Fleeing environmental disaster. Mural (proposal).
Photomontage. December 2023
This proposed mural is based on a cartoon about fleeing environmental catastrophe that I drew in about 1991.
The image depicts a Western family fleeing a ravaged land that is piled with the detritus of the consumer society. The family is fleeing in a builder’s skip or dumpster, which ironically is a symbol of consumerism in that skips can often be seen outside houses here in the UK while the owners of the houses have new kitchens installed to replace their perfectly good old kitchens. There are several skips in my street as I write this.
When I first drew the cartoon about thirty years ago the concept of fleeing environmental disaster by boat was a novel idea with little or no link to actual events in the real world. The journey in the cartoon was symbolic. Now in the 2020s everything has changed, with boats constantly crossing the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel carrying migrants from countries that are affected by climate change and other environmental and social pressures.
It’s interesting that if the mural depicted in this photograph was a cartoon in a magazine it would be looked at for a couple of seconds at most and then passed over. Enlarged onto a gallery wall the image may attract attention for noticeably longer and would magically attain a higher status.
I’ve drawn environmental cartoons since the 1970s. My environmental cartoons have been published widely, including in publications such as the Guardian newspaper and the Critic magazine. A book of my environmental cartoons, When Humans Roamed the Earth, was published by WWF/Earthscan in 1992.