Transitioning Societies: Crisis, Art and Social Change

Transitioning Societies: Crisis, Art and Social Change

Dr Catherine Butler

[email protected]

@drcbutler

Outline

• Opportunities and challenges for achieving transitions

• Research Project – responses to the winter floods 2013/14 (Somerset)

• Role the arts can play in meeting challenges

Climate Change and Transitions

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased”.

“Most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 are stopped. This represents a substantial climate change commitment created by past, present and future emissions of CO2”

Climate Change and Transitions

• Climate change intangible, viewed as a distant and future problem, difficulties in engendering changes in ways of living associated with lack of direct localised experience (Adam, 1998; Butler, 2008; Whitmarsh, 2008; Ungar, 2000)

• “analysts have pointed to the gulf that exists for most people between the familiar preoccupations of everyday life and an abstract future of climate chaos… [meaning] people struggle to maintain the ethical connections necessary to create imperatives for change”. (Shirani, Butler et al, 2013)

Crisis as Opportunity

“…if the environment is experienced most intensely when it connects to the personal domain of everyday life, this points to a need to use people’s concern for themselves,

their families and localities as points of connection for the wider ‘global’ environmental issues”

(Macnaghten, 2003)

Crisis as Opportunity?• Surveys have shown increased concern about climate change and higher

expressions of willingness to take action amongst members of the public that have been flooded (Spence et al. 2011; Capstick et al. 2015)

• Research has found that experiences of flooding did not result in differences of understanding and response with regard to climate change (Whitmarsh, 2008)

• Studies also indicate that though concern about climate change is evident amongst those affected by flooding, this does not automatically follow from such experiences, and that implications for change are not straight forward (Butler and Pidgeon, 2009; COIN, 2014)

• Questions remain about whether and how experiences of extreme weather events consistent with climate projections could be important to action on climate change

2013/14 Winter Floods Research

Research focuses specifically on processes of change following extreme weather events to better understand

challenges and opportunities for change

Qualitative Longitudinal Research

Interviewing and surveying members of the public affected by

flooding (n=31)

Interviewing stakeholders with professional roles

related to flooding (n=25)

First round interviews Aug –Dec 2014

Second round interviews March – April 2015

Building Community and Resilience

“Yes, bereavement really, the loss of community that we’ve all suffered… there has been a lot of ill feeling actually and it’s quite difficult because for a lot of people, there has been a lot of inequality in what’s happened, it does seem that some insurance companies have done more than others, the volunteers have helped some people and not others so it has made a lot of ill feeling and I think some of it will never go. Some of it will sort of subside but a lot of it will never go and I think it’s a shame because it’s a nice normal friendly little place to live, you know…”(F2)

“I would say getting to know, when you move somewhere new, it can take years to get to know people, to feel part of a community and that we were thrown in head first, they are very a welcoming community , we had met people, we had met our neighbours but we were suddenly thrust into this and we were embraced by them”. (F3)

Memory and the Long-term

“Yes, and that’s (the community plan) all about how can we work together to the benefit of all, which isn't something they were really thinking about a year ago, but now they are … No, that will disappear! Cynical! Well it will, for a start, if you stretch out the timescale, people will move out of the area and new people will move in, people who didn’t know those floods, who didn’t have that thing to hold them together, to bring them together so no, it will disappear again”. (M1)

“There’s an awful lot of knowledge here, all the farmers here who have managed this land since the dinosaurs wandered off, know what they’re doing. It may not be scientific but it works… “ (M2)

Memory and the Long-term

“In the event of a crisis quite understandably the governments’ focus is on providing the immediate help and welfare and the support, and provide comfort… that things are being done and things will get back to a sense of normality. The challenge then is once the flood waters have receded…conversations then being had which is about, okay, actually in the long term we need do things differently.” (SH1)

Engagement and Relationships

“…it’s quite clear I think in my mind that that’s the only way that we’re going to reduce the need for being rescued because once we’ve put all the adaptation and mitigation in place , then we just learn to live with it, we expect it to come, our houses are dry because we’ve designed the schemes which will do that, whether it means moving higher up or as I said, building new ones that can move with the floods, then those are the kind of solutions I’d like to see coming forward because it feels like this all happened, people get fixed up and then suddenly what is going on? Like they might be beavering away up there but you know …” (F1)

“I guess again what we thought was that the conversations that have been taking place over the last five or so years, by Environment Agency in the process of producing a catchment flood management plan, that process and the thinking and the dialogue that’s been happening with the local authority and the community, that all seemed to be thrown away.” (SH2)

Engagement and Relationships

“Not really because they were being told what to say, the EA was in denial, no doubt about it, they just thought it would go away and they’d done what they could and there was one particular chap who came on television, I think people practically threw something at their televisions, he was so arrogant about the whole thing. …obviously didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on and couldn't seem to care less either, that was in the early days before it all went horribly wrong”. (M3)

The Role of Art in…

• Building community and bringing people together

• Remembering and taking the long view

• Humanising and developing relationships across disparate worlds

• Breaking silences about climate change and connecting up

Dr Catherine Butler

[email protected]

@drcbutler

Thank you