Mart Hoogkamer in his swimming pool, singing about the nitrogen issue or Dutch artist Kevin rapping about rising sea levels that are threatening the future of his city of Rotterdam: I don't expect to hear that booming through our speakers any time soon.
I fear it will be a long wait until pop artists help us understand what it's like to be living on a warming planet that's heating up. Why? The lear distinction we tend to make between nature and culture.
Culture and nature
Culture (and pop culture) is about people and their desires, feelings and lust. Nature - that's all the animals, plants and the climate. In the best case, this distinction makes nature something worth saving, but it also sets nature apart from humans completely.
Does this distinction get things right? Is nature completely different from culture? Or can we actually see the climate crisis as a cultural problem?
Let's start with a definition. Culture consists of everything produced by society. Based on this definition, the climate is not a cultural problem. After all, we, as humanity, didn't come up with the natural laws behind the greenhouse effect.
'The Young Ones' at the pier in Scheveningen. Anefo, CC0, through Wikimedia Commons
Yet, based on this definition, one could also say that 'nature' as a concept is in fact a cultural artefact. This is a bit of a brain teaser.
What we call nature is a collection of rather diverse entities. Nature includes, for example, the jungles, steppes and rivers, but also more abstract things like the laws of physics.
And what we often forget is that firstly, we are the ones who squashed all these things into a single category, and secondly, then called this collection ‘nature’. Without this large collection and classification campaign, there would be nothing that was designated 'nature'.
The contingency of the concept of nature becomes clearer when we look at other societies, which sometimes don’t even use the concept of 'nature'.
Living without nature
The Achuar culture in the Amazon, for example, doesn't regard plants and animals as being essentially different from humans. On the contrary, it states that animals such as tapirs actually think of themselves as humans.
This means that the Achuar have a greater respect for the prey they hunt, since they consider them to have human souls. Factory farming is therefore unthinkable for the Achuar because, to them, this would constitute a crime against humanity . As a result, the Achuar have absolutely no need of the word 'nature', since for them there is no 'original' world that is separate from humanity. Everything is culture or, vice versa, nature.
Collapsed concert hall on the West Pier (UK). Briantist, Public domain, through Wikimedia Commons
In the West, we prefer to pretend that nature and culture are two different things. So in our pop music, we sing about human feelings that appear to have nothing to do with the environment. The human world plays the leading role in all our music, films and stories. Just as an example: the word 'cake' is used on British television ten times more often than 'climate change'. It's clear where our priorities lie. And so nature remains a background used as a kind of stage set for people baking cakes and singing songs.
The distinction nature/culture in itself enables us to treat everything going under the banner of ‘nature’ as less important. The human world plays a leading role in all our music, films and stories, but nature can remain a background to be used as a kind of stage.
However, humanity is found falling through that stage more and more often. Climate change demonstrates that the things people do, have a huge effect on the earth. If we're not careful and if we don't take action now, the coastal town of Zoutelande, immortalised in song by Dutch band BLØF, could well be a new Atlantis.
It's actually really strange that the greatest disaster heading our way has absolutely no place in, for example, our music (with the odd exception, as shown below).
From pop culture to pop nature
So we need to give our concepts of culture and nature a good shake to get a better understanding of ourselves as just one of the powers on Earth. The longer we pretend that human feelings and desires are not connected to our planet, the more danger we will be in. We don't live in a culture bubble, we live in the Earth system where everything we do has an impact.
If we want to look past the nature/culture distinction, we will need groups of Mart Hoogkamers singing about their eco-footprints, a flock of Ed Sheeran's wondering what it's like to be a carbon atom and, perhaps, a Kanye West who stops to consider the destructive force of forest fires.
Hopefully, then, it will become clear to everyone that the climate problem is also a culture problem.
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Text: Boris van Meurs This article previously appeared on the Faces of Science page of NEMO Kennislink.Photo: Ignacio Boza via Pixabay