An Odyssey of Culture Change

Written by Lucy Stone, Founder & Executive Director of Climate Spring and Jim Peacock, Senior Advisor, Reset Tech and Climate Spring Board Member

Our fate in this moment of profound existential transformation will be decided by our cultural response.

Our civilization is on an Odyssey through droughts and storms (environmental crisis), war, gods and monsters (rapid growth of AI). Will we come through this trial to return home to the safe haven of our planetary boundaries, or will we fail to meet the moment and be dashed on the rocks by the Siren calls of techno-utopia?

Culture has become a battle ground because that is where public and political realities are won or lost. The existential crises we're facing force us to confront profound questions about what it means to be human, our collective values, identity and morality. These are questions that cannot be answered with better communications, policy or technical solutions. They can only be answered by addressing the beliefs and values that uphold the system - our cultural foundations.

The origin of the word culture comes from the latin cultura, meaning care, and originally meant cultivation of the land. Culture is our social soil - it is the enabling conditions from which economic decisions and policy change is grown, and the speed at which social change can happen. Culture is not fixed, it is where we collectively compost outdated norms or renew long held views, for example the idea that women were the property of their husbands.

In this summer’s box office hit, The Odyssey, the hero realises that the threat to their great civilisation, was not from an outside force to battle, but came from within, breaking ‘Zeus’ law’ - that you offer hospitality to strangers. In a moment of interconnected and existential threats - climate, technology, the erosion of democracy and the rule of law, authoritarianism - The Odyssey speaks of the breaking of a social contract, one that holds society together based on values that reflect the invisible, sacred relationships with each other, the common good, and the natural world. Just as the gods were angered in The Odyssey and civilisation was under threat, so we are experiencing the breakdown of the social and planetary boundaries, those which we have co-evolved with over millennia.  

As wild fires and a heatwave rage this summer, another uncannily prescient story is released on BBC - The Rapture  - a psychological thriller set during an uncomfortable heatwave and growing climate anxiety, we see the intertwining of social media manipulation, polarisation, political corruption as well as integrity and debates over north sea oil exploration. Art mimicking life, and showing how culture can be upstream of politics in so many ways.

“They want us separated…they want us blaming each other, because then we’re not looking at them, doing whatever the hell they like.” (BBC’s The Rapture)

‍

‍This cluster of challenges we are experiencing right now cannot be addressed in siloes competing for our attention. We need to recognise the compounding impacts, and the shared root causes, so that we can build cultural responses that work at this intersectional level. This is why Climate Spring is not focused on telling stories about climate - we focus on the common cultural thread of the cause and solutions to the intersecting crises. We focus on stories that will reflect the underlying extractive root cause, and the regenerative values and norms that will support a safer, healthier future, one where humans flourish in a regenerated ecosystem. It is why we focus on the interconnection between climate, nature, technology and AI, health and equity. We are a 'Culture Spring'.

Questions of our relationship with new forms of technology, with each other and the natural world have been asked since the time of Homer. As with all technology adoption it is not a simple question of good versus bad, it's about the incentives that drive its development, design, and use, who benefits and what ultimate purpose it serves. AI isn’t inherently bad, it can be extremely useful. As Audrey Tang pioneered and showed in Taiwan, AI can be in service of enhancing democracy, with localised, ethical AI. But it is the inequitable and extractive model of the dominant tech and AI companies that are accelerating social and environmental decline by gobbling up resources, jobs, information, cultural output, and our attention to accrue benefits to a small elite. All while outsourcing the harms and risks to the public and wider society. As Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI shows, OpenAI starts to feel like the East India Company was to the imperial British Empire. The backlash against data centres has become widespread, as the physical impact of what has felt like invisible ‘cloud’ technology grows. Data centres to power AI aren’t just creating a resource pressure on land at a time of a housing crisis and on water during a heatwave. The tech companies are now bypassing backlogged grids that are trying to install the rapid growth of the renewables we need, by building new fossil fuel power stations next to the data centres or connecting to gas pipelines as their energy source. AI growth risks becoming a massive accelerator of the climate crisis - turbocharging  emissions, while also growing disinformation making it harder for political action on climate

A large part of why this feels like the inevitable future, is the cultural capture by these companies. But the future is not fixed and these technologies and the infrastructure needed to support them can be designed and deployed in ways that serve the public interest, right our planetary systems, and benefit the majority, not just the few.

Similarly renewable energy technology isn't inherently good or bad; it's how and where it's deployed. Large hydro dams to provide clean energy were often also preventing salmon migration and destroying communities and ecosystems. These are now being dismantled to improve biodiversity and let the rivers flow freely and in part because solar and wind are now more cost effective. Solar fields are now being built in ways that provide shade for flocks of sheep and protected biodiversity gains rather than destroying agricultural land.

We can no longer afford to focus on narrow goals of increasing energy supply without ensuring it is not creating wider ecological or social ‘own goals’. We have got to stop asking people to support ‘climate action’ or net zero in the abstract. Net zero is a technical accounting language that ignores the deeply human desires that a just energy transition could satisfy. It's easy for Reform to attack ‘net zero’ but much harder to oppose cleaner, cheaper, healthier energy, heating, cooling and cooking systems and more liveable neighbourhoods.

Responding to the climate and ecological crisis, and to the advancements of AI and tech, requires a social change in what we will collectively accept, enable or tolerate, from the systemic to the domestic. Adopting new technology or habits requires cultural adoption. This is a key reason why progress on climate is too slow, despite the impacts being felt across society and many cost-effective solutions already existing.

Changing our homes and buildings to be run on heat pumps, to be designed differently, to use active or public transport, to accept the development of renewables, of diet changes, is about changing our social culture. A bike, perhaps an e-bike, being the ritual gift to mark the transition to adulthood instead of a petrol/diesel car, and a smartphone no longer becoming a part of the transition from primary to secondary school. These all became ubiquitous across western society by introducing them as cultural social norms and rituals in hundreds of TV shows and films that embed them in our mindsets and values.

By looking at the interconnected polycrisis, and focusing on desirable alternatives to the current broken system, we are able to flip the narrative from one of inevitability and overwhelm to possibility and agency. We need to reclaim our visions of the future - not as ‘false hope’ that pretends everything will be fine - but as an act of collective manifestation.  To counter the cynicism that wants us to give up, and remind ourselves that we have the ability to collectively usher in profound social shifts for the better.

Just as we are in a polycrisis so we are also in a period of thrilling advancements, with the potential for solar energy abundance, regenerative food production and ecosystem restoration, to highlight just a few. The old culture built on extractivism, on petromasculinity, that sees humans as the top of the pyramid, dominating all other species for our own benefit, or that sees ‘nature’ as something other, is crumbling. Science is showing we are a symbiosis, an ecosystem, and our flourishing is entirely dependent on a healthy ecosystem. Our body is literally a biome of living beings, not a mechanised machine. We can no longer survive through the linear extraction of resources, we can only flourish by living within planetary boundaries.

However, the trajectory of this transition, how fair and fast it is, and whether the change leads to a fairer, more abundant future, is going to be determined by our culture. Our place of collective dreaming, of summoning a better future. First you have to see and experience that before you can accept or fight for it. That is the role of culture and storytelling - to help us feel, not just listen.

The fossil fuel industry has been astroturfing our culture with fake climate opposition, not just smothering the growth of renewables and regenerative practices but also hampering democracy. To counter this means getting rid of the plastic astroturf and composting the old colonising, fertilised culture to create a healthier cultural soil within which a healthier, regenerative society can flourish within planetary boundaries. Similarly with AI and Big Tech, rather than our information ecosystem being an extractive, monoculture, that causes enormous social harms to children, and breeds polarisation, we need to rewild the internet as an ecology as Maria Farrell has argued.

Some pioneer philanthropic foundations have understood the importance of investing in culture as not just a climate strategy but a strategy for addressing the compounding democracy, equity and resilience needs. If we understand the cultural soil to be the fundamental, cross cutting condition within which all civil society, scientific, legal and political work takes place, then we need a gear shift in support to meet the urgency of this moment. Philanthropy is essential to counter the well funded cultural greenwashing and astroturfing, and Climate Spring has shown that its funding will unlock a multiplier effect of creativity, talent and commercial investment in the cultural renewal of a healthier society.

A healthy cultural infrastructure, one that is not weaponised and politicised, but is independent, creative and inclusive involves public service media, libraries, theatres, civic space and our best creative talent having the resources to create mainstream commercial as well as independent stories.

Narrative warfare is being waged against climate action but its being countered largely with communications strategies that are focused on targeting particular audiences for specific policy aims. Culture strategy means supporting creatives and producers to freely approach these profound questions with depth, time and expertise. It requires patient capital, understanding that significant cultural projects take time, and the outcome does not fit into neat policy goals.

Just as change is not linear, so culture can spark widespread systemic change. Investing in culture means not picking your narrow winner, or trying to bend culture to a policy outcome, but instead requires investing in the cultural infrastructure of imagination and creativity, without knowing which story will create which change. As Marrriana Matsacato has recently outlined, our creative infrastructure is as vital social infrastructure to a healthy economy as a democratic and energy infrastructure is.

Culture is best understood not in ‘sectors’ - film, TV, music or the arts - where you pick a sector based on its ability to create change. Culture is a self referencing, looping ecosystem in itself. The Odyssey film has sparked a huge growth in book sales, and Greek language learning. A social media meme sparks protest gatherings in the streets. A computer game becomes a TV show becomes a theatre show. A song becomes the anthem for a movement. A footballer becomes a TV personality.

It is impossible to know the real world outcomes of investing in culture. It might create a revolution or it might be a flop that's ignored. You cannot instrumentalise culture for a political goal - that is propaganda.

Climate Spring has been funding and supporting a large and growing network of creatives and producers, creating a wide range of shows across all formats from thriller TV shows like The Rapture (BBC) and After The Flood (ITV) to reality TV and cooking shows, novels, theatre and digital content. Out of the over 100 TV and film projects alone, we are seeing a 20 x commercial investment, and 20% of projects going into production at a faster rate than the industry average. This shows we don't have to co-opt the screen talent to engage in these stories, there is a demand not just from creatives but also buyers (broadcasters and streamers) and audiences. And while we know we cannot pick a winner, and we cannot predict the outcomes, we do know that this is the critical infrastructure that might determine the trajectory of all of the policy, campaign and real economy work that has been taking place. We need to steer the ship of humanity to land in a safe ecological living space, and culture is the way we can put the wind in the sails and set the compass for the right direction.