A lot has happened since I started work on the ‘In This Climate’ series. Even as I'm writing this, there's a news story from the International Energy Agency about how the world's coal use will hit a record high this year. The disheartening barrage of headlines never ends.
Most of the interviews took place in the week or two immediately following the US Election in November, with the shadow of Donald Trump and his questionable stance on the climate crisis looming over every conversation I had. Whatever people said at COP29 in Baku – a sparsely attended event which received very little news attention – all eyes were on Washington, and will be for the next four years.
This created a slightly unusual vibe around the conversations I was having, though everyone I spoke to was keen to sound a note of hope. When the future of our planet feels as bleak as it has ever done, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to speak to so many wonderful, creative people who earnestly believe there’s still something we can do.
As the comedian Stuart Goldsmith told me, quoting biologist Dr Sandra Steingraber: “It's up to us all now to play the ‘save the world symphony’. You do not have to play a solo, but you are required to work out what instrument you play, and play it to the best of your ability.”
Those words give me great comfort and have helped to keep my chin up through the process of writing about the climate crisis at a time when, to be blunt, it feels like a lot of people just don’t care. That, in many ways, was the driving force behind the series as a whole. We’re at a point now where, for any sane person, the science is settled. Now, we just need to work out how to motivate people and governments to take action.
Art could and should be the gateway to that – an opinion shared by all of the creatives I have spoken to in the last few months. “Feelings matter, especially when they can connect to your values and then your actions,” said Savitri D, co-director of the Church of Stop-Shopping Choir. “Feelings can be a bridge between your values and your actions, so I think music elicits feelings and helps people reaffirm or manifest that bridge between their deeply held beliefs and values and their actions. In that way, I think music is really useful.”
The climate crisis is at the centre of a lot of creativity now, right across the arts sector, and that’s something I wanted to convey with this series. I spoke to a regular David Attenborough documentary collaborator – one of the most mainstream evocations of the crisis being conveyed through art – but I also wanted to spotlight comedy, activist music, sci-fi literature, and multiple art exhibitions showing the ways we can reshape waste into something useful.
As that Attenborough collaborator, filmmaker Serena Davies, told me, it’s important to cast the net as wide as possible in order to reach people where they are – in her case, a BBC primetime TV audience. “It's very easy, if you're a creative person in certain industries, to not be able to relate to other people out of your bubble,” she said. “So I think the most interesting thing we can do as creatives is to find those ways to appeal to people so we're not preaching to the converted. Do you know what I mean? There's no point in us all having a conversation constantly within a bubble.”
That’s the next frontier of the arts’ role in the climate crisis, bursting that bubble and reaching the people who really need to hear the constant drumbeat of anxiety that most of us can’t avoid hearing. That drumbeat plays even more loudly in the ears of the next generation, which is perhaps why the current crop of Voice Contributors has engaged so strongly with this series. Their work has been passionate, eye-opening, and full of insight. I’d encourage everyone to read some of their work.
If my role in the “save the world symphony” is to spotlight the work of these brilliant creatives, I’m more than happy to keep playing for as long as I can. So, one more time, I’ll ask all of you to click the link below and meet them…
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