Arts and Ecology

Coalition of the Willing: film-making, collaboration, activism

This is a brilliant initiative: a growing online activist movie created by an army of collaborators, who are animating a script by philosopher/activist Tim Rayner: Still from Coalition of the Willing: Back to the 60s by World Leaders The film is appearing online at coalitionofthewilling.org.uk. Rayner’s collaborator is the film maker Simon Robson aka Knife Party, who [...]

Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson

“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.” … a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News: Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural [...]

The impossible hamster & RSAnimate: thoughts on “nubs”

Yesterday, the New Economics Foundation released this video to support their report about the irreconcilability of the idea of sustained economic growth with the idea of sustainability itself, Growth Isn’t Possible. It’s made by Leo Murray, one of the makers of The Age of Stupid and the short film Wake Up Freak Out. The Impossible Hamster [...]

The new bucolics: Caught by the River

Illustration by Jonathan Newdick from Caught by The River In our industrial societies, nature comes to represent the escape from the business of our lives. Caught by the River (“the antidote to indifference”) has been around a while; it’s an interesting collective of people who have come together to reflect on the luxury of taking [...]

Update on State of the Arts

A week ago the RSA and Arts Council England held the substantial State of the Arts conference, which we hope will become an annual event. The conference tweeters continue to sing with the compelling ideas and discussions that the event prompted. And now content from the London event is becoming available from the RSAs main website [...]

Can literary fiction ever do climate? Part 2

… and, as if to continue that very thought above in the post about Ian McEwan, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine have just announced Dark Mountain Festival Uncivilisation 2010, from May 28 to 30. In an email, Paul says: It is deliberately staged to clash with the opening weekend of the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival: [...]

Ian McEwan: Can UK literary fiction ever “do” climate?

There is a sense of anticipation about Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, out in a few weeks. Well… maybe we better not get our hopes up. Of course I hope to be proved wrong. As a young novelist, McEwan was extraordinarily radical; The Cement Garden was scary, edgy and transgressive. He remains, without doubt, a brilliant [...]

Avatar; indigenous peoples, carbon credits and the rainforest

I’m loving the commentaries that have evolved around Avatar’s themes of exploitation of natural resources, imperialism and biological diversity. Libertarian blogger Stephen Kinsella argues here that it underscores his viewpoint that the movie demonstrates that property rights are the only way to protect the environment. Interestingly this is the logic of the UN’s REDD carbon trading [...]

Art for oil; protest and dystopianism

St Pauls – a late afternoon plunge, from Flooded London, 2009 by Squint Opera, a series imagining London in 2090. The 2010 Art For Oil Diary is available now, price £5, full of illustrations like Squint Opera’s depiction of a man diving into the flooded ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral in a London flooded by rising [...]

Avatar and the power of social media

That Avatar came out just as the Copenhagen talks were disolving into irrelevance is something a few commentators noted. It’s a blockbuster with a strong environmental theme; so much so that sceptics have been warning that it’s: “every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true.” Well, you can only hope. This weekend the movie broke records again; [...]