With submissions opening today for Planet in Peril, I would like to introduce second charity the anthology will fundraise for.
Along with their sister organisations, Stop Climate Chaos Cymru and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, they are a group of over 130 organisations — including the National Trust, Women's Institute, Oxfam, and RSPB — reaching across the UK to show their love for all the things we want to protect from climate change, and to ask politicians to put aside their differences and commit to doing whatever is necessary to protect them.
They say:
"Climate change is already impacting on the things we love and cherish both here in our own backyards and around the world — whether it is the pitches where we play cricket and football, the puffins who make their home along our coastlines, the woodlands where we walk, or communities affected by extreme weather events in other countries. It can be seen in increased flooding and droughts, summer heatwaves, and more unpredictable weather. It is changing the seasons, upsetting crops and flowers, and disturbing the journeys of migrating birds."
How can you write about climate change in a way which is personal to you and the way that you experience it? Why not look at the way your city or town or area has changed in the last decade?
Be inspired by this article about how artists can respond to Climate Change:
''as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. “Nature,” Raymond Williams famously wrote in Keywords (1976), “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Four decades on, there is no “perhaps” about it.''
I'm really looking forward to reading what you come up with and seeing some for fantastic photography – remember that I am working with Brazilian Wildlife Photographer, Emily Gellard, whose work is a useful source of inspiration also.