Above: Artists Mathieu Goussin and Hortense Le Calvez aka Forlane 6 Studio create innovative underwater sculptures out of clothing, streamers, and found furniture. In response to our time of climate change, their work explores the damaging effects of mindless consumption. More…
William Wordsworth found inspiration for his poetry in his environment, not least the “golden daffodils” he saw “beside the lake”.
Then there was Winnie the Pooh who pondered a little more simply: “The more it snows (Tiddely-Pom)/ The more it goes (Tiddely-Pom)/ The more it goes on snowing.”
Now scientists are being told to use art and poetry to win public support in the battle to curb climate change.
Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office, has called for a radical overhaul of the way climate scientists go about their business, arguing that they need to make their reports less turgid and more engaging.
Lady Gaga in Lodon
“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us… We increasingly recognise that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication,” Dame Julia told a recent gathering of leading climate change scientists at the University of Exeter.
“And it’s not through tables and graphs. Sometimes it is through art, through music, through poetry, and storytelling and that is increasingly something we have to think about – how we communicate in a more humanist way.
“Scientists have to stay engaged in the communication message. We will have to work at this. We will have to get the message out that this is a profound, deeply serious problem. It is urgent that we, as a science community, work together to advance the science and also to communicate it as effectively as we can so that we get the action that is so badly needed,” she said.
Post-apocalyptic fashion by Catherine Young
Some scientists are already engaging with artists to get the message out, such as the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute on Climate Change, which held a “slam poetry” competition on the subject of climate change in March.
Poetry section begins at 32:10
Naomi Hicks, of the Grantham Institute, said: “If we are to draw more of the public, particularly young people, into the debate on how best to manage the risks of climate change, we need to find better ways of communicating to them other than through turgid technical reports.”
Meanwhile, Exeter University, the Met Office, the London College of Fashion and the Victoria & Albert Museum have collaborated on the “Climate Dress” – a project looking at how clothing can be used to communicate ideas about global warming, for example by using moving pictures of melting ice-caps and related data projected across the dress.
Dame Julia also called on the public to step up their action to publicise climate change, for example by recording the way it is affecting their immediate environment.
“Climate change is a massive opportunity for citizen science,” she said. “For everybody who experiences the natural world, we can use all the social media tools that we have to document what we see happening to the world around us.”
A collaboration of Diffus, Alexandra Institute, The Danish Design School, and Forster Rohner has produced the Climate Dress, which responds to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Sculptor Gabriel Warren joins Dark Snow Project
Dark Snow Project is the first-ever Greenland expedition relying on crowd source funding to answer the ‘burning question’: How much does wildfire and industrial soot darken the ice, increasing melt?
Gabriel Warren: “This one is ‘Piesterion #6. The title refers to pressure (think piezo-electric), since this series is loosely based on ice cores. (1991).
I am invited to join Dark Snow summer 2014. This is a bullseye for me. I have seen plenty of imagery, in the course of research, of the supraglacial lakes, rivers, and the moulins that drain them down to bedrock far, far below. I see this as a cast of characters that I can use to create metaphorical meanings and interest in my work. I have only one life, and I will not use it to create pretty shiny things: I demand real meaning from what goes out the doors of my studios.”