Please stop making claims about how the arts and culture can stop climate change.

Or 5 artworks we don’t need any more of + 5 ways we actually could drive change.

Let's go.

The arts can tell powerful stories that can shape people’s beliefs and lead them to take action.

If I had a tenner for every time I’ve heard that in relation to artworks created about climate change, I’d be almost rich enough to sustain a career in the arts. For a long time, the arts and culture have bought into the ‘information deficit model’ - which basically goes that people don’t have enough information, and when they do have enough information, they’ll do something. So - goes the argument - let’s use the arts to get people that information they need, let’s change their beliefs, then they’ll take action and we’ll have climate change sorted.

But that isn’t how it works. Beliefs don’t drive actions. It’s actually the other way around. The idea that actions drive beliefs originated with cognitive dissonance theorists in the 1950s. A good introduction can be found in Elliot Aronson’s article The Power of Self-Persuasion but put really simply, if you can prompt someone to take action, their beliefs will catch up, because we -as humans- don’t like cognitive dissonance.

And people are aware of climate change and actually very worried by it. According to IPSOS Mori, the percentage of people in the UK who are concerned or very concerned about climate change hasn’t dipped below 79% in five years. People have the information they need, and they are worried, and they are not taking action for a whole bunch of reasons that we’re not going to go into because this is a rant about the arts and how they see their role in preventing climate change, rather than a total analysis of our failure to take appropriate action.

If the 2010s (and early 2020s) were the time of “we need to raise people’s awareness about climate change”, the arts has now entered a new period. We’re now in “we need to help people imagine something different”. I actually find this more irritating than the earlier Reithian “we must educate people into action”, mainly because so many people in this area are now shamelessly riding a shiny new bandwagon called Imagination ™. You may be familiar with past bandwagons like Creativity ™ and Leadership ™ - basically times where the arts have taken something that everyone has and exercises regularly, and makes it A Thing that they own and can smugly teach people about (for a fee). 

Having got some of my annoyance out in the open, I’m going to roll back on my original wholesale dismissal of these ideas. People can have transformative moments through experiencing films, theatre, TV shows, music, dance, literature, games and the rest, and imagination is important. But can we please be a bit more specific about how, rather than making these grand wafty claims that just leave us open to criticism. The second half of this piece of writing is my five principles of how the arts can get us to a place of change, so skip down to that now if you’re here for constructive ideas and not for me venting my frustration.

If you’re still reading here, welcome to the frustration sidebar.

This is a personal top five of climate art cliches which make me want to break things. You may recognise some of them. You may be responsible for some of them - I write this as a past offender myself. You may wonder why I'm so annoyed about all this. I think it's because this stuff is too important to be done badly. I know it's hard to admit that the approach you've taken in the past wasn't on the money but climate change is too serious for us to not to take a moment, breathe, and think about how we can use our skills for change, rather than trotting out tired cliches to get that next commission or job.

So here we go.

(And if you want to make any of these, knock yourself out, live your life but please please don’t make baseless assertions about the difference they will make to the climate mess that we’re in.)

1. The dystopia

Due to the budget it takes to evoke a dystopia, theatre tends to be less guilty of this than screen based arts. Or books. Anyway. The rationale behind this seems to be: let’s show people just how bad it could get and then there is NO WAY they will continue their current behaviour. If ‘beliefs drive actions’ is the number one fallacy here, number two is that you can reliably frighten people into taking action. The research shows that this is a high risk strategy. A handful of people may change their behaviour, but unless you provide a solution with your fear-mongering, other people are going to stick their heads in the sand, go full nihilist (if we’re going down, bring me my private jet and a Wagyu beef sandwich) or enter into denial (conspiracy theory anyone?). 

2. Save the planet vs save my marriage

This genre - heavily represented in my own former medium of theatre - casts climate change as the antagonist. Most often we follow a white male scientist who is dedicated to saving the world. He spends more and more time at the lab. He doesn’t see much of his wife. He likely misses his kid’s school play or sports day.  In the end, because his saving the world is an implausible conclusion, he probably has a moment where he realises he has neglected his family and got his priorities wrong. The world is not saved but we all feel a bit emosh when we see him teaching little Joey to ride a bike. I’m reserving a special place in hell for Save the planet vs save my marriage because of the bonus misogyny that often accompanies it.

3. Oh crap we made climate change pretty

There was a period around 2020 when you couldn’t move for funding calls for data visualisation projects. The principle behind this was totally valid - most people can’t relate to a bunch of numbers, so these projects were about giving them a way into realising the significance of these data sets. Among the other data visualisations, they seemed to spawn about a thousand ‘weather data reimaged as jewellery’ projects. Here’s a pair of strikingly fashionable chunky earrings which show how manmade climate change has caused the extinction of countless animal species. For you my friend, a beautiful necklace where the oxidation pattern shows how air pollution has disproportionately affected economically-deprived parts of the city. Oh crap we made climate change pretty projects buy into the information deficit model and supercharge it.

4. Zero sum game

As the name suggests, this one belongs to the world of games. Lots of games and interactive experiences about climate change have the participants making a series of decisions which result either in saving the world (winning), or failing to save the world (not winning). It’s a compelling game mechanic but it feels especially grim when you consider the people and places that are already being affected horrendously by the effects of climate change - predominantly Global South countries and peoples. To turn these things into penalty cards on a boardgame for people in the Global North, when they’re already life and death for people in other places with less privilege, feels gross. I also don’t see any evidence for these games with their complex scoring systems helping people figure out what they can do about climate change. It’s a no from me.

5. Something involving a girl who can talk to trees

If we’re going to be generous, the emergence of this sub-genre is maybe informed by a growing recognition that extractivist colonialism is massively to blame for climate change, and that First Nations and indigenous people have found better ways to coexist with nature and generally not trash the planet. Enter the tree whisperer girl, representative of these previously-dismissed knowledges and ways of being. Often in children’s literature, with lovely illustrations. Except more often than not, the people getting money from these books are not the people whose knowledge is being (mis)represented. Exhibit A is Jamie Oliver.

Now we’ve got rid of all that negativity, let’s get down to the constructive principles for when the arts can/ could make a difference in this field. I first heard about ‘action-based storytelling’ from Kris De Meyer. Kris has been a FF collaborator for over a decade now. A lot of the ideas in this section derive from his work with the Climate Action Unit. They're great, check them out.

Action-based storytelling

Let’s pause for a minute here, we need to talk about that name. Action-based storytelling. I get it, as will you if you read down, but for me, that name evokes Bruce Willis in a sweaty vest. It sounds like the stories are going to have to be about men running around and driving fast cars and doing stunts. The reason I’m writing my take on action-based storytelling is partly because whenever I try to explain it, I get stuck on the name. It's NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE. So here’s my five principles, sweaty vest free.

1. Something we know how to act on

A lot of climate change art focuses on the problem: on climate change. And on people being concerned about it. And fair enough, it’s a massive problem and I’m very concerned about it too. But if the point of your artwork is to help your audience imagine a different future or to do something about climate change, then the story needs to be about people tackling that problem, not the problem itself. This moves it away from despair, hopelessness, powerlessness, and all the other things we see depicted in climate dystopias. It turns climate change from a ‘threat we should be concerned about’ into ‘something we know how to act on’. That’s the action bit in ‘action-based storytelling’: show people taking action. And that’s because…

2. Agency is social

Kris has written about this in an academic paper here but let’s just go through the headlines here. The concept of agency was developed by social psychologist Albert Bandura, as part of his social cognitive theory. Agency means ‘knowing how to act in order to bring about an intended effect’. In social cognitive theory, an important source of agency is social learning: when we see other people solving problems, we start to be able to imagine ourselves doing the same or similar. Again it’s action - put simply, we see other people taking action and it feels more possible for us to do it. 

3. Right here, right now

Show actions that people can take now or in the near future, not actions that people will need to take when the UK floods or burns or freezes over or whatever other horror climate collapse might bring. I’m going to risk speaking for us all when I say that we don’t want it to get that bad: we don’t want people to ever have to take those sorts of actions. If we’ve established that social learning builds agency, let’s create narratives that people can learn from now - and apply that learning straightaway, rather than waiting for any more shit to hit the fan.

4. Climate change doesn’t give you a licence to be boring

The danger of writing listicals about how to create artworks that support climate action is that you can make it all seem really didactic, moralising and boring. Or worse, that people start to think their art is above criticism because it’s saving the world. The work can still be dramaturgically tight and aesthetically coherent. If you make the sort of artwork that has characters, they can still be complex and three dimensional, facing difficult choices in high drama situations. You can still treat your audience with respect and care. Don’t undermine your good intentions by making something that no one actually wants to engage with.

5. Beware the individual narrative

This one is really hard. Action on climate has long been stymied by emphasis on the individual. In 2004, British Petroleum (now BP) launched its ‘carbon footprint calculator’ so people could assess how their normal daily life -going to work, buying food, and travelling- was ‘responsible’ for heating the planet. In collaboration with advertising agency Ogilvy, BP mainstreamed the concept of carbon footprints for individuals. They convinced everyone else that it was their responsibility -individually- to solve climate change. Nothing to do with fossil fuel companies’ profit-making activities.

But this concept of the individual is really attractive to our brains. Although much criticised, the Hero’s Journey is the plot structure for countless narratives. We’re used to protagonists and lead characters. To Bruce Willis in his vest. I struggle to think of stories of collective action on climate change (which aren’t ‘wow, this person inspired a movement’). It's much easier to think of characters taking actions at the individual level that would lower their 'personal carbon footprint' - which is just what BP et al want us to think about. Where are the stories of collective action, systems change, governments and corporations being held to account?

Perhaps we don’t have the right artforms yet. So that’s what I’m going to be working on. Let me know if you're making headway in this area and I’ll look forward to learning from you - and developing my social agency.