Art and ecology are interwoven in a rich and timeless seam that has surely helped humans synthesise meaning and comfort since our early days as a species. And this is the landscape navigated by that wonderful organisation known as art.earth – a collective of artists of all sorts who gather to think, make, collaborate, and talk.
We need the art-ecology salve now more than ever, it feels, as we grapple with ecosystem breakdown and climate change on Planet Earth. And so it was that several weeks ago, on a suitably tumultuous night of wind and rain, I took myself off to art.earth’s launch of ‘Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change’, a compendium of creative, clinical, therapeutic, philosophical, and political viewpoints on death and life – human, non-human and planetary.
The book, edited by Mat Osmond and Richard Povall, had been several years in the making, since the kernel was seeded in an all-night grief workshop held in 2016 in a Sharpham woodland in South Devon. I am still meandering my way through its wide-ranging pages that encompass the power of music, ritual, art and movement to transform the heartache triggered by losing people, landscapes and species. And much, much, more – I suspect ‘Borrowed Time’ will become a fruitful and much-dipped-into companion.
And it will be forever linked in my psyche with Jennifer Abbott’s spellbinding documentary, ‘The Magnitude of All Things’, which was screened at the book launch.
Billed as ‘a cinematic exploration of the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate change’, the film explores two parallel tracks of grief: the personal, residing in the death from cancer of the film maker’s sister, Saille Brock Abbott; and the planetary, emanating from the growing sense of loss as ecological and climate breakdown accelerates. Abbott, an award-winning filmmaker who co-directed ‘The Corporation’ and ‘The New Corporation: the unfortunately necessary sequel’, weaves together the voices of Indigenous land defenders, youth climate activists, scientists, psychologists, and politicians to deliver a powerful message from the climate frontlines, all held within an exquisite and haunting soundscape.
The film is indisputably about climate grief. Speaker after speaker from across the globe expresses the pain and overwhelming sense of loss they feel as they see the world they have known metamorphosing and collapsing around them. They are eloquent, and it is heart rending.
Anote Tong, former President of the low-lying Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati, talks of how the future loss of the entire country under rising seas is ‘not an easy emotional thing to come to terms with’. He is driven by the injustice that is unfolding:
‘Our islands will be under water, not through our fault, not our creation. The information and the science is very clear, that what is happening is damaging my home. We’ve got so much power to do the right thing. Yet, why do they hesitate?’ He shakes his head, a dignified and understated expression of the sense of futility after years of inadequate action at international climate negotiations.
Mukutsawa Montahuano, youth activist from the Sápara Nation in the Amazon rainforests of Ecuador, expresses her sadness at her generation not being able to see what their grandparents could see, and feeling bereft as more and more animals disappear.
‘It’s one hell of an emotional journey, because your subject matter motivating you and moving you, it’s under threat from ecological climate forces, and it’s being, in some cases, destroyed before your eyes.’ This is David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, talking about his grief at the coming disappearance of the pencil pine trees found in the ancient Gondwana ecosystem of Tasmania. Some of these trees are 800 to 1,000 years old. They grow slowly and cannot easily regenerate after fire – so climate change will lead to their extinction through drought, lightning storms, and runaway fires.
The film is also about anger. Jo Dodds, President of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, Australia, and a City Councillor, describes the rage she felt at the Australian prime minister’s words after a devastating bushfire destroyed her nearby town of Tathra on the New South Wales southern coast, in March 2018. She realised, as he said this fire was ‘a normal part of Australian life’, and that it ‘would happen again’, the underlying meaning: that he, as the leader of a high-emitting developed country, was not going to do anything to stop the processes that were fuelling these disasters.
Derrick Pottle, an artist from Nunatsiavut, an autonomous Inuit area in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, expresses anger at the ecological destruction caused by the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam in the area, ‘It is imposed onto us without our welcoming. Doesn’t make no difference how you voice your concern, what you present, how you deliver it, it’s still going to happen.’ The sad irony is that the power generated by the dam supplies Canada’s eastern seaboard, leaving the local community dependent on polluting diesel-generated electricity. When he’s out on the land, looking into the distance at the iced and snowy landscape, Pottle is haunted by the question ‘Will my grandchildren’s eyes still be able to see what I see?’
And the film is about the psychological toll of all of this on human beings. Especially the people on the climate frontlines and those trying to resist and create change. Speaker after speaker, whether land defenders, activists or scientists, talks about their fatigue, their fear, and their efforts to move through depression to continue to act.
In a simple and moving scene, three women sit around a kitchen table in Australia. The ‘set’, the lighting, is cosy and comforting, but the topic is not. As Sally Gillespie, researcher and author on climate psychology, says, ‘We talk about phases of grieving, but the thing with climate change, it’s not like there’s been one death and then we grieve it, this is continuous.’ Jo Dodds speaks about how the footage of the last thylacine, pacing up and down in its unbearably small cage, always breaks her heart – but this crime of extinction was supposed to be bad human behaviour of the past. ‘To just now be in a world where that’s how it is now, on a daily basis, that’s just more than I can fit in my heart. I don’t even go there. I can’t, I can’t. it’s too much, it’s too extreme.’ A palpable, powerful silence emanates from the other two women around the table and is held in a prolonged gaze by the camera.
Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, charts a clear map of the psychological damage: ‘People have stepped beyond denialism into a state of, like, total doom and panic. And there hasn’t been that middle part where people come to terms with how bad this is, because basically nobody would talk about it. So that’s quite serious for people to have like no development, processing time. That’s why the emotional and intellectual labour of coming to terms with this and going ‘let’s tell the truth about it’ is so difficult.’
‘I have a lot of fear of what is going to happen in his lifetime,’ says Bélen Páez, Executive Director of Amazon Programmes at the Pachamama Alliance, about her small son, Samaru, whose name means ‘one energy’ in the Sápara language. ‘Because the time is ending for humans, for animals, for the forest – in my dreams, all this information is coming from my dreams, and I don’t want to see it.’ A human rights and nature defender, for years she has been under government surveillance, persecuted for her work, and appeared before the international courts to bear testimony to rights abuses. ‘Sometimes I get tired. I get tired and I get lost, and I start feeling that it’s not enough. But day by day, I have to do the best to change it.’
Passages of sadness and grief are intercut with sequences of Jen and Saille in what looks like an idyllic childhood in the gorgeous natural environment of Ontario’s Georgian Bay. They play and explore and swim through limpid waters. Sweet sad music swirls as they find a dead bird in one of their haunts and hold a burial for it, placing on the grave a little cross, handmade out of twigs and grass, foreshadowing the story that is yet to be guessed at.
What was fascinating about both the film narrative and the discussion after the screening at the art.earth book launch was how grief can be a doorway to hope. This does not happen immediately in the depths of despair but can arise as a creative response to feelings of hopelessness and desolation – if you are willing to sit with those feelings and make friends with them. This resonates with my experience – both of great personal losses and in my own initial bout with climate despair in 2008.
We are not talking about hope in the common or garden way, as a synonym for optimism. Rather, by facing the facts, embracing grief and not pushing it away, we can emerge ready for action and with a renewed sense of what is possible. It is a more muscular meaning of hope – as used by Vaclav Havel and written about several times in this blog – the conviction that ‘something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’.
As Jennifer Abbott states in the film, ‘So now, I understand that hope is found in this moment, what I choose to do now. That is all I have, what we each have.’
David Bowman describes as ‘a beautiful example of a gesture of environmental love’ the efforts of a community group in eastern Australia heroically trying to save hundred-year-old fish in rivers by pumping oxygen into the water, although this could be seen as ‘an absurd pinprick’ deployed to deal with a catastrophe. He goes on to say, ‘The action of trying to repair land helps people to repair themselves.’
Small actions showing our care and love for our natural home may not achieve the big results we want, and the planetary change we need. But they are important exercises in humanity. Ashlee Cunsolo, Dean of the School of Arctic and Sub-Arctic Studies, Memorial University, talks about how climate change calls on us to be different, asking of us the question ‘who do we want to be as a species moving forward? How do we see ourselves differently in this web of relations that we have suddenly disrupted, or destroyed, or harmed?’
The film reveals many examples of people taking action: Labrador land defenders and Indigenous leaders in the Amazon rainforests, Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for the Future school strike for climate movement, Extinction Rebellion, Wonnarua people in Australia protesting against against the hellish destruction wrought by coal mines on their ancestral land.
And there are many more unsung heroes across the world.
As the website of the film states ‘When hope is lost, the real work begins.’
What is it you could do, beyond reducing your own carbon footprint, to catalyse the urgent system change we need to transition our economies away from fossil fuels now?
The time for tinkering around the edges is long gone, so this means getting political. Not everyone can protest out in the streets. But even if all you can do at the moment is sign online petitions calling for fossil fuel divestment and rapid expansion of renewable energy – do it! If you think you can act by emailing your elected representatives to support low-carbon legislation – do it! What about donating to help people on the frontlines recover from catastrophic floods, fires, and droughts, through trusted organisations – just do it! Crucially, vote for people and parties that are serious about rapid climate action. Each step builds agency and demonstrates solidarity – and this is not nothing.
Throughout this, we can stay in touch with our feelings, supported by the knowledge that so many people feel the way we do. And maybe even excavate some joy out of the process. As Fiona Harvey, long-time environment reporter says in a recent Guardian documentary, taking action to keep the planet liveable should not be seen as a burden, but something positive that we could all enjoy.
Be that as it may, we will all need ‘small rituals’ to keep us steady, as Saille writes to her friends during her illness. A walk in nature, lighting candles, making tea, a morning meditation or qigong out on the dew-filled grass, a swim in the sea or a lake. Anything that stabilises you and helps you continue to find meaning in the existential crisis that is climate change.
Beth Hill, a writer and facilitator with Psychology for a Safe Climate, one of the circle of women at the kitchen table, identifies how her mother’s impending death from ovarian cancer has brought her home to what is real, and counter-intuitively made her feel more alive. As she says of this loss that is certain, and of the climate crisis, ‘If can be alive to it, like if I can bear witness to what is happening and I can keep loving what is, it’s what keeps me going. It’s the only thing.’
So, yes, ‘The Magnitude of All Things’ is about grief, and anger, and the emotional toll of the climate crisis. But what shines like a vein of silver through the participants in the movie is their deep love for the natural environment that surrounds them, of which they – we all – are part. And, as Caroline Hickman pointed out in the post-screening discussion, a universal sense of caring.
Being with and responding to climate change is going to entail an ongoing, extended period of loss and mourning. We will need all our resources to deal with it. Saille’s voice in the film points to another support for the way forward: if we can find a way to better integrate our living with the thought of our dying, a profound Buddhist teaching that deviates from the typical Western denialism of our mortality – then we will be better equipped to deal with the losses we will encounter as well as with our own death, and, conversely, to live more fully every day.
And that brings me back to another early message from ‘Borrowed Time’, the art.earth book – the reminder that grief is a form of love. We grieve for the destruction of its ecosystems because we deeply value our unique and thinly veiled home, this beautiful blue-and-white planet orbiting in the dark, starry sky.
Climate change gives us the opportunity to become more fully human, to open to who we are, to re-imagine a new way forward in which we are not the smartest ape on the block, but a living, breathing, dying part of Gaia, the intricate web of life. Transforming how we see ourselves as humans provides us with a clear, and maybe even hopeful, path into our uncertain future.