On Saturday 16th November I gave a keynote talk at the Ground Up conference at Thoresby College in Kings Lynn, organised by the Groundwork Gallery. It was great to hear from some amazing artists working alongside land stewards and scientists to explore ideas about extraction and material culture.
I recorded my talk because, although I had been there in person the day before, I was busy running a Climate Museum UK pop-up in Norwich on the Saturday.
Here is the recording, and below are the slides with some extra notes. I moved fast through a lot of information, so the notes below add a good deal more detail.
I explore these questions:
- Why is the Earth crisis a Disruption Nexus?
- What has Art & Culture got to do with this?
Then I illustrate this with some of my artful engaged practice in my work with others in these collectives:
- Culture Declares Emergency
- Climate Museum UK,
- my work with groups like Reimagine Norwich, and
- my Earth Talk book, community and course https://bridgetmckenzie.uk/
The Earth crisis is the point in time when, on a global scale, the normal starts to become impossible and when survival (of humanity and biodiversity) depends on drastic changes that we must imagine and enact. Disruption is happening because of the geophysical situation, requiring a drastically disruptive response in return, which means generative creativity and relinquishment of what we have come to expect. The illustration here is from the July 2023 research into the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and the domino effect this would have on other tipping points and climate systems globally.
Why do I call it the Earth crisis? Some call it the metacrisis or the polycrisis, but I feel these terms are fairly inaccessible and unrooted in our fundamental dependence on a precious living biosphere. All major current problems arise from harmful exploitative relationships to biological life (which includes humans), and from disregard for the vulnerability and overshooting of the Earth’s operating systems.
Read more about my Earth Crisis Blinkers material, and related, the Everyday Ecocide project.
To boil this complex picture down, it is a combination of the destruction of wild places (that act as carbon sinks but also habitats for millions of entangled beings), social & racial inequalities that rest on centuries of colonial exploitation of bodies and ecosystems, the escalation of intense development and consumerism, and the emissions of fossil fuels (and other pollutants).
This is a cultural story. It has cultural causes, and Culture can do something about it. Planetary boundaries have been breached, so the priority now is collective safety. We must shift our focus from (slow) mitigation to dealing with impacts in ways that stop harm at the source too.
So, is this the time to urgently come together in places — politicians, citizens and experts, with support for the vulnerable to attend, and with Cultural facilitators enabling the process, to ask: what must we do for all people and species to be safe and resilient?
In the image above are the range of planetary boundaries, or measures of planetary health, but global climate disruption is the threat multiplier. Its breaching matters more than the others because it worsens all the others. And its own impacts trigger faster warming. The Disruption Nexus is currently a vortex of cascading and intersecting drivers for vast uncertainty. Seeing it as a Disruption Nexus is an act of hope — seeing what possibilities there for us to attain safety and move towards sanity.
This (below) is the future laid out for us under current policies. That is Thermogeddon — collapse, heat stress, mass species extinctions…
So, whatever it is we are doing for the good of others, it has to be in the context of Collapse-response. This means embarking on a deep and drastic process of truth-telling, care-taking and change-making, working for Climate Survival, or Strategic Adaptation, or for ‘islands of sanity’.
This diagram sets out some roughly consecutive steps of Collapse-response, aligned to the process of Truth-telling, Care-taking and Change-making:
- Accept truths & declare emergency (recognising that the time to declare was 40 years ago)
- Anticipate a wide range of uncertainties, risks and vulnerabilities
- Protest and act to stop harm at source (e.g. support Ecocide Law and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty)
- Connect and collaborate to build an inclusive community
- Take action to protect vulnerable people, species and assets
- Call for, set up and learn about early warning systems and refuges
- Redistribute resources to give aid and ensure needs are met
- Recovery and repair of harmed places and ecosystems. (Given that ecosystems have been harmed by centuries of extraction & agriculture, this recovery is an ongoing — and urgent task, and thriving wild places mitigate climate change and aid resilience to climate impacts before they happen.)
- The collective ongoing mission: change systems to regenerate and sustain life.
ln my paper The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis I’ve set out some ways that the Cultural sector can work in response, restoring its ancient role as an expression of life at the heart of a Regenerative system. The standard Triple Bottom Line of sustainability is usually framed with that extractive, degenerative mindset. Culture has no place in this system apart from serving the economy with commodities, and serving society by patching up the harms of this system. A more nested approach would be powered by a Culture that sees life as sacred.
Culture Declares Emergency is an international movement, originating in the UK, that offers potential for a collapse-responsive and regenerative Cultural sector. It isn’t about making a declaration and then doing nothing, but forming communities in places to support each other to take courageous and compassionate action.
I’ve produced a toolkit, including this Blueprint for Change, which begins with declaration as a process of truth-telling and reflecting on responsibilities, then moving on to reprioritise and plan to adapt to shocks. Mitigating your footprint is held alongside your handprint — which is all about the role of imagination, care, creativity and stewardship to create a positive difference.
Climate Museum UK is a collective of artists, designers and educators who help people make sense of environmental issues through creative conversations. We hold activations not exhibitions, aiming to help people imagine their futures and know what they can do.
Under the umbrella of Climate Museum UK, we have a number of local activations. The one I run is in my home city, Norwich, to which I returned in 2022. Possitopia Norwich is all about opening imaginations to the possible futures of our place in the face of the Earth crisis.
I outline one example of these experiments with imagination activism and time travel, a workshop with the Reimagine Norwich group (exploring alternative economics). A cast of 15 radical characters from the history of Norwich came to life in the heritage home of Jeremiah Colman, the philanthropist mustard magnate.
I used the framework below to take participants through a process of bringing the past change-makers to life, understanding the impacts of ecological overshoot and social shortfall, grasping this as the moment of change, and deciding what interventions we are going to make.
We concluded by writing the history that a future historian would write, looking back to this moment when there was a flourishing of radical change-makers in Norwich. See the write-up here.
This workshop template is one of 128 that is included in my new course, book and online community, Earth Talk. (If interested you can join now for sessions beginning in December and January).
At the core of this book and course is this framework for narrative design, an integrated approach to engaging people in the Earth crisis. Many activities offered to people e.g. eco-education, eco-therapy, climate activism or similar, are valuable in themselves but don’t gel together to form an ecosystem. So, some might experience a therapeutic Climate Cafe but still feel unable to take effective action. Some might be able to learn about environmental facts in college but not feel able to make meaning or to empathise with impacts on lives. Some might take part in a futures-imagining exercise but then have no mechanisms to take forward and sustain their ideas for action.
The few people that do benefit from these offers may only experience a small element of a potentially integrated experience that would develop their capacities for understanding, coping with and acting effectively in the Earth crisis. (See my framework for Eco Capacities for more on this.) The lack of these fulsome and integrated offers has many reasons but they include a lack of communing around deep systemic problems, and a lack of funding and status for eco-social engagement and the Arts.
So, let’s come back to the power of Art, and in general the value of Culture. The public Cultural sector is underfunded, so it can be defensive and insular, and competition arises between its sub-sectors. I’ve been collecting reports & manifestos promoting Culture that fail to mention the Earth crisis (its structural causes and potential impacts) but still use ecological terms as metaphors. So the Cultural sector sidelines our living biosphere, separating Culture from Nature. And conversely, the Environmental & Social action sectors can sideline and even attack Culture, perhaps because it has been linked with commodity capitalism and elitism. It can lead to some caution about involving artists and heritage, using more generic phrases such as ‘imagination’ or ‘storytelling’. In reports or initiatives that do acknowledge the value of Culture, it is framed narrowly in terms of emotions and Inner Work.
I’m keen to show the breadth of cultural practices, and I try to bring these practices together in mutual respect. Culture is ultimately about integration within diversity and human adaptiveness to our environment. All cultural practices, even the most scientific and practical, can be better at enabling human adaptiveness when they are more Artful, by which I mean more open-ended, queer, curious and playful.
I think there’s huge value in everybody having access to resources and opportunities for more Artfulness. Within this potential picture of ordinary and applied creativity in all our work, activism and communing, Art as quality practice and experiment needs space and respect. And that means artists need support and respect.
I’ve rekindled my own Art practice recently to open up a source of ideas. I’ve started a post-grad visual art course at the ArtDepot in Norwich.
A key reason I find Art powerful is that it helps us integrate the Inner and Outer Work needed for the Earth crisis. These two sides are frequently explored in social and environmental activism e.g. in the Inner Development Goals (Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting). I see Artfulness as a generative force, an expression of our being alive and optimising our relationship with our environment. It is important to make space for this in a pure way but its power doesn’t stop at the edges of our interior visions and feelings. It carries on in our handprint, in the ways we make things, touch and care for beings, imagine alternative futures and forge relationships to sustain our diversity, sanity and safety. Art is integrative because it is both active and reflective, concrete and symbolic, and it bridges the individual and the collective.
The Spiral of Inner Work in the diagram above is at the dynamic centre of the Pathways of Action (for Outer Work) that is available to us to tackle the Earth crisis. These are from the People Take Action tools that I share through the Earth Talk course. Through People Take Action workshops, participants explore how they as individuals can help create systemic change.
In conclusion, I quote from Giles Hutchins in a recent piece about Future Fitness:
“From fearful reactivity we find courageous co-creativity that provides for responsive reciprocity fueling future-fitness. This future-fitness allows for the inner-nature of the living system…to learn and grow in-tune with the outer-nature of the living system…With this perspective, we may see that life is less about reacting to outer change and more about an inner-outer dance with change; a co-creative dance that drives evolution. This perspective of embracing inner and outer adaptiveness provide for conscious co-creativity, aiding our process of becoming who we truly are and opening into how life truly is.”
The quote led me to create this wheel diagram that shows how this is a cyclical process, as we continually experience new shocks. Fearful reactivity will be a growing feature of this world in crisis, so there is ever more need for courageous creativity to build responsive reciprocity (commonality) and therefore, future fitness. If Artfulness is not nurtured, we will fragment into reactivity, antagonism and destructiveness.
