Voices on Climate

The vision for this Extreme Weather Stories project (by us in Climate Museum UK) is that this is a multi-author platform, growing a collection of accounts of extreme weather. The stories published here might be:

• people writing from their own first-hand experience about a particular event, or place, or the impact of extreme weather on their lives;
• an author interviewing someone or several people about their first-hand experiences, or writing about someone else they know;
• reflecting on several stories as found in media, about a particular situation;
• reflecting more abstractly about extreme weather, how we understand it through stories, the value of witness accounts and so on.

This post fits the last category, and is about some inspiring projects that are about climate storytelling and conversation.

1001 Voices…

The first is a forthcoming book, 1001 Voices on Climate Change, the result of a heroic project by Devi Lockwood. In a nutshell, the project is: “For the last 5 years, I’ve been traveling around the world on a mission to record 1,001 stories on water and climate change. To date I have documented 850 stories in 20 countries on six continents.” You can share your story without meeting Devi, by phoning a number and leaving a message.

Now the book of the project is being published by Simon & Schuster. There are interviews with indigenous people in Fiji and Tuvalu about rising sea levels and drought. There are interviews about retreating glaciers, contaminated rivers and wildfires in New Zealand and Australia. And much more. Here is a bit of the abundant advance praise for the book:

“In a world that needs more listening and more storytelling, Devi Lockwood covers the waterfront. This is an empathetic and beautiful book.” — Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle and Our Wild Calling

“This is a great adventure story, but also a completely necessary book — the climate crisis has reached the point where people around the world feel it, understand it, and talk about it in ways that everyone needs to hear.”— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“In this lovely, engaging book — by turns wry and heart wrenching, and always candid and warm — Devi Lockwood connects us with humanity itself as we confront the existential threat of the climate crisis. Lockwood’s book is alight with vivid characters and stories from every inhabited continent, brought together by her own compassion and curiosity. It’s a book we need now.”— Miranda Massie, Director, The Climate Museum

We’re hoping to hold an event with Devi to explore these stories, and the importance of drawing out, capturing and amplifying voices of the unfolding emergency.

26,000 Climate Conversations

The second project to draw your attention to is a new student-founded campaign based at Oxford University. This is a campaign called 26,000 Climate Conversations, and its goal is to inspire and track 26k conversations about climate change worldwide by 1 November 2021, the first day of COP26. You can check out the website and submissions received so far since launching a few weeks ago. The idea is that you describe a conversation you had, whether it was formal or informal, with one or several people. The data might be interesting to see how themes of conversation change over time, or how they exponentially spread as conversation begets conversation. They also provide resources on how to have a good conversation, so hopefully it will grow people’s confidence and the quality of conversations.

They are keen to partner with organisations like us, and enable this by tracking submissions that come in via their partners. We’re planning to work with them, and to provide some prompts, which might be about #ExtremeWeatherStories, or about mending and repair, or supporting creative methods of conversation such as talking while walking or eating.

Letters to the Earth

This is another project that uses a creative prompt to encourage people to reflect and articulate their feelings, visions and demands for sustaining life on Earth. Letters to the Earth started out as a creative call along with the launch of Culture Declares Emergency, with a selection of letters published in a book. The current campaign is capturing messages for a better future, that will be shared to inspire and move influencers and politicians at COP26.

If you are interested to write something on this Extreme Weather Stories publication, please do get in touch on climatemuseumuk@gmail.com