No playground was needed where I grew up in Newcastle West, as we had an acre of pristine woodland just up the road from my house. All the kids in the area would gather there after school to make forts in the hollows beneath the trees, and fight epic wars and battles using fallen branches as swords. I learned to love nature in this wood, and would go there often by myself to watch the seasons work their magic. Sadly, a new owner bought the land and before long the angry whirr of a chainsaw resounded across the neighbourhood, erasing all traces of our beloved playground within a few short months. Nitrogen-fed grass soon replaced the trees and a herd of cows replaced the countless birds and animals and insects that called this wood their home.
I thought of this long disappeared wood recently when I read a headline by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times: “All my life there has been climate warnings. We’re ingenious at ignoring them”. In the 1980s we were already aware of the impacts of deforestation in the Amazon, but nobody seemed to notice the war on nature that was taking place all around us in Ireland as more and more of the country’s wild places became subsumed into farmland. This unchecked roll-out of increasingly larger farms has resulted in native woodland covering a paltry 1.5 per cent of the country. In 2022, agriculture created 38.4 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other sector, a statistic that issues another climate warning and one that we can no longer afford to ignore.
Dublin’s Project Arts Centre asked me to make an artwork about climate change, and I have spent the last two years researching this complex subject in an Irish context. I got lost in the back roads of Meath searching for solar farms, and I travelled west to the Cloosh Valley in Connemara, the site of the country’s largest wind farm. I tried to focus on the positives and find the people that were already leading the way in the fight to turn the tide on emissions. I read about Hometree, an Ennistymon-based charity, that transforms former farms into native woodland, and I sought out their latest project in the hills near Maam, Co Galway.
However, climate warnings continued to sound. 61,000 people died across Europe during the summer heatwave in 2022, and unprecedented forest fires raged in multiple countries. Autumn came and temperatures dropped and we conveniently seemed to ignore this warning and fail to prepare for July 2023, the hottest month ever recorded with catastrophic wildfires burning in nine European countries.
I thought about all these red flags that we continue to ignore. The island of Maui in Hawaii has just been ravaged, again by wildfires, but within a few weeks this story drops off the news cycle and lessons are not learned. What is this collective global amnesia? Is the threat to humankind so great that the only way we can live with climate change is by ignoring it?
With the help of two friends, I began sewing dozens of red flags from organic cotton before attaching them to fallen branches from nearby parks that double up as flagpoles (it turns out that learning to use a sewing machine is almost as complicated as getting your head around climate science). In my mind, each flag represents one of the many tipping points that are being reached with increasing frequency.
I began installing the flags in July at locations across Ireland at the coalface of climate change, including Tarbert oil-fired power station in north Kerry, and Dollymount Strand in Dublin, which is forecast to be underwater by 2050 due to rising sea levels. The flags popped up on treeless Connemara hillsides regarded as man-made deserts by ecologists, and travelled south to Killarney National Park, where almost one-third of the forest was destroyed by fire in 2021.
In driving rain and wind, the flags fluttered across Dunmore Head in Dingle, Ireland’s westernmost point, where I imagine the Gulf Stream first hits this country. Recent studies predict this warming current may cease to flow by the middle of this century. Curious passersby stopped and asked about the flags, and shared their own thoughts and concerns about climate change. Canadian tourists in Clontarf explained that less and less snow falls in their mountains and that they were glad to escape from their own forest fires. An Italian woman in Sandymount said that Verona had become unliveable during the summer.
While July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded globally, paradoxically Ireland experienced the wettest July on record. An upshot of this miserable weather meant there was plenty of wind to activate my flags, a weather feature affected by climate change and one that increasingly has a pivotal role in divesting the world from fossil fuels.
Some years ago I travelled across Turkey. I was struck by the prevalence of their red national flag, seemingly on the top of every hill and mountain, on every rooftop and city skyline, taking on the appearance of an art installation spread across the country. These flags were very much in my mind when I first came up with this idea. I will continue to show the red flags during 2023 at different locations across the country affected by climate change, and also in prominent public spaces in cities and towns. I share videos and details of each location on my Instagram.
When I started this project I gathered hundreds of silver birch seeds from a tree near where I live in Phibsboro. These seeds have grown into over 50 young saplings. This winter they will be planted in Dublin to create a little woodland with Pocket Forests, a social enterprise that works with communities to grow native trees. One day, many years from now, I imagine an epic war taking place beneath these trees with fallen branches used as swords instead of holding flags. – In conversation with Joanne Hunt
