Another World is Possible:
The role of culture in social and political transformation
Thought Leadership Lecture by Caroline Lucas for Cultural Philanthropy Foundation, at Southbank Centre, 20 November 2024
Introduction
I feel very honoured to have been invited to give this year’s Thought Leadership Lecture for the Cultural Philanthropy Foundation – And, to be honest, just a little daunted too, given the wisdom and experience there is in this room.
So I have to come clean with you –
I’m not an expert on cultural philanthropy or on the creative sector more broadly.
But I hope I do know a bit about the climate and nature emergency, and the broad range of strategies we need to tackle it. And that’s why I was so excited to hear of the Foundation’s plan to complete the 8 Types of Impact celebrated in the Culture Makes…campaign by adding “Environmental Impact” too.
But the case I’d like to make tonight is a provocative one. I’d like to suggest you make environmental impact not Number 9 in your list… but Number One…
– to make it your overriding aim, your outstanding purpose, your overwhelming preoccupation and priority.
That’s both because of the urgent and unprecedented nature of the existential emergency we facing …
And also because I believe you are uniquely well equipped to help all of us to rise to that emergency.
Now you might legitimately feel it’s a bit rich of me, someone who’s been on the front line of green politics for more than 25 years, to pitch up here tonight and essentially ask you to do my job for me.
After all, surely it’s the job of politicians to persuade the public of the need for bold climate action, and to introduce the necessary legislation to achieve it?
But I’m here to acknowledge that politics has failed.
And as a politician myself, that’s not an easy thing to admit.
But I know that even those politicians who do understand the urgency of making the transition to a zero-carbon economy have not succeeded in persuading parliaments around the world to act at the speed and the scale that the science demands.
Five years ago, I worked with the award-winning participatory creative campaign, Letters to the Earth, in collaboration with Culture Declares Emergency…
And I contributed a letter to a wonderful anthology which they compiled.
My letter opened with this plea:
‘Dear Artists and Writers and Poets and Musicians,
I’m writing to ask if you will help us.
Will you help us to protect this precious earth, to inspire us to believe that it’s not too late to act, to show us that each and every one of us can make a difference, and to convince us that the system can still be changed?’
And tonight I repeat that request –
…And with an even greater certainty that you hold the keys to unlocking action to address this crisis.
Because at its heart the climate and nature crisis isn’t an economic crisis.
It’s not a scientific crisis and it’s not a technological crisis.
It’s a crisis of corporate greed, extractivism, inequality and centuries of structural racism.
It’s a crisis of who we are and how we live.
In other words, the climate and nature crisis is a cultural crisis.
It’s about the value we put on ourselves, on each other, and on every other living being with whom we are privileged to share this one infinitely precious planet.
It’s about the compelling stories we tell about how the world could be, and that remind us that, when people come together and act, there is always hope…
I think we despair when we have no stories to describe the present, and shape the future.
Political failure is, at root, a failure of imagination.
A failure to imagine what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes.
And a failure to imagine that another world is possible.
But with your help, I believe we can rekindle our imaginations and rediscover the power to act.
Failure of politics
I’ll say more about the systemic transformational change that we need, but first let me set out why I make the assertion that politics has failed.
What’s the evidence?
Despite being informed by 6 landmark reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the past 35 years…
…Despite 29 global Climate COP meetings, 100s of assessments, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, political leaders have failed to make anything like enough progress in reducing climate emissions.
In each successive report, the alarms have become louder, the appeals for action more urgent, and the predicted costs of failure more extreme.
Just a few weeks ago came the starkest warning that I think I’ve ever read about the nature of the risks we face.
In their State of the Climate Report 2024, scientists warn of ‘a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis’, with the majority of the Earth’s vital signs worse than ever before recorded, leading them to conclude that, in their words, ‘the future of humanity hangs in the balance’.
And the evidence of this new state of instability and escalating crisis is all around us:
This summer was the earth’s hottest season on record, bringing with it a deluge of extreme weather –
…Increasingly unbearable heat; catastrophic cyclones and floods, and two extreme hurricanes in the space of two weeks.
Lives and livelihoods lost, crops devastated, homes and businesses washed away – with the poorest communities hit first and hardest.
And the natural world itself is under threat like never before, with deforestation and the “silent crisis” of biodiversity loss putting one million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction, and undermining the very existence of indigenous communities who depend upon them.
So why is it, that in the face of all this overwhelming evidence, our political leaders still fail to act with anything like the speed and seriousness that this moment demands?
Much like the cultural sector itself, politics deals in the business of narrative too.
And sadly, the political system as we know it, is still largely operating within a very narrow understanding of prosperity – centred solely on GDP and pursuing ever increasing economic growth.
Most politicians have no interest in reshaping this narrative of ‘what matters’, so that even today, in the midst of such overwhelming threats, our current government again focuses on growth at the expense of all else.
Yet, as economist Kenneth Boulding famously said, anyone who thinks exponential growth can go on for ever on a planet of finite resources is either a madman - or an economist.
And the impact of this myopia is stark.
It’s an issue which the 2014 film, The Age of Stupid, directed by Franny Armstrong, set out to expose.
In it, the late great Pete Postlethwaite plays the sole survivor of an environmental catastrophe.
Set in around 2050, his character finds a preserved video archive of news clips from 30 years earlier which, week in, week out, documented the mounting number of extreme weather events and the escalating warnings.
And as he watches them, he asks – in words that still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end every time I say them:
‘Why is it, knowing what we knew then, we didn’t act, when we still had time?’
To me, that is the overwhelming question.
Many reasons have been suggested.
The power and vested interests of those benefitting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system, for example, who are often not simply lobbying government, but being given senior roles within it.
Or the fact that so many are just trying to get by, to put food on the table, to keep a roof over their heads, forced to spend most of their waking hours trying to cope with the fall-out of an economic crisis that was none of their making
Or that we’re being distracted by thousands of advertisements each day, all of them persuading us to go out and, in the wonderful words of Professor Tim Jackson, spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.
Add to that list now the spread of deliberate disinformation which calls into question the very reality of the climate crisis and the policies required to address it.
Because the dangers we face aren’t just from rising temperatures.
The threat of the illiberal, anti-democratic Right is rising too.
Climate has become the new front line in culture wars not just in the UK, but across the Western world – because the populist Right will exploit any and every opportunity to sow discord.
Weaponizing climate action has now become a major feature of their playbook, and they’ve devised a whole new lexicon to describe how the ‘luxury beliefs’ and ‘virtue signalling’ of the ‘new elite’, combined with a ‘woke’ establishment are frustrating the ‘will of the people’.
So how do we rise to these challenges?
How do we avoid going down in history as the only species that spent all its time monitoring its own extinction, rather than taking active steps to avert it?
I believe the veteran US environmentalist, lawyer and Presidential adviser Gus Speth points us to the way forward when he famously remarked that he used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change.
‘But I was wrong,’ he’s admitted.
‘The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we, (lawyers) and scientists, don´t know how to do that.’
Most politicians self-evidently don’t seem to have much of a clue either.
The case I would make to you tonight is that the people who do know how to do that are, of course, yourselves.
Why the role of culture is a priority
Culture defines who we are, what we cherish and how we live.
Art offers us alternative ways of knowing, and culture emerges from all our many different ways of being.
The arts speak to hearts and minds, helping us understand the climate and nature crisis through story-telling and shared experiences.
They have the potential to move us to reimagine our world and inspire communities to take climate action.
And that’s why arts and culture need to be at the very heart of our strategies to tackle the nature and climate emergencies.
The limitations of appealing only to the head, and not the heart, are clear for all to see –
…And go part way to explaining the woeful progress we’ve made so far.
For too long, campaigners have focused on the ‘information deficit model’ of change…
In other words, on the idea that individuals are empty vessels waiting to be filled with virtuous knowledge,
…and when that knowledge has been imparted, they’ll automatically change how they behave.
While that strategy might have worked to inform the public of the facts of the nature and climate crisis, it’s all too clearly not been an effective approach to achieve the cultural and societal shifts that need to happen at unprecedented speed and scale.
Instead, it turns out that storytelling can be a far more effective strategy, as I’ve found out for myself.
I’ve spent most of my adult life either campaigning for change, or as an elected politician, trying to implement it.
And I’ve learned that change doesn’t happen through political action alone – and that the arts and clture have a vital role to play.
That’s why, in my own recent book, Another England: How to Reclaim our National Story, I chose to explore the political challenges we face through the lens of literature.
Stories can help us consider what a future England might look like: not so much its structure and constitution, but what people feel about it, how they engage with it emotionally, and what this might mean for those living within it.
Perhaps the power of story shouldn’t surprise us when we consider that, as a species, storytelling has been an integral part of our lives for more than 100,000 years, whereas logical and argumentative forms of information structures emerged only 5,000 years ago.
It seems that that 95,000-year head start has wired story structure into our brains – a conclusion now also being evidenced by experts in what’s being called the neuroscience of narrative.
These observations draw on important work by Climate Spring –
…An agency which is working with a global network of leading TV and film creatives to support this rapidly growing climate storytelling movement, and which recently supported the launch of the first Climate Fiction Prize in partnership with the Hay Festival – and the longlist has just been published tonight.
They set out very clearly the strength of the evidence underpinning their approach.
‘Multiple studies have shown that stories consistently outperformed factual narratives for encouraging action-taking in all audiences, even controlling for pre-disposition’, they write.
‘Fictional storytelling that reaches mainstream audiences has the power to change cultural narratives, to influence social norms and to change the debate.’
But let’s not underestimate the challenge involved in changing the narrative, harnessing the imagination, and envisaging those different possibilities.
Sometimes the status quo is so deeply entrenched, it can seem too big a job, too large a leap of faith.
It’s famously been said, for example, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
And indeed perhaps the most deeply entrenched story of all is the neoliberal story itself that seeks to persuade us that we are all out for ourselves, that we’re innately greedy and inherently competitive.
But as evidence from psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology mounts up, a different story emerges – that we possess an extraordinary level of altruism, and a unique level of concern about each other’s welfare.
We are, in fact, the supreme cooperators, an urge hard-wired into our brains through natural selection.
We have literally forgotten who we are.
And this is where culture can help us.
Because through the stories you tell, you remind us of the human capacity for cooperation and collaboration, and reaffirm that human beings are endlessly caring and creative…
And that if we choose to, we can set our minds to anything.
The power of culture to transform narratives, normalise behaviour and shape values isn’t always harnessed for positive ends, of course.
The very fact that fossil fuel companies fight so hard to continue sponsoring art exhibitions or museums is testament to the influence that culture is recognised to exert.
The Art not Oil Coalition has documented the scale of fossil fuel funding in the arts, but also the significant progress that’s been made in using creative campaigns to end it in institutions from the Tate, to the RSC and the Natural History Museum.
Indeed, while some might find their tactics controversial, Liberate Tate’s story shows that art can change the world.
When they first called on Tate to drop BP sponsorship, they were told ‘That will never happen’ by pretty much everyone.
Six years later, the contract was terminated.
How did campaigners achieve the impossible?
By combining the art of making art, and the art of making trouble.
By bringing things that were hidden into public view.
They made the gallery accountable and they made BP's impact visible. They were audacious.
And they did it all with love.
Love for art, love for the gallery, love for the Earth and love for humankind.
They also did it with art.
They did it as art. And it worked.
Progress on the ground
So the cultural sector has a unique role to play – both in modelling best practice in how it reduces its own environmental impact.
…And also – crucially - in being an essential catalyst for wider social and political transformation.
Work has been underway for some time, particularly in terms of getting your own house in order.
More than a decade ago, in 2012, Arts Council England embarked on the largest programme of environmental literacy for the sector anywhere in the world and made environmental action a condition of funding.
This year’s Annual Report from the programme shows that:
90% of organisations already include environmental sustainability in their core business strategies;
68% collaborate with other cultural organisations on environmental solutions; and
71% have produced or programmed work exploring environmental themes.
Work is happening internationally too:
For example Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Climate Leadership programme operates in over 30 countries to empower artists and cultural professionals to take action on the climate and nature emergencies in their own communities…
While BAFTA Albert has long been playing a pioneering role in reducing the environmental impact of film and TV production, and normalising climate action.
Working with the change agency Futerra, for example, it’s created the concept of ‘planet placement’– a guide to the types of everyday behaviours and actions that can be seeded in almost any story.
Importantly, last autumn saw the publication of a Creative Climate Charter, coordinated by the Creative Industries Council, and particularly significant because it covers the whole creative sector.
It pledges the sector to be role models for change, both in terms of reducing their own environmental footprints in line with the science…
…And also in using their collective voice and creativity to catalyse ideas and engage audiences in climate action through storytelling and inspiring narratives that drive positive change and challenge disinformation.
And some hugely exciting examples of this are already happening
Culture Declares Emergency, the Galleries Climate Coalition, the Climate Heritage Network and many more are all coordinating action across the global visual arts and culture sector.
In England, institutions like White Cube, Tate Galleries, the Whitworth and Serpentine Galleries among many others are taking a stand, and the range of work being undertaken is breathtaking.
In visual art, Andy Goldsworthy’s work reminds us of the intimate relationship that exists between people and nature.
In dance, Akram Khan’s choreography casts Kipling’s Mowgli as a climate refugee.
And in theatre, Katie Mitchell’s A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, pioneers an innovative touring model, the first of its kind in the UK, which sees a play tour, while the people and materials do not.
However, any work of this kind by cultural institutions must also challenge their own place in, and upholding of, the ‘establishment’.
In her recent think piece, the writer, artist and founder of Climate Museum UK and Culture Declares Emergency, Bridget McKenzie, highlights an ongoing lack of diversity in the practices and structures of the cultural sector.
“There is limited recognition of the close interconnections between the historical traumas of colonialism”, she writes, “how harms to the environment affect people, and how responses to the Earth Crisis must foreground justice”.
The kind of inclusive celebration of collaboration and imagination that McKenzie points to, bringing together art and activists, grassroots community groups and local film makers, was on show at Manchester’s Fete of Britain event earlier this year, organised by the Hard Art Collective.
Among the projects it showcased were the pop-up Empathy Museum, which provided the opportunity for people to literally walk a mile in someone’s else’s shoes while listening to their story…
…And so-called ‘legislative theatre’, celebrating creative and joyful participatory democracy.
Pioneering artist and musician Brian Eno closed the Fete with a rallying cry to action: ‘Cancel your sodding Netflix account,’ he urged, and ‘start doing things together.’
“We don’t need all this super-polished shit from Hollywood”, he went on. “Get into the mess of real life, of doing things with our friends – sometimes making a mess of it, and sometimes producing something beautiful”.
It was a passionate plea to step into our power.
But I’d suggest we need to go even further.
Yes, we need to start doing things with our friends.
But we also need to start doing things with people who are very different to us.
Solidarity is subversive.
By forming coalitions with those who will experience the impact of the crisis in ways that are unlike our own, we create a potent force for change.
That’s why I’m delighted to know that in the room this evening, there are cultural leaders, policy-makers and funders, and there are also small but mighty grassroots organisations and community representatives here, like the brilliant Poetic Unity, a youth organisation from Brixton who created the ‘Clean Air for the Ends’ initiative.
A coalition which places economically marginalised and racially minoritised people at the centre will be more powerful than one fronted by people who look like me.
Culture: a place at the table
If we genuinely believe the climate and nature crisis is a culture crisis, then it follows that the cultural sector needs to be absolutely at the heart of national and global policy agendas.
It hasn’t been – and we need to change that.
And that requires not just changes to cultural policy and funds, but to climate policy and funds too.
Because while there’s increasing recognition of the significance of the Creative Industries sector to the wider economy, representing 6% of UK Gross Value Added, and employing over 2 million people, and indirectly many more, government policy remains siloed.
In its recent report, Culture: The Missing Link to Climate Action, Julie’s Bicycle combines data that analyses publicly available national arts policies of 25 countries, a survey to arts and culture bodies with a national mandate and to cultural ministries, as well as in-depth roundtables and interviews with leading international arts leaders.
Its conclusion is unequivocal…
The cultural community no longer needs to be sensitised to the environmental emergency - cultural ambition everywhere is high, solutions abound, creativity is abundant.
What’s missing is the urgent and overdue policy dialogue with national policymakers, to support, scale, and take the work that’s already happening into mainstream environmental planning.
Not as an optional ‘nice to have’.
But as an essential element of climate and nature action at every level in governments throughout the world.
And that’s a critical gap: if we don’t locate climate action in how people live, how they feel and what’s meaningful to them, we’ll fail.
And one place this should start is at the Climate COPs themselves – the annual Conference of the Parties where all 196 countries who have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement meet to hammer out more ambitious targets and policies.
Now I’m not naïve in my view of the COP process – it’s painfully slow, operationally cumbersome, often reeks of hypocrisy and is at constant risk of capture by petrostates and Big Oil interests.
If further evidence were needed, just last week came news of a minister from this year’s COP29 host, Azerbaijan, offering to broker new fossil fuel deals just days before the event opened.
And if the COP space is captured by Big Oil, then clearly there’s also a risk that culture itself becomes further captured by it too.
This is not simply hypothetical – witness the buy-out of media companies by petrostates happening right now.
The oil and gas lobby should have no place anywhere near the COP process, and a firewall between them and policymakers urgently needs to be put in place to try to reduce their malign influence.
But the fact remains that COPs are just about the only international game in town – and as the saying goes, if you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.
Traditionally heritage, arts and creative industries (including sites and landscapes, institutions and collections as well as creativity, intangible heritage, and traditional ways of knowing and practices) have never been acknowledged within the policy framework of the UN Convention on Climate Change except as ‘Accords’ - the voluntary industry commitments located within the UNFCCC Communications, but not connected to policy.
Slowly that’s starting to change.
For example, the voices of indigenous and climate vulnerable communities are at last being heard at in the COP process. Not only are many in immediate peril, but their cultures are being destroyed for ever.
And at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, work by the Climate Heritage Network and Julie’s Bicycle finally secured an acknowledgement of heritage in the Loss and Damage Fund, as well as the inclusion of ‘tangible cultural heritage’ as a theme in the new framework to enable the Global Goal on Adaptation.
That same decision also establishes traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems as a cross-cutting consideration.
The following year, at COP28, a decade of campaigning culminated in the establishment of the ‘Group of Friends of Culture-Based Action’.
More than 30 Ministers or government representatives and a large delegation of committed cultural advocates from across the globe attended the historic inaugural meeting, co-chaired by the UAE and Brazil, recognising the key role of culture for transformative climate action.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the UK was not among them.
That means that making the case to the new Labour Government must be a priority going forward…
… As well as creating an advocacy campaign for the tabling of the first ever Work Plan on Culture for the UNFCCC at COP 30 in Brazil next year.
If we can establish global commitments on the cultural sector, we have another lever with which to lobby at a national level.
And let me be clear that I am acutely aware that the context for this lecture has been 14 years of what Culture Minister Lisa Nandy has called the Tory Government’s ‘violent indifference’ to the arts.
I’m not sure that ‘indifference’ quite captures the full extent of the damage that’s been done.
Funding for local authorities has been decimated, and arts funding slashed.
Up and down the country, libraries have been closed – those ‘Cathedrals of the mind, hospitals of the soul, and theme parks of the imagination’ that writer Caitlin Moran so powerfully describes….
…Increasingly gone from our towns, just when more demands were being made on them for community events and cohesion.
The curriculum has not escaped attack either, with Tory ministers labelling arts subjects ‘mickey mouse’ and erasing them from the classroom.
No surprise, then, that the number of students taking arts GCSEs dropped by nearly 50% since 2010.
Now the new Labour Government’s curriculum review has pledged to put subjects like music, art and drama back at the heart of learning.
So we need to hold them to that
But we also need to go further, because education and training are only part of the picture.
And that’s why storytelling campaigns such as Culture Makes are critical now – because they go to the heart of the work you are all doing across the sector.
We need to make sure the connections between climate, nature, culture and the arts are fully understood and operationalised in policy-making by all departments –
And properly funded for the long term, in ways that don’t simply pitch organisations into competition with each other for dwindling pots of money.
Because Culture sits at the centre of a life well-lived, and is at the heart of a healthy, functioning society.
Conclusion
Author and philosopher Rudolf Bahro famously observed ‘when the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.’
I imagine there’ll be quite a lot of people in this room tonight feeling pretty insecure.
Change is rarely linear, and as the new system emerges while the old system is in decline, it’s bound to be messy and complex.
But there are steps we can take to accelerate the transition…
And by way of conclusion I’ll set out just three.
First, one of the most important steps would to lobby Government to establish a statutory mandate to address climate and nature in public cultural policy and strategy – and for cultural policy and strategy to be systematically woven into climate and nature action.
Second, make broadening engagement even more of a priority – particularly with marginalised and racially minority communities who are more likely to be affected by climate breakdown…
…But who are often still not included in work with cultural organisations that respond to it.
And third, as well as seeking to mitigate the worst impacts of climate breakdown – both in your own operational work and in the work you inspire in others – develop a greater focus on adaptation and community resilience too…
While high level efforts towards mitigation can sometimes seem diffuse and remote, adaptation is – by definition – more focussed, local and tangible.
It has the capacity to transform climate concerns from the status of an abstract belief to a lived reality: something we do together, every day.
Adaptation, community resilience and collective preparedness together have the potential to appeal straightforwardly and viscerally to those in particular who, to date, have often been neglected by some in the climate movement, and are too easily exploited by right-wing populists.
Together, these three steps can bring us all hope.
Not the kind of hope that, in the words of Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts, ‘is the antidepressant that has been keeping us all comfortably numb, when we have every right to be sad, worried, stirred to action or just plain angry’.
Rather the kind of hope that Vaclav Havel had in mind when he said:
‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.’
The kind of hope that the writer Rebecca Solnit describes as strong enough to propel you off the sofa, out of the door, and in her words, is ‘an axe to break down doors with in an emergency’.
And the kind of hope that novelist Arundhati Roy had in mind when she said:
‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’
The cultural sector has an absolutely central role to play in both envisioning and midwifing that other world –
And I look forward to exploring with you how it can be done.
