Brann Sjel (Fire Soul): A Norwegian name for someone who is an agent for change.
Notes from our meeting with Professor Karen O’Brien, department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo.
‘How can we adapt to the reality of climate change? We can study this question through a merging of science and art, and therefore create opportunities for academic and co-production perspectives.
Sea Change is a program we run for conscious change, collaborative change, and cultural change. We challenge people to take a series of small changes over 30 days, and therefore look at their socially constructed assumptions. Sea Change produces a critical change by helping people realise that they are the power to change, whatever their sphere of influence.
Climate change is part of relationship problem that we need to fix as a whole. Allowing the oil industry to geo-engineer a solution to climate change will not solve the problems with bee colony collapse or plastic pollution in the seas. These issues are all throughly interconnected and need to be addressed in this way.
The (Oslo) city council needs a story that people own, not an elite subjectivity – we need deeper human dimensions. We have developed great plans and road maps, like electric cars, that will supposedly save us. These ideas come from a story sense of ego. We need to address the bigger narrative.
We need new paradigms, a new materialism not dualistic to infect the narrative, to activate the entanglement. The question is ‘can I have a bigger impact than my carbon footprint, the idea that we have to limit ourselves just makes us feel small.’
Paul Hawken looks at Biomimicy and how we can put carbon back in the biosphere, and at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. (Art can make a situation where you could) imagine if everything could be seen, if it was visible.
Self organised change. We are a quantum social organism – when part of the system wakes up there is a change, we can use consciousness and the capacity of reflection, we have that capacity for deliberate transformation – to get to a state of critical mass.
Photo diary:
A question in my mind is how can we oppose the conditioned and patriarchal view in contemporary that art and nature are separate? That to try to bring them together would be an exercise of pastoral regression, a romantic, and in our conditioned minds discredited, dis-assembly of our innate nature. At a time of ecocide and catastrophic climate change can we afford to still accept this patriarchal meta-narrative as truth.
