Are art and culture doing enough to help the planet?

Film, TV and books can resonate with us more vividly than a scientific study, writes Charlotte Cripps

Artwork from the Somerset House climate crisis show We Are History (Malala Andrialavidrazana via Somerset House)

Following the UN climate change report this week, dubbed “code red for humanity”, it’s a sure sign we all need to take action. The news is full of wildfires, extreme heatwaves and flooding hitting countries around the globe. The climate crisis is staring down the barrel at us, but is the arts doing enough to help the planet?

It’s good to see Somerset House putting on a climate crisis art exhibition this autumn. The group show, We Are History, will offer a new perspective on the climate crisis by looking back past the industrial revolution to the colonial era of plantation agriculture and forced labour, and its relationship to today’s crisis.

Nine artists with links to countries in the Caribbean, South America and Africa will exhibit photography, prints, textile, installation and video from “damming rivers, rising sea levels, to disposal of hazardous waste”.

The Science Museum is also raising climate awareness in the run-up to Cop26, with its Our Future Planet show about “carbon capture and storage”.

While there are tons of climate crisis documentaries, from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before the Flood, Hollywood is accused of ignoring it on-screen. The fire and brimstone scenarios on Earth in apocalyptic films are often attributed to pandemics, war or alien invasions, rather than global warming. There are exceptions, including 2004’s environmental disaster film The Day After Tomorrow and Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 Snowpiercer, which is set in an ice age after humanity fails to stop global warming.

Songs like Billie Eilish’s “All the Good Girls Go to Hell”, Paul McCartney’s “Despite Repeated Warnings” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wake Up America” help to bring the climate crisis to our attention.

Jeanette Winterson, who I recently interviewed, suggests in her new book 12 Bytes that artificial intelligence can help us save the planet. Literature – especially Climate Fiction, or “Cli-Fi”, which deals with the effects of climate change on human society – can also reach us in more vivid ways than a landmark study. It’s through emotions and pulling at our heartstrings that we can best tackle the climate crisis; this is surely something the arts must make their mission, so we act now to change.

Yours,

Charlotte Cripps

Culture writer