“I didn’t want penguins or icebergs,” curator Kathleen Soriano explained to the Guardian at the time: “We wanted people to have an aesthetic response.”

In 2009, the exhibition Earth at the Royal Academy in London broke ground by examining the climate through abstract art. Large digital screens display videos narrated by David Attenborough each room in the space is dedicated to a different continent.Īll these exhibitions have deeper roots. The BBC Earth Experience in west London is inspired by the Seven Worlds, One Planet television series and takes viewers on a journey through the world’s wildlife. While these shows venture into sociology, politics and economics, others focus squarely on nature. Meanwhile, Dear Earth, showing at the Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre until early September, features works from 15 international artists that examine, in the gallery’s words, how art can “deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis”. Installation at Somerset House, London, 2018. Liam Young’s film Planet City, for example, pictured a future mega-metropolis of 10 billion, based on the biologist EO Wilson’s idea that humans could live on just half of the Earth and regreen the rest. Last year, the Our Time on Earth exhibition at the Barbican in London brought together 18 works from across the globe that imagined possible planetary futures. In 2018, the artist Michael Pinsky created a series of Pollution Pods at London’s Somerset House, filling five domes with the particulate matter of five cities. It is no wonder, then, that art in recent years has looked ahead, like Tomorrow’s World, to the future of the planet. Eggy worms don’t seem too scrambled an idea now. Closer to home, wildfires increased fourfold in England last year and annual flood damage costs could rise by 20% due to the crisis.

We are living in a global climate emergency, with record heatwaves across the globe. While the early episodes of Tomorrow’s World opted for 60s optimism and, towards the series’ end in the 90s, dreamed of better things, the future of the planet today has never looked bleaker.

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