Soiva Tuleva, active hope and expressing environmental feelings
It's been a week since the Soiva Tuleva audio installation and future prototype were first presented at Yö Galleria. Now, it's time to reflect on the profound insights we've gained from this unique experience.
Wednesday 28.8. 2024 opened at Yö Galleria in Helsinki, the first presentation of The Soiva Tuleva. During the week, I talked with the exhibition guests about the environmental feelings evoked by the work, the presentation, and the concretization of the future through art. There was a space for reflection in the back room of the gallery, and if you wanted, you could write the feedback on paper and leave it in an envelope. The feedback emphasized love for nature, but at the same time, visitors felt climate anxiety and posed questions if it was too late to correct the mistakes humans had made. I want to introduce you to the term active hope, which was made famous by the ecophilosopher Joanna Macy and Resilience specialist Dr. Chris Johnstone in their book.
Creating Hope Through Action
In their book Active Hope - How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power, Macy and Johnstone write about how active hope acknowledges brutal facts and creates hope through action. The Soiva Tuleva presents elements related to biodiversity loss and climate change in forests in Finland. Each component has an explanatory sign explaining why I included the subject in the soundscape. The piece features forest, city, extreme weather phenomena, pollinators, boreal owls, alien species, and alarm bells. However, the exhibition visitors found the work meditative and calming; for some, the signs and the What if questions evoked climate anxiety. The feedback messages discussed, e.g., human-caused environmental crisis and whether we have already gone too far - whether we can repair human-caused environmental damage anymore. The idea of creating hope through action appeals to me, and the related exercises have brought clarity to my ecological anxiety.
The Soiva Tuleva alarm bells - photography Virpi Vaittinen, Yö Galleria 2024
According to Macy and Johnstone, we can explore our times through the three significant narratives. First, we could talk about the Business-as-usual story. BAU describes our industrialized society, where economic growth and overconsumption continue. In future research, BAU is often one of the scenarios through which we can look at the future and compare other scenarios. Macy and Johnstone see the scenarios as current stories. Another of the stories is "The Great Unravelling," which, in turn, refers to the distress that results from overconsumption and endless economic growth. In this story, the world we know - ecological and social systems collapse due to economic growth and overconsumption. The third story is "The Great Turning". In this story, more and more people move to act in a way that takes us towards a life-sustaining society.
Joanna Macy has written that there are three dimensions to the Great Turning: 1. Actions we can take to slow the damage to the Earth. e.g., Reporting, legislation, and corporate responsibility for various disasters. For example, the EU's CSRD directive (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) will force listed companies to report on the environmental impact of their operations in the coming years. 2. Analyzing structural causes and creating alternatives: for example, replacing fossil fuels with renewable ones and, e.g., People's living arrangements. 3. A change in consciousness, without which the previous two cannot happen. A change in consciousness is related to the idea of , e.g., a simpler lifestyle.
From individual focus to community
According to Macy and Johnstone, the BAU scenario emphasizes the individual and their separateness from the rest of nature. This individual-centered thinking often leads people to push the problem-solving to someone else, leading to a lack of recognition of the crisis or underestimating its severity, resulting in distress and paralysis of action. The authors stress the importance of personal awareness and expanding thinking from an individual-centered worldview to systemic thinking, where we acknowledge the entire planet as a common life-sustaining entity. They argue that active hope is awakening to the beauty of life and the readiness to engage, emphasizing the power of individual action in addressing the environmental crisis and the responsibility we all share in this endeavor.
For whom the bells toll? photography Virpi Vaittinen, Yö Galleria 2024
Rather than the result, Macy and Johnstone urge us to focus on the process. The realization of the final result may seem uncertain or take a long time, but we can still think about what we could do to help achieve the final result. In creating hope through action, we as humans must first be aware and acknowledge the plight around us and the feelings it evokes. After that, we can use different methods to process emotions and do different climate actions. When we choose a story of significant change, we can see ourselves as part of a larger, growing entity of many actors.
Future generations will look back at this moment; their history depends on what we do today. When I was working on the Soiva Tuleva concept, we sparred about future forests with the researchers of the Biofidul project. Biodiful project highlights that you don't have to start from scratch regarding positive actions. "For everyone who wants to do positive things for the forest, there is a time scale relevant to their life. We can all do different things, small things with quick results, actions that are visible in the long term, or actions whose results are visible for future generations," says Matti Salo, the leading specialist researcher for the project from the Natural Resources Institute Finland.
Let's go on a discovery trip to discover what could be the right way to act—through hope.