“when CORONA MET CLIMATE CHANGE… WHAT CHANGED?”
A series of live, short (under 3 minutes), and creative responses to the imagined meeting of coronavirus and climate change, 50 years after Earth Day and 50 years before Ecotopia Day (EarthDay+100).
Think of them as two waves: a tidal wave we can more or less see on our horizon coming to meet an even larger, slower wave that has been arriving for decades. What happens when the first (which may or may not be a child of the second) meets the second?
And think of ourselves looking back from 50 years on — from the perspective of Earth Day, 2070 (which we are christening Ecotopia Day) — and telling the story of how “everything changed” when this happened.
Coronavirus and climate change do not “meet” in real life, of course, but the current pandemic is causally related, in some measure, to the human encroachment on wildlife spaces, which itself is part of the mega-wave we call the Anthropocene (or the Capitalocene, the Homogenocene, the Plantationocene, et al).
This live, global, online event will be a kind of virtual “human chain” of “emotional weather reports” from the sagging century-midpoint between the first global teach-in on the environment (April 22, 1970) and an anticipated ecotopian world (which we are optimistically dating to April 22, 2070). Spiked with visions of how to get from here to there.
When: EarthDay+50, April 22, 2020, beginning 12:00 noon EDT / 4:00-5:20 pm GMT. (Event will last approximately 75-80 minutes.)
Where: Online, planet Earth. Click here or on the link below: https://youtu.be/_0szfnFj5sA
“When Corona Met Climate Change, What Changed?” will launch Feverish World: From Pandemonium to Ecotopia, an ongoing multi-media effort to help catalyze a shift from fear-based to empathic and compassionate responses to the feverish times ahead.
Feverish World is premised on an acceptance that industrially-triggered climate change and accompanying social, economic, and ecological “pandemonium” will characterize the decades ahead. We believe that traversing those decades will require creativity, moral courage, cultural flexibility, and a sense of human solidarity and ecological fellowship to guide our action forward. We call the goal “ecotopia,” an ecological place, while recognizing that its attainment will be negotiated among the diverse inhabitants of the many places making up our world. On April 22, 2070, we will look back to see where we have arrived.
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the call
Proposals should be sent to ecoculture@uvm.edu with the following details:
Your name, e-mail address, home location (e.g. city, state/province, country), and an affiliation of some kind.
A short title for your piece.
And 3 to 5 sentences describing your concept and format. (This should include information on whether you will be requiring a screen-share for any video or other material, or if you will simply be appearing or presenting from your webcam. Please consider what you want to convey and how you will do that.)
Proposals are due by April 15, 6 pm EDT. Entries are sought that address the theme in creative and provocative ways using visual, literary, and/or performative means. Presenters should be free to present between 12:00 and 1:30 pm EDT on April 22, via their own webcam and a reasonable internet connection. Presentations should be no longer than 3 minutes in duration.
THE CALL FOR PROPOSALS IS NOW CLOSED.
Any comments on “When Corona Met…”? Please add them in the following form. Thanks!