Climate Change Culture

Abstract:In this paper, I explore how stories of lost and broken worlds have been tied to hopes about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation. I historicize and complicate the idea of children as environmental stewards of an imagined planetary future. I investigate the issue further by examining the particular figure of the child redeemer and our "investment in the image of the child as a sign of the future, as defence against loss of significance in the world" (Lebeau 179). Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant and Clio Barnard's recent film adaptation of Wilde's book will be the objects of my discussion. Barnard's film, set in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford, England, offers child protagonists who unsettle the familiar fantasy of redemption and invite us to think past sentimental and nostalgic arguments for ecological preservation (premised on preserving an unjust world as it is). While it is important not to topple the myth of childhood innocence only to resurrect another myth of childhood agency, I am interested in these moments of refusal and how they point to the limits of a sentimental ecology.

Working with the Kai Tak River Project, the Chinese University Hong Kong School of Architecture, and communities of East Kowloon, it became apparent that the ‘River’ is, in fact, an unsustainable sewage channel that has been  reconceptualised to support low-density ‘gentrified’ housing development. However, placed in the context of different timescales (return on development investment, integration with mainland China, climate change, sea level rise, water scarcity and food security) new realities and opportunities emerge.

Annexed from China under threat of war, this former British colony was built on the labour of migrant populations and coastal wetlands. The irony is that by 2048, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will pass completely to the mainland Government at about the same time as the reclaimed land of one of the world’s most densely populated, and busiest financial trading centres is reclaimed by the ocean. But in a hundred years from the initial hand-back (2097) Hong Kong has the potential to re-invent itself as a ‘Special Ecological Region’. Given the evolution of these complex economic, political and environmental systems, this paper argues for the deconstruction of ‘the city’ - a paradigm shift to urban form as an integrated whole system metabolism.

Focusing on the ecological arts project, Life Support System: Towards 2048, Beyond 2097, to explore these issues, this paper will further consider the relationships between traditional Chinese knowledge, contemporary ‘systems thinking’, and arts practice. This will reveal the disjuncture, and some of the myths embedded in normative forms of thinking and education, policy and governance. It will, also, offer the potential for Fung Shui, an ecological epistemology, and art as transdisciplinarity.