Professor John Holmes explains why COP and the climate inaction it leads to have had a failure of imagination.
The hour is late. We have known about the threat of climate change for over fifty years, and the political will to act has ebbed and flowed. There were moments of agreement and determination in Rio and Paris, and a groundswell of hope just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but never the decisive action that we sorely need. Why is that? It is not that we lack knowledge. The empirical evidence that the planet is heating up is incontrovertible. The explanations and models are robustly grounded in well-established science. The vast majority of people around the planet recognise what is happening and are deeply worried. So why have we – collectively, politically – failed to act?
I suggest that it is not because we are unaware of climate change, but because we have been unable to fully comprehend it. If political leaders and even petrol barons themselves truly grasped the impacts of climate change in their minds’ eyes, they would change course. Ultimately, no one has a vested interest in a degraded planet, riven by food shortages, rising seas, burning forests, and with an ever more precarious and barren natural world. No one wants to bequeath that to their children.
We have found that it (literature) can make a profound difference to how connected people feel to the natural world, to engage with it imaginatively through immersive reading walks.
Equally, if our leaders and we could truly imagine a world free from our addiction to fossil fuel and unsustainable consumption, and from the extremes of poverty and precariousness that sustain extremes of wealth, we would see that it promises to be a much happier world to live in.
To reverse this global failure of imagination, we need to look to the arts as well as the sciences, to create visions of sustainable societies in order to bring them into being. This means conjuring imagined futures and alternative presents, while also peering into the past to see what we can learn from less demanding societies and the stories they tell. We need to heed the voices of indigenous peoples who still live sustainably, to learn their patterns of thought and ways of seeing. We need to take stories and poems from our own cultures into nature, to use them to help us reconnect with what we as humans have always valued but have forgotten to care for as we should.
To reverse this global failure of imagination, we need to look to the arts as well as the sciences, to create visions of sustainable societies in order to bring them into being.
At the University of Birmingham, we have recently launched a new partnership with the Guild of St George, an educational charity founded by the Victorian writer, art teacher and social critic John Ruskin. We have been working together at Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest to see what impact reading stories and poems together in natural landscapes can have on how people understand and appreciate both literature and nature. We have found that it can make a profound difference to how connected people feel to the natural world to engage with it imaginatively through immersive reading walks.
As my former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher Dion Dobrzynski and I explain in a new paper for the British Academy, reading walks can benefit people by enhancing their connection to nature in at least five different ways. Reading walks deepen people’s attentiveness to and understanding of nature through a combination of close reading and close observation. They can help us to recognise the complex histories of place, looking back into how landscapes were shaped in the past, but also imagining how they may change in the future. Because fiction and poetry contain multiple points of view, they can provide the prompt we need to recognise that we do not all have the same perceptions of or access to nature, and to share and take heed of one another’s different stories and experiences.
So much literature bears witness to a love of nature, and what we love, we strive to protect.
Research has shown that spending time in nature is directly beneficial to mental health and well-being. Our own research bears this out, with the reading walk itself providing a focus and a stimulus for this kind of life-affirming and enhancing connection to nature. Finally, reading walks can help to foster an ethic of care for nature. So much literature bears witness to a love of nature, and what we love, we strive to protect.
Literature and the other arts have a key role to play in tackling climate change. They can bring home the dreadful losses that unchecked climate change will bring and help us to call into being the truly sustainable societies that we need to create if we are to bring it to heel. They can help too, to restore the connection to nature that is so fundamental to our wellbeing, individually and collectively, in the moment and into the safe and secure future that we must build together.
Professor John Holmes has coordinated an open letter to the UN to demand that the arts and creative industries be given a more prominent seat at the COP table.
Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture
Biographical and contact information for Professor John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham.
