Miranda Whall

On Saturday 6^th November I crawled with a 6 year old potted Scots Pine on my back through the centre of Glasgow from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers’ by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and I silently and determinedly made our way through heavy rain and high winds to reach our destination. The intention of my heroic, tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism is an expression of my grief, despair and outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed and an insistence that non – human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates. My hope is that crawling to the COP26 United Nations climate change conference carrying a tree, that was equal in size to my body, might inspire human beings to re- think and re- align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. I believe that we all literally need to get down from our human centric, two – legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice – that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human made catastrophe.

The following clips are from live stream footage of the performance posted during the performance on my facebook page – www.facebook.com/mirandawhall

Article on the project by Rob La Frenais for ClimateCultures – https://climatecultures.net/conversations/failure-success-cop26/

A radio broadcast on the theme of trees, including an interview with Miranda Whall, Kate Rolt, Cath Peasey and Janek Fulda on the Cop26 Scots Pine crawl for Radio Bronglais by DJ Mscj Pea