Climate Change – Page 4 – Hannah Nicklin

http://walkwith.tumblr.com

Just squeaking in a blog post at the last moment to keep to my ‘at least 4 a month’ quota. Lots has happened this month, Mayfest took up a great deal of it, then I completed 10,000 words of PhD chapter 1 and other material for my first year progress board, including all of the fore-planning (I actually have the next two and a bit years planned out, which is an unusual combination of reassuring and scary). I’ve also released a first foray into soundwalk style storytelling to the general public, and agreed to and submitted an abstract for a joint paper on the inefficiencies of the academic conference in representing performative thoughts for a TaPRA conference in September… That’s written better in the actual abstract. So a busy month, though I really do intend to do a run down of my experiences at Mayfest sometime soon, promise.

The image above is from the soundwalk I’ve released, check it out at http://walkwith.tumblr.com – all it requires is an mp3 player, 10 minutes, and some rain. I would really appreciate any feedback you have – either in text/audio/image/video form via the site, Twitter, or even posting me handwritten/collected things (as some people have). It’s my first experiment in the form, and at the moment is a bit like a monologue-with-interactive-bits than something that might be called truly interactive or player-as-protagonist driven. I shall have to get working with the second-person referential, I think. I’ve also got plans to play with binaural audio – to develop a real 3D feeling with the headphones. You can hear some really good examples of where that can lead at Papa Sangre’s house, the audio storytelling is there described as a ‘video game without video’. Make sure you wear headphones when listening. I’m getting some mic’d up ear buds and a cheap minidisc player (from Twitter, the lovely @daveisanidiot) to experiment with that. My brother (trained sound engineer if you’re hiring/have intern work/want someone to hold a boom mic whilst BREAKING WOOD) is also going to help out, so more technical stuff and higher quality hopefully forthcoming.

These experiments are all eventually leading towards the ideas I have for the currently quite cryptic Umbrella Project (no zombies involved), which I’m trying to secure some funding before lift-off. If you know of any funds, grants, or tech/web/music support-in-kind that might be out there and interested in being involved in a country-wide pervasive storytelling experiment, let me know. You can follow the Umbrella Project on Twitter here, and if you have £8,000 (I have a fully costed and sensible budget and everything) you wanted to throw at me, please do!

Finally, as June arrives and July seems much closer than it did in May, I’m beginning to think about what I might talk about at Shift Happens on the 5th and 6th. Shift Happens is an industry (as opposed to academic) conference about arts, learning and digital technology, and there are some really big speakers from places like 4ip, The Guardian, and the National Theatre also up there, so I’m trying to work out how I can best fit in. I suspect I’m there as a passionate loud-mouth and blogger before I am an academic, but I do feel like the dialogue needs to move on from ‘you should be using/interested in tech’, ‘but it’s scary/time consuming/too hard/not monetarily justifiable’. Perhaps a focus on the harder times that are upcoming with regards to the Tory-Lib Dem arts cuts. I’ll have a think about that. And if you think I have a particular clear message that I’ve hitherto missed, do let me know, very welcome!

Merry Bank Holiday Weekend. And if any of you are off to the Rough Beats Festival next weekend, find me and say ‘hi’. I may even say ‘hi’ back.

“There’s an issue here, I think, where lots of people are assuming a right over these things, I think people have got a bit confused about ‘rights’ issues, ‘we all have a right to cheap flights, or cheap alcohol, or cheap meat’ but these things are not rights, and actually where they’re detrimental to society as a whole I think we need to look at them.” Marcus Brigstocke, Question Time 26/11/09

Yesterday we saw the president of the COP15 summit resign, in the past few days we’ve seen rich countries try to rescind on the legally-binding Kyoto protocol, promises on critical deforestation (20% of global emissions) destroyed, and little to no progress on what is widely considered the last chance for our world to act as one to limit the potentially disastrous effects of man-made climate change.

So this looks like the question that we may have to ask now:

What do we do when it fails?

What do we do when our governments let us down? When the representatives of our world stand and suggests that they can conceive of the damages of the 1-2% GDP necessary to prevent run away climate change, but not in the 5-20% that no deal is likely to cost us. When they have lost sight of the fact that these petty discussions about money amongst developed countries for whom ‘growth’ has become synonymous with ‘good’, should be nothing to all the deaths, refugees, famine, drought, flooding and severe weather events that are taking second place to the pounds the dollars the yen, the made up values, traded through the air.

It may be up to us.

This may not be a bad thing. What has been less publicised (and much more persecuted) is the open sustainability forums and communities in Copenhagen, the 60-1 00,000 protestors walking through London, placards held high, the several thousand councils and organisations, schools and businesses, and tens of thousands of individuals who have signed up to 10:10, and the recent survey that revealed 75% of British voters believe “world leaders are on an important mission at the climate change conference in Copenhagen” (source).

I have spoken before about how I believe it is time for us to reclaim grassroots politics, to change top down political posturing into bottom up action. And I don’t mean the important but inactive protest actions of closing down power stations or stalling shipping routes (I do think these kind of media events [there’s no denying that’s what they are] are very valuable in raising issue awareness). What I mean is us, all of us, generating positive personal and community lead actions to reduce our own emissions, and to encourage others too. 75% of us currently support a deal in Copenhagen. People are always moaning about the ‘Nanny State’. Well now it’s time to grow up. Now it’s time for us to take responsibility for our own methods of living. Let’s return to a true meaning of ‘rights’.

You do not have a right to cheap flights, to travel, to meat in every meal, to fizzy drinks, or to change your wardrobe every season. These are luxuries. Unsustainable ones. We need to break the bonds that capitalism has sold us. Your rights are to equality, to lack of persecution, to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, to life and liberty. You do not have the right to impinge on the rights of others. Our growth driven profligacy is doing just that. Food riots, climate refugees, flooding, this is happening now. Governments can legislate – and it is important that they do so – to curb the emissions of big business, of public services, and of energy policies, but if they don’t, we still have the power to affect change.

Continue reading What do we do when it fails?