Musician Climate Crisis Network (MCCN) was founded by musician and climate activist, Simon Kerr, emerging out of a longstanding involvement in music and concern about the climate future we face.
Simon sees climate change as a crisis of culture, not just a scientific or political crisis. We are in this mess, he says, because of the ways we think about ourselves, our expectations of the future, and in the types of stories we tell ourselves.
For Simon, the story begins in the late 1990s when he was teaching at a New Zealand University while completing his PhD in Political Ecology:
“I was becoming very aware of global warming, as it was called then, but it all felt a bit theoretical, something that was still far in the future. Since then, I think what all of us who follow the science have been stunned by is how rapidly the planet has been heating and the speed and severity of the impacts of this heating on our world. Things are changing so much faster than anyone anticipated.”
Even though he has worked in universities in the last 25 years, having moved from New Zealand to Australia in 2008, Simon was frustrated by the lack of overall urgency and understanding of what sort of dangerous future we are creating. In 2015, fuelled by the ongoing denial in Australia, he wrote and produced a multi-media, live music show about climate change called ‘Music For a Warming World’. It had a narrative in four parts: The Coming Storm (the science); Loss; Change; Hope. The show was a response to what Simon saw as the lack of emotional engagement with the implications of the science. This frustration came in part from the experience of attending seminars on climate change that ended with the speaker concluding, ‘It looks like it’s quite possibly the end of the world. Thank you for listening. (Then, after some polite applause) … Let’s all go and have a beer.’
“I wanted to engage in a more immersive and emotionally honest way and so decided to use multi-media visuals and live music to tell a story of the climate challenge”
The show became Simon’s primary musical focus and has now been performed around 80 times up and down Australia at music festivals, such as Woodford and Illawarra, universities, house concerts, community centres, small art galleries and large public theatres. Simon confesses to having no formal training in music. His journey began as a teenage drummer playing in a number of bands until he went to live overseas and realised that guitars make far easier travelling companions. Simon was in his late thirties before he discovered he could actually write songs that people seemed to like listening to. He has since then produced four studio albums and an EP.
During last year’s lockdown, Simon found himself thinking a lot about eco-grief and the notion of solastalgia, the experience of bearing witness to the loss of the places where one still lives. Simon says the extraordinary bush fires of 2019/2020 are not an accident but the outcome of decades of planetary warming.
“The sort of optimism we hear for the future, I wouldn’t say it was misplaced but I think that while we will see lots of really positive developments towards zero emissions, we are yet to recognise the scale and irreversibility of the climate and ecological challenges we face. We can no longer ‘solve’ climate change. We have moved into a new epoch where serious climate disruption will define our future. Not just our grandchildren or our children, but us, living here right now. It will do so faster and with increasing impact that most of us realise. This raises really important questions about the type of life we live. I keep wondering if this enormously consumptive lifestyle and the way we produce things is still fit for purpose?”
Simon’s thinking and songwriting has recently shifted from trying to explain and prove climate change towards asking more fundamental questions. We now must learn to live with dangerous climate change so what types of people does this future need us to be? What sort of new stories or narratives will we need to help us live with this changing future?
In 2019, just prior to the bushfires, Simon set up the ‘Musicians Climate Crisis Network’, a community for musicians, composers, choir leaders, choir members, singers, songwriters and other artists to meet and share their concerns about the climate crisis and how it affects their music, and to find meaningful, positive ways to respond.
“I felt I was watching our world, the world I loved, vanish. I realised I needed a community to help me deal with all the grief and frustration I was experiencing. I believe the arts can offer different ways, or different languages to help us process all these changes. I wanted a community I could talk through these things with, and with whom I could share music and artistic practice.”
MCCN seeks to offer a safe space where people can say, ‘do you know what, all this is really freaking me out’ and embodies Simon’s belief that art and music have something powerful to offer by creating new stories for a new future.
MCCN meet monthly, face to face in metropolitan Melbourne, or online. “We meet for a couple of hours, start with an informal chat, then usually have a topic to discuss, sometimes from an external speaker Zooming in”. Past speakers include the ‘Climate Music Project’, based in San Francisco; Prof Suzie Crane, a US-based anthropologist/musician and expert on permafrost melting in Siberia, as well local speakers such as ‘Psychology for a Safer Climate’. There are also often meditations and reflections, and the meeting generally ends with some music making.
For Simon, it’s about building a supportive community where conversations can flow and ideas can percolate in a safe and inclusive environment. Much of the focus is in considering what climate disruption means for our communities and for us as individuals. How do we re-think how to be ‘okay’ in the face of a deeply unpredictable future? What does a ‘future worth living’ look like in a epoch where things are constantly and more frequently disrupted by storms, bushfires, sea level rise and economic shocks?
“We seek to learn more about the science, the psychology and cultural issues of the climate crisis, supporting each other’s musical and emotional journeys and exploring collectively what it means for our music and our art in order to be relevant and to have a voice of compassion and truthfulness.”
For more information on how to join the Musician’s Climate Crisis Network contact Simon Kerr at musiciansclimatenetwork@gmail.com
Written by Simon Kerr with Deb Carveth, CMVic Online Editor, for Community Music Victoria
Feature photo: Music For a Warming World band members: Daniel Hook, Scott Lewis, Mal Webb, Simon Kerr, Kylie Morrigan and Christine Parker
Photos supplied
Community Music Victoria 