Credits: David Buckland, Ice Texts, 2004–2005
Imagine an eclectic group of artists, writers, and musicians. Imagine a group of scientists and professionals whose work is rooted in the latest climate science. Imagine a passionate group of communicators, educators, journalists, and media specialists. Imagine a boat, and a strong idea: climate is culture. You are imagining the Cape Farewell project.
In 2001 artist David Buckland created the Cape Farewell project to promote a cultural response to climate change. The original concept was about bringing artists, scientists, and communicators together to stimulate the production of art grounded on scientific research.
Cape Farewell asks the top creative minds of our time to address the complex issue of climate change and climate change communication in order to innovate and shape an inspired language to convey the urgency of climate challenges and build a vision for a sustainable development.
From 2003 onwards, Cape Farewell has led eight expeditions to the Arctic, one to the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon, and one to the Scottish Western Isles, taking artists, scientists, educators, and communicators to experience the effects of climate change on a personal basis. Over 140 artists, among whom novelist Ian McEwan, poet, playwright and novelist Nick Drake, choreographer Siobhan Davies and of course David Buckland – the artist and film–maker who founded the project and now directs it, have voyaged with Cape Farewell, engaging with more than 45 scientists. They sailed to the hotspots of climate change aboard the Noorderlicht (Northern Lights) schooner to promote public awareness and engagement, with artists asked to explore their human responses. These expeditions resulted in an extraordinary collection of artworks, exhibitions, books, videos, films and education programmes. Artists involved in the project have also been the subject of a film and a BBC documentary.
As David Buckland often points out, climate change is now a human-caused reality, threating the planet and future generations. That is, the solution to this potentially devastating reality has become a cultural experiment and necessity David Buckland has highlighted this idea once more in the article Climate is culture recently published in Nature Climate Change. Talking about the Cape Farewell project and its evolution over the years, he underlines the new challenges (especially communicative ones) we have to face and explains why climate change is truly a cultural challenge. ClimateScience&Policy had a conversation with Buckland to find out why we should currently accept that climate is culture.
Ackroyd & Harvey, Ice Lens, 2005 - Courtesy by {link:http://www.capefarewell.com} Cape Farewell{/link}
CLISP – You started the Cape Farewell project in 2001. How did the idea first come up?
David Buckland - At first it was all about climate models; those huge mathematical models used to foresee the future fascinated me. As an artist, I found the possibility of predicting the future quite intriguing. I went to visit the Met Office Hadley Centre one of the UK’s top climate change research centres – to engage with climate scientists and understand climate change and its related effects.
They gave me all the kind of information on anthropogenic climate change that we are currently very aware of. It was very clear that they already knew about this stuff twenty years ago! They told me what was happening, the media and public opinion were not understanding the situation at all; there was no awareness about climate change and its related effects being a big trouble for all of us. It might be unsurprising that scientists have been the first to report the evidence of global warming and to urge society to face it. Unfortunately this emergency and global priority was not communicated successfully enough to provoke a cultural shift and a significant societal change. Perhaps the problem lay in the language used to communicate climate change related issues; scientists and the general audience seemed to speak in languages that were very apart from each other. Scientists speak in data, numbers, and graphs; in a way that it’s quite difficult to understand for the general public and that it’s quite different from the kind of information the media are looking for. Maybe we need to reinvent a language.
I started Cape Farewell in 2001 with the idea to put together the best artists, writers, and scientists (especially scientists involved in climate change research like oceanographers, climatologists, geologists, physical scientists, etc.), on a boat sailing to the Artic. The idea was to get scientists and artists in a conversation about climate change. Our primary goal was to encourage artists to create an original and innovative language of climate change powerful enough to engage the audience. And indeed, that’s what they did!
After visiting the melting Artic ice, they came back and told their personal experience of climate change with films, novels, editorials, and more; they reported what was observed during the Cape Farewell voyage. That is, they talked about the issue not in science but in emotional terms, trying to describe what was happening to our climate through their personal point of view and cultural sensibility. They told people that climate change is a reality and a problem we all have to face. I think that the wide range of materials they’ve come up with– such as artworks, books, documentaries and exhibitions– is the best evidence to the success of this innovative and multidisciplinary project.
CLISP – What does “cultural response to climate change” mean?
DB – Scientists have been giving information about climate change for over twenty years. They have done a brilliant job, but scientists do not cause climate change. So, what does it? At the end of the day, it’s the way we live that it is causing the problem; we have devoted ourselves to a lifestyle that actually it is not sustainable for the planet. Climate change is not a scientific responsibility; it’s a cultural one. In that sense climate is culture; culture is actually affecting climate change, and if you really want to find the solution to the problem, you need to foster a cultural shift in societies. When I say culture I mean a lot of things; politics, economy, systems of values are all about and related to culture. Everything society is based on is about culture. Our model of progress based on fossil fuels is not sustainable anymore: it’s up to us to change our cultural values and to find reliable solutions.
2010 Artic Expedition: Svalbard - Courtesy by {link:http://www.capefarewell.com} Cape Farewell{/link}
CLISP – To leverage the arts as a primary vehicle for climate change communication is quite provocative. Are the arts the most appropriate mode to talk about the issue?
DB – Well, I don’t think that art is the primary mode to communicate climate change; scientists and politicians are central to this, and museology for example is another important way of communication. What is peculiar to the art is that the message that comes from the artistic world uses an emotional, popular language. So, people respond to it.
We make the key decisions in our lives based on emotional bases, we fall in love, decide to breed, choose places of habitat. Maybe we have lost our complexity of emotional knowledge; we need to understand the world more and with more sophistication on an emotive basis, which is the way an artist articulates his or her involvement with the world. Each of us has been profoundly moved by a work of art, a book, film, music, painting and once absorbed we inhabit this knowledge and it informs us.
CLISP – You said that one of the main drivers for Cape Farewell was engaging with the media. How are you doing that?
DB – Well, it’s not every day that a group of artists and scientists organize a scientific expedition to the high Artic, the place that is most challenged by climate change. It is clear that the event itself is news to be reported by the media. Perhaps we have the opportunity, even more than the conventional approaches (say journalism) to tell stories. Stories are the strongest way to inform and to foster a cultural shift. And art easily deals with stories because it’s personal: when you read a scientific report saying that Artic ice is melting, or asked to consider a temperature rise of 2°C, it might be difficult for you to engage with it emotionally. But if an artist goes to the high Artic and creates something out of their experience, then you have a story.
The most-informed amongst us – scientists, activists, common citizens – are well aware of the risks due to climate change; we know very well that a change of values and models of development is necessary, that a cultural shift needs to happen. If a cultural shift is required, there’s no one best suited for the role than an expert in managing culture, no one better than the artist.
I think that international finance and economy are unfortunately still quite indifferent to the climate challenge. We are destroying our planet, and the efforts to bring climate change into the political agenda are even more enormous, and largely failing.
CLISP – Do you believe that the aims of Cape Farewell expeditions and projects have changed over the years?
DB – People often see scientists dealing with abstract notions, such as a two-degree rise in global temperature, or 65 centimetre rise in the sea level. Artists convert these numbers into stories, and bring climate change on to a human scale, in order to foster public engagement and awareness. As I said before, and as I write in my paper in Nature Climate Change, establishing climate change as a reality is important, but now the Cape Farewell project is more focused on solutions. Why we should look at climate change as a tragedy? It is more a comedy of human error, but in reality it is a brilliant opportunity to address some of societies deep and misguided values. There’s a brilliant story to tell about climate change, about society, about the way we live. Perhaps we should address climate change more “in the spirit of an expedition that encompasses the optimism of moving forward”.
Furthermore, climate and weather are becoming more instable; we see an increasing frequency of different extreme events such as floods, draughts, storms, more strong winds and so on in many areas of the world. Look out of the window and you will see climate change in action. You don’t need to get to the Artic to observe climate change and its impacts, not anymore. That’s why we still focus our project on a cultural approach to climate change, on emotions and expeditions. But now we do it locally; basically we have expeditions only in England and North America.
Siobhan Davies, Walking Dance, 2005 - Courtesy by {link:http://www.capefarewell.com} Cape Farewell{/link}
Last year we explored for example the impact of climate change on Scotland’s Island communities. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned that rising sea levels are likely to have a severe impact on much of the UK’s coastline in coming decades, in particular across Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. This is why 42 artists and scientists travelled for four weeks through the Outer and Inner Hebrides, investigating the innovative use of local resources, the effects of environmental change on marine ecosystems and wildlife, the preservation of local culture and language.
CLISP – You mentioned your last expedition in 2011. Could you share with us some of the highlights of this remarkable experience?
DB – Last year Cape Farewell embarked on a four-week expedition by boat across the Western Scottish Islands. We wanted to explore the island ecologies and cultures, and the strategies for sustainable and resilient futures being implemented across the Scottish Isles. Island communities are very good examples of the sustainable cultural change we need, and many of them are at the forefront of sustainable thinking; during the voyage we saw diverse island communities practising real stewardship, managing their own resources, and generating their own power entirely from renewables. We met some very interesting models for a world free from fossil fuels. We were witness to a clear path of cultural change.
CLISP – In the end, what are the main topics of the three new exhibitions – Carbon12, Carbon13, and Carbon14?
DB – The three exhibitions recall the carbon isotopes 12, 13, and 14. Carbon is a building block of life, our bodies are 18% carbon, it also is the main cause of the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and importantly it was the original material with which artists made drawings. The Carbon 12 exhibition opens in Paris on May 3 at the Espace Foudation EDF. Five artists have addressed climate change working in partnership with particular climate scientists. The exhibition celebrates the interdisciplinary approach, showcasing a wide range of climate-related subjects, from biodiversity and marine ecology and pollution, to oceanography and atmospherics. Carbon 13 opens at the Ballroom in Marfa, Texas, in October 2012. Six artists are invited to realize artworks that address our current lifestyle, our fossil fuel addiction and the dramatic consequences of our persistent denial of climate change. To take an example, artist Erika Blumenfeld made her artworks with the carbonised burned wood left behind by the huge fires that raged through the states of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. When collecting her burnt wood object she was stopped by the police (she was told) because she was stealing from a massive ‘crime scene’. Her artwork is made from stolen objects but there is a strong query here on ownership and greed. The Carbon 14 exhibition will open in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, in September 2013. Like the isotope, the exhibition will be something edgy and unstable; in our terms, exciting, pioneering and subversive.
You may also be interested in:
- Climate is culture the feature article by David Buckland in the March issue of Nature Climate Science.
- The official Cape Farewell website
- David Buckland’s personal page in the Cape Farewell website.
- The blog of the 2011 expedition to the Scottish Isles.
- Read about Solar, Ian McEwan’s novel inspired by his voyage to the Artic with Cape Farewell.
- Watch the video “David Buckland: Cape Farewell, Archinet Feature”