Yesterday I was talking to RSA Arts & Ecology Centre contributor/writer Caleb Klaces and we both started raving about Dave Eggers’ book What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. It’s a supreme piece of narrative non-fiction writing in which Eggers tells the extraordinary life of Valentino Achak …
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Global Warming
“Global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one…â€
Robin McKie, science journalist for The Observer, has been to see Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan, and has noticed that that there is something significant happening across the arts:
Until now, scientists, journalists and politicians have dominated the debate about the threat of greenhouse warming. Many have fought well and brought a proper sense of urgency to the debate. However, it will be our writers, artists and playwrights who will finally delineate the crisis and explore in human terms what lies ahead. Only then can we hope to come to terms with our endangered world….Thus global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one and deserves to be addressed through the activities of those who define our culture: our artists and writers.
These individuals will be the ones who reveal to us the kinds of lives we may lead in the near future – not just in physical, but in moral and social terms – as our planet heats up. In other words, we need an Orwell or a Huxley to help us define the terrible issues that confront us – and to judge from the recent efforts of Waters, McCarthy and McEwan we can have a fair amount of confidence that our artists and writers will deliver. Whether or not we choose to listen to them is a different matter.
“Global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one…â€
Robin McKie, science journalist for The Observer, has been to see Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan, and has noticed that that there is something significant happening across the arts:
Until now, scientists, journalists and politicians have dominated the debate about the threat of greenhouse warming. Many have fought well and brought …
Go to RSA Arts & Ecology
Stuff gets Real.
The now-classic video Story of Stuff, a basic breakdown of our modern industrial-consumer system, recently came under fire on the now-classic Fox News Channel. Both Mike Maniates, who is on the Story of Stuff advisory board, and Christopher Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, took questions from reporter Jane Skinner for a segment called “Happening Now.â€
Horner defined the video as “terrorizing children,†(not surprising, since he’s drawn thin parallels between the German head of the Green Party and Hilter) while Maniates defended it as a valid examination of our culture. Some 7,000 schools and churches have ordered copies of Story of Stuff, and though you can barely catch them through all the Fox-newsy shouting, Skinner attempts to make some valid points about conversation and context. Not spouting dogma, as it were.
Dang straight, skulls and crossbones are scary. So are most flame retardants. So is much of modern resource management. So, to many, is Fox News. Whether Story of Stuff is an effective cultural impetus to move us toward a more gorgeous green utopia or not, it’s definitely bringing the conversation into the public sphere. That’s nothing short of awesome.
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GAS ZAPPERS an online game about Climate Change » Play
GAS ZAPPERS is a series of interactive online art game that tackles climate change. The game’s protagonist is the polar bear—that victimized, yet cuddly symbol of global warming. Players embody the polar bear as it progresses through different climate change scenarios: Venice under water, a forest threatened by bulldozers, and an altercation with vicious oil derricks.
GAS ZAPPERS have different gaming scenarios with custom designed gameplay addressing the various components of global warming. Each scenarios embody a specific environmental identity addressing the causes, problems and possible solutions to the various scientifically proven contributors to elevated global temperatures. The project is made possible by Tribeca Film Institute.
via GAS ZAPPERS an online game about Climate Change » Play.
Age of Stupid as a model for climate activism
Armstrong filming in New Orleans, 2006On the eve of the premiere of Age of Stupid, an email from director Franny Armstrong:
Tabloid Revolution: Three million people will have choked on their cornflakes this morning when they read Pete’s column in the Sun. See attached. “We – that is humanity – have only a couple of years left to act if we are to stop catastrophic climate change causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.†In The Sun.
Pete being Pete Postlethwaite. The column is an achievement in itself in a paper that last year published a column by Kelvin MacKenzie headlined Global Warming Doesn’t Exist.
The Age of Stupid has been an exemplary campaign, from the crowd-funding strategy that raised £450,000 to meet production cost, £130,000 to meet distribution and publicity costs and a further £164,000 for political campaigns running alongside the movie, to an incredibly efficiently run grass-roots internet strategy to get the words out.
How literature tackles climate change
A few months ago I reported on Ian McEwan, currently writing a book inspired by his Cape Farewell
journey to the Arctic, who was saying how hard it was to was to tackle such a “virtuous†topic in a novel.
The trajectory of a short story is very different from a novel, but Helen Simpson manages it deftly in her story “In-flight Entertainment” which appeared in Granta 100. In it, two men who meet in the first class cabin of a transatlantic flight discuss global warming, while, next to them, another passenger dies of a heart attack.
“Four hours’ delay,” volunteered Alan, “thanks to those jokers at Heathrow. Alan Barr, by the way.”
“And I’m Jeremy Lees. Yes, those anti-flying protesters. A waste of time.”
“Complete time-wasters.”
“I suppose so,” said Jeremy. “What I meant, though, was it was a waste of their time. They’re not going to change anything.”
“Exactly.
It’s nonsense, isn’t it, this global warming stuff. Trying to turn the
wheel back. Half the scientists don’t agree with it anyway.”
“Actually
I think you’ll find they do. Ah, red please,’ said Jeremy as the air
stewardess offered him wine. ‘What have you got? Merlot or Zinfandel?
I’ll try the Zinfandel. Thank you. No, they do agree now, they’ve
reached a consensus. I ought to know, I was one of them. No, it’s not
nonsense, I’m afraid. The world really is warming up.”
“Merlot,” said Alan, rather annoyed.
It was published well before the Heathrow decision, but manages to include the line: “Heathrow will get its third runway any time now.”
Nominations for other pieces of contemporary lit which tackle this sort of stuff?
Picture: Still from The Coming Race by Ben Rivers 2006. “An indistinct, slow-moving sea of humanity clambers valiantly up a rocky mountain.” Showing as part of Figuring Landscapes at the Tate Modern, February 6 – 8. Details here.
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Pessimism, optimism, pt 3
Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory, one of the best bloggers in the arts/ecology zone, has an excellent article in the Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine about the high level of public indifference to climate change, suggesting that our strategies are all wrong.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the authors of “The Death of
Environmentalismâ€, recently wrote that, “Global warming remains a
low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Centre for
People and the Press’s top 20 priorities. By contrast, public concern
about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically.â€Â It’s
no surprise that most people aren’t listening. Some years ago, NOP
conducted a survey where they went out into the street and told people
that they were going to mention a string of words and as soon as people
heard each one they had to say whether their energy levels went up or
down. The word “environment†was included in the list. “The horrible,
horrible conclusion of this surveyâ€, recalled Jonathan Porritt,
“was that for the vast majority of people the mere mention of the word
‘environment’ sent their energy levels plummeting downwards.â€
Environmentalismâ€, recently wrote that, “Global warming remains a
low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Centre for
People and the Press’s top 20 priorities. By contrast, public concern
about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically.â€Â It’s
no surprise that most people aren’t listening. Some years ago, NOP
conducted a survey where they went out into the street and told people
that they were going to mention a string of words and as soon as people
heard each one they had to say whether their energy levels went up or
down. The word “environment†was included in the list. “The horrible,
horrible conclusion of this surveyâ€, recalled Jonathan Porritt,
“was that for the vast majority of people the mere mention of the word
‘environment’ sent their energy levels plummeting downwards.â€
Instead he quotes Buckminster Fuller: “You don’t change things by
fighting the existing reality, you change things by building a new
model that makes the existing one obsolete.” People respond to a positive vision of our future life, not dire warnings of the impending grimness. Read it here.
Buoyed by the internet generation, there are many who have great faith that entrepreneurial creativity can dig us out of this. The difficulty is not so much the lack of new models though, but the lack of success of those that are being worked on. There are dreams like Winy Maas’s brilliant new city in Seoul, but in reality those dreams are proving extremely hard to make concrete. Not so long back, Robert wrote glowingly about Arup’s great plans for the new eco-city of Dongtan in China, arguably the best practical blueprint yet for mass urban living. But plans for building the city appear to be slipping as economic will disappears. The site remains as “sodden farmland”.
Both the warnings of scientists and environmentalists and the creators of new models are frustrated by the public’s indifferent response. People feel too disempowered, too fatalistic or too apathetic to embrace change. If the public, the activists and the dreamers are unable to create the energy for a solution, maybe it’s a failure of leadership.Â
In yesterday’s interview about the need for artists to engage in his campaign, Bill McKibben invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill. Now that was possibly an attempt to flatter us Brits, but intentional or not, there is a point there. Churchill’s depiction of himself as the lone voice speaking out against Nazism in the 1930s may be a historical exaggeration, but he was one of several politicians who took a vocal stand though initially unfashionable stand against the appeasement of Nazism.Â
Secretary of State for Climate Change Ed Miliband, as reported below, has been repeatedly calling for a popular movement about global warming, to give politicians like him a base on which to act. In his post on the Gaza conflict, Matthew Taylor points to the leadership deficit in Israel that allows the hawks to speak the loudest. When a Secretary of State for Climate Change starts asking Jarvis Cocker to lead a popular movment on climate change so that he can have the freedom to act, are we also suffering from a leadership deficit?
The Closest Packing of Spheres, Buckminster Fuller, 1980, Chrome-plated steel rods, acrylic spheres.
Sebastian + Barquet Gallery
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Art at work: global warming, step off.
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Dystopia: super motivating, right? Part of why we’re all so excited about green living and moving and breathing is that constant potential for utter global collapse. Ooooh. Potential ecological apocalypse. I gotta get me one of them CFLs.
Artist Petko Dourmana creates this eerie potential future. In Global Warming Survival Kit, he realizes this generation’s “nuclear winter†by setting up a station for a watchman of a border between land and the North Sea. The border lies on an ash-covered future landscape, images of which can only be seen with night-vision goggles. Perhaps the best way to prevent an apocalypse is to change our perspective.
The piece is on display as part of Brand_Dourmana at the Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Oldenberg, Germany. It was recently nominated for the 2009 transmediale award.
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