To COP or not to COP - that is the question... by Philip Ralph

You may well be aware that in the next few weeks there are some extremely important talks on the future of our planet happening in Paris. The COP21 Climate Summit is taking place with representatives from all the governments of the world heading to the ‘City of Light’ to negotiate a lasting settlement on global CO2 emissions.

To say these talks are important is like saying breathing is kind of handy for being alive. The science is in. The data is clear. And even if these two things weren’t the case, the evidence of our own eyes tells the story clearly enough. Floods, storms, heatwaves, forest fires, droughts, species extinction. Man made climate change is threatening the future of life on this planet – not just human life, all life. 

We have been playing with our giant chemistry set, the Earth, since the beginning of the industrial age and now, as we pass the milestone of 1°C of warming with no end in sight, we are entering ‘uncharted territory’. 2015 is the warmest year on record and temperatures are set to rise still further with 2016 predicted to be the first year in which the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches 400 parts per million (ppm). It’s safe to say, no matter what we do, things are never going to be the same again... This is our new ‘permanent reality’, folks...

And I’ve lost you, haven’t I?

Let’s say you’ve got this far. Let’s say that you actually clicked on the link to this blog and read this far. I can pretty much guarantee that you are now thinking of something, anything, else. I can pretty much guarantee that, no matter how concerned you are by what’s happening, no matter how engaged you are in doing something about it, no matter how much of an eco-warrior you consider yourself to be – you’ve still switched off.

Because this is utterly terrifying stuff I’m talking about here. It’s so terrifying and so huge that it’s incredibly hard for us to stay engaged and not flee into our minds or bodies to anything that brings us comfort. And, believe me, I’m not writing this to make you feel guilty or to force you to change or become an eco-activist. I’m writing this because I care passionately and with every fibre of my being about what we’re doing to this beautiful planet of ours... and I want to run away too.

I want everything to be alright. I want to bury myself in DVD box sets and holidays in the sun and nice food and a warm house. I want everything to stay as it is. And yet, the way things are isn’t especially making me happy. In fact, most of the time, it makes me miserable. So, why don’t I want to change it? Because I know this life. I know this way of being. And the future... is really scary...

All of these issues and questions are with me on a daily basis. I imagine they are with you too. And I can’t talk about them because I feel like I’m bringing up God at an atheist’s convention. I feel like I’m committing some kind of social faux-pas even to mention the words ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’. It’s just not cool (no pun intended...). It’s tantamount to talking about death. We just don’t want to think about it even though it’s the one absolute certainty that we all share. Only now, climate change and all it’s consequences are running death a close second and they may well catch up in the next few years. So, why the hell aren’t we talking about it?

Fern and I share these concerns. We are trying to live our lives by them. We are struggling to make our choices by them – not because it makes us feel virtuous and smug but because it makes us feel better. It makes us feel like we’re doing what we can. And also – and this cannot be overstated – it makes us feel so much happier than all the activities that the economic growth model of living wants us to partake in. So much happier and more connected to our own souls and to other people.

Because we share these concerns we wanted to go to Paris for COP21. We wanted to be there, with all the many hundreds of thousands of deeply concerned citizens from around the world who are making the trip to let their voices be heard. We wanted to be there so badly... but we can’t afford the trip. And we wondered what difference two more people would make. And we wondered if there were something we could do that was closer to home; something that might directly impact our locality here in Swansea; something that might connect us to other local people who feel deeply concerned and can’t make it to Paris...

And that’s why, in collaboration with many of our good friends, we are organising and hosting COP SWANSEA 1, 2 & 3. These three events are a space where, we hope, people will come together to talk about this huge issue that hides under our daily lives without being spoken of. We hope people will come and simply be with each other and allow their fears to be heard. So often, when it comes to activism or marching or protest, fear turns to anger. And as Yoda says, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.

We want to provide a space where fear can be seen for what it is – and that fear can be shared and, together, we can find a way to use that fear for positive actions and change. We’re not stipulating outcomes, we’re not insisting that actions must come from these meetings. We know they will and we trust that they will help in some small way to alleviate the fears of those who attend.

We’re also going to show some films – three extraordinary documentaries about the current crisis. Chasing Ice, The Age of Stupid and This Changes Everything.

I don’t know about you but I usually avoid films such as these like the plague. Why? Because I’m terrified and feel powerless and so often films like this only make me feel worse. But we believe, in coming together and talking and sharing our fears, we can find our way to something that enables us all to move forwards.

The direct inspiration for showing films at the COP SWANSEA events came a few weeks ago when Fern and I attended a screening of the film HOME by Yann Arthus-Bertrand at Swansea’s Environment Centre – our venue for COP2. HOME is an extraordinary film containing stunningly beautiful images of our world and the damage we are doing to it. You can watch it free online in its entirety. See below. (I recommend watching it on the largest possible screen you can... and having some tissues handy...)

Fern and I – and our friends Jo and Yanis – sat and watched Home together with some forty other people. At times I could barely bring myself to look at the screen, so painful and heartbreaking was it to take in the images I was seeing. I found myself utterly devastated by the film and, even when it tried to offer some sense of hope and positivity in its final minutes, I remained locked in my grief.

When the film ended, the audience sat in total silence. And then we instantly launched into announcements about all the various actions and meetings we could go to in the coming days and weeks... But we needed so much more than announcements...

We needed space. We needed time. We needed to be together in our shock and grief. We needed to be able to cry. We needed to be able to talk. We needed each other.

And so, that is what we intend to do at COP SWANSEA 1, 2 & 3. We’re going to meet each other, show some films and then we’re going to be together with however they make us feel. And we know that out of that togetherness will come comfort, will come solace, will come action.

We couldn’t make it to Paris. That’s okay. We can still find ways to come together and let our voices – our fears and hopes – be heard. We very much hope you’ll join us.

Tickets are on sale now. These events are non-profit – all monies raised will go towards covering costs (film licenses and venue costs).

For COP1 – click here. Sunday 22nd November – screening: Chasing Ice – Cinema & Co

For COP2 – click here. Saturday 28th November – screening: The Age of Stupid – Environment Centre

For COP3 – click here. Saturday 5th December – screening: This Changes Everything – Volcano Theatre

The relationship between human beings & energy is in crisis! - guest blog by Paul Allen

In our second guest blog, we're delighted to welcome Paul Allen from the Centre for Alternative Technology. Paul has been a huge inspiration to us at Emergence from the very beginning and his paradigm-shifting work on alternative technologies is leading the way to a new relationship to our world and how we live in harmony with it.

Humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with energy presents us with some big challenges, not only for our technology, but also for our culture, society and democracy. Paul Allen takes a look at how this relationship evolved and where it went wrong - and how Satish Kumar inspired him to be part of creating positive visions for a sustainable future.

Paul Allen

The extraordinary story of humans and energy began over 400 million years ago with the formation of fossil fuels. Early human societies, unaware of this energy deposit of ancient sunlight, lived on our annual sunlight ration for many thousands of years, with only soil, canvas sheets and wooden poles to harvest what all we needed. Then the discovery of fossil fuels transformed how we see ourselves and our relationship with our friends, family, communities and the natural world.

On one hand this transition has helped deliver incredible advances of medicine, science, education and entertainment. But on the other hand, the relationship between human beings and energy has become dysfunctional, if not abusive and is now resulting in self-harm.

We all must now live with, or bury, the pain of the destruction, exploitation and capitalisation of our natural spaces and the decreasing ability of both present and future generations to inhabit them.

Although it has become a deeply pervasive source of anxiety, society has created taboos against the public expression of anguish, leaving many paralysed, overloaded and sleepwalking through the shopping malls. Nowhere is this better reflected than the priority of these issues in the current UK general election debates and party manifestos – explore this yourself via the Centre for Alternative Technology's ‘Manifestometer’.

Over recent years, this deeply buried collective anxiety that we know there is a problem and we know we are not solving it has transformed the way contemporary culture portrays our future: from an exciting new world of progress to one of darkness and uncertainty. Whenever contemporary culture looks ten or twenty years ahead, we now paint dystopia and ecological collapse – clearly something is broken.

A powerful tool in healing any broken relationship is to be able to see a positive way forward. The Zero Carbon Britain project has been developed by CAT to help us to think differently. Our most recent report, ‘Re-thinking the Future’, shows that physically, we have all the resources and technologies we need to transform our living systems but we are locked into the fossil fuels paradigm, so change must be driven by a cultural shift. We know once triggered, cultural norms can shift quickly; as we have seen with attitudes to the banks that backed apartheid in South Africa, to gender discrimination, to health and safety in the workplace, to smoking in public places or to the unacceptable sexual conduct of celebrities. Once a cultural shift is catalysed, legal, political and administrative frameworks follow suit. We must now how we think about our relationship with energy.

We should, of course, acknowledge that fossil fuels have enabled a fantastic transformation: fuelling the embryo of human society, much like the yolk of an egg fuels the development of the chick. But we know our relationship with fossil fuels as it is today cannot go on forever, as burning them releases the massive amounts of carbon dioxide locked away when they were formed. The science is clear - to stabilise the climate and stay below the globally agreed limit of 2ºC, our relationship with energy must allow us to rapidly eliminate our emissions of greenhouse gases.

The next chapter the relationship between humans and energy must begin now, our yolk is used up, we must now bust out into the sunlight. But today, our tools for energy capture are now no longer limited to soil, canvas and wood; we now have an incredible array of renewable technologies that can capture enough energy from our annual sunlight ration to more than meet our global needs.

The conclusion of story is still unwritten, but is has become clear that our 21st century challenges can no longer be met with a 20th century approach, including how we think about the future!

I am deeply appreciative of the inspiration by Satish in leading me to this story and my exploration of how we can heal this dysfunctional relationship.We first met in 1979, right at the opening of my career, when I was taking a year out before university, working in a Watermill in Cumbria. His evening talk as part of his ‘No Destination’ UK walking tour inspired me to not just think about a different way of living but to really 'live' these ideas and to make real, practical and enduring changes - especially as he was, quite literally walking his talk! His inspiration took me to the Centre for Alternative Technology, where I have now been working for 26 years.

Paul Allen FRSA

www.cat.org.uk

Thank you, Paul. You can be part of making our documentary series about Satish by going to our Indiegogo campaign page. We have until Friday 29th May to reach our target. Help us make it happen!

www.indiegogo.com/projects/satish-kumar-documentary/

Monsters & Nightmares by Philip Ralph

It’s fair to say that is not how I normally start my day...

This morning, at around 8.20am, I was interviewed on BBC Radio Wales about my thoughts on the announcement of a forthcoming play at a theatre in London about Jimmy Savile. You can listen to the interview here – it starts at 02:22:20 and runs for about eight minutes.

Why did my day start like this?

Sean Benton, Cheryl James, Geoff Gray & James Collinson

Well, a few years ago I wrote a play called Deep Cut. It is a verbatim/documentary drama about the deaths of four young Army recruits at Deepcut barracks in Surrey between 1995 and 2002 and, in particular, how the parents of Cheryl James, the only woman among the four, have fought long and hard for answers and justice. Their fight continues and if you want to know more about their story, you can head to their website. Because I wrote Deep Cut – and it was perceived to be successful – it magically puts my name on lists of people who can be approached for comment by radio shows etc when something similar comes up. 

The question that framed the discussion between myself and the writer and critic Bonnie Greer was whether or not it was “too soon” or simply insensitive to write and produce a play about Jimmy Savile and his appalling crimes. For what Bonnie and I thought on this subject, I direct you to the interview. But, as I hung up my skype connection at the end of the interview, a deep and profound thought crossed my mind – and drove me to write this blog.

It’s a thought that has been burning through my brain in the last couple of weeks as the general election campaign has finally kicked off and the candidates have been on the hustings. It’s been on my mind as I read the news, or when I go for a walk, or when I read a book, or try to work. In fact, it’s a thought so pervasive that it has even taken over my dreams. Let me lead you into it because I’d be really interested to know if anyone else is having the same thought that I am...

So, the interview finished – Bonnie emphasising that theatre is a place to have important debates and that British theatre is the best in the world – and I hung up my skype connection and sat there in the afterglow of a raging adrenalin rush (I don’t normally start my day in this way so my body was overcompensating just a tad...). And here’s the first thought that went through my mind...

So what?

Don’t get me wrong. Let me be clear – what Jimmy Savile did – his innumerable crimes – was absolutely reprehensible and raises deep, important questions that need answers. But Savile is dead. His victims are still suffering and trying to go on living their lives bearing the wound of what he did to them – and a play won’t change that. Yes, theatre is a place to examine it and, yes, it may give them a voice and bring some closure. Of course. I could hardly say otherwise having written a play about Deepcut. But, ultimately... so what? Because the thought that won’t leave me alone, that invades my dreams, that haunts me as I walk the streets with the dogs – that thought is nowhere to be seen in the theatre. Or in television. Or in film. Or in the political messages of the candidates who seek my vote. And that thought is this...

Why is no-one talking about the environment?

This is perfectly normal. Obviously.

Not just talking about it – shouting about it, screaming about it, raving about it... Why is no-one doing that? 

Why are we all so fucking calm?

Boring... I wonder what's on telly tonight...

In the past two weeks, since the launch of the election campaign, California has announced that its drought of the past five years has now reached such epidemic proportions that there is no snow on the Rocky Mountains to melt and replenish the reservoirs. California has no more water and it’s far from alone. The Observer tells us that water is the next commodity we will be fighting over. Half of India’s rivers are polluted to the point of toxicity. Canada’s glaciers will shrink by 70% by the end of the century. We still don’t know why the bees are dying. The news is consistently terrifying and utterly compelling and yet no-one seems to be making drama or art about it and none of the politicians have it front and centre in their speeches – or anywhere at all, come to that. And I have to ask myself – why the hell not?

In the past, whenever I’ve discussed the notion of creating a piece of drama that centres around the irrevocable damage we are doing to our planet, I am always met with the same response. “People don’t want to hear it. Everyone is already stressed, they get home at the end of the day and they want to be entertained – they don’t want gloom and doom. It’s a turn off.”

Growth?

Similarly, the politicians – with perhaps the exception of the Green Party but you’d at least hope that they would be talking about it – are shying away from the subject in order to place all their focus onto the economy (and immigrants, of course, but that really comes down to the economy again. “They come over here, taking our zero-hours jobs that we don’t want...” etc). 

Growth. It’s all about growth. We need to get back into growth. The economy has grown again. It’s all going to be fine. If we just get back into growth then we can pay off the deficit (that none of us were actually responsible for creating) and then we can go back to living our lives just the way we want, consuming and wasting resources as much as we want, buying the latest Land Rover SUV despite the fact that we live in flat, suburban areas, etc etc etc.

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

But here’s the thing that the world and the climate and the environment are trying to tell us, day in and day out. The thing that we’re not listening to. The thing that keeps me awake at night.

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.

I’m going to write that again... And this time I'm going to underline it...

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.

That’s it. Everything boils down to that. Slice it whichever way you like. Do your sums again and again. There’s just no way of getting around that one. The only resources we’re ever going to have are right here, right now, and we’re burning through them like there’s no tomorrow. And, if we keep on like this, there won’t be. Never mind the economic deficit. What about the ecological deficit? We’ve been overdrawn at the bank of the environment for decades now and the day of reckoning looks like it may well be at hand...

Bugger...

Too gloomy? Too apocalyptic? Too soon? Sorry. I know. You lead very stressful lives. So do I. Busy, full, stressful lives. We don’t want to hear this, do we? I know I don’t. I just want it to all be okay and my choices not to matter and be able to buy anything I want whenever I want and (here it comes...) eat a pasty and watch DVDs whenever I want. But I can’t. Not anymore. Because it’s blindingly obvious what’s going on and the less people talk about it and try and act as if everything is normal, the more blindingly obvious it becomes.

Skin care in the dystopian future goes right to hell...

The only representations of the damage we are doing to the environment in drama seem to be through zombie films and TV shows. Either that or they’re so bleak (cf: The Road) that you can barely bring yourself to watch them.

And so we switch off, tune out and the inertia and the denial go on. And all the while our politicians are fiddling while Rome burns, hoping that we don’t notice that they don’t care...

So, yes, the theatre is the place to examine the crimes of Jimmy Savile. I’m sure the play will be sensitive and compelling. But surely, surely, the time is ripe to start making art as if the world mattered. Surely that should be more important right now. Surely we have to start talking about it, owning it, accepting it, taking responsibility for our choices. Surely we have to begin to discuss it in drama, in plays, film, and television. Not in an apocalyptic way but in a mature, responsible way that looks at our behaviour and questions the values upon which it is based. Surely we can’t continue to keep our heads comfortable in the sand and just carry on. Surely, if there is a debate to be had about anything, it should be this. The survival of our race and the planet we call home. Surely.

“We're not listening, Phil. And stop calling us Shirley...”

Shirley

Now, I'm fully aware that you may disagree. You may argue that people are talking about it - you may argue that actually there's too much talk about it and that we all just need to be left alone to get on with our lives and everything will be just fine.

As I hear so often these days – business as usual is not an option. There is no Planet B. Sometimes in my darkest moments, I’m not even certain that making art that puts the environment and the wasteful way we live front and centre would make any difference to the inexorable direction we’re travelling. At times like this I feel completely lost and without a sense of direction. And it's important for me to honour this lostness and doubt as well as sharing my belief that art, activism, random acts of kindness and the art of living can make all the difference in the world. If I don't honour the lostness and doubt then phrases like 'positive visions of a sustainable future' become nothing more than Orwellian Newspeak. 

For me, that’s what Emergence is all about. That’s why I, as an artist, am engaged with this project. I want to make art like the world matters. Fern and I are constantly trying to figure out neat, punchy ways of describing what it is Emergence does. The long answer is that we believe we need as a planet to   practice “the art of living well within the ecological limits of a finite planet”. The short answer is we are trying to find our way towards finding out what "the art of living" would look and feel like. It’s hard to hold onto that in my darker days and in the face of the raging tide of denial that seems to surround us wherever we look. It would be so much easier to go with the flow. But it just wouldn’t feel right. And so I carry on, because it's the only thing I can do…

Margaret Wheatley, quoting Thomas Merton writes "Do not depend on the hope of results…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps the results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself…You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people…In the end it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."

I suspect she's right. But some days it's hard to feel it's enough...

A more upbeat blog next week. Promise. After all, there's nothing to worry about, is there? It's all going to be fine. It's all going to be just fine...