DISCUSSION
Narrating the climate change
Ben Smith and Phylly Bluemel discuss the research, ideas, and methods behind the design of a contemporary Almanack
Interviewer: Ksenia Kopalova
Cover photo: Max Smith
Date published: 12 August 2026
The narratives of climate change are often handled through the language of catastrophe, guilt, and moral failure, which often does not yield the results that the urgency of such language suggests. How else can we narrate climate change in our visuals?
As part of a bigger project called ‘A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy’ Ben Smith (writer), Luke Thompson (publisher), and Phylly Bluemel (artist), invited scientists, artists, and writers to think together of what an alternative could look like – in a form of a contemporary Almanack.
In this interview, Ben and Phylly share how to encourage scientists, artists, and writers to work together rather than against each other, and explain why looking into the 17th century archives is important to understand how we think about our future.
As part of a bigger project called ‘A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy’ Ben Smith (writer), Luke Thompson (publisher), and Phylly Bluemel (artist), invited scientists, artists, and writers to think together of what an alternative could look like – in a form of a contemporary Almanack.
In this interview, Ben and Phylly share how to encourage scientists, artists, and writers to work together rather than against each other, and explain why looking into the 17th century archives is important to understand how we think about our future.
The past in narrating the present and future
Narratives of climate change are often directed towards the future, frequently taking the form of dystopian scenarios. In this project, however, we spent a great deal of time looking at the past: 17th-18th century archives and historical ways of narrating possible futures. What informed such a decision?
If climate change is understood only as something that will happen in the distant future – often in the form of dystopian scenarios – it tends to create a break between the present and the future.
Ben Smith:
The Almanack project emerged from a larger AHRC-funded fellowship I'm currently running called A History of Storms. The fellowship is concerned with finding new approaches to climate fiction and climate literacy and history is at the heart of that project.
Part of my research looks at narratives of climate change and some of the problems that arise when we think about climate solely in terms of the future. If climate change is understood only as something that will happen in the distant future—often in the form of dystopian scenarios—it tends to create a break between the present and the future. We imagine catastrophe, disaster, or some dramatic rupture. You can see this in climate policy too: targets like ‘net-zero by 2030’ often face a difficulty in imagining how we move from the present towards those futures.
Climate change, however, is fundamentally a historical issue. There are various ways to identify its beginnings: some people mark the 20th century, others look at the Industrial Revolution, or even further back – like we do in our project – to colonial expansion and imperialism of the 17th century. If we want to understand climate change properly, we need to look at historical narratives, and not only future-oriented ones.
I'm also interested in how people in the past imagined extreme weather and ideas about the future because we still operate within many of those same narrative systems today. A major strand of my project has been investigating the history of the narratives we use to talk about the future: where they come from, how we developed the idea that the future is something that can be predicted, and, if so, what and who controls these predictions, and how do we access them?
The Almanack project emerged from a larger AHRC-funded fellowship I'm currently running called A History of Storms. The fellowship is concerned with finding new approaches to climate fiction and climate literacy and history is at the heart of that project.
Part of my research looks at narratives of climate change and some of the problems that arise when we think about climate solely in terms of the future. If climate change is understood only as something that will happen in the distant future—often in the form of dystopian scenarios—it tends to create a break between the present and the future. We imagine catastrophe, disaster, or some dramatic rupture. You can see this in climate policy too: targets like ‘net-zero by 2030’ often face a difficulty in imagining how we move from the present towards those futures.
Climate change, however, is fundamentally a historical issue. There are various ways to identify its beginnings: some people mark the 20th century, others look at the Industrial Revolution, or even further back – like we do in our project – to colonial expansion and imperialism of the 17th century. If we want to understand climate change properly, we need to look at historical narratives, and not only future-oriented ones.
I'm also interested in how people in the past imagined extreme weather and ideas about the future because we still operate within many of those same narrative systems today. A major strand of my project has been investigating the history of the narratives we use to talk about the future: where they come from, how we developed the idea that the future is something that can be predicted, and, if so, what and who controls these predictions, and how do we access them?
A 17th century almanack from the Devon Heritage Centre
Photo: Max Smith
Photo: Max Smith
The form of an almanack
Could you talk about the art direction of the project, the artistic ideas behind the Almanack, and any ideas that informed the work with the format of the project?
[Almanacks] operated as tactile technologies for situating the reader in relation to the environment.
Phylly Bluemel:
I joined the project after Ben and Luke, publisher and founder of Guillemot press, had already begun discussing the idea of the Almanack, so thinking through publication formats and book structures came quite naturally.
One of the first things we did together was go to the Met Office archives and look at historical publications. We encountered historical examples of weather lore, right back to a late medieval Latin almanack dating back to the 1480s. I was so excited I kept making library-inappropriate squeals of joy!
I was fascinated by how these objects operated as tactile technologies for situating the reader in relation to the environment. An almanack might easily move between advice for choosing a wife and the movements of the stars, between a cure for the common cold and historical events – the everyday folded into the cosmos. Palm-sized, like a smartphone, I was struck by how similar they were to the tools and technologies we use today to make sense of ourselves in the world, not designed to be engaged with cover-to-cover – but pocketed, held, rotated, consulted.
I saw the almanack could be a physical container for a rich set of very different information: instructions, diagrams, poems and even adverts. Some of the images in the older almanacks were a bit like memes: for example, the ‘Zodiac Man’ – an image reused over and over again across different publications, almost like a stock image.
I joined the project after Ben and Luke, publisher and founder of Guillemot press, had already begun discussing the idea of the Almanack, so thinking through publication formats and book structures came quite naturally.
One of the first things we did together was go to the Met Office archives and look at historical publications. We encountered historical examples of weather lore, right back to a late medieval Latin almanack dating back to the 1480s. I was so excited I kept making library-inappropriate squeals of joy!
I was fascinated by how these objects operated as tactile technologies for situating the reader in relation to the environment. An almanack might easily move between advice for choosing a wife and the movements of the stars, between a cure for the common cold and historical events – the everyday folded into the cosmos. Palm-sized, like a smartphone, I was struck by how similar they were to the tools and technologies we use today to make sense of ourselves in the world, not designed to be engaged with cover-to-cover – but pocketed, held, rotated, consulted.
I saw the almanack could be a physical container for a rich set of very different information: instructions, diagrams, poems and even adverts. Some of the images in the older almanacks were a bit like memes: for example, the ‘Zodiac Man’ – an image reused over and over again across different publications, almost like a stock image.
Ben Smith:
In the case of images like the Zodiac Man, the same physical woodblock would often be reused by different publishers and authors because printing was relatively cheap and they would recycle these images for practical production purposes. But the result is remarkably similar to how memes function today: images migrate and, while being used in slightly different ways by different authors, they retain recognisable forms.
Phylly Bluemel:
What excited and daunted me was the practical and visual challenge of bringing many voices together within a single form. However, historically, almanacks already contained different voices and tones – using them as a framework felt both organic and liberating.
In the case of images like the Zodiac Man, the same physical woodblock would often be reused by different publishers and authors because printing was relatively cheap and they would recycle these images for practical production purposes. But the result is remarkably similar to how memes function today: images migrate and, while being used in slightly different ways by different authors, they retain recognisable forms.
Phylly Bluemel:
What excited and daunted me was the practical and visual challenge of bringing many voices together within a single form. However, historically, almanacks already contained different voices and tones – using them as a framework felt both organic and liberating.
The Zodiac Man from a 17th century almanack from the Devon Heritage Centre
A 17th century almanack from the Devon Heritage Centre
Photo: Max Smith
Photo: Max Smith
Collaboration and the absence of hierarchy
Oftentimes, the dialogue between the artists and scientists ends up being quite hierarchised, with the artists being more interested in what the scientists do – but that was not the case in this project. Were there any project design decisions or research methods behind this which you think contributed to the atmosphere of equal shared interest?
Ben Smith:
In my academic work I've been running multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations for quite a while, so all of that experience went into the design of this project. Around ten years ago I worked on a collaborative project with Plymouth Marine Laboratory that brought poets and scientists together and, subsequently, I was a member of the steering committee for the UK Future Earth Early Career Network. Both of these experiences taught me a lot about what makes for successful (and unsuccessful!) collaborations.
Those experiences taught me that it’s all just about finding the right people. For this project we were fortunate to work with Peter Stott from the Met Office. Although he's an atmospheric chemist, he's deeply interested in arts and humanities approaches. He really sees the value of this kind of collaboration.
When selecting scientists, artists and writers, we weren't simply looking for expertise or picking people with the biggest public profile. Of course, you can just put out an open call, but we were asking: who would enjoy a project like this? Who do we think would play well with others? Who would enjoy this situation of uncertainty and not knowing exactly where it will all go?
Luke has a lot of experience in organising collaborative events and publications, so I was really keen to get him on board at the start.. As a publisher, he often works with writers and illustrators, so he has a strong sense of how creative partnerships function.
As the people dealing with the practical elements of the publication, I left it to Luke and Phylly to plan the workshops, and they did an amazing job of developing a programme of exercises and activities that put the group at ease and brought everyone together.
In my academic work I've been running multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations for quite a while, so all of that experience went into the design of this project. Around ten years ago I worked on a collaborative project with Plymouth Marine Laboratory that brought poets and scientists together and, subsequently, I was a member of the steering committee for the UK Future Earth Early Career Network. Both of these experiences taught me a lot about what makes for successful (and unsuccessful!) collaborations.
Those experiences taught me that it’s all just about finding the right people. For this project we were fortunate to work with Peter Stott from the Met Office. Although he's an atmospheric chemist, he's deeply interested in arts and humanities approaches. He really sees the value of this kind of collaboration.
When selecting scientists, artists and writers, we weren't simply looking for expertise or picking people with the biggest public profile. Of course, you can just put out an open call, but we were asking: who would enjoy a project like this? Who do we think would play well with others? Who would enjoy this situation of uncertainty and not knowing exactly where it will all go?
Luke has a lot of experience in organising collaborative events and publications, so I was really keen to get him on board at the start.. As a publisher, he often works with writers and illustrators, so he has a strong sense of how creative partnerships function.
As the people dealing with the practical elements of the publication, I left it to Luke and Phylly to plan the workshops, and they did an amazing job of developing a programme of exercises and activities that put the group at ease and brought everyone together.
The almanack project workshop at the Met Office, which united artists, writers, and scientists.
Photo: Max Smith
Photo: Max Smith
Often illustrators are commissioned to produce work in response to a brief or a text – something that began before they arrived. But here, we all entered the room together, without knowing what any of it would turn into. [...] The work being produced now is hybrid, too: there is often no clear boundary between images and texts.
Phylly Bluemel:
This felt special in that we had a rare opportunity to bring all our collaborators together in the same physical space from the very start, to play. Often illustrators (in particular) are commissioned to produce work in response to a brief or a text – something that began before they arrived. But here, we all entered the room together, without knowing what any of it would turn into.
We offered up the almanack as a framework, the space itself, some initial provocations, and a shared research question – but nobody knew what the outcome would be. The workshops were designed so that everyone participated in the same activities. There wasn't a division where writers did one thing and artists another. Everybody was drawing, writing, discussing, making. The scientists did present their work, so there was a bit of learning from each other, but we wanted the workshops to be something that everyone could approach. It did feel like this approach helped the usual hierarchies and expectations to dissolve. The work being produced now is hybrid, too: there is often no clear boundary between images and texts.
This felt special in that we had a rare opportunity to bring all our collaborators together in the same physical space from the very start, to play. Often illustrators (in particular) are commissioned to produce work in response to a brief or a text – something that began before they arrived. But here, we all entered the room together, without knowing what any of it would turn into.
We offered up the almanack as a framework, the space itself, some initial provocations, and a shared research question – but nobody knew what the outcome would be. The workshops were designed so that everyone participated in the same activities. There wasn't a division where writers did one thing and artists another. Everybody was drawing, writing, discussing, making. The scientists did present their work, so there was a bit of learning from each other, but we wanted the workshops to be something that everyone could approach. It did feel like this approach helped the usual hierarchies and expectations to dissolve. The work being produced now is hybrid, too: there is often no clear boundary between images and texts.
The sense of working towards a brief, towards a final object – is not what we often do in literary studies and creative writing.
Ben Smith:
When we were planning the project, we kept asking ourselves a very simple question: What would we actually want to do in this situation?
I had funding for some sort of concluding event, and initially I imagined a symposium. Sometimes these do result in publications, but most often academic events like that end up following predictable patterns: even if the event is meant to be cross-disciplinary, people eventually just present their 15 minutes, maybe have a brief conversation over coffee, and leave. I was keen on trying to do something different.
Having a physical publication, an object, as the final outcome was actually really valuable. That was something that I really appreciated in working with Phylly – that sense of working towards a brief, towards a final object – which is not what we often do in literary studies and creative writing.
Phylly Bluemel:
In a symposium, people mostly come to share what they know. It’s about presenting what’s been done or what’s been discovered, listening, passing the ball to the next person, presenting, listening again, and so on.
But what was unique about this project was that collective sense of curiosity and not knowing. We all shared the same research question: how do we communicate climate futures? – and everyone was equally curious about it, including the scientists. The shared unknown eliminates the hierarchy – I really liked it as a research method.
Ben Smith:
I think it was also important that we found a format, a container, like Phylly says – the almanack – that is focused enough to give people a common frame, but open enough to accommodate very different contributions. When we saw everyone's developing ideas, they were radically different from one another, yet somehow they still made sense together.
When we were planning the project, we kept asking ourselves a very simple question: What would we actually want to do in this situation?
I had funding for some sort of concluding event, and initially I imagined a symposium. Sometimes these do result in publications, but most often academic events like that end up following predictable patterns: even if the event is meant to be cross-disciplinary, people eventually just present their 15 minutes, maybe have a brief conversation over coffee, and leave. I was keen on trying to do something different.
Having a physical publication, an object, as the final outcome was actually really valuable. That was something that I really appreciated in working with Phylly – that sense of working towards a brief, towards a final object – which is not what we often do in literary studies and creative writing.
Phylly Bluemel:
In a symposium, people mostly come to share what they know. It’s about presenting what’s been done or what’s been discovered, listening, passing the ball to the next person, presenting, listening again, and so on.
But what was unique about this project was that collective sense of curiosity and not knowing. We all shared the same research question: how do we communicate climate futures? – and everyone was equally curious about it, including the scientists. The shared unknown eliminates the hierarchy – I really liked it as a research method.
Ben Smith:
I think it was also important that we found a format, a container, like Phylly says – the almanack – that is focused enough to give people a common frame, but open enough to accommodate very different contributions. When we saw everyone's developing ideas, they were radically different from one another, yet somehow they still made sense together.
Materiality, scale, and climate communication
Climate change is often communicated through abstract data, digital visualisations and distant future threats. Do you think materiality and the analogue nature of your research can play an important role in communicating climate change differently?
The almanack is [...] a single narrative that connects the everyday with the magical, the body with the cosmos, often in playful, comic ways.
Ben Smith:
Yes, I think – absolutely. One idea I return to frequently comes from Timothy Clark, who writes about scale effects and the ‘derangement of scales’ in climate narratives. He points out that climate communication often begins with descriptions of planetary catastrophe – floods, heatwaves, disasters – and then will end with an injunction (no less solemn) not to overfill your kettle or remember to switch off lights when you leave the house. The catastrophic and the mundane collapse in a way that is totally deranging. These things operate at wildly different scales, and for me that is always something I’m trying to tackle in my own writing on climate change. This is one of the central challenges of climate storytelling: how do you present something from human scale at a level that is meaningful at scale of climate change?
Some theorists, including Timothy Clark and – to an extent – Amitav Ghosh, are quite sceptical about the possibility of doing this: Clark, for example, says explicitly that due to how human-centered fictional narrative itself is, maybe narrative simply can’t do it. Ghosh suggests that maybe we should move away from human-centred narratives: narrate from a perspective of a mountain, etc.
Part of the motivation for this project was that historically people have always attempted to connect these different scales. The almanack is a great example of this – a single narrative that connects the everyday with the magical, the body with the cosmos, often in playful, comic ways. As a reader, you understand that meeting these scales are not really possible, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t be trying, or that maybe this effort might produce new and unexpected ways of seeing the world. Approaching this with an open question, with uncertainty at the heart of the projects, is I think very important in trying to disrupt these scaled narratives.
What’s nice about an almanack too is that it is a personal object. Even in the 17th century they were mass-produced, so they were things that many people owned and would carry with them in their pockets. The first almanacks also functioned as first diaries. They were literally the objects that connected the personal, the astrological, and the political. The almanack was a connector of these scales.
Yes, I think – absolutely. One idea I return to frequently comes from Timothy Clark, who writes about scale effects and the ‘derangement of scales’ in climate narratives. He points out that climate communication often begins with descriptions of planetary catastrophe – floods, heatwaves, disasters – and then will end with an injunction (no less solemn) not to overfill your kettle or remember to switch off lights when you leave the house. The catastrophic and the mundane collapse in a way that is totally deranging. These things operate at wildly different scales, and for me that is always something I’m trying to tackle in my own writing on climate change. This is one of the central challenges of climate storytelling: how do you present something from human scale at a level that is meaningful at scale of climate change?
Some theorists, including Timothy Clark and – to an extent – Amitav Ghosh, are quite sceptical about the possibility of doing this: Clark, for example, says explicitly that due to how human-centered fictional narrative itself is, maybe narrative simply can’t do it. Ghosh suggests that maybe we should move away from human-centred narratives: narrate from a perspective of a mountain, etc.
Part of the motivation for this project was that historically people have always attempted to connect these different scales. The almanack is a great example of this – a single narrative that connects the everyday with the magical, the body with the cosmos, often in playful, comic ways. As a reader, you understand that meeting these scales are not really possible, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t be trying, or that maybe this effort might produce new and unexpected ways of seeing the world. Approaching this with an open question, with uncertainty at the heart of the projects, is I think very important in trying to disrupt these scaled narratives.
What’s nice about an almanack too is that it is a personal object. Even in the 17th century they were mass-produced, so they were things that many people owned and would carry with them in their pockets. The first almanacks also functioned as first diaries. They were literally the objects that connected the personal, the astrological, and the political. The almanack was a connector of these scales.
A 17th century almanack from the Devon Heritage Centre and a notebook from the workshop at the Met Office
Photo: Max Smith
Photo: Max Smith
These 'pocket objects' [almanacks] are attempts to contain the whole, and have control within it.
Phylly Bluemel:
I found it oddly reassuring, somehow – when we put Luke’s phone on top of one of the almanacks from 1670s – to see the similarities between these ‘pocket objects’. They’re attempts (however futile) to contain the whole, and have control within it – we’ve been doing this for a long time. An almanack contains big weather patterns, but also things like astrology - lots of people have both on their phones. On one page there would be a big prediction of a change on a global scale, but on the next one, it would say: ‘but if you’re a Cancer, you’ll navigate this with ease’ - constant derangement of scale!
Timothy Clark opens that same essay by imagining somebody lost in a town, he’s handed a map with the reassurance – “the whole town is there”, but when he opens it to navigate, it’s a map of the whole world – useless for getting about.
I’ve often come back to that little scenario in my own head. Part of my own research deals with the history of books that use their materiality to create a sense of scale or connect different scales. Clark goes on to probe the limits of narrative – but I think about that map itself – what types of scalar understanding can (and cannot) be represented by the combination of paper, image and the human body that interacts with them? If narrative can’t do it; can image? Can paper? Can they fail in effective ways? And where are we in the image?
There’s a children’s book from 1957 called ‘Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps’ by Kees Boeke, which uses a gradual zooming out as its main visual device. It uses the scale of the book itself as a measuring device, turning the book into an optical instrument. The body of the child who holds the book in their hands becomes connected to this vast scale, which is fascinating to me.
What I love about the almanack as a form is that it doesn't try to create a seamless narrative. It's fragmented and discontinuous. Yet throughout those fragments it constantly reconnects the body, the book, and the world that the book is representing. The writer Daisy Hildyard describes us as having two bodies, the body that ends at the edges of our skin, and a ‘second body’, our diffuse and unquantifiable physical presence, the sense in which we are implicated in everything else on earth. Like Clark, she says the difficulty in truly knowing and responding to the climate crisis is that you can’t ‘see’ both bodies in a single view. You could attempt to zoom out, to take in the world, but then you lose sight of the individual, you lose the ‘self’. In her writing she oscillates between the two bodies without trying to neatly resolve the relationship between them.
The almanack constantly moves between these scales, and the materiality of the publication is a big part of that for me.
Ben Smith:
And as a material object, an almanack always proposes material ways of engaging with the world: through things that you can cut out and use as measuring tools, through charts that you can unfold and place on your wall. Some contain images you can hold up to the sky and make your own weather predictions. Even in the ‘Zodiac Man’ illustration, you can see how the body parts are connected to the celestial processes. In this sense, it also breaks down those hierarchies: in an almanack, the cosmos is connected to the individual, but there is no sense that it is more or less important than what is going on in a house down the road or in your own family. All of these things, that we think of as massively hierarchised and separated, are – in almanacks – presented alongside each other.
I found it oddly reassuring, somehow – when we put Luke’s phone on top of one of the almanacks from 1670s – to see the similarities between these ‘pocket objects’. They’re attempts (however futile) to contain the whole, and have control within it – we’ve been doing this for a long time. An almanack contains big weather patterns, but also things like astrology - lots of people have both on their phones. On one page there would be a big prediction of a change on a global scale, but on the next one, it would say: ‘but if you’re a Cancer, you’ll navigate this with ease’ - constant derangement of scale!
Timothy Clark opens that same essay by imagining somebody lost in a town, he’s handed a map with the reassurance – “the whole town is there”, but when he opens it to navigate, it’s a map of the whole world – useless for getting about.
I’ve often come back to that little scenario in my own head. Part of my own research deals with the history of books that use their materiality to create a sense of scale or connect different scales. Clark goes on to probe the limits of narrative – but I think about that map itself – what types of scalar understanding can (and cannot) be represented by the combination of paper, image and the human body that interacts with them? If narrative can’t do it; can image? Can paper? Can they fail in effective ways? And where are we in the image?
There’s a children’s book from 1957 called ‘Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps’ by Kees Boeke, which uses a gradual zooming out as its main visual device. It uses the scale of the book itself as a measuring device, turning the book into an optical instrument. The body of the child who holds the book in their hands becomes connected to this vast scale, which is fascinating to me.
What I love about the almanack as a form is that it doesn't try to create a seamless narrative. It's fragmented and discontinuous. Yet throughout those fragments it constantly reconnects the body, the book, and the world that the book is representing. The writer Daisy Hildyard describes us as having two bodies, the body that ends at the edges of our skin, and a ‘second body’, our diffuse and unquantifiable physical presence, the sense in which we are implicated in everything else on earth. Like Clark, she says the difficulty in truly knowing and responding to the climate crisis is that you can’t ‘see’ both bodies in a single view. You could attempt to zoom out, to take in the world, but then you lose sight of the individual, you lose the ‘self’. In her writing she oscillates between the two bodies without trying to neatly resolve the relationship between them.
The almanack constantly moves between these scales, and the materiality of the publication is a big part of that for me.
Ben Smith:
And as a material object, an almanack always proposes material ways of engaging with the world: through things that you can cut out and use as measuring tools, through charts that you can unfold and place on your wall. Some contain images you can hold up to the sky and make your own weather predictions. Even in the ‘Zodiac Man’ illustration, you can see how the body parts are connected to the celestial processes. In this sense, it also breaks down those hierarchies: in an almanack, the cosmos is connected to the individual, but there is no sense that it is more or less important than what is going on in a house down the road or in your own family. All of these things, that we think of as massively hierarchised and separated, are – in almanacks – presented alongside each other.
An almanack from the Devon Heritage Centre containing hand-coloured sky patterns which are supposed to be held up against the sky, thus making the book a weather prediction tool.
Photo: Max Smith
Photo: Max Smith
Agency, guilt, and climate narratives
It seems that thinking in terms of multiple scales simultaneously also allows us to shift attention away from individual guilt and responsibility, since climate change is not reducible to the scale of individual moral action.
The way people think about climate change – at least, in the Western European context – is remarkably similar to how people historically thought about the heavens or God. If we replace the word ‘climate change’ with the word ‘God’, then we’d see that the narrative of guilt and shame is very similar – even in a lot of scientific narratives.
Ben Smith:
In fact, for me it is increasingly more interesting to look at where this idea of guilt in relation to climate change comes from. It is a very Christian guilt. Authors such as John Gray have discussed how scientific discourse in the West often inherits Christian teleologies. So when we talk about guilt, we need to take into account that the idea and feeling of guilt is very different for different cultures.
If the question is: what can an individual do in relation to climate change, it is important to take into account that an individual in the United Kingdom is very different from an individual in India or in Nigeria. These individuals may have very different levels of agency and responsibility – especially when the global scale of climate change reduces impact to particles of CO2 released into the atmosphere.
To me the question, however, is more about how to make these feelings useful, rather than paralysing. For me it is more about the narratives that can emerge out of these feelings. One reason that so many people purchased almanacks in the seventeenth century was that they were searching for meaning and a place for themselves to fit in this world. They were asking very much the same question many people ask today in relation to climate change: where do I fit within forces that are much larger than myself? That is where I think cross-disciplinary collaboration and disruption is so useful: with someone else’s ideas, it’s a lot easier to think outside of one’s own systems of thought. Through disruption, we might find different ways of engaging with feelings like guilt.
In fact, for me it is increasingly more interesting to look at where this idea of guilt in relation to climate change comes from. It is a very Christian guilt. Authors such as John Gray have discussed how scientific discourse in the West often inherits Christian teleologies. So when we talk about guilt, we need to take into account that the idea and feeling of guilt is very different for different cultures.
If the question is: what can an individual do in relation to climate change, it is important to take into account that an individual in the United Kingdom is very different from an individual in India or in Nigeria. These individuals may have very different levels of agency and responsibility – especially when the global scale of climate change reduces impact to particles of CO2 released into the atmosphere.
To me the question, however, is more about how to make these feelings useful, rather than paralysing. For me it is more about the narratives that can emerge out of these feelings. One reason that so many people purchased almanacks in the seventeenth century was that they were searching for meaning and a place for themselves to fit in this world. They were asking very much the same question many people ask today in relation to climate change: where do I fit within forces that are much larger than myself? That is where I think cross-disciplinary collaboration and disruption is so useful: with someone else’s ideas, it’s a lot easier to think outside of one’s own systems of thought. Through disruption, we might find different ways of engaging with feelings like guilt.
William Lilly Merlinus Anglicus Junior (1644)
Phylly Bluemel:
Agency has been a recurring theme throughout the project. Whether people were consulting astrology, weather forecasts, or their own observations, they were often seeking some sense of agency within systems they couldn't control. ‘If you’re Aries, then marry a weaver’, ‘on a full moon, plant barley’ – however silly, these are ways of finding agency in a system you don’t fully understand and have control of. That feels remarkably similar to contemporary climate anxieties. I guess that’s been an underlying question in our work: where do you find agency within patterns you can’t control?
Ben Smith:
I think a part of the problem is also that people tend to think of climate change as something radically different from what has ever happened before. In a way, it is: apart from, arguably, things like global pandemics, it does affect the world in a different way. But actually the way people think about climate change – at least, in the Western European context – is remarkably similar to how people historically thought about the heavens or God. If we replace the word ‘climate change’ with the word ‘God’, then we’d see that the narrative of guilt and shame is very similar – even in a lot of scientific narratives. It’s just that we’ve gone through a period of atheism where we have forgotten that we do have a language for talking about entities that big.
What I love so much about the almanack writers of the 17th century is how comfortable and playful they are in negotiating their position among these massive powers. These old almanacks are just dripping with humour and irony: they are both joking and are serious at the same time. They may be slagging off their competitors, or saying that they did make a correct prediction but due to censorship they were not able to publish it. I think this kind of humour and irony has a lot of potential in helping us to think about climate change in new and interesting ways.
Agency has been a recurring theme throughout the project. Whether people were consulting astrology, weather forecasts, or their own observations, they were often seeking some sense of agency within systems they couldn't control. ‘If you’re Aries, then marry a weaver’, ‘on a full moon, plant barley’ – however silly, these are ways of finding agency in a system you don’t fully understand and have control of. That feels remarkably similar to contemporary climate anxieties. I guess that’s been an underlying question in our work: where do you find agency within patterns you can’t control?
Ben Smith:
I think a part of the problem is also that people tend to think of climate change as something radically different from what has ever happened before. In a way, it is: apart from, arguably, things like global pandemics, it does affect the world in a different way. But actually the way people think about climate change – at least, in the Western European context – is remarkably similar to how people historically thought about the heavens or God. If we replace the word ‘climate change’ with the word ‘God’, then we’d see that the narrative of guilt and shame is very similar – even in a lot of scientific narratives. It’s just that we’ve gone through a period of atheism where we have forgotten that we do have a language for talking about entities that big.
What I love so much about the almanack writers of the 17th century is how comfortable and playful they are in negotiating their position among these massive powers. These old almanacks are just dripping with humour and irony: they are both joking and are serious at the same time. They may be slagging off their competitors, or saying that they did make a correct prediction but due to censorship they were not able to publish it. I think this kind of humour and irony has a lot of potential in helping us to think about climate change in new and interesting ways.