Climate scientists have made it clear: we are in a global state of emergency. The International Panel on Climate Change report published late last year was a wake-up call to the world – if we don’t limit warming to 1.5 degrees, 10 million more people will be exposed to flood risk. If we don’t, it will be much, much harder to grow crops and have affordable food. If we don’t, we’ll have more extreme weather, which will undoubtedly impact the most vulnerable. If we don’t, the coral reefs will be almost 100% gone.
And yet… National governments are failing to act with the urgency demanded by our climate crisis. The commitments each country made to reduce emissions under the Paris Agreement won’t get us there – not even close.
How can we make progress in the face of political paralysis?
The answer is local action. Specifically, it’s action at the city-scale that has excited and inspired a plethora of researchers at the Cabot Institute in recent years. Cities are complex places of contradiction – they are where our most significant environmental impacts will be borne out through consumption and emissions, whilst simultaneously being places of inspirational leadership, of rapid change, and of innovation.
City governments across the world are increasingly taking the lead and recognising that radically changing the way our cities are designed and powered is essential to reducing carbon emissions [ref 1; ref 2]. They are standing against national powers to make a change (see for example We Are Still In, a coalition of cities and other non-state actors responding to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement). And they are forming innovative partnerships to galvanise action quickly – both in terms of lowering emissions and planning for adaptation to climate change (see for example C40 Cities or 100 Resilient Cities).
Bristol is among them. It was a combination of grass-roots leadership and City support that led to Bristol being the first and only UK city to be awarded the title of European Green Capital in 2015. In November 2018, Bristol City Council unanimously passed the Council Motion to declare a Climate Emergency in Bristol and pledge to make the city Carbon neutral by 2030. It was the first local government authority to do so in the UK.
Today, the University of Bristol is the first UK university to stand alongside its city and declare a Climate Emergency. Far from being a symbolic gesture, these declarations reflect strong local political will to tackle climate change, and they are backed up by action at all levels of the University – from committing to become a carbon neutral campus by 2030, to making education on sustainable futures available to every student.
What’s clear, and potentially even more exciting, is that Universities and cities have a unique opportunity collaborate to innovate for change in truly meaningful and cutting-edge ways.
Bristol City Council has been working closely with both academics and students at the University of Bristol to explore ways to deliver the highly ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2030. Cabot Institute researchers have also been working alongside the City Office to embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the recently launched One City Plan, which reflects a unique effort to bring together partners from across the public, private and non-profit sectors to collectively define a vision for the city and chart a path towards achieving it. There are many organisations and citizens working to make Bristol more sustainable. The One City Plan is designed to amplify these efforts by improving coordination and encouraging new partnerships.
The good news is that Bristol has already begun reducing its carbon emissions, having cut per capita emissions by 1.76 tonnes since 2010. However, we need to accelerate decarbonisation to avert a crisis and make our contribution to tackling the climate emergency.
We can achieve this in Bristol if we work together in partnership, and we must. We simply cannot wait for our national governments to act. We look forward to standing with our city to meet this challenge together.
Dr Sean Fox, Senior Lecturer in Global Development in the School of Geographical Sciences and City Futures theme lead at Cabot Institute for the Environment.
Hayley Shaw, Manager of Cabot Institute for the Environment.
In 2015, Bristol was the UK’s first European Green Capital. During the year, HEFCE’s Catalyst Fund backed an initiative between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England Bristol to promote student involvement in green activities.
In cities and communities across the world, students form a significant, but often neglected part of the population. Seen as transient, they are easy for cities to ignore. Yet in Bristol they form nearly 10% of the population, offering vision and energy to the city. In a unique collaboration between the two universities in Bristol, student unions, the Bristol City Council and a network of over 800 local organisations, Green Capital: Student Capital was designed to unleash the power of Bristol’s students.
Green Capital: Student Capital initiated, promoted and celebrated student engagement with sustainability across the city region. Much of the work comprised novel initiatives co-created by students with community groups and SMEs such as:
addressing the urgent problem of homelessness in the city
working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help write new business plans, based on which some have secured future funding
helping produce new apps to widen awareness of parks and open spaces
creating business analyses based on which firms have relocated to Bristol.
Green Capital: Student Capital linked students with wildlife conservation groups, local businesses, local community groups, local schools and colleges, student societies, charities and NGOs, healthcare providers and many more local organisations. By creating a vibrant network with community groups, public bodies and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the first year of the project saw students giving over 125,000 hours of their time to sustainability volunteering, placements, internships, and projects. That amounts to over 72 years’ worth of work and over £1.2 million of economic contribution to the city.
Over 7,000 students took part in the first year and hundreds of students have been awarded the Green Capital Change Maker award for their work. This award was specially created for the project and recognises students’ passion and commitment to making a difference in their city.
To ensure that work can continue, both universities have established a joint SkillsBridge platform, which links the community and students. This enables students to find ways to help in the community, and enables the community to find students who are keen to help.
Students themselves have been very positive about the impact upon them. They have learnt skills, gained practical experience and made new connections. It has enhanced the employability of participants and, through the application of their energy and knowledge to resolve sustainability challenges, it has created a community of student Change Makers who will carry forward the positive experiences into their future professional and private lives. It has contributed to change in Bristol and fostered new connections between residents and the universities. Equally importantly, the project has increased students’ sense of belonging, which contributes directly to their wellbeing. This has been particularly important to international students, who took part in disproportionately large numbers (41% of participants) and reported feeling that they belonged and had a much fuller understanding of Britain as they volunteered in communities across the city.
In November 2016, the project was awarded the UK and Ireland Green Gown for Student Engagement. In March 2017, the project won an International Green Gown award against competition from across the globe. The awards recognise exceptional sustainability initiatives in higher and further education institutions. The judges described the winning entry as a dynamic city-wide project with a direct impact on graduate employability.
Top 3 learnings
Working together is essential
The two universities and two unions worked closely together, but in a much broader sense all partners were involved in the process of student engagement, from the external organisations and local authorities to the students themselves.
Ongoing engagement is crucial to a successful legacy.
Bristol’s Green Capital 2015 year provided a fantastic opportunity to showcase the city’s sustainability credentials and to act as a catalyst for sustainability action. But we needed to create lasting change. Right from the outset, the project was designed with its legacy in mind – for Bristol and other cities.
Change is possible.
Green Capital: Student Capital is testament to the success of the European Green Capital 2015 year, to the merit of the HEFCE Catalyst Fund and to the value of the student higher education community as a real force for practical change in our cities.
This blog has been written by Professor Chris Willmore, Professor of Sustainability and Law, University of Bristol; Professor Jim Longhurst, Assistant Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Environmental Science, University of the West of England, Bristol; and Dr William Clayton,
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of the West of England, Bristol.
This Green and Black Conversation involved several members of Bristol’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) community and organisations. It was held in partnership with Bristol Green Capital Partnership (Gary Topp), University of Bristol (Hayley Shaw, Cabot Institute & Kat Wall, Policy Institute) and sponsored by the Cabot Institute whose Director Professor Rich Pancost addressed the group. The campaign has political support from Mayor George Ferguson and also Marvin Rees who attended the forum with European Member of European Parliament Claire Moody. Our new volunteer Helly Dudley, Broadcast Assistant on Ujima’s Old Skool Cruising Show (Monday 4-6) with Roger Griffith who was co-facilitator with Julz attended her first community engagement event and here is her blog.
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The Green and Black Conversation
Arriving at St Werburgh’s community centre I knew I was going to be getting involved in discussions about being ‘Green/Environmental’ and how this is linked to the BME community in Bristol. However, I wasn’t sure what would be discussed, how they would be viewed and spoken about.
From the get-go I realised that this is extremely important to many members of the BME community as there was enthusiasm for living in an environmentally beneficial lifestyle and also a feeling of a lack of support which members of the BME community feel they are receiving from the campaign. Although Bristol is European Green capital, there is a divide occurring within the city and certain communities feel they are being excluded by Bristol European Green Capital from this campaign.
We first looked at the use of language and the ways in which this can be limiting to people of all ages and ethnicities. Not only do language barriers prevent certain communities from getting involved but it also prevents them from knowing how to help and giving them a sense of self-responsibility. When one member of the group declared they didn’t know what ‘buying organic’ meant this created a murmur of agreement throughout the rest of the group as few of us were able to define what ‘organic’ meant. If you, like me, are unsure of the term ‘organic’ then the definition is – ‘(of food or farming methods) produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial chemicals.’
If the Green agenda wants to get all of Bristol’s residents on board to help the environment then they need to change the way in which they portray their methods of being sustainable and as we explored language is just one of those methods.
Another issue raised throughout the day was there was a belief that it was seen as an elitist campaign which directs its messages mainly to a white middle-class demographic. One attendee pointed out that, Gloucester Road is covered with Green campaign posters, Stapleton Road was left untouched. Why is it that the campaign is just aiming their agendas at the central zone of Bristol and neglecting the rest of its communities?
Kat Wall, who works with the University of Bristol and helped set up this discussion, mentioned that she had been to an environmental meeting and was shocked by the lack of BME members present. When she questioned the organiser of the event why this was the case they just replied that they had sent out the necessary invites but no one turned up. When this was put to the rest of the group there was an immediate response that the main reason they don’t attend these events is because they are tired of time and time again going to the same talks and making their input but never actually being heard or have their opinions taken on board.
There seems to be a lack of conversations between communities and those in power. To quote a member of Bristol’s Bus Boycott and activist and former farmer Roy Hackett ‘nobody ever asks me’ so if Bristol City Council and others don’t start listening to the ideas and needs of their own citizens then how are we as tax-paying citizens supposed to be able to get involved . One attendee mentioned that if her house was better insulated then she would be able to use less gas and her bills would decrease and she would be able to find the money to buy organic foods.
How can our city expect to stay regarded as a great city when we are cutting out members of our society from joining this campaign and others? We need to change our way of approaching the environmental issues and instead of forcing change onto communities we need to ask the residences of Bristol what they need for change.
We need to carry on having these discussions with each other, and those in power on what the people need in all communities not just the city centre. With the United Nations COP21 meeting taking place over the next 10 days in Paris, discussing climate change we need to now, more than ever, change our way of approaching this subject; and this can be done by including all members of our communities and tackling environmental issues together.
I really enjoyed attending this event and, by the enthusiasm and energy in the room, so did the other participants I believe that it was a conversation that was desperately needed so communities understand that this isn’t just an environmental issue but a social one that needs tackling. It is essential we work together and listen to one another to create new ideas of how to better enhance Bristol’s sustainability.
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This event took place at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol on 30 November 2015.
This blog was written by Helly Dudley, follow on Twitter @helena_dudley
Follow @ujimaradio.com @julzbrizzle and Roger Griffith @rogerg44.
The Green and Black initiative is a campaign ran by Ujima Radio to raise awareness within the Black & Minority Ethnic (BME) community about the environment and includes Bristol European Green Capital 2015 and beyond. The campaign has been led by Ujima presenter Julz Davis AKA Mistri and has included live broadcasts, debates, featured radio shows and ideas and brings people from marginalised communities into the discussions. This can include cooking tips, exercise and health, climate change across the African and Asian diaspora or heavy air-pollution from the M32 corridor that divides St Pauls and Easton.
Read more about how the Cabot Institute is working with the BME communities around the legacy of the European Green Capital year – see project Green and Black- An alternative green capital.
In the run up to the Bristol Post’s Green Capital Awards, we thought we’d highlight some of our key Green Heroes and Green Leaders at the University of Bristol. As part of a four part blog series this week, we will be highlighting some of the key figures behind the scenes and in front of the limelight who are the green movers and shakers of our university. There are many more Green Heroes across the University that we would like to celebrate. To find out more about who they are and what they are doing to make our university and city a better place, please visit our Sustainability Stories website.
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Rich Pancost
With a background in Geology, Rich has steered his academic progress through a career straddling a range of disciplines from oceanography to isotope geochemistry, but all of which has been focused on understanding environmental change and its impact on life.
Rich has now been based in Bristol for the last 15 years and became Cabot Institute Director in 2013. The Cabot Institute engages interdisciplinary approaches to address the major environmental challenges of the 21st century. Rich’s work within the Institute has incorporated an assortment of current topics relating to how we live on the planet including natural hazards, climate change and food security.
One of Rich’s primary goals for the institute is to stimulate a dialogue between contrasting academic communities, particularly between the social and physical sciences, in combination with communication between the university and the city of Bristol. His modern vision of progress comprises a union of thoughts and ideas as he explains: “There are very few Newtons, Keplers and Darwins. I think that relatively few breakthroughs in the next century will be because of some genius sitting in a room by themself. Ultimately, those who come up with exciting new ideas will do so because they have been exposed to a cocktail of different interactions and stimuli, that will challenge us to think in very different ways.”
Under Rich’s direction, the Cabot Institute is trying to link up academics to create new communities within the university that can reach out into the public. It is this process that Rich identifies as a fundamental issue for our community to overcome: “The biggest challenge facing our city is inclusion and this is also true of Bristol 2015. We need to show how this is relevant to everyone’s lives; it is about carrying everyone along for the journey”. Additionally, he believes in maintaining the long term benefits of Bristol 2015:
“Being Green Capital isn’t a one year thing- it’s a long term legacy. We will always be the UK’s first Green Capital and that will always carry obligations and opportunities.”
This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
If you would like to nominate your Green Hero or Green Leader in the upcoming Bristol Post Green Capital Awards, please visit the official Green Capital Awards website. Entries close on 18 September 2015.
To learn more about the University of Bristol’s activities and commitments during the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital.
In the run up to the Bristol Post’s Green Capital Awards, we thought we’d highlight some of our key Green Heroes and Green Leaders at the University of Bristol. As part of a four part blog series this week, we will be highlighting some of the key figures behind the scenes and in front of the limelight who are the green movers and shakers of our university. There are many more Green Heroes across the University that we would like to celebrate. To find out more about who they are and what they are doing, please visit our Sustainability Stories website.
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Martin Wiles
Martin Wiles is the head of Sustainability on the University Estate Management team and leads a team of thirteen staff who have been responsible for delivering university-wide sustainability initiatives.
Martin and his team are responsible for designing and implementing green solutions to the University’s energy problems. This has lead them to an array of successes, including reducing CO2 emissions by 2000 tonnes, despite a growth in the University estate and population , through the carbon management plan. Martin and his team have accomplished this largely by the installation of carbon combined heat and power and solar photovoltaics.
Despite this achievement, Martin’s work has not been limited to CO2 reduction; the University now recycles over 80% of its domestic and construction wastes. Additionally, he has made headway in sustainable transport solutions, procurement and construction.
As well as solving practical issues in the University’s sustainability aims, Martin has been closely engaged with the student population, through a food cooperative, cycle schemes and student conferences.
Martin attributes his green-mindedness to a geography lesson in 1980; “we were looking at de-forestation in the Amazon, couldn’t believe what was happening!”. After years of hard work to bring the university this far, his task is far from over as he elaborates; “Making the University sustainable is a long term project, the challenge is to keep everyone engaged with the agenda and taking sustainable actions, the end of 2015 Green Capital year is not the end of our sustainable work”.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
If you would like to nominate your Green Hero or Green Leader in the upcoming Bristol Post Green Capital Awards, please visit the official Green Capital Awards website. Entries close on 18 September 2015.
To learn more about the University of Bristol’s activities and commitments during the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital.
In the run up to the Bristol Post’s Green Capital Awards, we thought we’d highlight some of our key Green Heroes and Green Leaders at the University of Bristol. As part of a four part blog series this week, we will be highlighting some of the key figures behind the scenes and in front of the limelight who are the green movers and shakers of our university. There are many more Green Heroes across the University that we would like to celebrate. To find out more about who they are and what they are doing, please visit our Sustainability Stories website.
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Katherine Baldock
Katherine is a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences and at the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.
Katherine has come from a background in Biology, studying in Bristol as an undergraduate. Her subsequent passion for biology and ecology has drawn her to study at various institutions and work all over the world in places such as Costa Rica and Kenya.
Her academic work is focussed on the networks of interactions between plants and their pollinators, particularly in urban environments. Her research objectives aim to improve the value of UK urban areas for insect pollinators; research which hopes to positively impact insects that are essential for maintaining a functioning ecosystem and subsequently our food supplies. Her current role requires her to liaise with policymakers, practitioners and conservation charities to ensure an effective link between research and policy. Her work is essential to Bristol as well as cities across the UK and has resulted in government action, as she elaborates: “The government have published a National Pollinator Strategy and a partnership of organisations has created a local Greater Bristol Pollinator Strategy so that we can promote action for pollinators across the whole city”.
Her work is more than just a job, Katherine is passionate about the research she does and the effects it has on our cities as she explains: “If everyone plays a part and creates a little bit of habitat for bees and other pollinating insects in their own gardens, allotments or window boxes we could really make a difference. I’m passionate about preserving nature, not just for nature’s sake but also because it is incredibly important for our health and wellbeing and provides us with so many essential services – from crop pollination to carbon sequestration to water purification.”
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
If you would like to nominate your Green Hero or Green Leader in the upcoming Bristol Post Green Capital Awards, please visit the official Green Capital Awards website. Entries close on 18 September 2015.
To learn more about the University of Bristol’s activities during the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital.
In the run up to the Bristol Post’s Green Capital Awards, we thought we’d highlight some of our key Green Heroes and Green Leaders at the University of Bristol. As part of a four part blog series this week, we will be highlighting some of the key figures behind the scenes and in front of the limelight who are the green movers and shakers of our university. There are many more Green Heroes across the University that we would like to celebrate. To find out more about who they are and what they are doing, please visit our Sustainability Stories website.
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Chris Willmore is the University of Bristol’s Green Academy academic lead, Director of Undergraduate Studies and lead academic for Technology Enhanced Learning.
Growing up in increasingly over-developed London, Chris has since fostered a passion for saving open spaces and built environments. After an early career as a barrister practising environmental and planning law, Chris decided to move back into academia; “being a barrister you tend to get involved in problems when things have gone wrong. I wanted to help prevent problems” she explains.
The transition to academia lead Chris to a position in the university’s Law school. In this time, Chris has used her role to introduce a number of schemes to help educate and encourage students to be involved in green issues. This includes introducing an award-winning interdisciplinary course termed ‘Sustainable Development’. The motivation for the course was inspire students to expand their thoughts on how sustainability is an issue for all, as Chris explains: “the whole aim was to offer students an opportunity to understand sustainable development as a holistic issue – and to see how different disciplines bring different things to the challenges”.
Her work isn’t confined to taught courses, over the last few years Chris has worked with the University’s students union to engage students in informal extra curricular activities such as the ‘switch off campaign’. In her words, this was key for “thinking about how students could change this city – after all they are 10% of the city’s population between the two universities”.
This work has drawn Chris away from pure law issues and into engaging the broader student population, through sustainable volunteering schemes. Chris is also part of a pioneering committee that aims to determine the best sustainable future for the university termed the ‘Green Academy team’. Chris explains why this team, which was formed off the back of Higher Education Academy Initiative, has been such a success: “our low cost, networked approach has attracted a lot of interest as an alternative to top down resource intensive approaches”.
Her ambitions aren’t just for a ‘quick fix’ either – Chris has long term goals for her work with the student population; “Our biggest environmental impact as a university is the thousands of students who graduate each year with a lifetime of footprint ahead of them. We need to skill them to be able to make wise choices”.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
If you would like to nominate your Green Hero or Green Leader in the upcoming Bristol Post Green Capital Awards, please visit the official Green Capital Awards website. Entries close on 18 September 2015.
To learn more about the University of Bristol’s activities during the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital.
On the 23rd of August, and as part of Bristol 2015 European Green Capital, I have the privilege of participating in a conversation about the future of our coastal seas that has been inspired by Luke Jerram’s ethereal and evocative Withdrawn Project in Leigh Woods. The conversation will include Luke, but also the esteemed chef, Josh Eggleton who has championed sustainable food provision and is providing a sustainable fish supper for the event, and my University of Bristol Cabot Institute colleague, Dani Schmidt, who is an expert on the past and current impacts of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems.
My engagement with Withdrawn has been inspired on multiple levels, primarily the enthusiasm of Luke but also arising from my role as Cabot Director and my own research on the oceans. Withdrawn inspires reflection on our dependence on the sea and how we have polluted and depleted it, but also on how we obtain our food and the people at the heart of that industry.
All of these issues are particularly acute for our island nation, ringed by nearly 20,000 kilometres of coastline and culturally and economically dependent on the sea. Beyond our own nation, over 2.6 billion people need the oceans for their dietary protein, a point driven home when I interviewed Sir David Attenborough on behalf of Cabot (see video below). He passionately referred to the oceans as one of our most vital natural resources. And of course, as Withdrawn reminds us, the oceans have vast cultural and spiritual value. It also reminds us that those oceans and those resources are at profound risk.
I’ve spent over 25 years studying our planet and its oceans. However, my first ocean research expedition did not occur until 1999, and it was a profoundly eye-opening experience. We were exploring the deep sea communities fuelled by methane extruded from the Mediterranean seafloor. Isolated from light, the ocean floor is a largely barren world, but in parts of the Mediterranean it is interrupted by explosions of colourful life, including tubeworms, bacterial colonies, fields of molluscs and strange and lonely fish, all thriving in exotic mountains of carbonate crusts cut by saline rivers. These are vibrant ecosystems but so far removed from the surface world and light that they instead depend on chemical energy sourced from deep below the bottom of the ocean. And even here we found human detritus, plastic and cans and bottles.
Those were powerful observations, in large part because of their symbolism: our influence on the oceans is pervasive and quite often in ways that are challenging to fully comprehend and often invisible to the eye. These include, for example:
The potentially devastating impact of plastic on marine ecosystems, including plastic nanoparticles that are now, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous. Of course, pollutants are not limited to plastic – our lab now identifies petroleum-derived hydrocarbons in nearly every ocean sediment we analyse.
Ocean warming. A vast amount of the energy that has been trapped in the Earth system by higher greenhouse gas concentrations has been absorbed by the oceans. Its impact on marine life is only beginning to be documented, but it has been invoked, for example, as an explanation for declines in North Sea fisheries.
And these represent only a few of the chemical and environmental changes we are making to the marine realm. They do not even begin to address the numerous issues associated with our over-exploitation and poor management of our marine resources.
Compounded, these factors pose great risk to the oceans but also to all of us dependent on them. As Cabot Institute Director, I engage with an inspiringly diverse range of environmental scientists, social scientist, engineers, doctors and vets. And in those conversations, of all the human needs at threat due to environmental change, it is water and food that concern me the most. And of these, our food provision seems the most wildly unpredictable. The synergistic impact of warmer temperatures, more acidic waters, and more silt-choked coastal waters on a single shellfish species, let alone complex ecosystems such as coral reefs or North Sea food webs, is very difficult to predict. This uncertainty becomes even more pronounced if we factor in nutrient runoff from poorly managed land, eutrophication and ocean anoxia leading to more widespread ‘dead zones’. Or the impact of plastic, hydrocarbon, and anti-biofouling pollutants. The ghost ships of Withdrawn quietly tell the story of how our increased demand and poor management have led to overexploitation of fish stocks, causing an industry to face increasing uncertainty. But they also invoke deeper anxieties about how environmental change and pollution of our seas could devastate our food supply.
But Withdrawn, like other Bristol Green Capital Arts projects and like all inspiring art, does not telegraph a simple message. It does not shout to ‘bring back local fisherman’ or ‘save our oceans’. These messages are present but subtly so, and for that both Luke and the National Trust should be celebrated. The boats themselves are captivating and draw you into the fisherman’s efforts; they acknowledge our dependence on the ocean and that we must continue to exploit it. To others they are suggestive of some past catastrophe, a tsunami that has somehow deposited fishing boats in a wildly unanticipated place. And yet to others, they suggest the changing character of seas, seas that once stood 100 m higher than they do today and which almost certainly will do so again if all of our coal and oil is burned into carbon dioxide.
Withdrawn is about all of those things. And consequently, at its deepest level, I think Withdrawn is about change.
Ammonite by Alex Lucas as part of Cabot Institute’s Uncertain World art project.
Geologists have a rather philosophical engagement with the concept of change – on long enough timescales, change is not the exception but the defining character of our planet and life. I should clarify that the aforementioned Mediterranean expedition was my first proper research excursion to the modern seas, but it came long after numerous visits to ancient ones. In 1993, my PhD co-supervisor Mike Arthur took a group of us to Colorado where we collected samples from sedimentary rocks that had been deposited in the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway 90 million year ago, a Seaway from a hotter, ice-free world, in which higher oceans had invaded a downflexed central North American basin. That might not seem like a proper marine experience but to a geologist you can reconstruct an ocean in startling clarity from the bold clues preserved in the rock: current flows that tell you the shape of the coastline; fossils that reveal the ecosystem, from cyanobacterial mats on the seafloor to inoceramids and ammonites to great marine reptiles in the waters above; and the rocks themselves that reveal a shallow sea in which limestone was deposited across a great platform.
But it was only like this at some times. The fascinating aspect of these rocks is the complex pattern of sedimentation – from limestones to shales and back again – limestones that were much like the lime cliffs of Lyme Regis, switching in a geological blink of the eye to oil shales similar to those in Kimmeridge Bay, from which, further North and at greater depths and pressures, North Sea oils derive. Limestone. Shale. Limestone. Shale. A pattern repeated hundreds of times. In the Western Interior Seaway. Along the Jurassic Coast. Across the globe, from the Tarfaya, Vocontian and Maracaibo basins to the Hatteras Abyss, from Cape Verde to the Levant Platform. Cycles and cycles of astonishingly different rock types – all bundled up in patterns suggesting they were modulated by the ever changing character of Earth’s orbit. These cycles are change, from a sea with clear waters, little algal growth and ringed with reefs to one fed with nutrients and gorged with algal blooms and stripped of oxygen.
Change is a necessary and inevitable feature of our planet. And of the human condition.
But we seem incapable of resisting the urge to impose a value judgment for or against change. It is either viewed as a technocratic marvel to be celebrated or a violation against the natural state of the world and to be resisted. But often, change is conflated with loss. And there is something of loss in Withdrawn. These are the ‘Ghost Ships’ of Leigh Woods. Ghosts of a way of life that no longer exists. Ghosts of the animals these boats once hunted. Ghosts of some past and inexplicable event.
Of course, change will always be about progress vs loss, its value neither solely good nor bad but nonetheless inevitable. But just because a geologist recognises the inevitability of change does not mean he thinks we should be passive to it. Change will come but should be managed, a significant challenge given its rapid pace over the past 150 years. In fact, one of the main observations of Dani Schmidt’s research is that our current rate of environmental change appears to be essentially unprecedented in Earth history, let alone human experience.
My hope is that Withdrawn has caused people to engage with the concept of change. How do we manage change in the 21st century? How do we recognise those things that can and should be let go. As one visitor said, ‘We want to resist romanticising the past.’ Conversely, how do we decide what change must be moderated, because its cost is too high? We can reduce our plastic consumption and waste, and we can enforce more rigorous regulations to stop the pollution of our planet – and we should. More complicated questions arise from how we manage our dependencies on these precious marine resources, but it is clear that we can eat fish more sustainably, and chefs like Josh Eggleton are showing the way. We can create marine reserves that will not only conserve species but serve as biodiversity hotspots benefitting all of the oceans.
Perhaps most importantly, how do we recognise those things that must be preserved? When I see the ghost ships of Withdrawn, I feel the poignant loss of our connection with nature and our connection with what it provides. Our food is now produced far away, delivered to sterile supermarkets via ships, trains and lorries; maybe that is necessary on a planet of over 7 billion people but if so, we must strive to preserve our connection to the sea – to our whole planet – understanding what it provides and understanding its limits.
The final Withdrawn talk at Leigh Woods will be taking place on 23 August 2015 and will feature Cabot Institute scientists, Luke Jerram and chef Josh Eggeleton who will be cooking up a sustainable fish and chip supper for attendees. This event is sold out.
