Carbon Ruins

‘Carbon Ruins’ is an exhibition of the carbon era which invites the visitor into an imagined future where the transitions to post-fossil society have already happened. The future date is 2053, three years after global net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide were reached, and recognizable objects in the exhibition bridge the gap between daily life and the abstract impacts of climate change. These objects may include a 2014 cookbook which speculated on the possibility of cultivated meat, a piece of black coal from 2020, a sample of plastic grass from 2024, a diary of the 2025 milk riots in Brussels, the last toys made from plastic (an iconic material of the fossil fuel age), a recycled steel water bottle from 2034, and a 2038 picture of the last fast-food hamburger. The exhibits vary with the form taken by ‘Carbon Ruins’: since its beginning in 2019 these have included a mobile exhibition, audio presentation, educational material for schools, and part of the Human Nature exhibit at the Ethnographic museum in Stockholm (Lund University, 2021). The museum initially leaned towards Swedish experience, but Carbon Ruins Scotland, exhibited in Glasgow at COP26 in 2021 included items of local significance: ski equipment from the final run at Glenshee on artificial snow in 2137, a jar of North Sea oil, a ‘decarbonised’ whisky bottle, and a sign from the Torness Nuclear Power Station, decommissioned in 2030 (Carbon Ruins Scotland, n.d.).

Raven (2021) describes Carbon Ruins as a space of speculation about climate change and adaptation to it and asks what academics have to do with “the tools of science fiction, product design and participatory theatre?” He then provides a threefold answer to his own question, in terms of making the challenge of climate change concrete, situating its consequences in time and in place, and rendering the discussion democratic. Concretisation of the problem means in part “talking about possible futures in terms of the audience’s own surroundings”, changes in the local climate, in the crops that can be grown locally, and in local flood risks. Situation doesn’t only refer to place and time, but also to the range of people who could each be very differently affected by the same climatic changes. Making visualisation of the future democratic can involve breaking the barriers presented by technical terms and specialist knowledge, and tapping “the vast resource of everyday expertise in lifestyle, practices and locations that years of ethnographic study could not hope to replicate”.

Raven and Stripple (2021) discussed the “ethics of speculative decarbonisation” and took the ‘Carbon Ruins’ exhibition as a case study. They saw the exhibition as documenting the Great Expansion of fossil fuel use from 1849 to 1972; the Fossil Fears, “defined by the oil crises of the 1970s”; the three decades of the Transition Years, beginning in the early 2020s; and key moments such as when the “regulators finally caught up”. The Museum exhibits have been described above, and for the authors of the paper it is the discussions that they provoke which are key to the museum’s purpose; museum guides draw on techniques of “immersive theatre and performative communications” and on the stories which surround the exhibits, relating to sectors “including food, transport, steel, energy, plastic and climate futures”.

The authors view the ethical issues surrounding the project from three perspectives; the fact that the project exists at all, its aim, and the means employed. The first view begins with acknowledging the exhibition’s implicit value assumption that “decarbonising society is itself a worthwhile project”. The speculative nature of the museum can be seen as aiming to allow “citizens to be part of a process” – policy production – “from which they are normally very distant.” It could be said that it would be unethical not to help fill in the details of a future which is usually “sketched mostly in technical and quantitative terms.” The second perspective, regarding the aims of the exhibition, is less straightforward, since the political feasibility of decarbonisation is involved. While the exhibition could be excused from considerations of policy making, it is concerned with the ways that policies “might affect the lives of ordinary citizens”. It must presumably aim to persuade visitors  “that a zero-carbon future is not only possible but plausibly desirable”; however the authors reject the idea that the museum acts as a marketing campaign. It is “at pains to emphasise the struggles, conflicts and losses that the transition will entail” while depicting a successful transition in a plausible and hopeful light, to help citizens to grasp implications of policy, and “to evaluate and critique the futures that the policy is promising them.” A local focus is unavoidable, and encourages the research community to “translate abstract climate science and policy into the everyday course of life”. While the exhibition can be criticised on the grounds that it lacks inclusivity,  the authors “maintain that the ethical thing is to do the best we can” and that such criticism should be welcomed as an opportunity to improve the work. The final perspective concerns “the manner and methods of the speculative process”. One concern with speculative futures is that they may unintentionally deceive their viewers into “believing that what they are seeing is actuality”. This issue can apply to any speculative imaginings: the authors quote a saying of the science fiction author Charlie Stross: ‘I tell lies for a living’. The methods used by the museum are arguably “the same as those used to sell political programmes” but they make its fictional frame fairly obvious: its goal “was always to stimulate discussion and engagement rather than to dictate a particular promissory future”.

Exhibitions based on the ideas embodied in Carbon Ruins, with exhibits appropriate to their own locality may have considerable appeal, and Manchester Museum plans its own Carbon Ruins exhibition, to coincide with its reopening in 2023, with input from schools in the Manchester area (Carbon Ruins Manchester, 2022). The strengths and weaknesses of such exhibitions, as outlined above, deserve careful consideration.  Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of Carbon Ruins is that visitors who are invited to step imaginatively into the year 2053, when climate change appears to be under control, are offered temporary relief from the anxiety which the prospect of uncontrolled climate change can produce, and can then more easily contemplate the road which must be travelled in order to reach climate security. Constructive engagement with efforts to mitigate climate change may then be easier, perhaps even for those whose fears about the future have led them to deny the reality of climate change and consequently to avoid taking actions to prevent it.

 

References

Carbon Ruins Manchester, 2022, Manchester Museum, online, accessed 30 June, 2022

https://mmhellofuture.wordpress.com/2022/06/24/carbon-ruins-manchester/

Carbon Ruins Scotland, Climaginaries, online, accessed 28 June 2022

https://www.climaginaries.org/carbon-ruins-scotland

Lund University, 2021, Carbon Ruins, online, accessed 17 December 2021

https://www.climatefutures.lu.se/carbon-ruins

Raven, P., 2021, Concretise, situate, democratise: The Museum of Carbon Ruins, TransformingSociety, online, accessed 28 June 2022

https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2021/02/16/concretise-situate-democratise-the-museum-of-carbon-ruins/

Raven, P., and Stripple, J., 2021, Touring the carbon ruins: towards an ethics of speculative decarbonisation, Global Discourse, online, accessed 17 December 2021

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bup/gd/2021/00000011/f0020001/art00023

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Energy maps and calculators

  The production and use of different forms of energy have been mapped geographically for a variety of reasons, and some examples will be outlined briefly before describing a recent place-based energy calculator for the UK. Scales of mapping vary in the examples from the global through region, country, city and parish down to city block. Both energy production and use have been mapped by type, such as coal, gas and oil, wind and solar renewables, by the associated emissions, and by energy flows between geographical regions. The purpose and the intended audience vary from case to case. The Global Atlas for Renewable Energy is a resource coordinated by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) which “allows its users to find maps of renewable energy resources for locations across the world.” (Global Atlas for Renewable Energy, 2021). The Global Solar Atlas provides information on irradiation levels on land worldwide within a suitable range of latitudes, and calculates the o
Read more

Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage

    Introduction The need to limit the harmful effects of climate change is a powerful motive for preventing carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere, and for removing CO2 that is already there, but there can be subsidiary aims associated with carbon capture, and there are many methods of accomplishing it. According to a definition published in 2014, “Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) encompasses methods and technologies to remove CO2 from … flue gas and from the atmosphere, followed by recycling the CO2 for utilization and determining safe and permanent storage options” (RCN-CCUS, 2014a). A definition of carbon capture and storage (CCS) used by Torvanger (2020) “refers to a group of technologies that reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, or from process industries." The term sequestration is also used for the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere or from combustion gases, and permanent prevention of its ret
Read more

Climate fiction and climate action

The interactions between climate fiction and environmental activism are the subject of a paper by Alacovska and Holt (2023). They describe environmental activism as “grassroots, decentralised social movements” which attempt to address issues of “inequality and systemic injustice arising from anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation and ecological collapse” by means of non-hierarchical collective organising. The main object of their paper is to propose methods for future research, but here we will only draw on their introduction to the subject and its background. They believe that the popular genre of climate fiction influences climate activism , with the potential to stimulate the imagination and to energise the “quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives”. This stands in contrast with much writing on climate change, which is concerned with data and “mathematical prediction models for forecasting and comprehending the gravity of global environmental challeng
Read more