humans know somewhere deep – somewhere like our spinal cords, somewhere we are not used to communicating with – that our planet is suffering. We know at a cellular level and it is causing us huge distress. It’s like being in a sci-fi story where we are under attack from the Martians – except in this story we are the Martians and there is no spaceship out there poised to save us from destruction. But let’s remember that because we are the authors of the story we can also be the authors of what comes next.
So many of our inventions – miraculous at the time – gas, coal, planes, cars, smoking (I loved it) are now the agents of destruction. It’s hard to let go of our addictions, so hard. But let go we must if we, and the greater web of life of which we are, after all, only a part, are to survive.
I wonder what the best way of helping us understand that is. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the terrifying documentaries, the relentless roll-call of climate disasters spread fearfully essential knowledge and are vital, of course. It goes without saying that we must educate ourselves and see for ourselves what is taking place. But something else needs to happen if our fear and rage and frustration are to succeed in transforming our world.
These writings have pulled me back into focus.
I can remember now how many bees I used to see in parks and gardens in London and on the hills of Argyll. I can remember the variety of butterflies, their miraculous beauty, strength and fragility. I realise how little I now see them and how heartbroken it makes me. I miss them in the visceral way I miss members of my family long since dead.
We all need to plug into our love for our home, our planet, our earth. The astronauts describe it so well – those people with fiercely trained scientific minds who may not necessarily open themselves to poetic imagination (that might be too dangerous). They suddenly see the vulnerable beauty of our pale blue dot in the reaches of dark space. They feel huge love and empathy for it and, crucially, they feel deeply protective.
Art – in all its forms – can turn us all into astronauts. It can help us out of the prison of assumption and the caverns of ignorance into the atmosphere of clarity and hope. The temptation to panic is very great but panic will always prevent useful action. I panic regularly about the planet and then I will often turn to small, everyday actions. One of them is to sit and contemplate the beauty of nature – to go to a park and read and look up every so often at the sky or at a tree and remind myself that while we are here, we can care for our home.
Or I can transform my panic by joining larger actions – like the XR protest at Oxford Circus which was so memorable and full of love. Standing on the pink boat reading Jackie Morris’s exquisite, anguished lament to the swallow was an extraordinary experience. I looked out over so many faces – some people, overwhelmed with grief, wept openly. The police came and stood around us but the atmosphere was peculiarly peaceful. Public moments of sharing – particularly the sharing of art – change the spaces and alter the atmosphere. This can give us vital strength. We must engage in these acts because – make no mistake – the ruling powers will not do enough to alter the course of this terrifying history. We are on our own and together we will have to make them.
My vision is sometimes blurred by the horror of the millions of deaths our fossil fuel habits have caused and by the certain knowledge that all of this will continue to get worse until it gets better – because so much of what we have done is irreversible.
But in the end, hopelessness serves no purpose. Fighting for everything climate change reversal represents, from the essential bee to global social justice, will never offer anything but active hope.
We must combine the determined and unstoppable organisation of our best instincts with the vision of astronauts.
The wave of change is here. The generation below mine is different. I feel it and I read it in these letters. They know we have failed them and instead of wasting time blaming us or even trying to punish us they simply act. The young do not mind change as much as the old.
They are our best hope and listening to them always makes me feel powerful once again. Plugging into that energy will recharge even the most tired of batteries.
Read this book and pass it on. Hand on your passion for the planet to the next person and never, ever give in. Convert your rage to action and your grief to love. I think the planet feels us as we do this. Perhaps it will even help us.
Emma
In the early spring of this year a small group of women came together around a kitchen table to talk. We had been profoundly shaken by the increasingly dire news of climate and ecological collapse, and inspired by the work of Extinction Rebellion in bringing that news to the forefront of the public conversation. In our working lives we are theatre-makers and writers and we felt strongly that we wanted to find a way to facilitate a creative response to these times of emergency. For so long – too long – our professions had been eerily silent about this greatest of subjects. Why? Was this a failure of nerve? Of imagination?
We knew Extinction Rebellion were planning a huge, disruptive action in the streets of London in April, and we began to imagine a creative campaign that might sit alongside and speak to that Rebellion. As we talked and shared ideas, we sensed that this was a chance to hear from those who sit outside the usual theatrical and publishing circles, to take the pulse of the country in these times of growing anxiety and realisation.
From that initial conversation others were born; we met people, listened, and soon the idea of a Letter to the Earth emerged, a callout to the public to write a letter in response to climate and ecological emergency. The letter could be to or from the earth, to future or past generations, those who hold positions of power and influence, to other species. We also invited venues to come on board and host a reading of the letters, on a date in April, just before the International Rebellion was due to take place.
We created an email account and in February the callout went live. We waited, a little nervously. The inbox was quiet. Then one letter arrived, and another, then our first batch of schoolchildren’s letters, twenty or more young people responding to the call. The letters were moving, disturbing, vital.
The inbox kept filling: pictures drawn by seven-year-olds, letters from teenagers, nurses, great-grandparents. Letters were coming in from all around the world, from published poets, people who had never put pen to paper before. In reading through them, there were many occasions when one or other of us was caught short, moved to tears on public transport, or by the electric rise of the hairs on your arm when you know you are in the presence of something great, a truly remarkable piece of writing. This great unsayable thing, this anxiety, this fear, this love, was finding expression in so many voices. Their cumulative power was overwhelming.
And venue after venue was signing up: a Ukrainian Club in Huddersfield, a Conservative Club in Paddington, a pub in Kent, leading theatres up and down the country: the Royal Court, the National Theatre of Wales, Shakespeare’s Globe, and venues around the world, from Alabama to South Africa to Zambia.
By the time submissions closed we had almost a thousand letters in our keeping, an astonishing gift. We believe it to be the largest creative response to these times of crisis the world has yet seen.
On 12 April the letters were read at fifty-two venues worldwide. During the International Rebellion, in which Extinction Rebellion occupied five sites in central London for two weeks, the letters were read from every stage. From the truck in the centre of Marble Arch, from a single microphone in front of seated lines of people willingly putting themselves up for arrest on Waterloo Bridge, from the grass in the middle of Parliament Square,
