It’s all go in adland this week. Following Extinction Rebellion’s open letter to the industry a few weeks back, written by XR members with decades of experience in the ‘power of persuasion’, the agency world of smart-thinking, super-savvy spinmeisters is starting to respond to the thrown-down gauntlet.

The XR letter pulled few punches: “Advertising will increasingly be seen alongside oil and logging as obviously toxic industries and those with the job title ‘creatives’ will soon find themselves rebranded as ‘destroyers’.” Ouch.

They went on to demand that companies: “Declare a climate and ecological emergency and act accordingly”. Everybody’s doing it after all, in fact it’s quite ‘on trend’. Ask Greta. It’s time to panic. Today, it is reported that consumers are set to spend £800 million on 10 million wedding outfits they will wear once.

Carbon disclosure

In light of this challenge the launch of the Creative Climate Disclosure Project is a welcome initiative.

Acknowledging that “creativity has consequences”, that the industry “cannot be neutral” and that there is a real choice to “inspire change or keep serving destruction”, the project seeks to echo the hugely ambitious, influential and successful global Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

This initiative has transformed our understanding of where carbon intensity, responsibility, risk and opportunity lies in the global corporate world. In the same way that enlightened investors use CDP data to potentially divest their portfolios from climate destruction and hold companies to account, the Creative Climate Disclosure Project (CCDP – sorry about the acronyms!) calls for agencies to ‘divest’ their creative services away from ‘those most answerable for causing the climate emergency’. This is all highly laudable.

So who are those “most answerable”? Well, this is where it gets complicated. The CCDP is essentially calling for agency transparency around how much money they make or take from these problematic “high carbon” industry clients (as defined by the IEA and EPA). These include all the usual suspects: fossil fuels, aviation, trucks, cars and shipping, timber, steel and plastics and meat and dairy.

At the extreme end of accountability the CDP’s (bear with me here!) ‘Carbon Majors Report’ highlighted that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of carbon emissions since 1988. So ‘Divest’ away from those and you and your agency can join the rebellion right? Wrong.

Carbon inequality 

Don’t get me wrong – It’s a good thing to avoid working directly for those badboy businesses driving us towards the brink of climatic and ecological Armageddon, of which the fossil fuel majors are just the most obvious.

Taking their dirty dollars should be a source of real shame, but that’s not something we’re likely to see a lot of from BP’s agency WPP.

The awesome ‘Liberate Tate’ movement has pioneered campaigns to get fossil fuel money out of the arts sponsorship world, and ‘Culture Declares Emergency’ has now followed. Plus an ever growing bunch of activist artists, including Oscar winning actor Mark Rylance who recently quit the Royal Shakespeare Company over BP’s funding of it, are also stepping up.

These creative boycotts and ingenious lobbying tactics work. Refuting these businesses public licence to operate, for which their arts funding provides a foundation, is one thing. As is ‘divesting’ your agency from high carbon industry clients. But is it enough? 

The answer is no. The world has what Oxfam describes as ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’ with the richest 10 percent of the world’s population in developed countries responsible for 50 percent of global carbon emissions.

Climate science

Our real challenge is about consumption not population. Whilst the number of humans on the planet also matters, it’s how we all live that really counts.

Generally, the richer we are, the more we consume, the bigger our carbon footprint. It’s a fairly consistent linear relationship. And even amongst the self-proclaimed ‘environmentally-enlightened’ individual impacts are higher than the average, and rise with rising income! 

And this is where, forgive the metaphor, the rubber really hits the road for the creative industries. They’re there to sell. And sell more. Simples. ‘Ah yes, but we can sell the good stuff!’ will say the ethical agencies, ‘we can tell the better stories and sell the more sustainable choices to keep us all on the right side of history and save the world’.

However as the CCDP itself states “agencies must be aligned with the climate science, just like everyone else”. And this is where it gets really tricky…

Without going into the dangerously seductive notion of ‘techno-optimism’ in massive depth here (I’ll leave that to this excellent paper on ‘Prosperous Descent’ by Samuel Alexander), it is now abundantly clear that increases in efficiency of resource use in a continuous economic growth paradigm, and any progress from the relative decoupling of resource use from economic activity, are almost always undermined by rebound effects – direct, indirect and macroeconomic. As per Jevon’s paradox– increased efficiency of use usually increases overall consumption.   

Economic growth

In short so called ‘sustainable growth’ will kill us, because in our existing economic paradigm, mindset and behaviours, efficiency will always be *coughs* ‘Trumped’ by growth.

Overall economic growth wipes out our savings. And this is why the desire industry needs to confront it’s own CGI, VR, augmented interaction, day-glo pachyderm in the room. Extinction Rebellion exploded into the public consciousness on the back of imploring that we all “Tell the truth and act like that truth is real”. 

What does that truth look like for the advertising world? As XR puts it: “One of the reasons we’ve got here is because you’ve been selling things to people that they don’t need. You are the manipulators and architects of that consumerist frenzy.”

Agency reality is currently an ‘at-all-costs’ growth model and a client-service cage of incrementalism on supposed ‘sustainability’.

Marketing budgets exist to boost sales, turnover, deliver growth and profit. Clients don’t brief-in radicalism because they’re often doing very well out of the status quo thank-you-very-much-so-why-change?

That leaves even the most courageous agencies trying to unpick a Gordian Knot – How far to try to push a client’s sustainability ambitions when there are a myriad other equally clever creative competitors out there, who can outgun, out-resource and out-maneuvre you just by being the more ‘realistic’ or ‘less risky’ option for the even vaguely cautious client.

If not quite a race to the bottom, this is at least a constant and ongoing competitive dilution of more radical possibilities. 

This is not a Drill

And after almost two decades in the business I don’t see it changing anywhere near fast enough. Sure we’ve made some great in-roads, perhaps almost proven by the ham-fisted cynical and disingenuous attempts by cynical creatives to hijack genuine concerns, issues and even values by greenwashing, pinkwashing and purposewashing in order to flog more stuff.

But we’re all still basing our work, our value, our very client promise on ‘more’, when everything about our shared challenges is screaming ‘less’.

Climate activist Alex Steffen warns that “winning slowly is the same as losing”. And we’re not even winning slowly at the moment, we’re just slowing the pace at which we’re losing.

This is why XR’s letter isn’t a ‘nudge’. It’s a seismic shock, an electrical jolt, it’s a rocket up where the sun don’t shine. If what needs to be done doesn’t fit within existing commercial realities – then we must change those realities. Fast. Anything else is delusional.

Because this is an emergency. Now eleven years and counting until we deliver (at least) a 40 percent reduction in carbon. And an urgency on biodiversity loss which is even sharper. Every month matters. Every quarter counts. This is not a drill.

Brave or dead

I’m not going to go so far as Bill Hicks went 25 years ago and suggest anyone who works in advertising and marketing should ‘kill themselves’. Although he was right on one point – this industry has merrily spent the last quarter of a century making things a lot lot worse. 

The advertising industry and their clients both need to stand up and be counted right now in a far more soulful and systemic fashion. This is not just about who your clients are and how you pay your bills. This is not just about avoiding high carbon sectors.

This is about the very beast we are all feeding – overconsumption. That is the planet-eating monster we all serve whilst we virtue-signal our way to oblivion. We’re fanning the flames of disaster. The first thing we should do is switch off the fan.

The CCDP’s failure to grasp this, or even mention it, completely and utterly misses and misrepresents the spirit of XR. 

The US marketing guru Seth Godin famously said: “There are increasingly only two kinds of company; brave or dead”. Brave agencies must step up in a way that none has done in the last two decades, but just telling us you’re not working with the ‘nasty’ clients ain’t enough. As consultants ping around the world on millions of flights to advise clients we need to think far more creatively on how we live the change required.

Burning questions

Perhaps agencies need to relocalise? Only serving or accepting clients they don’t have to fly to? Maybe we need further gatekeeper criteria for client selection? Is the client committed to science based targets? Or Fair tax payments (corporate tax avoidance hobbles Government’s ability to address the climate emergency)?

These are the burning questions because we are in totally unchartered territory here, business as usual is not an option, it’s a collective death sentence.

In their letter XR sardonically used the greatest of the advertising industry’s ‘hits’ back at them: Just Do It. Be All You Can Be. Impossible Is Nothing (or ‘shoes’, ‘army’, ‘shoes’ as they say in the studio). Or as David Attenborough put it recently ‘We cannot be radical enough’. 

Above all else what has driven XR is connection. A softly sublime and even spiritual reconnection with nature and one another and the often terrifying reality in which we find ourselves. An ability to recognize the grief so many of us feel at the unwravelling of the web of life around us, and in our lifetimes on our watch, and the unbearable suffering for people and wildlife that results.

We embrace XR to escape the nightmares created by advertising’s hollow dreams. XR’s collective emotional and emergent power stands in stark contrast to the psychological individual manipulation of the advertising industry.

Creative rebelling

What we really need and value and what genuinely makes us happy and gives us meaning in life is not material. It’s social, emotional and environmental. It’s not another slickly packaged and promoted product or service. We are already everything we need. And for the advertising world that is an inconvenient truth. 

XR and advertising are two wildly different worlds colliding. This will not be comfortable for anyone, and the CCDP is a good first step.

But we’re kidding ourselves if we think it is anything but the most basic of baby steps. A toddler when we need adults in the room immediately. To change everything we need everyone doing all they can. We need every concerned creative rebelling with all their heart and soul like all our lives depended on it*. 

*spoiler alert: they do

This Author

Ed Gillespie is the author ‘Only Planet’. Follow him on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook  and Instagram.

Image: Tomm Morton. 

An evaluation of the global energy return on investment for fossil fuels and renewable sources reveals a much more level playing field than previously believed.

An enduring argument for the ongoing use of fossil fuels is their high energy return on energy investment. This refers to the ratio of how much energy a source such as coal or oil will produce compared to how much energy it takes to extract.

Previously, the estimated ratios for energy return on investment (EROI) have favoured fossil fuels over renewable energy sources. Oil, coal and gas are typically calculated to have ratios above 25:1, this means roughly one barrel of oil used yields 25 barrels to put back into the energy economy. Renewable energy sources often have much lower estimated ratios, below 10:1.

Energy cliff

However, these fossil fuel ratios are measured at the extraction stage, when oil, coal or gas is removed from the ground. These ratios do not take into account the energy required to transform oil, coal and gas into finished fuels such as petrol used in cars, or electricity used by households.

A new study, co-authored by scientists from the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, has calculated the EROI for fossil fuels over a 16 year period and found that at the finished fuel stage, the ratios are much closer to those of renewable energy sources – roughly 6:1, and potentially as low as 3:1 in the case of electricity.

The study, undertaken as part of the UK Energy Research Centre programme and published in Nature Energy, warns that the increasing energy costs of extracting fossil fuels will cause the ratios to continue to decline, pushing energy resources towards a “net energy cliff”.

This is when net energy available to society declines rapidly due to the increasing amounts of “parasitical” energy required in the energy production.

The researchers emphasise that these findings make a strong case for rapidly stepping up investment in renewable energy sources and that the renewables transition may actually halt – or reverse – the decline in global EROI at the finished fuel stage.

Crude oil

Study co-author Dr Paul Brockway, an expert in energy-economy modelling at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: “Measuring energy return on investment of fossil fuels at the extraction stage gives the misleading impression that we have plenty of time for a renewable energy transition before energy constraints are a concern.

“Those measurements are essentially predicating the potential energy output of newly-extracted sources like crude oil. But crude oil isn’t used to heat our homes or power our cars. It makes more sense for calculations to consider where energy enters the economy, and that puts us much closer to the precipice.

“The ratios will only continue to decline because we are swiftly reaching the point where all the easily-accessible fossil fuel sources are becoming exhausted. By stepping up investment in renewable energy sources we can help ensure that we don’t tip over the edge.”

Study co-author Dr Lina Brand-Correa, an expert in the social aspects of energy use on the Living Well within Limits (LiLi) project at Leeds said: “There is too much focus on the initial economic costs of transitioning to renewable energy.

“Renewable infrastructure, such as wind farms and solar panels, do require a large initial investment, which is one of the reasons why their energy return on investment ratios have been so low until now.”

Energy policy

Brand-Correa continued: “But the average energy return on investment for all fossil fuels at the finished fuel stage declined by roughly 23 per cent in the 16 year period we considered.

This decline will lead to constraints on the energy available to society in the not-so-distant future, and these constraints might unfold in rapid and unexpected ways.

“Once the renewable infrastructure is built and dependency on fossil fuel decreases, the energy-return-on-investment for renewable sources should go up.

“This must be considered for future policy and energy infrastructure investments decisions, not only to meet climate change mitigation commitments but to ensure society continues to have access to the energy it needs.”

This Author 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the University of Leeds. 

The TUC has published A just transition to a greener, fairer economy – a roadmap to meeting the needs of working people in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The launch event included speakers such as the Shadow Environment Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey and Deputy Chair of the Committee on Climate Change Baroness Brown.

The roadmap sets out proposals for a Just Transition Commission, a cross-party national commission including business, consumers and unions to plan a clear and funded path to a low-carbon economy.

Industrial change

The roadmap also sets out Workplace Transition Agreements, to put workers’ voices at the heart of transition plans in every workplace where change is required; the need for Transition Skills Funding, so that every worker has access to training in the new skills needed for a low carbon economy, and guaranteed pathways to new work; and employment standard protections, to ensure new jobs in the low carbon economy are not of lower quality than jobs that are changed or superseded.

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Trade unions are committed to addressing the climate emergency. A greener economy can be a fairer economy too, with new work and better jobs right across Britain.

“It’s vital to avoid the mistakes of the 1980s, when industrial change devastated communities because workers had no say. This time we need a plan that everyone can get behind, with workers’ voices at the heart of it.

“That’s why we’re calling for politicians, businesses, consumers and unions to make those plans together, through a Just Transition Commission.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from the TUC.

A failure to tackle climate change will bring great “social unrest” and increased pressure from immigration, Sir David Attenborough has warned.

The TV naturalist told MPs that dealing with environmental problems will cost money and will require changes to people’s lifestyles, such as in their diet and with regards to air travel, where the cost of flights will have to go up.

But there are “huge opportunities” for making profits and benefiting from new innovations, he said.

Glacier

The veteran broadcaster was giving evidence to Parliament’s Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee as part of its inquiry into clean growth and international climate change targets.

He said the most vivid example he had witnessed of the changing climate was revisiting the Great Barrier Reef and seeing how it had been bleached because of rising temperatures.

Visiting the Australian landmark in the 1950s, Sir David said he had “the extraordinary experience of diving on the reef and suddenly seeing this multitude of fantastic, beautiful forms of life”.

But upon his return 10 years ago, he said: “Instead of multitudes of wonderful forms of life, I was struck by how it was bleached white because of the rising temperatures and increasing acidity of the seas.”

Sir David also remembers visiting a glacier on South Georgia, in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and then returning decades later to the same spot where the glacier was no longer visible because it had retreated so far.

Lifestyle

When he began making documentaries 50 years ago, he did not believe it was possible people could change the climate and, he said, “I’m not by nature a propagandist”.

But he added: “If you become aware of what is happening to the natural world, you don’t have any alternative.”

Quizzed on whether the UK’s new legal “net zero” target for 2050 or whether calls from campaigners for a 2025 goal were realistic, Sir David said: “The question is what is practically possible, and how can we take the electorate with us in dealing with these problems.

“Dealing with problems means we’ve got to change our lifestyle.”

Inexorably

And while the 93-year-old said the issue was unlikely to affect him, “the problems of the next 20 to 30 years are major problems that are going to cause great social unrest and great changes in what we eat and how we live”.

Sir David warned: “The problem you’re opening now is a very serious one. If the world climate change goes on, it is going to be facing huge problems with immigration.

“Large parts of Africa are going to be even less inhabitable than they are now, and there will be major upsets in the balance between our national boundaries.

“These kind of problems are going to grow inexorably and we are going to have to decide what we do about it, that’s going to happen.”

Futures

He said industry should be encouraged to invest in new technologies for generating, storing and transporting energy, such as batteries, and that he thought progress was being made.

Sir David backed the target to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, which the UK has now set in law, saying it was a “tough target”, but he hoped it could be achieved.

Asked if he was optimistic about the future, he said: “I feel an obligation – the only way you can get up in the morning is to believe we can do something about it, and I think we can.”

He said the growing voice of youngsters on environmental issues was a source of hope, and referring to the young people who had come to the committee hearing to hear him speak, he said: “It’s their futures that are in our hands.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

The government has a “ramshackle, Dad’s Army” approach to making sure England can cope with the impacts of rising temperatures, its own climate advisers warn.

And UK action to slash the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate breakdown is lagging far behind what is needed, even before the Government set a tougher new target to cut pollution to zero overall by 2050.

In its annual progress report to Parliament, the advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said the government had to show it was serious about tackling the problem in the next 12 to 18 months.

Curb

And it warned that action to prepare homes, businesses and the countryside in England for a hotter world is “less ambitious” than it was a decade ago.

The committee assessed 33 areas where the risks of climate change needed to be addressed, from flood resilience of properties to impacts on farmland and supply chains, and found there was no good progress in any of them.

The UK is not prepared for 2C of warming, the level at which countries have pledged to curb temperature rises, let alone a 4C rise which is possible if greenhouse gases are not cut globally, the committee warned.

Committee chairman Lord Deben said: “The whole thing is really run by the government like a Dad’s Army.

“We can’t go on with this ramshackle system, which puts huge pressure on individuals, who are reacting well but the system is not fit for purpose, and doesn’t begin to face the issues.”

Embarrassed

More action is needed to prevent overheating in homes, hospitals and schools as the risk of heatwaves rises, to tackle flash flooding from heavy downpours, cut water consumption and protect soils and wildlife habitats in England.

There has also been little progress on many areas for cutting emissions, and the gap between what is being done and what needs to be done to meet existing targets to curb climate change is growing, the committee warned.

A new UK-wide legal target to cut emissions to “net zero” by 2050, which replaces the existing goal of an 80% reduction, has recently been passed by Parliament.

The Government is also set to host UN climate talks in late 2020, and will be “embarrassed” on the international stage if it has not pushed forward with a raft of policies by then, the committee’s chief executive Chris Stark warned.

He said that when they looked at the plans for dealing with climate change, there was a “tale of two governments”.

Citizens

There was “one government prepared to make the big and bold step to set the net zero target in 2050, and that’s a very welcome step”.

But there was “another government that has not yet increased the policy ambitions to match, and hasn’t got a plan for what the science tells us is coming in terms of the changing climate. This is a ‘get real’ moment for them.”

The government must back its net-zero emissions target with a coherent package of measures, including moving the sales ban on conventional cars forward, improving energy efficiency of homes, and planting trees.

Policies need to be business-friendly, as companies will deliver the net zero target, and ordinary people will need to be engaged with what is happening because many of the changes will affect lifestyles, the committee said.

And Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chairwoman of the CCC’s adaptation Committee, said “Citizens, homes, workplaces and critical infrastructure must be prepared for a future with unavoidable climate impacts.

Aviation

“The effects of climate change are already being felt in the UK.”

A government spokeswoman said: “As the CCC recognises, we are the first major economy to legislate for net zero emissions, have cleaned up our power sector, cut emissions faster than any G7 country while growing the economy, championed adaptation and set a strong example for other countries to follow.

“We know there is more to do and legislating for net zero will help to drive further action.

“We’ll set out plans in the coming months to tackle emissions from aviation, heat, energy, agriculture and transport as well further measures to protect the environment from extreme weather including flood protection and nature restoration.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

Pressure on the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) to drop its BP sponsorship has escalated with 78 leading artists – including Turner Prize winners Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing and Rachel Whiteread – backing a letter calling for an end to the controversial partnership.

The letter urges the NPG’s Director not to renew the contract with BP, to start looking for alternative funding for the Portrait Award and to immediately remove BP’s representative from the award’s judging panel.

The full letter and signatory list can be found here.

Growing controversy

The artists’ intervention is the latest development in the growing controversy around oil sponsorship of culture.

The letter has been spearheaded by artist Gary Hume who, as judge of this year’s BP Portrait Award, decided to speak out publicly against the oil sponsor in June because of his concerns about climate change.

He was joined by eight former winners and nominees of the BP Portrait Award who also voiced their concerns.

This new development comes just over a week after Oscar-winning actor Sir Mark Rylance resigned as an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company over its BP sponsorship deal.

Writing to the Gallery’s Director Nicholas Cullinan on 2 July 2019, the artists point to “BP’s role in furthering the climate crisis, and our collective responsibility to act”, and conclude that “the loss of BP as a source of funding is a cost worth bearing, until the company changes course and enables future generations to make art in a world that resembles our own.”

Social responsibility

One of the signatories, Paul Benney who has painted portraits of the Queen and Mick Jagger, exhibited at eight BP Portrait Awards, been shortlisted twice and won the BP Public Choice award, said: “One of the functions of an artist is to shine a spotlight on society’s inequities and injustices.

“We do this mostly in our work but right now is the time for us to speak out against what and who is contributing to the undeniably critical global climate crisis. I have learnt more about social responsibility from my daughters than from any other source. They have always walked the walk.”

Last month’s announcement of the BP Portrait Award winner at a private reception was delayed when activist theatre group BP or not BP? temporarily blocked entrances to the NPG while artists painted portraits of frontline community activists resisting BP and of several BP bosses. The protest led to VIP guests having to climb over a wall in order to enter the building.

In March, the Gallery rejected a £1 million grant from the Sackler Trust over its ties to Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis in the US, following a recommendation made by the Gallery’s newly created ‘Advisory Ethics Committee’.

On Monday 1st July, artist Nan Goldin led a protest at the Louvre in Paris calling on the museum to rename its ‘Sackler Wing’. In February, Goldin said publicly that she would not go ahead with a retrospective of her work at the NPG if it were to accept the Sackler Trust’s grant. The retrospective is now going ahead.

Ethical fundraising

The Gallery’s BP sponsorship has not faced similar scrutiny by the ethics committee.

In 2017, campaign group Culture Unstained, advised by law firm Leigh Day, submitted a formal complaint to the NPG alleging that a key clause on human rights in the Gallery’s ‘Ethical Fundraising Policy’ had been breached by the decision to renew its BP sponsorship deal.

The Gallery dismissed the complaint, and its Ethical Fundraising Policy was replaced last year with the human rights clause in question removed.

The Royal Opera House (ROH) also continues to come under pressure over its BP sponsorship deal, with members of Extinction Rebellion holding their second protest in a month on 2nd July.

Last month, over two hundred musicians – including percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, tenor Mark Padmore and composer Nigel Osborne – called on Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to withdraw permission for BP branding to be displayed in Trafalgar Square during ‘BP Big Screen’ broadcasts of ROH performances, arguing that it represented an unacceptable form of advertising.

Increasing pressure

BP has sponsored the Portrait Award for thirty years, taking over from the tobacco giant John Player.

The current five-year sponsorship deal was announced by BP in 2016 alongside deals with the British Museum (sponsoring special exhibitions); the Royal Opera House (to continue sponsoring the annual ‘BP Big Screens’) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (where BP currently sponsors ‘BP £5 tickets’ for 16-25 year olds). The oil firm also cut the amount it spends on cultural sponsorship by 25 percent.

All these institutions are now coming under increasing pressure to drop BP, with the British Museum in February facing the biggest protest in its 260-year history, by activist theatre group BP or not BP?, which opposed BP’s sponsorship of the Assyria exhibition and made the links between BP’s activities in modern day Iraq, climate change, war and colonialism.

A major BP-sponsored exhibition – ‘Troy: myth and reality’ – will open at the museum on the 21st November, and activists have vowed to target it. 

This Author

Brendan Montague is the editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Culture Unstained. 

Image: Dr Stephen Pritchard, Twitter. 

The exhibition Trees, 12 July – 10 November 2019, gives voice to numerous artists, botanists, and philosophers who, through their aesthetic or scientific journey, have developed a strong and intimate connection to trees. 

The ensemble of works reveals the beauty and biological wealth of these great protagonists of the living world, threatened today with large-scale deforestation.

Trees boast sensory and memory capacities, as well as communication skills, exist in symbiosis with other species, and exert a climatic influence. They are equipped with unexpected faculties, the discovery of which has given way to the fascinating hypothesis of “plant intelligence,” which could be the answer to many of today’s environmental problems.

Inquisitive exploration

The exhibition Trees merges the ideas of artists and researchers, thus prolonging the exploration of ecological issues and the question of humans’ relationship to nature, which has been a regular theme in the Fondation Cartier’s exhibition program, as was the case recently with The Great Animal Orchestra (2016).

The exhibit features drawings, paintings, photographs, films, and installations by artists from Latin America, Europe, the United States, Iran, and from indigenous communities such as the Nivaclé and Guaraní from Gran Chaco, Paraguay, as well as the Yanomami Indians who live in the heart of the Amazonian forest.

The exhibit explores three main narrative threads. Firstly, our knowledge of trees, from botany to new plant biology; secondly, aesthetics, from naturalistic contemplation to dreamlike transposition; and lastly, trees’ current devastation recounted via documentary observations and pictorial testimonies.

Orchestrated with anthropologist Bruce Albert, who has accompanied the Fondation Cartier’s inquisitive exploration of such themes since the exhibition Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest (2003), the project revolves around a number of individuals who have developed a unique relationship with trees, whether intellectual, scientific or aesthetic.

For example, the botanist Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer of plant neurobiology and advocate of the concept of plant intelligence, has collaborated with Thijs Biersteker to create an installation that “gives voice” to trees, and through a series of sensors, reveals their reaction to the environment and pollution, as well as the phenomenon of photosynthesis, root communication, and the idea of plant memory, thus making the invisible visible.

Science and sensibility

Another of the great figures who has played a role in constructing the exhibition is traveling botanist Francis Hallé, whose notebooks display both the artist’s wonder at trees and the precision of an in-depth knowledge of plants.

His work is a testimony of the encounter between science and sensibility. At the heart of the exhibition lies a reflection on the relationship between humans and trees, which is also the subject of Raymond Depardon’s film.

It paints the portrait of the plane trees and oaks that shade village squares through the words of those who are familiar with them, and to which many memories, ranging from the highly personal to the his- torical, are connected.

Artist and sower, Fabrice Hyber has planted some 300,000 tree seeds in his valley in Vendée, and offers a poetic and personal observation of the plant world in his paintings, questioning the principles of rhizome growth, energy and mutation, mobility and metamorphosis.

Guided more by the aesthetics of an intuitive collection than by a search for scientific rigor, Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini, on the other hand, composes lush landscapes, organizing the imaginary meeting of trees, borrowed from tropical botanical gardens, and the markers of urban modernity.

Pictorial exuberance

The conceptual and systematic inventory elaborated by architect Cesare Leonardi responds to this pictorial exuberance, in collaboration with Franca Stagi. They have produced a typology of trees, in all their shades and chromatic variations, in a precious corpus compiled for the purposes of the design of urban parks.

The ghostly silhouettes of Johanna Calle’s tall trees evoke with poetry and delicacy, the fragility of these giants threatened by irreversible deforestation.

The drama of the destruction of the world’s great forests, conveyed in particular by the film EXIT by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, comes after the dreamlike world of Paraguayan film-makerPaz Encina who offers an internalized image of the tree as a refuge for memory and childhood.

The garden of the Fondation Cartier, a natural extension of the exhibition, was created in 1994 by artist Lothar Baumgarten. The public are invited to stroll through the trees which, like the majestic Lebanese cedar planted by Chateaubriand in 1823, inspired Jean Nouvel to create an architecture of reflections and transparency, playing on the dialogue between inside and outside, and giving rise to “fleeting emotions.”

Nestled in the vegetation, a discreet double of nature, retaining the trace of the artist’s hand on its trunk, Giuseppe Penone’s bronze tree sculpture finds its place in the garden of the Fondation Cartier.

Anthropocentrism 

Also on display is a sculpture by Agnès Varda, specially imagined for this project.

Finally, for a week in the fall, the Theatrum Botanicum will become the natural support of a video installation by Tony Oursler.

This exhibition restores the tree to the place from which it had been stripped by anthropocentrism.

It brings together the testimonies, both artistic and scientific, of those capable of looking at the vegetal world with wonder and who show us, to quote philosopher Emanuele Coccia: “There is nothing purely human, the vegetal exists in all that is human, and the tree is at the origin of all experience.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from Fondation Cartier, Paris. 

Image: Salim Karami, Sans titre, 2009. Courtesy of the Galerie Polysémie, Marseille, France. © Salim Karami.

The guards were carrying pistols and clubs and they looked ready to use them. They were barking out questions to the forestry service official that stood in front of them. What do you want? What are you doing here? Who are your companions?

I was standing a few feet behind the man from the forestry service and the guards kept looking in my direction. One of them had his hand on his gun. 

This is an edited excerpt of Stephen Davis’s new book, Truthteller.

We were on a remote road at the entrance to a mine in Jamari National Forest in the province of Rondonia, Brazil. My companions were forestry officials and I was there carrying out an undercover investigation.

Under cover

I was a member of the Insight team of The Sunday Times and investigating the involvement of governments and corporations in the destruction of the world’s rainforests. We had been tipped off that the oil giant BP owned a mining operation that was damaging the Amazon. 

I’d gotten in contact with Mauro Leonel at IAMA, a non-profit that investigates anthropological and environmental issues. He made contact with a group of forestry officials whose job it was to protect the forest and knew which mine was causing damage— the Santa Barbara mine in the Jamari National Forest, owned by a subsidiary of BP.

Some forestry service men agreed to take me there and try to talk their way in under the guise of an official inspection. Still, local people warned me that even the forestry service was often prevented from investigating the mines; the mining companies had the money, political power, and the guards and guns.

I was dressed as a forestry service official but spoke no Portuguese. At all costs I had to avoid answering questions.

My cover would be blown and if they searched me they would have found my hidden camera and notebook.

Opencast mines

To my surprise, after an initial objection, we were permitted to drive though. Once inside, I was astonished. What had once been lush rainforest had become a moonscape of cratered, opencast mines.

Trees lay felled while others were shriveled and coated in dust. Holes up to 100 feet deep had been dug and large amounts of soil were being dumped haphazardly, silting up one of the main rivers.

No attempt had been made to repair the damage by replacing topsoil or replanting. The forestry official couldn’t believe his eyes. Mauro explained that big companies had determined the region’s public policies for decades.

The country had been run by a military regime from 1964 to 1985, and the 1980s became known in Brazil as the lost decade. Brazil had to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund and the exploitation of natural resources through mining were used to offset the country’s huge debts. 

There was a bitter irony to what was happening to the forest. A multimillion-dollar advertising campaign was underway by those operating these mines to convince their western customers that conservation was their creed. BP was going green.

Burying the truth

Back at the London headquarters of BP, I sat across from an impressive line-up of executives: senior management, public relations personnel, a lawyer, and a geologist. The setup seemed designed to intimidate, six against one.

I had prepared for the meeting, organizing the notes based on what I’d actually seen and discussed with local officials first-hand. On their side of the table, surrounded by employees with impressive sounding titles, stood surveys, maps, studies they had commissioned, and other official-looking legal papers with an alternative interpretation of the facts.

It was a common tactic used by large corporations faced with awkward questions, burying the truth beneath the paperwork.

Since monitoring land use in the wilds of the Amazon was not an exact science, the amount of rainforest that had been destroyed was being disputed. The mining company claimed the total amount directly cleared for opencast mining was 13,500 acres, but a survey commissioned by the World Bank estimated that the damaged area amounted to 220,000 acres.

The executives, when questioned about whether the balance between commerce and conservation was being achieved in their mining operation, replied that they held the legal rights to exploit the area two years before forest protection was established. The argument amounted to this: we were there first and it is up to the Brazilian government to sort out any conflicts.

Consequences

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government reacted to our story. But they didn’t attack the mining company or The Sunday Times.

A letter from Mauro Leonel arrived two months after my story was published, reminding me that serious journalism has consequences —it is never just a story. The forestry service officials were being accused of incompetence by the government. Their jobs were under threat.

Whereas Western media companies will generally defend their journalists, sources on the ground do not have that level of support. When I tried to reach out to the men who had helped me, I got no response.

All I knew when I started the investigation was that BP owned a mine – under the name of an unknown subsidiary – somewhere in the Amazon.

It is highly unlikely that any major media organization would mount such an expensive investigation now based on such scant information.  But the damage is still being done. 

Truth suppression

Much of the blame for the current predicament lies with the increasingly successful use of truth suppression, made easier by our short attention spans. 

In the years after our groundbreaking investigation, the destruction of the rainforest became a major story, but governments and corporations know that if they just wait long enough, the media will move on.

All these years later, deforestation in Brazil is reaching a record high. In 2018, Brazil’s supreme court upheld a law reducing rainforest protections, enabling landowners to reduce the percentage of forested land while allowing cultivation closer to areas particularly subject to erosion.

The Amazon is still essential—and it still needs our help—but as long as it remains old news, money is the only green thing in sight.

This Author 

Stephen Davis worked for The Sunday Times in both London and Los Angeles and was news editor and foreign editor of The Independent on Sunday. He has been a war and foreign correspondent, a TV producer for 60 Minutes and 20/20, and a documentary film maker for the BBC and Discovery. 

Stephen’s latest book, Truthteller: An Investigative Reporter’s Journey Through the World of Truth Prevention, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories is shedding light on news corruption worldwide and is available wherever good books are sold. 

A pair of beavers introduced to a forest in North Yorkshire in a “revolutionary” trial to combat flooding have become parents.

The two kits have been captured on camera, swimming and interacting with their mother, at their home in the Forestry England site at Cropton Forest.

Their parents were moved from Scotland earlier this year as part of the five-year trial to assess how they will interact with man-made dams in the area.

Dams

Cath Bashforth, ecologist at Forestry England, said: “We are all very happy to see the arrival of two healthy kits.

“With beavers being very social animals, the family unit will live together. It is fascinating to watch them explore their surroundings and they are quickly learning from their parents. I’m really looking forward to watching them grow and bond as a family.”

The Eurasian beavers were once native to England but were hunted to extinction in the 16th century.

The mammals can bring huge benefits to people, wildlife and plants by building dams and digging canal systems, creating large areas of water-retaining wetlands, which reduce flooding downstream.

Benefits

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) licensed the original beaver pair to be moved from Scotland to Cropton Forest – where communities have suffered severe flooding in the last 20 years, including a flood in 2007 which caused around £7 million of damage to homes and businesses.

Forestry England described the move as “a revolutionary trial in natural flood management” and said it is hoped that the beavers will maintain existing man-made dams and create their own, potentially reducing the impact of flooding locally.

It is also expected that the beavers’ activity in Cropton Forest will improve biodiversity in their 10-hectare home.

The animals will be monitored throughout the five-year project to assess the benefits they bring to the ecosystem.

This Author

Amy Murphy is a reporter with PA.