Special Edition: Creative Responses to the Climate Crisis

In 1968, astronauts on the Apollo 8 spaceship took a photograph of the Earth. Combined with ubiquitous recycling symbols and tree icons, Earthrise has become the defining symbol of the climate movement.

But it's also become a tired symbol, and perhaps even a token of corporate inaction, slow conferences, and an environmentalism that often leaves people, politics and justice behind. What are the images, stories, sounds, and performances that we get more from?

Visible Signs That Something Isn’t Right is a collection of creative responses to the climate emergency, published by the team behind It’s Freezing in LA!  magazine with Open Practice. Mixing creative writing, images and essays, this new publication explores how different types of imaginative work can grapple with the ecological, justice and political challenges we face.

• Short stories about rampaging tigers and poisoned water by writers Lucy Zhang and Samantha Cheh, intricate drawings of ecosystems by Mogaje Guihu and a re-imagined world map by Michelle Kuen Suet Fung.
• Perspectives on the interactions between neurodiversity, creative work and ecology from poet Elspeth Wilson, embroiderer Tzipporah Johnston and poet Jane Burn.
• Essays by archivist Gail Tasker on field recordings, journalist Daniel Milroy Maher on photography, designer Anoushka Khandwala on the iconography of ‘natural’ disasters and academic Adrian Holme on plastics.
• Testimonies about greening the theatre creative process by director Eleanor Warr, and on creating green imagery by artist Fungai Marima.