"Literature and the arts are uniquely well placed to help people to face up to climate change"

Back in 2021, I was interviewed by Laura Ludtke and Catherine Charlwood for LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast. Laura and Catherine always asked contributors to come up with a motto for their work. I proposed ‘Shoulder to Wheel’. Fresh out of the COVID 19 pandemic, which had given modern life such a shake, there seemed to be a moment to be seized. As Arundhati Roy proposed, the pandemic could be a portal through to a better, more sustainable world. I had become convinced that all of us had a part to play in helping avert environmental disaster. It was not exactly obvious what I could do, though, as a scholar of Victorian literature and science. Luckily, I had already established partnerships with two organisations going back to the Victorian period who shared this same conviction. Since 2012, I had been working with Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which first opened its doors to the public in 1860. In 2019, I started collaborating with the Guild of St George, an educational and environmental charity founded in 1871 by the critic, art teacher and social reformer John Ruskin. As I worked on arts projects and exhibitions at the museum in Oxford and on research and public engagement at the Guild’s Ruskin Land site in the Wyre Forest, it became more and more clear to me that stories and storytelling had a crucial role to play. Literature and the arts, it struck me, were uniquely well placed to help people to face up to climate change and biodiversity loss, to imagine more sustainable ways of living, and to rediscover the hope needed to see this transition through.

In 2021, as the UK was due to host the UN Conference of the Parties, COP26, the University of Birmingham prepared a collective report entitled Addressing the Climate Challenge. With my PhD student Dion Dobrzynski, I contributed a short essay on the role of the arts and humanities in tackling climate change, drawing on my work with the museum in Oxford and our work together at Ruskin Land. From its campus in Dubai, the University took a substantial role in COP28 two years later. Two of the themes of that COP were environmental justice and the youth voice. As President of the Commission on Science and Literature, I hosted an online symposium showcasing work by early career scholars on how the study of literature could contribute to a just transition to sustainable societies. Given our longstanding collaborations in Brazil, this year’s COP30 in Belém looked to be another opportunity for the University to play its part in shifting the dial on climate change.

Back in January, I was asked by the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action to prepare a policy brief on the role of literature and the arts in confronting climate change. When this was published in early October, it sparked a much bigger campaign than I had expected. Working with colleagues in the College of Arts and Law and the University’s press team, we gathered over 200 signatures for an open letter to the UN and its member states calling on them to use the power of storytelling to confront the failure of imagination that is holding us back from climate action. We published the letter in mid-November, just as COP30 was getting underway, then at the end of November, after the COP closed, I hosted another online symposium, this time gathering international experts to discuss stories from the frontline of climate change. The same week, Dion and I finally published our research from Ruskin Land as a policy paper for a series commissioned by the British Academy on nature recovery.

Now that the dust has started to settle on COP30, I find myself reflecting on what this campaign has achieved. The open letter may not have caused the big splash we hoped for, but it has shown that it is not just a handful of disaffected literature scholars who think that the arts and humanities might hold a key to unlocking real action on climate change. Alongside over a hundred academics from across the humanities, the signatories included sociologists and economists, energy and environmental scientists, pathologists and psychologists. More than forty creative artists from around the world, including Sir Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter and David Oakes, broadcaster Chris Packham, Pulitzer prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver and Booker prize-winner Samatha Harvey, signed the letter. We gained support from leading UK arts organisations including the National Literacy Trust, the Writers’ Guild and the National Youth Theatre. We won the backing of museum directors from as far apart as New York, Philadelphia, Dublin, Oxford and Bulaweyo. We even had the support of leading charities and NGOs including Caritas Internationalis and Greenpeace, not to mention the Green Party of England and Wales. More locally, several of the University’s leading partners in the West Midlands lent their voices to this campaign, including Writing West Midlands, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and the Guild of St George, along with representatives from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Birmingham City Council.

The breadth of this support suggests that this is an idea whose time has come, and not just in the UK. For the online symposium, we were privileged to hear from scholars, scientists and writers from Türkiye and Indonesia, Pakistan and Dubai, South Africa and Ghana, Brazil and the UK, many of whom also signed the open letter. We heard too from students from Birmingham and Brazil who worked together on a project in the Amazon in the run up to COP30. Across countries and generations, people are clamouring for action on climate change and frustrated with the baby-steps taken by the international community through official processes like the COP. Scientists too are increasingly desperate, trapped in the role of Cassandras as their well-informed predictions fall on deaf ears even as they come to pass all around us. As the papers that we heard at the symposium showed so well, stories offer us the cultural depth, imaginative reach and emotional charge that we need to mobilise decisive action on climate change. Allied with science and civil society, the arts and humanities really can make the difference.

Thank you to everyone who signed the open letter and to all our speakers and attendees at the online symposium. You are all bearers of light in dark times. We can and we will march forward to a better, kinder future together.