‘What Happens Next?’: Can Art Help Our Climate Anxiety?

In the late 17th century, British poet William Congreve penned a line that still resonates today: “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. To soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak.”

Art in any form – music, poetry, prose, etc – has a profound effect on human emotions. We use it to express our feelings, to soothe ourselves when they seem overwhelming, and to process complicated situations.

And climate anxiety can be extremely overwhelming. It’s difficult to express the paralysing feeling of helplessness we experience when confronted with the complex and often dire implications of climate change. The unrelenting stream of distressing climate news and the complexities of the issue often leave us feeling emotionally knotted and even desensitised.

Through art, however, we can externalise our emotions and give voice to our concerns and fears. Creative expression can provide a means of emotional release, offering solace and validation to our climate-related distress.

In the third episode of What Happens Next? podcast’s exploration of climate anxiety, host Dr Susan Carland explores the shared experience of climate anxiety and how art can be used to reach the core of human emotions. Our expert guests create and study music and fiction that can evoke empathy and foster a sense of community among audiences who may be grappling with climate anxiety.

Listen: How Can We Conquer Climate Anxiety?

In today’s episode, Dr Anna McMichael and Dr Louise Devenish from Monash University’s Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music and Performing Arts introduce “Climate Notes”. This unique project combines letters from climate scientists and ordinary people, which discuss how climate change makes them feel, with original musical compositions. These “musical letters” provide a moving outlet for expressing the emotional and psychological impacts of climate change.

The podcast also features literary scholar Professor Adeline Johns-Putra, head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia, who specialises in climate fiction, or “cli-fi.”

Climate fiction includes novels, stories, and films that grapple with the impact of climate change on our world. These narratives can serve as a powerful tool for processing the emotional toll of climate anxiety, offering readers a chance to explore various perspectives on climate change and its consequences, fostering empathy and awareness.

“… They’ll read someone else’s letters and they have those feelings as well. And it’s not a scientist, and it’s not sort of an expert on the area talking about it. It’s just another person and their thoughts. And actually, the science letters come across in a similar way. They’re not about the data. They’re really, really deep feelings. So I think it allows people to feel they’re not alone with that.” – Dr Anna McMichael

While no single work of art or fiction can change the world on its own, these creative outlets provide a vital space for reflection and discussion. They allow people to share their feelings, fears and hopes in the face of climate change. This shared experience can lead to increased awareness and motivate individuals to take action.

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Transcript

[Music]

Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and asks the experts, what will happen if we don’t change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I’m Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Adeline Johns-Putra: Climate anxiety is important because it can, I think, be galvanised. You have to be worried about something to act on it.

Anna McMichael: Bringing everybody into the discussion of such a big complex issue is probably what we’re going to need to do to really transform things. When we know a lot about statistics, data, numbers, we know what has happened, we know how it’s happening, we know what will happen.

Louise Devenish: We don’t know yet how humanity, collectively, is going to really actively respond to this to mitigate this crisis and the future of humanity.

Susan Carland: This week, we’re doing something a little bit different on the podcast. Normally, we’d be off on a new topic, but today we’re bringing you one final episode on climate anxiety and a uniquely human approach to coping with it.

Throughout this series, you’ve been listening to music from a very interesting project called “Climate Notes”, created by doctors Anna McMichael and Louise Devenish from Monash University’s School of Music and Performance. “Climate Notes” is a response to another fascinating undertaking, something called, “Is This How You Feel?”.

Anna and Louise, welcome both of you.

Anna McMichael: Thanks, Susan.

Louise Devenish: Hi, Susan.

Susan Carland: I want to start by asking you about the “Is This How You Feel?” project. Can one of you start by telling me, what is that project?

Anna McMichael: That’s a project that started a while ago, and it was run by Joe Duggan, who’s a science communicator from the ANU. And he collected quite a body of letters by climate scientists and just asked them the really simple question, “How does climate change make you feel?” They wrote many handwritten letters, just one A4 page, basically. And my late father was one of those climate scientists that wrote one of the letters.

And then he came back a few years later and wanted to ask the same scientists how they feel now, a few years in. And as my father passed away, he asked our family to write one. And so I was tasked by the family to write one. And as I was writing the letter about how climate change made me feel, I thought, because I’m working in the arts and in performing arts, it would be great to invite a lot of composers to do the same thing and do, in effect, a musical letter.

So that’s how the project came about. And then, as it grew, we commissioned. I invited Louise Devenish to be part of the project as well, and we thought it would be really great to get the public also involved, so it would become an installation performance where people would see the science letters, hear the musical letters, write their own letter, very participatory installation performance.

Susan Carland: So Louise, it was called “Climate Notes”. And so you got composers to write music about how they felt about the climate. Is that what it was?

Louise Devenish: Yes, that’s right. So the “Is This How You Feel?” collection of letters was handwritten letters. And “Climate Notes” builds on that idea to add this collection of musical responses to the question, “How does climate change make you feel?”

And so we approached composers from all around Australia, six different composers, and shared the original collection of letters with them as a point of departure and asked them, “Can you write a musical response to this question for a violin, which is Anna’s instrument and percussion, which is my instrument?”

Susan Carland: Were the tones of all the pieces of music similar? Was there an overarching sense of whimsy or sad? Were there any uplifting pieces? Or were they all extremely diverse?

Anna McMichael: They were all extremely diverse, which was what we were hoping as well. The arts has so many different ways of being imaginative and creative. And so some of the composers took the letters and literally took… such as one composer, Bree van Reyk, took the actual words from the letters, as an inspiration. So we were given the remit to improvise using words such as “tipping point” or “inaction” or “clean and sustainable,” these kind of words.

Other composers used… Because we did the project at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. So one composer, Daniel Blinkhorn, used the biomes, the different biomes of the botanic gardens to try, with field recordings, capture the sounds of the different biomes. Another composer took the botanical specimens, the Collection State Botanical specimens at the Melbourne Gardens.

And so you see the beautiful specimens, see a video, see the care that’s gone into cataloguing them. But also the dried specimens, putting music to those. So giving colour back to them. So that’s the musical function.

And Cathy Milliken sent us out to the desert garden in Cranbourne. Louise and I trekked out there and went into the middle of the desert garden and recorded a video and captured all the sounds around the gardens, the planes going overhead and the crows. And had a video actually in the middle of the desert garden. So all the composers really wanted us to do very different things.

Susan Carland: And then was it a recording that then people could listen to? Was it a live performance? How did people hear it?

Louise Devenish: We like to think of this project as being a suite of different ways to engage with this question of what climate change feels like. So there are, as Anna mentioned, a series of video works which show photographs of some of the original handwritten letters, video footage that we captured on the two Royal Botanic Garden sites and performance footage, mixed in with studio-recorded versions of these musical pieces.

So that exists as an installation, which can be viewed in an art exhibition format. And then there are also the concert pieces, if you like, that can be experienced in a live concert setting so people can choose to engage with these works and that question in that way.

And then, as Anna mentioned earlier, there is a wall of letters that we put up as part of the exhibition, which includes some of the original copies of the original handwritten letters, and a letter-writing station where the general public can write their own letter and stick that on the wall and add to this growing discourse about what it feels like to live in the world at this point in the climate crisis when we know a lot about statistics, data, number, numbers, we know what has happened, we know how it’s happening, we know what will happen.

We don’t know yet how humanity, collectively, is going to really actively respond to this to mitigate this crisis and the future of humanity. So having the project exist in these three ways offers people different points of access to this really challenging topic. The climate crisis is something that is so immense.

It’s very difficult for individuals to grasp the scale of it and also grasp our part in that and what we can do as individuals, as small communities, as countries, as humanity to respond to this crisis. So because humans respond to things in different ways, the project offers different ways to connect with this.

Susan Carland: And Louise, what kind of things would people write in their letters?

Louise Devenish: Well, they were as diverse as the musical works themselves. And that makes sense in many ways because the experience of what it feels like to live at this point in the climate crisis is very individual and very personal. So some people drew pictures, some people wrote poems. There were a couple of just happy and sad faces up there as well. And other people wrote quite long letters that were quite detailed.

And we had left the letter-writing invitation quite open so people could choose to address it to Joe Duggan, to address it to us, to not address it to anyone. They could choose to sign it or not. And so that meant that people responded in quite different ways.

Some spoke specifically about how they were worried about their future, personally, and the future of their families. Others spoke more of hope and ideas and positive messages. So we really saw the full spectrum of emotions represented across the letters. And I think the musical works represent a full spectrum of responses as well.

Susan Carland: Now, Anna, I’m not going to ask you if you had a favourite piece of music because that would be cruel. But was there a piece of music that resonated with you more than others? And why that one?

Anna McMichael: I think there’s one piece, which, for me, was really challenging. Maybe not so much for Louise. But it was by a composer, Bree van Reyk, and it involved building our own instrument and learning how to play that as well.

Susan Carland: So you got homework?

Anna McMichael: Yes. Which, for me, was great, as a violinist who learnt to play a very refined, sophisticated instrument, hundreds of years old, having to get back to basics.

Susan Carland: Wait, what was this instrument you had to build?

Anna McMichael: So it’s quite a complex story around the instrument. She was wanting to get right back to basics, to have to rethink things, which is something to do with the climate crisis as well, to have to simplify lives or think in a different way, think a bit outside the box. But she also had the idea that this might be at a time where possibly there were less trees around or trees…

Susan Carland: Mmhmm.

Anna McMichael: The idea was that we build our own tree out of strings and wood and porcelain, bits of old rusty saws from the back of the shed kind of thing. And string this up, learn to play it, and then respond to the letters with the improvisational phrases from the letters. So for me, as a violinist, that was really great. Louise is a bit more accustomed to this kind of thing as a percussion instrument. But it also has a lot of quite strong visuals of Antarctica and the Barrier Reef.

And so it’s quite a visual piece as well. And they did have a name, these instruments, and they’re called replica trees. So her work consisted of designing these sculptures, these sculptural musical instruments and composing the work as well. And what Bree was trying to do was find something instrumental where the violin and the percussion instruments met in the middle. So these replica trees, not only were they this kind of playful reflection on what someone might build if they went out to their shed and using the materials, the urban materials at hand, what they might build as a tree.

But something that had a little bit of string playing and string technique, because it did have three or four strings right down the middle of the trunk, if you like, and something that brought in percussion technique. So instruments that could be struck or rubbed or bowed.

And so we had one each of these replica trees, and so they had quite a strong visual presence on the stage. And it was quite interesting, I think, to be playing these trees that were actually made of saws, different types of saws and saw blades which are used to cut down trees, which is part of this whole climate discussion that we’re part of.

That was a lot of fun, receiving this huge box from Bree with all of the disassembled and pre-cut porcelain tiles and saw blades and piano wires and bits of wood, putting them together on site. And she was really thoughtful and put a box of bandaids in there. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we did okay. So that piece was quite fun for the experience of making the instrument as well as sounding the instrument.

Susan Carland: Those trees sound like something from Mad Max. There were trees that were instruments, sort of this dystopian future. And it was interesting, as you mentioned, the bit about playing saw blades and there being bandaids in the box. It feels like the environment’s fighting back, it’s fighting back against what you’re doing to what the environment’s responding, which I suppose is part of the conversation as well. Do either of you have climate anxiety?

Anna McMichael: I would say I have a faint tinge of climate anxiety. I’ve grown up with that most of my life with my father’s work. And my sister works at Melbourne University, their Geography, Earth Sciences. So she’s also working in climate crisis and migration patterns. So it’s been something in our family that I’ve been brought up on.

Susan Carland: Yeah. And what about you, Louise?

Louise Devenish: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I don’t think we’re alone in feeling… There are words for these feelings: eco-grief, eco-anxiety, are terms that are in the vernacular now. And I think the existence of those words maybe points to the fact that it’s a phenomenon that’s experienced by many.

So yeah, it is something I think about a lot, and I do feel quite acutely. So it’s really wonderful to be able to harness the tools that we have in our musical practice to be able to contribute to the discussions about this, about the anxiety itself, but the larger issue as well.

Susan Carland: But music isn’t the only way we express our feelings. As you browse the shelves of your local bookstore, you may notice a certain theme cropping up more and more.

Adeline Johns-Putra: Hi, I’m Adeline Johns-Putra. I’m a professor of literature and the head of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. I’m a literary scholar with research interests, mainly in the relationship between literature and climate change.

Susan Carland: Adeline, welcome to the podcast.

Adeline Johns-Putra: Thank you.

Susan Carland: Tell us what climate fiction is.

Adeline Johns-Putra: Well, climate fiction, as far as I define it, is simply fiction that deals with anthropogenic climate change that is human-made global warming, as we’ve understood it in the past since the middle of last century. And it deals with climate change in any way, whether it’s in its setting or its plot or something its characters deal with. So that’s it, it is fiction about climate change. That’s the way I define it.

Susan Carland: And so does it have overlaps with other genres? Or is it very much a standalone genre?

Adeline Johns-Putra: No, it’s not. And in fact, literary scholars might quibble about the extent to which it’s a genre, and I’ve gotten into that conversation myself. It’s not a genre in that it doesn’t have really strict generic rules. To detective fiction, it’s going to be a whodunnit and you’re not going to know until the end. Romances need to end happily in marriage, that kind of thing. Now, that doesn’t necessarily happen with climate fiction. It just happens to do with climate change. So in one sense, anything could be a climate novel. You could have comedy, and some have attempted to write satires on the way people deal with climate change.

Not very many people do climate romance. And you could have realist novels, which are a great many of them, and of course, science fiction. Because imagining a world in the future or somewhere else, extraterrestrial, affected by climate change in the way ours is, is a major form of climate fiction.

Susan Carland: You mentioned that not many people successfully have managed to write climate fiction that incorporates romance, or is it romantic climate fiction? Why do you think that is? Is it because ultimately, climate fiction, or cli-fi, makes us anxious?

Adeline Johns-Putra: Yes, I think that’s a big part of it. I think romance comes into some of these stories. But I think there are a couple of reasons. Yes, it’s the enormity of the issue. So I’ve said it doesn’t have generic rules, but the pressures of representing climate change and engaging people in the issue will have created, over time, some characteristics.

So I tend to put climate fiction into two broad categories, the ones that project you into a world that is changed by climate change, and of course, romance can happen there. All the realist novels that are set in the here and now in which people grapple with the ethical dilemma of what we are grappling with, the anxieties of climate change.

And of course, anxiety happens in both those types of novels. But does romance happen? Yes, it can. But the enormity of it is yes, you’re dealing with something that creates great emotional angst for us, but you’re also dealing with something that makes human dreams and hopes and ambitions look really very trivial, individual hopes and ambitions.

And that is one of the great challenges of representing climate change, actually saying, “Look, guys, this matters.” And the thing with climate changes and the reason it dwarfs individual hopes and dreams is because it affects the entire planet, every single human being on it. And more than that, every single non-human being. And it’s affecting all of us, human and non-human, into the future.

Susan Carland: Do you think that reading cli-fi can help us deal with or alleviate some of the anxiety or at least process some of the anxiety that we might have about climate change?

Adeline Johns-Putra: Yes. I think it offers an important space. But as I say that, I think I want to add a few provisos. I think that novels that deal with issues of great political and social and even economic impact, like land change, but like the line of protest fiction that you could put climate change in, are issues the novels that have dealt with the plight of enslaved people in the United States, novels that have dealt with women’s rights, novels that have dealt with civil rights.

Shedding light on all of that, and allowing people a voice and allowing people to see that their suffering is shared is important. So just creating a space is really important. And climate anxiety is something that is shared by, as it turns out, the people who can do something about climate change, and that’s the other proviso I want to make. But climate anxiety is important because it can, I think, be galvanised.

You have to be worried about something to act on it. And I think that’s where climate fiction is really useful. So it becomes a space to deal with that anxiety and process it. Because all good fiction becomes a space for thinking through your feelings and thinking through your ideas.

I think where climate anxiety becomes useful is if we make a distinction between what environmentalists call a full stomach and empty belly environmentalism. Those of us with full stomachs can afford to experience climate anxiety, and those of us with empty bellies really have other things to worry about.

And that’s a very real important distinction in climate when it comes to climate change. Because those of us with the full stomachs experience that anxiety, think through these ideas. And we need to then not be paralysed by it and do something with it so that those of us with the empty bellies, have people thinking and worrying and then acting on their behalf. And the best climate novels allow that to happen.

Susan Carland: Does climate fiction inspire change in readers? Does it make them want to take action or actually do things?

Adeline Johns-Putra: I don’t think any single climate text could, and I don’t think climate fiction writers, I don’t think authors want that responsibility. I think authors want to write inspiring stories. They want to inspire. Not necessarily teach us, but inspire us to do good things, possibly.

I think a good writer gets the book out into the world and wants people to do their own thing with it. So no single text can do that. And not even a really important climate fiction text.

And I’m going to look at film now, rather than novels, and The Day After Tomorrow, a really famous climate fiction film. It came out in 2004. And studies were done that showed that actually, when people watched it, once you allowed for differences in demographics and even allowed for… understood the politics of the people who actually went to see the film versus people who didn’t see the film and you weren’t self-selecting.

After all that, 70 per cent would say they were more interested in doing something about climate change and even voting differently versus 50 per cent who hadn’t seen the film. It was those types of figures. So yeah, one text can do something. But the overall findings, and this is a really large-scale project, were that even such a film didn’t have a huge effect. It didn’t reach enough people.

We might think of it as a blockbuster, but actually it wasn’t a blockbuster on the scale of the Star Wars franchise. But I think there’s a cumulative effect. And I mentioned protest fiction earlier. I think that you can let air into a topic and inject more awareness into what I think of as the discursive universe that readers and writers inhabit. And you can’t not notice that climate change is in the texts we read and some of the films we watch and so on more and more.

Susan Carland: A single work probably can’t change the world, and that’s likely a relief for writers, artists and musicians everywhere. What art can do, however, is give everyone a voice. Anna and Louise noticed this in the “Climate Notes” letters.

Anna McMichael: I noticed that a lot of the letters, as Louise said, were quite poetic or artistic in their own way. So it is a moment when people can really contemplate things and also think a bit more open sky about things, which is what the arts can really bring, I think, to the conversation. So allowing people to feel as if their individual voice, they have agency and they really can contribute something, is what we wanted to do as well.

Susan Carland: Louise, do you think it helped people?

Louise Devenish: Well, music and sound are an abstract art form, which means that music has this extraordinary power to contain and convey and communicate things in different ways than words or numbers might be able to, which is what makes music such a wonderful tool for storytelling. And storytelling is such a big part of what makes us human. And telling stories around huge issues like this is how we can start to tackle them and engage with them, I think.

But because music is an abstract art form, it means that as makers, we make something and we know what we’re trying to communicate, we know our feelings, we know what the work means to us. But there is a relinquishing that happens in the performance experience or the exhibition experience where we put this thing out in the world, and how others choose to respond to it or engage with it is really up to them.

And there are thousands of right ways to engage with abstract art like this. So I hope that those people who came to these performances in the exhibition were moved, maybe to reflect on this issue in a different way than they might be if they’re reading a newspaper or a blog about these things. So that’s the hope. The letters suggest that people did feel something and engage in that way, but not everyone chose to write a letter. Others reflect on these things in different ways.

Susan Carland: And that is one of the many gifts of the arts is that you see throughout human history, even the earliest records we have of humans we’ve used art to help process our understanding of what’s happening in the world around us. And this is just another modern example of that, although from what you said, it came at a bit of a cost to you guys cutting your hands while you were putting it together.

But I suppose that’s all good art too. It costs you something. My last question is, do you think your work can be seen as a… Is it a type of therapy for people, for yourselves, for the audience, for the composers?

Anna McMichael: I was interested to see how many people wanted to read other people’s letters as well. That was always obvious that that might happen. But I’ve noticed that people really do engage with all the public letters as well.

Susan Carland: Is this, do you think, us not wanting to feel alone in our feelings?

Anna McMichael: Well, I think so. I think so. And also, people are feeling as if they’ll read someone else’s letters and they have those feelings as well. And it’s not a scientist, and it’s not an expert on the area talking about it. It’s just another person and their thoughts. And actually, the science letters come across in a similar way. They’re not about the data. They’re really, really deep feelings. So I think it allows people to feel they’re not alone.

Susan Carland: It’s almost like reading someone else’s diary. You get that little window into someone’s most intimate emotions that we very rarely actually get. So I imagine it must’ve felt quite a privilege to read those letters. Did it?

Louise Devenish: Yeah, I think so. And there’s something about the fact they’re handwritten as well. With some of them you can make a guess, “Oh, is this a young person writing or an older person writing?” And how does their handwriting reflect them in a different way than the words themselves?

But yeah, I think reading other people’s letters, especially the feelings that are uncomfortable around this issue, feelings not just of anxiety, but maybe a little bit of guilt that we have around whatever, recycling or anything like that.

There’s a feeling of validation that comes with reading another person’s honest letter where they say, “I’m worried about this and this is how I feel about it.” And it allows a reader to feel those same things, which I think is quite nice.

Susan Carland: Louise and Anna, thank you both so much for your time today.

Louise Devenish: Thanks for having us.

Anna McMichael: Thanks, Susan.