Love in the Times of Climate Change, a collaboration between CEEW and Unerase Poetry, wants to make the dialogue around climate change accessible to everyone.
New Delhi: Helly Shah is a poet who understands love, longing and loss. She didn’t know much about climate change except certain buzzwords picked up from her school textbooks. She never had to. Her audience, governed by algorithms and the opinions of strangers, didn’t care.
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Climate change and poetry may appear to be an odd couple at first, but an online project by a Delhi-based think tank helped bring the two together this week in a bid to make it more intimate and urgent for the people. Climate catastrophe, after all, wouldn’t just destroy the forests, cities and seas. It will destroy romance too. After novels and movies, it is now poetry’s chance to do the right thing.
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) wants to free climate dialogue from technicalities and jargon, and make it accessible to everyone. The project looks at narratives of climate change through the lens of love –– combining CEEW and the poets’ areas of expertise.
“People do not care about things they do not understand. Until and unless it is explained in terms of how it impacts you on an intimate level,” says Kartikeya Jain, a communications associate at CEEW who leads the project.
And just like that, Love in the Times of Climate Change was born.
Seven poems — each chronicling an experience of love moulded by the changing planet — are being released weekly on CEEW’s YouTube channel. The project is in collaboration with Unerase Poetry, a spoken word collective.
The seven poets were not indifferent, but unaware, even sheepish about their lack of engagement with climate change. CEEW conducted workshops with them, provided copious amounts of reading material, and the poems that emerged went through several rounds of fact-checking and editing.
They were also taught how to differentiate between what has been caused by climate change and what hasn’t. A heatwave is more likely to happen because of climate change, but the drop in the number of trees, in many cases, is a developmental issue.
Helly Shah’s poem is set in 2030. The sea has encroached the home shared by her and her lover. The selection of 2030 was not random, says Kartikeya. “It was decided through projection models.”
“Maine asmaan se humari khidki se dekha, samundar laang aaya tha har banaavati rekha, insaano ke sheher mein insaano ka geher tha (I looked down from my window set in the sky, the sea had breached every border, humans had been trapped by a kingdom of their own making),” recites Helly.
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Changing relationship with nature
The effects of global warming and rising sea levels dominate the poems. Floods, forest fires and other extreme climate events are changing relationships. The goal of this creative collaboration is to make climate change more than an aesthetic concern and understand it as the crux of people’s intimate lives; to weave it in through memory and personal experiences.
Shubham Shyam, a government school teacher in Mumbai, meets this brief through a comment on the arrogance of youth. Written and performed in Hindi, his poem is about a boy who is blithely unaware of how his world is changing and his grandmother who notices fundamental changes — because she remembers how things used to be. Crops being destroyed by unseasonal rain, the drying up of once-mighty rivers. A direct consequence of this is on Chhath puja, a Hindu festival, during which devotees bathe in a ‘holy’ river. In 2021, visuals showed worshippers in the Yamuna, even as they were surrounded by a thick layer of toxic fumes. The festival now takes place inside our homes, says Shyam in his poem, signifying how environmental decay affects both the individual and the community.
Shyam once asked his students where do suji (semolina), atta (wheat flour) and maida (flour) come from. “From the supermarket,” they responded. This ignorance and total separation from the natural world is generational, he says and this is what he wanted to capture.
Relatability and reach
The poets CEEW has collaborated with are terrified of sounding preachy, which is also something Kartikeya wanted to avoid. That’s where the benefits of the form come in. The poems don’t need them to be explanatory. They concentrate on the effects of climate change, not the causes.
The point is to be relatable. “We are a policy think tank out of the global south, where there are a limited number of climate change narratives.” He gives the example of mangoes, beloved by Indians. Mangoes being hit by climate change can serve as a marker that most people understand.
One of the poets, Amandeep, steers his poem around the shrinking size of mangoes.
“Paths that were once lined with lush mango trees in the monsoons, were now dry with shrivelled fruits. It was like someone had taken the taste out of our childhoods,” he laments.
Instances like this are used to strike a chord with the larger public.
Love in the Times of Climate Change is targeted not only at the metropolitan listener but also those in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, says Kartikeya.
Thus there’s not just a call for relatability but also simplicity, and poems are rather on-the-nose. One of the lines in Simar Singh’s poem is: “I love you like a solar panel loves the sun.” Simple to the point of comical. It is also a line written by someone who is yet to find the vocabulary to describe issues of this magnitude but is compelled, by virtue of their job, to try anyway.
It’s Instagram poetry, think Rupi Kaur and the likes.
“I didn’t really have it [climate change] in mind. I never thought as a writer I’d explore it,” says Simar, who founded Unerase Poetry, when he was 17. In his poem, he tackles floods, inspired by the city of Mumbai, where he lives.
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“The rain and her breath both get heavy, and while it floods outside, we find refuge in each other’s eyes. But then suddenly, the light goes away,” recites Simar.
Saynee, one of the poets, mentions the underlying guilt she feels. “There is so much we are directly involved in. I can’t ask someone to do what I’m not doing,” she says.
In her poem, she tackles forest fires. Her performance is emotionally charged. A couple’s ‘spot’ has been burnt down.
“You don’t like what you hear. You look at me with despair. I don’t know how to console you, so I hold your hand and stand right there,” she recites, her version of a couple grappling with the onset of a forest fire.
Researchers and communicators have long argued that in order for people to take climate change seriously, innovative means need to be devised. Research papers, alarmist reports and calls for change by activists are no longer cutting it. A different group needs to be deployed.
Popular, mainstream artists tend to be effective communicators. Although, it is still to be decided whether the audience will take to a still-evolving genre.
Shubham says that the consumers of spoken word poetry connect to poems that are like a guidebook to life. “They want me to be a motivational speaker,” he jokes.
With Love in the Times of Climate Change, a new page has been added to the book.
NOTE – This article was originally published in The Print and can be viewed here
Tags: #CEEW, #climate, #climatechange, #climatecrisis, #climaterisk, #environment, #getgreengetgrowing, #globalwarming, #gngagritech, #greenstories, #nature, #solarpanel
