New Rules

The rush of being part of a creative community - and what it taught me about the world of climate science.

A story about the hunt for a storytelling form that can hold the full complexity of the transforming planet.

In which my brother Chris and I share our list of the major climate stories of the year. This has been a watershed year for the planet, in ways both good and bad.

I've recently been doing a deep dive into the last hundred years of the climate conversation. Here are the top four surprising takeaways.

When it comes to adapting to our new world, are humans more like crows or more like sparrows? An episode about inventive intelligence vs Facebook nostalgia.

The Real Housewives of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

You already know: plastic is everywhere. It's a familiar story, we hear it every week, told in the same way with the same moral. But is there a different way to tell this story?

When a fifth of the world went underwater, we had to become something new in order to survive. Now, we have to do it again.

Every shock that brings us close to death has three things in common.

https://davidfinnigan.substack.com/

You've already, in the last years and decades, absorbed so much climate grief and loss - and you're still okay. Joy is coming, as well as pain.

Everything shifted in the late 2010s. Now we're in a new world, and it's crucial we reorient ourselves before we lose our way completely.

Lessons I learned as a taxi driver for injured possums. 

The failure of my arts practice - or, why the arts will never succeed in communicating the truth of climate and global change.

We try to make sense of who we are by dividing our lives into chapters. But chapters have ends - so if the climate era is one chapter of human history, when will it conclude? And who will we be on the other side of that journey?

People have described Covid as a kind of rehearsal for the oncoming crises of climate and global change. But if it is, it's a very particular kind of rehearsal that theatre-makers know as the 'stumble through'.

Have we all become quietly radicalised in the last two years?

A dive into the world of climate activism in the last three years - what drove the sudden escalation in the year 2018, where are we headed next, and how has lockdown turned each of us into our own kind of radical?

The thing I find hardest to process about planetary change is that we're not heading towards a new normal. There's no new paradigm that we'll reach. The impacts won't hit in one single burst or a smooth continuum: they will accelerate.

So how do we make sense of this in the context of our own lives? For me, processing the crisis comes down to asking myself three questions:

1. How should I live?

2. How can I help?

3. What should I work towards?

This is what I dive into in this episode..

Things change when you become an accelerated species. 

A story about the difference between shooting an animal and striking it with a car, and about roadkill that hits back.

In this episode, I talk about the connection between scientific models and games. Both are tools to help us think about the world - but not just for the sake of understanding it. Instead, scientists and artists model the world so we can help transform it.

Some people say we need to remember what we’ve lost, in order to fight to stem those losses - but increasingly, I wish I could forget the world of my childhood altogether.

In 2015 I wrote a play called Kill Climate Deniers. One of the scariest predictions in that play - one of my personal biggest climate fears - took place last year. But I was completely wrong about how I’d react.

I don’t think I realised until this year how much my values and principles are shifting as the crisis escalates. Things that used to scare me I now welcome - and it's a little scary.

'Climate art' emerged several decades ago as a label for art and storytelling engaged with climate change. Around the turn of the century, the genre label made some sense. But the 21st century has seen a growing awareness that climate change is not a scientific issue: it's the backdrop against which all other issues take place. Climate is not an issue, but an era  - and so every artist alive today has become a climate artist, whether they like it or not.

As an artist making work about the climate and the environment, the most frequent question I get asked in interviews is, ‘Where’s the hope?’  But I find myself asking myself: Are you asking for a way to help or a way to make yourself feel better?