Connecting artfully in the context of the emerging climate crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT The climate crisis is not (merely) a problem of science but also, pre-eminently, a moral and ethical one. Humans alive today are the first with overwhelming data that our modern, industrialised, high-carbon-consumption ways of living threaten the biosphere we depend on, and perhaps the last with meaningful opportunity to avert climate disaster. However, knowing how to act is not straightforward. This crisis requires the application of our scientific ingenuity and also that we build our individual and collective psychological, emotional and moral responsiveness. Whilst not replacing technological innovations or political reform, there is a vital role for artful actions that locate and re-connect us, to ourselves, to our context-in-nature, to each other. In artful action attentiveness to the subjective, committed personal experience is fundamental and so artful inquiry often begins with first person work, which can then be adapted to address communal concerns. In this article I present outcomes from a sustained cycle of first-person inquiry, which used a structured framework of walking and ‘compressed writing’ that I term poetic charting. My aspiration is to develop simple exercises that might support an ethic of connectedness and participation for moral action appropriate to the challenges facing the present climate breakdown generation/s.