Culture and Climate Change: Narratives
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Open Research Online Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Culture and Climate Change: Narratives Edited Book How to cite: Smith, Joe; Tyszczuk, Renata and Butler, Robert eds. (2014). Culture and Climate Change: Narratives. Culture and Climate Change, 2. Cambridge, UK: Shed. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2014 Shed and the individual contributors Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchcentres/osrc/files/osrc/NARRATIVES.pdf Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Culture and Climate Change: Narratives ALICE BELL ROBERT BUTLER TAN COPSEY KRIS DE MEYER NICK DRAKE KATE FLETCHER CASPAR HENDERSON ISABEL HILTON CHRIS HOPE GEORGE MARSHALL RUTH PADEL JAMES PAINTER KELLIE C. PAYNE MIKE SHANAHAN BRADON SMITH JOE SMITH ZOË SVENDSEN RENATA TYSZCZUK MARINA WARNER CHRIS WEST Contributors BARRY WOODS Culture and Climate Change: Narratives Edited by Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk and Robert Butler Published by Shed, Cambridge Contents Editors: Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk and Robert Butler Design by Hyperkit Acknowledgements 4 © 2014 Shed and the individual contributors Introduction: What sort of story is climate change? 6 No part of this book may be reproduced in any Six essays form, apart from the quotation of brief passages Making a drama out of a crisis Robert Butler 11 for the purpose of review, without the written consent of the publishers. From truth war to a game of risk Joe Smith 15 ISBN 978-0-9557534-3-5 Greenland: How the National Theatre created a 25 climate change play Kellie C. Payne What shall we tell the children? Alice Bell 37 Cautionary tales: The Sky is Falling! The World is Ending! 45 Renata Tyszczuk Words after things: narrating the ends of worlds Bradon Smith 58 In Conversation 70 Nick Drake, Kate Fletcher, Caspar Henderson and Zoë Svendsen talk with Joe Smith. With contributions from Feimatta Conteh, Roger Harrabin, Alex Holland, Anna Jones, Charlie Kronick, Bridget McKenzie, Lucy Neal, Daniel Nelson and Bradon Smith Eleven Stories Tan Copsey 90 Kris De Meyer 91 Isabel Hilton 92 Chris Hope 94 George Marshall 96 Ruth Padel 98 James Painter 99 Mike Shanahan 102 Marina Warner 104 Chris West 105 Barry Woods 107 Contributors 110 Bibliography 113 Timeline 117 CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NARRATIVES CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NARRATIVES Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the Ashden Trust and the Open University What Sort of Story Open Space Research Centre for their continued support of the Mediating Change group, including its events, podcasts and this publication. Thanks are due to Sian Ferguson, Trust Executive at the Sainsbury Family is Climate Change? Charitable Trusts, and Parvati Raghuram, Director, and Louise Topley, Administrator, both at Open Space. The podcast and the transcript that appears in this volume are derived from an event held in partnership with Free Word: ‘What Sort of Story is Climate Change?’ Sam Sedgman at Free Word undertook the recording and editing of the podcast and Lauren Moody transcribed it. Thanks also to the staff supporting the events in other ways, particularly Executive Director Eleanor Lang. Thanks to Caspar Henderson, who organised and edited the section ‘Eleven Stories’ a series of responses to the question: ‘What Sort of a Story is Climate Change?’ The publication and related events have drawn on work funded through an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) development grant leading to the AHRC Stories of Change project. Renata Tyszczuk’s work has been supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2013-2014). This publication is integral to the ‘Weatherfronts: Climate Change and the Stories We Tell’ workshop being organised by Peter Gingold of TippingPoint and Rose Fenton of Free Word. The workshop is funded by Arts Council England and seeks to invite creative writers to engage with climate change. This volume provides a working document for that event. The resources in the book, including the timeline and bibliography, are intended to be concise. It is also worth emphasising that these essays and our other activities are intended to inhabit a middle ground between the academic and creative worlds, and hence while we aim to respect scholarly conventions we do not want to be ruled by them. The referencing is lighter than is typical in academic journal articles, and the writing styles and voices more diverse. We are particularly grateful to Hannah Bird, who produced the events and publication, and Eleanor Margolies, our copy-editor. Joe, Renata and Robert 4 5 CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NARRATIVES INTRODUCTION ready listeners (particularly in the United States and Australia) who Introduction have been comforted by the idea that the science is at best uncertain, and that the policies proposed are damaging, politically-motivated, and anti-prosperity. The result is that politicians claim that they lack the political space for more decisive action. This unstable public platform for action on climate change is Climate change is understood to be urgent and important, and at in part explained by the arrival of a long and deep global recession. the same time is widely seen as boring, difficult and confusing. It As with previous economic downturns, there has been a sharp poses a global risk, and yet is highly divisive. It represents a defining falling away in the political importance of climate change and challenge for our age, and yet it is one that many people choose to environmental concerns more broadly. Powerful economic and ignore and some, even, to deny. political interests, supported by mainstream news organisations, In the two years leading up to the climate change negotiations have been quick to fall back on the perceived successes of economic in Copenhagen in 2009, there was an enormous amount of media growth driven by fossil fuels, although it is important to note positive attention around the subject. One storyline emerged as the dominant developments too. These include a sustained and spreading public one: there was a universal threat, the science was ‘settled’, and the concern, matched by genuine advances in business and social answer would have to be global policy responses that would affect responses. Progress is often made through networks or within global many people’s lives. But that storyline — which we might call ‘the institutions, including corporations and civil society. It should also Gore narrative’ — proved insufficiently supple and robust. The rapid be acknowledged that, despite all the criticisms of their pace, UN journey that people were offered — from apocalyptic scenarios to processes have often spurred social and business achievements in low-energy lightbulbs — asked too much, too quickly, and many reducing emissions. welcomed the chance, when it came along, to reject it. The conditions that are required for fuller public engagement How might other stories about climate change help to ensure a with and debate about climate change are complex. This makes it better quality of understanding, debate and action? The editors of an important time to think carefully about the stories that are told this book believe that climate change requires multiple framings about climate change, and the politics of knowledge that surrounds and perspectives, and that these need to be provisional and evolving. it. In 2011 we published the first volume in this series, Culture and Only some voices have so far had the chance to speak and the stories Climate Change: Recordings. The panel discussions and essays were that have been told represent only a fraction of the ones that might be informed by academic research but freed from scholarly conventions. available to us. This new volume of essays — and the associated event and podcast — This book also tries to draw attention to the many ways in which seeks to reflect further on the kinds of stories that are already being climate change has a wider cultural significance, and deeper reach, told and to ask what new narratives about climate change might need than research and policy discourses generally tend to recognise. to be nurtured. Climate change research is difficult new knowledge. It introduces The rapidly expanding body of artistic and cultural work that complexities, anxieties and new questions into many areas of life. responds to climate change reflects a strong imaginative engagement In the past there has been a tendency for the research and across many disciplines. There is now a deeper and more diverse policy community to treat the communication of climate change as research base, including contributions from the humanities. a demanding but simple problem of ‘getting the message across’. Although the natural scientists have become increasingly confident And in its accounts of the future this message has had a very limited of their headline messages it is also clear that it is wholly wrong narrative range, lurching rapidly between radical pessimism and to frame research into climate change as in any sense ‘finished’. techno-optimism. The big environmental NGOs have swung between Transformations in the cultural sphere, above all in social and digital these two poles, with chants of ‘too little too late’ alternating with media, are having ambiguous, but potentially very constructive, somehow unconvincing promises of ‘win—win’ technical solutions. consequences for the ways in which stories about climate change Within this confusing context, contrarian accounts that describe develop and travel. Among other things, these changes encourage climate change as ‘the greatest scientific hoax in history’ have found more plural and dynamic accounts of our understanding of climate 6 7 CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NARRATIVES CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE: NARRATIVES change and the actions that are available to us.