Within the context of the “Art and Sustainability” campaign, two members of the ECP-FG met online with Jason Davis, the founder of the Climate Stories Project (CSP). We were interested to know more about the Climate Stories Project as an educational and artistic forum for sharing stories about personal and community responses to climate change. CSP focuses on personal oral stories, which bring an immediacy to the sometimes abstract nature of climate change communication.
A musical setting by composer Jason Davis of a personal narrative by Minnesota author and playwright Jessica Lind Peterson, who relates how the forests of northern Minnesota are rapidly changing with the warming climate, and discusses her emotional responses to the climate crisis.
source: screenshot from Climate Stories Project on Soundcloud.
Ji: How old is the organization ? What is its main mission ?
Jason: I started in 2013 in Massachusetts, U.S. The mission is to help people engage personally with climate change and on a community level by using storytelling, education and art.
Ji: How does the Climate Stories Project convey a message to talk about the issue of climate change ?
Jason: I use music because I think it's a really powerful medium for communicating ideas and emotions. My particular approach integrates people's spoken narrative into music. I think it gives more of an emotional connection for people to hear these climate stories in this musical format, instead of just hearing voices which I think it’s also powerful. But to add the music and engage through sound and art can really draw more people in and get them excited to talk about climate change and share their stories about what they are observing and how they are feeling about it.
Ji: Why can music be the right vehicle to trigger a conversation about sustainability?
Jason: I don’t think there is one art practice that’s better or worse. I’m a musician and that’s been a lot of my training so I just gravitate towards that. There are plays, fictions, visual art and even dance, that were used as ways of communicating around climate change in the past couple of decades or so. Personally, I’m a musician so I relate to music and it’s not better or worse.
Ji: Who do you wish to reach ? The people, the politicians, students or the internet... ?
Jason: It is kind of almost everybody. I’ve worked with school groups, students, people from different organizations, people from all around the World and of all ages. The way I see it is not targeting a specific group of people. I don’t consider it so prescriptive. I think artists generally don’t think like that anyway. It’s not an intervention tool where you have a goal and you can measure how that goal is achieved. The project is not structured like that. At some point, maybe I’ll be able to do a little more analysis of people’s viewpoints of climate change. I collect my evaluations when I do the climate storytelling workshops, so that gives me some feedback about people’s attitude about climate change or how they were influenced by the workshop. But I haven’t done any formal studies like statistics or anything like that.
Maeva: The issue of climate change is so abstract - how can the recordings make the stories told more personal / tangible? Does music help to express the emotions related to this issue?
Jason: So climate change is very abstract, it can be very hard to get a grasp on what’s going on because it's global and it's a phenomenon that we can’t really see. We can’t see the atmosphere nor the greenhouse gas coming out of our cars or factories. It’s happening very fast yet it’s difficult to observe day to day the changes in emissions or in the climate. However, everyone has a narrative about experiencing this change, and part of the project is to help people articulate that. Some people can make observations over the years. The elders especially have given me some amazing insight into how things have changed since they were children. Typically, the indigenous communities have a really strong connection to their home and their environment. I have been blown away by details about changing weather patterns or animal distributions.
...Even when you are living in the city and without a view from the past, most people have an emotional response to this issue. Reading about climate change in the news and how it’s affecting different places can bring a lot of difficult emotions. Processing those emotions is part of the story telling. I hope it is validating that people’s voices matter. It's not that you have to be an expert, a politician or a scientist to engage with climate change. It is affecting everyone, but it's happening unevenly. There’s a lot of issues with equity and justice, as the bulk of the emissions come historically from the richer countries and communities but the most severe impacts so far have been in poorer communities and countries. So it is important to give people a voice in those communities.
Maeva: The techniques combine voice recordings layered with bass compositions - what is inspiring in these narratives as a musician ?
Jason: The one I always tell is the story about John Sinnok, the elder Iñupiat who lives on a small island in the west coast of Alaska. The community has been hammered by the changes. With the melting sea ice and winter storm, the waves have eroded the beaches, the island is basically disappearing and now they must plan to relocate the village on the mainland. I was working there in 2015 to do interviews. John Sinnok, who lived there his whole life, told me about incredible details. The one that stuck out to me was that the sound of people walking through the snow has changed, as the climate warmed up the snow has gotten wetter. That response was perfect for a music piece because it had sound. Also, part of the process is to get people to dig deeper rather than just “climate change is bad” or “I’m afraid of climate change”. Those are valid responses, but we want to ask what it looks like ? What are the details ? How do you feel?
...There is also the tone of people's voices and its quality, as some people speak with a really evocative cadence. I also want to include voices from a range of people, younger and older people. There are definitely some ethical issues in the process. The interviews last 45 minutes but I am only uploading an edited version of 2 or 3 minutes. Of course I have the permission of the people taking part in it, but I do modify the story and even more so in musical pieces as I am not using long stretches of narratives or dialogues. For the most part it’s snippets like phrases. Like the phrase told by another woman from Alaska “the glaciers are leaving us” was very evocative, so I am extracting a little bit out of a 45 minutes interview. It’s a bit tricky. I have been asking myself is it ethical to take people’s words and put my aesthetics into them ? However, I am certainly not the only one who’s done this. I got inspired by this American composer named Steve Reich who did plenty of pieces using voice samples from interviews or from archive recordings.
Maeva: Would you say that the missions are to educate around the topic of sustainability ?
Jason: Definitely. Just so you know, I tend not to use the word “sustainability”. In the same way that I don’t like to use the word “solutions” for climate change. To me “sustainability” means “let’s keep things the same”, when we have to make radical changes in how we produce energy and structure the economy. I get what people mean when they use it, it’s something about changing things and making a culture and an economy that can endure and not collapse. I am just not a huge fan of it that’s all.
Maeva: Are there artworks displayed ? In your case music pieces ?
Jason: Yes, it’s a chance for me to share what I am doing with music. I would love to get more contributions from other artists to share their music pieces or visual arts. There’s a lot of other artists working in climate change. There is a Facebook group Artist and Climate Change. The person who started it, Chantal Bilodeau, the founder of The Arctic Cycle is at the forefront of this (check out our interview of her!). She is really plugged in the climate change and arts scene, more than I am. My project came organically without a plan per se. It started as a music project before I made any educational aspect or story collecting. One idea I have is to do a crowdsourced campaign with a call for musicians or composers all over the world, who would like to use this approach interviewing people or telling their own climate story setting it into music.
Maeva: Is the artist playing an active role ?
Jason: Oh yeah absolutely, that’s a huge part of the project. Actually, I just finished up a Ph.D. at McGill University focused on techniques for doing this: doing the interviews with climate story narratives and making musical pieces out of them. And also researching other composers who have done similar work. So most of the pieces that you heard have been written during that Ph.D..
Maeva: Did you perform with an audience, pre-corona times?
Jason: I started the project years ago, I did some preliminary versions of it with a bigger group, so it wasn’t only solo bass pieces. Before the pandemic I was doing some live performances in libraries and community centers. I probably did about four or five of those. Since then, everything shut down and it’s been recorded on the website. I am going to do a couple of live stream performances in the next month or so at universities. As part of my Ph.D.I did a lecture performance in a college. First, I talked about the project, then I played some of the pieces and we discussed. It gave some context so people get really engaged once they understand the goal of the project and the backstory. I am really hoping once things open up more, to the point where I can do live performances next year.
Maeva: Anything else to add ?
Jason: I guess there’s one thing I did not talk about, a part of the musical pieces. Years before I started the project, going back to the nineties, climate change was something we could not really observe and we did not talk about it at all. I am sure some people were thinking about it but nowadays it is so much part of our conversations. Back then, it was all about levels of CO2 and future impacts. I started to realize, not wait, we can actually observe what’s going on, it is not like just some abstract thing. Long before I started this project, I was already thinking about that. That was the initial goal, to shift our mindsets from future abstract concepts to something that we can actually see, feel or experience.
Visit Climate Stories Project's website: https://www.climatestoriesproject.org/
To listen to more of the musical pieces by Climate Stories Project visit their Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/climate-stories-project