Plane speaking | YouTube climate science  
Leo Murray is a high profile member of Plane Stupid activist group, campaigning against growth in British air travel. He's also an artist. In his new film Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip he's discovered an ingenous way of using stick-figure animation to explain the complex world of climate system dynamics.

Can online animation be a cheap, powerful way of getting a message across? Caleb Klaces spoke to Leo Murray for RSA Arts & Ecology about campaigning, science and how art can change the way we feel about an issue.

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

Who do you see as the audience for the film?

I’m not trying to persuade anyone that climate change is real. That’s many rungs down the ladder of awareness. The implications of the most recent science are that there is a finite window of opportunity for effective action. After that window of opportunity we’ll lose control. The biosphere will take over. I was concerned already but when I realised that, it changed the way I thought about the problem. Most people tend to think about it as a problem in the future that will be solved by people in the future. The reality is it’s a problem in the future that can only be solved by us in the present. I had the realisation that if I was ever going to do anything about climate change I had to do it now.

You campaign as an animator and through direct action with Plane Stupid. How do those two work alongside one another?

The ability of explaining problems to people through direct action is limited because you’re working through the mainstream media. Tactically, through, direct action embodies the scale of the threat. Here’s the problem: the end of the world. Here’s me as an individual: what can I do? Carrying out non-violent direct action is as proportionate a response as I can see. And it provokes observers to wonder why people would chain themselves to a runway on a freezing cold December morning and get arrested.

How would you respond to accusations that direct action is counter-productive?

There are three ways to answer that. The first is by looking to history. Historically, rapid social change has always been accompanied by civil disobedience. It’s perverse to imagine that we can effect social change of that scale and speed is impossible without that sort of disruption too. The second is that what we in the environmental movement have been doing has not been working. The large environmental NGOs only push for with what is politically expedient, which is just not commensurate with the science. The notion that small-scale incremental changes will get us where they need to be is fantastical. The third thing is that we don’t expect everyone to join or even support us. But we move public debate onwards. Stansted Airport pissed off a lot of people. But by doing those things we’re opening up a space that didn’t exist before, into which others can come – not least the Tories.

It’s noticeable that the Plane Stupid campaign and your film both share a tone which is extremely serious and humorous at the same time…

The film has a horizontal mode of address. I thought about all sorts of people for the voice and ended up doing it myself. Partly because I’ve got an ordinary-bloke sort of voice. If you use that BBC English it doesn’t work nearly as well as if you sound like a normal person. People trust their peers more than they trust experts…

What about the look of the film?

First of all, there were practical constraints. I didn’t have that much time, hence the stick men. It’s also a bit of a pastiche of itself. It’s a lecture, so I thought chalk on the board…

You’ve created some new visual metaphors in the film, such as pushing the planet up a hill – when it gets to the top it runs down the other side into a flaming pit…how did they come about?

I went to a lecture about "systems dynamics", which is a field of physics/mathematics which looks at how complex systems work. There is a concept called "attractor basins" which keep a stable state in a complex system, based on negative feedback loops kicking in when something’s changed (like the earth’s negative feedbacks, such as more CO2 in the atmosphere encouraging more plant growth, which in turn absorb more CO2, up to a point). In the lecture it was illustrated by basins, which I took and put an earth into.

I’m interested in where there is fertile ground for radical, or even different, thinking to happen in Britain. Did you find that at art school?

The RCA [Royal College of Art] is not very forward thinking. You couldn’t say it was a hot-bed of innovation. I loved my time there – the resources are great and there are some brilliant people, but…

What did other people think of you making the film?

My tutors found it interesting because no-one’s made something with such an explicit, campaigning message… perhaps ever. But for most of my peers it was right outside their comfort zone. But that reflects me, too. There’s nothing I find more gratifying than drawing a picture but I’m not sure I truly qualify as an artist. I get annoyed by all the chat; there’s an awful lot of chat that surrounds every artist. I’m too self-conscious to be making work that is just serving my own sensibilities, I suppose. I’d be embarrassed to write a poem, you know?

Some people would argue you’re not really indulging your own sensibilities, you’re responding to the world in a certain way…

I value art because it lets you look at the world through someone else’s eyes. But there’s a lot more bollocks around art than it warrants

So what about art as catalyst for social change?

Art has the ability to move people in a way that nothing else does. In the world we live in today, screen media is the most prominent cultural feature. People spend the majority of their waking hours staring at screens (computers and TVs), which gives you a clue if you’re trying to propagate social change. If you don’t try and come at people through their screens you’re just standing behind them tapping them on the shoulder saying “Hey, over here…”. It’s really clear that there’s no way to bring about the social change that we need to deal with climate change without the use of screen media. Aside from mass media, I’m pretty certain that The Age of Stupid [which Murray animated the first three minutes of] is the most powerful tool to motivate people around climate change that exists now. It does the opposite of what I do in my film, it barely addresses the science at all. It’s set in the future and uses narrative to suck you in. Taking a historical view seems a very productive perspective…

There’s looking forwards from now and looking backwards from a distant future. Then there’s the middle bit, which is slightly more hazy. In your film you look at that. Did you feel uncomfortable going from scientific climate predictions to conjecture on human future? 

I very consciously went from peer-reviewed scientific literature to drawing some social conclusions. But I haven’t made that up – it also comes from social sciences. The scenes in my film do not depart significantly from what’s in The Age of Consequences report which a US think-tank prepared for the Pentagon. What I did was a sneaky thing, lulling people into absorbing science, then hitting them with my analysis but I defy anyone to draw significantly different conclusions. Pretty soon there will be 250 million climate refugees… are we just going to let them come here? My guess is that we’ll head for police state. I think we’ll see monumental human rights abuses of refugees in our lifetimes...

Why is the film more focussed on problems than solutions?

I’m happy for people to make their own minds up. I’m not arrogant enough to think that I know what the right answer is. I respect and admire anyone that is formulating a workable solution to this problem. They might come up with a completely different answer and are just as likely to be right.

Are you optimistic?

I know enough about the international negotiations process to know that [the COP15 United Nations Climate Change conference in ] Copenhagen is extremely unlikely to deliver. The highest aspirations of any development nation will give us a 50:50 chance of preventing catastrophic climate change – and we know we won’t even get that. In the absence of a global worldwide revolution, which isn’t coming…

…so that’s a no?

Well, no: I’m pessimistic in my analysis, but optimistic in my actions because I’m doing my best to sort it out. It’s irresponsible to be any other way.

Caleb Klaces is a poet,and founder and Editor-in-chief of www.likestarlings.com, a website which pairs up established and new poets to create new poetic conversations. He is a guest blogger at the RSA Arts & Ecoloby Blog and recently wrote a review of Marcel Theroux's Far North for RSA Arts & Ecology.