Given some of the awkward conversations I’ve had over the course of my career, I’ve added something to my website about my values, my expectations, and what I bring to the proverbial table. It’s very much a work-in-progress which I’ll doubtless keep refining. Do please feel free to let me know your thoughts!
We win or lose through the stories we tell. They’re what changes the world. And the most important story we need to tell today is the one that gets the people of Planet Earth to take meaningful action on the ecological breakdown.
The stories we’re offering now, however, aren’t working.
It’s fine to tell those who respect science about how we’re on track for catastrophe, because they understand evidence. It’s fine to tell those already awake to social and environmental injustice how climate change is driven by our economic system and the power structures that maintain it, because that fits their existing worldview. But what’s the story for everyone else?
Humans are brilliant at denial. Being able to put aside thoughts of suffering and mortality, to compartmentalise and not feel everyone else’s suffering too deeply, helps keep us sane. It seems that’s how the majority of people respond when faced with the facts of impending apocalypse too, and it’s understandable. Climate change is deeply frightening and it’s coming at us like juggernaut with broken brakes.
Continue reading Fly, you fools! (or How Popular Culture Can Help Tell the Climate Crisis Story)
This is the text I prepared for the above-named panel, at Making Theatre Green, at the National Theatre, London, 6th June 2022. What I actually said was inevitably a little different, but this version is clearer to read than a transcript with all my ums, errs, omissions and mistakes!
When I was around 12 or 13, I dug out my old Playmobil figures and made scale model sets for them. They’re quite close to 1:25, actually! I first painted the back wall of the school hall for a show when I was about 15. An early starter, you might think?
Well. According to a newspaper clipping, my mum found the other day, I got a brief write-up in the Harlow Star, aged 10, for saving up my pocket money to plant trees.
And, frankly, it escalated from there.
So… I’ve been involved in environmental campaigning longer than I’ve been designing shows. But the crazy thing is how, until a few years ago, I totally compartmentalised the two.
Why did it take so long for me to bring these two obsessions together?
Continue reading Environmental ethics and artistic practice: can they speak the same language? What does environmentally careful design look like?
The last time I was purposefully academic was probably when I sat my finals. Even then, we’d only been educated in the historical contexts of the writers we studied; there was little contemporary theory. Since then, I’ve taught at half a dozen universities at least, but always as a practitioner. Academically cutting edge I am not! But I do want to understand how the work I and my colleagues do in the arts fits with the urgent need, in the face of imminent climate breakdown, to view society as part of an ecological system. The question ‘what is green criticism?’ therefore seems to me to a pressing one. Green thought has provided us with a sophisticated analysis of society and its relationship to planet. How can we apply it to artistic practice?
Around the time I did my English degree, there were some books emerging that used ecology as way to approach literature: Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology springs to mind, and Kim Taplin’s Tongues in Trees; I probably should re-read them. The aim of these books was to understand how writers related to nature: how ‘green’ they were. But that approach is about ecology; it’s not employing ecology as a critical tool. I wrote an extended essay in my third year about depictions of landscape in literature and painting at the time of the first generation Romantics. I was interested in the sublime and the beautiful, not out of any kind of swooning romanticism but because they suggest two ways of modelling our desire for the external. I’d noticed how some writers saw nature as a force that transformed the tiny figures traversing its landscapes, while some saw it as something that framed or provided a kind of extension to/illustration of heroic anthropocentrism. I was somewhat out on a limb, frankly. It probably wasn’t my best work. And it was also mainly ‘about’ the natural world. Yet it made me realise that there are analyses of nature which can – and probably should – be be applied to any kind of discourse.
So what might real green criticism be? Is anyone writing about how ecology could be a useful way to look at culture? Continue reading What is Green Criticism?
Paul Burgess 