“In Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘She Unnames Them’, published in the New Yorker in 1985, Eve does away with the names of the animals, along with her own, in order to find and feel a new kind of closeness. “Attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.” It seems to me that stories like this, stories that stretch the boundaries of what it means to be alive, to be human, are more important now than ever. Climate change happens to other beings, the violence that underpins it happens elsewhere – these narratives are deeply embedded within our culture, within us. How do we undo them? There is no fix for climate change, at least not for me, without this undoing. Without a process of ‘un-othering’, enough to combat the ease with which we ‘other’. What would it look like, what would it feel like, to truly say, what happens to you, happens to me. Is a part of you also a part of me? What if we were the same, you and I?”

LAURA COLEMAN is founder and co-director of ONCA, an arts and research space in Brighton, that that explores ecological questions, working within the community to inspire positive environmental and social change. In her early twenties she met a rescued puma in the Bolivian Amazon, and this friendship has informed her life and work since, as a curator, producer and aspiring writer. She is currently researching her PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, looking at the role of arts venues in the context of climate change.

​“We are used to taking the natural world around us for granted, with its winds, clouds, rain, rivers, lakes, seas, animals and plants. In our tradition, stretching back over thousands of years of civilisation, we feel it to be something vast. To many it has been an object of awe and wonder, and something to be profoundly grateful for. But we have taken it as a given, as inexhaustible.

Now we are told that it is under threat from our own actions. And we are told that some familiar ways of comforting ourselves (preparing food, choosing clothes, making pleasant living spaces) are major drivers of the damage. It is a tough ask to take that in! We are pushed to our limits in grasping what we are doing. But that does not let us off trying to face up to it. We need to harness our fear and anger and turn them into vision and generosity.”

DR JANE HEAL is a British philosopher, and since 2012, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. First female President of St John's College, Cambridge, serving between 1 October 1999 and 2003. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997. She was also President of the Aristotelian Society from 2001 to 2002. Heal has written extensively on the philosophy of mind and language. Her work in the philosophy of mind came to be known as 'simulation' or 'co-cognition'- that our understanding of other people is achieved by, so far as we are able, placing ourselves inwardly in their situation and then allowing our thoughts and emotions to run forwards in a kind of imaginative experiment.

Synopsis forthcoming

ANDREW SIMMS is political economist, environmentalist and co-founder of the New Weather Institute. He is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, and a fellow of the New Economics Foundation, where he was policy director for over a decade. During that time he founded the NEF’s work programme on climate change, energy and interdependence, instigated their ‘Great Transition’ project, and ran work on local economies coining the term ‘clone towns’ to describe the homogenisation of high streets by chain stores. He wrote the book ‘Tescopoly’ on Tesco’s dominance of the grocery market, ‘Ecological Debt’ on framing the transgression of planetary boundaries, and co-authored ‘The New Economics’ and ‘Green New Deal’, devising the concept of ‘ecological debt day’ to illustrate when in the year we begin living beyond our environmental means. He writes often for The Guardian and was described by New Scientist Magazine as 'a master at joined-up progressive thinking’ and his latest book ‘Cancel the Apocalypse: the New Path to Prosperity’ is manifesto of new economic possibilities.

Why make Art about Climate Change?

“Dermot, you know what?

It’s not about the planet getting hot.

That’s just an excuse to demonise

energy and commerce and the rise

in our quality of life. ....”

“…. Mud slides, falling roads, whole trees floating

broken, skeleton stories, goading

lorries in sideways slumber where they fell,

cars in circling arabesque before the swell

till overcome, they dive and uptail.

Flood gates fail.”

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"We need narratives as imaginative journeys : towards a better world, to play out our worst fears and to get into the heads of those who think differently to us. I think of artists as Social Dreamers: in the words of Gordon Lawrence, ‘making manifest the infinite knowing that is present’ in societies, institutions, groups. What if artists are tapping into what is present in the dreamtimes of western society, that which is driving us literally mad? Making performance work is the only thing that gives me the energy to believe that the world can change."

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TESSA GORDZIEJKO is a theatre producer, director, poet and performer. Creative Director of Imove Arts which produced The Second Breath, a circus/music promenade outdoor performance exploring psychological dimensions of climate change; and breath:[e]:LESS. a spoken word/ music performance about threat, grief and global warming. She has worked closely with the Climate Psychology Alliance researching this work, and recently performed The Divided, her narrative poem inspired by the 2015 Boxing Day floods, at the CPA Members’ Day 2016.