         
Notes and background info from Joe Butler's Creative Writing Workshops. Conjuring the Heroic is from the Oxford Literary Festival in March '07, and Floodscapes is from Science Oxford in November '07. Links to background notes for Re:versing the Damae: Notes from the Climate Journey can be found below. External Links:Cape Farewell - Cape Farewell brings artists, scientists and educators together to collectively address and raise awareness about climate change. Funny Weather - The funniest way to learn about climate change on the web International Polar Year - Two hundred scientific projects will be focussed on the Arctic and Antartic, in the fourth 'international polar year' of the International Council for Science and the World Meteorological Organisation. This site gives you access to information about our Polar regions, about their ice, atmosphere, peoples and oceans.. and lets you monitor what is going on with the scientific projects. John Goto's Floodscapes - Images from John Goto's Floodscapes exhibition Surface Tension - Nick Cobbing's photos - Stunning pictures of ice in Greenland Transition Towns - Transition towns is a growing movement in the UK, of towns, village and areas that are making the transition towards a future without dependence on oil. Read exciting and inspiring stories, and get all the news here. Conjuring the HeroicEvery age and culture has produced its own literature of the ‘heroic'. From Cuchulain to Superman, heroes and heroines have served as inspirations in times of turmoil. Climate change presents a unique threat to life on this planet, and in meeting the challenge we may discover unsuspected depths of resourcefulness and imagination. Writer and artist Joseph Butler, together with Maxwell Boycoff from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, led a two -hour workshop, for writers of all abilities and across all forms, to explore our responses to these turbulent times.See Dr Max Boycoff's presentation on the science of climate change. You might also want to see the Climate Impacts in Oxfordshire Presentation for further ideas, and you'll find a host of info articles on this site. The objective of the workshop was the generation of text in three different areas, outlined below: 1. 20:20, a dystopian vision of the future. "For evil to triumph it is only necessary that good men and women do nothing" (to misquote Edmund Burke).Penny sighed and fingered the corner of her ration-book. Shopping was such a chore, and this new car-share arrangement made a nonsense of getting stuff back from the Burford Tesco's. It was going to be a trying day ... From the corner of the garden came the sound of the twins playing in the sand-pit. It was months since the reactor-incident at Didcot and they'd been cooped-up indoors for most of the Winter. Now, smeared in sun-block they were out enjoying the fresh air, leaping and laughing and scooping up handfuls of dirt to throw at each other. Sally, older by two years, and studious as ever, was putting the finishing touches to a Mermaid that she'd sculpted - a hangover from the beach holiday in Lincoln. From the radio came the strains of Sir Paul McCartney's "Anthem for a Lost World". Write from a dystopian view of the future - it might be an everyday event, it might be an ordinary incident made extraordinary with extreme weather or pressure on resources.... 2. 21st Century Nature Poetry. Systems Theory - the human as mouthpiece for a sentient world.
This ice comes from neither the Arctic nor the Antarctic. It came out of an Oxfordshire tap. But there is every probability that at least one molecule of water in this block has already, at least once, made the journey from mammalian mouth, to bladder, to river, to Ocean, to be evaporated as cloud, to cystallize as snow, to fall on one of the Polar ice-caps. And there is every probability that that same molecule has, over the course of millennia been borne in the body of a glacier back out to the open sea, where it melted, became cloud, and fell as rain on the part of Oxfordshire known as Farmoor. Everything in Nature is cyclical. Everything is dynamic, in a state of constant flux. Everything interconnects. There's not one droplet of water in my body - or yours - that hasn't already made a journey similar to the one I've just described. (Or that won't make it again). There's not one shard of bone in my body that hasn't previously been calcified as shellfish, or coral, or a dinosaur's jawbone, or a blade of grass on the cliff at Beachy Head. What's so extraordinary about our species is that we've evolved the capacity to assemble all this ... stuff ... into, not just arms and legs, not just bladder and spleen, but into this extraordinary organ inside our skulls ... that we've come to call "Mind", or "Consciousness", or "Sense of Self". And what's so perilous about this ability is that it confers the illusion of our being somehow distinct from the world around us, that we're somehow a separate entity. And that's an illusion that's only intensified in the last 50 ... 200 ... years as technology's taken us further and further away from the world that surrounds us. That wasn't always so. The aboriginal peoples on this planet had an intimate understanding of how closely their lives were bound up with the life of the world around them. Their health and wellbeing depended absolutely on the health and wellbeing of their environment. And they even went so far as to personify those forces of nature on which their survival depended. So the Aboriginal Australians mapped their Creation in Songlines, and the Native Americans offered prayers to the creatures whose flesh they hunted for food. There's a lovely scene in the film "An Inconvenient Truth" where Al Gore is talking to climate scientists at the North Pole who are drilling down into the ice and taking core-samples, plugs of centuries-old ice. And those samples tell a story, just like the ring-patterns in the bark of a tree tell a story. They tell a story about temperature, and about the concentration of gases in the atmosphere. And because the people who are conducting that discourse with the ice are scientists, that story is told in a language that's necessarily detached and rigorous and objective. So I'm going to end this story with a question, which goes: if we, as writers and artists and poets were to conduct that discourse what might we hear? What voice would the Ice speak to us in? What might it have to say? **** So here's your task: Try to write a piece in the voice of that environment that we're threatening. It might be the Ice. It might be the land that we're threatening with flooding. It might be the air that's growing thick with pollutants. It might be in the voice of the fires we burn in Amazon. Or it might be in the voice of any one of those organisms that depend on those environments for their survival. Try writing it in the first-person. And don't feel that you need to exclude feeling. Feelings are a guide. Feelings are instinct and passion. Let them inform what you do.
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I want to tell you a story ...
3. Carbon Rationing: the new Austerity, or a "Call to Adventure"? Values in a carbon-neutral society ...
Exercise 3 The Ark 
