Snow Laughing Matter

The photograph on the left is currently doing the rounds as an email forward, under the subject line "Hundreds gather to protest global warming." There's a laugh there, no doubt about it, and it comes from the disparity between the anticipation established by the subject line, and the presence of snowmen protesters in the image. For the visually attuned, the photo also echoes the sight of Antony Gormley's "Amazonian Field" of 1992. However, as the inclusion of the latter in the Royal Academy's "Earth: Art of a Changing World" exhibition suggests, Gormley's work focuses on human responsibility for the world (and, it is implied, its climate) and therefore makes the opposite point to the snowmen who, while positioned as protesters, in fact ask us not to care about global warming.

The snowmen image is a climate change joke that does, and should, have activists, thinkers, scientists and citizens weeping over their keyboards. As a recent Guardian article points out, the conflation of our present, limited snowbound situation with a cooling of the global climate is a surprisingly widespread misunderstanding, and one of which several of our MPs are guilty. So why do we find this (in some cases perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of basic scientific principles, including the disciplinary distinction between meteorology and climatology, amusing? Because it taps in to several factors that lie at the heart of many a crass joke: a sense of the contravention of a wide consensus, a complicity between the laughers predicated on the notion that they are the common sense thinkers, the emboldening thought that we have an "emperor's new clothes" situation and the laughers are the little boy who spoke up, and a belief that those who will be negatively affected by the widespread acceptance of the joke as amusing are distant from those who laugh.

There's a danger of being too po-faced about this of course, and it is far from the case that climate change can't have its lighter moments. Robert Butler has been on a long-term hunt for climate change jokes, highlighting those that play on the willed ignorance of climate change denial, and those that achieve a gallows humour in the face of frightening and unprecedented rates of climate change. Ian McEwan's forthcoming novel Solar has been revealed in preliminary public readings to contain comic passages, a feature of which much is made by his publishers. Perhaps the author and his promoters find common ground here. McEwan will use humour to foreground the story of human folly that is the intended focus of his book, as a recent article in Corriere della Sera reports (also giving a mention to this blog). Climate change will in fact offer a "background hum" to the novel, as McEwan famously put it. His publishers may be anxious that the public is beginning to become inured to the very phrase "climate change," and be keen to assure readers that laughs - a connection with the human - will be available, as opposed to stern moral lectures.

So we anticipate that Solar will be amusing, while I claim that the pictured snowmen are not. Why? Certainly because McEwan's reputation is as an author peculiarly interested in and very well informed about matters of science (most in evidence in the psychiatry of Enduring Love and the neurology of Saturday), while the senders of the snowmen are making the rudimentary weather / climate mistake. But there is more to it than that. Early signs are that Solar will mobilise a gallows humour, making us laugh at human folly against a backdrop of global crisis. Placed alongside the cynical, "can't-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes" humour of the snowmen gag, Solar creates a good joke / bad joke template that is instructive as we come to cultural terms with our current environmental predicament.

Caught in the Web

Sad news today: “The internet is killing storytelling.” Recently there’s been much debate about the role of storytelling in helping us understand, and take steps towards managing / mitigating, the human contribution to our changing climate. Robert Butler, Alette Willis and Robert Macfarlane (following Bill McKibben) have all thought through the importance of stories in this context, and the issue has been a major concern of this blog. Yet the fact that the preceding sentences contain a number of links to other pages on the web demonstrates that a lot of the public discourse of climate change is taking place online. So while storytelling is crucial to understanding changing climates, and while a large proportion of the myriad debates on this issue take place on the web, the latter is anathema to the story. Why? Due to issues of temporality. While the web (as its name suggests) enables connections across previously prohibitive geographical distances, allowing debate across millions of miles, the appetite for quick as well as easy access prevents the telling of tales that unfold over a period of time in excess of the morning flit from blog to blog. While we associate the web with the futuristic and the cutting edge, it can offer (suggests Ben Macintyre in The Times) only glimmers and glimpses of stories about the future (or, for that matter, the past). Macintyre claims that “The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative.”

Macintyre’s claim recalls the public concern about the shift from the long-length undifferentiated format of nineteenth century newspapers, to the imaginative lay-outs and ad-heavy prints of the papers of the modernist period. There was concern that the newspapers were pandering to a public appetite for “minces and snippets” (claimed Edward Dicey, writing in 1905). Yet it was technology that facilitated the shift towards the new ways: roll feeders that allowed a swift flow of paper through the presses, ultimately enabling up-to-the-minute reports; new developments in typesetting; cheaper paper after customs duties were no longer levied per page etc. We have a familiar debate here: did the public demonstrate an appetite that was sated by the developing technologies of the press, or was the readership fed fragments until it became attuned only to that way of reading? If coherent narratives are our best chance of imagining our climate futures, and therefore a promising prompt to action, and if the web is the place where people increasingly head for information on climate issues, perhaps it’s time for “restorying” the web (to borrow Alette’s term) in the hope that public appetite for a nourishing narrative might be re-established. But as Macintyre states “The blog is a soap box, not a story,” so I dismount.

And Another Thing

Proving that there's more than one way to skin a...rabbit, Robert Butler over at Ashdenizen has another, more cheerful take on the "ACT ON CO2" campaign and the objections that have been made against it.

Telling the Times

On the 20th June springcoppice took part in a discussion entitled “Changing Climate Stories,” organised by Robert Butler (whose blog post here summarises our day), warmly hosted by ArtsAdmin and funded by Artists Project Earth. Robert’s post here gives a partial line-up of the sixteen writers, activists, journalists and academics involved in the discussion – an eclectic mix which was rather surprised to find itself on common ground in one particular way: it seemed we all had a lot to say about stories. The subjects covered, loosely framed by issues of displacement and migration, were wide-ranging, but storytelling recurred as our leitmotif. I wondered why that was. Were we preselected to be fascinated by narrative and by stories? Had the title of our discussion sent us all scurrying in search of the latest thinking on the links between storytelling and climate change activism? (We could start here if so).

I want to suggest that links between climate change and stories are deeper rooted than this; that the story – any story – and the discourse of climate change are logical bedfellows. A story is constructed in language and unfolds over time; whether spoken or written it is particular to its teller and that teller’s locale; each retelling shifts its meaning, each new audience its interpretation; it charms and persuades; it has the power to captivate and bewitch. To consider climate change is also to consider language. The language used to describe the concept of climate change is itself contested – are we dealing with “global warming” or “global heating,” “climate change” or “climate catastrophe”? Are those displaced by a situation exacerbated by environmental factors “refugees,” “climate migrants,” or “forced climate migrants”? Climate change, as it is represented in scientific, popular scientific, journalistic or creative work, is also a matter of history, of unfolding. Climate science attempts to predict the future, with competing models vying for the greatest claim to accuracy. Campaigners rely upon sand timer models which implore both the public and the policymakers to appreciate that time is running out. Those that deny the scope of the human contribution to climate change do so through the suggestion that the past has been misunderstood, and the future misforecast. Popular scientific and journalistic discourse is filled with tipping points, apocalypses and imagined futures.

In this narrative landscape, of course our stories – poems, novels, plays, memoirs, essays – will approach issues of history, time and memory in an unprecedented way. While the formal revolutions of postmodernism created narratives in which time became uncertain, such strategies often resulted in a breaking of the narrative frame – we were invited to think again about the nature of storytelling, of the status of the story as a constructed, open ended work. Today, our narratives play with time in response to the overarching question of climate change – the priority has shifted from the storytelling itself, to the tale told, the message of the story, and the likely responses of the reader. This imagined future on the smallest scale – the future anticipated thoughts and actions of the reader of or listener to the narrative – is the point where storytelling meets activism. Stories have the advantage over scientific data in this respect. While science has the analytical tools to predict the future, beyond modelling it cannot imaginatively inhabit the future it predicts. This is where stories come in.

Andrew O’Hagan’s description of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as “The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation” is a problematic one due to the uncertain cause of the apocalypse it depicts, but it is interesting because is suggests a) that a new trend of fiction has arisen in response to our increased awareness of impending environmental catastrophe, and b) that there is a generation of the globally warmed – a generation that understands itself as such, that situates itself in history by association with an environmental predicament that is considered, in all discourses, as in part a matter of the control of time through accurate forecast and prediction. This is, then, an era in which our stories rethink issues of temporality in response to the discourse of climate change. In doing so, such stories take up imaginative residence in a future that science can predict, but cannot make vivid. To tell a story, as we agreed on Saturday, is to perform an action. But more than this, we are in an era that is, as a result of these journeys into the future, peculiarly self-reflexive. We look back at our present efforts to address climate change, to tell adequate stories about that process of change, with the critical eye of our imagined future selves. What we discovered on Saturday was that we all – as various kinds of storyteller – had an acute sense of our place in a globally warmed generation.

Guilt Edges

Yesterday's Guardian prints a response from Trudie Styler (here) to accusations made by Marina Hyde (here) regarding the sincerity of her environmental campaign work. Hyde had wondered whether environmental credentials really could accrue to someone who flew to meetings and campaign events, at times by private jet. (The private jet stories have been reported extensively in the tabloids - the red tops may not be very green, but they are sniffer dogs for celebrity insincerity). Gut instinct draws me towards the thoughtful and acerbic Hyde, and away from Trudie "Seven Homes" Styler. The headline used for the latter's Guardian response is "It is not hypocritical to fly if I'm campaigning for the environment" - too glib by half at first reading. But Styler points us toward interesting questions about the ethics of travel-as-awareness-raising, particularly when that awareness typically involves recognition of plane travel's contribution to anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Timothy Morton used videoconferencing to "appear" at an ASLE conference here at Edinburgh University (he discusses this decision here). Next week, the Ashden Trust will use similar methods to contribute to the Earth Matters on Stage Festival and Symposium in Oregon (as Robert Butler mentions in his excellent blog here). And poet and author Kathleen Jamie claims to have turned down a BBC invitation to visit the Arctic because she felt that it could not be justified as essential travel (see interview here). What questions might this raise in the minds of those artists and writers who have travelled in the region, for example with Cape Farewell? Ian McEwan's much-anticipated new novel (which will apparently feature a "background hum" of a climate change theme, as reported in The New Yorker here) was partly inspired by his Cape Farewell expedition. Richard Mabey states that in Findings (a collection of prose pieces) Jamie "has written far and away the best book in my field" (see Ashden Directory article here). What might Jamie have achieved if she had made her own journey to a polar region?

These issues must surely strike all of us who travel in order to undertake what we can loosely describe as environmental work. Can I justify my own flights to the Peruvian Amazon this summer, since the expedition I will be helping to lead (BSES Amazon 09) actively seeks to create scientists and environmental campaigners from among its young participants? Shouldn't an environmental awareness leader (my role) simply stay at home? Whatever our intentions to assist in the creation of a new mindset regarding our treatment of the environment, we must look rigorously at our own behaviour first. It seems many attempts to be green are guilt-edged.