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How my thinking around climate justice has shaped my life and work as an artist
Below is a transcript of a talk I gave recently at an event organised by the Biome Collective. Biome is a Dundee-based creative studio and community exploring games, digital art and technology. The event was part of Pacesetters, a Europe-wide project powering artistic and cultural entrepreneurship to drive the climate transition. The day brought together artists, game designers, community workers, educators and academics to think about climate justice through paper prototyping and collaborative game design. My talk came partway through the day.
Hi, my name’s Tommy Perman. I’m an artist, designer and musician.
My work is made in response to the environment – whether that’s my immediate local surroundings, the online world, or a combination of the two. Over the course of my lifetime it has been impossible for me not to notice the changes to our climate, increases in pollution, and the exploitation and devastation of nature. These themes have become central to my life and work.
As my awareness of climate justice increased, I changed how I live my life. I believe one of the driving forces behind climate change is capitalism’s constant need for growth and its exploitation of both people and finite natural resources.
With everything that’s happening around us right now – the UK experiencing its third heatwave of the summer and wildfires raging across the country – the impacts of climate change are very real, and closer to home than ever.
The Lottery of Birth
I believe that all human life has the same intrinsic value and the same inherent worth. But I’m aware I did really well out of the “lottery of birth.” I’m male, white, straight and able-bodied. I was born to a loving, supportive, middle-class family who lived in a large house in the centre of Edinburgh. I was encouraged to follow my interests and supported emotionally, practically and financially. I was born in Scotland in the pre-internet 1980s. I was able to enjoy a childhood free of social media, before the world had warmed as much as it has now.
Scotland is still my home. I’ve found it to be a safe, stable and secure country to live in – but I’m aware that my experience of growing up and living here is shaped by my privileges. Scotland has a complex and problematic history. The safety, stability and security some of us experience today is a consequence of being part of the British Empire, our colonial history, and our part in the transatlantic slave trade.
The economic system I’ve grown up inside – and benefited from – didn’t emerge by accident. It was built through white supremacy and colonialism, sustained through patriarchy and misogyny, and it continues to police who counts as fully human through racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia. My privileges aren’t separate from those systems. They’re a direct product of them.
Redefining Success and Ambition
My awareness of all of this has shaped how I want to live my life, informed my relationship to ambition, and helped me redefine what I believe a successful life looks like.
Going Flight Free
Almost 10 years ago, I took the decision to stop flying for climate justice reasons. This decision has really shaped my career since then. I’ve turned down numerous exciting international opportunities in places such as Mexico, Thailand and Finland – and that’s been harder at times than I expected. But it’s pushed me towards values-aligned work closer to home, and meant I get to spend much more time with my family. It’s also led me to develop new ways of collaborating remotely, such as my long-running collaboration with Mexican classical guitarist Morgan Szymanski.
I know many people say that one individual choosing not to fly doesn’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things. But my reasons aren’t solely to do with reducing my own emissions. They’re to do with fairness. I often think about how the majority of flights are taken by a very small percentage of the world’s population: just one percent of us are responsible for more than half of flying emissions.
Why should I get to use up these precious, finite natural resources – and contribute to global heating – just because of the characteristics I’ve inherited through the lottery of birth? Climate change is affecting us all, but the worst impacts are being felt by those who have done the least to cause it.
Practicing Gratitude
I’m lucky that my parents brought me up to be a grateful person, with an awareness of how privileged I am. But in recent years I’ve developed a daily gratitude practice that really helps keep this at the front of my mind. There’s something in that practice that feels quietly at odds with capitalism, which needs us to always want more. Gratitude asks you to notice what you already have instead.
I’m also grateful that I was born with the ability to find wonder and beauty everywhere. I’m autistic, and I’ve come to understand that my tendency to focus closely on detail is partly a way of managing sensory overwhelm. My parents never treated that as strange, they encouraged me to follow it, and I think it’s a large part of why I became an artist. These days, that slow, close way of looking and listening feels increasingly like a refusal of the pace capitalism demands of us.
Becoming Comfortable with Earning Less
I’m aware that my privileges have given me a massive head start, and helped me live a life that’s less motivated by money. I doubt it would be as possible for me to live this way without them. But over a long period of time, I’ve also become genuinely comfortable with not earning much money, and I’ve cultivated an attitude of not coveting luxuries. That said, I’m a father to two disabled children and carer to a disabled partner. I have people who depend on me, and that’s part of why I believe so strongly in things like a Universal Basic Income.
Enough is Enough
I think all of this comes down to one question: what is enough? Capitalism runs on the idea that there’s never enough – never enough money, never enough growth, never enough audience, never enough taken from the natural world. I’ve spent the last decade or so pushing back against that logic wherever I find it in my own life.
I’ve been thinking about scale too: does something need to reach a massive audience to be considered successful? I don’t think it does.
Humans are Nature
Capitalism places humans above nature, but this isn’t true. I’ve just been reading mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life and I love this line: “There have never been individuals. We are all lichens.” We’re taught to see organisms – including ourselves – as separate, self-contained units. In reality, what looks like a single entity is usually an interdependent ecosystem of different species, operating as one. Humans aren’t a part from nature, separate and observing. Humans are nature. And once that clicks, “endless growth” starts to sound less like ambition and more like a kind of self-harm.
What Do We Value?
I want to finish by talking about one project that I think brings all of this together. It’s called Positive Interactions, and at its core it’s an anti-capitalist idea – a small, deliberate experiment in building an economy around something other than money and growth.
In September 2020, I contacted 50 friends from all over the world and asked them to send me a sound that makes them happy. I made an album from those sounds, and I’ve been giving it away ever since – not for money, but in exchange for happy messages. In a way, it’s a small analogue game for redistributing value and the rules aren’t dictated by the market.
If you go to positiveinteractions.space, you can read about the sounds used in each track. The project caught people’s imaginations and spread around the globe. To date I’ve received several thousand messages in “payment” for the album, from people of all ages, from all over the planet. By conventional metrics, that’s not a lot of albums “sold” – but the quality of those interactions has meant more to me than mass scale ever could. It’s been such an uplifting feeling to receive them, and I’d encourage everyone to look at some on the website – I think even the most cynical souls will find something cheery in to read there.
The messages have become a beautiful, informal survey of what actually makes people happy. And there’s an overwhelming theme: it’s simple things. Joy from walks in nature. The changing seasons. Birdsong. The love of pets. Friendship, laughter, time with people we love. Parents full of pride for their kids. Arts. Crafts. Music. Coffee. Books. Cycling. Hill walking. Weather – sunshine, wind, rain, storms (when you’re safe and warm inside) and snow; people really love snow.
Nobody wrote in about economic growth.
Like many musicians, I became disillusioned with streaming, where music is essentially given away for free and quietly devalued. Positive Interactions was my way of asking: what if we built the exchange around something other than money altogether? I’d love to keep exploring that question in future projects.