Nations at Cop29 have emphasised the role culture can play in climate recovery – as a playwright, I’m sceptical
For many, the advent of the 29th UN Cop has elicited as much despair as hope – especially with the long shadow of the US election result darkening proceedings. Add in the grim irony of its setting in Baku, Azerbaijan – capital city of a petrostate maxing out on fossil fuel production – and it didn’t take a no-show by Greta Thunberg to conclude (to paraphrase Kafka) that there’s hope … but not for us.
Yet there’s a new kid on the block, the GFCBCA – one more acronym to add to proceedings already blighted by alphabet soup. The Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action is an initiative by a series of states seeking “a place at the table” for culture in the final conference statement. Sorry guys, I’m not holding my breath.
It’s easy to be cynical about Cop-culture. But these summits are the only game in town for global collective action so the GFCBCA initiative is welcome, even if its manifesto offers some pretty meagre rallying cries. “Scaling up culture- and heritage-based strategies for enhancing adaptive capacity” hardly makes the heart sing.
Nonetheless, this “group of friends” rightly insists that culture rarely plays a role in Cop deliberations, which are too often left to scientists and diplomats.
As a playwright, I’ve measured out my life in Cops. In 2009, ahead of the ill-fated Cop15 in Copenhagen, my double bill of plays The Contingency Plan dramatised the void between politics and science. Cop15 inspired the widely derided play Greenland at the National Theatre, while the more warmly received Kyoto at the Royal Shakespeare Company this year reached back to the mother of all Cops in 1997.
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The revival of my plays in 2022 was too late to catch the damp squib of Cop26 in Glasgow. But watching them convinced me the old strategies of cultural engagement with the climate emergency had peaked.
I doubt there’s any appetite now for more warnings, patient explanations, invocations of polar bears or the horrors of 2050. In that 13-year interval between productions and numerous Cops, climate change had defied schedule, the future arriving rudely uninvited.
The role of culture
Given this, what kind of culture is optimal for climate recovery? A play can hardly stop a flash flood in Valencia, nor will an art installation puncture a heat dome in British Columbia.
Frankly, the extremity of the events we are experiencing throws into question the value of culture, other than as mere distraction. And endeavours like GFCBCA – or Cop itself – hardly inspire confidence, taking place as they do in the airless, invulnerable zone of the global elite. The triumphant statements that emerge usually amount to numbers and targets experienced as technocratic imperatives: “Keep 1.5 alive”, “net zero”.
These disembodied injunctions are gifts to the far right, who defuse climate disaster as an elite hoax, or speak of net zero as an expensive fantasy. The cheap demagoguery of “drill baby, drill” has proved more galvanising than dead phrases like “enhancing adaptive capacity”.
One way out of this impasse might lie in re-positioning the abstraction of climate politics into sensuous experiences of places in peril. After all, “culture is ordinary; that is where we must start”. So said Welsh critic Raymond Williams in his 1958 essay, Culture is Ordinary, which used a humble bus journey to explore the idea of democratising culture.
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
In the light of that, I’ve been experimenting with how drama might engage directly with the work of conservation. The linked crises of biosphere and climate are being met by practical everyday practices, such as the re-wetting of agricultural land in Cambridgeshire at Wicken Fen and the Great Fen.
Yet these visionary endeavours remain largely unknown beyond their parish. Using drama, I’ve tried to amplify news of these resources of hope.
Similarly I’m engaging with farming and its impacts through my show, Phoenix Dodo Butterfly. It seeks to broker conversations between audiences and farmers to address regenerative possibilities for the soil itself.
Such work is by definition regional, and off the radar of the grand theatre of Cop. Nonetheless, it enables the shaping of what philosopher Rupert Read has called “thrutopias” – stories that dramatise transition, and help us navigate the seismic transformations we face.
If culture is to model possible futures, it must walk the talk. British theatre has taken up the baton in this respect through the advent of the Theatre Green Book, which supplies a map of techniques to ensure sustainability is not an add-on but inherent in the work itself.
If culture is ordinary, it’s inescapably part of the fossil capital system we’re seeking to eradicate. Changing that will not just be achieved by disrupting Les Miserables or calling out literary festivals for their sponsors. Art can build tools to fashion new audiences, to envision real-time change, to tell the truth about our predicament while sketching out an inhabitable future.
Cop may be astride the stage of climate change politics right now, but the real show’s elsewhere.
Steve Waters has received funding from AHRC and ACE; I have been a member of Labour Party