The achilles heel of climate campaigners
As American writer Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in her book Bright-Sided, it’s now OK to say that optimism may be over-rated. If a relentless economic positivism led to the economic crash, I’d also say that an instituational inability to say how dire things really are environmentally must now be seen as one of the contributing factors to why the public are reluctant to back the kind of radical measures we need from COP15.
In private, climate experts often admit they’re scared silly about what the future’s going to be like; in public they maintain a more positive face. There are, of course, very good reasons for this. Conventionally, we assume that people don’t change unless there’s something in it for them. But what if the climate crisis doesn’t fit this paradigm for cultural change? What if we actually need to start to panic to achieve change?
A slightly comic tussle took place on Monday in the Guardian between two people – both climate campaigners – who hold opposing views on this. The new British bugle blower for looking apocalypse in the face has been the writer and activist Paul Kingsnorth, who, along with his friend Dougald Hine, established the anti-modernist Dark Mountain Project to urge us to embrace the end of civilisation, (see this blog from a few weeks ago). Kingsnorth’s radical view is that civilisation is the disease, not the cure. Any efforts civilisation makes to combat climate change are doomed to failure, and will only prolong the descent.
Kingsnorth and the Guardian’s climate rottweiler George Monbiot went to head on this, Kingsnorth belittling Monbiot’s efforts to browbeat us to reform ourselves:
We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace “sustainable development” rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet.
It’s an odd situation for Monbiot to find himself in. Monbiot is more accustomed to coming under attack from the denial-bots of the conspiracist fringe. Now activist Kingsnorth himself is attacking his friend Monbiot forbeing a denialist. You have to feel sorry for the man. Interestingly poet and author Kingsnorth comes at the issue as much as an artist as a camaigner – and as noted earlier – art often scratches at the apocalyptic door.
Monbiot’s obvious defence is to point out that Kingsnorth’s millenarianism has a lurid seam of misanthropy to it:
I note that you have failed to answer my question about how many people the world could support without modern forms of energy and the systems they sustain, but 2 billion is surely the optimistic extreme. You describe this mass cull as “a long descent” or a “retreat to a saner world”. Have you ever considered a job in the Ministry of Defence press office?
Monbiot is right of course. Kingsnorth’s world is a dark one. It’s just whenever I hear Monbiot arguing like this, there’s something about the primness of his tone, the convolutions of his clauses and the use of words like “surely” that always makes me think of Miss Jean Brodie.
But despite the misanthropy of Kingsnorth’s position, he has hit on a real achilles heel of the climate change movement. It’s never healthy to believe one thing and say another.
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By the by, Kingsnorth himself refers to Monbiot’s love of McCarthy’s The Road as evidence of Monbiot’s own millenarianism. Kingsnorth and I have been disagreeing about that book (see comments); he doesn’t think it’s about climate change at all. It’s one of those arguments where the only solution will be to pull McCarthy off the sidewalk and ask him himself:
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EDIT. Coincidentally, Bill McKibben and Steven Colbert also danced around the same maypole on the Colbert Report, with Cobert adopting a slightly lighter form of millenarianism: “It’s game over. We should all have end of the world sex, right now. We’re all going to die!”
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bill McKibben | ||||
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Paul Kingsnorth's new millenarian literary movement
Paul Kingsnorth, poet, environmentalist, journalist and author of Real England, attempts to kick off a ground-breaking new literary movement this month, The Dark Mountain Project with social-web frontiersman Dougald Hine. Its premise is a radical one; if I represent it right, it’s that we are on the brink of catastrophe and it’s art’s reponsibility to face that, and to reflect it in its output. We have been telling the wrong stories. It is time to start telling the right ones:
We don’t believe that anyone – not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers – is really facing up to the scale of this. As a society, we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction. Well, we don’t buy it.
Kingsnorth and Hine have written a remarkable manifesto that’s well worth reading; it’s erudite, lyrical and, most of all, apolcalyptic in an almost William Blake-ish kind of way, seeing civilisation treading on a “thin crust of lava” as the environmental catastrophe looms. Its eight principles of “Uncivilisation” include the following:
3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
There is a growing debate here at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre about the role of apocalyptic art in changing minds. We are fond of quoting Raymond Williams here, “that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”. If you want people to change, you have to offer them a way to a future that inspires them, rather than terrifies them. Pessimism convinces nobody.
But what if that act of making hope possible only bluntens the urgency of the situation, dissipates the urge to action?
Kingsnorth and Hine are looking for people to rally to the flag.
"I am overpopulation"
When I lived in the US, I got the idea that environmentalists there seem a lot freer with discussing the concept of overpopulation than they are here in Europe. There’s a possible reason for this. We have direct historical experience of a regimes that have practiced population control – not just in the Nazi era, but more recently in the Balkans.
European liberal politics equates the idea of population reduction with a kind of Malthusian misanthropy; shouldn’t we be looking for ways to feed the nine billion population sustainably, 
rather than to deny them? And there is almost always a subtle tang of racism in the idea of population control. But what if that idea of mass sustainability is impossible? Lovelock predicts the human population will collapse to one billion by 2100.
Jonathan Porritt sounds stung by the reaction he got when when he floated the idea. In his column A Sustainable Population on the Forum For The Future site he seems puzzled that people should question his motivation for promoting the Optimum Population Trust’s “Stick At Two” campaign:
You’d have thought I’d advocated compulsory sterilisation, emasculation, euthanasia, and baby-slaughtering all in one fell swoop. Melanie Philips likened me to Pol Pot and Hitler (who was “green” after all!), and when Fox News in the US got hold of the story, every religious nutcase with nothing better to do crawled out from under their stones to suggest the best thing I could do to help address population pressure would be to top myself. Instantly. Logic and sound evidence were not much in evidence.
He insists that it’s an issue we have to consider urgently. He’s right to suggest that it’s a taboo topic; but maybe with good reason, given its history.
Trying to think about how artists would respond to the idea of overpopulation I can only come up with two examples. The first is the Hungarian/Syrian artist Roza El-Hassan, who did a series of works over the last decade called R thinking dreaming about overpopulation, [above right] which included producing t-shirts that read “I Am Overpopulation”. Her works approach the topic from a feminist viewpoint, but also envisage it in terms of European racism. If there was any doubt about the latter element, El-Hassan participated in the billboard above with the artist Milicia Tomic. If you don’t recognise him, the person driving the Porshe in the photo is supposed to be the Islamophobic Austrian politician Jorg Haider. The peculiar artistic irony of the photo is that Jorg Haider died at the wheel of a fast car a few months ago while driving several units over the limit.
The other is the recently-mentioned Extreme Green Guerillas, who take even more provocative viewpoint by advocating – more accurately appearing to advocate – voluntary euthanasia at the age of 40.
Any other nominations for “art about overpopulation”?
Main picture: Milica Tomic and Roza El-Hassan driving in a Porsche and thinking about overpopulation by EXTRA-TERRITORIA, Vienna 2002; R. thinking dreaming about overpopulation by Roza El-Hassan, 1999
Apocalyptica: No Blade of Grass
If, like me, you are the sort of person who would run a mile rather than listen to Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, take courage and think again. This week the programme is dramatising John Christopher’s classic science-fiction thriller No Blade of Grass. (It’s kind of John Wyndham on steroids: it also became a fairly dire movie). In it, an unknown virus wipes out all the west’s staple crops, leaving Britain starving. The country quickly descends into murderous anarchy.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the apocalyptic meme is so strong right now. It’s there in art, clearly, in movies and in BBC remakes like this and Survivors. Interestingly, just to underline the fact that the long cultural history of apocalyptic visions is not unrelated to our current environmental predicament, there’s a new edition of the book being published, with an introduction from cultural historian and ecologist Robert MacFarlane.
Listen to the drama – this week only – on BBC’s Listen Again here.
Doomsday art: is it bad for you?
Does the dark heart of art make it the right medium to discuss climate change? Is expecting anything productive out of the alignment of art and ecology a ghastly mistake?
Alongside the Tantalum Memorial, in the line up for transmediale09’s Award this weekend at Deep North is Michiko Nitta’s Extreme Green Guerillas – a final project from her time as a student at the RCA that was displayed by the ICA in 2007 and even attracted the attention of Treehugger.com.
The artwork uses writing [see above], illustration and flash sites to propose the creation of Extreme Green Guerillas. The actual artwork itself deliberately leaves room to imagine that they are already in existence. Nitta writes,”They are a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened
their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to
extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a
decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This
consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green
solution.”
Her imaginary guerillas take their rejection of consumerism to extremes. They don’t use corporate structures like mobile telephony. Instead they use a network of electronic devices implanted in pets and migrating animals to spread messages around the world.
Instead of relying on agribusiness for our meal, she proposes guerilla hybridisations of vermin with gourmet delicacies, like the piguail (half quail, half pigeon) rattit 
(half rabbit, half rat [pictured right]. Yum.
Extreme Green Guerillas also opt for voluntary euthanasia at 40 to ensure that they do not consume more than their fair share of the earth’s resources.
It’s one of a growing number of artworks which demand the viewer participate by imaging themselves in this future. There was After Nature at the New Musem curated by Massimiliano Gioni; Superflex’s Flooded McDonalds; Heather and Ivan Morison’s work last year for the One Day Sculpture festival or their work at Margate, Folkestone and Tatton Park; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 at the Tate Turbine Hall. It’s clearly on a lot of people’s minds.
Also up for the transmediale09 Award this weekend is Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit.
This is a room with a caravan in it, and an infra-red projection which is invisible to the viewer until they pick up night vision devices to see it with. The visitor is then confronted by a vision of a devastated world; inside the caravan are blankets, food and communication devices, the bare essentials for survival.
Dourmana’s work dreams a time in which governments have collaborated to create a nuclear winter as a last-ditch response to global warming. It’s a scenario that could be the setting for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. If that is what it takes to survive, you’d want to end it all now.
We recently asked a poll question on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website about whether apocalyptic visions were more or less powerful in leading to change than positive encouragements. A majority, 41%, reason that positive images are more likely to lead to change. But a huge 22% are undecided.
Conventional wisdom suggests that carrots work better than sticks. Matthew Taylor held this line in an article on our website Climate Change = Culture Change:
this throws in interesting distinctions about what art can do in terms
of encouraging strong feelings, and what actually inspires us to do the
right thing. We know from social psychology that telling people that
things are terrible is often just disempowering.
According to that view, all this work is disempowering.
Two points:
One. To understand why art so often finds darkness, death and contemplations of destruction more productive to depict than positivism, hope and light would require a much, much longer post than this, (and the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Sian Ede will be discussing this in an interview shortly to be posted on the main site) but the fact is, it does. To wish it otherwise is to wish that black was white, or that Damien Hirst would finally realise that it’s not clever to sound like you don’t know much when discussing your own art.
Two. If a scientist tells me straight that we’re going to hell in a handbasket I’m terrified. That scientist knows big stuff I don’t. But if an artist creates an installation envisaging a post-nuclear winter, I don’t start panicking. Art is not journalism; it is not science. It is art. None of the artists above have any more power to predict the future than I do. I don’t know of anyone who has ever mistaken one for the other. But what artists do engages the brain in totally different ways and and one of those is to make me think, but what if… in ways that are totally unexpected.
Which is good. Empowering, even. So bring on the apocalypse. It’s great. Artistically speaking, at least.
Apocalyptica
Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is definitely something millenarian in the air. Laura McLean-Ferris at artreview.com draws the parallels between Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 and the Roberto Cuoghi sound installation at the ICA. She writes: “If both of these artists ask us ‘what will it be like at the end?’,
then Cuoghi’s sound installation at the ICA answers in a din of
wailing, crying, spitting and shouting.”
Q. Who wrote the line: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Wimpey”?
Roberto Cuoghi’s statue of Pazuzu on the roof of the ICA. Photo: Zoe Franklin
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- The Tyranny of Guilt April 19, 2010
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