June 2014: An interesting report in Independent that:
“…scientists are being told to use art and poetry to win public support in the battle to curb climate change. Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office, has called for a radical overhaul of the way climate scientists go about their business, arguing that they need to make their reports less turgid and more engaging.
“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us… We increasingly recognise that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication,” Dame Julia told a recent gathering of leading climate change scientists at the University of Exeter.
“And it’s not through tables and graphs. Sometimes it is through art, through music, through poetry, and storytelling and that is increasingly something we have to think about – how we communicate in a more humanist way.”
With this in mind, its interesting to see that an event took place over the weekend in Hackney, as part of a programme called The Spark, entitled ‘Using hip-hop and music to empower communities and tackle Climate Change’, and earlier this year the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change held a novel poetry slam ‘Rhyme & Reason: Reflections on Climate Change‘ evening (poster below), performances from which can be seen here – and additional details of the night here.
