David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

Now, in this video, listen to the author himself talk about his book, its portrait of human failings and how it was reflected in the farce that was the Copenhagen summit.

‘Freedom’ is not a novel about the environment. However, Frantzen does nave an interest in birds and conservation and his main character is a committed environmental activist who works for The Nature Conservancy – a character who learns that life is not perfect and that pragmatism is essential to making progress. Environmentalism and conservation are therefore seamlessly worked into the broader framework of the novel without taking centre stage – much like they are in real life.

Frantzen’s views on activism and conservation are explored in a recent article in The Guardian newspaper. In this interview he makes a number of points that are valuable to environmental activists.  Here are some quotes:

“As a reader, as soon as I sense that I’m reading a piece of straight-up environmentalist advocacy, I put the piece of writing down. I feel like I’m already the converted, so don’t try to convert me. Tell me something interesting.”

“Walter comes to feel that coal is maybe not so bad. He sees that we aren’t going to stop using coal in this country, and he asks, “Why don’t we talk about how to do it better, how to do it right, rather than taking extreme positions that feel good but have no realistic alternative solutions to offer?”

“Love leads to pragmatism in a way that anger doesn’t.”

…and many more.

For those of you who love birds, or who want to get a flavour of Frantzen without delving into the whole book, try his essay “My Bird Problem” as a taster.

When environmental concerns arrive in mainstream literature and are skilfully incorporated into major novels like ‘Freedom’, it is, to my mind, a sure sign that these concerns have become a real part of our everyday lives. Such works do more for the creation of environmental awareness and exploration of the difficulties involved in addressing them than yet more statistics and doom-and-gloom bombardment telling us all what bad people we all are.

For an overview of ‘Freedom’, read the review in the New York Times.

The book is worth a read – with some qualifications.

"Solar" - Ian McEwan's new book inspired by climate change

Some parts of the book show McEwan at his best. The development of the selfish, self-centred, ‘human’ character of the main protagonist, Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard, is vintage McEwan. In this book climate change issues form the backdrop for the novel but they are not front and center in the novel. As many of McEwan’s novels, this is a novel about the human condition – not a novel about climate change. Yet, climate change is the thread that runs through the novel – in some places easily and elegantly, in others seeming more like an add-on. Speeches and discussions on the intricacies of climate change and possible solutions sometimes seem pasted on to the main plot, interrupting rather than enhancing the flow of the book.

McEwan has clearly done his research – an in some depth. But it is not clear to me why he has to submit his readers to the tedium of the intricate detail of particle physics. He seems to have forgotten his own advice when saying that part of the issue with trying to communicate climate change issues is that all the jargon puts people off. In an interview prior to publication, he stated: “Even writing sentences about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, already I know that about half the readers [will] see the names of those gases and their minds white out. Just seeing the word hydrogen they panic”.  You can imagine how my eyes and mind whited out when I came across this passage – and many more like it:

“…made elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in M-theory or Nambu-Lie 3-algebra as if it were not a change of subject.”

Still, given that, the book shows some vintage McEwan skills with the thoroughly unpleasant character of Michael Beard creates humor out of his very baseness. Apart from increasing the profile of climate change and, maybe, getting some to think about it further, the book also contains some points that should cause environmental and climate change enthusiasts to pause for reflection.

For those who have adopted the moral high ground and think of themselves as superior do-gooders, here is some advice worth taking when thinking about solutions:

“The matter has to move beyond virtue. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilization, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might think they are. For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and cooperation, the satisfaction of profit.”

The Michael Beard character also raises another question: has the whole environmental movement now become an industry and a vested interest just like any other? Have the motivations of the days of Rachel Carson largely disappeared and are those in the environmental community now doing jobs just like the rest of us and primarily motivated by advancement of their own careers?  There would be nothing wrong in that, but it does suggest a significant change in the environmental community, how it behaves and how it hopes to achieve its aims.

At the end of this novel, the author leaves us hanging between a belief in climate change as a human problem with possible solutions and seeing the whole issue as simply another bandwagon on which have jumped a new generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. That ambiguity may be a true reflection of today’s state of the public’s acceptance of climate science.

William Blake says: Everything that Lives is Holy

Long live the Child
Long live the Mother and Father
Long live the People

Long live this wounded Planet
Long live the good milk of the Air

Long live the spawning Rivers and the
Mothering Oceans
Long live the juice of the Grass
And all the determined greenery of the Globe

Long live the Elephants and the Sea Horses,
the Humming-Birds and the Gorillas,
the Dogs and cats and Field-Mice –
all the surviving Animals
our innocent Sisters and Brothers

long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking

we have done enough killing

Long live the Man
Long live the Woman
Who use both courage and compassion
Long live their Children

Adrian Mitchell

Acclaimed British author Ian McEwan is one of my very favorite authors.  He is the author of, among others, ‘First Love, Last Rites’, ‘On Chesil Beach’ and ‘Atonement’ - adapted in 2007 into a major movie starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.  I was naturally delighted to hear that his next novel – due in 2010 – is inspired by climate change.

To my knowledge this is the first time that such a prominent, award winning author is producing a novel inspired by environmental issues. The entry of climate change into the literature through a work of fiction must represent a major milestone in the involvement of the arts in sustainability.

McEwan is an acute observer of the darker side of human nature, addressing complex psychological and moral issues in a terse style that is gripping and often somewhat disturbing.  What has been described as “McEwan’s preoccupation with disquieting subject matter” makes me wonder in anticipation as to whether he can be the first to bring out in a meaningful manner the truly disturbing human behaviors that are leading to climate change and its consequences.

Unfortunately we still have some time to wait.  But meantime, environmentalists might benefit from taking heed from what this highly acclaimed author had to say in a recent interview about what it takes to keep audiences interested and listening to your message:

“That’s another problem with writing about climate change – it’s full of facts and figures. We’re putting into the atmosphere 16 gigatons of carbon every year; it takes 16 terrawatts to run civilisation. It’s very necessary to keep these out. My character is engaged in a project to use light to split water, imitating something of the process of photosynthesis. Even writing sentences about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, already I know that about half the readers [will] see the names of those gases and their minds white out. Just seeing the word ‘hydrogen’, they panic.”

Full interview here.