anguished lament to the swallow was an extraordinary experience. I looked out over so many faces – some people, overwhelmed with grief, wept openly. The police came and stood around us but the atmosphere was peculiarly peaceful. Public moments of sharing – particularly the sharing of art – change the spaces and alter the atmosphere. This can give us vital strength. We must engage in these acts because – make no mistake – the ruling powers will not do enough to alter the course of this terrifying history. We are on our own and together we will have to make them.
My vision is sometimes blurred by the horror of the millions of deaths our fossil fuel habits have caused and by the certain knowledge that all of this will continue to get worse until it gets better – because so much of what we have done is irreversible.
But in the end, hopelessness serves no purpose. Fighting for everything climate change reversal represents, from the essential bee to global social justice, will never offer anything but active hope.
We must combine the determined and unstoppable organisation of our best instincts with the vision of astronauts.
The wave of change is here. The generation below mine is different. I feel it and I read it in these letters. They know we have failed them and instead of wasting time blaming us or even trying to punish us they simply act. The young do not mind change as much as the old.
They are our best hope and listening to them always makes me feel powerful once again. Plugging into that energy will recharge even the most tired of batteries.
Read this book and pass it on. Hand on your passion for the planet to the next person and never, ever give in. Convert your rage to action and your grief to love. I think the planet feels us as we do this. Perhaps it will even help us.
Emma
In the early spring of this year a small group of women came together around a kitchen table to talk. We had been profoundly shaken by the increasingly dire news of climate and ecological collapse, and inspired by the work of Extinction Rebellion in bringing that news to the forefront of the public conversation. In our working lives we are theatre-makers and writers and we felt strongly that we wanted to find a way to facilitate a creative response to these times of emergency. For so long – too long – our professions had been eerily silent about this greatest of subjects. Why? Was this a failure of nerve? Of imagination?
We knew Extinction Rebellion were planning a huge, disruptive action in the streets of London in April, and we began to imagine a creative campaign that might sit alongside and speak to that Rebellion. As we talked and shared ideas, we sensed that this was a chance to hear from those who sit outside the usual theatrical and publishing circles, to take the pulse of the country in these times of growing anxiety and realisation.
From that initial conversation others were born; we met people, listened, and soon the idea of a Letter to the Earth emerged, a callout to the public to write a letter in response to climate and ecological emergency. The letter could be to or from the earth, to future or past generations, those who hold positions of power and influence, to other species. We also invited venues to come on board and host a reading of the letters, on a date in April, just before the International Rebellion was due to take place.
We created an email account and in February the callout went live. We waited, a little nervously. The inbox was quiet. Then one letter arrived, and another, then our first batch of schoolchildren’s letters, twenty or more young people responding to the call. The letters were moving, disturbing, vital.
The inbox kept filling: pictures drawn by seven-year-olds, letters from teenagers, nurses, great-grandparents. Letters were coming in from all around the world, from published poets, people who had never put pen to paper before. In reading through them, there were many occasions when one or other of us was caught short, moved to tears on public transport, or by the electric rise of the hairs on your arm when you know you are in the presence of something great, a truly remarkable piece of writing. This great unsayable thing, this anxiety, this fear, this love, was finding expression in so many voices. Their cumulative power was overwhelming.
And venue after venue was signing up: a Ukrainian Club in Huddersfield, a Conservative Club in Paddington, a pub in Kent, leading theatres up and down the country: the Royal Court, the National Theatre of Wales, Shakespeare’s Globe, and venues around the world, from Alabama to South Africa to Zambia.
By the time submissions closed we had almost a thousand letters in our keeping, an astonishing gift. We believe it to be the largest creative response to these times of crisis the world has yet seen.
On 12 April the letters were read at fifty-two venues worldwide. During the International Rebellion, in which Extinction Rebellion occupied five sites in central London for two weeks, the letters were read from every stage. From the truck in the centre of Marble Arch, from a single microphone in front of seated lines of people willingly putting themselves up for arrest on Waterloo Bridge, from the grass in the middle of Parliament Square, and, perhaps most memorably, from the top of Berta Cáceres, the now iconic pink boat, when youth strikers and performers came together on the XR ‘Day of Love’.
And now this collection: it has not been easy to choose from such a rich variety of voices, and the collection could easily have been twice as long, but the following selection feels both challenging and vital.
We have gathered the letters into five headings: Love, Loss, Emergence, Hope, Action. The headings are not prescriptive, though they may serve as a prescription: if you feel despair, turn to Hope; if you feel loss, you may find comfort in voices who feel as you do; or you may need to read poems that immerse you in love for this home we all share.
We encourage you, too, to read the book from start to finish, but if you do so you will see that this is not a simple journey from Love to Action: love also contains fear and anger, hope contains despair. This is not comfortable reading. It is not comfortable to read the words of teenagers who fear they will have no future, of children begging for change. Of adults horrified by the world they are complicit in creating. Of mothers who despair for their children. Of those stricken by grief at the daily, catastrophic loss of the living world they hold so dear.
Some of the boldest voices speaking to us through this collection are those from the Global South, in countries where ecological and climate catastrophe are a lived reality. Daniela Torres Perez challenges us not to turn a blind eye to the suffering of her home country Peru: ‘a place where the people with the least money are the ones that suffer most’. While Renato Redentor Constantino, writing from the Philippines, invites us to imagine ‘an island travelling south, a landscape on the move where compassion is the currency and solidarity the only debt people owe one another’. As climate breakdown arrives on the doorstep of those living in the north, it is important to remember this wider reality, one in which people of colour and people living in poverty have long been disproportionately affected by ecological breakdown.
There are no easy answers contained within these pages, no clear paths out of the maze in which we find ourselves, but there is courage here and there is hope, hope that – in the words of Joanna Macy – is active, that calls us to action. There is love that echoes and speaks back to loss. Voices that dare to imagine a more beautiful, equitable, generous way of being with ourselves, each other and all those who share this living, interdependent, planet that we call home.
With love, and hope,
Anna Hope, Jo McInnes, Kay Michael, Grace Pengelly
August 2019
Dear Author of Genesis,
I know it’s pointless to begin like this, because you lived about three thousand years ago and are no longer around to answer my questions,