Oiled bird, Brazil Photo: Credit: D Rodrigues / UNEP / Still Pictures
Hard Rain
Out arts editor, Rowena Loverance, reviews an exhibition which drives home the need to act
We learn a lot about big environmental disasters but we may overlook the pollution we ourselves cause. Lights left on in empty rooms, car journeys that could have been cycle rides, heat pouring out of badly insulated homes, shopping taken home in single-use plastic bags. Our small acts of pollution lack the awful drama of the oil spill that trapped this bird but, taken together, they are far more destructive to the planet. Ten times more oil reaches the seas from car owners pouring old engine oil down drains than from oil tanker disasters like this one off the coast of Brazil that polluted miles of coastline and killed thousands of seabirds.
Think back to when you first saw that famous image taken by the Apollo astronauts of the earth seen from space. What did you think? What did you feel? What did you do? Photographer Mark Edwards was in the Sahara desert at the time, photographing Tuareg nomads; so the link between fragility and sustainability struck him particularly strongly.
He made another connection, to the sixties anthem for our threatened planet, Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. He decided to use his and colleagues’ photographs to illustrate each line of the song. The result, the exhibition Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature, is now being shown around the world.
See it if you can. Check out the website. Buy the DVD. Use it in worship – I saw it with about 400 others in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, so felt its impact in a large group. The photographs are displayed outside on the church railings for twenty-four-hour viewing. They will be shown in Copenhagen throughout the UN Climate Change conference.
Why is this conjunction of music and photos so effective? Even at their most harrowing, the photographs are still beautiful. A man carries his naked and dying wife, in flight from the 1971 Bangladesh war; a woman stands upright at the door of her home, a drainpipe in Calcutta. The conjunctions with Dylan’s lyrics are fearful and terrifying: a burning tree, the Abu Ghraib degradation. Dylan’s ‘ten thousand talkers whose tongues are all broken’ are Pol Pot’s tortured victims in Cambodia, his ‘highway of diamonds with nobody on it’ is the melt water in Greenland, which threatens the loss of the entire ice cap and a six metre rise in sea level. Edwards often returns thirty years later to the same site, so we can see for ourselves the melting glaciers, the productive plains disappearing beneath high-rise buildings. And the rain continues to fall, rain which is infinitely renewable, but which we are still causing to run out.
The other ingredient is Edward’s commentary – he has a gift for the verbal turn of phrase that is as sharp as his photographs. ‘Climate change is handcuffed to poverty’. ‘We carry on with this way of living which is also a way of dying’. He knows we can only cope with limited numbers of statistics, so they have to be well chosen. One-third of the earth’s top soil has been lost since the second world war. One in six of the world’s children are in slave labour. Two species have disappeared for ever while he’s been speaking. He also understands the contributions and the limitations of his own art form. ‘For the photographer, every picture has a before and after’. ‘Photographs are a shadow of the past, but can also be a ghost of the future’.
Edwards’ argument is that all these disasters are linked, that we cannot solve one without tackling all the others. Poverty, the wasteful use of resources, habitat and species loss, over-population, climate change, they all require the same demand, that we reinvent the modern world so that it’s compatible with nature. To put it even more simply, that we find a way to align nature and human nature. We all know what we have to do, the personal change in life style, the public campaigning so that politicians know they have a constituency. What we lack is the will, the blood-and-bone urgency to do it. Go see these photos.
Hard Rain exhibition continues at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, until 31 December. Go to www.hardrainproject.com for other venues or to see the images.
