Festival Albertine: How Do We Get People to Care

Literature, music, drama—these are key resources for societies trying to come to grips with new realities. In recent years we’ve seen them begin to grapple with climate change, but that engagement must now grow. The arts have traditionally engaged with what seemed the most dramatic questions: the struggles of one set of human beings with another. That struggle is still underway, of course, but now we’ve added something different: the terrifying drama of people with a suddenly angry natural world. How does this new moment redefine what we think about when we take up brush or pen, camera or keyboard? What is the work of a poet in a world on fire, or an orchestra in a city where the seas are rising?