‘It’s positive, not apocalyptic’: can climate change art help save the planet?

The future was a fantastic place, once. Twenty years ago, the BBC’s pioneering science show Tomorrow’s World came to an end after 1,400 episodes. First beamed into living rooms across the nation back in 1965, the series envisioned the inventions of the near future, offering a blueprint of blue sky thinking.

As well as introducing products that soon became commonplace – such as artificial grass, the pocket calculator, the mobile phone and the robotic vacuum cleaner – it stretched the imagination to breaking point with the robot snooker player, paper underwear and the worm omelette, a protein-packed dish predicted to take over dinner tables.

While the early episodes of Tomorrow’s World opted for 60s optimism and, towards the series’ end in the 90s, dreamed of better things, the future of the planet today has never looked bleaker. We are living in a global climate emergency, with record heatwaves across the globe. Closer to home, wildfires increased fourfold in England last year and annual flood damage costs could rise by 20% due to the crisis. Eggy worms don’t seem too scrambled an idea now.

It is no wonder, then, that art in recent years has looked ahead, like Tomorrow’s World, to the future of the planet. In 2018, the artist Michael Pinsky created a series of Pollution Pods at London’s Somerset House, filling five domes with the particulate matter of five cities. Last year, the Our Time on Earth exhibition at the Barbican in London brought together 18 works from across the globe that imagined possible planetary futures. Liam Young’s film Planet City, for example, pictured a future mega-metropolis of 10 billion, based on the biologist EO Wilson’s idea that humans could live on just half of the Earth and regreen the rest.

Meanwhile, Dear Earth, showing at the Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre until early September, features works from 15 international artists that examine, in the gallery’s words, how art can “deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis”.

While these shows venture into sociology, politics and economics, others focus squarely on nature. The BBC Earth Experience in west London is inspired by the Seven Worlds, One Planet television series and takes viewers on a journey through the world’s wildlife. Large digital screens display videos narrated by David Attenborough; each room in the space is dedicated to a different continent.

All these exhibitions have deeper roots. In 2009, the exhibition Earth at the Royal Academy in London broke ground by examining the climate through abstract art. “I didn’t want penguins or icebergs,” curator Kathleen Soriano explained to the Guardian at the time: “We wanted people to have an aesthetic response.”

Then there is the Eden Project. First opened in 2001, the Cornwall attraction, which features huge enclosures with more than 1,000 plant species, has since blossomed, attracting more than 1 million visitors a year, with a new marine venue in Morecambe, Lancashire, set to open in 2026. Sam Smit, the Eden Project’s creative head, believes the venue’s multisensory approach helps to inspire action. “In the rainforest, you can smell it, see its visual abundance, feel the humidity and temperature on your skin, hear the sound of the waterfall, and the odd bird,” he says, citing the recent installation, Blue (Infinity Blue), a nine-metre monument to bacteria that fires O-shaped vapour rings into the air fragranced with “primordial” aromas.

Other features invite visitors to complete the story. Seeing the Invisible, an augmented reality exhibition, is accompanied by a Call to Action trail and activity book that invite young visitors to create a mind map, illustration or short video imagining what’s next. Technology has often been used by the Eden Project to give viewers the opportunity to see the planet through other species’ eyes. AI-poweredThe app Pollinator Pathmaker imagined gardens from a bee’s eye view; audio experience Vegetal Transmutation encouraged listeners to view the Eden Project as a plant might; while the film Kinommic Botany took this to the extreme: shot from a potato’s perspective and giving new meaning to the role of the YouTuber, it challenged our anthropocentric view of the world.

The aim of these exhibitions is to offer a preview of the near future: but they also show what’s in the pipeline to change the timeline. The hope behind the work of attractions such as the Eden Project is not only to show a glimpse of the future but also to spur change. “These exhibitions can tangibly help people visualise what a different world can look like,” says Our Time on Earth curator Luke Kemp. “We felt that historically a lot of exhibitions and experiences depicted the problem of the climate crisis.”

“Facts and data can leave one feeling disempowered and disengaged,” the Eden Project’s senior arts curator Misha Curson says. “Immersive experiences like ours are more powerful than talk of environmental disasters that are already in the media every day. It’s a positive approach rather than an apocalyptic one.”

But does eco-art actually make us act? A study led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology examined the behaviour of visitors to Pinsky’s Pollution Pods. Using interviews and a questionnaire to measure the emotional responses of the audience, it concluded that the exhibition did increase people’s intention to act, but that very few attendees later went on to track their climate crisis emissions – something they were encouraged to do.

Studying the effectiveness of different works at COP21’s eco-art festival, the researchers Laura Kim Sommer and Christian A Klöckner later defined four categories of environmental art: what they termed the comforting utopia (playful visions of a better world); the challenging dystopia (depicting negative scenarios); the mediocre mythology (imagery drawing on myth and folklore); and awesome solutions (beautiful representations of nature that offer viable outcomes).

They discovered only three of 37 artworks made a positive behavioural impact: Mur Vegetal, an upcycled carpet made from flowers; The Blue Whale, a representation of a captured whale; and Honey Roads, 80 photographs of hives across the world. All three, they found, belong to the “awesome solutions” subset; they were sublimely beautiful, were exhibited outside, clearly showed the effects of human behaviour, and were regarded as something new. “We suggest environmental art should move away from a dystopian way of depicting the problems of climate change … and keep in mind the power of offering solutions and emphasising the beauty and interconnectedness of nature,” Sonner wrote in the report.

Malcolm Miles, the author of Art Rebellion: The Aesthetics of Social Transformation, is more doubtful, arguing that increasingly less realistic depictions of nature can numb the emotional effect on the viewer and lead to inaction. “If the eco-narrative becomes entertainment, the message may be lost: people go home at the end of the film,” he says. He also warns against the damaging effects of climate art that tries to say something good, but isn’t very good at all. “Bad art doesn’t communicate much; the same with immersive technologies.”

There is hope, though, if the art actively showcases the future and “imagines what alternative futures might be”, he continues. “That matters because it is not easy to foresee something which does not yet exist. The underlying message is: there are always alternatives to the way things are, and another world is possible.”

Back in 1989, an episode of Tomorrow’s World that imagined a family home in 2020 was strikingly accurate – it got automatic lights and voice-activated music right – but crucially got something wrong.

“There will be enormous pressure on us to cut down our burning of fossil fuels to protect the environment,” it predicted, before showcasing a honeycomb-shaped insulating material that could bring heating bills down to zero and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. That future has yet to fully arrive but if we treat artists’ solutions as fantastic, rather than fantastical, we may have a better tomorrow.

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