WHEN THE FOREST BURNS

Climate change is not only the greatest crisis of our lifetime, but possibly of human history. How do we carry on as individuals complicit in the great crime - the slow but methodical destruction of life on earth? The scale of the problem boggles the mind. But I also believe that the climate crisis is our cosmic wake-up call. It is less about will we survive and more about, how do we want to live? Not about what we know, but about how we think.

It is the othering of nature – seeing it as a resource, or ground, or even environment – that has allowed us to seek to control it, exploit it, conquer it. We need to be re-enchanted, re-engaged, to truly and deeply feel that human and nature are the same – while at the same time recognizing that the other-than-human world is something that is alive and mysterious and beyond our control or even understanding. It has its own agency and intelligence. Our task is first to be present in our deeply entangled now, in order to then make changes that ensure a vibrant future for all life.

Science fiction has often been about encounters with alterity - typically alien or technological. What better genre to examine our relationship with nature as the other? We aim to bring together the horror of that which is beyond our control, the desire inherent in boundaries dissolved, and the beauty of the whole great mess to challenge our relationship with the more-than-human world.

Put another way, if Walt Whitman made a sci fi movie - this would be it.