Misleading Climate Narratives And How To Take Creative Action

In the Netherlands, Amsterdam will become the first municipality banning advertising and marketing of fossil fuel companies in the metro stations of the Dutch capital, moving towards a fossil fuel-free future of advertising. The decision was taken by deputy mayor Marieke van Doorninck, responsible for Spatial Development and Sustainability together with Radjen van Wilsem, CEO of CS Digital Media. This city-wide move hopes to generate a similar decision for other cities and countries worldwide. It can also be seen as a concrete action raising awareness about the role advertisements play in the understanding of and consciousness around climate issues.

As John Berger says in Ways Of Seeing, publicity images "always speak about the future", they offer a glamour image, an object of envy, power, a promise for transformation towards happiness. Through this act of banning advertisements from the part of the city, Amsterdam disrupts the function of publicity images, and by extension, the wish to consume and use fossil fuels by erasing them from the public spaces. 

Metro Advert Fossielvrij Amsterdam

While hope can emerge from cities that are taking specific decisions about climate consciousness and coming up with initiatives to raise awareness around the issues of global warming, creators are acting, fighting for ecological awareness and denouncing misleading representations and political decisions which perpetuate the destruction of Earth.

So, when it comes to climate issues and Earth's breathlessness, how do designers, artists, creators, activists and all other visual thinkers act to denounce the current state of the Earth, as well as the continuous destruction of the planet? What are the tools, actions and visual representations they propose to engage in a fight against misleading narratives in order to come to an awareness of the political and economical decision in regards to ecological struggles? 

The awareness of the Earth as a living-being starts with the acknowledgment of the planet as being intimately connected with all elements and organisms living within it. By  understanding this interdependency between all forms of life, and not as a disposable object detached from human beings, but as an entity whose survival is intrinsically tied to them. J. T Demos in his book, Against the Anthropocene, Visual Culture and Environment Today, develops how the visual representation through technology and photography created a fictional, distant, and misleading vision of the global environmental crisis. He shows how the violence of contemporary visual culture and the politics of representation have universalised the responsibility of climate change as well as reduced the Earth to an object of contemplation.

Techniques of visualisation such as Google Earth created a detachment between inhabitants of the planet and the planet itself. The Earth became a kind of flattened, 2D object visible from above. Google Earth is like a tool which places human beings on an object called Earth, creating a perspective of division.

One of the last examples of these advanced technologies are the pictures taken by Mastcam, the rover sent on Mars, where by assembling pictures together NASA proposes to see a panorama, a landscape, where shapes are extruded from 2D images. But what is the reality that these pictures tell? Possibly a narrative of conquest, disposability and of technological advancements; indeed a new planet to discover, to look at from above. And then new questions arise : by whom are the pictures taken? From which perspective and which discourses are applied to them? In other words, what do these representations say about the current state of the Earth, a planet? Are these pictures addressing the entanglement between ecology, socio-political issues and environmental disaster? In which ways are they giving access to knowledge about climate change as well as a space for reflection about the consequences of global warming? 

Nasa Science Mars, Curiosity Images July 06, 2020. (c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Testimony from the Earth

Kelly Jazvac, the Canadian artist based in Montreal and member of a plastic pollution research team called The Synthetic Collective, started a collaboration in 2013 with the oceanographer Charles Moore and geologist Patricia Corcoran. Their research investigates the increasing plastic debris pollution in oceans, seas and lakes. They reported about a new form of stones that they called "Plastiglomerates". A mixed material composed of plastic, beach sediments, sand, wood, rocks captured by molten lava that they found in Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii. Since the first discovery by Charles Moore in 2006, they have gathered around 200 samples, now part of a collection, that testify to new forms of material born from anthropogenic activities. Their discovery is no other than proof of how consumption of plastic over the last decades shifted the composition of our waters and soils. These material evidences show soil fractured, disrupted then reassembled in a new form of contaminated matter that reveals an arrangement of the Earth in mutation. A mutilated ground that speaks about its struggles.

Plastiglomerates, Kelly Jazvac in collaboration with Charles Moore and Patricia Corcoran, mix of plastic debris, rocks, sediments, fabrics, 2013. (c) Jeff Elstone

The project Voice of Nature βº1, a collaboration between Thijs Biersteker (Woven Studio) and scientists from Delft Technical University, is an artwork visualising how a tree feels about environmental changes. Using real data and sensors connected to the leaves, roots and branches of a living tree, data points are generated to create visual representations of the pollution levels, carbon emission and demonstrate how fauna struggles with its environment.

Each year a tree creates a ring forming a pattern that tells the weather history of its location as well as its age, in this project tree rings are created every second to reveal its state of health in real time. Through this visual representation, this collaborative artwork proposes to amplify the voice of a tree by making a poetic visualization of the struggles that nature is enduring. This project was trialled and exhibited in Chengdu, China in 2019 with the aim to make visible to human eyes how nature itself is struggling with climate change.

Voice Of Nature, Thijs Biersteker, 2019. © Thijs Biersteker

Listening and acting

It is probably a matter of listening. Listening to the Earth, as well as listening to every being breathing in a way or another on this planet. This also means that leaving all organisms ample space for breathing and thus, understanding that environment destruction is an act of intoxication and suffocation is crucial to shift the global mindset around pollution.

The video Kahsatstenhsera: Indigenous Resistance to Tar Sands Pipelines is a nine minute video which explains the destruction and degradation of Indigenous lands by corporation such as Suncore, Irving and Enbridge that wish to increase their refinery capacities by expanding their tar sands pipeline and thus, annihilating lands and poisoning waters and grounds. This collaboration between the Indigenous organizer Amanda Lickers and land defenders in the northeast of Turtle Island shows Indigenous resistance against the Line 9 and Energy East pipelines from West to East Canada.

The documentary showcases the ongoing Indigenous fight against the disposability of the Earth for economic interests as well as their resistance for the survival of their lands. This project as many others are voicing the struggles endured by both the Earth and people. It shows that by thinking of the planet as a commodity, the destruction one engenders the destruction of the other and vice-versa. This awareness about the interconnectedness and interdependence between the Earth and all living beings is fundamental to understanding ecological and environmental issues. 

Kahsatstenhsera: Indigenous Resistance to Tar Sands Pipelines, Amanda Lickers and land defenders, 9 mins, excerpt of video, 2013. © Amanda Lickers

To re-enforce this awareness, creative research-projects and platforms propose dialogues, and idea-exchanges about the real state of the Earth, while also inciting acts for changes. The platform Climakaze Miami launched in 2015 and founded by Elizabeth Doud in collaboration with FUNDarte created a community of artists, activists, scientists, educators and citizens to engage with climate change issues and environmental justice.

This year's event uses creativity as a medium to narrate the complexities surrounding the climate crisis with the aim to provoke actions for acknowledging the state of the planet. The projects such as Doud’s performance The Mermaid Tear Factory  in which the artist incarnates the mythical mermaid to speak about the ecological crime that the ocean is facing.

Other projects such as the experimental movie Zenú by Claudio Marcotulli, is a surreal exploration  of the human-nature relationship. There are also creative writing workshops centred around climate.Through these events, Climakaze Miami Festival proposes participatory dialogues, and provides a platform where collaborative and alternative actions are debated to highlight the struggles of communities as well as the ongoing damage of the Earth. 

The Mermaid Tear Factory, Elizabeth Doud, performance, 2019. (c) Ines Grimaux

Since 2012, the project DEAR CLIMATE proposes to inform and mediate the relationship between humans, other species and nature. By using different tools such as posters, workshops, installations and meditations this research project aims to find new ways to talk about weather and climate issues with humor and provocation. DEAR CLIMATE is also giving accessibility to their posters that everyone can download and disseminate freely. Founded by four active members willing to speak about the current state of the Earth, Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer and Marina Zurkow, their collaboration projects actively inform and propose to act for changes pointing out at political and economical decisions diminishing environmental destruction.

Dear Climate #M16, poster.

The interactive game called Climate Games initiated by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii), a collective based in Brittany, France working at the intersection between pedagogy, permaculture and climate justice activism, has also actively mobilised actions of resistance and joyful rebellions for environmental justice. This project resonated internationally bringing together activist-artist groups such as Not an alternative, United Kingdom's Art Not Oil or ZAD, denouncing political and economic decisions made by governments and institutions, such as the Louvre's sponsorship by Eni and Total and the COP21.

These actions and nonviolent protests use creative methods to unveil untold realities and uncover economical agreements responsible for climate degradation, thus for Earth's destruction. With the initiation of that project and as many others, the message about the urgency of rethinking economical and political decisions in relation with the state and the future of the planet took the shape of a collective protest actively determined to fight for the Earth.  

“We are nature defending itself,” slogan of the Climate Games 2015. © Climate Games

Extinction Rebellion is one of the most known international movements actively and peacefully fighting against climate issues and ecological crises. By using nonviolent civil disobedience, activists gather to interfere and move political decisions with specific actions to raise awareness and call for changes. This movement is one of the many which collectively challenge power and strategies when it comes to the future of the planet. It actively denounces and highlights the misleading narratives that undermine the current state of the Earth as well as the economic decisions that nourish those narratives. 

Extinction Rebellion, posters. © XR

Hope to see otherwise

The collaboration between artists, designers, activists, scientists and others brings a message of awareness that gives a glimpse of the current state of the Earth and actively finds ways to narrate the complex relation between political, economical and governmental decisions in relation to the climate crisis.

It seems urgent, now more than ever, to understand what kind of representations and actions are taken to speak about the environment and the need to care about the Earth. By thinking of the entanglement between organisms, all living beings and nature, as well as considering the interdependency between all, a possible hope could emerge.

It is time to start thinking about the Earth not as a flattened image, a disposable object, but as it truly is: an entity that breathes, feels and lives, that needs attention and care.