Adaptation & Imagination Part 4: Movement, Change, Adjustment, Resilience

By Megan Lindow

Adaptation requires innovation and creativity. Life itself is inherently creative – always moving and adapting to thrive and survive in changing circumstances. 

This art piece, assembled from the contributions of several different people, reflects adaptation as a path of interdependency, a journey that the Earth’s living communities are all travelling together, in search of a liveable future. What one person draws on the page provides the input for the next person to continue building on the story. As the individual pieces are created in response to one another, a wider landscape of possibility also emerges. 

Climate adaptation pathways are being shaped collectively by all of us as we move through the unchartered territory the climate emergency presents.  We don’t know where our journeys are taking us. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote: ‘Traveler, there is no path. You make the path as you walk it.’ 

We don’t make our paths alone. Our circumstances are all different, yet one person’s path shapes the journey of another, just as their path is shaped in turn by the steps of countless others. The making of the artworks required collaboration, building on each other’s contributions – developing a whole picture together; just as adaptation requires collaboration – drawing on our collective resources to shape our future.

These artworks with clusters of texture and different coloured yarn illustrate the beauty, entanglement and uncertainty of our interdependency as we collectively explore new pathways of adaptation. As these drawings reflect, humans are not the only ones shaping such pathways. People, animals, plants, bacteria and fungi as well as the natural cycles of the elements are all responding to one another and shaping new possibilities and strategies of emergence together. As the Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka once observed, ‘rain doesn’t fall from the heavens – it comes up from the ground.’ The mycelial networks and the roots of plants absorb water and allow it to percolate into the soil, while plant respiration through leaves and blades of grass release moisture into the atmosphere. As droughts become an increasing feature in our landscapes, communities may still increase their resilience by learning and collaborating with nature to restore local water cycles, working to nurture plants and regenerate the soil to hold and circulate water. 

As we collectively strive to shape life-giving pathways, even as a changing climate upends many of our lives and forces us to adjust to new realities of drought, flooding, extreme heat as well as changing and volatile weather patterns, it feels more important than ever to emulate ways in which nature is always responding and adapting herself to a changing world. 

The drawings at the bottom right illustrate the pain of being reliant on inadequate human-made systems and structures in times of upheaval and rupture. When the river swells from an intense rainfall, the concrete bridge cannot adapt itself to meet the situation. The hard, brittle structure instead gets swept away, and people are cut off from one another.  The loss of a job becomes a devastating setback, plunging a family into hunger and despair, cutting off future possibilities. Wider support structures of family and community are often themselves under strain, frayed or non-existent, and fail to hold people going through such challenges. The failure of our systems and structures to hold people in the challenges they face means that some will exploit the natural environment for profit out of desperation.

As we walk the paths of climate adaptation together, how do we help create new, life-affirming possibilities for one another? How can we dream into the possibilities of greater harmony and reverence with the living natural world that supports us? How can we restore ourselves to dignified livelihoods that do not compromise the natural systems we rely on? How can we learn from life itself, in its boundless creativity, to move and flow and adapt to a changing world?

Adaptation & Imagination Part 1:                                              A Journey of Creative Collaboration

Adaptation & Imagination Part 2:
Bring Your Hands to the Work of Climate Adaptation

Adaptation & Imagination Part 3:                          Tomorrow’s Fear – Uncertainty in a changing climate

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