In her book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), Naomi Klein argues that climate change denial isn’t just about rejecting science, but that it’s deeply tied to the capitalist ideology we live within. She critiques the role of corporate media in downplaying the urgency of climate change, spreading misinformation, and pushing a ‘soft denialism’ onto us, whereby climate change is acknowledged but weak, market-driven solutions are thrust upon us in the place of real change (think, for example, of carbon offset schemes). Despite being written over ten years ago, this is more relevant than ever, with committed climate change deniers Elon Musk and Donald Trump now at the helm of one of the most powerful countries in the world. If we are lulled into a state of learned helplessness, what future do we have on this planet?
Inside Out Pendle was a day of activity on 18 November 2024 to start conversations around these questions. Run by In-Situ, an embedded arts organisation based in Pendle with a mission for social change and a non-hierarchical ethos, the day was a collaboration with climate educator Tom Deacon and artist collective The People Speak. It was held as part of Climate Lab Pendle, an intergenerational and intercultural programme of community education and collective action promoting social and climate justice created by In-Situ. Inside Out Pendle set out to ‘hold space for people to come together, to learn and also share and process their feelings about climate change’.
Attended by one hundred local secondary school pupils, teachers and local council representatives, there was a mix of emotions at the start of the day. Some of us nervously gathered around the coffee urn, whereas others, mostly the teachers, commanded respect across the room. There were two types of teenagers present: those that largely avoided eye contact, opting to stare at the ground or bite their nails for a while, and those full of exuberance, recording tik tok dances on their phones. When the event began, we all sat at our allocated seats around group tables, each with a mix of high schoolers, teachers, local residents, business leaders and council staff.
The Inside Out team used two vastly differing approaches to achieve their goal of getting everyone talking. The first was a game made up of forty-four cards called Climate Fresks, named after the French non-profit organisation whose aim is to raise awareness about the climate crisis. It was originally developed by a University Professor, Cédric Ringenbach, to teach his students about the causes and effects of climate change. It was produced to make the hefty reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change simple, cutting out the report’s main graphics and organising the content on small cards. When developing the game-like activity, this professor asked students to sort the facts and findings into cause and effect. This has now developed into an open-source activity, a website full of resources to help people play the game around the world, that takes groups on a journey starting with basic human activities like building and eating, expanding out into broader areas like fossil fuels and biohacking. The game slowly unfolds to create a picture of where we’re at with the climate, as well as where we’re heading. At Inside Out, each table had a trained Climate Fresk facilitator to help encourage engagement with the cards, with climate educator Tom Deacon leading.
The second approach was the locally legendary Talkaoke – a pop-up talkshow led by artist-collective The People Speak, a group of international artists, cultural producers, science communicators and activists. Participants sit around the outside of the table, donning silly hats, wigs or other paraphernalia. They take the microphone whenever they want to talk, coming and going as they please. The table has built-in speakers to amplify the conversation, as well as funky lights and video recording equipment to really amp up the drama of the experience. The grown-ups dominated the conversation at my table a little, with dismay at the housing crisis and discussion of how proper insulation would help reduce carbon, stop us from breathing in toxic mould and keep our bills down. While this was largely received by the younger folks’ disinterest, it was in the Talkaoke that the teens’ unfiltered opinions and imaginations became unleashed. Topics ranged from Taylor Swift to the military, wind farms to mars and everything in between.
As well as hosting the Talkaoke, The People Speak also led some other fun games and activities across the day. One was a regular ‘temperature check in’, whereby the audience lifted a coloured card to represent how they were feeling, each colour representing a different emotion, including blue for mourning, yellow for hope and pink for anger. The colours lifted were recorded in what the collective called ‘emotion maps’, visually mapping the room’s feelings across the day. They also created digital collages to represent the crazy directions the conversations in the Talkaoke journeyed to, such as the image below, which I find remarkably harrowing – the way the whole world is in just two hands pulling the strings.
The Climate Fresk card depicting war was one which I knew had to come up but anticipated with dread. Though it feels grotesque to call it such, it told us that the ‘industry’ of war – the production of weapons as well as acts of war – is one of the most carbon-heavy human activities. According to research from the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) it is responsible for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that if militaries were countries, they would be among the largest emitters of carbon globally. A huge discussion on our table, however, was about how these statistics may be out of date since Israel’s siege of Gaza. In addition to the mass murder and destruction, it was reported by EuroNews in summer last year that the siege was responsible for releasing around six hundred thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) so far. That is equivalent to burning more than 1.5 million barrels of oil, and exceeds the annual emissions of 135 individual nations.
Another point of discussion was that even separate from the carbon emitted from war itself, the jets and the dropping of bombs were other aspects to consider. The World Bank and UN reported that just the first four months of the siege destroyed up to 66% of Gaza’s buildings, half of the territory’s trees, and killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. This destruction of life obviously has a colossal negative impact on the planet, on a human level but also ecologically. Trees and greenery are hugely efficient cleaners of the air, not to mention the carbon that will be needed to rebuild all the (already carbon heavy) buildings which have now been destroyed.
Remarkably, nation states have no responsibility to report the carbon emissions from war to the UN. With ‘free Palestine’ scribbled onto our group’s notes, it became clear to our table that activism against military action, or the hands pulling the strings in the image above, was also one of the most important aspects of reducing climate change.
One of my favourite visual representations from the Talkaoke conversations was an image which shows the world’s top 1% of wealth-holders colonizing Mars, while earth and the 99% are left to burn. This was a topic discussed primarily by the young people present. Both distressing and satirical, it shows some really profound class consciousness, contrary to the indifference or helplessness that Klein warns about.
In the Climate Fresk activity, Pendle’s Climate Lab shared statistics drawn from a 2023 report by Oxfam on Climate Equality, that to be included in the world’s top 10% of richest people, you have to earn £32,000 per year, which is a harrowing revelation considering it’s not that far off the UK’s national average household income. He then told us that to climb from the richest 10% to richest 1% of earners, the amount one has to earn skyrockets. This demonstrates the global wealth gap and inequality, which directly translates to climate injustice, with the richest 1% of people being responsible for a whopping 16% of all carbon emissions, according to Oxfam.
Zooming in from a global to a local perspective, the same inequalities apply. Nelson is reported to be one of the country’s most deprived areas, with a higher than average percentage of the area falling within what the UK Government calls ‘Living Environment Deprivation’. This is defined by two measures of indoor and outdoor living: the quality of housing available to live in, and the air quality outside. On our table, we spoke about the heavy traffic on the nearby M6, cement factories and landfill sites and the negative effects that these have on the air and the environment and how, if you have money, you can simply choose not to live near such a place.
What became apparent is that climate injustice is just as big an issue in the UK as it is globally, and this image shows that our young people know exactly who to direct their anger at.
Another striking conversation topic was food security, the globalised food network and veganism. In the Climate Fresk activity, we learnt that cows were a large contributor to methane emissions, and how the meat industry in general is a huge contributor to global warming. In the face of such grim facts, veganism is often heralded as the way forward. In classic British kitsch aesthetic, however, the chicken shop image visualizes the complicated nuances of any one-size-fits-all solution.
The chicken shop is a true staple of any working class, British town, especially those with ethnic minorities. Oldham has a whole street dedicated to them, and chains like Dixie Chicken are as popular in Nelson as they are in New Cross, London. Up and down the country, young people everywhere flock to them after school. While this is not without its concerns, for both health and climate reasons, this discourse can often slip into racist rhetoric. Arguments for veganism, or the clean eating movement for example, are largely heralded by a white middle class, with respectability politics discrediting other ways of being.
The 2021 UK Food Security Report issued by the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that 93% of white households across the country were classified as ‘food secure’, which is defined as having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. That number drops for households of other ethnicities, as well as when the statistics are looked at regionally rather than nationally. In this case, the North West was one of the lowest scorers. In the height of the cost of living epidemic, when over 3 million people were reported to have had to use food banks in 2024, vilifying meat even when it’s a reliable source of quick, cheap and easy food, becomes more complex.
Although a lot of the phrases on the image seem to be sarcastic (100% real vegan chicken?!), I appreciate the nod to locally grown produce: ‘not made from imported potatoes’. There were some Fresk cards that considered the globalised agri-food network – that is, the vast quantities of fruit and vegetables grown on the other side of the world which end up on our plates. From the effects of monocropping on the soil, to the carbon used to transport them, and everything in between, this industry is another huge contributor to global warming. This again brings up similar concerns regarding food security – the costs of imported fruit and veg are able to remain dirt cheap due to lower wages than big farm corporations can get away with in the UK (though some may try!), but it showed me that the young people of Pendle are decidedly pro food sovereignty. While food security refers to our access to food, food sovereignty refers to having control over how our food is produced. Dependency on global supply chains make us more vulnerable to crises like pandemics, conflicts, and economic shocks, as well as being integrally carbon heavy and involving unethical working environments. Locally grown food systems reduce our reliance on imports and strengthen regional self-sufficiency. Could the future of the chicken shop, we asked, one day include veggies grown down the road?
It feels appropriate to return to the original goal set by the Inside Out Pendle project, on holding space for people to come together, to learn, share and process their feelings about climate change. Through a playful and interdisciplinary mix of fact and creativity, it seems that they achieved it. I would be cautious of one without the other – facts threatening to overwhelm or bore, and creativity able to slip into blind optimism. The mix of both however, allowed people to explore issues and feelings on climate with one foot firmly grounded in scientific fact. As author and theorist Adrienne Marie Brown states in her book Emergent Strategies (2017), we have the gift and responsibility to imagine. At Inside Out Pendle, this gift was nurtured for the day.
Inside Out Pendle was organised by In-Situ and held at Colne Municipal Hall on 18 November 2024.
Jessica El Mal is British Moroccan writer, curator and artist based. She currently curates for The Arab British Centre, is the founder of A.MAL Projects and is a current PhD candidate at University of Leeds.
This exploration is supported by In-Situ.
Published 04.04.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
2,227 words
