(an edited version of a talk I gave at Higham Hall, Bassenthwaite, Cumbria on 26 Sept 2021, to accompany a temporary installation of work from the exhibition ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’ – see the end of the post for a list of books that have informed these musings)

In 2019 I took some time out from my bread-and-butter job (freelance proofreader/copyeditor) to spend a few months focused on making art related to the climate emergency, leading to an exhibition in Carlisle. While I was working on the various elements, the initial ideas developed new connections and interpretations, often through qualities of the materials themselves. For instance, the sand, which I used partly just to hide the bare plywood, triggered thoughts of Ozymandias’ ‘lone and level sands’ and, later, of Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland, a book I have known since childhood. Or the mylar drafting film, which I chose for the drawings because it would be strong enough to hang in free-standing frames (which in turn were a solution to the lack of wall space in the original venue), turned out to rhyme with the mirrors, because you can see the drawings in reverse through the mylar. The way that material things, or answers to practical problems, connect to or spawn ideas, unplanned and unexpected, which enhance the possible meanings of the artwork, is I suppose what it’s all about. As my usual approach to ‘making art’ is a pretty unimaginative (unthinking?) one, of simply trying to render what I am looking at, in a drawing or a painting or a sculpture, finding metaphorical or literary resonances was a pleasant surprise for me. It was even better when other people found connections and references that I was unaware of (such as, Hildegard of Bingen – ‘a feather on the breath of god’ – or the McEwan quote: ‘She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime’).

Trying to address an issue like this was also unusual for me. I tend to feel that polemical art, art with a specific ‘message’, is hard to do well, maybe because the message can suppress the ambiguities that are part of the richness of art. Art, in my view, isn’t about informing, or persuading. It’s more layered and more open-ended than that. It can change in the making. And meanings, like beauty, are in the eyes of the beholders. So, I hoped this stuff would be thought-provoking, rather than didactic. And it turned out to be thought-provoking for me, too. My sense of the importance of the issue was liberating – though this exhibition project came out of my personal thoughts and feelings about the climate emergency, it wasn’t about me trying to be an ‘artist’, so the perennial impostor syndrome fell away and the ideas and the objects took over. (It was also liberating to drop any pretence that I was trying to be ‘commercial’ or make things that people might buy.)

However, in spite of all that, I also partly wish that this work didn’t exist at all, because the ideas and concerns it deals with (namely the climate emergency and how we got here) sadden and scare me. I suppose making these things gave me a way to think about the crisis which was less depressing than just ranting at the radio or to my long-suffering friends and neighbours. It was therapeutic for me. But I’d much rather be in a world where I could retreat into a studio to paint portraits or whatever, without worrying about what the future will look like.

But that’s not where we are. And in the current context, maybe silence, or failure to acknowledge the issue, amounts to complicity. As I read the other day, everything has a message; the question is only whether it’s intended or not.

Not everyone feels the same as I do, of course. There are lots of different views – some more pessimistic than mine, some less. Even in the couple of years since the exhibition had its first outing, the public conversation has changed and a lot more of us are thinking along similar lines, though the CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are still going up (2019 – 413ppm, 2020 – 417ppm, 2021 – 419ppm – when 350ppm is the supposed maximum limit we should be aiming for, and even that is higher than the approximate average of 260ppm that prevailed throughout the Holocene, i.e. the whole period of the development of human civilisations). So, I start from the assumption that the climate crisis is real, is urgent, is affected by human activity, especially fossil fuel use, but that there are still things we can do (or not do) to avoid or mitigate the worst outcomes. And if we can, we should, even if the odds are long.

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Anyway, how does this artwork relate to the climate emergency?

There are several overlapping thoughts here –

1. The illusion of separation – separation of human existence from ‘Nature’ and of individual humans from each other (the enclosed form of the black boxes)
2. The illusion of infinity – of the possibility of unending economic growth, and/or technological ‘progress’ (the mirrors inside the boxes)
3. The feeling that we have been sleep-walking into an emergency, while we’ve been focused on our day-to-day problems or closeted within the ideological structures that support those two illusions, and that prevent us from imagining alternatives. (The Beatles quote I borrowed for my title seemed to encapsulate this and to provide an excuse to include portraits in the exhibition.)

There are also the flip sides of these ideas, which include the interconnectedness of things, the complexity and permeability of the systems we inhabit, and the unintended consequences that can come from this delicate complexity. (The suspended pieces hint at this – pieces which started from the finding of an abandoned egg and the gift of a bird skull, used in the construction called ‘tipping point’.)

1 the illusion of separation – growing up when and where I did, ‘Nature’ was mainly what you saw on the telly, in Jacques Cousteau’s programmes or David Attenborough’s documentaries. It was out there in other parts of the world. And it was threatened, but only in a piecemeal way – Save the Whales etc. – and the potential losses felt almost like a matter of aesthetics. The world would be less beautiful without these creatures; and it would be sad if future generations couldn’t experience them. Sad, but remote and not that urgent, and maybe not too hard to fix if some unknown, far away people were persuaded to stop killing whales or hunting elephants. It didn’t seem to impinge on us directly, either as something we were complicit in or dependent on, sitting by our coal fire in West Yorkshire. And I, at least, had no idea about the roles of these threatened species in an ecosystem, and how their decline could disrupt that system. There was the human world and there was Nature with a capital N, and they were separate. (And of course, at that time we were distracted by other existential threats – the Cold War, mutually assured destruction.) These black mirror-lined boxes can be seen as symbolising this separation. They form enclosed, solipsistic spaces. As well as referring to a world-view in which the human is defined as ‘not nature’, their external opacity relates to the individualistic politics of the last few decades (most of my adult life), as in Mrs Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’.

This tendency to see ourselves as isolated individual atoms rattling around in a disconnected way, all pursuing our own self-interest, is a view that keeps us myopic – focused on our specific situation, and, especially if we are not wealthy, focused on the short-term, on making ends meet. So, we might not notice the large-scale changes going on around us.

Another form of separation can be seen in the divisions of labour that we take as normal – and which perhaps enable the sleep-walk, by allowing us to assume ‘someone else’ can/will deal with it, that there are people in positions of influence who understand the problem and will respond to it, so we ordinary folk don’t have to worry about it. These ‘silos’ can become internalised as well. We can separate our work self from our private self – so we may accept that at work, the priority is profit and shareholder value, letting that justify actions that would not seem acceptable in other contexts. And we might tend to identify with the silo we are in – e.g. tobacco/oil companies knew about the harms before the general public, but instead of leaving the industry they found ways to keep doing the same things, through disinformation campaigns, lobbying etc. (And maybe academia is affected too – for example, if you divide up Politics, Philosophy and Economics into different departments, perhaps fundamental values or questions of ethics can be seen by economists or politicians as someone else’s job, shut away in the philosophers’ particular ivory tower.)

There is another element of the human–nature divide – divide and conquer – the common assumption that we humans (or at least some of us) are meant to control nature and that we can fix what our interventions have broken with technology or ‘sustainable management’ – that is, with more intervening, more control. But books like Isabella Tree’s Wilding show us that stepping back may be a better thing to do – not acting on ‘Nature’, but being with/within it and letting natural agents rebuild their interconnections, letting it be. The interconnections of course include ourselves, because the separation of human and Nature is, again, an illusion. We are part of, dependent on and implicated in the systems of the natural world.

2. the illusion of infinity – this is a gift of the physics/magic of mirrors

Our sleep-walk to the brink of catastrophe has also depended on the illusion that there is always room for more: more ‘resources’, more space (go west, young man – there’s a link to colonialism here – and now some people seem to be looking to extra-terrestrial space for new places to colonise), more economic activity – GDP must always grow, productivity must go up. For a long time that view has seemed to be confirmed. If you’ve cut down all the trees in Holland, go to Poland for their forests. If you’ve dug up (most of) the coal in England, go under the North Sea for oil and gas. And still today, in spite of ever more dire warnings from climate scientists, you often hear politicians addressing the climate emergency in terms of ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ growth. Or they express ambitions to act on climate change one day and promise to grow the economy the next.

But we all know the world is not infinite. Nothing grows forever. And the externalities that economics likes to ignore are coming back to bite us. The unintended consequences of accelerating human activity, transmitted through systemic connections of ecology, geology and meteorology, mean we are faced with rising temperatures, rising seas, increasingly wild and unpredictable weather, loss of biodiversity, loss of fertile soil and so on. And the delicate complexity of these systems means they are vulnerable to tipping points, tipping points which may bring an irreversible end to the nearly 12,000-years of stable CO₂ levels and global temperatures during which human civilization has developed. A mirror-box shows us an apparently endless world, but it is a world of sameness, a monoculture. The climate emergency challenges us to imagine different ways of being, which means recognizing the box we are in and getting out of it.

What is the metaphorical box? What is it made of? How was it built? And why is it so hard to unbuild/escape?

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3. As I said before, the title ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’ refers to the ‘sleep-walking’ that has got us here (perhaps I could equally well have called it ‘Out of sight, out of mind’). More specifically, it refers to the uncritical way we, as a society and as individuals (myself included), have mostly failed to notice or question the assumptions underpinning our economic and social system – basic things like:

Private property (another solipsistic concept) – money, markets, economics – the ‘bottom line’ – what counts as realistic/pragmatic – consumerism, jobs for jobs’ sake, education for jobs’ sake, jobs for money’s sake, money for consumption’s sake – debt – the endless trickle up of rent and interest – which all depend on the social fiction of money, money which is treated as the measure of all things. Economics enthroned as the primary field of policy making – an economics which is based on an idealised ‘rational’, self-interested ‘man’ in a ‘perfect’ market, economics which coined the term ‘externality’ for the unpriced (and therefore ignorable) side effects of economic activity. People defined as workers or consumers, so that, for instance, education comes to be seen as a matter of preparation for the job market and students as customers who can complain about whether their university course is ‘value for money’.

Economics translates everything into tradeable units and simultaneously externalises anything that can’t fit into the market paradigm: individuals pursuing private interests in an idealised ‘free’ market, guided by an invisible hand. It assumes equilibrium will be reached via the mechanism of prices and the automatic balancing of supply and demand. This way of thinking, prioritising financial costs and benefits, has become habitual and pervasive. For example, people ask is it worth my while getting solar panels? How soon will you get your money back in cheaper electricity bills if you install them? As if monetary cost is, as they say, ‘the bottom line’ and a thing is only worth doing if it is financially profitable.

But prices are of necessity relative, a way of determining what can be exchanged for what. What is equilibrated may not be intrinsically valuable. And that which cannot be traded, like clean air or a diverse and resilient biosphere, cannot be straightforwardly subject to the mechanisms of markets.

And if we are now impinging on the conditions of the possibility of human society, we are facing categorical imperatives, absolute values, absolute limits, not tradeoffs between ecology and economy, or between now and a heavily discounted ‘to come’. It is not a question of whether I, as an individual, can serve my private goals better by spending money now on solar panels or later on higher electricity bills. Rather it’s a question of us, as a community, making systemic changes to try and preserve or restore those conditions of possibility. But changing a system that has come to seem self-evidently natural is not easy. It involves asking some pretty basic ‘what if’ questions. It requires thinking outside the box.

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A few years ago, I would sometimes descend into a pretty misanthropic mindset. I’d go round in a little mental hamster wheel of ‘we humans are wrecking our world; we aren’t doing anything about it; we’re doomed; oh well – the world will be better off without us – but by then we’ll have wrecked the world for non-human life too, so nothing will be better off’. This doomy state of mind was not helped by hearing a powerful argument that the collapse of civilisation would be at least as carbon-emitting as its continuation. Hence the resonance of the newish word ‘anthropocene’. It felt like humanity was (‘by nature’?) the worst of invasive species, like a biblical swarm of locusts leaving devastation in our wake.

But of course, it’s misleading to treat ‘humanity’ as a homogenous lump, equally responsible for ‘anthropogenic’ changes. Part of the problem was that I took for granted that everyone everywhere would automatically need/want to live like the affluent in rich countries. That is, that any solution to inequality has to mean making everyone more like the rich – i.e., consuming more stuff, having a larger carbon footprint. I was buying into the image of ‘progress’ as endless growth of GDP, and the corollary that, if addressing the climate crisis means giving up our addiction to growth, it also means going back to the dark ages. Perhaps this came out of an underlying idea that I grew up with, namely, that history = progress from worse to better. I think this idea was part of our sleep-walk: change = progress, ‘things can only get better’, and if the change is increasing stuff, decreasing that stuff must be bad. (You might remember Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history, in 1989. He thought that liberal democracy and markets had won the historic debate and that we had reached a kind of settled – though no doubt ever-growing – state. I think we can safely say he was wrong.) But if you give up a monolithic idea of human nature progressing through history towards a single, final state, whether that’s utopia or apocalypse, in favour of a recognition that people can live in many different ways, then there’s room to imagine alternatives…

(But I was supposed to be talking about art…)

art and environment – thinking outside boxes

The arts (and crafts) relate to this as they can involve or demand certain ways of thinking – paying attention to specifics; doing, making, rather than owning; thinking about why you are doing what you are doing; thinking adventurously, speculatively, playfully; doing the thing for its own sake. Not only art can do this, of course – gardening, raising children, looking after a companion animal: these are things that we don’t think of in terms of ‘getting our money’s worth’. And while they will generate consumption and acquisition, that is not their primary point.

Art as an activity doesn’t fit that easily into the work/consume framework that we’ve got used to. Though it may, for some, be a source of income and may supply an art market, for many makers, if not most, it’s also like play – an open-ended activity done for its own sake, by its own rules, to some degree outside the definitions of GDP, bottom lines, etc. It involves experimentation and questioning, as well as attentiveness.

[Digression: It sometimes feels like art as an activity, or the artist as a person, is self-indulgent or self-obsessed. There is a kind of individualism in the idea of the artistic genius, and in the thought that art sets its own ends and means. But I’d argue that, if there is a kind of individualism in art, it is unlike the neoliberal individualism of the market, because the latter sees individuals as interchangeable abstract agents who all fit the same mould, defined ultimately in terms of spending power, whereas art is hopefully open-minded, diverse, playful, and taking this artful play seriously doesn’t have to/maybe goes against taking oneself (or anyone else) too seriously. It’s the variations between us and the ways we see the world that art reveals and delights in, as well as connections, resonances, layers of meaning.]

Economics is often seen as a matter of practicality and ‘realism’, in contrast to environmentalism (or art!) as utopian fantasy. Economics presents itself as ‘scientific’; it’s all about mathematical formulae and macroeconomic data. But economics itself (classical/neoclassical) starts from an abstract model which assumes various perfections – perfect markets, perfect information, perfectly rational agents whose preferences can be expressed in their free choices about how to spend and earn. (This sounds like fantasy to me. If economists are allowed to invent an ideal economic man, why can’t the rest of us imagine a utopian society without being called airy-fairy…?)

As well as unrealistic assumptions about perfect markets, economics edits out anything which is not traded in a market – the unpaid labour of carers, the exploitation of common/natural goods. It provides a useful invisibility cloak for the externalities and unpaid-for inputs of the economic system. Nature can be used as free resource and endless sink. But the dominance of this way of thinking means we tend to try to solve ecological problems with economic responses: carbon pricing, carbon offsetting – trying to translate the value of the ecosystem into financial terms so that it can be factored into economic calculations and traded. But the idea that you can keep flying your private jet as long as you pay to plant some trees seems pretty perverse to me. (As does the implication that environmentalism is a middle-class indulgence, a luxury – but that’s an aside.)

Systemic problems require systemic solutions, which may mean paradigm shifts, radical changes of thinking as well as of behaviour. The climate crisis is not like the hole in the ozone layer or lead pollution from car exhausts, which could be addressed by technological changes to specific aspects of activity – get rid of CFCs or lead in petrol. These tweaks did not affect use of deodorants or of cars. They could be made without much effect on behaviour or consumption. Addressing the climate crisis feels more like trying to adjust a metabolic issue in a body – there are feedback loops which mean your medical intervention can be counteracted by the body’s own processes – or like squeezing a balloon – you push in one place and it just swells in another. For instance, Mike Berners-Lee talks about the ‘rebound effect’ of efficiency improvements, which you might expect to reduce environmental impacts. But instead of reducing the energy used (and the carbon emissions associated), efficiency improvements tend to lead to more emissions because they make room for more activity. The money you save on heating your home you spend on going on holiday, perhaps, or on buying food with more air-miles embedded in it.

Tweaks like replacing fossil fuel vehicles with electric cars don’t change the system as much as reviving public transport would, getting people out of cars altogether and onto bikes or their own feet, or making travel less necessary by localising production. (Note: if these changes lead to healthier people and less economic activity in terms of vehicle and fuel purchase and healthcare, they can also contribute to lowering GDP – which is a bad thing from an economic point of view!)

Why do I keep coming back to economics? I’m struggling to get out of a maze of economic thinking. (The ‘eyes closed’ bit relates to how hard it is to see out of the box – the system we are in.) But maybe the practice of creativity can help us open our eyes, not so much in terms of its content/messages but through the attitudes it brings with it.

For instance, the slowness of making in actual practice can lead to appreciation of the value of the work (both as a noun and a verb) – that is, the product is valued more when we understand from personal experience the time and effort and attention and skill required to make it. (I’ve been trying to learn how to throw pots and my respect for potters has gone up massively!) But also, the activity of making can be its own reward – while there is an art market which deals in the commercial exchange/investment value of ‘high’ art, ‘art for art’s sake’ is probably a better description of the average maker who certainly isn’t in it for the money! And even artists who do manage to make a career of it often talk of what they do as necessary in itself, regardless of the financial reward.

The consumerist world of maximising productivity (in order to maximise profit), of division of labour, mass production, automation etc., divorces us from the making and devalues the product and the maker, hiding the production process and its side effects – out of sight, out of mind again. Consumerism aspires to keep everything moving as fast as possible, because every transaction contributes to keeping the machine of GDP running, keeping the revenue streams flowing. This has produced a throwaway culture of single-use plastics, built-in obsolescence, fast fashion, which all trade on a kind of casual thoughtlessness.

In contrast, the practice of art slows things down; it engages us with the material, with the physical work and the thoughtfulness that making calls for, and it can reward us in the experience of flow. (There’s a connection to be made here with the hand-made, the made to last, the right to repair, which are all counter-impulses to consumerism.) Perhaps even the high end of the art market hints at a longer view than that of the consumerist merry-go-round; though the market can only express a long view in terms of investment, the objects it trades in are expected to retain their value for decades, if not centuries. And most people who acquire art objects are probably not expecting a financial return at all. Rather they expect to live with and enjoy the work for more than a fleeting moment. There’s a personal relationship involved in both the making and having of art which is not easily tradeable.

There’s one more aspect of the mirror-boxes I should mention – the Pandora reference that any box can evoke (though, apparently, she had a jar, not a box). It was, I think, from one of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time programmes that I learnt that the only thing that didn’t escape from Pandora’s box of evils was hope. Which is puzzling – why would hope be in there, with the evils, in the first place? Perhaps for the same reason that some climate worriers will talk about ‘hopium’ – they see hope as another form of denial, which can postpone action – hope as wishful thinking rather than facing reality, a way of maintaining our illusions, of not thinking radically enough or acting fast enough. But I hope that hope is a more positive thing than that! I can’t do without it myself. And among the things that give me hope are the increasing awareness, the changing conversations, the rewilding projects (the most hopeful book I have read in the last couple of years is Wilding) and the fact that so many people I know are making music, making art, writing books. Maybe doing art (with its for-its-own-sakeness, and its playfulness, its thinking outside of the box) can be one of the ways we humans can rewild ourselves.

PS In later posts, I explore the ideas of rewilding ourselves and sociability as human nature.

Bibliography

Paul Behrens, The Best of Times the Worst of Times (London: Indigo Press, 2020)

Mike Berners-Lee, There’s No Planet B (2020) and How Bad Are Bananas? (London: Profile Books, 2020)

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (Penguin, 2015)

Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor (London: WH Allen, 2020)

Karen Lloyd, Abundance (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)

Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm (London: Verso, 2020)

George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage (London: Verso, 2018)

Jason Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2016)

Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (London: Penguin, 2017)

Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London: Penguin, 2013)

Isabella Tree, Wilding (London: Picador, 2018)