I was invited by the European Cultural Centre to participate in its TIME SPACE EXISTENCE exhibit in Venice, one of several concurrent international exhibits organized during the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, which I wrote about previously here and here.
Six of my wind energy photographs are on display on the second floor of the historic Palazzo Mora in Venice through November 25, 2018.
I am very pleased to reprint below the text from my Venice exhibit for members of our Artists and Climate Change community.
*Â *Â *
At the dawn of the Anthropocene, there is one constant: everything has changed.
Wise Man has changed. The pale blue dot has changed. The rules of the game have changed. Food/water/energy consumption have changed. Even our DNA has changed in response to all these changes.
Time is ticking… Are sapiens wise enough to halt the further destruction of the fragile ecosystems upon which their very existence depends?
I cling to the belief, with all my heart, that the answer to this question is yes. Perhaps we are not as wise as we think we are, but just wise enough to avoid irreversible climate change for generations, if not millennia, to come. Our clever brains have already designed a multitude of technological solutions to climate change. But we lack the political will to go to scale.
What is holding us back at this existential moment? How can we shift the global climate change conversation from despair to hope, from apathy to action?
I think the answer is right here in front of us, in this beautiful space, in this magical city of Venice. We need… artists!
Throughout history, artists have played pivotal roles challenging the status quo. From medieval court jesters to Lennon/Ono’s masterpiece Imagine, artists have cleverly disguised their lyrics and images as barbs that force our privileged overlords to recognize the truth.
As a photographer, I have found my artistic voice on the construction sites of utility-scale wind farms. Surrounded by heavy machinery, noise and dust, I seek moments of grace and timeless beauty. To me, an industrial wind turbine is not an electrified tower jarring the landscape. It is a beacon of hope, designed by sapiens, powered by nature. My intention is to seduce, to inspire others to visualize – to imagine – what a post-carbon world will look like.
In the past, it was imagination that propelled homo sapiens forward. In the future, it is imagination that will ensure our existence in a rapidly changing world.
It is urgent therefore, for artists and architects and all creative souls to take their rightful place at the table alongside scientists, engineers, city planners, journalists and politicians. Collectively, we must “imagine that which we know†according to the poet Shelley. Collectively, we must design a future of clean abundance and endless opportunity. Collectively, we must immediately start to build this future. A future that, according to architect Alice Guess, not only insures we will persist, but that persisting can be beautiful, comfortable, safe and functional.
The Holy Grail is within reach: a 100% post-carbon circular economy in our lifetimes. To get there, Wise Man needs to embrace the arts, culture and myth. If not, we will lose our humanity in the Human Age.
Joan Sullivan is a Canadian renewable energy photographer. Since 2009, Joan has found her artistic voice on the construction sites of utility-scale wind and solar projects. Her goal is to help others visualize – to imagine – what a post-carbon world will look like. Joan is currently working on a photo book about Canada’s energy transition. She also collaborates with filmmakers on documentary films that explore the human side of the energy transition. Her renewable energy photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, the UK and Italy. You can find Joan on Twitter and Instagram.Â
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.
The first thing she cheekily asks me when I enter her stunningly light, stylish, modern house on the south-eastern coast of Ireland is whether I expected to see a traditional farm. Perhaps the expression on my face reveals that I associate sheep farming with dark stuffy barns, thatched roofs hiding swallow nests, and the smell of animal dung mixed with hay. But I should have known better: this sheep farmer doubles as a red-lipsticked artist, a feminist with a keen eye for beauty and style. Naturally, her sheep farm wasn’t going to be like any other sheep farm.
Orla Barry owns a flock of fifty pedigree Lleyn sheep, which can be seen grazing in the lush fields below her house in County Wexford. She’s addicted to her animals, she immediately admits with a loving smile, as they always provide her with a legitimate reason to be outside. “Whether it’s for lambing season (helping sheep to give birth) or to retrieve a chicken escaped from its pen, there’s always something urgent, some animal that needs to be saved,†she states. Being on the farm is in her DNA; Barry’s father was a tillage farmer and her grandmother was a feminist who wrote for the Farmer’s Journal. Barry very much identifies with her grandmother as she too was “learning by doing.†That it was never her career plan to become a shepherd is evident when Barry describes her shockingly small profits selling lambs that end up as meat on our plates: “Scale is the only way to earn money with farming, the market is dominated by big meat factories.†Rather then scaling up, she got hooked to pedigree breeding and proved a keen and curious learner; this “learning by doing†philosophy entails, among other things, learning from her peers, becoming invested in the agricultural community, paying close attention at pedigree sales, talking to a lot farmers about pedigree breeding, and visiting many flocks.
Ireland Lleyn Competition, Tullamore National Livestock show. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The world of sheep breeding has clearly informed her artistic practice. Recent art videos include two performers sitting in a big pile of wool performing a fictional story inspired by her experiences at the pedigree sales, but mixing the perspectives of the buyer, the seller, the breeder and the animal that is being sold. And she doesn’t only play with humans and animals – gender roles and stereotypes are also addressed. “Pedigree breeding is a male dominated world and I have fun reversing some of the roles. Humor is a very important element in my work.†Some of her other videos are rather fable-like: cats turn into women (The Fable Of The Man Who Fell In Love With the Cat Who Became a Woman (And Still Devoured Mice)), people into bees (Humming at the Hive), and sheep talk (Pedigree Sales: Technique, Emotion, Poetry). For Barry, storytelling is an important political tool; it can re-connect people to the land and the animals. “The fact that we have largely lost this connection is part of the ecological problem. We have to become non-consumers and reconnect to things that cost nothing.â€
Barry underlines that she is not a “sheep artist†(smiling). Rather, she is someone interested in language and in the relationship between agriculture and culture as well as in the tension between being a farmer and an artist. It is apparent where she gets her inspiration. Overheard conversations and snippets of interviews about the sheep buying-and-selling process constantly re-appear in her videos, giving the viewer a curious insight into this niche world. According to Barry, the art world and the world of pedigree sheep breeding are not too dissimilar. She explains that by analyzing the methods the pedigree breeders use to sell a sheep, she was able to see the art world through another lens: “Both are about storytelling and a certain form of speech. Art is also shaped by storytelling, it’s always someone’s view that is being sold. It’s all about emotion and poetry.†Barry goes on, explaining how she sometimes just falls in love with a sheep and looks for its “auraâ€, reminding me how art can be a magical yet irrational purchase, indeed similar to falling in love.
Pedigree sales. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Like in the arts, aesthetics play an important role when purchasing a pedigree animal. Barry is always looking for certain criteria so that, through careful breeding, she can build her “perfect sheep.†When I ask her what a “perfect sheep†looks like, she takes me into the field and explains how to judge a sheep. Of course, the criteria are different for different types of sheep but generally it’s about “the back, the pasterns, testicles, udders, and teeth.†As we walk through the field, she lifts one of the rams’ tail to show me what the perfect distance between the butt and the mid-length of the leg should be.
While I ponder over the art equivalent of the ram’s butt, she has already moved on: the chickens need to be treated for lice.
Curator Yasmine Ostendorf (MA) has worked extensively on international cultural mobility programs and on the topic of art and environment for expert organizations such as Julie’s Bicycle (UK), Bamboo Curtain Studio (TW) Cape Farewell (UK) and Trans Artists (NL). She founded the Green Art Lab Alliance, a network of 35 cultural organizations in Europe and Asia that addresses our social and environmental responsibility, and is the author of the series of guides “Creative Responses to Sustainability.†She is the Head of Nature Research at the Van Eyck Academy (NL), a lab that enables artists to consider nature in relation to ecological and landscape development issues and the initiator of the Van Eyck Food Lab.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
Popular author Margaret Atwood called climate change the “everything change.†Atwood’s novels are generally about the human experience, at times notably the female’s, but she also writes about this everything change. Her genre-busting books range from literary to speculative. Global warming occurs prominently in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (which she calls “speculative fictionâ€) – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – which describe a post-apocalyptic Earth set in the near future.1
I think it’s interesting that, like Jeff VanderMeer, discussed earlier of this series, Atwood has many close relatives who are scientists. This certainly must have inspired her imagination when bringing the natural world into the intricate human environments about which she writes.
At the beginning of the trilogy, in Oryx and Crake, the reader can tell by the descriptions of the world that global warming is taking place due to rising seas, harshly pounding large waves, incredible heat, and so on. In a holistic way, it is not surprising that the world Atwood created in this trilogy reflects one of corporate greed, dystopian values, genetic cloning, and other human manipulations of nature – a mirror of the world we made ourselves, most particularly where we could be heading. The MaddAddam trilogy, according to Quill and Quire: 2
It’s a story about The End of Civilization As We Know It, but the event is coming up very soon – around the year 2050, it seems, from the hints Atwood provides. That’s close enough to the present for us to be able to recognize the seeds of catastrophe in our morning newspaper. Environmental degradation, global warming, and the resultant floods up the East Coast (Harvard has drowned) provide the backdrop, but the central action involves our most disturbing current headlines: cloning and genetic manipulation, toxic microbes and viruses, and a culture that has handed all the important decisions over to the “numbers people.â€
The second book in the trilogy, The Year of the Flood, came six years after Oryx and Crake. Rather than being a true sequel, it is a retelling of the first part of the trilogy from the perspective of two new characters. Using flashbacks and fleshing out the original mythology and narrative, Year of the Flood, like I noted in the Jeff VanderMeer piece in this series, also reminded me – at least in structure somewhat – of the television show “Lost,†which filled in blanks later with new perspectives. Again, in the third part of the trilogy, MaddAddam, Atwood retells the story and builds it with the underlying idea of a “fresh startâ€. According to LitReactor:3
Even though Atwood gives us a new beginning in each of these novels, it is not until Maddaddam [sic], the final installment of the trilogy, that she truly explores the theme of starting over. And even then, she poses the questions but doesn’t give the answers. Questions about creation, the infallibility of “God,†and the evolution of religion. She does this once again by flashing to the characters’ pasts, focusing on backstory to expand the world’s mythology even further. At this point, the narratives of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood have converged. Jimmy and the Maddaddamites (the survivors introduced in The Year of the Flood) are united in the day to day struggles of dystopian life. The Crakers, however, those Adam and Eve’s of the new world, are more preoccupied with where they came from than where they are going (much like Atwood) and demand nightly stories of life before “the Great Rearrangement.†These remnants of the old world, knowledge of good and evil, taint the Crakers’ so-called fresh start.
“Lost†offered, indeed, one of my favorite mythologies ever, so I am very keen to the idea that in storytelling we can deepen the story by bringing in new characters and new truths later that examine the initial story. New perspectives give a sort of humanities type of peer review and offer the reader a fuller and clearer look into the world being created by the author – often reflecting upon our own world and speculating on what may happen if we continue going at our current rate. I like the “Lost†quotes below, where two of the oldest people on the island (therefore hopefully the keys for the audience to understand the cosmology and existence of the island) are talking about why characters are brought to the island.
MAN IN BLACK: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?
JACOB:Â You are wrong.
MAN IN BLACK: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.
JACOB:Â It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.
The final line above has some similarities to what happens in our world with climate change. “What happens next?†That’s what readers wanted to know from Margaret Atwood after Oryx and Crake. Well, in fact, the world only ends once. Anything that happens before is just progress. And we can look at this progress through different lenses, but I think Atwood’s treatment of climate change – or rather, everything change – is particularly clever.
Note that Atwood has included environmental themes in many of her books – it’s part of our human condition, after all. And global warming is not some tiny object within fiction that we can hold in our hands – rather it is indeed everything change, with up- and down-stream effects, many of which Atwood has explored in fiction, poetry, and even the graphic novel, whether about overpopulation, environmental degradation, or an assortment of issues that generally play into the reasons behind why our world is warming. And, for sure, those reasons have to do with the human species.
This article was originally published on Eco-Fiction.com on October 9, 2016. It is part of our Wild Authors series.
(Photo by Liam Sharp.)
______________________________
Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Eco-Fiction.com and Dragonfly.eco, sites that explore ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
I have worked for most of my career as a medical and scientific illustrator, which means a lot of time spent in front of a computer screen. But early in 2016, I dusted off my much-neglected art materials to return to my first love: painting and drawing. I love my Adobe programs but though it was a bit unfocused, I shed my digital chains and felt I was back to where I had left off before Photoshop took over my life!
Then fate lent a hand. I began walking on Hampstead Heath early every morning with three friends. The Heath is an exquisite, ancient heathland only 400 yards from my house and just under four miles from the centre of London. By coincidence, the new walking regime started not only at the same time as my return to painting but coincided with the completion of the Hampstead Heath Ponds Project. All the large ponds on Hampstead Heath are man-made, built as reservoirs over 300 years ago to provide water for the rapidly expanding population of London. Three of the ponds – the Model Boating Pond, Men’s Bathing Pond, and Hampstead No. 1 Pond – are still classified as “large raised reservoirs†under the 1975 Reservoirs Act and the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act. In 2011, the City of London Corporation, which manages the Heath, was advised that should an extreme rainfall event occur, the ponds might overflow (or “overtop†to use the technical language) and flood residential communities south of the Heath. The Corporation was legally required to rebuild and reinforce the dams between the ponds.
Leaves on the pond.
Research has shown that although extreme rainfall events in the UK are not unprecedented, their frequency will increase as climate change raises global temperatures. The project involved a huge amount of work with much disruption to the peace and quiet of the Heath. Local organizations were consulted and there was some dissent and plenty of negative newspaper headlines. At that stage, I remained unconvinced that the work was necessary. But as time went on and I learned more about the Ponds Project and how it would protect and enhance the environment, I came to understand its value. The peace and quiet of the Heath was finally returning when my merry band of walkers and I began our route marches. I became fascinated with how the flora and fauna was recovering. This was my lightbulb moment…
Since my daughters Sara and Tor were little children, the Model Boating Pond has been one of our places. We have spent many hours, in all seasons, walking and watching the pond. Now the walks were fueling my mission to put my paints, pens, and pencils to work and record what I was seeing. This was to be where my creative journey would start.
It would have been easy to limit myself to these paintings and drawings, but I wanted to find out more about the work that had been carried out, the history, the geology, even the archaeology behind it all. After some research, the answers started pointing me in the direction of climate change. Again, I wanted to find out more. My painting project jumped to a different level.
Wildfire at Medicine Lake.
Another journey to another continent showed me the impacts of global climate change on another key place in my life. My younger daughter Tor lives in Jasper, Alberta in Canada. After I visited her, she urged me to go further north to the Canadian tundra. I packed up my paints and, in November 2016, travelled to the small town of Churchill on the Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba.
Churchill’s nickname is the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.†Every year, after months of fasting inland, bears migrate to the bay – hence the nickname – to wait for sea ice to form, which will allow them to start hunting seal again. The vast flat tundra was awe-inspiring, but seeing that the frozen North is not so frozen anymore was disturbing. This was a seminal moment.
Waiting for the sea ice.
The climate issues in Canada brought to mind some friends, thousands of kilometers to the south, in Mandeville, Louisiana – a place where I worked in my early 20s. I still spend a lot of time on the Gulf Coast of America which, particularly over the last decade, has been increasingly threatened by intense hurricanes and resultant flooding. I realized Louisiana had to be part of the story.
I call London, Jasper, and Mandeville “My Places†because they are cities and regions where I have deep emotional connections. They are also intimately linked by climate change. I needed to pull it all together.
My painting projects and the book that accompanies them are the result. The book, It Started On Hampstead Heath… An Artist’s Journey Into The Science Of Global Climate Change, is an exploration of “My Places†and their connections. Of course, these three places are not the only ones linked by climate change, but they are the three closest to my heart.
Pages from It Started On Hampstead Heath… An Artist’s Journey Into The Science Of Global Climate Change.
I have always had an interest in environmental issues, but it has taken me until now to find the time to study them in more detail. I hope my paintings and drawings have captured the ephemeral nature of our ecosystems, and the words I have written will provide some insight into it all. I hope to remind us all of the beauty and precious qualities of the environment around us, wherever we live.
My projects focus on “My Places,†but we each have our own corners of the world that we love. We have a responsibility to protect them.
(Top image: Oaks & Cones.)
___________________________
Dee McLean studied Illustration at Harrow School of Art, London, and went on to a career in medical and scientific illustration. Taking a break, mid-career, she had an opportunity to return to painting and drawing, having several exhibitions and taking on private commissions. She then returned to medical illustration specializing in artwork for medical education. Dee is now bringing her love of science and art back into painting, drawing and writing. Journeying through the places that she is emotionally attached to and looking at how they are all intimately linked by the changing global climate, Dee hopes that through her art she can remind us all how beautiful and precious our environment is. All Dee’s projects have a local charity attached to them.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
The Persistent Acts series continues its synthesis of Climate Week NYC, focusing on this recent week of events around solutions, optimism, and positive stories.
Last week, I recapped the Drawdown event presented as part of the tenth anniversary of Climate Week NYC. Drawdown kicked off a week of panels, concerts, exhibitions, and beyond, running concurrently to the UN General Assembly, all to encourage climate action across sectors. Another galvanizing event I attended was Women in Sustainability.
Organized by Women in Global Affairs (WIGA) and hosted at CUNY Graduate Center, Women in Sustainability brought together women from myriad disciplines to explore the challenges and opportunities within the field of sustainability. WIGA, whose mission is “to assist in bringing intelligent young women together both with their counterparts from across the country and with role models who wish to help mentor a generation of up and coming leaders,†curated panels about sustainability in academic and professional fields.
On the academic front, three women spoke to the institution of academia at large, and presented on their specific areas of research. Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Associate Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College, discussed how women have been kept out of leadership positions in traditional academic settings, in part because of the limited scope of the career ladder metaphor. She offered an alternative mode of thinking, replacing the ladder with a more nimble trellis, broadening institutional notions of how to build a career.
Sara Perl Egendorf, PhD Student, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, shared her process for mitigating lead exposure through soil, and her ongoing research with participating New York City Housing Authority residents. Sara outlined the scientific and social components of her research, indicating how community members can become more involved in their local green spaces after lead-free soil from other parts of the city has been mixed into the contaminated soil in an area.
Jennifer Cherrier, Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, also discussed science in action, through her expertise on waterways. In the age of climate change, as rain storms become more frequent and severe, Jennifer is researching how the city may better handle rainwater, especially when it surges during storms. She is working not only on how to better the gray infrastructure of New York City’s water system (the pipes and pumps), but also on how to incorporate green infrastructure into the way the city manages rain water (through existing and new green spaces).
WIGA hosted Women in Sustainability on September 27 as part of Climate Week NYC.
The second part of the evening focused on a panel of women in the field of sustainability, moderated by Laetitia De Marez, Director of the New York City branch of Climate Analytics. Laetitia posed questions about success and career trajectories to an all-star panel: Sarabeth Brockley, Partnerships Coordinator at Business for Social Responsibility; Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development; Vlada Kenniff, Director of Sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority; and Bhakti Mirchandani, Managing Director at FCLT Global.
The conversation covered instances of sustainability in both public and private sectors, and in the fields of business, agriculture, and public interest. The women spoke about their mentors and career paths – why women must continue to be more and more a part of scientific, political, and financial decisions locally and around the globe – and instances of positive change when women ascend to leadership roles within various companies.
The tone that resonated with me throughout the evening was realistic optimism. As an artist, I felt the power of positivity in the room, especially since there are so many negative forces in our country right now. These scientists, and business and public sector leaders, know the weight and urgency of the climate crisis, and they tackle systems of oppression in various ways through their jobs. In spite of this (and because of it), they continue to do their work toward a more sustainable existence for us all. I spend so much time in my own silo of theatre, I don’t often hear the sustainability accomplishments in other sectors. We need to hear more about these positive outcomes across disciplines. This evening was an instance of palpable collaboration and camaraderie, which I try to emanate in my own creative endeavors.
The evening was broad, covering topics related to each woman’s expertise, and also went deep in connecting the issues to the roots of our problems – namely, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and individualism. These systems of oppression will not self-destruct. With this Climate Week event as an example, when women come together, we proliferate alternative ways of being, and collectively pave more pathways for each other – that is a power which oppressive systems cannot take away.
Lift Eachother Up illustration by Libby VanderPloeg.
There’s More
Among many other change-making folks at the WIGA event, I met Jordana Vasquez, who runs the blog Urban On Site, for “exploring, exposing and experimenting with sustainability†– Check it out!
(Re)Visit the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Peruse the candidates for the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change’s 2018 Best Climate Solutions Award.
Visit Chantal’s post Exorcising Harveys about tackling gender equity onstage in the Arctic.
This article is part of the Persistent Acts series which looks at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? The series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre.
______________________________
Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative, The UPROOT Series, to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
This month, the Persistent Acts series focuses on Climate Week NYC, synthesizing a week of events around solutions, optimism, and positive stories.
There is plenty to be pessimistic about. It is easy to doubt, to spot alternative reasons and proofs at every turn. However, in these polarizing times, there’s Climate Week NYC. Organized by The Climate Group and in its tenth anniversary, “Climate Week NYC is the time and place where the world gathers to showcase amazing climate action and discusses how to do more.†Taking place in late September, “Climate Week NYC is one of the key summits in the international calendar and has been driving climate action forward since it was first launched by The Climate Group in 2009.†This global event is in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York, and happens annually during the UN General Assembly. The event series that comprises Climate Week involves panels, concerts, exhibitions, and beyond, all to encourage climate action across sectors. I participated in a slice of Climate Week, and during the handful of events that I attended, positivity, collaboration, and sustained action were the refrain.
My Climate Week kicked off with some powerhouses of today’s U.S. environmental movement. Held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Drawdown’s Climate Week event featured headliners Bill McKibben and members of Project Drawdown, as well as panelists to engage in the local and global climate conversation. Given the nature of the event, I didn’t expect much art, so I was pleasantly surprised when I entered the Ethical Culture’s large theatre to hear a choir singing “Here Comes the Sun!†This brief opening act set a high-spirited tone, as New Yorkers gathered for the highly-anticipated main event. As the house lights lowered, an introductory video glowed, with clips about each of the night’s speakers: Lynne Twist of Pachamama Alliance, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Chad Frischmann of Project Drawdown, food justice advocate Karen Washington, Chief Climate Policy Advisor at the Mayor’s Office Daniel Zarrilli, and Lauren Zullo of Jonathan Rose Companies. I realized I wasn’t simply at a lecture or panel, I was at a climate conversations concert.
The Street Tones Choir – DRAWDOWN: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, presented at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 24, 2018. Photo by Erik McGregor.
Our host, Bill McKibben, noted the “rapid disintegration†that he had witnessed in Greenland over the summer, and now in North Carolina. Then McKibben pivoted to the positive, the reason everyone was gathered: Drawdown, “a project without parallel.†In scientific terms, “Drawdown is that point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.†As the tagline of the Drawdown book states, this is “the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.†The entire evening was rich with inspiring messages – I won’t try to replay it in this post. I will share some of my takeaways on the potential of Drawdown in local and national contexts:
For Lynne Twist of Pachamama Alliance, Drawdown was “like water to the desert.†Twist spoke passionately about flipping the narrative on climate change: climate change is not happening to us but for us, and is serious, urgent, comprehensive feedback for a species that has lost its way.
Following suit, Katharine Wilkinson of Drawdown outlined the history of the project as a way to map the path forward on a different (positive) side of the climate change story. Based on extensive research, including rates of carbon emission, sequestration, and dollar cost, Drawdown ranks solutions to climate change that humans are already doing, to contribute to the reversal of climate change – so that we might take an evolutionary leap toward a more vibrant, equitable, and resilient living world.
Karen Washington reminded us to keep pressure on institutions and to take responsibility for knowing our representatives, so that they know that they work for us. Dan Zarrilli and Lauren Zullo commented on some key transformations happening in New York City, including building retrofitting, sustainable design, and the city’s divestment from fossil fuels in favor of investments in climate solutions.
McKibben slid in: to reverse climate change, jobs one, two, and three are to get rid of the Trump Administration. In the meantime, Twist suggested that we shift conversations, because when we share the positives, our ways of living shift.
DRAWDOWN: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, presented at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 24, 2018. Photo by Erik McGregor.
Throughout the panel discussion, I was playing out reasons for the arts to participate in the climate conversation, as is my habit as an artist. I can see a role for artists around Twist’s suggestion of shifting conversations – I am constantly investigating how a performance-based event might spark the types of positive discussions the panelists proffered. Zarrilli also spoke about the future of New York City with a focus on imagination, on how the city can reinvent itself. In the hands of artists, these imagined possibilities are endless. While the arts were not an explicit part of this Drawdown evening, I couldn’t help but pick up on how many different sectors, whether city planning, real estate, or climate science, share values of consideration, imagination, and positive transformation with the arts sector.
The concert concluded with a video from Pachamama Alliance. The word that resonated for me most throughout the evening was “love†– love for self, locality, human and non-human neighbors, and our planet itself. As we left, we took tangible action, signing postcards to urge the New York State Comptroller to follow the city’s lead and divest from fossil fuels. In the way that marches instill a buzz of collective power, I felt energized at the start of Climate Week because 1) we Americans have a lot of work to do, and 2) tools for just, equitable change are in each of us.
Take Action Call on New York State to divest from fossil fuels Learn more about a fossil fuel free world Participate in the Live Stream of Drawdown Learn on Friday, October 19
This article is part of the Persistent Acts series which looks at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? The series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre.
______________________________
Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative, The UPROOT Series, to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
Fall is officially here in New York City. For many on the East coast, and especially in the Carolinas, the season has been devastating. Evacuations are still taking place in parts of South Carolina a week after Hurricane Florence due to historic flooding. Scientific evidence predicts that climate change will cause storms like Florence to grow larger and more frequent in the years to come. Climate change communication efforts are therefore more important than ever, and the artists and writers I profile here are taking part in those efforts.
This month I have for you an exclusive interview with novelist Cai Emmons. Her novel Weather Woman hits shelves in October. It follows the story of 30-year-old Bronwyn, who drops out of her doctoral program and takes a job as a TV meteorologist. After being dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers that she has the ability to affect the weather. Weather Woman is a beautifully written and deeply engaging novel that had me hooked from page one.
Your novel has a fantastical element in that the protagonist, Bronwyn Artair, can directly affect the weather. But the novel is also rooted in reality with its references to climate-related phenomena like wild fires, extreme weather patterns, and the effects of Siberian methane field emissions on the atmosphere. What inspired such a rich and interesting story?
A novel idea crystallizes for me when two persistent thoughts dovetail. Since I was a small child in New England, I have always been fascinated by weather, extreme weather in particular. On many occasions I have wanted fervently to change the weather, to favor activities like swimming or trick-or-treating. As an adult, when I awoke to a downpour on my wedding day I desperately wanted to stop it. This idea connected with one of my favorite books as a child, Oliver Butterworth’s The Trouble with Jenny’s Ear, in which a young girl realizes she can read people’s thoughts. At some point along the way a what if sprang up in my mind: What if a person really could change the weather? That premise led to a consideration of what such a person could do in terms of changing the climate.
Are you concerned about climate issues beyond what you write about in your fiction?
Perhaps because of having been attuned to the weather, I have been obsessed with climate change for years. To my mind the warming planet presents an enormous threat to human survival, particularly because it gives rise to a host of other life-threatening circumstances such as drought, fires, floods, famine, disease, mass migration, war, etc. It is incomprehensible to me that this threat has not given rise to hysteria and a massive remedial effort in response. I am interested in the work of sociologist Kari Norgaard who has attempted to understand the general malaise regarding climate change, especially among people who acknowledge both that it is happening and that it is human-caused.
I, too, feel largely helpless in the face of the changes I see. The fires raging across the planet this summer are on my mind now. I support 350.org, I go to climate rallies, I try to ride my bike as often as possible, but I often feel that I come up short in terms of having significant impact. I try to guard against despair, but I confess to frequently feeling very bleak about the subject when I awake in the wee hours.
Weather Woman brushes up against how climate change is addressed (or not) in the press, both in the character of tabloid journalist Matt and Bronwyn’s own experiences. The question of how the American press in particular reports on climate change haunted me as I read. What are your thoughts on the subject?
I have read some excellent coverage of the climate crisis in The New York Times and The New Yorker, along with various other publications (The Washington Post, National Geographic, etc.). Some of these articles have been very informative, others have been deeply alarming. But I am always acutely aware of the limitations of journalism in a culture that is so heavily polarized as ours now is. I may be drawn to every article I see about the unfolding climate disaster, but are these articles reaching people who know nothing about how dire the situation is, or those who actively oppose the idea that a problem exists. I doubt it.
I ask myself when it might be appropriate for journalists and scientists who are well-informed about what is happening to become advocates for action. I have watched my friend, Jason Box, glaciologist and climate scientist, struggle with this question as he tiptoes in the direction of advocacy.
In some ways, Weather Woman is about personal responsibility. Bronwyn has the supernatural power to affect the weather, but looked at a different way, so do we all. Climate change has been brought about because of anthropogenic activity, and we’ve only begun to see the effects of that activity. The presence of this theme suggests that this is something you’ve thought a lot about. Would you discuss your artistic process for coming up with this theme and how you teased it out?
I think a lot about what the path forward is in addressing climate change. I see the U.S. as deeply crippled by the cultural attitude that prizes individual rights over the needs of the community. This prevailing ethos means that we tend to view solutions to climate change in individual terms. I live in a small liberal Oregon city whose residents (many of them) pride themselves on being good custodians of the Earth. People here recycle, drive hybrid cars, ride bikes, eschew meat. This is all laudable, and it makes people feel good about themselves, but the impact is minor and does not address the problem head-on. We need large-scale collective action to change laws, regulate emissions, ban human practices that are deleterious to the environment. Only when we act together will our actions be consequential.
At some point in the writing of the novel I realized I did not want Bronwyn to be a singular heroine of the climate crisis, letting the rest of us off the hook. This is what she comes to understand near the end of the novel. Even with her considerable power she is not capable of saving the planet alone. This is what the Arctic fox tries to tell her when he says:Â Where are your people?Â
Throughout the book Bronwyn has to deal with skeptics. How do you deal with skeptics?Â
Skeptics, OMG! This was actually a fun element for me to work with as a novelist, particularly in terms of who was going to believe in Bronwyn’s power. She is aware of moving in a world in which she is unlikely to be believed. A few characters like Nicole and Earl believe in her power immediately, but others—most notably her mentor, Diane—are hard to convince, even after they’ve seen her at work. I wanted to feature diverse reactions to make readers wonder how they would be likely to react.
I mostly feel that it is a waste of time to try to convince people to believe in something they are dead set against, whether it is a superpower or climate change. My brother-in-law does not believe in man-caused climate change, but to engage with him about this is to bring on a shouting match. People rarely change when they feel bullied or threatened or humiliated (I don’t think I bully or threaten or humiliate, but I think even a rational conversation can bring up those feelings). If people are going to change it is usually a process that happens over time, in private, when they have been exposed to new information and feel free to consider things differently without being judged.
What do you think fiction can show or teach us about climate change that, say, scientific reports can not?
I think novels can be stealthy in a way that it is hard for journalistic or scientific work to be. The questions a novel raises piggyback on the lives of characters with problems and emotions readers recognize and participate in. If we, as readers, have stepped into the shoes of a character we can often embrace experiences and feelings, and even thoughts and opinions, that are antithetical to our own. I think most of us have had the experience of discovering a friend thinks differently about something than we do. Usually, rather than dropping the friend, we reevaluate our own position. Novels can, at their best, have the same impact.
Weather Woman hits shelves in October via Red Hen Press.
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.
___________________________
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.comand follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x.Â
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.
It is a full year since I began writing this monthly series on artists who are focusing on the topic of water – water pollution, melting glaciers, rising tides, plastic in the seas and killing drought. What I have learned from the extensive research I’ve conducted and the many artists I’ve contacted is that there is a groundswell of poets, painters, musicians, architects, filmmakers, craftsmen, sculptors, public artists, playwrights, dancers, spoken word artists, novelists and installation artists all over the world with passion, energy and determination to address and educate the public through art about the very real threats to our most precious natural resource.
Like poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, these artists come from the Pacific Islands, where the tides already “gnaw at the shoreline, chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees, gulp down rows of your seawalls and crunch your island’s shattered bones.†They come from the Northern regions of our planet, like Islandic/American artist, Roni Horn and Danish artists, Bjornstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen, where glaciers are melting at a rapid pace. In tribute, they are building monuments – a permanent library of water containing samples from all of the regional glaciers (Horn) and even a mock McDonald’s restaurant flooded with water to show what happens when “a rising tide caused by global warming claimed the very thing that contributed to it.†(Christiansen et al.)
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Marshall Islands poet.Roni Horn, Icelandic/American visual and spoken word artist.
Danish artists/filmmakers, Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen of the Collective Superflex.
The artists also come from lands where there is not enough water or enough clean water for a viable future, like the 10 prominent musicians from Cape Town, South Africa who took on the challenge of creating 2-minute shower songs to help the local population limit their water use during a severe water crisis; or like Indian artist Vibha Galhotra, who used the thick sludge from the toxic river Yamuna as a medium for her paintings in order to stress how dangerous the river water is to the health of the New Delhi population.
Vibha Galhotra, New Delhi conceptual artist.
They are innovators like Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman, who are designing seasteading colonies that offer a new way of living on the sea itself; and like Ben Morison, Ali Skanda and Dipesh Pabari, who developed the know-how to build the first traditional Swahili dhow in Lamu, Kenya, entirely out of plastic waste. And speaking of plastic, there are scores of artists like Karen Hackenberg, who are incorporating images of discarded plastic objects in their paintings to emphasize the significance of plastic in our contemporary culture and to call attention to the billions of tons of plastic that are choking our oceans and polluting our shores.
Peter Thiel, American entrepreneur and co-founder of the Seasteading Institute.Ben Morison (left), co-founder of The Flipflopi Project and Ali Skanda, Kenyan boatbuilder.
American painter, Karen Hackenberg.
Some artists engage the public as integral components of their work, like Native American Uncà Carole, whose annual river walks honor and attempt to heal threatened waterways for the sake of the “seven generations to come;†like Dutch artist Daan Roosgaarde, whose “Waterlicht†light installation provided visitors all over Europe with the visceral experience of rising seas overtaking the city; and like me and my fellow artist Elena Kalman, who along with thousands of participants from all walks of life and from cities and towns throughout the United States, are making a literal Wave, piece by piece, that emphasizes how we are all connected by our mutual need for water and by our mutual responsibility to protect our vital water sources.
Uncà (Grandmother) Carole, founder of Water is Life walks.Daan Roosegaarde, Dutch artist and innovator.
American public artists Elena Kalman and Susan Hoffman Fishman, co-founders of The Wave, an interactive, public art project.
What If?
All of the artists I’ve covered this past year give me hope that we will ultimately win the battle to clean our rivers and oceans and make progress on mitigating the impact of climate change. They and an army of others are working hard to reach citizens and policy makers all over the world – to engage their hearts, minds and senses, which hopefully in turn will translate into caring and action.
But what if these individual artists weren’t operating alone in their own studios, in their own cities and countries? What if they came together in one place to create interdisciplinary projects with each other that then dispersed and reached millions all over the world? Theatrical productions with dramatic music, lighting, dance and scenic imagery held on a plastic stage that traveled the seas from port to port on a plastic boat? Or a poem created by thousands and thousands of poets and other artists that was broadcast globally? Imagine an international festival of art, the mother of all artist residencies, devoted entirely to addressing water pollution, melting glaciers, rising tides, plastic in the seas and killing drought – a movement of artists working in the same place at the same time that would create a “storm†of public art the likes of which we have never experienced. Who was it that said, “if you build it, they will come.?†Let’s build it.
(Top image:Â Three of the 10 South African musicians who created 2-minute shower songs.)
 ______________________________
Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides caused by climate change, the trillions of pieces of plastic in our oceans and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.
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.
Harveys suck, let’s start with that. They utterly and despicably suck. Harveys, as we brutally found out last summer, are abusive and dangerous. They have power, a ridiculous amount of power, and nothing will stop them. The first one, Harvey the hurricane, pounded the Gulf Coast of the United States for several days in August 2017, dumping Biblical amounts of rain on Texas, and leaving thousands of people stranded. The second one, Harvey the Hollywood producer, assaulted and silenced women for decades with, if not the blessing, at least the obliging blind eye of an army of people around him for whom it was convenient to keep their mouths shut.
Since then, I can’t help it: I see Harveys everywhere.
Harveys are fed and fattened by money and power, and prey on vulnerable people. Particularly women. (If you haven’t seen this gut-wrenching article in the New York Times about one man’s desperate fight to save his wife as Houston was flooding, I highly recommend it.) Harveys wouldn’t exist without capitalism. They wouldn’t exist without colonialism. And they wouldn’t exist without patriarchy. And, of course, Harveys thrive with the changing climate. For example: the melting Arctic is opening up new territory for extractive industries, these industries bring in a bunch of outside workers – mostly men – near isolated indigenous settlements, and that quickly becomes a breeding ground for Harveys who turn young women into victims of sexual assault and/or trafficking. #MeToo.
Director Jennifer Vellenga, playwright Chantal Bilodeau, actor Julie Jesneck and the Women of the Arctic organizing team: Tahnee Prior, Gosia Smieszek, and Olivia Matthews. Photo by Nancy Forde.
To exorcise the Harveys haunting me, I wrote a play titled Whale Song. It’s a short play, about 15-minute long. I wrote it for a day-long event titled Women of the Arctic: Bridging Policy, Research, and Lived Experience, organized by Tahnee Prior, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and PhD Candidate in Global Governance at the University of Waterloo and Gosia Smieszek, researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland. Women of the Arctic was held at the UArctic Congress in Helsinki in September 2018.
The goal of the event was to carve out a non-academic space for women and girls who work on or live in the Arctic to explore the roles and contributions of women to northern policy-making, research, exploration, art, activism, and daily life. It consisted of three related 90-minute panels: “Northern Women at the Table: From Community to Business Leaders;†“Women in Arctic Science & Exploration,†and; “Grappling with ‘Uncomfortable’ Conversations: From Past Traumas to Future Generations.â€
At the heart of Whale Song is the concept of migration. A woman has run away, or, as she puts it, “migrated,†from her abusive husband named Harvey. Following a somewhat cryptic advice from her father – “When in doubt, go North†– she picked Alaska as her destination. Alaska is where her friends Teri and Allison live: strong Indigenous women who have dealt with their own Harveys and, wisely, chosen to migrate. But the woman’s husband seems to have caught up with her when she got to Alaska because she’s now in Helsinki, addressing the conference attendees.
Julie Jesneck in Whale Song. Photo by Veikko Somerpuro.
Migration, as she describes it, is a survival skill: Both humans and animals migrate, and we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. Whales in particular are very good at it:
Whales used to be land animals. Fifty million years ago, they had four legs and huge teeth. Then the ice sheets melted, the oceans rose, and when it became clear there wasn’t gonna be enough land for everyone, the big mamas were like: “We’re outta here.†And they migrated to the ocean. How’s that for a winning strategy? “Shrink those legs and grow some fins, ladies! We’re diving in!â€
But her admiration for the whales’ pluck in taking their destinies in their own hands hides a painful question. After listening to a whale song, she asks:
I wish I spoke Whale… Or is it Whalish, like Finnish? Or Cetaceanese? … I’d ask them: “How did you know?†Because, think about the people in Texas who didn’t leave until the water was up to their second floor. Think about the women in Hollywood who didn’t walk out of that hotel room until he had gotten his way. Think about me and Teri and Allison and all the beautiful wonderful women out there who have found themselves in the same situation. Why didn’t we know? Why didn’t we get out before it was too late? Is there something wrong with us?
Is there? Is it human nature to refuse to see the inevitable?
Julie Jesneck in Whale Song. Photo by Nancy Forde.
On the night of the performance, the atmosphere was mellow. A DJ played music, people mingled over wine, then helped themselves to the buffet and sat down to eat. At the appointed time, Julie got up on stage and performed Whale Song Ted-talk style. All of the women and most of the men gave her their full attention. But a handful of men, no doubt Harveys, proceeded to talk louder than her, annoyed that she was interrupting their Very Important Conversation. Would they have done the same if it had been a male actor? One of them was sitting next to the stage with his back turned to Julie. He didn’t move or even attempt to be discreet. Afterwards, we received many positive comments. One Sami woman confided with a smile that she had kicked all of the Harveys out of her community. Several men, on the other hand, avoided making eye contact with Julie.
For me, the experience was exhilarating. New city (Helsinki is beautiful), new context, new audience, and a chance to add my voice to the voices of women fighting to carve a place for themselves in a world that still sees us as “less than.†It was theatre at its best – naked, raw, and unapologetically engaged.
Women of the Arctic panel “Grappling With ‘Uncomfortable’ Conversations: From Past Traumas to Future Generations†with (l to r) Katarzyna Pastuszak, Louise Fontain, Sigþrúður Guðmundsdóttir, Liisa Holmberg, and Michelle Demmert. Moderated by Tahnee Prior. Photo by Chantal Bilodeau.
The next day, I attended the Women of the Arctic panels and saw some of the themes addressed in the play reflected in these women’s lives. These were highly accomplished women who, in some cases, had overcome great obstacles to get to where they are today. But despite their accomplishments, they are routinely overlooked in conferences where most presenters tend to be male. A photo of a session of the UArctic Congress, showing rows of men in suits, speaks volumes about the ongoing problem of gender inequality.
At the end of the play, the actress delivers a final plea to the audience before she has to leave. I’m making the same plea to you today:
No more Harveys, OK? For me. For Teri and Allison and the whale. For all of us. No more Harveys.
(Top image: Julie Jesneck in Whale Song. Photo by Veikko Somerpuro.)
______________________________
Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight countries of the Arctic – and the founder of the blog and international network Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.
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.
The long-awaited moment had arrived early; I’d thought I had two more days.
By now the woodland of the Wild Center in upstate New York was well known to me. I had been coming here for two years in a noisy little eight-seater plane from Boston, my head pressed against the ceiling as we flew at cloud level into the six-million-acre wilderness of the Adirondacks. Now came the culmination of all the work.
Before me was the iForest. Twenty-four speakers had been placed on telegraph poles hidden throughout the woods with cables running underground to each from a central hub that housed multiple racks of amplifiers and interfaces. In my hand was the thing that would bring it all to life: a hard drive containing a choral piece that featured the Grammy winning choir, The Crossing, singing primarily in the Indigenous Mohawk language. What made it unique was that each of the 72 voices was separately recorded and assigned to a location throughout the woods. It was all fine in theory – the question that now weighed on me was: What would actually happen when I plugged it in?
I made my first sketches for immersive sound pieces back in 2000. It took until 2004 to make my first piece. Simultaneity recorded various locations simultaneously then played them back together to create a “God’s ear view of the world.†I began what was to become the iForest in 2005, as a room full of iPods titled iPod Forest. Since then I’d created all manners of works that, as well as using pitch, rhythm, tone and dynamic, also used spatiality. By 2014 this had led to apps that synchronized choirs across cities such as with And Death Shall Have No Dominion across Manhattan.
There were plenty of setbacks. When I started out, gear was specialized and expensive. Worse, the whole area in the UK seemed to be run by a sonic-arts clique and if you wanted funding, the funders, not knowing this world, would call the clique who would duly cast doubt on your work (it’s dog eat dog at the waterhole) and then get grants from those same people.
Gloucestershire, UK.
But I was convinced that immersive sound was part of the future. I grew up in Gloucestershire, a beautiful rustic area of the UK. As a teenager I played guitar in Led Zeppelin-inspired bands, but I was transfixed by the sounds of birds singing at dawn; each had its own unique song yet the song was part of an extraordinary whole and the experience constantly changed depending on how you moved through it. It was a million miles away from theories of music harmony or stereo reproduction. Throughout my entire career as a composer, I have tried to find a way back to those moments. Now, in these woods, that time had come.
Dave, the site manager, was waiting for me at the hub. Unflappable and unstoppable, he’d done the hard work of getting all this in place.
“You ready to give it a try?â€
The hub was an intimate space, tall enough to stand in, crammed with electronics and countless mosquitos and black flies. I connected the drive. The interface whirred to life. The amps were all powered. There was no more reason for delay; it was time to find out if all the work had been worth it.
I’d spent time imagining sound in the woods. I’d listened to birds, to animals, to people, to the whispers of the wind. How far away was that sound? How much could you detect its direction? What happened when the weather changed? When the season changed? There were so many ways it could fail or disappoint. But instead, something magical happened: I pressed the button and suddenly, through the woods to my left, a vast choir began to sing. It was answered by a second choir to my right and then by a third directly ahead. Then they sang together, as though a synchronized choir of 72 voices was all around us. It sang back and forth across the woods in ways surprising and inspiring to me. It was more than I had hoped. We grinned at each other, listening.
In its first year, iForest received around 160,000 visitors. One of the nice things about it has been the feedback. Countless people have described being moved to tears: “Now I know how angels sound,†said one child. A man recently wrote: “It was an amazing, remarkable, beautiful experience. The music seemed to heighten all of my senses and brought back the awe and wonder of being a child exploring the forests. I could smell the duff and the pines, feel the breeze, and see the forest as if it was for the first time. The sounds of the forests were amazing, almost as if they were part of the music. Red squirrels and chipmunks scampering about, chittering and chipping; birds singing and chirping; winds blowing through the trees. The feeling of tranquility was almost overwhelming. I had tears in my eyes as I came to the end of the trail…â€
This deeper sense of connection to nature is my chief aspiration. For me, placing humans out in the woods alongside all the other species is a way to experience ourselves as a part of nature (I titled the choral work I Walk Towards Myself for this reason). The nice thing about iForest is that it can constantly reinvent itself. I am currently developing two new iForests in the US and installing new material to the iForest at the Wild Center for next year. As it spreads and develops, it may help generate not only a deeper connection to nature but new creative opportunities. Spatialized sound offers a whole new approach to music-making and it’s my hope to mentor new composers and sound creators to explore its numerous possibilities. It would be nice to think of iForest still growing, long after my time.
(Top image: Song of the Human commissioned by New Sounds, WNYC for Brookfield Place, Manhattan and performed by The Crossing. It used 18 independent speakers above, around and below the palm trees of the main atrium. It was performed live then ran as an installation for 3 weeks in October 2016.)
Pete M. Wyer is a composer and musician from England whose works often involve storytelling and innovation, especially in the area of immersive sound. He has created scores for the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Juilliard, the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, The Crossing, BBC Television and the Royal Opera House as well as writing seven operas and music theatre works. His immersive installation The iForest opened in a permanent home at The Wild Center, in the Adirondacks in 2017, receiving 160,000 visitors. It was described by Inside Hook Magazine as “Like hiking through Fantasiaâ€.
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.
