Kat Austen, CultureLab editor
Pandemic Plant (Ampelocissus admonitio) by Troika
To reclaim the precious metal from iPhones and laptops, there will be gold weed (Brassica aurea), a purple, cabbage-like plant that will grow on landfill. The carbon-neutral biofuels of the future will ooze from the leaves of the self eaters, aloes genetically modified to break down their own cellulose and thereby provide an ecologically benign fuel source.
This is the botanical future according to Troika. The artist collective?s exhibit, Plant Fiction, is an arresting part of the new Climate Changing Stories display at London's Science Museum. Troika?s work addresses the question of what plants will look like after bioengineering and climate change have had a profound impact on the world?s vegetation. What will be the next step in their evolution?
Like Brassica aurea, some of these imagined plants will have evolved to suit the changing climate, while others, like the self eaters, will have been bioengineered to meet needs created by climate change. Stunningly executed and accompanied by whimsical yet realistic anecdotes of where you?ll find these plants, the prints are as evocative as the concept they represent.
While Plant Fiction imagines the planet?s future, other exhibits in Climate Changing Stories look at changes that have already happened. The project aims to bring home the scale at which these processes are working. Because that timeline far exceeds any individual lifespan, it's sometimes hard to viscerally appreciate the effects of climate change, but this walk-through meta-exhibition effectively draws together exhibits of various types to drive home the magnitude of what we face.
Take Jaywick Escapes, a film by artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope that takes you on a whirlwind journey through the rise and fall of the holiday town in Essex, UK, that was purpose-built as an escape for east Londoners in the 1930s. Guthrie and Pope use archive and contemporary footage to portray the town, from its vibrant, bustling heyday through its decimation in 1953 after a catastrophic flood killed 37 people, finishing on images of its present-day windswept desolation. Newspaper clippings complement a wistful narrative that is by turns cultural and environmental.
The Jaywick floods were far from the only environmental catastrophes that marked the British 1950s. The Big Smoke exhibit focuses on the "great smog" that had blanketed London several months earlier. The four-day pea-souper killed more than 4000 people, making it the worst of many similar smogs that beset the capital as a result of widespread coal burning. It led to the Clean Air Act 1956, legislation that, among other things, prohibited coal fires at home.
As I watched 50-year-old public-health information films urging people to burn smoke-free fuels at home, it struck me that globally we still push our environment to the limit before changing the status quo. Take Ulaanbaatar's air pollution crisis, itself largely a result of coal-burning within Mongolia's capital. Not to mention the global apathy we have seen at Rio +20.
The intervention also has an implicit but sharp critique of our attitude towards renewable energy. A series of collectable cigarette cards shows The World of Tomorrow - namely tidal, wind and solar power imagined by the visionary Idrisyn Oliver Evans in 1936. Nearby is the museum's 14-metre section of a contemporary wind turbine blade, and between the two, it's hard not to be beset by the conflicting feelings of awe at humanity's inventiveness and despair at its inertia.
(Image: David Parry/PA)
To drive home the point, opposite the turbine blade is a battery-operated car. No, not a Renault Twizy, nor a Tesla Roadster, nor a Mitsubushi i-MiEV. This is a battery-operated electric taxi from 1897. The Bersey cab, which weighed 1.5 tonnes, emerged when the source of power for cars was still hanging in the balance. "There was everything to play for," curator Selina Hurley told me, "until the Model T Ford came along". What would the world have been like if we had pursued electric cars instead of petrol-powered ones? Where would we be now if we had really invested in researching sustainable energy sources back in 1936 when Evans first conceived of them?
But perhaps the most important question prompted by Climate Changing Stories is, are we looking at the right things now? There are numerous narratives to be picked out through this overarching intervention. The path you follow - much like your actions in our global narrative of climate change - is up to you.
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