Are you willing?

Dear David Cameron

I’m writing this to you as an open letter and encourage others to do the same. I know that you have Christian faith and believe in compassionate politics. I know that you believe in the importance of science. I know that you love your children with all your heart. I wonder then what you feel about recent scientific confirmations that global warming is occurring much faster than predicted, that the planet your children are growing up on is heading to be 6C warmer by 2095? (See MIT report)

Because it is very hard to model scenarios that account accurately for the feedback effects such as methane release and the dieback of forests, the situation is even more desperate than can be portrayed. By the time your children reach middle age, life will be extremely stressed for them even with their privileged background, as they will be witnessing deaths and migrations of billions of people and destruction of ever more ecosystems. We now know that dangerous climate change occurs at only 1C of warming, not at 2C as previously thought. It is here already. In 2012, records for warm weather were broken all over the globe and news came in of alarming melting of polar ice, including in the Antarctic, dieback of old trees, excessive forest fires and storms. Can you imagine this news worsening exponentially every year, placing greater stress on our infrastructure and resources leading to greater conflict and inequality?

I assume that you have scientists and NGOs, and even businesses and the World Bank, ringing alarm bells to you about their findings and predictions every day or so, such is the extent and extremity of their data. I assume you have heard in many ways that climate action must be drastic and urgent, to reduce the concentration of CO2 to below 350 ppm within 48 months. Even if this information is filtered so as to muffle its effects I assume that you absorb media reports independently.

When it comes to your Government’s response to this data, I can make no more assumptions because their response is incomprehensible. Ed Davey has just announced that from 2014 you will aim to reduce emissions by 30% (rather than 20%) by 2020. This is rather like a morbidly obese person, on being told by a doctor he will die in 6 months, plan to reduce his intake by 100 calories starting in 12 months time. It is a delayed and uncertain plan, part of a loosened carbon budget that includes fracking for gas, which will contribute to climate change.

Are you aware that your Government’s policies need updating in the light of new data about climate change? Are you aware how much and how imminently climate change threatens the wellbeing of this nation of people you responsibly care for, including your own children? Are you willing to intervene in order to develop urgent divestment policies that might help save millions of lives? As you reflect on Christ’s compassion at the celebration of his birth, are you willing to put your own values into action to combat the social injustices of climate change?

If you are not willing, what will you tell your children when they ask you in coming years what you did in the fight against climate catastrophe?

Yours Sincerely

Bridget McKenzie

Fruiting Bodies artwork

These photos show our Fruiting Bodies cabinet of curiosities. This artwork is collaboration by me, my daughter Megan and my partner Brian. Megan has made some amazing woodland sprite figures from fallen branches, and Brian has made a wonderful tree-human figure lying flat on a lower shelf of the cabinet made from smooth symmetrical slices of beautifully marbled diseased wood. The brain is made from a gnarled knot, and the feet are spreading out roots. I’ve gathered some words, photographs and natural specimens into a cabinet. All three of our contributions work together in layers. It will be on display every weekend throughout September as part of the Woodland Wonders exhibition, part of the Open Cities festival, in Nunhead Cemetery in SE15.

The photos that were in the cabinet are here in this Flickr set.

The text from the cabinet labels is copied below. If after reading this, you feel moved to support work to combat tree diseases you can donate to the Woodland Trust here (Note that Fruiting Bodies was created before Ash Dieback hit the UK).

King Alfred’s cakes, cramp balls, coal fungus, honey mushroom, shoestring root rot, artist’s conk, heart rot ash, shaggy bracket, chicken-of-the-woods, brittle cinder, carbon cushion.

Phytophthora lateralis, Ophiostoma novo-ulmi,  Ceratocystis platani…

The old fruiting bodies have poetic names. The new diseases are harder to say, harder to take.

This ‘wunderkammer’, or cabinet of curiosity, pulls together fragments of writing, photographs, sculptures and specimens. Maybe it’s a gentle wind in the trees, rustling the leaves, calling you to look up and see trees differently, and, to see them change.

Harmful diseases in trees are accelerating due to changes caused by human actions. Combined with forest fires, stronger storms, logging and pollution, Earth’s tree cover is depleting faster than we can replace it.

We are used to thinking that human disease is the biggest problem and that being a hero is all about arresting human death. We see trees thrust, full of life, out of this earth where our old fellows lie. We can’t see their fragility.

There is a growing movement of people opting for natural burials. The idea of this movement is that you become a nutrient system for the trees.

When people have a near death experience they report leaving their body, rising up to the ceiling and looking down on themselves on their near-death bed. As a child I had some teeth out under general anaesthetic. I remember rising up into a long spiral tunnel then looking down on myself, sweat in my hair, mouth wedged open. I heard recently that children can die under general anaesthetic. The angel of death hovers very near, even when our solutions in contemporary science seem foolproof.

Imagine human consciousness rising up, minds together, to look down upon ourselves in our planetary sick bed. We would be very confused. We’d see that our species has found its way everywhere and seems to be thriving. True, here and there, in some parts of the world we see famine and desperation.

But on the whole, the human species is too many and is crazed all over the planet, eating much of it rotten. It looks fine to most of us when we are close to the surface, as most of us are eating and some of us are very fat. The leaves still come green each summer. But we are hollowing it out, and soon it may suddenly fall.

We are pests.

We have viewed too many forms of life as a pest. But we have not eradicated pests because we have created the conditions for some pests to thrive. When you read about borers, moths and beetles attacking trees, the story often goes that the pest is ‘imported on vehicles or packing cases’. You also see ‘worse spreading in cities’ or, ‘due to increased temperatures and humidity’.

We can see the horse chestnut trees in this cemetery and all over London weakening, with their yellow leaves. They are hit by a double whammy of drought, bleeding canker and the leaf miner moth.

“Like all living things, trees are susceptible to disease. A tree needs a good supply of light, water, carbon dioxide and nutrients from the environment for optimum growth. A lack of one or more of these may lead to reduced growth and put the tree under stress. If a tree is stressed then it may not have the energy required to manufacture important defences and can become vulnerable to disease.” (The Royal Forestry Society)

Try replacing ‘tree’ with ‘child’: “A child needs a good supply…” You only need to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. Trees and humans give each other the elements they need.

Symbiosis

Mutuality

Breathing together

Disease factors are complex and cumulative. A tree could be weakened by drought, by soil erosion or by wounds from storms, and then become subject to a fungal attack. Changed temperatures due to global warming may lead to intense infestations of pests. Chemical pollution and ozone depletion may play a part. As with humans, if one disease is present, another may move in.

Tree Fungi can be: Harmful (pathogenic), Non-harming (saprotrophic) or Helpful (symbiotic)

One reason why trees came to thrive is the start of a symbiotic relationship between trees and a fungus in the roots, about 400 million years ago. With this mutually beneficial infection called Mycorrhizae, the fungus eats the sugars produced by the tree during photosynthesis. In return, the fungus enhances the ability of the tree to draw up water and soil nutrients.

Mychorrhizae allow trees of diverse species to connect with each other. From a mother tree, strands of the fungus spread out to others, providing water and nutrients from tree to tree according to the needs of each.

The evolution of trees is a primary reason for the relative stability of Earth’s climate and its landmasses, allowing for Earth’s immense biodiversity of life and for one particular species, Homo Sapiens, to thrive. Without symbiotic fungi, this would not have happened.

Non-harming or saptotrophic fungus causes wood to rot. If you walk off the paths in the Cemetery, you can walk on a raft of fallen wood, concealed by weeds, bouncing and sometimes breaking where it is rotted. The rot mixes with leaves to make soil that covers the gravestones. Dust to dust.

The ones to watch are the harmful or pathogenic fungi, which are like viral or bacterial infections. They will weaken and kill the tree they infect.

Sudden Oak Death is a bacterial infection affecting both pedunculate and sessile oaks, the two species of native oaks. It is not yet in Nunhead Cemetery but it is spreading and jumping species. Infected trees bleed, then areas of bark die, followed by rapid die back and death within five years. It could be England’s tragedy.

In Victorian times, there was no panic about the health of trees, only of humans. Cholera was considered an English tragedy, an infection that spread in cities due to poor sanitation. It was believed that disease was generated spontaneously from filth and transmitted by invisible gas or ‘miasma’. Old, crowded cemeteries were thought to be rife with miasma, spurring the building of new cemeteries out of town like this one. Cleanliness came to be next to godliness.

In fact, although cholera was frightening, most people died of other causes, especially to do with food: alcoholism, malnutrition and chronic food poisoning. Myths and misunderstandings continue today about the causes and solutions for disease. We imagine moral or political causes, but as ever, the reasons relate to how we treat the soil, what we put in the air and what we put in our mouths.

Onwards and Upwards

Originally posted January 2011:

The more we know, about the rapidity and devastating impacts of climate change (which you can discover if you dig into science journals and obscure blogs, because you wouldn’t know it from many public media sources) and about the mindboggling corruption of big business, especially fossil fuel companies (which you can now discover from newspapers like the Guardian thanks to Wikileaks) the more obvious it is how the attempt to tackle the former is being derailed by the efforts of the latter. As Bill McKibben said the day after COP16 at Cancun, ‘we cannot rely on our Governments to do the job, we have to do it ourselves’ and that the biggest task is to tackle the influence of the ecocidal businesses who are now bigger than nations.

Polly Higgins in this audio slideshow about why and how ecocide should be made an international crime against peace, provides statistics from the 2010 UN report on the value of biodiversity. This report expresses environmental damage in financial terms so that it can be comprehended by the dominant culture which only acknowledges financial value.  It explains that in 2008 the top 3000 companies caused $2.2 trillion damage, in 2009 that doubled to $4 trillion and in 2010 that is expected to double again.

Ray Kurzweil, author of Singularity and maestro of the Google University, demonstrates with utopian verve the law of accelerating returns, creating an exponential curve of technological progress. This uptick, with innovation feeding innovation and computing power acting like rocket fuel, will lead us to a point of singularity where machines and humans are integrated for mutual benefit. He sees climate change as a positive driver for rapid innovation so I appreciate his thinking. However, I wonder, what are the side effects and what is the fuel for this upward curve of technology?

If we see Kurzweil’s big uptick alongside two other global big upticks, the hockey stick curve of runaway climate change and the annual doubling of environmental destruction, two questions arise. The first reflects ‘pessimism of the intellect’ and the second reflects its corollary, ‘optimism of the will’.

The first: Does this widely shared optimism about the rapidity and potential of technological progress, based on the current trend of exponential progress, arise only because of a related exponential increase in environmental destruction? I’m not suggesting that we couldn’t innovate rapidly without exploiting the environment. (In fact I believe our only option IS to innovate rapidly without exploiting the environment.) I’m suggesting that the current trend of progress has depended on exploitation, which has taken us to the brink of ecological collapse. If the trend of progress does depend on exploitation, the grounds for optimism based on the upward trend so far are very shaky, because our only ‘grounds’ are earthly.

I have placed hope in our ability to learn, helped by the massive opening up of information with the internet. For 25 years, there has been serious concern about climate change and widespread understanding that ecocide causes climate change. This knowledge has intensified every year along with the evidence in the form of human suffering. However, it is hard to keep this faith when you see how companies double their destruction annually in the face of this evidence. The media today brings us news of climate-change related devastating flooding spreading down Eastern Australia. In the same news we hear that BP has negotiated to exploit Arctic oil fields of Siberia, potentially yielding vast amounts of hydrocarbons.

No connection made. In the context of this continuing behaviour, it’s hard to see how humans will develop the right technology to overcome mass loss of infrastructure, food supply, biodiversity and human life in the right timescale.

This video from NASA intends to shift our frame of reference to look to a distant future to see space colonisation as human destiny. It’s very impressive but it glosses over a major issue while also somehow making much of it. The video opens by saying that humans are incapable in their current state of evolution, of being stewards of their planet. It says that we need to evolve in order to colonise space, implying that we first need to evolve in order to stop ecological collapse and discover resources that will make them capable of space travel. Putting my project manager’s hat on, how will this work in terms of scheduling I wonder? Perhaps NASA and the technological elite imagine that some of us will be able to retreat to a number of high tech biosphere arks or bunkers whilst simultaneously evolving, restoring Earth’s ecosystems and in turn developing the capacities to travel to and terraform other planets. But the video leaves such details to the imagination.

The second question is the more optimistic one: Is the combined challenge of attaining exoplanetary space exploration and arresting global ecological collapse enough to make us overcome the weaknesses which have mildly slowed the former and rapidly accelerated the latter? In my view, the most fundamental political global split is between those who believe we must restore the health of the planet and those who believe we must focus on human prosperity. On the whole, the ruling elites who focus on the extrinsic goals of prosperity are also inspired by the potential of technology, and in many cases, by the possibilities of the colonisation of space.  Perhaps the goal of human enlightenment and subsequent evolution with the promise of going into space is more motivating as a common enterprise, than the challenge of tackling the environmental collapse per se. Perhaps this combined challenge is what it would take to unite people with different views.

By asking this question I’m not saying that I believe in a positive answer. But, it’s a more optimistic view than I’ve had in the past. It’s in keeping with the publication of Mark Stevenson’s book, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. Mark is my co-founding director in Flow Associates and over the past 5 years we’ve had many discussions on these topics. I think a bit of his optimism has rubbed off on me.

Fruiting Bodies

I’ve just completed laying out our Fruiting Bodies cabinet of curiosities. This artwork is collaboration by me, my daughter Megan and my partner Brian. Megan has made some amazing woodland sprite figures from fallen branches, and Brian has made a wonderful tree-human figure lying flat on a lower shelf of the cabinet made from smooth symmetrical slices of beautifully marbled diseased wood. The brain is made from a gnarled knot, and the feet are spreading out roots. I’ve gathered some words, photographs and natural specimens into a cabinet. All three of our contributions work together in layers. It will be on display every weekend throughout September as part of the Woodland Wonders exhibition, part of the Open Cities festival, in Nunhead Cemetery in SE15.

Please do come and see it, and wander round the Cemetery too. If you come 3-4th or 10th-11th you can also visit the Unextinction Machine in the Hill Station nearby, by Brian and Megan McKenzie. If you feel moved to support an organisation that helps keep trees healthy in cities, you could sponsor me as I’m running the Tree-athlon for Trees for Cities.

I’m sharing the writing element here:

King Alfred’s cakes, cramp balls, coal fungus, honey mushroom, shoestring root rot, artist’s conk, heart rot ash, shaggy bracket, chicken-of-the-woods, brittle cinder, carbon cushion.

Phytophthora lateralis, Ophiostoma novo-ulmi,  Ceratocystis platani…

The old fruiting bodies have poetic names. The new diseases are harder to say, harder to take.

This ‘wunderkammer’, or cabinet of curiosity, pulls together fragments of writing, photographs, sculptures and specimens. Maybe it’s a gentle wind in the trees, rustling the leaves, calling you to look up and see trees differently, and, to see them change.

Harmful diseases in trees are accelerating due to changes caused by human actions. Combined with forest fires, stronger storms, logging and pollution, Earth’s tree cover is depleting faster than we can replace it.

We are used to thinking that human disease is the biggest problem and that being a hero is all about arresting human death. We see trees thrust, full of life, out of this earth where our old fellows lie. We can’t see their fragility.

There is a growing movement of people opting for natural burials. The idea of this movement is that you become a nutrient system for the trees.

When people have a near death experience they report leaving their body, rising up to the ceiling and looking down on themselves on their near-death bed. As a child I had some teeth out under general anaesthetic. I remember rising up into a long spiral tunnel then looking down on myself, sweat in my hair, mouth wedged open. I heard recently that children can die under general anaesthetic. The angel of death hovers very near, even when our solutions in contemporary science seem foolproof.

Imagine human consciousness rising up, minds together, to look down upon ourselves in our planetary sick bed. We would be very confused. We’d see that our species has found its way everywhere and seems to be thriving. True, here and there, in some parts of the world we see famine and desperation.

But on the whole, the human species is too many and is crazed all over the planet, eating much of it rotten. It looks fine to most of us when we are close to the surface, as most of us are eating and some of us are very fat. The leaves still come green each summer. But we are hollowing it out, and soon it may suddenly fall.

We are pests.

We have viewed too many forms of life as a pest. But we have not eradicated pests because we have created the conditions for some pests to thrive. When you read about borers, moths and beetles attacking trees, the story often goes that the pest is ‘imported on vehicles or packing cases’. You also see ‘worse spreading in cities’ or, ‘due to increased temperatures and humidity’.

We can see the horse chestnut trees in this cemetery and all over London weakening, with their yellow leaves. They are hit by a double whammy of drought, bleeding canker and the leaf miner moth.

“Like all living things, trees are susceptible to disease. A tree needs a good supply of light, water, carbon dioxide and nutrients from the environment for optimum growth. A lack of one or more of these may lead to reduced growth and put the tree under stress. If a tree is stressed then it may not have the energy required to manufacture important defences and can become vulnerable to disease.” (The Royal Forestry Society)

Try replacing ‘tree’ with ‘child’: “A child needs a good supply…” You only need to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. Trees and humans give each other the elements they need.

Symbiosis

Mutuality

Breathing together

Disease factors are complex and cumulative. A tree could be weakened by drought, by soil erosion or by wounds from storms, and then become subject to a fungal attack. Changed temperatures due to global warming may lead to intense infestations of pests. Chemical pollution and ozone depletion may play a part. As with humans, if one disease is present, another may move in.

Tree Fungi can be: Harmful (pathogenic), Non-harming (saprotrophic) or Helpful (symbiotic)

One reason why trees came to thrive is the start of a symbiotic relationship between trees and a fungus in the roots, about 400 million years ago. With this mutually beneficial infection called Mycorrhizae, the fungus eats the sugars produced by the tree during photosynthesis. In return, the fungus enhances the ability of the tree to draw up water and soil nutrients.

Mychorrhizae allow trees of diverse species to connect with each other. From a mother tree, strands of the fungus spread out to others, providing water and nutrients from tree to tree according to the needs of each.

The evolution of trees is a primary reason for the relative stability of Earth’s climate and its landmasses, allowing for Earth’s immense biodiversity of life and for one particular species, Homo Sapiens, to thrive. Without symbiotic fungi, this would not have happened.

Non-harming or saptotrophic fungus causes wood to rot. If you walk off the paths in the Cemetery, you can walk on a raft of fallen wood, concealed by weeds, bouncing and sometimes breaking where it is rotted. The rot mixes with leaves to make soil that covers the gravestones. Dust to dust.

The ones to watch are the harmful or pathogenic fungi, which are like viral or bacterial infections. They will weaken and kill the tree they infect.

Sudden Oak Death is a bacterial infection affecting both pedunculate and sessile oaks, the two species of native oaks. It is not yet in Nunhead Cemetery but it is spreading and jumping species. Infected trees bleed, then areas of bark die, followed by rapid die back and death within five years. It could be England’s tragedy.

In Victorian times, there was no panic about the health of trees, only of humans. Cholera was considered an English tragedy, an infection that spread in cities due to poor sanitation. It was believed that disease was generated spontaneously from filth and transmitted by invisible gas or ‘miasma’. Old, crowded cemeteries were thought to be rife with miasma, spurring the building of new cemeteries out of town like this one. Cleanliness came to be next to godliness.

In fact, although cholera was frightening, most people died of other causes, especially to do with food: alcoholism, malnutrition and chronic food poisoning. Myths and misunderstandings continue today about the causes and solutions for disease. We imagine moral or political causes, but as ever, the reasons relate to how we treat the soil, what we put in the air and what we put in our mouths.

The climate crisis and ‘the happy museum’

Originally posted May 2010: (Since then, the Happy Museum project has launched, and funded six projects and also hosted our Flow/Renaissance toolkit on Museums for the Future)

Tomorrow I’ll be contributing to a discussion about the Happy Museum, instigated by Tony Butler and co-ordinated by the New Economics Foundation. You will have seen from my last post that I’ve just read Clive Hamilton’s ‘Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change’. So, I’m trying to gear up to talk about happiness when what I’m feeling (beneath my habitual buoyancy) is despair at the picture he paints. I’m despairing precisely because this is not a fiction, cooked up with metaphor and catharsis, but because it is a scenario rigorously underpinned by scientific consensus. The truth is: the most likely future is one in which the planet will reach 4C by 2070, which will have catastrophic impacts for humans and many other species.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than that we face the fact that we have made our planet unliveable by our fetish for things. And what is a museum, fundamentally, other than a monument to our fetish for things? If it is solely that, how can I feel happy working in the museum sector? How can museums themselves be happy in this context? How can museums contribute to wellbeing, not just of people but the biosphere?

If you look at it logically (without being too linear) it is not a simple task. David Cameron said the other day that he wanted to lead the ‘greenest Government ever. It’s a very simple ambition and one I’m absolutely committed to.’ It might be simple in concept (in a nutshell: stop exploiting the earth’s resources now, pursue a no-growth strategy, invest in geo-engineering, lead the world to follow suit at an urgent pace) but it is not simple in practice. That he believes it to be simple belies the fact that environmental problems are understood to be treatable with technocratic measures. He believes, like most politicians, that you can turn down the climate dial by investing in a bit of technology, enabling some making and saving of money in the process. Hamilton said that he’s certain that the future is going to be bad, that even if we take extraordinary radical action globally we must face the fact that things are still going to be bad, but that this mustn’t stop us aiming to take that radical action.

So, how can museums help push forward that radical action? The time has come for museums to:

-          stop focusing (quite so fetishistically) on their things and start focusing on complexity and contextual education

-          to shift focus somewhat away from the past to start looking more to the future

-          to stop being so slow as a working culture and to start behaving with urgency.

But what does this mean? Responding to the key causes/solutions in Hamilton’s books, here’s the start of a list of ways that museums can, and must, contribute to tackling this crisis.

Politics above all

Hamilton shares research that says the more people understand the climate crisis the less likely they are to take individual action to green their lifestyles (though many of course may be relatively careful). They understand that the solution will not be individuals (or small organisations) making small changes. The only solutions effective enough will be international political and large-scale industrial action. Museums can and should contribute with dialogue and narrative that helps us see a bigger picture, to see how big changes have come about due to decisions made by those with material and political power.

No growth
Hamilton shows how essential it is we resist the entrenched notion that the priority in politics and the purpose of work is economic growth. Museums have been complicit in this ethos because of their role in showcasing objects of wealth, the spoils of war and exploration, and regional or national growth fuelled by technology and exploitation. Currently, museums are attempting to maintain a sense of pride while admitting alternative narratives, for example, about diverse or demotic cultures.  However, they must take several steps beyond this to critique our growth-led values. However difficult this might be, museums can be an ideal resource for this because they contain the evidence of the damage caused by growth strategies.

Work less
Hamilton analyses economics to show that saving money only defers consumption and probably increases it. We actually need to earn less, so therefore we need to work less. Many people may feel that their lives would be empty without work but perhaps museums offer us a way to see different ways to live and be productive, by showing us how different cultures have lived in the past, by inspiring creativity, or offering opportunities to do voluntary work or informal learning.

Alternative to advertising
Advertising, especially to children, has played a huge role in the increase of consumption. In 1983 companies spent $100 million on advertising to children, but by 2007 they were spending $17 billion or more. He says ‘their capacity to moderate their desires has been systematically dismantled from birth’. So, it’s even more important now that that cultural & heritage organisations engage children with non-materialistic programmes. Also, it’s important for museums to rival advertising, which might mean they have to act like marketers, by using digital social media and games much more. Museums offer a safe, secular space to help resist corporate dominance.

Global emissions
Another issue is that of consumption measured at a global level. We should not rest on our laurels of reducing emissions within the UK when a) we outsource much of our production and b) global emissions are what matter overall. Developing nations such as China, India and Russia are some of the primary emitters. Although there has been a great stress on museums developing a sense of local or regional identity (in many ways a very good policy), we shouldn’t lose sight of the potential of museums to connect us to other countries. We can enhance this by stepping up dialogue, sharing heritage knowledge and an exchange of professional practices with India, China, Russia and other countries most likely to raise global emissions. (Flow Associates is developing museum & gallery learning programmes in India and Russia, in part, for these reasons.)

Ethical sponsorship

Hamilton says ‘the most immediate reason we now face climate disruption lies in the political power of the fossil fuel lobby’. We have seen how BP & others lobbied to resist regulations that would have prevented the Deepwater Horizon spill. Museums and galleries should be scrupulous about resisting sponsorship from companies such as BP and Shell. They should pursue this as a positive strategy because as oil spills from deep water and Arctic drilling get ever blacker and dirtier, and more people see how marine pollution is a major cause of global warming, their continuing reliance on such sponsors will significantly damage reputations. Only this weekend, activists carried out an oily protest at Tate Modern, calling for Tate to wean itself from BP.

Emotion to cognition to action

Humans have evolved to respond to immediate visceral fear, but the threats of climate change require us to rely on cognitive processing. Museums have developed powerful interpretive strategies so that there are closer links between our emotional response and our grasp of big ideas. There is a danger of the museum experience being so emotive and engaging that it becomes hallucinogenic, distancing us from reality, like the way films can make disasters seem cool. Museums should plan their learning experiences so that visceral emotion leads to cognition, and then crucially, leads to action, on a personal and collective level. We (in the UK) need to develop a new framework for planning and evaluating learning and social outcomes, one which takes account of the future we face.

Facing the bad but preventing the worst

Originally posted May 2010. (Since then, the climate denialists have been ever more active in their death threats and what George Monbiot calls ‘Astroturfing’ and lobbying, and Obama has just approved the building of a pipeline to transport oil from the Tar Sands to Texas.)

I went to a talk this week at the RSA called ‘Facing climate change’ by Clive Hamilton who has written an essential book called Requiem for a Species. I’m not writing in this post about the cultural and heritage sectors, except to say that his position is vital for us to consider, and so I’m just summarising his speech. The book addresses cultural shifts, the need to reimagine all our political and lifestyle decisions. It’s not yet another essay to prove anthropogenic climate change but is about why we can’t move forward, why the responses to science are either hostile or inadequate.
He described the vicious cyberbullying of climate scientists, how death threats, break-ins and hackings of senior scientists have escalated. Science (which has also been championed as a tool of progress) has now been characterised as left wing ideology and climate denialism has been funded by right wing thinktanks. Now that the BNP has adopted climate denialism it’s now inextricably linked with right wing ideology (though he also notes that the left wing has also been dismissive of environmentalism.)

He described how the 4th IPCC report (2007) seriously underestimated climate change impacts and now how the evidence of increasingly rapid warming has been buried in avalanche of reports around Climategate. (One statistic out of many he showed: Warming of 3 to 4 C is now associated with 360 to 420 ppmv of CO2 rather than 500 to 600, as previously thought, Schneider and Schneider, Nature Geoscience, Dec 2009). The sustained and media driven assault on science led to public surveys of more disbelief in climate change than before Copenhagen.

He tells us that it is virtually impossible to avoid dramatic change to the climate this century. It is already happening. (We knew this before but it hurts to hear it again and so convincingly.) He talks about some of the research that explains the modelling. For example, the Tyndall Centre has explored a range of two figs defining the curve upon which our future depends, of when emissions peak and how quickly they decline. How likely are we to peak at 2020 and decline by 6 to 7 % every year afterwards? The Stern review looked at some historical precedents to work out the answer. When and where gas and nuclear were introduced you would expect a big rate of emissions decline but it was minimal. The best incidence was when the Soviet Union’s  economy collapsed.

So, the likely scenario is 4C by 2070, which is hotter than the planet has been for 15 million years. To avoid this level we must have reductions of 9% annually. But this has been seen as impossible because it’s equivalent to global war mobilisation on the scale we saw in the 2nd world war. I feel incredulous that this is seen to be impossible: we did it before to resist a dictator, we can’t consider it now to resist the loss of a planet most species can live in? The reason why we don’t mobilise is that the majority response is denial, including casual denial and disengagement. Others might attempt to ‘do something’ but with maladaptive strategies, for example with minor diversions, greenwashing, blame shifting, reducing the problem in scale or distance, or by creating benign fictions. Adaptive strategies are the only helpful approach (and even so, without global radical political action they won’t avert some catastrophe) as the only healthy way we can deal with the situation is to express and manage our emotions, to solve problems and to readjust our values. He cited something called post-traumatic growth theory: if you see your mortality you’re more likely to seek material comfort but if you’ve had major trauma you’re more likely to be more empathetic, less greedy. So, we need to experience despair in order to develop generosity. You must ‘move forward in the dark’ with small steps even if you can’t see your victories.

Someone asked him: Should we be allowing people to despair? His belief is that if you don’t despair you’re not listening to the scientists. Being optimistic might have been a defensible position a decade ago.  He said: ‘I’m optimistic that it’s going to be bad, but also that we can do lots of things to mean it’s not as bad as it can be.’ USA is especially allured by optimism but this isn’t so far leading to radical breakthroughs in reducing emissions.

Another question: What would you do if you were a politician? He said that we have to completely reimagine how we deal with it. He noted that climate was not mentioned in our election because 3 parties don’t differ in their policies very much. Many scientists thought that the IPCC and Stern reports would blow away the denialists but climate science is too much of a fundamental challenge to the enlightenment conceit.

Another question: There’s all this emphasis on climate change but why not tackle biodiversity decline, as it’s a far more serious issue. Hamilton’s response suggested that biodiversity is entirely wrapped up with it, it’s not a separate issue. Ecocide in the oceans and forests is causing climate change and in turn climate change destroys biodiversity.