down the Corporate empire. As they do, the main character comes to understand her own power and trust her intuition. I think 2020 made clear to so many more people that we are, indeed, in the last days of the Corporate empire. We need radical, transformative changes if we – all beings – are going to survive the climate and related crises.
 
So I wrote this book for all the activists, organizers, healers, cultural workers, teachers, and artists who are doing the daily work of creating radically new worlds within this broken one. My wish is that these readers can lean into the hope that Last Days is rooted in, and that the poems offer ways for them to ground in their power.

Do you think about environmental issues, climate change, and related problems beyond what you write about in your poetry?

It’s impossible for me to live in this world, in this moment, in this body, and not think about and be affected by the climate crisis and its root causes – racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. As a writer of prose and poetry, and as a social justice communications strategist, I feel called to write about the structures and systems we are living under, as well as the ways that we can navigate through them, ultimately tear them down, and create new ones. 

For most of the years during which I worked on Last Days, I worked at Corporate Accountability, which wages campaigns challenging the life-threatening abuses of corporations, and I still write for them as a freelancer. So I’m often writing about Big Polluters, their role in fueling the climate crisis, and the solutions that are being led by communities on the frontlines of the crisis – Black, Indigenous, people of color; communities in the Global South; women; people with disabilities; and youth.

I also write about these issues in my newsletter, Starlight and Strategy.

What role do you think poetry plays in our larger conversations and thinking about climate and environmental issues?

Poetry invites us to think and feel expansively and nonlinearly, to listen closely, and be willing to be completely surprised. I can think of it as practice for how to implement solutions to the climate crisis. We need to listen to the people on the front lines who are already putting these solutions to work. We need to be expansive, radical, and unfettered by what we’re told is politically possible.

My favorite kind of poetry helps me understand language as more than just utility, but as magic. I’m currently co-editing a book with fellow poets Destiny Hemphill and Lisbeth White on poetry as spellcasting, by and for BIPOC. We are thinking about how poems are ritualized acts of liberation. One section of the book is devoted to the way poetry as spellcasting can help re-establish a reciprocal relationship with the Earth and help us move in right relationship towards healing deep wounds inflicted on ourselves and the Earth.

Some of your poems speak to the damage – ecological and cultural – wrought by colonialism. 

The collection as a whole grapples with the many manifestations of white supremacy, of which colonialism is one. Colonialism can only succeed when both the people who are doing the colonizing and those who are colonized feel deeply disconnected from the source and power of the land and the people.

I spent my first ten years in Japan where I absorbed both the fundamental Buddhist teaching of interdependence, as well as the form of animism that is central to the Shinto religion. I grew up understanding that things have a spirit – are beings – whether they are animate or inanimate, and that all beings are connected. These are ancient teachings, central also to Indigenous cultures, and colonization and imperialism have attempted at every turn to destroy such ways of understanding the world. No wonder we are in the crises we are in. In this collection I seek paths back into interconnection.

Your collection opens with quotes from three incredible writers and activists, including Audre Lorde. Her quote is: “I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.” How do these powerful words relate to the poetry in your collection?

Yes, the work of all three powerful women – Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs, and adrienne maree brown – were influential in the development of this collection.

When I was pulling the book together, I was reading Audre Lorde’s collection of essays, “A Burst of Light.” I spent a lot of time with the titular essay: diary entries as she lived her life with cancer. That line, that idea, appears in several places in the essay, and it stayed with me. I guess it’s another approach toward understanding how we are interconnected – we all have differences inside ourselves, and knowing how to navigate these differences in generative ways teaches us to better navigate differences with others to whom we depend on and are connected to. As a queer multiracial femme and a third culture kid, I’ve spent a lot of time navigating the differences inside me, and I was interested in what it might look like to think about how they “lie down together.” Many of the poems that address race and nationality in this collection is my attempt to do that.

Your approach to launching this book is a bit unusual. Please tell us about it!

In this political moment, I feel called to reimagine what I do and how I do it. So as I thought about launching this book, I was interested in how it could be a catalyst for new ways of thinking about the intersection of arts and organizing, poetry, and movement work. I developed an idea for a launch grounded in collaboration and solidarity instead of competition, one that operates within a gift economy instead of a capitalist approach.

The central component of this project is to give away Last Days and performance artist and poet Gabrielle Civil‘s forthcoming chapbook, ( ghost gestures ), to at least 250 organizers, campaigners, activists, cultural workers, and healers, prioritizing people working on racial, climate, and economic justice. At the time I write this, we’ve already got 175 people signed up to receive the books. I’m also organizing virtual “catalyst events” in the fall to inspire and activate people; creating tools for teachers to share the books with a new generation of organizers, activists, writers, artists, and cultural workers; and promoting other BIPOC writers with new books through my website, newsletter, and social media. And I created a successful fundraising campaign to power it all, asking people in my network and strangers to support this new way of launching a book.

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 Peterson Toscano

In the Art House this month, we feature song leaders Annie Patterson and Peter Blood. They are liberal Quakers in New England who have been leading singing for over 30 years. They talk about the songs that motivate and inspire climate advocates. Some are protest songs and others are beautiful ballads. They discuss the role of music in social movements as they offer up their own tiny desk concert. 

Annie and Peter are the creators of the Rise Up Singing and Rise Again Song Books. These songbooks take on social justice issues like racism, poverty, inequality, and sexism. See them in action on the Rise Up and Sing YouTube channel.

Annie and Peter appeared on Citizens Climate Radio episode 57: The Tide is Rising along with former U.S. representative Bob Inglis, a Republican fostering conversations with fellow Conservatives.

Next month, we meet Claire Vaye Watkins, author of the cli-fi novel, Gold Fame Citrus.

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 Joan Sullivan

This post is part of an ongoing series of occasional musings about the larger context in which we currently find ourselves: an energy transition, of which there have been several throughout human history. I have chosen Barry Lord’s important book, Art & Energy: How Culture Changes as our guide, because it sheds much-needed light on the reciprocal relationship between art, artists, and energy transitions through the ages. I also draw inspiration from the emerging field of Energy Humanities, led by Imre Szeman and his colleagues at the University of Alberta and the University of Waterloo in Canada. For previous posts in this series, please check here and here.

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A common thread throughout Barry Lord’s book, Art & Energy: How Culture Changes, is that energy transitions overlap. This may seem obvious and redundant. But readers of this blog will appreciate that the social and cultural tensions inherent to these decades-long (sometimes centuries-long) energy transitions – when the new trumps the old – inevitably result in profound changes across all sectors of society: transportation, architecture, agriculture, industry, politics, warfare, and culture. These shifting tectonic plates, if you will, have inspired artists throughout the ages – in the past as in the present – to respond with bold new methods of expression.

What’s different today, of course, is that 21st century artists are not just responding to the current transition from non-renewable fuels to renewable sources of energy. They are primarily responding to the much broader context in which the current energy transition is but one part: the global climate emergency that has triggered the sixth mass extinction. The stakes have never been higher. We need artists of all stripes and colors on board, ASAP. 

A tsunami of artists from all disciplines and from all corners of the globe have already risen up; many have found a home here on the Artists and Climate Change platform. But for those artists and writers who have not yet “found their voice” within the global climate movement, I’d like to suggest that they take a closer look at energy transitions as a source of artistic inspiration – as did JMW Turner in the middle of the 19th century. Turner witnessed the dying days of the “age of sail”, as tall sailing ships were replaced by smaller, polluting coal-powered steam ships that were not dependent upon the whims of the trade winds. 

An excellent place for artists and writers to begin reading about energy transitions is Barry Lord’s book. It artfully weaves together the history of the reciprocal relationship between art, artists, and energy transitions over the millennia. This book provides valuable insights to help contemporary artists understand the current energy transition within a historical and cultural context. 

Lord shines a light on artists who played pivotal roles in previous energy transitions by influencing (how I loathe that word!) social and cultural values that contributed, either directly or indirectly, to broadening the consensus for cutting-edge “alternative” energy sources. And, as each previous energy transition has already demonstrated, it is only a matter of time before these so-called “alternative” energy sources dethrone the formerly dominant energy source(s). 

The same can be said for today’s renewable sources of energy – wind, water and sun. While no one (yet) can predict how long fossil fuels and renewable energy will co-exist within the global energy mix, one thing is for sure: renewable energy will eventually dethrone fossil fuels to become the world’s dominant energy source. It’s only a matter of time. But time for the climate is running out… 

Moreover, the critically important questions of who controls the future production and distribution of all this clean energy, and its geopolitical consequences, are beyond the scope of this post. For those interested in a deeper dive into the energy humanities, I suggest the recent January 2021 special issue on “solarity” in the South Atlantic Quarterly.

My goal in this post is simply to encourage artists to recognize the historical precedent of previous generations of artists who, intentionally or otherwise, helped contribute to successful energy transitions by influencing the perception of and the cultural values associated with the “alternative” energy source. The current energy transition is no exception. Once again, artists can help us get there more quickly. 

Nina Simone said it best: “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” 

And how the times have changed! I only recently discovered that coal was initially considered an “alternative” energy source, i.e., alternative to renewables. Wood, wind, water, animal power, and human slavery were the dominant energy sources (all renewable) from the earliest human settlements right up into the middle of the 19th century. So it is quite remarkable how quickly this new “alternative” coal became the world’s dominant energy source: by the late-19th century, coal was crowned “king,” fueling the Industrial Revolution. Coal’s heyday lasted approximately 200 years, until it was usurped by oil and gas in the post-WW2 era. Although coal’s contribution to the global energy mix has been declining ever since, it still generates nearly 40% of global electricity. 

Having photographed the renewable energy transition for more than a decade, I’m eager to convince other artists and writers that energy transitions are truly fascinating and a rich source of inspiration! Not just from a technological perspective, but from many inter-connected social, cultural, historical, and political perspectives. Let’s be clear: today’s energy transition is definitely not just about solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery storage. As promising as these solutions are, technological infrastructure alone does not an energy transition make. What’s missing is the social or human component.

I’ve started calling this missing component of the current energy transition the “human transition.” By this I mean an awakening, a renaissance, an unquenchable thirst to break free from the chains of our lifelong addiction to fossil fuels. To fully embrace, in Lord’s words, the tantalizing possibility of a shift away from a “culture of consumption” (proscribed by the age of oil) towards a “culture of stewardship” (inherent to the age of renewables). 

This is where global artists come in: to wake us up from our stupor, like the protest music of the 60s and 70s.

Without music and poetry, without the deceptively simple lyrics and melody of the next “Imagine” which will be forever seared into our collective consciousness, I fear that the current energy transition will not evolve quickly enough. Technology alone can not do it for us.

This profound shift in social norms and cultural values requires nothing less than revolutionary transformation – at both the individual and collective levels – of the way our violent extraction-based society is organized. More urgently, it requires looking at ourselves in the mirror to confront the ghosts of acquiescence: why and how we have allowed ourselves to remain numb for so long to the unspeakable violence, injustices, and inequalities to both the human and non-human worlds throughout the entire fossil fuel era. Without critical self-reflection, a truly Copernican transformation seems unlikely. 

Technological infrastructure alone does not an energy transition make.

As we have learned from previous energy transitions, artists can and must use their creative energy to question the past and envision the future. I’ve purposely left out many of the more complicated and thorny geopolitical issues that are so well addressed by energy humanities researchers Imre Szeman and Darin Barney, co-editors of the previously mentioned special issue on solarity.

With their blessing, I’d like to end here by quoting directly from their introductory chapterin that journal. It is impossible for me to paraphrase: their words are so powerful, going straight for the jugular. Please take note.

The solarity we envision is committed to the core impulse guiding left politics, which is the struggle for equality and social justice against the rapacious force of extractive capitalism. The realities of environmental racism and the implication of energy extraction in ongoing colonial histories mean that any concept of solidarity worth the name must begin from the experiences of those whose bodies and relations have been made expendable through the brutality of extraction, and who stand to suffer most greatly from the accelerating climate and environmental effects of fossil fuels (citing Kathryn Yusoff, 2019). 

This means that solarity begins in solidarity with Black and Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere, with racialized and impoverished communities in the so-called Global South, with women, with care-workers, with those who have been disabled by their environments, and with the non-human others previously relegated to the exploitable domains of mere objecthood (citing Jamie Cross 2019; Sarah Jaquette Ray 2017; Sheena Wilson 2018; and Kyle Whyte 2017).

The first imperative of solidarity in relation to these will be to stand aside and accept their leadership in the struggle against the global fossil fuel regime, and in the development of radically alternative practices, relations, and infrastructures of solarity. This might include putting our (in our case: white, male, affluent) bodies and our accustomed ways of living on the line, as others have done for so long with theirs. As Nandita Badami argues in her provocative essay in this issue, we may need to turn from Eurocentric ideas about the sun and “enlightment” to a solarity of endarkenment.

The second imperative is to think and work together to develop political and economic forms that facilitate, nurture, and manage egalitarian societies, as an energetic base for even more widespread social transformation. A solarity animated by solidarity will require humility, patience, and courage, especially on the part of those for whom petrocapitalism has delivered mostly comfort, convenience and impunity. This, and not just our fuel source, has to change.”

Very powerful words, indeed. Thank you Imre and Darin.

(Unless otherwise noted, all photos by Joan Sullivan.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer and member of @WomenPhotograph, 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 eJoan Sullivanquipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

Multi-media artist and educator Itty Neuhaus has spent a great deal of time observing and interpreting environmental changes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and in Iceland and Greenland. Since 2000, when she took her first trip to Iceland, her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos have addressed the degradation of glaciers and the nature of icebergs. 

Neuhaus’ initial interest in the region was piqued by John McPhee’ description in The Control of Nature (1989) of an Icelandic physicist’s effort to divert the flow of a volcano by directing voluminous jets of water at it. She was fascinated by the notion of attempting to re-sculpt the Earth, as the scientist had done, and decided that she wanted to see Iceland for herself. On the flight there, Neuhaus observed a line of icebergs calving off a glacier and felt a sense of intense loss. In her attempt to process these feelings, she discovered a working method and subject area that would dominate her practice over the following years. 

During that first visit to Iceland, Neuhaus began a postcard series in which she removed areas of pretty tourist scenes by scratching away at the surface of the postcards with a stylus and superimposing ice melts and other environmental losses onto the idyllic imagery. She also observed the deep crevasses that existed in the glaciers and heard stories about individuals who had fallen to their deaths within them. As a result of the experience, she began to imagine that the Earth itself has a conscious volition and is luring us into its center – a notion that later led her to create a body of work on human bodies and crevasses.

With funding from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she has taught since 2000, Neuhaus continued to travel to locations where she could observe icebergs and glaciers. In 2011, she spent four months on a research and lecture fellowship as a Fulbright Scholar in Newfoundland and Labrador that included three months as an artist in residence at the Gros Morne National Park through Parks Canada. Her experiences helped her to understand how artists have an opportunity to educate the public on the climate crisis by translating big issues like habitat loss and environmental degradation into provocative imagery. 

During that time, Neuhaus continued to create what she refers to as “scratch works,” taking photographs of icebergs and scratching into the surfaces to show melting ice and other environmental impacts of climate change. For one particular piece, she sat on a rock waiting for an iceberg to flip over as the waves increased and changed. While she was waiting, she considered her hours-long observation to be a metaphor for how we are all simply waiting for the Earth to change in radical ways without implementing effective interventions. The underside of icebergs and their actual movements filmed over a period of four hours from a bluff in Twillingate, Newfoundland is reflected in a 2008 video entitled Dance of the Three-Pronged Wonder. In order to emphasize the mystery of what lies beneath the surface of the water, Neuhaus digitally altered these portions of the iceberg so that they appear to grow as the icebergs dance to a waltz by P.I. Tchaikovsky.

In 2015-2016, as a Fulbright Scholar on an Arctic Initiative, Neuhaus was the only artist among a cohort of physical and social scientists, economists, and others who were studying the degradation of icebergs in Greenland. Using a hydro-robot designed for the task, they were measuring the size, salinity, and other aspects of the icebergs while she was drawing and videotaping them. The work she began there culminated in a 2018 solo exhibition titled Sublimation: An Iceberg’s Story, which was held at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, New York. The show included a scratched composite photograph taken in Greenland, printed to a size of 27’ x 4,’ backlit, and hanging loosely over two gallery walls. It also included a video written and filmed by Neuhaus called Icylla, An Iceberg’s Story. Told in the voice of Icylla, the last existing iceberg in a world without ice, the piece incorporates a watery soundtrack, a gritty narration, animation, and stunning imagery of Greenland and Iceland.

Neuhaus completed Arctic Magnetism, a “scratch work” based on a photograph of the Russell Glacier in Greenland, in 2019 (see detail at the top). A large-scale photograph printed on film in two pieces as mirror images, it was created, as much of her work is, by removing portions of the photograph with scratch nibs and steel wool. Almost nine feet in length, the Russell Glacier looms over us as if sucking us in and pushing us away at the same time. With its dramatic imagery and frenetic motion, Arctic Magnetism exudes a sense of foreboding and serves as a metaphor for our own impending demise.

During the extraordinary 2020-2021 pandemic year, Neuhaus decided to pause from her usual subject matter and address the way in which the virus has imbued us all with a fear of touch. Instructed not to shake hands, hug, or conduct any normal actions that necessitate physical contact with other human being outside of our “pods,” we washed our hands constantly to prevent infection. Her series of monoprints and paintings, each 18” x 24,” consists of hands rendered in black and white in the process of washing. Shown together, the Wall of Hands emphasizes the redemptive and regenerative nature of water, which both cleans and heals. 

Neuhaus’ inventive works cleverly imitate the melting and disappearance of icebergs and glaciers. As she goes through the process of scratching at the surface of her photographs, she can viscerally feel how the ice is melting away and how the landscape she witnessed at one particular moment in time is changing before her eyes. It is imperative in viewing these frozen moments in time not only to serve as witnesses to this change but to do everything in our power to prevent further environmental loss.  

(Top image: Arctic Magnetism, photograph of Russell Glacier, Greenland. Printed on backlit film. Drawing by removal with scratch nibs, steel wool with water-based crayons, 106” x 44,” 2019.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and 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.

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By Thomas Peterson

Last Earth Day, I wrote about the evolving iconography and visual culture of the day, lamenting its gradual cooption by corporate greenwashing – protest art replaced by bee-themed Google Doodles. I ended the essay with a call to action, encouraging a return to the radical artistic visions that accompanied the first Earth Day in 1970: 

This Earth Day, and for all the Earth Days to come, we must find a way to strike that balance again. The stakes are too high for cute utopianism. Earth Day may have devolved into a corporatized greenwashing opiate, animated flora and fauna masking collaboration in ecocide, but it can become revolutionary again if we pair an unblinkered exposition of the extremity of the crisis with a reaffirmation of our love for life on earth. We must make images that tell the devastating truth about what is happening to our planet and the life that inhabits it, images so powerful they cannot be sanitized into endless cute bee oblivion. These images must radicalize us, radicalize us with love.

In the past year, I have attempted to answer this call in my own work. In just a few months, communities around the world will begin to perform the short plays commissioned for Climate Change Theatre Action 2021: Envisioning A Global Green New Deal, a project I co-organize with Chantal Bilodeau, Julia Levine, and Ian Garrett, and to which I contributed a play for the first time this year. We commissioned fifty playwrights from around the world to reckon seriously with the intensifying climate crisis and then respond to it with visions of a world worth fighting for, visions of beautiful, sustainable futures for the people and communities we all know and love. 

This fall’s Climate Change Theatre Action, beginning on September 19th and concluding on December 18th to coincide with the 2021 United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, will be the fourth iteration of the global distributed festival. Founded in 2015, Climate Change Theatre Action is a biennial series of readings and performances of short plays about the climate crisis, and a project of The Arctic Cycle in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Climate Change Theatre Action 2015encompassed 80 performances, reaching several thousand people around the world. In the fall of 2019, over 220 presenting collaborators in 28 countries produced events, engaging over 3,000 artists and reaching an audience of roughly 26,000 people. In the United States, collaborators presented over 150 events, reaching all 50 states for the first time. As we prepare for this fourth edition, we anticipate even greater global participation – these plays will soon grace stages, Zoom screens, classrooms, parks, perhaps even mountains, deserts, lakes, and seas.

Coming into this year, 150 short plays had already been written for Climate Change Theatre Action, 50 for each edition. If a through-line can be identified in this formally diverse and multi-faceted collection, the common theme is courage in the face of crisis. The 2017 plays search for kernels of optimism, provoked by the question â€œWhere Is the Hope?”, while the 2019 plays portray climate heroes who are â€œLighting the Way” to a just and sustainable future. As we considered guiding themes for CCTA 2021, straining for hope in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that the necessity for positive visions had never been less urgent, nor had the need for rapid, dramatic action to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and redress environmental injustice. So we asked playwrights to envision the societies and communities they hope to see on the other side of the unprecedented societal transformation that we must achieve if we are to mitigate the worst effects of a warming climate.

Facing the intersecting, compounding crises of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, racist violence, and skyrocketing economic inequality, people around the world are turning to a common framework for solutions: a Green New Deal. Just as policymakers worldwide are considering massive investments in clean energy, care jobs, and a regenerative economy, we asked the CCTA 2021 playwrights to consider what an equitable, sustainable, decarbonized, and just society might look like, in their communities or beyond. What would it look like if Green New Deals were adopted around the world, and these plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while addressing interwoven social inequalities became realities?

Fifty-one playwrights took on the challenge, hailing from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Uganda, the UK, and the US, and representing seven Indigenous Nations. 

The call for 2021 producing collaborators is now live, and the 50+ plays are available for perusal. Individuals and organizations are invited to host an event in their communities this fall – anything from an intimate reading to a fully staged show, and from a podcast to a site specific performance. I invite each and every one of you to explore the plays in the collection and to take action by envisioning a Green New Deal on stage.

I sincerely hope that as artists and activists around the world gather to enact these visions on stage this fall, the performances will radicalize us with love and catalyze the societal transformations we so desperately need.

(Top Image: “Climate Change Theatre Action 2021: Envisioning A Global Green New Deal” by Alex Lee)

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Thomas Peterson is an organizer, writer, and director whose work focuses on the climate crisis. He is an Artistic Associate with The Arctic Cycle, with whom he co-organizes Climate Change Theatre Action, and a field organizer with Green Corps. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and was a Williams-Lodge Scholar in Paris. He has written about theatre and locality, climate propaganda, the aesthetic of the sublime in climate theatre, and about the cultural history of the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn. He is currently developing The Woods Avenge Themselves, an original adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

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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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