I’m interested in creative responses to our ecological and climate predicaments, which are also of course full-on emergencies.
Building pro-environment networks and engaging people has been my core work, but when I began to see how even great work often leaves us fuelling the emergency, I wanted to look beyond ‘solutions’ mindsets to ones that engage our imaginations.
I manage ClimateCultures a free platform I created for artists, curators and researchers looking for creative engagements with the Anthropocene. It’s a space that’s becoming a community. Different members use it to share their work; maybe we all use it for reassurance there’s so much out there that we’d otherwise miss in the isolation of our own work. It’s a resource for all.
I support creative people and organisations. For example, I’m part-time manager of Architects Declare a UK-wide initiative addressing the climate and biodiversity emergency, part of a global family of built environment declarations.
I also edit websites for creatively minded projects: Finding Blake (‘Reimagining William Blake for the 21st century’) and The Waterlight Project (‘a journey along the River Mel’).
Earlier projects were with TippingPoint (a charity that engaged artists and climate scientists in deep encounters and creative outcomes), the National Trust, London Climate Change Partnership, and the Adaptation & Resilience in a Changing Climate Network.
In my earlier career, I worked in knowledge exchange at the UK Climate Impacts Programme, researched co-ordination of climate change Masters courses for Exeter University, led Climate South East, a regional partnership focused on adaptation priorities, and delivered environmental programmes to Hampshire businesses for Southampton’s Environment Centre.
Building pro-environment networks and engaging people has been my core work, but when I began to see how even great work often leaves us fuelling the emergency, I wanted to look beyond ‘solutions’ mindsets to ones that engage our imaginations. If it’s really easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, for example, then something fundamental needs to change. An MA Climate Change at Exeter University was the catalyst, and working with TippingPoint the spark that made use of that: leading to ClimateCultures and my current focus.
Over four decades, I’ve moved from a Physics & Astrophysics degree, through an Advanced Environmental Practice Postgraduate Diploma and an MSc in Policy Studies to that MA Climate Change and, later, an MFA in Creative Writing. So clearly something keeps me moving on…
A lot of words? Words hold us back or move us forward, as we choose.
For me, the dangers we’re in are ‘predicaments’, not ‘problems’ (even ‘wicked problems’): they demand ‘creativity’, not ‘solutions’. ‘Climate change’ is also ‘planetary heating’ and many other things, and the ‘Anthropocene’ is so much more than ‘the Age of Humans’, more complex than assumptions that fault and fallout are equally distributed: we know they aren’t. ‘Environment’ is us too, and ‘Nature’ is also ‘Culture’. Should ‘sustainability’ become ‘regeneration’?