Arts and Climate Change

Awel Aman Tawe is all set to deliver an exciting programme of arts activities specifically themed around climate change. ReCreation embraces a range of arts genres as a way to explore our personal relationships with some of the most critical environmental issues facing us today – dwindling resources, catastrophic weather patterns, food security, environmental refugees and so on.

We are bombarded with news and facts about climate change and the environment all the time. There is very little disagreement now among scientists that the planet is hotting up at an unsustainably high rate. We are urged, cajoled, frightened into resolving this. But while there is a lot of excellent reporting on the issues, it can come across as abstract, impersonal, and far removed from our daily lives. Apart from ‘letters to the editor’, there are very few public opportunities for people to put across their own personal views on the issues. In many circles, climate change is becoming a dirty word, and while we are encouraging people to switch off their lights, many people are switching off from the entire debate.  

Creating a sustainable community requires major shifts in thinking, behaviour patterns and consumer spending. The arts are, and always have been, used to represent and argue new technologies, political ideas, social upheavals. We have raised funding from the Department for Energy and Climate Change, Awards for All, Environment Wales and Academi to deliver an arts programme that encourages people to make a personal, creative response to the complex problem of climate change.   ReCreation integrates literature, film, theatre, animation, graphic design among other genres and focuses on approaching climate change issues from a creative angle, aiming to engage people in a fun, non-threatening way.

As Booker Prizewinner Ian McEwan recently said “it doesn’t help if you badger people”. He chose a comic angle to address the issues of climate change in his new novel ‘Solar’. “I have been surprised” he said “ that there aren’t more novels about [climate change]. It’s clearly begun to have an impact on our lives already and it has huge human consequences, on a small scale, on a private level and on a geopolitical level”.  Philip Pullman agrees that “the degradation of the environment, in all sort of ways, is the biggest thing we’ll find ourselves having to deal with for the next hundred years, whether we want to or not”, but there are not many writers who are tackling the subject of climate change.  

So, why not get involved in our arts programme! email Emily for more details: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it