Are you an Earthling?

What is our burning platform?

Let's be honest: most climate engagement in cultural spaces remains trapped in what researchers call 'persuasive system optimisation'—trying to nudge individual behaviors while leaving fundamental structures intact. This approach is failing. We think it's pretty clear now that the future will look fundamentally different from today. As we navigate towards a post-1.5°C world, there will necessarily be dramatic transformations in our world and in our daily lives. And we're not yet really able to imagine how extreme these might become.

We need cultural institutions willing to ask harder questions and explore more radical possibilities. This isn't just a technical or policy challenge—it's a cultural one. And we think it’s cultural solutions, not technocratic ones that need to take centre stage.

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So what is Earthlings trying to do?

We're focused on what recent research calls 'New Worlds' approaches—collaborative public engagement that drives system change rather than just optimising existing structures. Climate action requires transformation across multiple interconnected systems: not just technology and policy, but markets, infrastructure, social structures, and cultural values. Museum collections offer unique entry points to reimagine all of these dimensions simultaneously.

This platform will pilot innovative forms of creative public engagement that:

• Use cultural collections to tell new stories about possible climate futures
• Embrace complexity, rather than oversimplify or isolate the planetary challenges we face
• Tell plural and vivid new stories about how we might live in post-carbon futures
• Help communities envision and build support for fundamentally different ways of organising society

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What makes this different? True collaboration means sharing power throughout the project lifecycle. We're committed to involving communities not just in viewing or responding to exhibitions, but in shaping the research questions, interpreting collections, making strategic decisions about what futures to explore, and co-designing how these stories are told.

We're opening up multiple areas to collaborative processes:

• Information gathering: What questions should we ask? What voices need to be heard?
• Analysis and sense-making: What do collections and community knowledge tell us?
• Strategic exploration: What futures are possible? What systems need to change?
• Decision-making: Which pathways should we prioritise?
• Project design and delivery: How do we bring these visions to life?
• Communications: How do we invite others into this work?

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We're not selling smooth transitions. The coming decades will include failures, setbacks, and unpredictable shocks. Our work aims to build collective resilience—helping communities develop the understanding and trust needed to maintain commitment to transformation even when progress is messy and non-linear.

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You can visit the Earthlings website to learn more about our approach.

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An adventure in adaptive field building

We are not the first people to do this work. There are so many amazing practitioners and networks who have been thinking, writing, piloting projects and organising people to explore these ideas. We're part of an emerging ecosystem of practitioners working to diversify public engagement. Some focus on collaborative optimisation within existing systems. Others pursue visionary storytelling for radical change. We aim to support this entire ecosystem while concentrating our efforts on collaborative system change.

Here are some practitioners and networks doing vital work in this space:

• Bridget McKenzie has an amazing selection of writing as part of her work with Climate Museum UK, exploring how museums can facilitate deeper public dialogue about climate futures.
• LEAP labs explores how embracing uncertainty, moving beyond institutional constraints, and reimagining historical narratives can open pathways to alternative futures and new forms of knowledge

• Christie Swallow bridges art and design to playfully reimagine complex ecological issues, using facilitation to bring people into their practice and co-create future imaginaries.
• Hard Art are a cultural collective standing together in solidarity to tackle the crises we face in the multifaceted, intersecting shit-show

• Culture Declares has an emergency blueprint for change in the cultural sector, combining truth-telling, care-taking and changemaking with a long-term, big picture approach
• The Climate Majority Project incubates projects that connect with as many willing people as possible to tell new stories of climate futures and drive climate action
• The climate heritage network Empowers people to imagine and realise low carbon, just, climate resilient futures through culture – from arts to heritage
• Mass liberation and climate justice toolkit - A toolkit connecting climate justice and mass incarceration through narratives, workshop activities, and resources that challenge extractive systems and build movements for change across interconnected communities.

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We're hoping to bring some of these people, and others, together to learn from each other's practices and build a shared practice. This means:

• Creating spaces for shared learning and collective exploration
• Developing relationships with funders and museum commissioners ready to support bold, experimental work
• Codifying what this emerging practice looks like and how it's distinct from traditional climate communication
• Being accountable about the depth of our collaboration and the scale of transformation we're pursuing

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Our values

To avoid the "strategic underreach" that plagues much climate work - offering bold statements with underwhelming reality- we think the network should promote work that centres:

1. Genuine power-sharing: Communities should have decision-making authority in at least four areas of each project: defining questions, interpreting data, making strategic choices, and shaping communications.
2. System change focus: Project should engage at least three layers of the socio-cultural regime (e.g., technology + markets + cultural values, or policy + infrastructure + social structures).
3. Transparent evaluation: Measure success not just by audience numbers but by evidence of communities or institutions developing new collective capacities and taking concrete steps toward alternative systems
4. Network effects: Actively connect projects across geographies, communities, and sectors to accelerate broader transformation.

Don’t be put off by these. We realise that most projects don’t achieve them - inducing some of our own. That is, I think, what makes them valuable. They are a goal to reach for - and they will be shaped with an by our shared learning journey.

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An invitation

I hope you will see this post as an invitation. An invitation to join this process and imagine differently. To use the power of shared cultural histories and storytelling to help society navigate the profound shifts ahead. An invitation to engage in complexity and explore what everyday action on the earth crisis could mean through different cultural lenses.

If any of this piques your interest I would love you to reach out and say hi. Or if that feels too much right now, check out our new website, and sign up to hear about Earthlings activities when they come about. We're just getting started. 

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~ Other worlds are possible ~

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