By Rena Marthaler

How could it be possible to sing without heart? Any musician I am amazed by is a musician who I know has poured their soul into a piece, maybe even when they didn’t feel an initial connection to it. A musician has to find a way for the music to mean something to them. Fortunately, I was given the opportunity to sing about something that already had deep meaning for me, something I could pour myself into – our global climate crisis. I am 15 years-old, scared for my world and future, and now not only opening my eyes to this issue, but opening my ears. 

I am a member of the Shine Children’s Chorus organization, a nonprofit musical education and performance program for any youth in Portland, Oregon, directed by Lauren Fitzgerald. More specifically, I am in the organization’s oldest group, True North Acapella. In December 2019, we had the opportunity to join forces with the Portland Peace Choir for a “Beauty of the Earth” performance, performing pieces that engage with global climate issues with force and with grace. The Portland Peace Choir is a group comprised of singers of all ages who sing music for a cause – advocating for peace, equality, diversity, and unity. 

I was exhilarated at the thought of putting my passion for the climate into music, but I didn’t know going in that the very first rehearsal would bring tears to my eyes. I listened to the Peace Choir sing a gorgeous arrangement written by one of their own members, Janice Leber. As they sang Our House is on Fire, the youth in our choir spoke portions of Greta Thunberg’s speeches. I asked Janice after the event what led her to create something that had so much impact on me. She said, “I was already inspired by Greta Thunberg. The moment I heard that the choir wanted to sing about climate change, I started googling Greta Thunberg. The tune for Our House is On Fire was in my head by the time we got home.” The passion flowed from Janice and into the hearts of the singers as we performed her arrangement. 

Our other collaboration that night was I am the Earth, a piece that featured the Peace Choir as the Earth singing to the children, who responded in lines of song. This powerful conversation between generations felt alive, and resonated emotionally as we realized that this was a metaphorical conversation between the Earth and the next generation. The melody was dramatic, then becoming hopeful as the youth sang, “It is our time, we’re in your hands, together we stand, this moment in time we share.” 

This idea of coming together is vital to the climate change movement because while youth have the passion and desire to have their voices heard, older generations have the power to enact change. It is important for multiple generations to work together. The women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement had a generational gap between them that caused frictions in how to approach the issue. This led to conflicts within the movement, conflicts that I believe can be prevented with intergenerational partnerships such as ours. Barbara, a member of the Peace Choir, expressed, “It’s so incredibly beautiful to see all you young people here, knowing that you are going to step up and take stewardship of the planet, something we’re trying to do in our generation, which is such a struggle with the people that are such climate deniers. It gives me so much hope knowing that there won’t be so much of that by the time it’s your turn to take over the planet.”

One of the ways to close the generational gap is to find a common interest, such as the arts. The arts, in this case music, offer a way for people of all ages to protest and express care for the cause together. That is the mission of the Peace Choir, which is open to all ages. Jesse Cromer, director of the Peace Choir, explains it this way: “The goal is to come together – all ages, whether you read music or don’t read music – and sing for peace. We’re always looking to push the envelope for social change. If we’re going to come together intergenerationally, we have to come together musically. Children have a certain kind of wisdom, and people who have lived on the earth for longer – whether they’re middle-aged or older – have a different kind of wisdom. When you get all these different kinds of wisdom together, not only do the ideas flow like water, so does the spirit and the joy. We can see things and be open to things that we wouldn’t normally see and be open to.” 

The youth in the performance that night were able to see that there are adults who care enough to stand up for the next generation. We were able to get involved in the movement in ways that are familiar to us and that we feel passionate about. In many ways, the performance felt like activism – for one of the songs, we participated from seats in the audience, raising signs that you would normally find at a rally, during the chorus. 

Janice told us, “I have a poster up in one of my rooms that says, ‘Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, it’s a hammer with which to shape it.’” This just reflects and amplifies how each piece of art, every person, and every performance, shapes our future. 

(All photos by Sadie McRae.)

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Rena Marthaler is a sophomore in high school. She has been singing and playing instruments her entire life. She is the student director for True North Acapella, as well as belonging to another choir and to the two top school ensembles for band. She spends her time getting involved in her community, by volunteering at the Q Center every Saturday, facilitating a queer youth support group with her friend, and picking up any other volunteer opportunities that come her way.

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

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury

For this post, I explore the Antarctic via the novel The Lamentations of Zeno (Verso Books, 2016) by Ilija Trojanow. I had not reached out to Ilija before, though I read his book a couple of years ago and featured it at the Free Word Centre as one of my favorite novels that include the topic of climate change. For this series, we began a conversation through email. He sent me a photo from his current location – Samarkand, Uzbekistan – of a beautiful courtyard, with sunlight and shadow at sharply contrasted angles. In turn, I sent him a photo of a cedar in the rain covered in moss and lichen, indicative of the temperate rainforest where I live. With these introductions, we began discussing The Lamentations.

In the novel, Zeno Hintermeier, the main character, works on an Antarctic cruise ship as a tour guide to rather well-off people whose lifestyles of high consumption exemplify how we came about the consequence of climate change. This is in juxtaposition to Zeno’s sadness at the death of glaciers he has studied his whole life and at his marriage falling apart.

As the polar ice-caps melt, one man’s existential lamentations mirror our own personal and global crises. Zeno is not even a character we might like very well, but in a way, his collapse is like our planet’s, which reminds us that these dirges are natural. And the style of the novel is brilliant, seeping into us like cold meltwater. We are living in desperate times, and to gloss over the reality of it hints at a different sort of denial. Ilija faces it head on. What’s that old saying: when you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Verso Books describes the novel in this way:

The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age – perhaps of our entire history as a species – from an impassioned human angle.

My conversation with Ilija follows.

Have you been to the area of Antarctica where your story takes place, and what is it like now?

Yes, twice: once before I started the novel and once after I had finished my first draft, both times on a cruise ship similar to the one in the novel. The Antarctic peninsula is melting faster than previously expected, but otherwise it is a humbling experience of facing nature in its pristine form, a very extreme and heart-wrenchingly beautiful landscape that appears untouched by human intervention, so it was a fitting location for the inner turmoil of Zeno, my hero.

The word “lamentations” reminded me that while we have to learn to adapt to climate change, we also have a lot of regrets due to diminishing landscapes, species, and biodiversity. What are Zeno’s lamentations?

He is a scientist, who used to believe that his work on glaciers and climate change would supply society and policy makers with a rational basis for their decisions. This, however, is not the case, so he starts questioning our system of decision-making, our priorities as a civilization (by the way, many of the leading climate scientists are becoming more radical and challenging capitalism itself because it seems incapable of rationality). As someone who has dedicated his life to glaciers, he is also a wounded lover, someone who cannot bear the destruction of these beautiful entities, each one of them unique with a soundscape of their own, constantly moving and changing, a symbol of life. Thirdly, he laments the fact that we destroy nature, the mother of all existence, in order to produce things that are often superfluous, to satisfy greed and stupidity, so he becomes increasingly misanthropic (recently an anthology of misanthropical writing came out in Spanish and Zeno was the last excerpt, the last nail in the coffin).

How important do you feel it is for authors to tackle climate change in fiction?

Good literature has always tackled the major issues of its time, be it war and peace or crime and punishment or pride and prejudice. So how could we not deal with the major issue of our epoch, the ongoing exploitation and destruction of our habitats. I am amazed how many journalists in Germany, a country that is supposedly on the forefront of ecological awareness, asked me why I had to write a novel about this subject, as if it were a weird choice. Not to write about it would be weird, would mean succumbing to the blindness of an age that is pillaging the present and burdening the future.

I agree wholeheartedly. Are you working on anything else right now?

Always, can’t stop. I am working on a utopian novel. We have had an enormous amount of dystopian narratives in recent years, not only in literature but also in the movies, on the TV screen. We lean back, munch popcorn and delight in the apocalypse. That’s pathological. To form a vibrant and dignified and truly humane future we need to imagine it first, we need utopian (or eutopian) ideas, concepts, narratives. We could do so much better, why not imagine it within a novel?

Thanks, Ilija. I am looking forward to the next novel!

Later Ilija sent me a link to a Guardian article titled “We’ve never seen this: massive Canadian glaciers shrinking rapidly.”

The article states:

Scientists in Canada have warned that massive glaciers in the Yukon territory are shrinking even faster than would be expected from a warming climate – and bringing dramatic changes to the region. After a string of recent reports chronicling the demise of the ice fields, researchers hope that greater awareness will help the public better understand the rapid pace of climate change.

These massive forever structures are shrinking away before our eyes and ears. Maybe we cannot see or hear them every day, but they are there. And it is a life that should be respected and a vanishment that should be grieved. It is true in both poles. Going back to the Antarctic, according to NASA, there is a ramp-up in ice loss and sea level rise:

Ice losses from Antarctica have tripled since 2012, increasing global sea levels by 0.12 inch (3 millimeters) in that timeframe alone, according to a major new international climate assessment funded by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).

According to the study, ice losses from Antarctica are causing sea levels to rise faster today than at any time in the past 25 years. Results of the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

It is here that I will quote M. Jackson, whose book While Glaciers Slept moved me incredibly:

It is in these quiet moments that the glacier reveals herself in entirely novel and original ways. There is so much in life that can be missed if we don’t settle down for a bit. My life is full of distractions – deadlines, flights to catch, a smartphone that beeps away, life life life. Listening brings things to focus, and often times it is quite surprising what draws the attention of that quiet ear.

(Top image by Jože Suhadolnik / Delo. Downloaded from Vaaju.com.)

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 the lower mainland of British Columbia 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.

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By Peterson Toscano

Playwright Chantal Bilodeau returns to the Art House. Every two years to coincide with the UN COP meetings, Chantal and her team organizes an international event, Climate Change Theatre Action. They commission 50 short climate change-themed plays from 50 playwrights around the world. This past fall, over 200 communities organized events in 30 countries where they read some of these plays.

Chantal shares highlights along with good news about how the movement is growing both in and outside of the theatre community. A book with all 50 of the 2019 plays will be published in 2020. The collection of 50 plays from 2017 is available now.

The Art House is proud to present two of these Climate Change Theatre Action plays adapted for the radio. First, you will hear Dust written by Marcus Youssef and read by me.

It is followed by my play Bigger Love read by Jordan Sanderson and Israel Collazo, students at Susquehanna University. They play the parts of Kyle and Joey in their NYC apartment in the year 2028.

Photo: The cast of Climate Change Theatre Action 2019. Iowa State Daily—Britney Walters

Coming up next month, Rooted & Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis, a new book that fuses faith and personal narrative with climate action.

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.

(Top image: Performers Brandon C. Smith and Caiti Lattimer during “Climate Change Theatre Action: Setting the Stage for a Better Planet,” the official kick-off event of Climate Change Theatre Action 2019 in New York City. )

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 Portes

You may not know me yet, but I’m Portes. Nice to meet you. Portes came into being in the summer of 2018, like Venus coming out of the ocean riding on her seashell. Portes is the exploration of a new music identity that finally feels comfortable. I’ve been singing and songwriting for decades. I’ve had bands in the past, but eventually decided to go solo to have more creative flexibility, and sing and create the kind of music that I enjoy listening to and playing. I didn’t want to sing other people’s songs anymore; I wanted to sing my songs.

What does Portes sound like? I think the answer lies in whatever is inspiring me. No pigeonholes here. Before transmuting into Portes, there was more folk music in my song catalogue. But with the development of my artistry, I’m happy to find that sweet spot in dream pop, synth pop, electronica, and ambient music. That’s not to say that it’s where I reside all the time. There’s R&B as well. And, with all my fond high school memories of listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the 1990s, I simply love that “grunge” sound and am making my way back to it with my own personal Portes touch, especially in my upcoming album, “National Anthems,” slated for President’s Day 2020. 

https://soundcloud.com/portesmusic/human

I have a diverse family and educational background that informs my music. I was born in Guatemala and adopted as a baby. I came to the United States at six-month-old and was raised in Littleton, Colorado. After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Denver where I studied Art History and Anthropology. I was afforded the opportunity to travel to Europe during my junior year and I had amazing cultural experiences. I love to travel, and I fell in love with Germany. After college graduation, I worked various jobs and after being in retail and traveling around the country for jewelry shows, I decided to return to school to pursue a Master’s degree in Genetic Anthropology and International Development from Colorado State University. 

My degree included a research internship in Haiti. I lived there in 2007, in the mountain town of Fermathe. My home base was a residential facility called Wings of Hope. Children and adults with disabilities lived there and were cared for by Haitian staff and medical providers that visited from the US, Canada, and Europe. I traveled throughout the country, studying how individuals with disabilities and genetic disorders were treated within the Haitian culture. It was a life-transforming experience that brought joy and purpose to my life. I also made wonderful friends with whom I have stayed in contact to this day.

The night I came home from Haiti, I woke up in a cold, panicked sweat, disoriented and not knowing where I was. I hit the pillow again and realized I was home… but home now felt foreign. I walked down the aisle of my local grocery store and felt exactly like Jeremy Renner’s character, Staff Sergeant William James, in The Hurt Locker. I was completely overwhelmed by American affluence after three intense months living much more modestly.

While living in Haiti, some days we had electricity, other days we didn’t. Some nights, Wings of Hope ran the generator so we could watch TV, or, in my case, work on my graduate thesis on my laptop. Other nights, my roommate Gretchen and I would light candles and play cards, talk about life, love, faith, or play backgammon with a kind, but grizzled old man named Claude. He was a character for sure. He wore a patch over his left eye and was a “fixer.” He would fix all kinds of things for the children and adults at Wings of Hope.

Haiti lacks infrastructure in all senses of the word.  Very few roads are paved. There are only a few light signals in Port-au-Prince. Public transportation is an unorganized system of vans, buses, and trucks called “Tap Taps” because you literally tap on the side or the roof of the vehicle to indicate a stop. These are often brightly colored with music blaring. I’ve ridden on the top of a bus in the middle of the night with a “boyfriend” I met there. 

In the mountains of Fermathe, staff would collect trash and toss it down the hill behind the building. At first, coming from my privileged background of waste management every Wednesday morning, this was appalling. Sometimes animals, such as goats, would scavenge the land looking for remnants to nibble on. 

The coined phrase, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down,” never rang truer than while living there, except the one time I was visiting Port-au-Prince and had to use a communal toilet. 

There was no home for trash in Haiti and refuse would spill down the hillsides and flow to the shores and sea after a rain. Some Haitians would use their ingenuity and create art from the trash, to make valuable commodities for others, or, on the most basic level, to feed their families.. That is one thing I miss from living there: all the vibrant colors on canvases sold on the streets to tourists; reclaimed wood resembling a Christ figure or a “Restavek” in tattered clothing (the word comes from the French “rester avec,” which means “to stay with,” as in a slave, usually a child), or an animal. Some artisans reused old steel metal drums to create beautiful pieces of metal work with intricate details. 

Forward to today, it’s starting to feel like our trash is out of control even here in Denver, Colorado. I obsess over recycling to the point of feeling guilty if I miss an item. I hear reports that China doesn’t want our recycling anymore. So, what’s the long-term plan? I think about this often and I’m trying to find ways to reduce my plastic usage even more. One of the things our household is considering is purchasing glass containers rather than using plastics to hold food. We use canvas bags for groceries, rather than plastic or paper bags. I’ve also been researching homemade recipes for shampoo and other hygiene products to avoid buying plastic bottles. And there’s always the option of not buying so many products wrapped in plastics in the first place. 

After those three months living in Haiti, I changed several personal habits of mine including unplugging most electronic devices, recycling more, driving less, using less water while brushing my teeth, and turning off lights in rooms unoccupied, just to name a few. You don’t have to have lived in Haiti to make your own changes in the world. I encourage each person who listens to “Human” to find that one thing that motivates them to make the world a better place and to get involved in a way that makes sense and that brings out their own passion for change. “Human” is just one part of my contribution to art and climate change. What will yours be? 

To learn more about the political turmoil and current revolution in Haiti, see â€œDemonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting for an Uncertain Future” in The New Yorker and listen to the Haitian band Anmwey.

(Top image: Photo by Sierra Voss)

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Denver-based singer-songwriter Portes is not afraid to go head to head with controversial societal topics in her latest single, “Human.” She uses her angelic, lullaby-style singing to weave thoughtful, reflective lyrics into a striking song that implores the listener to unify and take action to improve human rights and global warming. Can you make a difference? She and her son, who joins her on “Human,” believe that you can.

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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 Yasmine Ostendorf

In recent months, Chile has received global attention, but for different reasons than initially expected. The capital city of Santiago was supposed to host COP25, the United Nations meetings where world leaders discuss how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But instead of being the proud backdrop for the political groundwork needed to usher us towards a more sustainable future, Santiago was all over the news because of its social uprising.

On a superficial level, the protests seemed to have been triggered by an increase in subway prices, but the reality was much more complex. The country had been a ticking time-bomb, fueled by built-up anger and frustration over its unfair social systems, extreme neoliberalism and increased privatization – remaining legacies of the Pinochet dictatorship. Even though the media tried to prove otherwise, the protests were mostly peaceful, full of music, art and other forms of creativity. They only became violent when the police started responding with extreme violence. 

As the protests escalated, COP25 had to be moved to Madrid. Still, the majority of the Chilean protesters had shown their courageous and creative side. Song, graffiti and street-art brightened the streets, and the whole world was introduced to “Un violador en tu camino,” the powerful Chilean anti-rape anthem initiated by Lastesis, that went viral and fueled a movement of feminist protests across Latin America and beyond. Another personal favorite is the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, whose statement on the protests can be read here. 

Creativity proved once again to be central in the fight for a better future, so the time is ripe for another personal list of Top 10 Most Exciting Art/Sustainability Initiatives, this time in Chile (as always, in random order). Because of its long shape and 6,000 km coastline, Chile has some of the most (bio) diverse and astonishing landscapes in the world. The country stretches all the way from the dry Atacama desert in the north to the volcanoes, glaciers, and ancient forests in the south. Its natural environment is of incredible beauty and importance, and the art initiatives listed below admire as well as address that.

1. LABVA

This innovative and experimental biomaterials lab is located in Valdívia in the south of Chile. Occupying an old building constructed in 1906, Labva is essentially an independent and self-managed community laboratory and kitchen, where artists cook up biomaterials, grow biomaterials and research local and circular economies. Labva aims to bring science closer to the community, focusing especially on new materials or open biomaterials. 

2. FUNDACIÓN MAR ADENTRO

Fundación Mar Adentro is the steward of Bosque Pehuén in Auracanía Andina, Chile, a 882-hectare Natural Reserve sitting between the Villarrica vulcano and the Quetrupillan vulcano – a stunning area known for its abundant biodiversity. Fundación Mar Adentro founded this private conservation initiative in 2006 with the belief that “to preserve, one should understand,” conceiving the place as an outdoor research lab. Ever since, they have been developing multidisciplinary and collaborative initiatives in art, education, and nature that encourage recognizing the value of the Chilean natural and cultural heritage.

3. VALLEY OF THE POSSIBLE

Valley of the Possible is an independent cultural non-profit that offers artists, scientists and other thinkers and makers a place to connect with nature, time for research, and space for artistic development. Located in the stunning Cañon del Blanco valley in La Araucanía Andina, the place is surrounded by ancient volcanic landscapes with abundant biodiversity and a strong Indigenous presence. The works and narratives that are created as part of the projects and residencies encourage thinking and acting ecologically. The founders believe it is essential to support the parallel development of ecological and economical shifts that re-addresses the wisdom, tradition, and culture of Indigenous people and the importance of their cosmology. 

4. MUSEO DEL HONGO

This nomadic museum of art and science has one obsession: mushrooms, and anything to do with mushrooms. Museo del Hongo even operates in mycorrhizal ways, spreading its spores across Chile and beyond through fungi-inspired performances, fashion, magazines, exhibitions, and educational workshops. And, like mycelium, it has a central role in a vast network, connecting people, resources, and knowledge. Museo del Hongo collaborates closely with many partners, including the Chilean Fungi Foundation. It functions with the versatility and resourcefulness of the fungal ways of living and working. 

5. LAWAYAKA CURRENT

La Wayaka Current is an artist-led initiative whose main focus is to develop ways to engage people with the pressing environmental and philosophical questions of our time through self-reflection, arts, and culture. This is in response to the increased loss of connection between humans and the natural world, and the global socio-political and environmental problems that have arisen due to this distancing. Since 2015, La Wayaka Current has orchestrated alternative residency programs in various remote natural biomes, often in collaboration with indigenous communities. Participants connect to the rich biodiversity, culture and ancestral knowledge of a place, in order to recognize and value these things in light of the present ecological crisis. The aim is to investigate the potential to form new perspectives through creative practice and critical thought. 

6. MAGMA/LAB

MAGMA/Lab is an artist-run space for creative experimentation, located in Pucón in the Araucanía region. The artists work in various disciplines, including ceramics, engraving, graphics, visual art, design, and furniture, always taking nature as point of departure. Programs include workshops, design services, as well as projects on sustainable solutions for various local challenges. The founders believe that local commerce and respect for nature don’t have to be at odds with each other, and they seek to strengthen the creative industry of the beautiful Araucanía region, without harm to the environment.

7. THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF RÍO SECO (MHNRS)

The Natural History Museum of Río Seco (MHNRS) is a space of convergence between disciplines related to arts and sciences that assimilates and reflects on the natural and cultural heritage of the Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic region. This space was created with the purpose of embracing and disseminating knowledge regarding the southern Pole through the development of collections, which mainly relate to the natural and material history of the extreme south of Chile. Through community experiences, academics, professionals, specialists, students and visitors from diverse backgrounds are invited to think critically, and develop an understanding of the challenge of inhabiting a territory where the natural environment is key to cultural development. 

8. ENSAYOS TIERRA DEL FIEGO

The nomadic research collective Ensayos Tierra del Fuego‘s practice is centered on extinction, human geography, and coastal health. The members of the collective honor the Indigenous Selk’nam, Yaghan, Kawéskar and Haush peoples on whose ancestral lands and waters they conduct research and learn – mostly in Tierra del Fuego (the southern tip of Patagonia) and other archipelagos. The land is rich in fungi and plant species and home to unique Patagonian wildlife. Ensayos Tierra de Fuego believes that understanding environmental change requires sound science. Through their work, they underline the fact that making choices about Earth stewardship involves ethics, aesthetics and critical geopolitical perspectives.

9. REVISTA ENDÉMICO

Revista Endémico is a bi-annual magazine and online platform that creates spaces for art and environment. From issues on the mysterious world of oceans and the challenges to preserve marine ecosystems, to interviews with artists who have participated in projects and residencies, Revista Endémico publishes superb images and top-notch writing. The platform is a great resource to learn about both environmental and artistic practices in Chile. Revista Endémico is an initiative of  Hola Eco, a group of bloggers who converge on an essential point: their mutual quest for a more balanced lifestyle with the planet and themselves. 

10. CIUDAD ABIERTA

Picturesquely tucked away in a national park in Ritoque, north of Valparaíso, one can find Ciudad Abierta â€“ the Open City. Covering 270 hectares, this landscape is home to an extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna, wetlands, cliffs, dunes, and gorges, and dotted with an impressive array of architectural interventions. Founded in 1970 by a group of poets, philosophers, sculptors, painters, architects and designers, it still functions as an experimental architecture school, with several workshops and workspaces for artists, designers, and architects. Several of the founders still live on site and all decision-making processes regarding new architectural and experimental interventions are made collectively and democratically during “Heart Open” table discussions. 

In addition, I should mentioned the Tompkins Foundation and CAB Patagonia, which are doing incredible work in nature and cultural conservation in Chile; curator Rodolfo Andaur has been taking artists around Chile, researching the different geographies of the country through the critical and reflective lens of contemporary art; and The Pearl Buttonis a beautiful film about the relationship of people with the water in Chile. 

I express my deep gratitude to Valley of the Possible for the incredible research trip in Chile in December 2019, which formed the foundation for this list. 

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

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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

I am thrilled to bring you this month an interview with climate justice essayists and podcast hosts Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt. With their podcast, Hot Take, both writers/hosts are approaching climate change in a way that so many artists and novelists do: through emotional, heartfelt storytelling. The podcast examines trends in climate storytelling across mediums, and future episodes will possibly feature novelists, poets, and other creatives. The podcast launched late last year but has already made waves among writers and media types. In this interview, we discuss what inspired the podcast and why allowing emotional responses to the climate crisis into the public arena is just as important as making space for scientific research. 

What inspired you both to start the Hot Take podcast?

Mary: Amy approached me about a podcast a couple of times. First, the idea was to develop a podcast on my own, which felt a bit overwhelming, but I did throw around ideas about climate messaging and intersectionality. A little later, she mentioned that she was going to start a podcast on climate news, and wondered if I would be a co-host. Then, the wheels got to turning about combining that with the ideas we had for the solo show. That turned into ideas for a media criticism show and as the concept developed, we grew more and more excited and were asking ourselves, â€œomg, how has no one thought of this before?”

Amy: Yes, exactly! The idea sounded sort of narrow at first, but the more we talked about it, the more we realized we had a lot to say on the subject and a lot we wanted to explore, and we felt like a lot of people wanted to talk more about climate storytelling but there was no place to really do that. 

Your first few episodes are dedicated to reviewing the last four years’ worth of climate coverage. What major trends have you seen in journalistic storytelling? Did any of them surprise you?

Mary: [Climate storytelling] got so much more emotional. I think for a really long time, the climate conversation had been wedded to the idea of a very strict set of best practices: you must be hopeful, you have to emphasize individual actions, “we” are responsible for this. All of that got thrown out of the window in the past couple of years. Sure, there are still messages of hope, but there’s also fear and anger and sadness. In other words, there’s more honesty. The conversation had been largely democratized. It used to be that you had to have a certain level of access to know how bad our situation is, but now everyone knows. I don’t know if I’m surprised by [these increases in emotional responses and accessibility] so much as I am simply delighted. 

Amy: We recently finished working on the 2019 episode, the last of the recap episodes, and were bowled over by how, for the 2016-2017 episode, we had to really hunt for stories, but by 2019 we had more than we could feasibly include. So just in terms of quantity there’s been an explosion in climate coverage, which is great to see. It’s also gotten so much more diverse both in terms of who gets to write about climate and what counts as a climate story. I don’t remember reading many, if any, personal essays on climate five years ago, for example – climate storytelling was often confined to either policy stories or science stories. Now the media is starting to deliver on the idea of climate as a lens and not a distinct issue (which coincidentally is how I think we need to approach acting on climate: holistically, systemically, and not just tackling the energy source!) 

This newsletter is dedicated to art and literature, but journalism is also a kind of storytelling – a vital one that largely shapes how we discuss the climate crisis. Any predictions for how the climate narrative will unfold in 2020?

Mary: We also plan to weave in more fiction as we continue, and I’d say that most personal essays are literary, and those have exploded on the climate scene in recent years. I think we’re going to begin to see way more of that. I also think we’re going to see more usage of different mediums. For one thing, there’s a lot of room for more podcasts and a desperate need for more climate storytelling in video format. I think the tone is going to continue to get bolder and stronger. The climate movement is done with being polite. They’re ready to go to the mattresses. 

Amy: I predict we’ll see more and more narrative approaches on climate. Drilled, the other climate podcast I do, is still one of the only narrative podcasts on climate, which seems nuts to me given how many climate stories are unfolding all the time. Given Hollywood’s growing interest in climate and the desire for character-driven narratives there, I think we’re bound to see more of those sorts of stories. I am also thrilled to start seeing the first inklings of humor and satire being used effectively on climate, and I suspect (hope!) we’ll see more of that, too. Sarah Miller’s piece in Popula, about Miami real estate and sea-level rise, is a great example. So is Katy Lederer’s piece on the COP climate negotiations in n+1. 

A subject that comes up often on your podcast – and in both of your writing – is the validity of intense emotional reactions to climate change. Why is allowing for an emotion response – as opposed to a purely rational and scientific one – important?

Mary: Because the scientific one hasn’t worked! If we had rational leaders in place who wanted to solve the problem, then sure, all we need to do is present them with the evidence and go on our merry way. But, that’s not where we’re at. This isn’t a war on “facts.” This is a war on “power.” And power doesn’t surrender to simple “facts.” It never has. If it did, it would never have existed. To challenge power, you have to make noise, and to make noise you have to feel something. But also because I don’t want to be the one who watches my world slip away with cool detachment. I’ve seen people get furious about missing a green light or a subway train and then laugh off Camp Fire or Hurricane Maria as “well, what are you gonna do?” I don’t want to be that person. 

Amy: Because climate change is a trauma inflicted on humanity by a few humans. And you cannot process a trauma and get to action without experiencing and confronting a whole range of emotions: grief, anger, shame, guilt, sometimes all at once. And because we can’t accept others’ emotions if we don’t accept and process our own. I think that work is really critical to moving past the various blockers to climate action. 

What voices and stories would you like to see more of in the climate conversation?

Mary: I want way more people of color and women. To get real specific, I want to hear from more Indigenous women. Their experience is critical, and when they speak, I want everyone to listen. The same goes for the disabled community. I’ve learned so much from voices from that community over the past year and it’s been really instructive. 

Amy: Dammit, the exact same! Indigenous women, disabled people, and I’d also like to hear more from Latinx writers, particularly from those who are connecting the dots between climate change, eco-fascism, and immigration. 

What do you have planned next for Hot Take?

Mary: Ha, I think that’s hard to say since we just got started! But already in 2020, we’re going to start taking listener’s questions and inviting guests onto the show, with priority given to climate storytellers. We feel like there’s already a lot of spaces for experts like scientists and policy analysts to talk about their craft vis-a-vis climate, but precious few of them for climate storytellers. I’m really excited to get those conversations going. I think they’re going to be cathartic. 

Amy: Yes! There’s an element to the show that I don’t know if we totally planned for, and that is the therapeutic catharsis stuff. Talking through our own emotional responses to the problem, looking at all the different ways the story has been told, it’s kinda the thing that we both say about the need for emotion in this space. Looking at it from a variety of angles actually really helps to process and get to a place where action is possible. We hope to do that for other climate storytellers, and our listeners, too.

Any other projects you’d like my readers to know about?

Mary: Not so much for me. Amy? 

Amy: I do! Drilled season three is launching January 21st, and we’ll also be launching a new climate accountability reporting project that same day, which will include a website for both reporting and essays, two newsletters (we’re sponsoring Climate Liability News and Heated), and a handful of audio projects, too. We’ll be working with various partners to collaborate and amplify as well, including HuffPost, New York Magazine, and some others I can’t talk about yet. When I say “climate accountability,” I mean we’ll be digging into all the various reasons for delayed action on climate. So the role of the fossil-fuel, automotive, and manufacturing industries for sure, but also less obvious things like how the language we use impacts action, how different messaging frameworks have or haven’t worked, why the IPCC kept social scientists out of their process for so long, really trying to examine all the big blockers. 

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 Susan Hoffman Fishman

For over four decades, New Mexico-based environmental artist Basia Irland has created projects about water that focus on rivers, waterborne diseases and water scarcity. Her extensive body of work includes sculptures, installations, books, essays and videos that have connected with, engaged and educated local communities in Africa, Canada, Europe, South America, Southeast Asia and the United States.

In our recent phone conversation, Irland admitted that she is obsessed with water. She describes it in her artist’s statement as “marvelously mysterious” in all of its gaseous, fluid and frozen states, complex in its science and behavior and endlessly nourishing to her soul.

Irland’s interest in water began as a child growing up near Boulder Creek in Boulder, Colorado. She would often go to the creek for solace and contemplation, and developed a deep personal connection to water that continues to this day. Similarly, on visits to her grandfather’s farm in Texas, where a water pumping windmill drew the family’s only available water from the ground, Irland observed in real time what happens when drought occurs and access to water dries up. Although these experiences informed her work, she insists that the water itself was the greatest influence on her career as an artist. For a 2018 interview in Interalia Magazine she explained, “I am a humble student constantly learning from tiny rivulets, dammed streams, wild and scenic river systems, or major waterways.”

Since Irland is such a prolific artist and doing justice to all of her work would require a full-length book (Ireland has already written two comprehensive books on her career: Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland  (2017) and Water Library (2007)), I’ll focus here on three projects that represent her commitment to integrating art with science, her method of successfully engaging community participants and her ability to imagine how water would speak for itself.

Ice Field

Ice Field, one of Irland’s early projects, anticipated by many years the more recent alarm over glacial melting. Twenty years ago, when climate disruption was a non-issue for most of the world, Irland spent time hiking on a number of glaciers, including those at Lake Louise, a lake fed by meltwater from nearby glaciers in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

Inspired by these hikes across glaciers and her observations of meltwater, Irland began thinking about a future when there would be no more glaciers on the planet and meltwater would be the only way scientists could study them. Knowing that meltwater contains microbial populations, nutrients and metals that escape from glaciers and feed downstream ecosystems, Irland developed an installation entitled Ice Field. She used some of the instruments of scientific research – petri dishes, vials, test tubes and flasks filled with water and stones – as both an artistic interpretation of a future scientific study set in a pristine lab and an ode to the melting glaciers themselves. A second version of the original Ice Field was installed in 2015 as part of a major retrospective of Irland’s work at the Museum De Domijnen in the Netherlands.

Ice Books

In 2007, Irland was invited to participate in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art entitled “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change.” The exhibition was curated by renown American activist, feminist, author and art critic Lucy Lippard, who asked the participating artists to create new pieces about climate change in collaboration with scientists.

Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of what is now more accurately referred to as climate disruption or climate crisis, Irland wanted to do something that would both call attention to an important environmental issue within a positive framework, and promote activism. A sculptor at heart, she chose to carve a 250-pound block of frozen river water into the shape of an open book in honor of the nearby Arapaho Glacier. The glacier is melting rapidly and, along with the snowmelt, provides drinking water for the town of Boulder. Imbedded into the ice book was its “text,” comprised of the seeds of plants native to the Boulder Creek ecosystem.

Irland worked with a local botanist to determine which seeds to use. Ultimately, the seeds of mountain maple, columbine flower and blue spruce were selected. (See image at top of this article.) As Irland describes, “the seeds form the ecological language of the book and just as we learn from books, we can learn from the river.” Once the ice book had been carved and the seeds had been added, the book was released into the water with the participation of the local community. As the ice melted, the seeds would implant themselves into the riverbank to restore the ecosystem as they traveled downstream.

That first book in 2007 became the prototype for an on-going series of ice books, entitled “Ice Receding, Books Reseeding,” which Irland continues to make in consultation with stream ecologists, river restoration biologists and botanists. In several locations, Irland imbedded other materials into the ice books instead of seeds when local river conditions would benefit from that change. For example, she used chunks of limestone at Deckers Creek in West Virginia in order to reduce the high level of acidity in the river water that had been caused by acid mine drainage. She also incorporated krill into the ice book released into False Creek in Vancouver, Canada so that smaller fish that ate the krill would attract salmon into the river again.

The creation of subsequent ice books always included participants from the local communities around the globe where she had been invited. Whenever possible, Irland also partnered with Indigenous tribes in the area. Participants assisted with implanting the seeds into the books and launching them into the water. In recognition of their gift of participation to the project, Ireland provided gifts in return, such as seeds, maps of the river’s watershed and other items of relevance. The video below provides an overview of Irland’s innovative global Ice Book projects.

River Essays

In 2014, Irland was invited by Sandra Postel, director and founder of the Global Water Policy Project and Freshwater Fellow at the National Geographic Society, to write an essay on her Ice Books for the Society’s blog “Water Currents.” That first essay led to a series of 17 additional pieces that she wrote for the blog from 2015-2017, entitled “What Rivers Know.” (Irland has written additional essays in the series not published in “Water Currents”).

Each of the essays is written in the first person from the point of view of a particular river. The essays give a voice to the rivers and the sense that they have knowledge, memory and mythic powers equal or greater than our own. An excerpt from the February 2016 River Essay on the Ping River in Chiang Mai, Thailand and the video “What Rivers Know” below provide examples of the river as subject/speaker:

On the night of the twelfth lunar month during the full moon at the end of the rainy season, communities gather along my banks to pay homage to me, and my water spirits. They thank the Goddess of Water, Phra Mae Khongkha (พระแม่คงคา), which is the Thai form of Ganga, the Hindu goddess of the holy Ganges River, India. It is also a way to beg forgiveness for polluting and abusing me during the past year.

This festival of lights is called Loy Krathong (ลอยกระทง). The name is translated as “to float a basket”, and refers to the tradition of making krathong or buoyant, banana-stem sculptures that are decorated with folded banana leaves and contain flowers, incense, candles, and coins (an offering to the river spirits). These sculptures are floated on my moist skin in the evening forming a candle-lit parade dancing downstream. Lights hanging from trees and buildings, and a multitude of hot-air lanterns rising up into the night sky reflect on my body, creating a myriad of new constellations…

Basia Irland is a pioneer in addressing the complex issues affecting water. Before many artists and certainly the general public were focusing on climate disruption, she was already thinking about the eventual absence of glaciers and the interconnectedness of our global waterways. All of Irland’s work encourages each of us to become better recipients of the deep knowledge our rivers have to offer. It is her personal commitment and passion for the wonder of water, though, as well as the impact of her work on local communities all over the world that should inspire us all.

(Top image: TOME 1. Ice and seeds of the mountain maple, columbine flower and blue spruce, Boulder Creek, Colorado. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and videos are courtesy of Basia Irland.)

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. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the US and she has received numerous grants and commissions. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and drawings have focused on water and climate change. She co-created a national, interactive public art project, The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and 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 – dead trees that have been exposed to salt water 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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I was thrilled to talk with Rajat Chaudhuri, author of The Butterfly Effect (September 3, 2018, Olive Turtle, Niyogi), which Scroll.in describes as a novel that “blends mystery, eco-fiction and a Russian doll narrative.” Truly this story is a wild ride, with brilliant and Ballardian descriptions and actions of a future world that I don’t think we want to be in, but which are vibrant and alive as well as deadly. The story jumps around the map, beginning in India.

A self-obsessed Calcutta detective who goes by his last name, Kar, an enigmatic internet cafe hostess in Seoul, and a hotshot geneticist laboring away on a top-secret corporate project: these are just a few pieces in the puzzle that need to be put together to explain a world sucked into the whirlpool of the butterfly effect.

In the decaying capital city of a near-future Darkland, which covers large swathes of Asia, Captain Old – an off-duty policeman – receives news that might help to unravel the roots of a scourge that has ravaged the continent. As stories coalesce into stories – welding past, present, and future together – will a macabre death in a small English town or the disappearance of Indian tourists in Korea help to blow away the dusts of time? From utopian communities of Asia to the prison camps of Pyongyang, and from the gene labs of Europe to the violent streets of Darkland – riven by civil war, infested by genetically engineered fighters – this time-traveling novel crosses continents, weaving mystery, adventure and romance, gradually fixing its gaze on the sway of the unpredictable.

The genre-blurring tale left me hanging on edge as I discovered a new world through Rajat’s imagination, and I would recommend this book highly. I talked with Rajat about his new novel. He explained that The Butterfly Effect is a transcultural novel, which crosses borders while also switching back and forth in time. The major settings of the book are India (present and near-future Calcutta), England (London and southern England), South Korea (Seoul and other places), North Korea and China (minor setting). 

What motivated you to write this novel?

The book has an eco-dystopian theme centered around the dangers of genetically modified (GM) crops and the inherent threats of this technology.  It also has a climate change backdrop in a near-future setting. The double whammy of climate change disaster and a GM experiment gone horribly wrong is what triggers the disastrous circumstances portrayed in the book.

I have been an environmental activist for many years now. I have been a climate change advocate representing civil society groups at the United Nations in New York, and have spoken and written about climate and environment issues in international and national forums and publications. I am also a past contributor on sustainable consumption issues to the World Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Program in New York.

This activist background motivated me to translate my learning to my creative work, especially through the vehicle of a novel. The so-called realist novel, because of its debt to the Enlightenment, has shied away from engaging with Nature and issues involving large collectives, and focused instead on what John Updike calls an “individual moral adventure”. This focus, Amitav Ghosh points out in his seminal work on climate change, The Great Derangement, has ghettoized all other kinds of writing, placing them in genre fiction.

I, like some others, feel the time has come  to change this as climate threats have been growing in exponential proportions and dangerous technologies are being pushed into our lives and food plates without proper testing and without the use of the “precautionary principle,” which is a foundational principle of the Biosafety Protocol. There are, however, writers in the West, like Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Liz Jensen, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, and others who have been engaging with climate environment and disaster issues. In my country, these issues are rarely handled in creative fiction.

All of the above influenced me to write The Butterfly Effect. Above all, the challenges and difficulties of creatively engaging with the unimaginable aspects of worldwide disaster caused by human actions in the Anthropocene have driven me to write this book.

This book is not far-future science fiction about intergalactic wars, nor will you find teleportation here. Rather, this is speculative fiction of a very possible future, amplified for the purposes of creativity and dramatization.

How do you feel climate change and/or environmental crises play a part in the places in your novel – and how do you feel that they might be unique compared to the rest of the world?

My setting is both the developing and developed worlds (India, Korea, UK, etc.). Each of these places will be affected by a runaway bio-technology disaster (as in my book), but impact will vary according to preparedness. Climate change, which is a backdrop for the book, will affect all these places in similar and different ways. So in my book, we find hot summers in England, fertile crop-growing regions in Tibet, the disappearance of island nations like Sri Lanka, and the flooding of Japan. These are backdrops in the story. As we all know and have begun to see with increasing regularity, climate change will have unpredictable consequences from increased storm activity, desertification, extreme temperatures, and crop failures, among several other crises.

The uniqueness of the affected region in my story is that it covers large parts of Asia and essentially constitutes the developing world. Because of a lack of preparedness, vulnerable populations, limited resources, corruption, the business-as-usual mentality, lack of awareness, and the attraction of high-consumption life styles, these regions will definitely be worse off once a worldwide disaster begins to unfold.

I also want to mention Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan incidents, which are rare (hard to predict) incidents of devastating consequence. A Black Swan incident – such as the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster – is very hard to predict but can be understood in retrospect. Just as the Fukushima disaster and meltdown was the result of a chain of incidents that were too rare for the designers of the reactors to foresee, so in this book we find a concatenation of rare and almost unpredictable events. The bottom line is: Change high-consumption lifestyles and stop employing dangerous and unpredictable technologies, even if for welfare. There are always simpler solutions.

Is there anything else you want to tell us about the story?

Environmental disasters are often borderless, and so is my story. This is why the plot travels from one place to another and the characters are drawn from many countries.

The book benefited from a number of international fellowship grants (Korea, UK, Scotland) which helped me research these places and people and set up the scaffolding of the novel. There is a long section in the book which has to do with North Korea, and important characters from that country, and I feel what the story is telling us is that risky technologies become bigger threats when they are contested by powers which lack the checks and balances of a functioning democracy – corporate power and totalitarian regimes to give you two examples.

This book is also about the tug-of-war between reason and faith, or reason and its absence. This duality is portrayed through the character of the detective Kar, who is a man of reason led into strange circumstances where faith and magic fight a losing battle with the all-consuming power of science. It is in the character of the detective that we find a reflection of this age-old contest.

Thank you, Rajat, for the in-depth background of The Butterfly Effect.

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 the lower mainland of British Columbia 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 Joan Sullivan

This is our decade.

By “our”, I mean everyone: all consumers, all professions, all industries, all nations, all beliefs. As Roddy Clarke articulated so passionately in his recent Forbes article The Twenties – The Most Important Design Decade Yet, “We have one common denominator: the power to create change. And, through courage, collaboration and co-operation, we can achieve this.”

Clarke describes, among other things, the Duke of Cambridge’s recently announced The Earthshot Prize, the multi-million pound prize that will be awarded to five winners per year over the next ten years. By 2030, the Earthshot Prize intends to provide at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest problems.

According to its website, the Earthshot Prize wants:

to motivate and inspire a new generation of thinkers, leaders and dreamers. Our prizes will reward progress across all sectors of industry and society, not just technology. The prizes could be awarded to a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations – scientists, activists, economists, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries – anyone who is making a substantial development or outstanding contribution to solving our environmental challenges.

The Earthshot Prize is inspired by the concept of moonshots, in reference to U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 moonshot speech about “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” before the end of that anxious decade. This historic speech unleashed a decade of unprecedented innovation and collaboration that inspired a whole generation. Despite technological challenges, political obstacles and naysayers, Kennedy’s audacious dream was achieved within nine short years, even though he did not live to witness its moment of glory.

Kennedy’s generation achieved the impossible, in less than a decade. We can do the same. We must do the same. This is our decade.

Which is why, for my inaugural post of this brave new decade, I am inspired to write about a woman whose audacious vision has the potential to radically transform our lives and our homes before the end of this anxious decade.

Meet Dr. Rachel Armstrong, the pioneering architectural designer, synthetic biologist, and sustainability innovator who is blurring the lines between art, architecture and science in her quest for alternative technological platforms to solve third millennium challenges.

“The fundamental units of design must be reconsidered,” Armstrong argued during her 2019 talk at Design og arkitektur Norge in Oslo. “The fusion of biology, technology and art speaks of different kinds of beginnings, where we can imagine, build and explore futures that may one day entirely wean us off our umbilical attachment to fossil fuels while diversifying the metabolic richness and flourishing on earth.”

Originally trained as a medical doctor at Cambridge, Armstrong earned a PhD in Architecture at University College London. She is currently Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, where she founded and directs the Experimental Architecture Group. She is also Coordinator of the multi-country Living Architecture Project, funded in part by the European Union. Her collaborative work has been exhibited widely, including major installations at the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the Trondheim Art Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, among others.

Known by her popular Twitter handle @LivingArchitect, Armstrong believes that “we are in the midst of a transition from an industrial to an ecological paradigm of architectural practice.” This transition involves, among other things, embracing permeability to allow chemical exchanges between buildings and the natural world, as well as within our living spaces.

The concept of permeability is anathema to the dominant Victorian top-down architectural philosophy, which favors the use of “hard” inert construction materials – masonry, aluminum, glass – to hermetically seal our buildings. Architects choose these energy-intensive inert materials to prevent the outside environment (heat, cold, precipitation, dust, pollution, disease) from getting inside.

“Impermeability was, and is, the driving goal,” Armstrong wrote for FastCompany. But impermeable design has a major flaw: it requires a one-way transfer of energy from the outside environment into our homes and cities, followed by a one-way transfer of unprocessed waste products back out into the environment.

New research suggests, however, that these waste products can become a source of renewable energy for buildings. Armstrong and her Living Architecture colleagues propose an alternative technological platform that can holistically recycle, re-use and reintegrate household waste products in a variety of new contexts. This technology has been around for 3.6 billion years: life itself.

“We are blind to the incredible work that nature does!” Armstrong exclaimed during her Oslo talk. She is convinced that the only way “to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it.”

In its earliest stages of experimental evolution, the Living Architecture project successfully demonstrated the potential of using semi-permeable “living bricks” (see image below) to catalyze radically different approaches towards how we think about the nature of our homes, our relationship with microbes, sustainability and resource management.

In an email, Armstrong describes these living bricks as different “species” of bioreactors, e.g., microbial fuel cell, algae bioreactor, genetically modified bioprocessor. When “fed” by human liquid wastes (notably urine and grey water), the resident microbes living within the different bioreactors are programmed to perform different “household chores” such as removing organic matter from wastewater, generating oxygen, making usable biomass (fertilizer) and producing clean electricity.

Moreover, since each bioreactor performs a different task, their end products can feed each other. For example, the production of electricity within the microbial fuel cell can be boosted by oxygen from green algae in the photobioreactor system. These products can either be fed back into the household system, or released as nutrient-rich streams back into the natural environment to increase soil fertility in our cities.

Future iterations of “living brick” technologies could transform our homes and commercial spaces into environmentally sensitive, renewable production sites. For example, interior wall partitions in our bathrooms and kitchens could be replaced with bioreactor walls (see video below) that can “recycle detergents from domestic wastewater, produce fertilizers for the garden, and synthesize new, biodegradable detergents – just from grey water, carbon dioxide and sunlight,” Armstrong wrote. In these scenarios, cleaned water will be recycled back into our bathrooms and kitchens to reduce overall water consumption, while zero-carbon electricity will charge our portable devices.

According to Armstrong,

Future bioreactors could generate bioluminescent lighting, produce nutrient-rich food supplements, and remove problematic estrogen-mimic compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from drinking water. In commercial spaces, these living walls could recycle water, fertilize green roofs, and purify air to make building interiors healthier and more like natural environments.

“The home of the future isn’t smart, it’s living and green,” claims the headline of a recent article in the SingularityHub. Another article describes five ways that buildings of the future will use biotech that may ultimately wean us off fossil fuels: 1) buildings that grow; 2) buildings that heal; 3) buildings that breathe; 4) buildings with immune systems; 5) buildings with stomachs.

For example, Living Architecture researchers intend to install integrated bioreactor walls – designed to function like a cow’s stomach – in real homes by 2030.

It may all sound like science fiction, but these are the kinds of bold, cross-disciplinary, solutions-oriented initiatives that will surely be recognized by the Earthshot Prize in the coming decade.

In my next post on this same subject, I will explore the role of artists collaborating with Living Architecture scientists to re-introduce microbes back into our homes, our buildings and our cities.

(Top image: Rachel Armstrong and Cécile B. Evan’s installation “999 years 13sqm (the future belongs to ghosts)” at Whitechapel Gallery’s Is This Tomorrow 2019 exhibit. All images from the Living Architecture project reprinted with permission by Rachel Armstrong.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer focused on the energy transition. Her renewable energy photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in Canada, the UK and Italy. She is currently working on a documentary film and photo book about Canada’s energy transition. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan shines a light on global artists, designers and architects experimenting with renewable energy as an emerging art form. You can find Joan on Twitter, Visura and Ello.

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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 Caroline Reck

I want to tell you a story about a Styrofoam cup, and how, in giving voice to this one cup, many others were saved from a wasted life.

I’m the artistic director of Glass Half Full Theatre in Austin, Texas. Our company creates new works of theatre using the precise physical language of both humans and puppets – through clowning and object puppetry, in which existing objects are manipulated as characters – to confront global issues of environmental and social justice and explore imaginative solutions. In 2018, we presented an original stage production called Polly Mermaid, Apocalypse Wow!, based on a “walk about” persona that Indigo Rael, a company member, had created. Polly, whose purpose is to help people rethink their interactions with “disposable” plastic, has been an in-demand persona at live events such as Earth Day ATX and the San Marcos Mermaid Festival, and even has a short film detailing her origin story.

Indigo and I co-wrote the script for the stage production, which features live actors and object puppetry. While some of our company’s work is for all ages, this one is aimed at adults. Polly Mermaid is “polymer-made,” a mermaid who, sometime after the demise of humanity, evolved from the plastic trash in the ocean. She reigns over numerous species of sentient sea creatures, including schools of flip-flop fish, crabs made from discarded prescription bottles, and jellyfish created from plastic umbrellas. Polly loves plastic – can’t get enough of it, really – and couldn’t be more pleased that humanity (long extinct) has gifted her ocean with so much plastic garbage.

In this eco fable, an incidence of time travel propels a Styrofoam cup, named Cup, from our present time into this imagined future. Cup describes to the ocean trash puppets how her entire life – from being molded into shape, to waiting to be selected in the store, to being filled with hot liquid – is just the preamble to the shining moment of being brought to the lips of a human woman who is about to take a sip. This magical, sexy moment, this fulfilment of Cup’s life purpose, is so brief, and so honestly performed by puppeteer Gricelda Silva, that the devastation Cup feels once she is discarded after only seconds of fulfillment is legitimately heartbreaking. The other plastic trash commiserate; they too were used only temporarily before being tossed away. They mourn their brief instant of utility and languish, unloved and devoid of purpose for hundreds of years, outliving their “people” ten to fifteen times over.

Part of the value of this scene is that it is slightly ridiculous yet oddly compelling. In our experience as clowns, it’s easier to gut-punch an audience once they’re laughing. Cup is just a small part of the show, one of many that ask audiences to reverse their perspective on patterns of behavior. Yet in the year and a half since the production, so many people in town have come up to me and the other performers telling us how that moment changed how they viewed and used disposable objects. They tell me how they’ve stopped using plastics. They are fixing things that break rather than discarding them. They are buying fewer products. They’ve stopped relying on recycling as a solution. They are enforcing new rules in their households and communities.

Theatrical moments like these put people in the position of empathically recognizing their own ecological impact, which results in them actively changing their daily habits.

In the spirit of climate justice, Glass Half Full Theatre has set a goal to reach people less actively engaged in the battle against climate change, people who might be enticed by a sci-fi play, or a clown show, or a revisionist bilingual Don Quixote. We devise in a variety of sophisticated puppetry and physical theatre forms, but we often return to object puppetry because it is such an effective tool to help audiences reenvision the mundane world.

I believe this imaginative reenvisioning is key to breaking open the complex work that must be done to reverse climate change. As a society, we don’t pay attention to the small objects that surround our day. Most of us buy things and dispose of them almost without thought. It isn’t just carelessness; we are compelled by advertising and planned obsolesce to consume and dispose without imagining where the object came from or where it will go when we are done with it. We were raised to demonstrate our own value through the value of the objects that surround us, and that means regularly buying new things for ourselves and our loved ones to show we value ourselves and others.

If climate change is a result of our cultural values, then it follows that we can fight it by reevaluating those values, by championing the future over the present, the givers over the takers, and the collective over the individual. Inherent in object puppetry is a sense of cosmic equality: every object can become the protagonist in its own story. Once an audience accepts this, they can begin to undermine the prevalent assumption that humans are the inalienable protagonists in the story of planet Earth.

Glass Half Full Theatre’s productions often point out that humanity (more specifically, dominant Western culture) hasn’t been the best steward of the planet, and that humankind’s current pattern of behavior does not indicate that we’re well suited to saving the planet. Many of our company’s futurist narratives include the demise of humanity and the survival of a resilient Earth. Our intent is not to be pessimistic. Rather, we provoke audiences to defend humanity’s place on Earth through a reevaluation of lifestyle.

Another of our shows, The Global Arena, features WWF-style wrestlers representing climate change solutions (“Carbon Capture,” “Alternative Energy,” “Rubber Man”) fighting against “Mz. (mass) Extinction” to save the planet. It’s exhilarating to participate in a live theatre experience where the audience is yelling and screaming in support of lifestyle change, propping up the potential solutions against the seduction and ease that is represented by Mz. Extinction. Audiences leave the experience pumped up, looking for action and accountability, rather than depressed by the statistics that occasionally make even the staunchest environmentalist want to curl into a ball and sob.

We want people to feel energized, to be reminded of what we are fighting for. We don’t want audiences to feel judged or that we are somehow holier-than-they for caring about these things. To that end, we are trying to set impossible goals with the likelihood that we will fail miserably and publicly. We plan to produce a show this season with a zero-dollar materials budget. It will mean more time, more labor, more creating, but we’d rather put every cent we can into the hands of the creators and performers, and openly show how much harder it is to avoid buying new. When we fail, because we break down and buy batteries, or gaffe tape, or lighting gels, we’ll share our failures audaciously on social media and as part of the show.

Climate change is such a monumental problem that it can feel like we’ve all already failed, and nothing can be done. So let’s be open about striving hard and failing big. Our cultural narrative is full of characters we love and admire who achieve glory in striving for the impossible. It’s Don Quixote tilting at giants, Luke confronting Darth, David fighting Goliath. It’s time to get comfortable with the likelihood of failure, and practicing terrifying realities onstage is the dominion of the theatre artist.

Cup will be making a return, this time to a virtual reality video experience Glass Half Full Theatre is creating, which will be available on the internet or as a live installation in 2020 in Austin. It’s called Trash Trial/Trash Trail. The year is 2050, and zero-waste practice is strictly enforced. Random audits are performed in landfills using DNA analysis, and the user of any improperly discarded item is brought to justice. Audiences experience this 360-degree movie from the point of view of the defendant on trial. Every disposable cup they’ve ever used, and every hairbrush they’ve tossed out, becomes both evidence and witness in a case against them. Babies fill the jury box and preschoolers are the judge and prosecutor. Our audiences took the planet away from these young people, and now the audience has to pay. Luckily, trash mutant Polly Mermaid is the lawyer, and she’ll be able to get their sentence reduced if they participate in a live event called Trash Trail, a trash hunt where convict-participants collect trash from the park.

The point of the hunt is to expose participants to new ways to view trash. They can collect items and find a new use for them with the help of artists, who will be on hand, to envision that future. Or, they can dispose of it and learn, through our team of experts, how to be more detailed in their sorting. We hope that Trash Trial/ Trash Trail can be replicated in other localities by interested artists to reinforce the “think global/act local” practice that is so important in environmental justice.

In a spirit of joy, hope, and accessibility, Glass Half Full Theatre moves forward into the widening jaws of climate crisis with the recognition that while not all individuals are responsible for this crisis, we must all be responsible for its resolution if we want to stay in it at all. We are always looking for new ideas to make the solutions more palatable, possible, and potent, and we welcome outreach from other groups and individuals in pursuit of this goal.

(Top image: Polly Mermaid: Apocalypse Wow! featuring Indigo Rael.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on October 3, 2019.

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Caroline Reck is the Producing Artistic Director of Glass Half Full Theatre, an Austin, Texas based theatre that creates new works of theatre using the precise physical language of both humans and puppets to confront global issues of social and environmental justice. Caroline is a graduate of Ecole Jacques Lecoq (France) and teaches Physical Theatre at St. Edwards University in Austin. She curates The Austin Puppet Incident and has performed with Trouble Puppet, The Rude Mechanicals, and Ballet Austin.

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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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